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Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Standard social-science approaches that seek long-term regularities become less useful during periods of systemic transition, until the system stabilizes again.

  Their words

  the value of standard social science approaches, which attempt to discover long term regularities, is likely to depreciate in relative terms until the system settles down again.

  programmablemutter.com

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

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  The original NHS bargain with doctors is moribund: the state kept the monopsony but stopped paying out the promised rewards.

  Their words

  The bargain is, in any meaningful sense, moribund. The state retained the monopsony. It stopped paying out the gold.

  Your Book Review: This Is Going To Hurtastralcodexten.com

Epidemiologist; founded Your Local Epidemiologist in March 2020 to translate public-health science, and consults for organisations including the CDC.

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  Reliable public health data is as valuable as gold for protecting people's lives.

  America

  Their words

  Public health data isn't just information; it's a vital resource, as valuable as gold, for protecting Americans' lives.

  yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com

Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.

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  The late stage of the Big Debt Cycle shows itself as long rates leading rates up, the currency falling against gold, and the treasury shortening maturities.

  interest ratesgovernment

  Their words

  Early in the final stage of the Big Debt Cycle, the market action reflects this dynamic via interest rates rising led by long-term rates, the currency declining especially relative to gold, and the central government’s treasury department shortening the maturities of its debt offerings because of a shortage of the demand for long-term debt.

  raydalio.substack.com

Co-founder and former chief executive of Uber, now chief executive of CloudKitchens and of Adams, an industrial AI company automating food, mining and transport.

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  Ride-hailing is only the gold medal of transport; food delivery, parcels, trucking and off-road autonomy are silver medals each worth hundreds of billions.

  Their words

  So, we know Phelps is the gold medals guy, but I like to say that transport is full of silver medals, right? A lot of people think about ride sharing as a gold medal. What about food delivery? What about parcel delivery?

  youtube.com

Professor at Stanford working on robot learning and meta-learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence.

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  Hand-tuning a robot's data set cannot reach very high reliability, because people get tired; the system has to seek out its own missing data.

  Their words

  Um, and while this generally improves the reliability of the model, uh, people eventually get tired and it's hard to get really, really high reliability with a person that's manually tuning this. And so what would be even better is if the AI system itself can iterate on the scenario in which you want it to have higher reliability where it on its own automatically seeks out places where it needs more data, where it needs more supervision.

  youtube.com

Head of Instagram since 2018, previously head of Facebook's News Feed.

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  An abundance of synthetic content will make people seek out the person behind the content more, not less.

  Their words

  but I think people are going to really seek out other points of view because Instagram was never just about the content. It was always about to a certain degree the person behind the content, the point of view, the reason they're sharing it, their perspective. And I think that's going to become more important, not less.

  youtube.com

Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.

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  A company is not a democracy: every voice should be heard and then one person decides, and the decision should not be the popular one.

  Their words

  It's false to believe that a company is a democracy. The way I run the company was what I called a democratic dictatorship. And I said, I want everyone everyone's voice to be heard and then I'll be the single vote. And I think that's the way a company should be run. I think there's one CEO, there's one chef. I think a good CEO is going to seek out the intellectual honesty, the truths from everywhere and hear from everybody and then they're going to make the decision and they're not going to make the decision because it's most popular in the company.

  youtube.com

Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter on the business and strategy of technology, and hosts the Dithering and Sharp Tech podcasts.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Starlink

  Their words

  I’m pumped about Starlink and will seek out United

  x.com

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

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  Seeking special tax treatment that could not sustainably be extended to everyone is morally wrong.

  Their words

  it's also morally wrong to seek out special treatment that could not sustainably be offered to everyone.

  Stop Microlooting the Tax Codejoshbarro.com

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

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  Comparative advantage stops governing once the power imbalance is large enough: groups then switch into seeking to dominate instead of trading.

  Their words

  and part of it is just power, I think. Like, once there's a sufficiently large power imbalance, um, very often, not always, but very often groups of people seem to to sort of shift into this other mode where they just seek to dominate.

  youtube.com

Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.

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  Repeated rewrites are the correct answer under fast growth, because a system specified to scale forever would take so long to build that the company would die before it shipped.

  Their words

  Let's say if my requirement for the engineer was build a system that will scale infinitely to the test of time, it might take a year. We never get there. We'll die before then.

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

Canadian bootstrapper and writer on small software businesses. Co-founder of the podcast hosting company Transistor.fm and author of the book Marketing for Developers.

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  When a skill becomes widely attainable, people feel pressure to seek a rarer, higher-leverage skill to prove their value.

  Their words

  When rare skills become more attainable, people feel pressure to move "up the stack" to prove their value.

  Will Claude Code ruin our team?justinjackson.ca

Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.

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  Working prototypes have replaced product requirement documents.

  Their words

  There’s just no way we could have shipped this if we started with static mocks and Figma or if we started with a PRD.

  newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com

Vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group, the advertising agency; author of Alchemy (2019) and the Wiki Man columnist at The Spectator.

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  Reason is only one of several evolved mental faculties, and treating it as the gold standard misdescribes how people decide.

  Their words

  We have a whole variety of different mental mechanisms at our disposal gifted to us by, you know, a few million years of evolution as a social species. And yet we've made rationality the gold standard.

  youtube.com

Author of The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans, and host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Gold

  Their words

  Gold by Rumi and Haleh Liza Gafori. Poetry, 112 pages. A vibrant selection of poems by the great Persian mystic with groundbreaking new translations by Haleh Liza Gafori, an American poet of Persian descent. Read 1–2 poems before bed each night and thank me later.

  tim.blog

Novelist and writer, author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough; previously worked at Twitter and Current TV.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  The Fat Gold Gift Set

  Their words

  Consumable gifts Fat Gold The Fat Gold Gift Set My work life has two great lobes.

  robinsloan.com

Emeritus professor of war studies at King's College London; wrote Strategy: A History and Command, and writes about the wars in Ukraine and Gaza as they happen.

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  NATO's Article 5 carries no automatic obligation to fight, and it is still the gold standard for a security guarantee.

  Their words

  Despite its lack of automaticity this remains the gold standard for security guarantees.

  samf.substack.com

Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.

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  Retention is what makes a consumer subscription business possible: without it the whole burden falls on getting a stranger to pay on day one.

  Their words

  Yeah, I mean user retention is gold for consumer subscription companies. If you don't retain your users, then a lot of the onus is on getting them to pay on like day one. That's super hard, right?

  youtube.com

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

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  Nine tenths of the cost of Mars Sample Return comes from a single planetary-protection requirement.

  Their words

  something like 90% of the complexity and cost of MSR is driven by a requirement that the samples “break the chain” on the way home

  How to get samples back from Marscaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

Product designer and entrepreneur; author of Mobile First and Web Form Design; formerly a product director at Google; now building AI products.

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  Web forms make people adapt to databases; AI flips this so people can provide information in any form they like, and no form is the best kind of web form design.

  Their words

  With Web forms, the burden is on people to adapt to databases. Today's AI models, however, can flip this requirement. That is, they allow people to provide information in whatever form they like and use AI do the work necessary to put that information into the right structure for a database.

  lukew.com

Technology analyst whose weekly email on tech reaches over 150,000 readers. Publishes essays and an annual presentation on where the industry is going.

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  The leading chatbots are undifferentiated: in a blind test most people could not tell one model's output from another's.

  AnthropicGoogle

  Their words

  Like it seems to me right now you could do like a double blind test of the same prompt given to Grock Claude Gemini um Mistral Deep Seek. Do a double blind test. I bet most people wouldn't be able to tell which is which.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

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  Mocks and docs are dying: AI-native teams prototype and prune with code-first prototypes instead of static mocks and product requirement documents.

  Their words

  Say goodbye to cycles of mock and doc feedback, and say hello to code-first prototypes with constant iteration (on prompts, models, etc) to answer three key questions.

  The Death of Product Development as We Know itlg.substack.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

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  Air cooling has run out of headroom for AI racks, so liquid cooling is now a requirement rather than an upgrade.

  Their words

  Conventional air cooling is likely limited to around 20 to 30 kilowatt racks, perhaps 50 kilowatts if rear heat exchangers are used.

  How to Build an AI Data Centerconstruction-physics.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

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  Air cooling has run out of headroom for AI racks, so liquid cooling is now a requirement rather than an upgrade.

  Their words

  AI servers bring new challenges because many require liquid cooling.

  How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site

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

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  Air cooling has run out of headroom for AI racks, so liquid cooling is now a requirement rather than an upgrade.

  Their words

  The critical change that makes this all possible is liquid cooling.

  fabricatedknowledge.com

Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.

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  Seeking reassurance never satisfies, because an unpredictable future keeps rendering the reassurance already received insufficient.

  Their words

  reassurance is futile. Reassurance that we seek is like a warm bath, it feels great, and then you need more of it. Because the future is unpredictable, and when the future doesn't match what you hoped for, the reassurance you used to have isn't enough. You need more reassurance.

  youtube.com

American author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked. Writes essays and book reviews at markmanson.net.

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  How a person treats themselves determines who they let into their life and how those people treat them.

  Their words

  If you treat yourself poorly, then you will also unconsciously seek out and tolerate others who treat you poorly.

  markmanson.net

Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.

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  Historians should be required to publish photographs or transcriptions of the archival sources they cite, the way scientists are expected to publish their data.

  Their words

  Just as in the sciences it is considered good practice to make one’s data available, in history it should perhaps be a requirement to upload to some public repository the photographs or transcriptions of any cited archival sources that are not otherwise freely accessible online.

  ageofinvention.xyz

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.

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  City of Gold: Dubai

  Their words

  So well-written! Absolutely fascinating history of Dubai. An exciting page-turner. It gave me so much admiration for the city and its visionaries.

  sive.rs

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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success

  Their words

  Absolutely. It is incredibly enjoyable and readable. The authors, in a way that is very rare for economists, find small stories that paint big pictures for the points they make.

  fivebooks.com

Biochemist at University College London; writes about the origin of life and the role of energy in evolution, in The Vital Question and Transformer.

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  Sex is not an option but a requirement: a large genome cannot be maintained by picking up loose DNA, so eukaryotes were forced into it.

  Their words

  If you’ve got a small genome, the chances of you picking up the right bit of DNA from the environment is much higher than if you’ve got a genome of 20,000 genes. To do that, you’ve effectively got to be picking up DNA all the time, all day long and nothing else, and you’re still going to get the wrong DNA. You’ve got to pick up large chunks, and in the end, you’ve got to line them up, you’re forced into sex, to coin a phrase.

  youtube.com

Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

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  A tracing requirement in an encrypted messenger gives up the confidentiality of who sent what, which is the part that protects the sender.

  Their words

  In short: traceability can really screw with the “who sent what” side of content confidentiality.

  Thinking about “traceability”blog.cryptographyengineering.com

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Pre-modern subsistence farmers were minimising the risk of starvation rather than maximising output, and their apparently backward practices are rational once that is understood.

  Their words

  These small subsistence farmers generally seek to minimize risk, rather than maximize profits. After all, improving yields by 5% doesn’t mean much if everyone starves to death in the third year because of a tail-risk that wasn’t mitigated.

  acoup.blog

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos

  Their words

  Steven Strogatz is one of the most well-known math communicators, and for good reason. He has a way of making you love a problem before diving into telling you how it's solved. Chaos is an incredibly fascinating field, which has only emerged relatively recently in the history of math. This is the well-deserved gold standard for understanding what it's all about.

  3blue1brown.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.

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  Thinking in Bets

  Their words

  Amazing point: Would your belief in something stand up to the question, “Wanna bet?” If you had to gamble significant money on that belief, would you still feel 100% about it? Or maybe more honestly 60%? This creates healthy skepticism encouraging you to seek the best information instead of just defending your belief. Now objective accuracy wins instead of argument. Combine with “The Biggest Bl…

  sive.rs

Security researcher; founded Have I Been Pwned, and writes and speaks about data breaches.

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  Mandatory periodic password changes make passwords worse, because people just increment the number on the end.

  Their words

  If you're working in an environment that mandates regular password changes, you're very likely doing the same thing because it's an easy human control to deal with a technology requirement that's seen as an impediment.

  troyhunt.com