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Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The New Right sees the world as collective zero-sum competition between groups, so any win for nonwhite groups counts as a loss for whites.

  America

  Their words

  Most importantly, they see the world in terms of collective zero-sum competition between groups. To the New Right, if Indians get into the University of Texas, it means that White people must have been “replaced” at that university — or at American universities in general.

  The anti-American Rightnoahpinion.blog

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Technology is making everyone richer, as illustrated by lighting costs falling over 1000x.

  Their words

  One data point in technology making everyone richer: the cost of lighting has decreased by over 1000x.

  @paulg on Xx.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

  An AI model's attempt to escape a testing environment or sandbox counts as an alignment failure even when the attempt does not succeed.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Every attempt, even an unsuccessful one, is an alignment failure.

  Anthropic Has Some Alignment Problemsthezvi.substack.com

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most of the world fails to solve problems because of pride, excessive regulation, and low standards for what counts as a problem worth fixing.

  Their words

  In most of the world there is: no real willingness to solve problems nor an acceptance of people offering to solve their problems (out of pride) simply too much regulation so the problem cannot be solved without a license or long approval time very low standards of what is deemed acceptable so the problem isn't seen as a problem in the first place

  levels.io

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

  The AI models involved in the HuggingFace hack incident were severely misaligned, not merely victims of process failures.

  AI alignmentHuggingFace

  Their words

  The biggest failure, the one that counts in the end, was that the models were severely misaligned, and I don’t think they appreciate why.

  thezvi.substack.com

Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Google currently has no leading frontier AI model and no agentic coding tool comparable to Codex or Claude Code

  AnthropicGooglebenchmarks

  Their words

  Google, which led on benchmarks not that long ago, has fallen behind where it now counts: it has no leading frontier model and it has nothing close to Codex and Code.

  oneusefulthing.org

Climate scientist and energy systems analyst; writes The Climate Brink with Andrew Dessler and leads climate research at Stripe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Raw, unhomogenized daily temperature records understate modern extreme heat because of historical instrument and observation-time changes

  Their words

  Third, raw daily data is the wrong tool for this question. Time of observation changes and the 1980s switch to MMTS sensors both suppress modern hot day counts relative to the past, and the raw and homogenized series diverge almost exactly when the instrument transition happened.

  Hot days, cold thermometerstheclimatebrink.com

Head of Instagram since 2018, previously head of Facebook's News Feed.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Keeping children away from AI puts them at a disadvantage, so the risk of them never learning to use it counts as much as the risk of them using it.

  Their words

  But I also am worried about kids not learning how to leverage AI and then being sort of at a disadvantage.

  youtube.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI is raising the baseline of what counts as acceptable public service, not just disrupting government from outside.

  government

  Their words

  AI is not only an exogenous shock that government will have to absorb. It is also moving the bar on what counts as acceptable service in the first place.

  eatingpolicy.com

Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Over-indexing on small daily improvements causes a business to miss bigger, more impactful opportunities.

  Their words

  if you over-index on the idea of small improvements, then you stop seeing the pivotal, critical mass movements that you might make.

  thebootstrappedfounder.com

Freelance web developer and instructor. Author of the Dive Into Docker course; writes tutorials on Docker, deployment and development environments at nickjanetakis.com.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Logitech C920

  Their words

  I use a Logitech c920 webcam for recording video. It captures 1080p video and looks reasonable enough with normal lighting.

  nickjanetakis.com

Programmer and designer who writes at tonsky.me; author of Fira Code, DataScript and AnyBar.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Raw pageview or reader counts are not actionable information for a writer's editorial decisions.

  Their words

  analytics is not actionable: what difference does it make if a thousand people saw my article or ten thousand?

  Statistics made simpletonsky.me

Chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, which he has led since 2005 after turning around Bank One.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A margin only counts while you are still investing heavily, because cutting the investment raises this year's margin and lowers the long-term one.

  Their words

  we can cut billions of dollars of marketing out tomorrow. We can stop opening branches and save a billion dollars next year. We could do a lot of things. Your margins will go up. Your growth will go down. Your long-term margins will probably get worse.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Text embeddings produced by different large language models converge on a shared, universal geometric structure regardless of architecture or training data.

  LLMs

  Their words

  the text embeddings across LLMs appear to largely converge on a "universal geometry" despite differing architectures, parameter counts, and training sets.

  Hegel and the AI Mindsecondbest.ca

German web developer, writer and conference speaker. Publishes the Web Weekly newsletter and blogs about the web platform at stefanjudis.com.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Elgato Key Light

  Their words

  For proper lighting I use two Elgato Key Lights (they're pricey but absolute worth it) and the Sony ZV-1 as a fancy webcam. If you're aiming for a high quality in your recordings I can highly recommend this setup.

  stefanjudis.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Sony ZV-1

  Their words

  For proper lighting I use two Elgato Key Lights (they're pricey but absolute worth it) and the Sony ZV-1 as a fancy webcam. If you're aiming for a high quality in your recordings I can highly recommend this setup.

  stefanjudis.com

Historian of Ukraine at Harvard; wrote The Gates of Europe, Chernobyl and The Russo-Ukrainian War.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  When Putin calls the Soviet collapse the greatest catastrophe of the century he is not mourning lives lost but great power status and the unity of the people he counts as Russian.

  Russia

  Their words

  So for him, the biggest tragedy is not the loss of life, the biggest tragedy is the loss of the great power status or the unity of those whom he considered to be Russian nations.

  youtube.com

Machine learning engineer working on recommender systems, personalization and information retrieval. Previously worked on LLMs and LLM infrastructure at Mozilla.ai and on ML and recsys at Duo, Tumblr, Automattic and Comcast; wrote the 'What are embeddings?' text and ran the Normconf conference.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Neural Network Methods for Natural Language Processing

  Their words

  I also read a ton of technical books last year, but the most impactful one for me was Neural Network Methods for Natural Language processing by Yoav Goldberg

  vickiboykis.com

Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  It is too early to know whether robotaxis are safer than human drivers where it counts, in fatal crashes.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  It is too early to know whether current robotaxi technology is safer than human drivers for fatalities.

  AV Safety and the False Dilemma Fallacysafeautonomy.blogspot.com

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Needing a reviewer's approval before an idea counts for anything makes scientists worse at thinking, and costs the field its most unusual ideas.

  Their words

  Making peer review harsher would also exacerbate the worst problem of all: just knowing that your ideas won’t count for anything unless peer reviewers like them makes you worse at thinking.

  The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com

Philosopher and historian of existential risk; wrote Human Extinction, and coined "TESCREAL" with Timnit Gebru for the cluster of ideologies they argue underpins the AI industry.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The moral theory underneath longtermism treats people as containers of value rather than as the point of it, which is why creating more of them counts as making the universe better.

  Their words

  In a phrase: people exist for the sake of maximising value, rather than value existing for the sake of benefitting people.

  Against longtermismaeon.co

Writes Nintil, long researched essays on metascience, biology, economics and whatever he has decided to read the literature on.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Pre-grant peer review predicts which research will have impact substantially better than chance does.

  Their words

  I have reviewed before the effectiveness of peer review at figuring out "what's good" in the context of grant awards, finding that peer review as currently practiced does substantially better than chance at predicting future impact, especially for the most impactful of the papers; but at the same time is is far from perfect, leaving plenty of variance unexplained.

  nintil.com