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Technical educator, conference speaker and developer relations engineer based in Ottawa, Canada. Author of the Anubis bot filter and of over 400 articles at xeiaso.net.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A network round trip is roughly a million times slower than a filesystem-cache read.

  Their words

  Filesystem reads in that case are 10 nanoseconds at most (the filesystem cache helps so much here) but doing any network roundtrip is 10 milliseconds at minimum. It's at least a million times slower because of how reality works.

  tigrisdata.com

Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The United States is unusual among nations in letting legacy status influence college admissions.

  America

  Their words

  The United States is the only nation in the world with colleges that use legacy status as a factor in admissions.

  Marriageable Women, Informants, Ego-Shockrobkhenderson.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Legacy media is far left and therefore treats normalcy as far right.

  Their words

  They never do, because the legacy media IS far left! That is why they view normalcy as the far right.

  @elonmusk on Xx.com

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Reading literature from a vastly different historical culture requires explanatory context, without which its characters can feel completely unrelatable.

  Their words

  The footnotes are critically important if you want to understand a world so completely different from the one we live in, and the characters generally behave, think, and feel in ways that are so outdated as to be completely unrelatable.

  Your Book Review: The Tale Of Genjiastralcodexten.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

  Almost every company now reports that engineering processes which worked fine for years have suddenly become outdated.

  Their words

  Almost every company we talk with currently says that processes which worked fine for years are suddenly pretty outdated.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Writes at kk.org and runs its long-running recommendation projects, True Films and Cool Tools.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The large-scale AI compute buildout may turn out to be a temporary phase rather than a permanent necessity.

  energy

  Their words

  The supercomputer inside our own skull runs on about 25 watts, which hints that the minimum energy needed for intelligence might be small - and that the giant, controversial AI compute centers we're building now may turn out to be a temporary blip rather than a permanent feature.

  Without a theory of intelligencekk.org

Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Working Effectively with Legacy Code

  Their words

  First, Refactoring, Domain-Driven Design, and the Pragmatic Programmer are all classics for a reason. Amazing books, and mandatory reads. Working Effectively with Legacy Code deserves all its praise, and of course everyone (yes, really) should check out the Mythical Man-Month.

  adamtornhill.substack.com

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  The Mythical Man-Month

  Their words

  First, Refactoring, Domain-Driven Design, and the Pragmatic Programmer are all classics for a reason. Amazing books, and mandatory reads. Working Effectively with Legacy Code deserves all its praise, and of course everyone (yes, really) should check out the Mythical Man-Month.

  adamtornhill.substack.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

  When institutional transformation keeps failing, leaders should start fresh with new entities rather than keep reforming the old ones.

  Their words

  we've both come to believe that when transformation fails repeatedly, it's time for something different, and one of the tools that leaders need to add to their tool belts (and probably use a lot more frequently than they do today), is starting fresh, creating new entities (agencies and departments, for example) and either endowing them with new authorities or transferring authorities from legacy institutions to the new ones.

  Thinking the unthinkableeatingpolicy.com

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

  The word to kill in "minimum viable product" is viable, because viability is where hope comes from — aim at a maximum launchable product instead.

  Their words

  Minimum viable. that the viable is the the word we got to kill along with hope because viable is where hope comes from, right? If it's viable, it might make it, right?

  youtube.com

Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Current fears about AI causing harmful cognitive offloading are largely based on outdated impressions of early chatbots rather than today's AI tools.

  Their words

  To a certain extent, the concerns about cognitive offloading are an example of technological lag, where the mainstream discussion of AI and its impact is still framed in terms of the first-generation chatbots.

  Cognitive Uploadingadjacentpossible.substack.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

  Line-by-line code review has become an outdated ritual: senior engineers should be giving feedback on how their team instructs AI, not on the code AI wrote.

  Their words

  So, I think that the whole workflow of like reviewing code is very outdated. Like, I don't think the I think that the senior member, instead of like giving feedback on the code, they should be giving feedback on like how you give instruction to AI to produce better.

  youtube.com

American social psychologist at NYU Stern School of Business; author of The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind and The Anxious Generation.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The minimum age for opening a social media account should be 16, because puberty is a sensitive period of brain rewiring that needs protecting.

  Their words

  Sixteen is also roughly the age by which a majority of adolescents have completed puberty: a sensitive period of neural reorganization during which it is extremely important to protect the brain.

  afterbabel.com

Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Shortened versions of hard hobbies profit mainly from casual participants riding a legacy sport's superstar mythology, not from elite-level players.

  Their words

  It's interesting that the Shorter hobby businesses all draft off superstars in the legacy hobby, but make their vast majority of their money from people who will of course never come close to the level superstars - you'd still go to pickleball and talk Nadal vs Federer, you'd still go to Top Golf and make Tiger Woods jokes.

  Take a hard game, and make it shorterswyx.io

Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin. Writes at arslan.io about Go, tooling, industrial design and books.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Amusing Ourselves to Death

  Their words

  It's a little outdated, but still worth reading just to see how the world has, or hasn't, changed in the past 40 years.

  arslan.io

Game designer; wrote A Theory of Fun for Game Design and worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Lavish feedback wrapped around no real problem is shallow entertainment at best and exploitation at worst.

  Their words

  At minimum you’re making shallow entertainment. At worst, you are building exploitative entertainment.

  Game design is simple, actuallyraphkoster.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Figma, the collaborative design platform he started in 2012 and took public in 2025.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A minimum viable product is not enough: the first release still has to contain something a little bit awesome that shows people where it is going.

  Their words

  I think it's not enough to have the MVP. You got to have something that's a little bit awesome at least.

  youtube.com

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  With nearly free solar power, industrial processes optimised for efficiency should be redesigned to use far more power and run faster and cheaper instead.

  solar

  Their words

  You can revisit a bunch of legacy industrial processes that are have been optimized for efficiency and say, well, what if we just like use twice as much power and we just want to do them faster and cheaper, right? Like less capex, less lead time, more power, right?

  youtube.com

Development economist; writes Global Developments, on growth, history and the numbers behind them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Without a stock of trained administrators no development strategy of any kind can even begin, whichever theory of growth you hold.

  Their words

  The fact remains that without a stock of capable administrators, industrial policy and export targeting and infrastructure-building—or even Adam Smith’s minimum of “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice”—are a nonstarter.

  global-developments.org

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Friedman's universal minimum income went nowhere precisely because it was pure and free of moral judgment, which made it beautiful and politically impossible.

  Their words

  And Friedman advanced a policy that was really abstract and really it was devoid of judgment. It was pure and beautiful in that way but utterly impractical.

  youtube.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The same afterlife journey along the Milky Way turns up in cultures too distant in space and time to have shared it, so it is an inheritance from one remote common source rather than a coincidence.

  Their words

  And I don’t feel that that can be a coincidence. I feel that what we are looking at is an inheritance of an idea, a legacy that’s been passed down from a remote common source to cultures all around the world, and that has taken on a life of its own within those cultures.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Not the End of the World

  Their words

  His life and work have influenced my own tremendously—and just a few pages into Ritchie’s essential and hopeful new book, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, it became clear that she was carrying on his tremendous legacy.

  gatesnotes.com

Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  When safe interest rates are expected to remain below growth rates for a long time, rolling over public debt without later tax increases is feasible and public debt may carry no fiscal cost.

  public debtinterest rates

  Their words, before

  If the future is like the past, this implies that debt rollovers—that is, the issuance of debt without a subsequent increase in taxes—may well be feasible. Put bluntly, public debt may have no fiscal cost.

  Their words now

  Across advanced economies, the celebrated ( r - g ), i.e., the difference between the interest rate and the growth rate, appears to have durably changed sign or, at a minimum, to have gone from a substantially negative number to a number closer to zero.

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every doubling of the solar built worldwide has cut its price by 30 to 40 per cent, and that learning rate is why the price keeps falling.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  Per doubling of production, costs have fallen a consistent 30-40% since 1970, but it’s only in the last few years that this price has become competitive with legacy electricity generation

  Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The first move on a legacy code base is tests you can trust, before a single line of the code itself is changed.

  Their words

  I mean, the first thing that I would do is build tests. The first thing I would do is get a CI to where people can trust to make changes. Before I touched any code, I would actually say, “No one touches any code. The first thing we do is we test this code base.”

  youtube.com

First Amendment lawyer and former federal prosecutor; writes The Popehat Report and explains what the law actually says when people shout about free speech.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A threat loses First Amendment protection only if the speaker was at least reckless about it being taken as a threat.

  government

  Their words

  Now, finally, the Court has resolved the question: the First Amendment requires that, at a minimum, the government prove that a speaker was reckless about whether their statement would be interpreted as threatening.

  popehat.substack.com

Family therapist and founder of Relational Life Therapy. Author of I Don't Want to Talk About It, How Can I Get Through to You? and Us; argues that Western individualism is what makes couples' work hard.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression

  Their words

  In it, Terry reveals how men can unearth their pain, heal themselves, restore relationships, and break the legacy of abuse.

  terryreal.com

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

  A sustainable on-call rotation needs seven or eight engineers.

  Their words

  The ideal on-call rotation has seven to eight people; five people is a bare minimum.

  Why On-Call Pain Is A Sociotechnical Problemcharity.wtf

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.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Economics in One Lesson

  Their words

  This economics thought experiment is a classic book originally written in 1946. Like most books that follow Nassim Taleb's "all books worth reading are at least 20 years old" rule, it has timeless lessons throughout. It tackles all kinds of ongoing political/economic concepts like rent control, minimum wage, tariffs, "saving industries", and more.

  jasonevanish.com

Co-founder, chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Hosts the Masters in Business podcast for Bloomberg and wrote How NOT to Invest.

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  Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us about Economics and Life

  Their words

  Alan B. Krueger, Rockonomics: A Backstage Tour of What the Music Industry Can Teach Us about Economics and Life: From the economist who revealed the secrets of the minimum wage comes this look at the economics of the music industry. Its disruptions by technology to economics of songwriting and concert tours, the music industry offers important financial lessons. Kreuger, an economic rock star himself (he was former chairman of the president’s Council of Economic Advisers) left us far too soon.

  ritholtz.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  OpenBSD

  Their words

  But if you’re experienced, like to “look under the hood”, and prefer software that does the minimum necessary, OpenBSD is for you.

  sive.rs

London-based front-end architect, web developer evangelist and cloud consultant; Microsoft MVP. Writes at praveen.science and answers on Stack Overflow.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Fanny

  Their words

  Fanny (macOS Specific) is a free Notification Center Widget and Menu Bar application to monitor your Macs fans. Allows me to know the speed of my fans and heat generated by the CPU, so that I can make sure I keep my apps to a minimum and get the maximum performance.

  blog.praveen.science

Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Quantum Mechanics: The Theoretical Minimum

  Their words

  If you want to make the step from popular science literature to textbooks and the general scientific literature, then this book series is a must-read.

  backreaction.blogspot.com

Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  The Theoretical Minimum: What You Need to Know to Start Doing Physics

  Their words

  Susskind made his lecture notes into a book and did a great job.

  backreaction.blogspot.com

Cyborg anthropologist and UX designer; author of Calm Technology and co-founder of the geolocation startup Geoloqi.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  EyeFi Connect 4G

  Their words

  When I get home all of my documents automatically upload to Flickr on private mode, so that I can choose which ones to reveal or delete with a minimum of work. I use an EyeFi Connect 4G SD card for this.

  usesthis.com