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Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Anthropic prices its Claude subscription plans as loss leaders relative to its own API rates.

  Anthropic

  Their words

  The subscription tiers are still enormous loss leaders: $20/month for your first $200/month of tokens at API rates for the "Pro" tier, and $100 or $200/month for your first $1500 or $3000/month of tokens at the "Max 5x" or "Max 20x" tiers.

  braddelong.substack.com

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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  The benefits to economic science from AI will be enormous, even if current practitioners cannot foresee most of them

  Their words

  I expect the benefits to economic science from AI will be enormous, even if current practitioners cannot foresee most of those benefits today.

  The mathematicians rebel against AImarginalrevolution.com

Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  When a team sees what needs to happen but does not want to be the bad guy, someone making the call saves enormous amounts of meetings and change management.

  Their words

  They see what needs to happen but don’t want to be the bad guy. I’m happy to just make the call if I agree with the premise. Saves enormous amounts of meetings and change management etc.

  @tobi on Xx.com

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  In expected value terms, Christ made an enormous difference.

  Their words

  It still seems in expected value terms, Christ made an enormous difference.

  marginalrevolution.com

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

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  AI has changed almost nothing about how a startup works; the one genuinely new thing is that companies now carry enormous token bills.

  startups

  Their words

  Everyone always asks me like with all this AI is anything still the same? And the answer is so far almost everything is exactly the same. The only weird The only weird new thing is that companies have these giant AI bills.

  youtube.com

Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

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  How data is laid out and how it is accessed are architectural decisions with nothing to do with hot spots, and the difference between two layouts can be enormous.

  Their words

  when you're working with a lot of data, the the difference can be massive if you structure it in one way versus structuring another way, right? Again, architectural decisions that have nothing to do with hotspots, they're how all the data is laid out and what the access pattern is, right?

  youtube.com

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

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  What people care about in their own identity is continuity, not similarity -- they accept enormous drift so long as the thread is unbroken.

  Their words

  so I'm in the camp that like continuity is greatly important. And so people will accept significant drift in their identity over time as long as they have continuity.

  youtube.com

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Elements of Style

  Their words

  I wish everybody read this book. The surprising thing is that many aspects and recommendations apply to virtually any language, not specifically English.

  rakhim.org

Founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, a nuclear-reactor company founded in 2023.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nuclear safety should be pursued by reducing the consequence of an accident rather than its odds, because something unpredictable always happens.

  Their words

  The alternative way that you can reduce risk is actually just reducing consequence, right? And we would argue that that's a much better way to reduce risk. Odds uh are stochastic, right? Even if you do an enormous amount of risk reduction on odds and you do all this engineering, something's still going to happen, right? like just something's going to come out of left field and you can't predict everything.

  youtube.com

Chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety and AI control.

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  Anthropic's constitution is compatible with Claude seeking enormous amounts of power, as long as Claude believes that produces better outcomes.

  Anthropic

  Their words

  I think this constitution is in some sense very compatible with Claude doing huge amounts of power seeking because it thinks that will result in better outcomes.

  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.

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  Having children does not make people better: parental love concentrates concern on a few and leaves less of it for everyone else.

  Their words

  Are parents better people? Not really. Parental love directs enormous concern toward a few particular people, leaving less for everyone else.

  smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

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.

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  Renouncing your own cognitive ability because the models are good is premature, because companies still pay an enormous premium for it.

  Their words

  there still seems to be an enormous premium on cognitive ability. And so, I wouldn't I I I I think, um, renouncing that before there's evidence that we've saturated, uh, those benefits would be premature.

  youtube.com

Professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M; writes The Climate Brink with Zeke Hausfather.

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  Climate change's effects will unfold as sudden catastrophic events rather than as steadily accumulating small changes.

  Their words

  The transformation to come will be decidedly nonlinear, meaning it will not occur as small impacts over many years but rather a series of infrequent, huge events of enormous destructive power.

  Wildfires are remaking the worldtheclimatebrink.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Standardizing document or table tooling on HTML instead of PDF, LaTeX, or RTF removes most of the underlying complexity.

  Their words

  Once you commit to HTML, an enormous amount of complexity simply evaporates.

  yihui.org

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is enormous unmet demand for social, because the social products people already use have lost their adrenaline.

  Their words

  I believe that we have beyond a latent demand for social we are being social right online. We are on Snapchat and Instagram and and Tik Tok, but I believe it's it's lost the adrenaline.

  youtube.com

Economist at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute; works on what advanced AI would do to growth, saving and the long-run economy.

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  Even with no redistribution at all, a little saving would rescue a great many people, because the same AI that automates the work makes returns enormous.

  interest rates

  Their words

  things have to go really wrong for us to like just get over the threshold of uh you know, capital being productive enough to automate lots of work, but not be productive enough that that the interest rate is high and or the price of capital produced goods is falling a lot, okay? So, even without redistribution, a little bit of savings will save a lot of people.

  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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  Expertise is an enormous accumulated library of small facts and skills, which is why no method can shortcut the sheer volume of learning it takes.

  Their words

  The boring truth is that expertise in most subjects is largely a matter of having an enormous library of knowledge and skill.

  scotthyoung.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

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  Computing is not a car market: x86 and ARM persist because ecosystems cost too much time and energy for anyone to replace.

  energy

  Their words

  Computing is not like that. There's a reason why the x86 still exists. There's a reason why ARM is so sticky. These ecosystems, these ecosystems are hard to replace. It costs an enormous amount of time and energy and most people don't want to do it.

  Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?youtube.com

American game designer and director, for nineteen years at Blizzard as a World of Warcraft quest designer and then game director of Overwatch; now runs the independent studio Kintsugiyama.

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  Other players must be present in an online world but never compulsory: forcing interaction is what kept MMOs small, and letting people play alone is what made World of Warcraft enormous.

  Their words

  And what makes an MMO, massively multiplayer online game, massive is having the other people there. And they’re so important or else the world feels kind of wrong and dead. But the concept that we have to force you to interact with them to do anything is very off-putting to a lot of people.

  youtube.com

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

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Boos block

  Their words

  Bought after much cutting-board deliberation and based on your recommendations. We love this thing. We got one that nearly fills a section of our counter (between the stove and wall) and it's heaven to have so much space to cut various things at the same time.

  haleynahman.substack.com

Co-founder and co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management; author of the Oaktree memos.

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  Nobody can yet know whether the current enthusiasm for AI is excessive, so anyone claiming conviction about how it resolves is overreaching.

  Their words

  Given the vast potential of AI but also the large number of enormous unknowns, I think virtually no one can say for sure.

  Is It a Bubble?oaktreecapital.com

Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.

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  The hard-headed realists who wrote America's 2001 energy policy expected renewables to stay trivial, and were wrong by an enormous margin.

  energyAmerica

  Their words

  But politics aside, what’s notable about that 2001 report, put together by men who regarded themselves as hard-headed realists, is that it envisaged an energy future reliant almost entirely on fossil fuels plus a bit of nuclear energy.

  The Rise of Renewable Energypaulkrugman.substack.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Models are enormous only because the internet is bad: most of that capacity does memory work, and a better dataset would need far less of it.

  Their words

  Um so I almost feel like because the internet is so terrible, we actually have to sort of like build really big models to compress all that. Uh most of that compression is memory work instead of like cognitive work. But what we really want is the cognitive part actually delete the memory

  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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The fastest-growing companies are not using data well, because they reached enormous scale before they had time to build any of the instrumentation.

  Their words

  So the funny thing, my funny answer to this is I don't actually think a lot of the fast growing companies are using data well at this point. And the main reason why is because traditionally things just didn't grow that fast.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  In a managerially run company legitimacy lives in the plan rather than in any person, which is why changing anything takes enormous activation energy.

  energy

  Their words

  no one carries the full legitimacy inside of a company. Legitimacy is a currency in a companies. No one carries the full legitimacy in a company, even the CEO. The CEO just has a lot of input on the plan. The plan carries the legitimacy.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Language models lack catalog-specific knowledge, so their recommendations tend to be generic and biased toward popular items.

  Their words

  language models have world knowledge and can eloquently talk about products, but are unaware of our catalog. Also, their recommendations are generic and suffer from popularity bias.

  eugeneyan.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Proprietary data is not an advantage in training large language models, because no company's holdings are large enough to matter.

  LLMsGoogle

  Their words

  I think it's actually the opposite which is that everyone's kind of using the same data which is you need such an enormous amount of generalized text that the amount that Google has or that meta has is not actually enough to move to be a kind of fundamental difference in what you can train with.

  youtube.com

Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Having banked almost everyone does not entitle banks to a fee on every transaction in society.

  Their words

  We have made enormous strides, both from the financial industry and civil society, in banking almost everyone.

  Open Banking and payments competitionbitsaboutmoney.com

Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and a 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry for the protein-structure work behind AlphaFold.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Meta is not at the AI frontier, and buying talent with enormous salaries is the rational move for a company that is behind.

  Their words

  And Meta right now are not at the frontier. Maybe they'll manage to get back on there and it's probably rational what they're doing from their perspective because they're behind and they need to do something. But I think there's more important things than just money.

  youtube.com

Historian of the Second World War; wrote Normandy '44 and Brothers in Arms, and co-hosts the We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Hitler had no business directing the German war: an enormous memory for units on a map is not the training a commander needs, and he had never been to staff college.

  Their words

  He might have amazing attention to detail, he might be able to understand, have an enormous capacity to remember units and where they are on a map, but he was only a half corporal in the First World war. He’s never been to staff college.

  youtube.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

  The many-worlds interpretation invents infinitely many unobservable universes to avoid what quantum mechanics is plainly saying: that measurement matters.

  Their words

  Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn't there. Go to enormous lengths like the many-worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Wartime shipbuilding surges have never left America with a commercial shipbuilding industry afterwards.

  America

  Their words

  But the U.S. again failed to transform its enormous shipbuilding effort into a successful commercial shipbuilding industry.

  Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships?construction-physics.com

American science-fiction writer, author of the collections Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation, and an essayist on artificial intelligence for The New Yorker.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Art is what results from making an enormous number of choices, and a prompt contains almost none of them.

  Their words

  But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices.

  Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Artnewyorker.com

Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008; later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, where he now posts many times a day.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Wages of Destruction

  Their words

  Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman

  x.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Iliad

  Their words

  Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman

  x.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Guns of August

  Their words

  Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman

  x.com

+ 2 more

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Storm of Steel

  Their words

  Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman

  x.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  American Caesar

  Their words

  Some audiobook recommendations: The Story of Civilization by Durant Iliad (Penguin Edition) The Road to Serfdom by Hayek American Caesar by Manchester Masters of Doom by Kushner The Wages of Destruction by Tooze The Storm of Steel by Junger The Guns of August by Tuchman

  x.com

Neuroscientist at UC Davis; studies memory and wrote Why We Remember.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Having both episodic and semantic memory is what lets a mind change on a dime without erasing what it already learned, and it is why humans can learn from so little data.

  Their words

  So it gives us this enormous amount of flexibility to stop on a dime and change, without having to erase everything we’ve already learned. And that solution is incredibly powerful, because it gives you the ability to learn from so much less information, really, and it gives you that flexibility. So one of the things I think that makes humans great is having both episodic and semantic memory.

  youtube.com

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  The same law that made chips cheaper made the factories that produce them enormously more expensive.

  Their words

  These enormous costs are ultimately due to the same factor that has steadily driven down the cost of semiconductors: Moore’s Law, the observation that the number of components on an integrated circuit tends to double every two years.

  How to Build a $20 Billion Semiconductor Fabconstruction-physics.com

Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Nobel Prize is probably a net good for the world and a net negative for science, because it makes scientists want to win a Nobel Prize.

  Their words

  I think that Nobel Prize has enormous problems. I think it’s probably a net good for the world because it brings attention to good science. I think it’s probably a net negative for science because it makes people want to win the Nobel Prize.

  youtube.com

Journalist and author writing on politics, liberalism and ideas; a contributor to Quillette and co-author of a book on Christopher Hitchens.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Moving money out of global health and into existential risk is a gamble paid for with lives that could have been saved now.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Diverting attention and resources from global health and poverty is an enormous gamble, as it will make many lives poorer, sicker, and shorter in the name of fending off threats that may or may not materialize.

  How Effective Altruism Lost Its Wayquillette.com

Co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the writer who started the modern argument that a sufficiently capable AI would by default kill everyone. Has argued the case since the early 2000s, latterly with the conclusion that it is being lost.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The field calling itself AI safety is not being remotely productive on the problems that are actually lethal.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  It does not appear to me that the field of ‘AI safety’ is currently being remotely productive on tackling its enormous lethal problems.

  AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalitiesintelligence.org

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

  A pre-modern countryside produces an enormous amount of food and almost no extractable surplus, which is the hard limit on everything the state above it can do.

  Their words

  There is a ton of food in this countryside (nearly everyone is producing it) but hardly any surplus.

  acoup.blog

Writer and researcher, founder of New Science; writes essays on science funding, sleep research, productivity and ambition at guzey.com.

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  Getting the science wrong in a bestselling health book does real harm to the people who follow it.

  Their words

  Walker’s book has likely wasted thousands of hours of life and worsened the health of people who read it and took its recommendations at face value

  guzey.com

Journalist and author of Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation. Writes the newsletter Culture Study, which runs a recurring links-and-recommendations issue.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Wirecutter

  Their words

  The Place to Go For Real Recommendations: Wirecutter

  annehelen.substack.com

Obesity researcher; wrote The Hungry Brain, on why the brain overeats, and reviews nutrition evidence.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  The executives of the Nutrition Science Initiative paid themselves their own enormous salaries out of a nonprofit's donations.

  Their words, before

  One thing that I think hasn’t gotten enough attention is the fact that NuSI staff, particularly Attia, paid themselves enormous salaries while they were at NuSI

  Their words now

  NuSI executives didn’t set their own compensation, as I and others have implied.

Writer and researcher on how people organise online; wrote Working in Public, on the maintenance of open-source software, and Antimemetics.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Open source on GitHub creates enormous value that the platform hosting it captures none of, while its policies limit how maintainers may earn.

  open source

  Their words

  Open source projects on GitHub represent billions of dollars in value creation, but none of that is captured on GitHub.

  Who pays the toolmakers?nadia.xyz