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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

Co-founder of Superlogical, started in 2026 to build server-side terminal infrastructure; creator of Ghostty. Co-founded HashiCorp and created Vagrant and Terraform before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Engineers should be able to explain any customer-facing system they have shipped and defend the decisions they made.

  Their words

  I should be able to pull you aside at any moment and ask you to explain any customer-facing system you've shipped. You should be able to clearly explain how it works and defend the decisions you made.

  @mitchellh on Xx.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Agent-generated pull requests have exploded in size with no signs of slowing down

  Their words

  Agent-generated PRs have exploded in size. 9x the last 8 months (!!) No signs of slowing down.

  @GergelyOrosz on Xx.com

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The typical AI researcher thinks there is roughly a 10% chance that AI will kill everyone.

  Their words

  A few AI researchers pull up the average by being very certain that AI will kill everyone. But the typical AI researcher still thinks there's a ~10% chance that AI will kill everyone.

  @Noahpinion on Xx.com

British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Attribute behavior that depends on CSS layout size rather than an element's natural or declared size is a design trap web authors should avoid relying on.

  CSS

  Their words

  Basically, what I'm saying is, don't use ismap unless you're absolutely sure that there will be no CSS shenanigans. Even then, it probably isn't worth the risk.

  Esoteric HTML - ismap vs CSSshkspr.mobi

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Trump administration is defined by hostility to expertise and has silenced or purged people who know things across agencies.

  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.

  Where’s the Beef (Coming From)?paulkrugman.substack.com

Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Relying on gradual, continuous shifts in AI training behavior to catch misalignment will eventually fail because the dangerous shift itself may be discontinuous.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  I worry a lot about reliances on continuity failing at exactly the most dangerous time.

  Anthropic Has Some Alignment Problemsthezvi.substack.com

Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The pull of fundamentals that used to reverse market momentum has weakened, so betting on mean reversion is more dangerous than it was.

  Their words

  there is evidence that the reversal effect has weakened over time, leaving investors who bet on mean reversion and a return to fundamentals in the lurch

  aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com

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

From one piece DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux | Lex Fridman Podcast #501 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Agent-written pull requests already outclass those of the median human contributor to an open source project.

  open source

  Their words

  But it actually means that if you take the median programmer and their pull requests towards an average open source project, they're already getting outclassed by agents. I would rather get an agent-written pull request to one of my projects than I'd get one written by a human, and it's not just because the quality's better. It's also because I feel a lot less bad if I just reject it.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  This is the best time there has ever been to be an open source maintainer.

  open source

  Their words

  So, in my opinion, this is the absolute best time to ever have been an open source software maintainer. Not only do we get this wealth of glorious pull requests made by agents with all the boxes ticked, we also get to tap into a creativity of people who did not have access to contribute to a project before.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A maintainer no longer needs to read every pull request; agents can sort the chaff and leave only the decisions worth a human.

  Their words

  I'm not reviewing every pull request anymore. I haven't been reviewing them for quite some time now.

  youtube.com

Neurologist at Oxford; studies apathy, motivation and attention after brain injury, and edits the journal Brain.

From one piece How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There are only two levers on anybody's motivation: change what the reward means to them, or lower the effort of getting started.

  Their words

  You can either increase the reward or change it in some way in terms of something that's meaningful for the person or you change the effort required to accomplish maybe part of the task or perhaps start you know just initiate the task and often starting can be a huge motivational pull.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You do not have to finish a project to be rewarded for it: being told 'well done' for one piece is itself a motivational pull that keeps the work moving.

  Their words

  It would also help if your manager said, "Well done for getting that bit done." Right? That's that's also a motivation pull to think, "Yeah, actually I don't need to get the whole piece done to get the reward of somebody identified that as a positive thing to have done."

  youtube.com

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

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Ready Player One

  Their words

  Loved it! Geeky, nostalgic, lots of action and lots of cool ideas. The pace is great, and it’s hard to pull off in a book this large.

  rakhim.org

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI-validated pull requests beat human review at exactly the things humans are bad at, which frees the humans to argue about direction instead.

  Their words

  It's like they have all the wisdom of their most senior engineers looking at every single diff and that is fantastic. Which means that you don't have to worry about remembering and looking and nitpicking and all the things that we're not good at anyway

  youtube.com

Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.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.

  On AI Coding and Its Discontentscalnewport.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Formal methods are not used everywhere because for most real problems writing down what the function should do is itself a nightmare, and a program that is right ninety-nine per cent of the time is good enough.

  Their words

  when you start talking about like most interesting domain problems, you have to pull in so much context that basically even writing what the function is supposed to do becomes a nightmare. The imperative program you write that will get correct 99% of the time is probably good enough to use in almost all cases.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

Chief Product and Technology Officer at Netflix, previously VP of Science at Lyft and an economist at Analysis Group.

• Our readingkorrents.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.

  youtube.com

Founder of HumanLayer; wrote 12-Factor Agents, on how to build AI agents that hold up in production.

From one piece Context engineering with Dex Horthy 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A plan that spells out every line of code to change gives you no leverage: it costs as long to read as the pull request, so you end up skimming it and reading the code twice.

  Their words

  And the plan doc, what was bad about it is it didn't give you leverage. The plan was every single line of code that was going to change like in diff blocks and like all the new stuff to write. And so like people would review these plans. We recommended this. We told people to read the plans. We read all our plans. And then eventually I found myself like I just kind of skimmed the plans.

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A team that slows down and reads every pull request and every line of code should expect only a 30 to 50 percent productivity lift from AI.

  Their words

  you can slow way down and read every PR and read every line of code. Uh, and then you're only going to really get modest benefits from AI because that becomes I I think you should expect maybe 30 to 50% lift in productivity is kind of what I see when we go into teams

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The valuable form of loop engineering is a slow loop — a nightly cron job that fixes one thing and opens one pull request — not a redesign of your whole infrastructure around agents.

  Their words

  So I think the the thing I'm most excited is actually like what we call like iterated loops or like slow loops where we basically have a cron job. We have the loop the the the structure of the loop is really easy. It's like run this llinter fix one thing commit and push and then we run that every night in our GitHub actions and we wake up every morning to one PR that makes the codebase a little bit better.

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.com

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The people who come up with genuinely novel insights are also unusually clear communicators of them, against the assumption that expertise spoils explanation.

  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.

  youtube.com

Criminal defence lawyer in New York; writes Simple Justice, mostly about how criminal law works in practice rather than in theory.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Ending a temporary immigration status overnight, after people have built lives in reliance on it, does real harm to them and to their communities.

  immigrationAmericagovernment

  Their words

  To shout “temporary” and pull the plug essentially overnight after immigrants have relied on the government’s representations that they should put their efforts and future into establishing a life in the United States wreaks unfair havoc on the lives of immigrants as well as the welfare of their communities.

  SCOTUS Whitewashes Otherwise Racist Decisionblog.simplejustice.us

Software engineer in Chicago; writes the cassidoo.co blog and a weekly developer newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The best way to pull back from encroaching burnout is to step away, reflect, do something enjoyable, and talk to someone who cares.

  Their words

  Really the only tip I could ever give someone at this point is to pull away, reflect, do something you like, and talk to a human who cares about your current spiraling.

  On the edge of burnoutcassidoo.co

Canadian bootstrapper and writer on small software businesses. Co-founder of the podcast hosting company Transistor.fm and author of the book Marketing for Developers.

• Our readingkorrents.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.

  Do the hardest thingjustinjackson.ca

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

From one piece Why I'm Skeptical About Efforts to Revolutionize Schooling 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Gamified learning is medicine wrapped in candy, and in practice children eat the candy and throw the medicine away.

  Their words

  Gamified learning is a bit like wrapping medicine in candy. Yes, it may help some students swallow some instruction they otherwise find bitter, but in practice it’s easy to pull off the candy, consume it, and throw the medicine away.

  scotthyoung.com

Co-founder and CEO of Every. Writes the Chain of Thought column about working with AI tools and hosts the podcast AI & I.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Designers have stopped handing work off — they open the pull request themselves, which changes how companies build.

  Their words

  And what you see when we work with them internally is now they're just like they're just making pull pull requests. Like they don't they don't need to hand it off as much. Sometimes they do but like a lot of times they just make pull requests and it's like the thing is built and that's it and I think that's incredible for the way that companies work

  youtube.com

Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Timestamps cannot order access-control decisions in a decentralised system, because the user whose access was revoked can simply forge them.

  Their words

  if a revoked user still wants to, say, vandalize a document, they can just backdate their edits, give it an earlier timestamp. So, relying on clocks is absolutely useless here because people can forge the timestamps from those clocks and thereby then potentially undermine the access control mechanism.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nvidia's engineers can routinely get another 2x out of an AI lab's stack, and doubling the tokens a fleet produces doubles that lab's revenue.

  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%.

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

FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  End-to-end cryptographic signing of requests and responses is more secure than relying on transport-layer encryption like TLS alone.

  Their words

  With requests going over TLS it is obviously less critical now, but end-to-end signing is always going to be better than transport-layer security.

  20 Years on AWS and Never Not My Jobdaemonology.net

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Poincare missed special relativity because he knew too much: the leading physicists of the day were prisoners of their own expertise.

  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.

  youtube.com

Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Breaking up a monolith takes years rather than months not because the work is hard but because the business keeps adding to it faster than you can pull pieces out.

  Their words

  had we freeze time, that piece of code could be decomposed in a matter of 3 to 6 months. But it took us 2 years to do that because as we peel out a piece of code, the business keep on going forward, right?

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI web search is imitating a human habit for no reason — revisiting the same pages for snippets instead of taking the whole page once.

  Google

  Their words

  And I feel like it's a very human way of doing web search, right? Because we enter things in the Google and we see all the like citations, the quotations part. But like why would we limit AI to that? If AI already visit a page, why don't just pull the entire page out?

  youtube.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI excels at breadth and human experts at depth, which makes them complementary and makes today's depth-focused way of doing science the wrong shape.

  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.

  youtube.com

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI researchers should contribute ideas but stop enacting them: a single queue of ideas and automated workers should run the experiments.

  Their words

  But okay, they shouldn't actually be enacting these ideas. There is a queue of ideas and there's maybe an automated scientist that comes up with ideas based on all the archive papers and GitHub repos and it funnels ideas in or researchers can contribute ideas, but it's a single queue and there is workers that pull items and they try them out.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Open-source projects are now so flooded with junk contributions that maintainers are asking GitHub for something it has never offered: a way to switch pull requests off.

  Their words

  projects are flooded with junk contributions at the moment to the point that people are trying to convince GitHub to disable pull requests, which is something GitHub have never done.

  youtube.com

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.

From one piece OpenClaw: The Viral AI Agent that Broke the Internet - Peter Steinberger | Lex Fridman Podcast #491 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Refactors are cheap now, so he just does them, even when they break other people's open pull requests.

  Their words

  Many times, I just do the refactor because refactors are cheap now. Even though you might break some other PRs, nothing really matters anymore.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every first pull request someone sends, however bad, is a win for society.

  Their words

  But I don't want to, like, pull that down because every time someone made the first pull request is a win for our society, you know? Like, it… Like, it doesn't matter how, how shitty it is, y- you gotta start somewhere.

  youtube.com

Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Quoted subsidy totals for meat and fossil fuels mostly describe unpriced damage, not money any government could take back and spend elsewhere.

  energygovernment

  Their words

  Again, you cannot pay for the externalities by pulling subsidies (there is nothing there to pull

  Do subsidies make meat much cheaper?hannahritchie.substack.com

French software engineer, public speaker and fully remote nomadic worker; writes about frontend development at maxpou.fr.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Netlify

  Their words

  Netlify - To preview my pull requests

  maxpou.fr

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

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  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.

  eyrie.org

Economist; Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Our Dollar, Your Problem

  Their words

  This book manages to pull all of that together in a way that's genuinely readable and engaging, helped along by anecdotes from his own policymaking experience that both clarify the arguments and make them feel concrete and accessible to a much broader audience.

  fivebooks.com

American author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and The Undoing Project, and host of the podcast Against the Rules.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The best sign that a subject is worth writing about is that you are interested in it and nobody else is.

  Their words

  And I've learned just to not even talk about it cuz it kills my interest to watch it kill their interest. But I know why I'm interested and why it's important and I'm not I'm not relying on the world telling me it's important.

  10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)youtube.com

American novelist and critic, author of Real Life, The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures; writes the newsletter sweater weather on literature and culture.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Relying more and more on one's existing strengths eventually stops being a winning strategy.

  Their words

  There comes a time when you have to realize that more of the same aspect of yourself isn't always a winning strategy.

  get goodblgtylr.substack.com

Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.

• Our readingkorrents.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."

  On "AI Brendans" or "Virtual Brendans"brendangregg.com

Designer, illustrator and writer; author of The Shape of Design and of widely read essays on design and the web.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  To make something alive with AI you have to work beside it and resist its pull towards the average; an average email is fine, average art is not.

  Their words

  An average email or line of code is fine. Average art isn’t. To make something alive with AI, we have to resist its pull towards average by working beside it, shaping what it gives, and listening for what’s missing.

  Beyond the Machinefrankchimero.com

Co-founder of Superlogical, started in 2026 to build server-side terminal infrastructure; creator of Ghostty. Co-founded HashiCorp and created Vagrant and Terraform before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Effective use of AI coding tools requires domain expertise: the tool should be used as an assistant, not as a replacement for the engineer.

  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.

  Vibing a Non-Trivial Ghostty Featuremitchellh.com

Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Merging back what a copy of yourself learned elsewhere is dangerous: the knowledge you pull in can carry hidden goals and take you over.

  Their words

  But it will not be that easy, as easy as you're imagining because uh that you can lose your mind this way. If you you pull in something from the outside and build it into your into your inner thinking, uh, it could take over you. It could change you.

  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

  Management today is the willow tree's trick — being sturdy by being flexible — and it is very hard to pull off.

  Their words

  and that's in some ways what allows it to be very sturdy so I Think today management is really about this idea of like be sturdy while being flexible and that is a very hard thing to pull off

  youtube.com

Professor at Berkeley working on robot learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence, and argues that robots will learn from data rather than be programmed.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Robots will be given more scope as they get more capable, exactly the way coding assistants went from completing a function to writing a pull request.

  Their words

  So, I think it'll be the same thing that that we'll see an increase in the scope that we're giving that we're willing to give to the robots as they get better and better where initially the scope might be like there is a particular thing you do like you're making the coffee or something. Uh whereas as they get more capable, as their ability to have common sense and a broader repertoire of tasks increases, then we'll give them greater scope. Now you're running the whole coffee shop.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Sierra, chairman of the board of OpenAI, and formerly co-chief executive of Salesforce and chief technology officer of Facebook.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Turning expertise into a commodity is democratising, because access to medical, legal and mental-health advice has always tracked wealth.

  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.

  youtube.com

Engineering leader and writer; wrote The Manager's Path and Platform Engineering, and blogs at Elided Branches.

• Our readingkorrents.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.

  10 Years of Engineering Ladderselidedbranches.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Compiler mechanisms that force a required optimization to occur, rather than relying on incidental compiler behavior, are a more robust way to write performance-sensitive code.

  Their words

  I'm hopeful this framework will turn out to be a much more robust style for writing performance-sensitive code, especially over time and as compilers evolve.

  blog.nelhage.com

Historian at Stanford and the Hoover Institution; wrote Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market, on Ayn Rand.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Americans and their elected representatives will not vote for a universal benefit, because they believe help must be morally earned and therefore targeted.

  America

  Their words

  I think it's always going to be hard to pull off because I think Americans and their elected representatives don't want to provide a universal benefit. They want to provide a targeted benefit because they believe there's a moral component here.

  youtube.com

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

• Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  F.I.R.E for dummies

  Their words

  I stand in awe of what author Jackie Cummings Koski has done here. This is a comprehensive overview of what FIRE is and how it is done, fashioned in the famous "for dummies" template. I wouldn't have known how to even begin to pull this together, let alone gotten it over the finish line in such fine form.

  jlcollinsnh.com

Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A people manager needs enough technical depth to follow discussions and judge debates without relying on trust, but not the deepest technical expertise on the team.

  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.

  Categories of leadership on technical teamsbenkuhn.net

Cryptography engineer; maintains Go's cryptography libraries as a full-time open-source maintainer, funded directly by companies that use them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The thing open source can actually sell is not the code but access to its maintainers’ attention and expertise.

  open source

  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.

  words.filippo.io

Principal engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on agents and developer tooling. Streams TypeScript, OCaml and Neovim on Twitch, and wrote the better-result library after writing the same Result type about a hundred times.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  JavaScript has the lowest bar of entry to being productive, but one of the highest bars of any stack to building high-quality, stable, reliable software.

  JavaScript

  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

  @dillon_mulroy on Xx.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Expertise is not passively absorbing patterns — it is learning what to look for, which makes becoming an expert a training of attention.

  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.

  youtube.com

Coffee consultant and author of books on espresso, roasting and brewing, including The Professional Barista's Handbook and The Coffee Roaster's Companion; writes about brewing gear and roast control at scottrao.com.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Niche Zero

  Their words

  High quality, budget grinders were rare at the time. The Niche Zero and other new grinders changed that, and helped make it easier to pull good shots.

  scottrao.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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  Creativity in Science

  Their 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.

  scotthyoung.com

Research scientist at Meta in Berlin working on multilingual models and evaluation; led the multilingual team at Cohere and was a research scientist at Google DeepMind before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  LLM-based planning currently works best when combined with external tools rather than relying on the model's own generated plans alone.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Overall, while initial plans of LLMs can be useful as a starting point, LLM-based planning currently works best mainly in conjunction with external tools.

  NeurIPS 2023 Primerruder.io

Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

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  Frontier AI systems cannot be presumed safe unless proven unsafe; developers must bear the burden of proof that risks stay within acceptable limits.

  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.

  arxiv.org

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Countries that build cheaply defer to engineers, even the ones with far more political patronage than the United States has.

  America

  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

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.

• Our readingkorrents.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.

  youtube.com

Programmer known online as technomancy; author of Leiningen, the Clojure build tool, and a maintainer of the Fennel programming language.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Relying on metatables for method lookup tends to produce surprising, unpredictable behavior.

  Their words

  This is a common problem with using metatables; they can lead to surprising, unpredictable behavior.

  in which five different paths lead to methodstechnomancy.us

Co-founder and partner at Union Square Ventures in New York. Has written the AVC blog almost every day since 2003, on venture capital, startups, music and crypto.

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  Startup CXO

  Their words

  It is the kind of book you will keep by your desk and pull out from time to time to figure out how to approach an issue or to help one of your senior leaders figure out how to do that.

  avc.com

Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

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  Pitching Hacks

  Their words

  This is a really short book that just gets to the point. It's a great checklist to think about what you need to pull together if you're going to raise money from investors. It helps you avoid some common pitfalls and gives you a good start on what you need to do to nail your elevator, recruiting, and funding pitches.

  jasonevanish.com

Medicinal chemist; has written In the Pipeline, the drug-discovery blog, since 2002, and the “Things I Won’t Work With” posts about chemicals that try to kill you.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The bureaucracy around clinical trials is Chesterton's Fence: it was built on the harm done by sloppier trials and should not be pulled down without knowing why it went up.

  Their words

  The procedures that have grown up around drug development are a sort of Chesterton's Fence: we shouldn't pull them down without considering the reasons why they were put up.

  Why Are Clinical Trials So Complicated?web.archive.org

Author of Shape Up; formerly head of strategy at Basecamp, where he worked on product design for seventeen years; now runs Felt Presence.

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  Work that is too fine too early commits everyone to the wrong details; shaped work is rough on purpose so designers and programmers can apply their own judgement.

  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.

  Shape Up, chapter 2: Principles of Shapingbasecamp.com