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Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The specific rules taught as clean code are simply bad programming practices, and they get worse when you apply them together.

  Their words

  If you look at those things, they're kind of just bad programming practices. I I don't really know how else to say them. They don't mesh well when you put them together.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Dopamine drives wanting rather than liking: the pleasure of actually getting the thing runs on opioids instead, which is why an addict can want what they do not enjoy.

  Addiction

  Their words

  And the evidence suggests that wanting pursuit of a goal is mediated or modulated at least by dopamine whereas actually the liking the pleasure you might get from an outcome is not that seems to be related to uh opioid neurotransmitters in the brain.

  youtube.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

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  Resolving workplace conflict is better achieved by changing the relationship itself than by trying to change the other person.

  Their words

  This helped the leader shift from wanting to change Jacob-something they couldn't control-to taking responsibility for changing the relationship-something they could.

  Designing Better Working Relationshipsbringthedonuts.com

Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and co-founder and CEO of World Labs.

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  Prompting should be taught in schools from kindergarten onwards, as a matter of public education.

  Their words

  This is why public education is so important. This is why education is so important. I would love to see our schools K12 teaching prompting.

  youtube.com

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

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  What made Netflix fast — local teams building whatever stack they needed — stops working once agents operate across systems; common paved paths now matter more.

  Their words

  In a world of AI with agents operating across multiple systems, wanting source of truth data, the importance of having preferred paved paths that get the most of the benefits and produce some guardrails so we can make sure we're doing good work, common infrastructure, common paved paths, solving problems once with a core set of capabilities becomes more important.

  youtube.com

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

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  The engineering intuition that matters cannot be taught from a textbook — you know bad patterns in software because you have debugged them at three in the morning.

  Their words

  there's a different kind of intuition that you that you develop over years as a software engineer and uh there's many categories of it but the one I'll I'll call attention to that is like a thing that you cannot teach you cannot do you cannot learn in a textbook. The only way to learn it is like I know bad patterns in software because I have debugged them at three in the morning.

  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.

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  Even if AI curates better, people will still want a human curator they have a relationship with, because wanting to learn something is a social phenomenon.

  Their words

  I think we would always still prefer like a human that we had a relationship with because the way that we get motivated to be interesting interested in things is a social phenomenon.

  youtube.com

Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.

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  Living for as long as possible is worth wanting: if you enjoy life now, more of it is simply better.

  Their words

  This seems like an easy yes. If you enjoy life right now, why not get more of it?

  Immortality Sounds Pretty Good, Actuallysmallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

Full-stack Laravel developer based in Madison, Wisconsin; maintains open-source Laravel, Livewire and Alpine.js packages and writes at randallwilk.dev.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  UniFi UNAS Pro 8

  Their words

  I've been wanting to get a NAS for a while now, so I decided to go all-in and get the UNAS Pro 8 from UniFi. The initial cost was a lot but for me it's been well worth the investment.

  randallwilk.dev

Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Good writing requires wanting to tell people something, which AI itself lacks.

  Their words

  The prerequisite to good writing is having something you want to tell people about, which AI doesn't.

  Slop Readersputanumonit.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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  General problem-solving ability is neither learned nor taught; what transfers has to be taught explicitly rather than discovered through projects.

  Their words

  General problem solving abilities are neither learned nor taught. While some problem-solving methods have broader applicability than others (such as the scientific process of hypothesis testing), students learn these methods better when they’re explicitly taught rather than simply giving students projects and hoping they’ll reinvent them on their own.

  scotthyoung.com

Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.

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  Cloudflare is worth what it is worth because of the trust it bought by giving encryption away, and most leaders cannot defend their principles at all.

  Their words

  The trust that they gained is the reason why they're a 70 billion dollar company today. But most leaders when asked to defend their principles can't do it because they've been taught ROI based thinking.

  youtube.com

Polyglot who speaks twenty languages and co-founded LingQ; argues that comprehensible input, not study, is what does the work.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A person who studies a language for years and cannot speak it was taught the wrong method; it is not a failure of talent or of effort.

  Their words

  Most people hear that story and think: he must have lacked talent, or commitment. I don’t think that’s the right conclusion. I think he was never taught how second language acquisition actually works, and so he spent hundreds of hours doing the wrong things.

  What Is Second Language Acquisition?blog.thelinguist.com

Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The wish to get rid of all the programmers keeps coming back, and programmers ought to ask themselves why, because some of the reason really is about us.

  Their words

  But now now we have this repeating this repeating, "Hey, we get to get rid of all the programmers." Which it behooves us as programmers to think about why they keep wanting to get rid of us. Some of that's about us and some of it's not, but some of it is. So we should think about that. But also that ants amps up the fear factor that everybody is experiencing.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Until, a reversible-cryopreservation company, and previously the founder of the Longevity Fund.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Biology is taught as flat triangles and arrows in a textbook, a depiction of the molecular world that makes no conceptual sense.

  Their words

  and I think most people experience it as like flat triangles and squares in a biology textbook where it's like you know there's an arrow between like this triangle and this triangle is just like doesn't make any conceptual sense and is like confusing and annoying

  youtube.com

Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Spy Who Came in From the Cold

  Their words

  The Spy Who Came in From the Cold by John le Carré is a perfect espionage novel: tight, taught, twisty, and thought-provoking. Le Carré brings the subtle machinations of intelligence operations to vivid life, illustrating their geopolitical ramifications and human cost with equal care.

  eliotpeper.substack.com

Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.

• Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  The Everlasting Meal

  Their words

  The Everlasting Meal taught me how to cook with instinct, which is my most cherished skill!

  mariandrew.substack.com

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  Lovevery

  Their words

  Lovevery Kits are just the ultimate. We have this play gym (as does everybody?!) which works with the Montessori toys they make. They have kits for different age groups from newborn through 51 months (I cannot even begin to calculate how old that is) and they have taught me so much about baby development!

  mariandrew.substack.com

Co-founder of Rockstar Games, lead writer of the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, and founder of Absurd Ventures since leaving in 2020.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Wanting to build a utopia is fundamentally anti-human, because what it says is that you like humans apart from the bad bits.

  Their words

  I think the power and money corrupted him in the end as well, but I also think that there’s something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens, because what they’re saying is, “I like humans apart from the bad bits.”

  youtube.com

Economist at the Hoover Institution; wrote The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level and blogs as The Grumpy Economist.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Climate became a moral and political cause rather than a technical one, and that is what will destroy public support for it.

  Their words

  The “climate crisis” has been taught as gospel for 20 years. Now the average person can see their teachers have been preaching politics in the name of science.

  Climate turning pointgrumpy-economist.com

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  People aim at a number of surviving children rather than a number of births, so falling child mortality lets births fall without anyone wanting a smaller family.

  Their words

  the key point is that as child mortality declines, live births can be allowed to decline without changing desired family size

  There Is No Long Decline in Fertilitylymanstone.substack.com

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

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  AI is welcome as a better search engine and a pair programmer that does not drive, but writing the code itself is not something to hand over to it.

  Their words, before

  I enjoy it even almost like as a sort of pair programmer AI pair programmer who doesn't drive who's just there to give suggestions to know the API to do all these other things but the second it starts wanting to autocomplete my code I'm like yeah I'm out bro

  Their words now

  I love chiseling my code and the way I use AI is in a separate window. I don't let it drive my code. I've tried that. I've tried the cursors and the wind surfaces and I don't enjoy that way of writing. And one of the reasons I don't enjoy that way of writing is I can literally feel competence draining out of my fingers.

Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Culture can be changed, so falling birth rates are a fixable problem rather than a one-way ratchet of modernity.

  Their words

  My qualitative research has taught me one thing: culture is malleable! So surely this issue is fixable!

  How do we Boost Birth Rates?ggd.world

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Reasoning is not taught to a model by people: it emerges from reinforcement learning on questions with checkable answers, with no human preference data at all.

  Their words

  And these reasoning behaviors emerge naturally. So these things like, "Wait, let me see. Wait, let me check this. Oh, that might be a mistake." And they emerge from only having questions and answers.

  youtube.com

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Export controls slowed China at the leading edge and accelerated it everywhere else, because being locked out taught China to in-source the trailing edge.

  China

  Their words

  So there is an angle of, the US' actions, from the angle of the expert controls, have been so inflammatory at slowing down China's progress on the leading edge that they've turned around and have accelerated their progress elsewhere because they know that this is so important.

  youtube.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.

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  Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

  Their words

  A useful read for more experienced engineers and those wanting to improve architecture and devops skills on designing and operating reliable systems. The content is excellent, but the book is not designed to be read in one sitting.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Earning more is an outer game you do not control; wanting less is an inner game you do.

  Their words

  Making money depends on other people, so it's harder. It's not entirely under your control. It's an outer game.

  Wealth = Have ÷ Wantsive.rs

Language mentor and polyglot; teaches people to design their own learning method rather than follow a course.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nobody can be taught a language by anyone else; a teacher can help, but the learning is the learner's to do.

  Their words

  I'm convinced that it's not possible to teach anyone a language. A good teacher can help you on this journey – but they cannot give the language to you on a silver platter.

  About Melanguagementoring.com

Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Copenhagen interpretation taught to physics students is a God-awful mess; many-worlds is beautiful because it needs fewer ingredients and one equation.

  Their words

  If you think about how we teach quantum mechanics to our students, the Copenhagen interpretation, it’s a God-awful mess. No one’s going to accuse that of being very beautiful. I’m a fan of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that is very beautiful in the sense that fewer ingredients, just one equation, and it could cover everything in the world.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Ukraine's vote for independence is what ended the Soviet Union, and Ukraine is exactly as decisive today for anyone wanting to restore Russian control over the post-Soviet space.

  Russia

  Their words

  And the combination of all this factors led to the processes in which Ukraine’s decision to go independent spelled the end to the Soviet Union. And if today anybody wants to restore, not the Soviet Union, but some form of Russian control over the post-Soviet space, Ukraine is as important today as it was back in December of 1991.

  youtube.com

Development economist; argues that letting people move to rich countries does more for the poor than aid, and wrote Let Their People Come.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Wanting to preserve a national culture is a legitimate human impulse and not in itself a racist one.

  Their words

  Valuing traditions, culture and history is simply a legitimate part of the human experience, and there is nothing wrong with preserving that.

  english.elpais.com

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

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  Milton Friedman's chief intellectual flaw was wanting to make economics too simple.

  Their words

  And indeed overall that interaction fits with my more general reservation about Friedman: he wanted to make economics just a little bit too simple.

  tylercowen.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A puzzle that invites guessing and then punishes wrong guesses stops the player learning the very method it could have taught.

  Their words

  Fundamentally, the game invites you to make guesses, but punishes you for them — and a missed guess doesn’t help you prune the logic space, only the trivia space.

  Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel badraphkoster.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Grading flattens whatever is taught into what can be tested, and teaches students to ignore everything else.

  Their words

  Evaluation forces me to flatten everything I teach into something that can be tested, and it encourages students to ignore everything that isn’t on the test.

  I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com

Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The programming practices taught as best practice are ruinous for performance and should not be followed.

  Their words

  The ideas underlying the “clean” code methodology are almost all horrible for performance, and you shouldn’t do them.

  "Clean" Code, Horrible Performancecomputerenhance.com

Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.

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  Hacking: The Art of Exploitation

  Their words

  Hacking: The Art of Exploitation by Jon Erickson taught me about ARP spoofing

  jvns.ca