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Age of Invention: Outdoing the Ancients
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17 September
Former options market maker who writes Moontower, a newsletter on trading, volatility, decision-making and how to think about risk outside markets too.
Co-sign Dave & Jon are media personalities with pointed views because that travels even though plenty of room for reasonable debate in between. For most of us debate is a waste of time. We have bills to pay not crusades to fight. Pick whatever view makes your life better. Related
Programmer, writer and musician; author of the Learn Code the Hard Way books and of Mongrel, the Ruby web server.
If you ever wonder where I get ideas for my videos that get 500k+ views it's from idiots like this: Related
16 September
Bootstrapper and investor. Founder of TinySeed and MicroConf, host of the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, and author of several books on self-funded software startups.
Seven million views is a difficult number to comprehend. So I think about it differently: millions of moments when a founder was wrestling with a hard decision, trying to grow their company, or wondering whether to keep going, and trusted me enough to listen. That means far more to me than the number itself. Related
Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.
"we may think that in the contemporary world we have moved beyond...the need for religious belief and worship has largely been superseded; but we have merely transferred these primal needs to celebrities and charismatic politicians and political leaders" Related
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
This was a fun paper to write, though my views on international relations debates are just slightly less obnoxious than the argument might be read to suggest (more on that soon) issforum.org
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15 September
British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@Edent/117271435790504594 Do *none* of you have strong views on the correct encoding of HTML within an XML Atom feed???? Related
14 September
Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.
startups
Their words
Technologies are not neutral, but political. Money is indeed one of the incentives, but not the only one. A mixture of millennialism, eugenics, search for utopia and for a spread of the specie beyond the confines of the Earth, are all elements we find among the founders’ views.
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branko2f7.substack.com
12 September
Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.
About a year ago, before it was on anyone's radar, we began exploring the idea of a benchmark for open-ended invention. Since then, we've developed several promising directions that will serve as the foundation for ARC 4 and ARC 5. We're incredibly excited to share what we've been building. We're still on track to release ARC 4 in Q1 next year, as promised. Quoting @arcprize ARC-AGI-4 will be a benchmark for autonomous open-ended innovation. It will continue our commitment to open-source, giving the research community a shared target for progress that benefits all of humanity. Despite rapid model progress, humans still significantly outperform AI at open-ended inventio… benchmarks Related
11 September
American author of The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy and Stillness Is the Key. Writes the Reading List book-recommendation email (started 2008) and owns The Painted Porch bookstore in Bastrop, Texas. Hosts The Daily Stoic podcast.
Edison’s Real Genius Wasn’t Invention Related
Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.
Their words
Rather than thinking of this set of preferences as incoherent, or merely the expression of a sectional petty bourgeois interest, it makes more sense, surely, to view it as a coherent set of anti-systemic views.
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adamtooze.substack.com
10 September
Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.
8 September
Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.
7 September
Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.
From one piece
@fchollet on X
2 beliefs · x.com
AGI
Their words
So I would not "declare AGI" until we have AI that is, at last, capable of invention -- conceptual breakthroughs, novel insights, new real-world technology, etc.
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@fchollet on X x.com
AGI energy
Their words
The narrative around why building AGI was a good idea has always been about invention -- "it will cure cancer", "it will solve fusion energy", etc.
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@fchollet on X x.com
6 September
Co-founder of Modem and a founding engineer at Sentry, where he went on to be VP of Engineering. Co-author of Third-party JavaScript, and co-host of the State of Agentic Coding podcast with Armin Ronacher.
Toronto has a new huge park with beautiful skyline views, trails, and a 10/10 playground for kids Related
Former L8 engineer at Meta, Microsoft and Atlassian, now writing and building solo on agentic engineering. Writes Kun's Field Notes and posts a lot about AI coding agents on X.
Co-founder and CEO of Linear; previously principal designer at Airbnb, where he led the Design Language System, and founding designer at Coinbase.
Agents 🤝 @linear Linear documents are just documents meant for writing down things. Projects, issues, views and other entities have different types. I think the structure makes it easier for both agents and humans alike to use the right one. Quoting @faruk_parhat Our coding agents did something interesting… We are both a @NotionHQ and @linear shop, but over time our coding agents seem to have preferred writing docs in Linear over Notion (since they were already creating tickets). And this kind of natural bias and proclivity of coding agents toward Linear sl… Related
1 September
Chilean web engineer building web experiences since 2006; co-founder of Media Creators and writes at iolivares.com.
Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.
Short This invention may have saved more lives than anything else in history Related
21 August
General partner at Benchmark Capital for over two decades; was the lead analyst on Amazon's IPO before moving into venture capital. Writes Above the Crowd on tech and marketplace economics.
This is very good. Ben brings a career of thinking to his views on where we are today. My favorite part is the beginning. There is no reasonable path to AI global dominance for the U.S. vs the world. It’s a fantastical notion that falls apart when thinking through the details. Quoting @patrick_oshag My conversation with @benthompson. Ben has been writing Stratechery for over a decade and remains one of my favorite business thinkers. We covered a lot. Every important company in the industry and the forces acting on all of them. - Why he thinks it would be problematic for the US to win the AI ra… America Related
20 August
Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.
by total views, matt’s now the top @aidotengineer speaker in our brief history, and arguably one of the best skills experts in the world — his /grill-me has reached all echelons up to @satyanadella (with some variations…) /wayfinder is @mattpocockuk’s /grill-me for /grill-me, when you are just navigating the fog of war and don’t yet know what you dont yet know, and need to orchestrate research and other grill sessions to get there. super glad to have @ricmac help launch our new Skills coverage with his course launch this week! 👇exclusive interview, quick read Quoting @latentspacepod We chat to @mattpocockuk about his /wayfinder skill, which he designed for the "fog of war" — when you need to figure out a project but the end state isn’t entirely clear. This is the first in a series of skills we'll be exploring in the coming weeks. Related
17 August
Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Writes at kk.org and runs its long-running recommendation projects, True Films and Cool Tools.
Senior space editor at Ars Technica; wrote Liftoff and Reentry on SpaceX, and reports on launch and rocket programmes.
Their words
In financial documents, it’s clear that SpaceX views commercial launch as a rounding error compared to revenues from its own satellites in space.
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arstechnica.com
16 August
Software engineer and founder of Block Party; previously an engineer at Pinterest and Quora, and a co-founder of the non-profit Project Include and the tech diversity data project Where are the Numbers?
great views from twin peaks this morn Related
7 August
Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.
LLMs
On changing their mind
In the era of base LLM scaling (2022-2024), I believed the LLM line of research would reach a capability plateau (as later seen with base LLMs).
In late 2024, after the o3 test-time compute demo, I changed my views: the new models were showing genuine fluid intelligence, and with this new line of work, the LLM line of research could achieve unbounded capability scaling. "There will be no wall."
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28 July
Economist at Brown; writes ParentData and the books Expecting Better and Cribsheet, reading the evidence behind pregnancy and parenting advice.
20 July
Author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts and of Bittersweet; writes The Quiet Life newsletter.
12 July
General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.
16 June
Editor at Works in Progress writing on architecture, urbanism and housing policy, and a fellow of the Centre for Policy Studies and Create Streets. Has worked in think tanks, academia and government in Britain.
Europe
Their words
In fact, zoning was invented in Europe, in Germany and Austria-Hungary, in the late nineteenth century.
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worksinprogress.news
9 June
Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.
3 June
Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.
Their words
But if you ever want to get better at anything, and sometimes that depth, that nuance is the thing that leads to an invention, right? If you know how a compiler works, if you know how memory management works, that might give you enough information to say, "Oh, I can make a new programming language."
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youtube.com
8 May
Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.
Their words
our cartoon picture is that the big transition is farming, but the genetic data, the biological readout is saying our genome is reacting much more strongly to this these events that happened 5,000 years ago.
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youtube.com
9 April
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability. The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest roun… Quoting @staysaasy The degree to which you are awed by AI is perfectly correlated with how much you use AI to code. OpenAI Related
4 April
Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.
24 March
Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.
Winning is rare for active investors (retail or institutional), and even with the few who win consistently, separating luck from skill is tough to do, and there are broad differences in market views and investing approaches. Related
Winning as an active investor is rare, and even with the few who win consistently, separating luck from skill is tough to do, and there are broad differences in market views and investing approaches. Related
Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.
19 February
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.
12 January
Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.
26 November 2025
Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.
16 November 2025
Software engineer writing about maintenance, open source and the industrial reality of software — the author of "I am not a supplier".
13 October 2025
Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.
26 August 2025
Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.
23 August 2025
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.
Bluesky Hey, psst, you can find early views for two upcoming guest videos on Patreon, one about statistical mechanics and another covering a story of modern art and group theory. Notes on early releases are always helpful before finalizing a video. patreon.com
Related
x.com Hey, psst, you can find early views for two upcoming guest videos on Patreon, one about statistical mechanics and another covering a story of modern art and group theory. Notes on early releases are always helpful before finalizing a video. patreon.com
Related
13 August 2025
Economist specialising in China's economy, international macroeconomics and global trade, and author of The New China Playbook.
China America
Their words
The US will lead for some time on breakthroughs on disruptive technologies, the zero to one technologies that ultimately change the world. But innovation is a process. It goes from invention to production and commercialization and diffusion, diffusing technology throughout all parts of the economy. And on those two stages, I think that China has a unique advantage, even if it still can’t do the zero to one breakthroughs, because in the end, how much this technology is adopted by the countries and by the various parts of the economy is fundamentally crucial to how much productivity will be unleashed.
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youtube.com
2 July 2025
Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.
19 January 2025
Historian at Stanford and the Hoover Institution; wrote Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market, on Ayn Rand.
Their words
Over time, they all come to share Ayn Rand's views and opinions on everything, from music to art, to clothes. She gets a dining room table and a bunch of them get the same dining room table, and it becomes incredibly conformist, because they've all believed they're acting rationally. And they believe that to act rationally is to agree with Ayn Rand and they believe there's no other way to make decisions than rationality. To disagree with her is to be irrational.
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youtube.com
11 December 2024
Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.
3 December 2024
French software engineer, public speaker and fully remote nomadic worker; writes about frontend development at maxpou.fr.
I wrote a post about a type of hack that I had never seen before. Tomas Robert, a YouTuber with decent metrics (162k subscribers/650k total views) turned out to be an AI-generated person designed to trick viewers into executing malicious scripts and stealing cryptos maxpou.fr
Related
6 November 2024
Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.
Their words
A delightfully insane introduction to systematic invention.
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worrydream.com
10 October 2024
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.
Their words
Fascinating subject. Countries are made of stories. Kings didn’t need their subjects to agree, but nations do. So to build a nation, they need to make a story that helps people feel a shared identity, nationalism, and what distinguishes them from their neighbors. Back-creating a history. Founders of Israel did this brilliantly.
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sive.rs
30 September 2024
Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.
Their words
The result is extremely engaging, and while I didn't particularly learn from it, I daresay most of the prospective audience will not, in fact, have read as widely in Ansary's sources as I happen to have done.
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bactra.org
19 August 2024
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.
Their words
The Chip -- the invention of the microchip.
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patrickcollison.com
3 June 2024
Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.
Nothing matches. Show everything
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Got it
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
Got it