Related posts

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  When liability for unverified failures approaches zero, verification budgets collapse and deployers flood systems with unmonitored agents while socializing catastrophic risks.

  Their words

  When liability exposure approaches 0—when no one pays the price for unverified failures—verification budgets collapse...Deployers flood the Runaway Risk Zone with unmonitored agents, capturing the gains of automation while socializing catastrophic risks.

  @naval on Xx.com

Lawyer and everyday-carry gear reviewer who publishes scored knife, flashlight and multitool reviews at Everyday Commentary.

• Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Benchmade Mini Bugout in S90V

  Their words

  In the end, the MBO in S90V is probably the best EDC knife Benchmade has ever made and it is a jewel in my collection (the Valet and the Aphid were pretty good too; Benchmade can we get a re-issue of the Aphid with upgraded materials?). The exposed rear tang is an irksome but ultimately minor issue. The size, refinement, steel, and weight make this one of the very best knives on the market right now.

  everydaycommentary.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.

From one piece Travis Kalanick: How AI Will Transform the Physical World 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Once mining is automated end to end, a mining company is nothing but the owner of some real estate.

  Their words

  Will mining get automated? And if it does, not just the movement of the materials, but every part of mining. Then what is a mining company? It just owns real estate.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Superintelligence bottoms out in mining, because both the chips and the energy it runs on come out of the ground.

  AI alignmentenergy

  Their words

  Chips come from the ground. Where's the energy come from? And a lot of people are like, "Oh, it comes from the sun." Yeah, it comes from the sun. But how are you capturing it from the sun? From stuff made from the ground, right?

  youtube.com

Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Multi-Paradigm Design for C++

  Their words

  Multi-Paradigm Design for C++ by James O. Coplien. Twenty years after reading this, the core techniques are still with me. These are commonality analysis, where the purpose is to identify families of systems, and variability analysis, which focuses on capturing the domain parameters that vary. In essence: the foundation of great software design.

  adamtornhill.substack.com

Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A narrow, highly accurate model can beat a general one inside its own domain, as AlphaFold did, and materials science and chip design are next.

  Their words

  I mean I think like if you look at uh my colleagues work on say alpha fold that was a very specific model for uh protein folding and it was highly successful um and was able to really handle that domain quite well so that all of a sudden you now have this amazing tool and model that can give you answers to questions about proteins and their structure um really effectively um but it's not a general model it's a very specific one and there are other I domains where that kind of approach can work really well. Uh maybe in material science or chip design or things like that that uh will enable you to leverage the capabilities of a very accurate but but niche model uh to do things that are hard today.

  Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com

Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Other engineering fields compile deep reference books about their materials and software has nothing of the kind, not even a five-hundred-page book on how to version an API.

  Their words

  And that kind of compiling of information about the materials is something other fields do that we don't do. An analogy that I would think of in software would be something like a 500-page book on how to version an API.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

Polyglot who speaks twenty languages and co-founded LingQ; argues that comprehensible input, not study, is what does the work.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Learning from input does not mean refusing grammar books; the point is to notice patterns, not to master the rules.

  Their words

  Some people think CI means you reject grammar books. I disagree. I often reference grammar materials and find these explanations useful. However, the focus of my learning is not to “master the rules”. Grammar resources simply help me notice and make sense of patterns in the language.

  blog.thelinguist.com

Social scientist turned small-scale farmer; wrote A Small Farm Future and argues against the case for feeding the world from factories.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Efficiency is the wrong measure of a food system; what matters is what it costs at a level of energy and materials that can be sustained.

  energy

  Their words

  a more relevant metric in the long term is the cost, not the efficiency, of food production methods at sustainable levels of energetic and material throughput.

  chrissmaje.com

Chief executive of Intel since 2025, founder of the venture firm Walden International and chief executive of Cadence Design Systems for thirteen years.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Performance can still double, but cost and area will no longer come down with it unless new materials or new design methods arrive.

  Their words

  and then the power and the cost and then you can double the performance but you cannot double down on the cost and and area. So those are the thing you have to give give way unless you find some new way of material new way of design.

  youtube.com

Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The moral debt for AI's capabilities is owed to the authors of the public data used to train it, not to the AI companies.

  AnthropicOpenAIGoogle

  Their words

  We owe a debt, not to companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, or Google, but to the authors of the free public raw materials that were used to train AI.

  Reflections on AI-assisted Programmingyihui.org

Programmer and essayist who has worked at Amazon, Google, Grab and Sourcegraph. Best known for the long-form essays collected as Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI has a vampiric effect on the people using it: it excites them into working past their own ragged edge.

  Their words

  There's a vampiric effect happening with AI where it gets you excited and you work really really hard and you're capturing a ton of value. For me, I'm doing it all for myself and it's still kind of like pushing me to my ragged edge.

  From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yeggeyoutube.com

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.

From one piece Back To The Garden 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Stone Age, Bronze Age and Iron Age framework names historical eras after the inorganic materials that happened to survive, not what those societies actually valued.

  Their words

  That now ubiquitous timeline names eras after the inorganic materials that happened to survive in the dirt.

  Back To The Gardenadjacentpossible.substack.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Archaeological interpretations of human history are biased toward artifacts made of durable materials that survived, not what mattered most to the people who made them.

  Their words

  archeologists naturally build their interpretations of human history out of artifacts that survive the passage of deep time.

  Back To The Gardenadjacentpossible.substack.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  For small strategic materials markets like rare earths the right policy is a stockpile, not domestic production.

  Their words

  Stockpiles provide insurance while conserving our valuable labor.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

Writer of MacSparky and author of the MacSparky Field Guides on Apple productivity software. A lawyer for 30 years before going full-time on the site, he co-hosts the Mac Power Users and Focused podcasts.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Readwise Reader

  Their words

  I continue to get a lot of value out of my Readwise subscription in terms of capturing and organizing what I read.

  macsparky.com

Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Playground

  Their words

  Playground by Richard Powers is a strange and wonderful novel set (mostly) on a remote atoll in French Polynesia that follows the tangled lives of an environmental advocate, a sculptor, a tech entrepreneur, and a brilliant bookworm trying to escape the grinding poverty of Chicago's South Side. The richly drawn characters drive the story, but what I love most about the book is that it's a love letter to the ocean with prose that comes closer than anything else I've read to capturing what it feels like to, for example, dive a thriving coral reef.

  eliotpeper.substack.com

President of the European Commission since 2019; previously Germany's defence minister.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  This is Europe's independence moment: it must be able to provide its own defence and control the technology and energy its economy runs on.

  energyEurope

  Their words

  This must be Europe's Independence Moment. I believe this is our Union's mission. To be able to take care of our own defence and security. To take control over the technologies and energies that will fuel our economies.

  enlargement.ec.europa.eu

Economist specialising in China's economy, international macroeconomics and global trade, and author of The New China Playbook.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Since 1990 ageing economies have grown richer rather than poorer, because ageing pushes a society to adopt automation faster.

  Their words

  If you look at the most recent evidence on this issue, they found that post-1990, aging economies became richer. Not the other way around, which was true for the pre-1990 sample. And the reason is that these aging societies much more rapidly adopted new technologies, automation that actually helped the entire economy.

  youtube.com

Designer and co-founder of Lux, makers of Halide, Spectre and Kino; formerly a designer at Apple.

From one piece Physicality: the new age of UI 2 beliefs · lux.camera

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Interfaces are returning to skeuomorphism, but as behaviour rather than lacquer: clear, graphic elements that act like materials from the real world.

  Their words

  We’ve come back, in a sense, to skeuomorphic interfaces — but this time not with a lacquer resembling a material. Instead, the interface is clear, graphic and behaves like things we know from the real world, or might exist in the world. This is what the new skeuomorphism is. It, too, is physicality.

  Physicality: the new age of UIlux.camera

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Opaque, inert, obstructive interface elements will become as niche as the full-screen command line once interfaces are infused with dynamic materials.

  Their words

  Opaque, inert and obstructive elements might occupy the same place as full-screen command line interfaces — a powerful niche UI that was a marker in history, passed on by the windowed environment of the multi-tasking, graphical user interface revolution.

  Physicality: the new age of UIlux.camera

Prime Minister of Canada since March 2025; formerly governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The old Canada-US relationship, built on ever-deeper economic integration and tight security cooperation, is over.

  America

  Their words

  The old relationship we had with the United States based on deepening integration of our economies and tight security and military cooperation is over.

  cnn.com

Development economist; writes Global Developments, on growth, history and the numbers behind them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Aid to African states has been large enough to warp their politics and too small to transform their economies.

  Their words

  As scholars like Nicolas van de Walle have pointed out, aid can also foster an unhealthy dependency—in his coinage, many African states live in a state of “permanent crisis”, where aid is large enough to reshape (and warp) the political economy around it, but not large enough to be fundamentally transform countries’ economies.

  A World Without Aid?global-developments.org

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building materials are already about as cheap as civilisation knows how to make them, so cheaper materials are not where housing savings will come from.

  Their words

  Bulk building materials are already mass-produced in factories, and are among the cheapest materials civilization is capable of producing.

  What Makes Housing So Expensive?construction-physics.com