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korrents.com
A competent, empowered civil service that performs crucial government functions with in-house expertise is good.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.
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The the words it uses that this site has seen least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone — nothing here is a summary of this one.
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18 September
17 September
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Their words
Historically, whenever companies get power over what people's computing facilities can do, they use it against us, building malicious functionalities, designed to benefit them, into the software they invite us to use.
16 September
13 September
11 September
10 September
8 September
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Their words
At a fundamental level, they’re just hostile to the idea of expertise in any domain, in pretty much every agency where there’s something to know, where there’s technical stuff that you need to know to make good decisions. The people who actually know things, or the people who are willing to speak up about what they know, have been silenced, purged.
3 September
31 August
29 August
26 August
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Their words
The revelation I've had working on Omarchy the last three months is that to get that magical 10X, 100X, in a few rare cases, 1000X productivity boost, you have to interact with the agents directly, and you cannot intermediate that bandwidth with another human because it's simply too slow.
10 August
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korrents.com
Handing all code production to AI leaves junior developers with no path to becoming senior ones.Their words
In addition to reliability issues, it often engenders a mind-numbing workflow and an environment where junior developers will never acquire the expertise to become senior developers capable of designing complex systems.
20 July
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Their words
However, there's an increasing body of literature that shows that by engaging older adults in novel cognitive activities, you see improvements in function. So that can be language learning. Uh that can be uh complex like coordinative movement or exercise. You see the same things with um like musical training like people learning a new musical instrument or learning um musical theory trying to identify different patterns in music. And you see in randomized control trials improvements particularly in executive function that seems to be most common across those different interventions.
19 July
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korrents.com
Deep design expertise does not get squeezed out just because code and analysis got faster.Their words
But I think it would be a mistake to say design and deep design expertise and thinking gets squeezed out just because we can write code faster. We can do data analysis faster.
30 June
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Their words
One is it seems like there's a really strong correlation between the people who come up with genuinely novel insights and also who are actually quite clear in their communication of it.
16 June
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Their words
It shouldn't It shouldn't be shelved next to How to Win Friends and Influence People because it's a manual not of how to gain power, but of how to keep power.
9 June
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Their words
And their idea is we must hash out our different differences with diplomats and lawyers cuz when you send the soldiers in, it is uh whatever gains you think you're going going to get are going to be inferior to what you would have done with the diplomats.
7 June
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korrents.com
Making your customers unhealthy is a short-term gain that ends with having no customers.Their words
Sure, you could have a short-term gain in your customers, but if you make your customers unhealthy, you're not going to have customers.
4 June
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korrents.com
The most valuable problem to pursue is the hardest one someone is genuinely positioned to solve.Their words
Doing "the hard thing" means pursuing the highest-value problem you can find that still sits inside your zone of expertise; the hardest problem you're personally in a position to win.
27 May
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Their words
The boring truth is that expertise in most subjects is largely a matter of having an enormous library of knowledge and skill.
15 May
2 May
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korrents.com
People who are openly power-hungry tend to eventually lose their power or never gain it.Their words
Sure, some skilled sociopaths run amok. But most of those who are crudely, blatantly power-hungry in the long term lose it, or never gain it in the first place.
30 April
15 April
From one piece Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
And so our expertise um helps our our our um uh our AI labs partners get another 2x out of their stack easily. Often times it's not unusual that we you know by the time that we're done optimizing their stack or optimizing a particular kernel their model sped up by 3x 2x 50%.
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Their words
Between Hopper and Blackwell from the transistors themselves, call it 75%. It was 3 years apart. 75%. Blackwell is 50 times hopper. My point is architecture matters.
12 April
7 April
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Their words
his expertise seems to be getting in the way. He knows so much, he understands so much, um and then he's not able to let go of these these things.
20 March
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Their words
Yeah, so they excel at breadth and humans excel at depth. Um like human experts at least. Yeah, so um I think they're very complementary. Um but our current uh way of doing math and science is focused on depth because that that's where the human uh expertise cuz humans can't do breadth.
4 February
25 January
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Their words
When you have a loss, a percentage loss, you have to have a greater percentage gain just to get back to where you were. In this case, a loss of 20% requires a gain of 25% to get back to where you were.
7 January
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Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Strong Product People: A Complete Guide to Developing Great Product ManagersTheir words
Whether you’re a product leader coaching a team member or still early in your product maangement career, Petra Wille will help you break down the essentials of the job and develop a plan for growth.
1 January
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Politics on the EdgeTheir 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.
5 December 2025
27 November 2025
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korrents.com
Relying on AI to replace performance engineers reduces an organization's overall technical expertise over time.Their words
If a company spends less on performance engineers as it's considered AI'd, it will reduce the company's effective "performance IQ."
12 November 2025
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Their words
the improvement software improvements of really throughput in terms of tokens per dollar per watt that we're able to get uh you know quarter over quarter year over year is massive uh right so it's 5x 10x maybe 40x in some of these cases
11 October 2025
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Their words
This is intentional and I believe good AI drivers are experts in their domains and utilize AI as an assistant, not a replacement.
28 September 2025
19 August 2025
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Their words
My model is that research requires a mix of skills. The day-to-day coding and execution is crucial. But there's also a set of harder-to-learn conceptual skills, collectively called research taste. These skills take a long time to gain because they have poor feedback loops, but they take very little time to use.
18 August 2025
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Their words
I just think about like really simple things like access to mental health care, access to education, access to medical advice, access to legal advice. We're essentially taking expertise and making it a commodity. And I think that will is generally democratizing.
4 August 2025
24 July 2025
10 June 2025
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Their words
Consistent with the Kantian hypothesis, reasoning models automatically gain greater autonomy, self-consistency and long-horizon planning ability for free.
28 May 2025
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korrents.com
Defining what expertise looks like in a job family is not HR’s work, and a career ladder left to them will be wrong.Their words
Don’t let (or make!) HR do all of the work. It’s really not their job to define expertise in your functions.
5 May 2025
6 February 2025
29 January 2025
8 January 2025
20 November 2024
18 November 2024
21 July 2024
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Their words
The bar I typically suggest is that the people manager doesn't need to have the most technical depth on the team, but they need enough depth that they can follow most discussions without slowing them down, understand who's correct in most debates without needing to rely on trust, and generally stay oriented easily.
8 July 2024
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korrents.com
The thing open source can actually sell is not the code but access to its maintainers’ attention and expertise.Their words
Clients still pay a fixed monthly retainer to ensure the professional maintenance of the whole portfolio, and to get access to the expertise of all of Geomys’ maintainers.
29 June 2024
10 June 2024
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Their words
But there's also reason to believe that data center power consumption will nevertheless rise substantially.
9 June 2024
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Their words
My hot take is that JS has the lowest bar of entry to building and being productive (a good thing) but one of the highest bars of any language and stack to building high quality, stable, and reliable software. Very few devs have the expertise to pull off the latter
25 May 2024
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Their words
This fits with some of the studies of chess experts and so forth that it’s not so much that you learn the patterns passively. You learn what to look for. You learn what’s important and what’s not.
18 April 2024
26 March 2024
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Their words
Criticism is what happens when someone with domain knowledge who is not trying to earn status by hurting you is able to help you see the world as it is. And those three pieces are the key, right? Because most of the criticism I've gotten in my life has come from people who felt like they would feel better if I felt worse.
13 March 2024
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korrents.com
Making American farms more productive shrinks cropland in the rest of the world by more than it adds at home.Their words
Nelson Villoria estimates that for every 1% gain in Total Factor Productivity (inputs required per unit of output) in the US, croplands in the rest of the world shrink by 0.7%.
19 December 2023
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korrents.com
Whatever safety gain a driver-assistance system delivers is cancelled out by the driver complacency it creates.Their words
suggests that any steering automation safety gains (e.g., Level 2 autopilot) are approximately negated by driver complacency, with autopilot on being slightly worse than autopilot off
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Likedrcmnd.app
Creativity in ScienceTheir words
This book surveys theories of creativity, contrasting four competing explanations: expertise, genius, society, and chance, in offering a model for how creativity works. Simonton's work provides a nice hybrid between the purely anecdotal work of biographers and the data-driven work of experimental scientists.
18 December 2023
29 November 2023
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korrents.com
Anti-immigration parties gain ground by generating fear, not by winning the argument about what immigration does.Their words
The thing about the far-right parties is that they are trying to get people to equate all foreigners in a country with a threat to our future, but they are only gaining ground because of their ability to generate fear.
17 November 2023
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Their words
I'm not a defensive realist, I'm an offensive realist. And my argument is that states look for opportunities to gain more power, and every time they see, or almost every time they see an opportunity to gain more power, and they think the likelihood of success is high and the cost will not be great, they'll jump at that opportunity.
26 October 2023
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Their words
Despite evaluations, we cannot consider coming powerful frontier AI systems "safe unless proven unsafe". With current testing methodologies, issues can easily be missed. Additionally, it is unclear if governments can quickly build the immense expertise needed for reliable technical evaluations of AI capabilities and societal-scale risks. Given this, developers of frontier AI should carry the burden of proof to demonstrate that their plans keep risks within acceptable limits.
12 January 2023
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Their words
Importantly, low-cost countries with more clientelism and politicization of the state tend to be more deferential to the expertise of engineers.
High Costs are not About Precaritypedestrianobservations.com
5 December 2022
17 November 2022
9 August 2022
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korrents.com
A run of correct forecasts is not evidence of expertise, because among many forecasters some are right by chance.Their words
I may have I may be an investor. I have a track record of calling the market right in the last five times. People say, "Wow, he really knows what he's talking about." But there are lots of people who are trying to predict which way the market is going to go. And some of them are going to get it right by chance. And people assume it's because they know what they're what they're doing, and in fact they're just the lucky ones.
24 July 2022
21 July 2022
1 February 2021
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Their words
In people living their normal lives, circulating insulin level, and the insulin response to carbohydrate, don’t reliably predict who will gain weight and who won’t.
9 September 2020
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korrents.com
There is no best or fastest way to learn a language; the question has no general answer.Their words
after 30 years of learning languages and 10 years of coaching people to do the same, I am 100% positive when I tell you that there is no absolute best and fastest way to learn a language.
20 August 2019
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Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
Triton Audio FetHead preampTheir words
The SM7B needs a lot more gain than most mics, so this little inline preamp is great for getting the levels up without investing in a really expensive mic preamp.
10 July 2019
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Their words
Work that’s too fine, too early commits everyone to the wrong details. Designers and programmers need room to apply their own judgement and expertise when they roll up their sleeves and discover all the real trade-offs that emerge.
1 May 2019
14 March 2019
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korrents.com
The thing open source can actually sell is not the code but access to its maintainers’ attention and expertise.Their words
While everyone is focused on putting up tollbooths, opportunities to “price” maintainer attention, and access to maintainers, remain undervalued.
14 July 2018
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Their words
Managers should support 6-8 engineers. This gives them enough time for active coaching, coordinating and furthering their team’s mission by writing strategies, leading change, and so on.
16 April 2018
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Likedrcmnd.app
That the Best Physician is Also a PhilosopherTheir words
There's another ancient text I could have mentioned: Galen's That the Best Physician is Also a Philosopher. It's essentially a call to arms for doctors to concentrate on the perfection of their clinical skills and to give up on ideas of attempts to get rich through their art. It shows all the ways in which he doesn't trust those doctors who use their talents for a gain other than the benefit of their patients. It is short and elegant.
10 April 2018
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Recommendsrcmnd.app
full spectrum LED lightTheir words
I use a full spectrum LED light most mornings for about 10-15 minutes while I catch up on email. It's great—if you try nothing else in here, this is the thing I'd try. It's a ridiculous gain for me.
31 January 2017
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