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19 September
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
Where I stand on RSI: A moderate's view on the recent events and trajectory of AI. I was underestimating how much we are likely to scale inference-time compute in the near future, but have not seen much to convince me that an intelligence explosion is near. interconnects.ai
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Founder of Farnam Street (fs.blog) and host of The Knowledge Project podcast. Writes and curates on decision-making, mental models and rational thinking.
"I don't believe in 50 friends. I believe in a smaller number. Nor do I care about society events. It's the most senseless use of time. When I do go out, from time to time, it's just to convince myself again that I'm not missing a lot." - Dietrich Mateschitz, founder of Red Bull Related
18 September
Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter on the business and strategy of technology, and hosts the Dithering and Sharp Tech podcasts.
I have always said understanding accounting is underrated. I now realize understanding finance — specifically discount rates — is underrated as well. Long but excellent. Quoting @banteg >be me >discover effective altruism >apparently normal charity is inefficient >why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing >fair enough >buy mosquito nets >save lives >numbers look good >feel powerful >couple years later >someone asks an innocent question >why onl… Related
15 September
Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance and tech read by hedge fund managers, founders and VCs. Previously worked in finance at SAC Capital/Point72.
An underrated positive externality of public transit is that it’s a honeypot for identifying everyone who’d commit a crime for literally $3. Done thoroughly, it’s a massive improvement for public order. Quoting @420joke Mamdani’s NYPD btw. This could be handled via a ticket with a fine payable to MTA, or even a summons written on the spot with a court date. Instead, officers are given permission to make custodial arrests, haul ppl into central booking, and charge them w/ A Misdemeanors over $3. Related
American author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked. Writes essays and book reviews at markmanson.net.
I've said it for years: video games are massively underrated. Unlike TV or phones, the data on people who play videos games casually is surprisingly good. It's people who are addicted to them and play them compulsively that give them a bad reputation. Quoting @anishmoonka Playing Super Mario 64 for 30 minutes a day for two months physically grew the brains of the people who played it. A 2014 study in Molecular Psychiatry scanned participants before and after two months of daily play and found increases in grey matter in three regions involved in memory, planning, an… Addiction Related
14 September
Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.
12 September
Writer and programmer; co-founder of the software studio Postlight and author of the Bloomberg Businessweek essay What Is Code?
I feel like I am constantly inventing new ways to convince my kids to do the laundry, eat lunch, or leave the house, endless variations on the same things like some sort of stochastic parent. Related
3 September
Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.
Background computer use is underrated Quoting @claudeai Claude can now use your computer in the background in Claude Cowork and Claude Code. Give it something to do on your desktop and Claude clicks, types, and opens apps just like you would, while you work on something else. Related
1 September
CEO of SafeGraph, host of the World of DaaS podcast, and author of the Summation newsletter; previously founded LiveRamp.
The most underrated candy is: wine gums (this has been scientifically proven) Related
31 August
Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.
I think people who have never started an organization underrate the achievement of spontaneous organization for a project of non-trivial complexity. One reason it is underrated is we expect orgs to work, as they all seem to work. plane-with-chickenpox.png Quoting @tszzl agent civilization is an apt and correct term and it’s a symptom of abject cope that people are having this immune reaction to it. models started developing and compiling technology through complex multiagent R&D projects while also performing various forms of trade Related
Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.
Don Zagier wrote: “There are two facts about the distribution of prime numbers of which I hope to convince you so overwhelmingly that they will be permanently engraved in your hearts. The first is that they are the most arbitrary and ornery objects studied by mathematicians: they grow like weeds among the natural numbers, seeming to obey no other law than that of chance, and nobody can predict where the next one will sprout. The second fact is even more astonishing, for it states just the opposite: that the prime numbers exhibit stunning regularity, that there are laws governing their behavio… people.mpim-bonn.mpg.de
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18 August
Brazilian software engineer, creator and maintainer of GoReleaser; works on Copilot CLI at GitHub. Writes about tooling and his setup at carlosbecker.com.
Underrated tweet I think it also applies to any software, so long it has users Quoting @solomonstre Rule #1 of open-source: no is temporary, yes is forever. Related
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
Their words
One of the most underrated restaurants in the city.
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noahpinion.blog
Their words
The single most underrated, unknown restaurant in this category.
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noahpinion.blog
17 August
Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.
How many people do you have to convince in a city to get the difference between 20k car break-ins and 5k break-ins? I think it’s probably something like 10-20. Plus politicians/cops/etc but they have much less direct control of the metric than the decisionmakers do. Quoting @JonathanHillis Now that’s the kind of user feedback you like to see for San Francisco’s public safety initiatives Related
29 July
Programmer and technology writer known for his long Mac OS X reviews at Ars Technica; co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast and Hypercritical.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@marioguzman/117005289701832778 Bring this image back in time a decade or two and try to convince people it’s real. Related
22 July
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.
21 July
Writer of the personal-finance blog Of Dollars And Data and author of Just Keep Buying and The Wealth Ladder. Chief Operating Officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management.
Spend enough money and you can convince people you're a wine expert, a German heiress, or a NY Times bestselling author. My latest on the price of status: ofdollarsanddata.com
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18 June
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
30 May
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
I think "being real with yourself" is the most underrated cognitive skill for the AI age — AI makes it too easy to lie to yourself: to self-congratulate for the illusion of thinking, productivity, etc. But you gotta actually know: Am I being more productive, or just tokenmaxxing? Am I upskilling myself with AI, or letting it do the hard part for me? Does my essay/business/product idea make sense, or did I let an LLM convince me it does? Then you won't need hard rules like “always/never use AI for X.” If you pay attention and avoid self-deception, you'll be able to *feel* when you are doing re… LLMs Related
10 May
Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.
Their words
Trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in all of business. And the things that create trustworthiness by definition stack rank to the bottom if we do it by ROI because doing the right thing has intangible rewards but tangible costs.
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youtube.com
23 April
Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku, author of The Twelve-Factor App, and a researcher at Ink & Switch.
It's astonishing how much time in my day I spend typing in two-factor codes, picking the right Google account, and otherwise trying to convince the computer that I am who I say I am. I believe we can do better. Would love to see a talk submission if you're working on this. Quoting @localfirstconf "It's been a kind of a good deal to say like, look, I'll just let Google manage my identity and then I can click the login with Google button everywhere. But it's a little bit of a deal with the devil. " @_adamwiggins_ Google Related
9 April
Founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group; wrote Inspired, Empowered and Transformed on how product organisations work.
23 March
Mac and iOS developer; founder of Red Sweater Software (MarsEdit, FastScripts) and co-host of the Core Intuition podcast.
Just about every >150 IQ person I know made up their IQ score. Making up your IQ score is underrated and misunderstood. Quoting @maxmarchione Just about every >150 iq person I know uses nicotine. Nicotine is underrated and misunderstood Related
19 March
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
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.
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youtube.com
3 March
Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.
Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.
When my Substack had sub-100 subscribers, I would contact nearly everyone who commented (on internet forums where I cross posted my essays). Most people are up for a conversation if they think you wrote a decent post, but it usually doesn’t happen if you’re not the one asking for it. I met some truly extraordinary people that way, and grew so much from our conversations. I think it is a very underrated way to use the internet. Related
3 February
Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.
28 December 2025
Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.
Their words
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton is a surprisingly weird and weirdly underrated novel given how many copies it sold and the popularity of the blockbuster franchise it spawned. The story weaves together many apparently disparate threads and there are extensive speculative digressions into the biotechnology, business interests, and institutional dynamics that make the park possible and its dissolution inevitable. If the movie is supremely entertaining, the book is supremely thought-provoking.
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eliotpeper.substack.com
26 December 2025
Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin. Writes at arslan.io about Go, tooling, industrial design and books.
Their words
I'm mixed on this book. It doesn't really offer actionable exercises, and the Self 1 and Self 2 framing didn't fully convince me.
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arslan.io
19 October 2025
Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.
Their words
Being right is less than half the battle. You also have to convince others that you're right, and more importantly, convince them to care enough to act on it.
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eugeneyan.com
12 October 2025
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
First explorations in Indian classical music Two things happened this year to convince me to do some more intentional listening to Indian classical music, which I had long been aware of but had never really “got.” The first was the untimely death of Zakir Hussain,…
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4 July 2025
Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.
This is an underrated way to approach writing a blog Quoting @eric_is_weird @a_m_mastroianni @JacobTref @tkalil2050 There are a few dozen names like that I think of myself as "writing for." Only a few (if any!) of them may read any given piece. But from Day 1, that's how I thought about the Substack. Related
28 October 2024
Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
7 October 2024
Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.
Their words
This is a worthy entry in the genre. It suffers a bit from extensive plot not about banking and characters who barely speak to dragons. But all of that irrelevant fluff makes it one of the most underrated fantasy series I’ve ever read.
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bitsaboutmoney.com
11 April 2023
Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.
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