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Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A competent, empowered civil service that performs crucial government functions with in-house expertise is good.

  government

  Their words

  One unpopular position I’ve stuck to over the years is that a strong bureaucracy is good. I don’t mean “bureaucracy” as in red tape and regulation; I mean a competent, empowered civil service that can perform crucial government functions efficiently and well using in-house expertise. This is also called state capacity.

  Roundup #88: Is it time to panic yet?noahpinion.blog

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

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  A country whose economy and military are deeply entangled with a dominant neighbor will keep getting stuck with choices that run counter to its own national interests.

  Their words

  So long as Canada is irrevocably plugged into the US economy, military and other arrangements, it's liable to get stuck with choices that run counter to its national interests.

  Canada is cosying up to Europeprogrammablemutter.com

Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and co-founder and CEO of World Labs.

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  Intelligence is not sitting still and interpreting what you see; it is closing the loop between seeing, experiencing and interacting.

  Their words

  I think for me, let's go back to the first principle of intelligence. Intelligence is not sitting there stuck and just seeing something or interpreting something when it comes to space and physical space, right? It's really this uh closing the loop between seeing and experiencing and interaction.

  youtube.com

Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.

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  Self-driving cars will not fix commuting; the US needs public transportation instead.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  if I was stuck in this traffic every day in a car, I would go insane. No amount of self driving would change that. We need ACs, but the US badly needs to warm up to public transportation.

  @mitsuhiko on Xx.com

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

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  It is very hard to actually get stuck, because the action space is always larger than it appears.

  Their words

  Now, the good news is that in my experience, it's very difficult to actually get stuck. Um, you can get yourself into trouble and the action space is always larger than it appears.

  Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.com

Author of The Simple Path to Wealth and of the jlcollinsnh.com stock series on index-fund investing.

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  Buying beyond what you can comfortably afford leaves people financially weaker and stuck living paycheck to paycheck.

  Their words

  Buying from a position of weakness keeps people in debt and living pay check to pay check.

  The Power of Self-Cleansingjlcollinsnh.com

Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.

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  Elaborate agent scaffolding is unnecessary: a task plus a way to check the output is enough to keep a model working for weeks.

  Their words

  You don't need slash goal, you don't need slash loop. These help, but really all you need is give the model the task, give it a way to verify the output of its work so it doesn't get stuck, and it will just go.

  Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code's Promptyoutube.com

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

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  What gets a stuck maker out is an hour of work with no idea what it is for, and the relief arrives before any result does.

  Their words

  So I did something crazy. I pulled out my typewriter and banged away for an hour.

  The Night That Changed Everythingstevenpressfield.com

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.

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  Card payments cost two to three percent because of how the industry is structured, not because moving money has to cost that much.

  Their words

  the whole industry is is kind of stuck in this world where they make a lot of money because it is this way. But there's zero reason why it should cost 2 or 3%. Just zero.

  youtube.com

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.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Selected Poems, 1968--1996

  Their words

  I am a Philistine, because I thought this was just OK. There were some good poems, quite a few which I found boring, and absolutely nothing that has stuck in my memory even a few weeks later.

  bactra.org

Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.

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  Shipping ten times as much is not an advantage, because the moment you ship something you are stuck supporting it forever and every later feature has to interact with it.

  Their words

  The moment you ship something, you're stuck supporting it forever. And by supporting, it means any future feature you build is going to like interact with it. So you still have to be very conservative with what you put out there. It's hard to undo anything. Just cuz we can ship 10 times more doesn't mean we have 10 times as many good ideas to ship out there.

  Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.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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  Being stuck is not an obstacle to understanding something; it is probably the most important part of the whole process.

  Their words

  I mean funnily enough I mean spending time stuck is incredibly important. Um and and I sort of you know, I that used to just be annoying. Now it seems like oh, this is actually um uh uh maybe even the most important part of the whole process.

  youtube.com

Writer and technology executive; blogs at anildash.com, was CEO of Glitch, and helped build Movable Type and ThinkUp.

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  Closing off interoperability is how a platform locks people in, and that lock-in is what lets the service be made worse without losing them.

  Their words

  Meanwhile, others like Spotify and Netflix leverage their dominant positions in the market to coerce creators to abandon open podcasts entirely, in favor of proprietary formats that require listeners to be on those platforms — locking in both creators and their audiences so they are stuck as they begin the enshittification process.

  Endgame for the Open Webanildash.com

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

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  The overhead of learning a new programming language no longer justifies sticking to the two you know: start writing in a third now, without learning it first.

  Their words

  if you've always stuck to two programming languages because of the overhead of learning a third, go and learn a third right now. And don't learn it, just start writing code in it.

  youtube.com

Machine learning engineer and consultant focused on RAG and retrieval systems. He writes about applied AI engineering at jxnl.co and is the author of the instructor library.

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  Purple Mattress

  Their words

  I've always stuck with Purple Mattress

  jxnl.co

Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  GPT-5.2

  Their words

  GPT 5.2 goes till end of August whereas Opus is stuck in mid-March - that’s about 5 months. Which is significant when you wanna use the latest available tools.

  steipete.me

Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Dead Weight

  Their words

  Dead Weight by Emmeline Clein: Certain parts of this book really stuck with me and changed how I think, like the chapter on the psychological effects of restriction.

  haleynahman.substack.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Starlink

  Their words

  If you're stuck on a rock in the middle of nowhere, and you somehow haven't discovered the glory of Starlink, maybe just stick to your old full-disk backup ways.

  world.hey.com

Chairman and chief executive of Microsoft since 2014; joined the company in 1992 and ran its cloud business before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building capacity at massive scale on a single hardware generation is the trap; pacing matters more than gigawatts.

  Their words

  Oh by the way the other thing is I didn't want to get stuck with massive scale of one generation.

  Satya Nadella – How Microsoft thinks about AGIyoutube.com

Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.

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  Action comes before motivation: you do first and feel afterwards, not the other way round.

  Their words

  If you’re stuck in a depressive cycle, even when you really, really, really, really don’t want to do anything, to do something. Try to make progress because the good feeling comes on the end of that. The whole point is to do first and then feel, not feel and then do.

  youtube.com

Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.

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  Settled civilizations only improve inside a fixed way of doing things; Genghis Khan had no fixed way of thinking, and that is why he could absorb any technology he met.

  Their words

  I think that sedentary armies, sedentary civilizations, they get stuck in ways, this is how we do it. And we're going to make it a little faster, we're going to make it a little bigger, a little stronger but this is how we think. Genghis Khan had no set way to think and, when he encountered the first walled cities around 1209 after founding his nation in 1206, he went out on these raids and I really think there were raids not wars at first.

  youtube.com

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

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  Google had the data, the technology and the engineers to ship ChatGPT in 2019, and bureaucracy alone is why it did not.

  OpenAIGoogle

  Their words

  They could have shipped ChatGPT for example, I heard, in 2019. And they never shipped it because they were so stuck in bureaucracy. But they had everything. They had the data, they had the tech, they had the engineers and they didn’t do it.

  youtube.com

Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Clear and Simple as the Truth

  Their words

  When I’m stuck and hate myself and my work, I pick up Francis-Noël Thomas and Mark Tuner’s short and wonderful book

  smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Leaving an old relationship for a new one is usually shopping for novelty rather than refusing to honour a sunk cost.

  Their words

  a new relationship is like fresh powder. It is new and shiny and exciting but it will not be a new relationship for long. And then you're still stuck with an old relationship and the question is will your old relationship a year from now be better than your old relationship that you currently have is? And if the answer is yes then yes sunk costs completely apply. But if the answer is no then what you're really doing is shopping for novelty not ignoring sunk costs.

  youtube.com

Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Generative models will let us build media a person genuinely cannot look away from, and that is the likeliest way humanity ends.

  Their words

  We’re actually going to build that, I think, but it’s not going to be one static tape. I think the human brain is too complex to be stuck in one static tape like that. If you look at ant brains, maybe they can be stuck on a static tape, but we’re going to build that using generative models. We’re going to build the TikTok that you actually can’t look away from.

  youtube.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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  Bacteria never became complex because the barrier is structure, not information — they explored genetic space far more thoroughly than eukaryotes and still got stuck.

  Their words

  So they have explored genetic sequence space far more thoroughly than eukaryotes ever did because they’ve had twice as long at least, and they’ve got much larger populations, and they never got around this problem. So why can’t they? It seems as if you can’t solve it with information alone. So what’s the problem? The problem is structure.

  youtube.com

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

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  However normal the rest of Sparta is argued to have been, its enslaved majority is not: no reconstruction of the population makes Sparta anything but extraordinarily enslaved.

  Their words

  Consequently if everything else about our understanding of Sparta is made less exceptional, is made more like a normal Greek polis, we are still stuck with this absolutely wildly high percentage of enslaved persons in this society.

  Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Retrospectiveacoup.blog

Research psychologist, instrumental in founding the field of naturalistic decision making; developed the recognition-primed decision model, the PreMortem method and the ShadowBox training method, and wrote Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don't.

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  Fixation errors come from explaining away anomalies and holding on to a wrong first impression until it is far too late.

  Their words

  So we we want people, that's the way we break out of fixation, is we notice the anomalies. The way we get stuck in fixation and making fixation errors is we explain away the anomalies, hold on to the original wrong impression until it's far too late.

  youtube.com

Release engineering manager at the Wikimedia Foundation. Keeps a public log at tylercipriani.com of every book he reads, with a rating and notes.

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  Snow Crash

  Their words

  I stuck it out to the end for a deus ex machina and that was some bullshit. This book would have been a perfect short story about pizza delivery.

  tylercipriani.com

Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Beginning of Infinity

  Their words

  I’m currently stuck in a loop where, at least in science, I’m only going to read The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality over and over again until I understand them fully.

  nav.al

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  The Fabric of Reality

  Their words

  I’m currently stuck in a loop where, at least in science, I’m only going to read The Beginning of Infinity and The Fabric of Reality over and over again until I understand them fully.

  nav.al