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Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is now broad agreement within AI safety circles that fully open AI development is undesirable.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  I think it's now pretty widely agreed in safety circles that total openness is in fact not desirable.

  A simple plan to save the world from rogue A.I.slowboring.com

President of the United States, the 45th from 2017 to 2021 and, as of 2026, the 47th; before politics a New York property developer who ran the Trump Organization, and the host of The Apprentice from 2004 to 2015.

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  Market access should be reciprocal: Canada bars American firms from government procurement while its own firms sell freely into America's.

  Americagovernment

  Their words

  This is the case even though Canada gets broad access into the massive American Government Procurement Market, including those of our States. That is not reciprocity, it is a Canadian Trade Scam.

  Truth Social post, 8 September 2026truthsocial.com

Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.

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  Marco Rubio is struggling to hire talented staff and is settling for loyalists who follow his instructions instead.

  America

  Their words

  This suggests that Rubio is having some difficulties hiring anyone with talent and is settling for a putz who will do what Rubio tells him to do on Latin America.

  The Devolution of the Policy Planning Staffdanieldrezner.substack.com

Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Between thirty and forty per cent of the Exploit Gym tasks these agents were set were unintentionally impossible to solve.

  Their words

  But in many of these cases, this vulnerability is just not broad or deep enough to ever actually be exploitable to get the flag. So a bunch of exploit gym problems are just unintentionally impossible. The authors estimate roughly 30 to 40% of these problems are impossible in this way.

  youtube.com

Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Awe is a uniquely human emotion, resting on the metacognitive ability to detach conscious experience from the here and now.

  Their words

  I think it's a uniquely at least as we have it it's uniquely human emotion and it's based on a broad sort of metacognitive ability we have which is to detach our conscious experience from the here and now and do like mental time travel.

  youtube.com

Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.

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  The identity politics of Woke 1 alienated the ordinary Americans the left once championed.

  America

  Their words

  By demanding the purification of the individual and branding broad swathes of the public as oppressor classes, 'Woke 1' besmirched the average Americans who Democrats once championed.

  joshbarro.com

Writer of Today in Tabs, a daily media-and-internet newsletter started in 2013; earlier founded the community site Kuro5hin.

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  Let Me And A Food Scientist Sample The Abandoned Fish Sauce Terrorizing A Small Canadian Town

  Their words

  The first is just solid blogging, the second is one of the finest defenses of the value of critical thinking I’ve ever read.

  todayintabs.com

Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.

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  Making a highly paid team wait a week to buy a tool at half price destroys far more value than it saves.

  Their words

  then you also remember that you've hired some very highly paid and talented employees. And are you saying they can't get the tools that they need? That you're spending $100,000 a week. If you wait a week to get a power supply half off, you have certainly dwarfed any possible benefit from getting it.

  Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.com

Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025, Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads the company’s superintelligence lab.

From one piece Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity” 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Talent density is the one thing to bet on when building a lab, because it compounds by itself: the more talented people you have, the more the best want to join you.

  Their words

  the first is talent density was incredibly important. That was the the core thing to bet on and um, like talent density is something that compounds naturally. Like the more talented people you have the more of the most most talented people want to join you.

  youtube.com

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  The future of AI is a broad decentralised ecosystem, not a totalising handful of AIs that control the world.

  Their words

  we don't believe in this totalizing, you know, totalitarian view of, you know, AIs that control the world. We believe that these are going to enhance this very broad ecosystem.

  youtube.com

Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.

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  Large language models give people broad exposure to average human output at the cost of exceptional, original results.

  LLMs

  Their words

  They've given us broad, passive exposure to the market average, but at the cost of suppressing upside

  fortelabs.com

Physician focused on longevity; wrote Outlive and hosts The Drive.

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  Exercise is the most powerful broad-based longevity intervention available today, and a drug that blunts its adaptations is not worth taking for longevity.

  Their words

  we now have multiple trials confirming that metformin interferes with your ability to reap the adaptive benefits of exercise, which is the most powerful broad-based longevity intervention available to us today

  Metformin and cancer: active surveillance neededpeterattiamd.com

Novelist and writer on craft; wrote The War of Art, Gates of Fire and The Legend of Bagger Vance.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  He is not the most talented writer in the room and never was; what has carried him is the capacity to grind.

  Their words

  I’m not the most talented writer in the room. Never have been.

  Talent Is Bullshitstevenpressfield.com

Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".

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  As AI labs aim for broad, general capability, handling messy real-world bureaucratic tasks is becoming a primary application domain for their models.

  Their words

  Considering every lab wants to "eat the world" the focus on how to work in real-world messy situations seems apt as their primary home.

  Introducing BenchBenchstrangeloopcanon.com

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

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  Inventing the Renaissance

  Their words

  Ada Palmer may just be the most bewilderingly talented person I know: a genius sf writer, incredible librettist and singer, wildly innovative educator, and a leading historian of the Renaissance, and last year, she published her magnum opus, Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning book about so much more than history

  pluralistic.net

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

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  Exit Stalin: The Soviet Union as a Civilization 1953-1991

  Their words

  This one is well written, broad in scope, and yet rich in detail, treating the covered era as a living, breathing time in human history.

  marginalrevolution.com

Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku, author of The Twelve-Factor App, and a researcher at Ink & Switch.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  What a message-recipient considers important is too idiosyncratic to be captured by generic heuristics like "all receipts go to FYI."

  Their words

  It's a good example of how user preferences are much more subtle than broad heuristics like "all receipts go to FYI."

  Email triage with an embedding-based classifieradamwiggins.com

American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.

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  A Fish Called Wanda

  Their words

  I have thought a number of films have been riotously funny, but only A Fish Called Wanda made me laugh so hard that I was in very real danger of pissing myself right there in the movie theater.

  whatever.scalzi.com

Co-founder and chief scientist of Safe Superintelligence Inc., and previously co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI.

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  Broad deployment of AI that can learn on the job will very likely produce rapid economic growth for some period of time.

  Their words

  But I think the idea of very rapid economic growth for some time, I think it's very possible from broad deployment.

  youtube.com

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

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  In a world changing this fast it is better to have broad interests than to be an extreme specialist.

  Their words

  In an environment of change, it’s better to be the hardy dandelion rather than the hothouse orchid.

  What's Still Worth Learning in a World With AI?scotthyoung.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

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  Europe must decide how big it wants its public sector to be: France's public spending at 58 percent of GDP is above the late Soviet Union's.

  Europe

  Their words

  Because today, if you take France for example which is a beautiful country with a lot of talented people, but public expenses are 58% of the country's GDP, it's maybe as much more than in the latest stage of the Soviet Union.

  youtube.com

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

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  School's purpose should be humanistic rather than economic, and the people who are not academically talented need a welfare state rather than a promise that school will lift them.

  Their words

  What we need, ultimately, is a return to a holistic, humanistic vision of what school is for, and we need a robust social safety net to protect those who are not lucky enough to be naturally academically talented.

  Education Doesn't Work 3.0freddiedeboer.substack.com

Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Predators everywhere target juveniles, and there is no reason dinosaurs were an exception — the bite marks and stomach contents say they were not.

  Their words

  But this is the absolute rule of thumb for how foraging and growth and predation operate across everything from fish to starfish, praying mantises, all the way up to things like big cats via stuff like crocodiles. It's how it works. So it'd be very weird if it didn't also operate for dinosaurs. And then, as I say, we've actually got the direct evidence for this from bite marks and stomach contents. They're taking small stuff.

  youtube.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Changing one's mind is life; stopping flip-flopping means being a dead fish.

  Their words

  I love changing my mind. If I stop flip-flopping, that means I'm a dead fish. Changing my mind is life.

  sive.rs

Semiconductor analyst; writes Fabricated Knowledge on the chip industry and the companies in it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The AI build-out is not yet a bubble, because it lacks the self-reinforcing feedback loop that drove the railway and telecom manias.

  Their words

  What prevents this from being a broad-based bubble is that we are missing a critical feedback loop from the announcement's impact, like network growth or land value.

  Capital Cycles and AIfabricatedknowledge.com

Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; works on the search for life elsewhere and wrote The Little Book of Aliens and Light of the Stars.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every SETI search ever conducted adds up to sampling a hot tub's worth of an ocean, so finding nothing tells us nothing.

  Their words

  And what they found was if that search space, if the sky is an ocean and you're looking for fish, how much of the ocean have we looked at, and it turns out to be a hot tub. That's how much of the ocean that we've looked up. We've dragged a hot tub's worth of ocean water up and there was no fish in it

  youtube.com

Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Fish

  Their words

  Trying Fish instead of my usual Oh My Zsh

  eugeneyan.com

Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Europe is losing the competition for talented migrants because it is not an attractive enough destination.

  immigrationEurope

  Their words

  Europe’s real problem is that we are not a competitive destination.

  Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally?ggd.world

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A civilization that advanced and that large would have left something behind, and archaeologists find fish scales.

  Their words

  And archeologists, all of our ideas are theories. Very few of them are facts, and we could have the story wrong, but one thing we’re real good at is finding stuff. We find fish scales, so I find it just too big a pill to swallow that there was a civilization that was that technologically advanced and that large that we can’t even find a potsherd from.

  youtube.com

Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.

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  fish shell

  Their words

  In 10 years of using fish I have never found a single thing I wanted to configure. It just works the way I want.

  jvns.ca

Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.

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  How to Say Goodbye

  Their words

  How to move through it is what my talented friend and sometime-collaborator Wendy MacNaughton explores in How to Say Goodbye

  themarginalian.org

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Modern economics has shifted from being a carrier of broad ideas to being primarily a means of data collection and hypothesis testing.

  Their words

  economics is no longer a carrier of ideas. It is primarily a means of data collection and very sophisticated hypothesis testing.

  tylercowen.com

Game designer; wrote A Theory of Fun for Game Design and worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

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  A puzzle whose categories can only be seen by the broadly educated is elitist by construction.

  Their words

  But it’s fundamentally elitist — it basically requires you to have a broad education to find the categories in the first place.

  Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel badraphkoster.com

Development economist; argues that letting people move to rich countries does more for the poor than aid, and wrote Let Their People Come.

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  Labour-saving innovation in rich countries is aimed at the only asset most of the world’s poor have to sell.

  Their words

  Therefore, we have the perverse situation that the richest people are hiring some of the most talented and technologically sophisticated people on the planet to engage in innovation aimed at driving down the demand for labor—the major and often only asset of the world’s poor.

  Choose Peoplelampforum.org

Economist; Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.

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  Guns, Germs, and Steel

  Their words

  I have a soft spot for extremely broad histories like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel and Joseph Henrich's The WEIRDest People in the World.

  fivebooks.com

Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.

• Recommendssponsoredrcmnd.app

  Template Metaprogramming with C++

  Their words

  I spent the last few weeks reading Template Metaprogramming with C++ by Marius Băncilă. It is currently 50$ on Amazon. Though, technically, the book is about advanced 'template' techniques, it is much more broad and practical. It is one of the 'good programming books'. If you are an experienced C++ programmer, you should give it a peek

  lemire.me