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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.

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  As societies rely more on coordination than coercion, the power to shape beliefs and knowledge grows in importance.

  Their words

  If anything, I think that the book has gained very substantially in relevance, as more of our social structures have come to rely on coordination rather than violence.

  No-One Makes You Shop at Amazonprogrammablemutter.com

Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, the Denver company building the Overture supersonic airliner and its Symphony engine.

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  Good software is modular, but a good aeroplane is the opposite — everything affects everything else, which is why hardware iteration has always been slow.

  Their words

  But great airplanes are incredibly integrated and everything affects everything else. uh the the best airplane design is interplay of propulsion, of aerodynamics, of structures, of all kinds of optimizations, how you fit the systems into it.

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Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.

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  The current AI-driven intelligence explosion will require new social structures to harness its power without damaging human values.

  Their words

  I believe the same is true of the current intelligence explosion being driven by AI. We are in desperate need of new social structures that allow us to harness its power, without damaging or destroying human values in the process.

  Introducing the Alumni Mentor Corpsfortelabs.com

Makes NeetCode, the structured practice list and video walkthroughs people use to prepare for coding interviews; a former Google engineer.

From one piece Tech interviews with NeetCode 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  The data-structures-and-algorithms interview never tested a skill that transfers to the job; what it tested was whether somebody can think.

  Their words

  And DSA interviews were never the best for that. Well, thinking, sure. But in terms of like does that skill translate to what you're doing on the job? It never really translated to that. It was more about evaluating like does somebody think?

  Tech interviews with NeetCodeyoutube.com

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  The right way to hire is not four rounds of data structures and algorithms but work like the job, plus asking a candidate why they made each choice.

  Their words

  I'm not going to spend four interviews going through and asking somebody data structures and algorithm stuff. I just have them do work that might be similar to something I'd give them on the job or even just have a conversation with them. See how they think. Like can they think through trade-offs? I don't even care about what answer they give me to a problem. I care about like what's like why did they say that?

  Tech interviews with NeetCodeyoutube.com

Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.

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  A digital-service team embedded in an unchanged agency produces no lasting change once it moves on.

  Their words

  A digital service team that works with an agency that continues to hire and manage for the same jobs they did last year, and structures the work in the same way it did last year, is just a tourist.

  The Digital Service Was Never the Pointeatingpolicy.com

Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.

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  What trips up newcomers to Rust is not the code but the shape of their data.

  Their words

  I think the most tricky thing people run into is how should you put together your data structures? I mean for your code you can mostly do the same things as you can in other languages. I mean that's not entirely true but the big thing is really the data structures.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

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  The structures of science now have to change, because the scarce thing is no longer proposing theories but verifying and evaluating the thousands anyone can now propose.

  Their words

  So, we're now in a situation where suddenly people can generate thousands of theories for a given scientific problem. And now we have to to verify them, evaluate them and this is something which we we have to to change our structures of science to actually sort this out.

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Long-time Debian developer and free-software maintainer (remctl, INN, pam-krb5) who has published book reviews on his personal site since the 1990s.

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  Politics on the Edge

  Their words

  The stand-out non-fiction book of the year was Rory Stewart's Politics on the Edge. I have a lot of disagreements with Stewart's political positions (the more I listen to him, the more disagreements I find), but he is an excellent memoirist who skewers the banality, superficiality, and contempt for competence that has become so prevailing in centrist and right-wing politics. It's hard not to read this book and despair of electoralism and the current structures of governments, but it's bracing to know that even some people I disagree with believe in the value of expertise.

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Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.

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  Different forms of government map closely onto different corporate governance structures because both arise from the same transaction-cost logic.

  government

  Their words

  There is a close mapping between government ideal types and corporate governance structures given their shared origins in transaction costs.

  Notes from the UAEsecondbest.ca

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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  A sophisticated economy cannot be centrally planned, because planning removes the price signal that carries information about demand.

  Their words

  But once you actually have a sophisticated industrial economy, central planning can't handle the complexity. And so you try and create incentives and structures around that while not having pricing and that just doesn't work.

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

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  We have not scratched the surface of what classical, non-quantum computers can do; they can already go far further than anyone expected.

  Their words

  I think we've proven, and the AI community in general that classical systems, Turing machines can go a lot further than we previously thought. They can do things like model the structures of proteins and play go to better than world champion level. And a lot of people would've thought maybe 10, 20 years ago that was decades away, or maybe you would need some sort of quantum machines to quantum systems to be able to do things like protein folding. And so I think we haven't really even sort of scratched the surface yet of what classical systems so-called could do.

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Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

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  Cracking the Coding Interview

  Their words

  a classic to prepare for the data structures and algorithms interviews.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Writer on a lost civilisation of the Ice Age; wrote Fingerprints of the Gods and presented Ancient Apocalypse. Archaeologists reject the claims, which he disputes at length.

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  The three Great Pyramids are a Fourth Dynasty renovation and enhancement of much older structures already standing on the Giza plateau.

  Their words

  But what I do suggest is that there were very low platforms on the Giza Plateau that are much older and that when we look at the three Great Pyramids, we are looking at a renovation and a restoration and a enhancement of much older structures that had existed on the Giza Plateau for a much longer period before that.

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Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.

From one piece Sara Walker: Physics of Life, Time, Complexity, and Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #433 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  You are not constantly branching into many worlds — you are that space, and the quantum reality is not the one you live in.

  Their words

  So my interpretation of reality is if you fold it up, all that bifurcation of many worlds, and you just fold it into the structure that is you, and you just said you are all of those many worlds and your history converged on you, but you’re actually an object exists that was selected to exist, and you’re self-consistent with the other structures. So the quantum mechanical reality is not the one that you live in. It’s this very deterministic, classical world, and you’re carving a path through that space. But I don’t think that you’re constantly branching into new spaces. I think you are that space.

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  We are conscious because we are objects extended deep in time — consciousness is all of that history rolled up in us.

  Their words

  Yeah. I think if you’re thinking about this thinking about living things as these giant causal structures or these objects that are deep in time or whatever language we end up using to describe it seems to me that consciousness is about the fact that we have a conscious experience is because we are these temporally extended objects. Consciousness and the abstraction that we have in our minds is actually a manifestation of all the time that’s rolled up in us.

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  Life is the process by which information structures matter over time and space, and any individual organism is only one instance of a lineage.

  Their words

  And so for me, I think life is the process of how information structures matter over time and space, and an example of life is what emerges on a planet and yields an open-ended cascade of generation of structure and increasing complexity. And this is the thing that life is. And any individual is just a particular instance of these lineages that are structured across time.

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  Living things are among the largest objects in the universe — not large in space, but large in time.

  Their words

  And so what I’m getting at with this is I think that living objects are actually huge. They’re some of the biggest structures in the universe, but they are not big in space. They’re big in time. And we actually can’t resolve that feature.

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Co-founder of Netscape and of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Argues at length for building things, mostly in short form.

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  Hostility to a new technology comes from people whose power rests on the old one, because the new technology reorders who holds status.

  Their words

  And so all of the people who have achieved positions of power and authority in the world based on prior generations of technology are inherently threatened by new technology because new technology will upend the power and status structures and then a new set of people will, you know, come to the foreground and and take the power.

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  A computational method can regularly predict protein structures with atomic accuracy even when no similar structure is known.

  Their words

  Here we provide the first computational method that can regularly predict protein structures with atomic accuracy even in cases in which no similar structure is known.

  doi.org