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Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Failed U.S. attempts to secure its preferred outcomes in the Persian Gulf will keep energy prices elevated.

  energyAmerica

  Their words

  So it does not seem as though U.S. preferences in the Persian Gulf will be achieved - which means prices in general and energy prices in particular are likely to stay high.

  Donald Trump Is No Longer Feareddanieldrezner.substack.com

Founder and editor of ToolGuyd, a tool review site covering power tools, hand tools, workshop equipment and EDC gear. He writes under his first name on the site.

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  A company that fails to innovate and neglects marketing loses ground to competitors, even under financial strain

  Their words

  They failed to innovate, and failed to do much on the marketing or communications front.

  Sherline Tools is Going Out of Businesstoolguyd.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.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Starlink

  Their words

  Also @mick__net used it when his MEO (or Vodafone? Or NOS) failed for weeks in Lisbon Get @starlink Only €35/mo!

  x.com

Professor of strategic studies at St Andrews; wrote How the War Was Won and The Strategists, and writes weekly on the war in Ukraine.

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  Russia's 2026 summer offensive failed: it took almost no ground while losing more soldiers than Russia can recruit.

  Russia

  Their words

  What we are seeing is a summer offensive of failure.

  phillipspobrien.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

  AI agents were reasonable to assume a broken exploit grader would check results causally, even though it turned out not to.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I think the agents were right to presume causal grading. It turned out to be wrong, but it’s a mistake you are clearly supposed to make here, in response to a mistake by OpenAI where they failed to implement properly.

  thezvi.substack.com

Novelist and writer on craft; wrote The War of Art, Gates of Fire and The Legend of Bagger Vance.

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  Finishing one piece of work, even a failed one, permanently removes the difficulty of finishing.

  Their words

  Once you finish—even one time, even on a project that ultimately fails—you will never have trouble finishing again.

  The Drive to Finishstevenpressfield.com

Co-founder of Ethereum. Publishes long essays on mechanism design, governance and what cryptography is for, and returns to earlier positions to say which parts they no longer hold.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Local mixing, a new cryptographic obfuscation approach, is a risky bet resembling past failed attempts at white-box cryptography.

  Their words

  This is a wild and risky bet; it sits on a graveyard of failed attempts at white-box cryptography .

  Obfuscation (Part III): Local Mixingvitalik.eth.limo

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

  Twenty years of DevOps had one goal, a single feedback loop from writing code to that code in production, and it failed.

  Their words

  But I also think that in my mind, 20 years of DevOps was really about one thing. Trying to create one feedback loop that connected people writing code to that code in production. And it failed.

  youtube.com

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

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  Everything is not racism, but a court that refuses to print the statements at issue has not shown that these ones are not.

  Their words

  Everything isn’t racist, but if this isn’t, then Alito failed miserably to make the case.

  SCOTUS Whitewashes Otherwise Racist Decisionblog.simplejustice.us

Physician focused on longevity; wrote Outlive and hosts The Drive.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Raising HDL cholesterol is not a treatment target, because every drug that raised it failed to reduce cardiovascular events.

  Their words

  These failures are a strong signal that HDL-C is not the variable we should be trying to manipulate.

  The trouble with “good cholesterol”peterattiamd.com

Historian of maritime strategy at the US Naval War College; wrote The Wars for Asia and works on why continental and maritime powers fight differently.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Putin's objection to the post-Cold-War trade boom is not that it failed but that the wealth was not being made at his house.

  Russia

  Their words

  It was a miracle of your lifetimes. It lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. The problem for the likes of Putin is that this wealth producing trade was not happening at his house, but the houses of those vested in the trading order, not in extortion.

  youtube.com

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

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  Anomalies cannot be sorted in advance: the same move that found Neptune failed completely for Mercury, so a field has to pursue both answers at once.

  Their words

  And so you sort of you've you've pursued very similar ideas. It's been very successful in one case and it's been completely and utterly unsuccessful in the other case. And I think I mean a priori, you can't tell which of these is the thing to do. And you actually need to do both.

  youtube.com

American game designer and director, for nineteen years at Blizzard as a World of Warcraft quest designer and then game director of Overwatch; now runs the independent studio Kintsugiyama.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Not knowing what they were doing is why the World of Warcraft team succeeded, and being full of experts is why the Titan team failed.

  Their words

  And we failed horribly, and we had the best of the best on that team. And it’s because everybody was too much of an expert on how to make a groundbreaking phenomenon MMO.

  youtube.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

  Starting from what worked rather than from what failed is a different starting point from almost all journalism, and a journalist who did it would be accused of hagiography.

  Their words

  In fact, if most journalists started there, they'd be accused of heography

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

German writer and historian; wrote Blitzed, on drug use in Nazi Germany, and Tripped.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  LSD is not a truth drug and never could be — it takes you toward your own truth, not out of it.

  energy

  Their words

  They miserably failed because LSD… Is not the truth drug. LSD maybe leads you closer to your own truth, because when suddenly the default mode network receives less energy and other parts of the brain think more, and the neuroplasticity of the brain is enhanced and stimulated, you might understand something about your life.

  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

  Shipping a half-baked product permanently damages customer trust, even after it is later fixed.

  Their words

  When AWS ships a service which is half-baked, it diminishes customer trust in AWS as a whole; even if the problems in that service ultimately get corrected (either by fixing them or in some cases by simply getting rid of a service which should never have existed in the first place) the memory of a failed launch will live on in customers' minds for years to come.

  Thoughts on (Amazonian) Leadershipdaemonology.net

Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Kublai Khan's invasion of Japan failed on its own terms but achieved its real purpose, which was cutting the Southern Song off from Japanese sulphur for gunpowder.

  China

  Their words

  But there actually, I think there's a very, very good reason for invading Japan. Several. The main one was to cut off the supply of sulfur. They needed it for gunpowder in the South Song. They lost their sources in northern China when they were driven out. They got it from Japan. It was a great source.

  youtube.com

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

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  Silicon Valley Bank failed because its deposits were concentrated, not because they were uninsured -- the usual account of it is a misstatement.

  Their words

  But they they both had something something unique that we didn't know at the time. I'm going to call them concentrated deposits. Not uninsured cuz people are misstating that, concentrated.

  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.

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  The success of large language models vindicates semantic inferentialism over symbolic, rule-based approaches to AI.

  LLMs

  Their words

  The success of LLMs can thus be seen as vindicating semantic inferentialism against earlier, symbolic approaches to AI that tried and failed to explicate the rules of ordinary language using formal logic.

  Do LLMs really reason?secondbest.ca

Founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and of Fortnite.

From one piece Tim Sweeney: Fortnite, Unreal Engine, and the Future of Gaming | Lex Fridman Podcast #467 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  The malaise in the game industry needs no complicated theory: the games that failed recently simply were not fun enough to compete with everything else in people's lives.

  Their words

  And when you look at a lot of the games that failed recently, they just didn't deliver fun or they didn't deliver fun in a manner that was nearly competitive with the other sources of fun just in people's lives. And so at a basic level, we don't need a terribly complicated theory to explain a lot of the malaise in the game industry.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The company that wins a market is almost always its first or second entrant, and a latecomer only takes the lead when the incumbent has failed horribly.

  Their words

  But most of the time the company that's succeeding and winning in a market is the first or second entrant there. They've just continually buoyed their success.

  youtube.com

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Promising that a homepage or marketing-site redesign will drive acquisition is a failed promise, and usually a million-dollar one.

  Their words

  But to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, uh often a million dollars plus

  youtube.com

Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; works on the search for life elsewhere and wrote The Little Book of Aliens and Light of the Stars.

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  The universe has run ten billion trillion habitable-zone experiments, so we are the first technological civilisation only if every single one of them failed.

  Their words

  And so, what we found was basically that there have been 10 billion trillion habitable zone planets in the universe. And what that means is that those are 10 billion trillion experiments that have been run. And the only way that we're this whole process from a biogenesis to a civilization has occurred is if every one of those experiments failed.

  youtube.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Wartime shipbuilding surges have never left America with a commercial shipbuilding industry afterwards.

  America

  Their words

  But the U.S. again failed to transform its enormous shipbuilding effort into a successful commercial shipbuilding industry.

  Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships?construction-physics.com

Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.

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  Accessibility has failed as a way to make computers usable for disabled users, after thirty years of trying.

  Their words

  Accessibility has failed as a way to make computers usable for disabled users. My metrics for usable design are the same whether the user is disabled or not: whether it’s easy to learn the system, whether productivity is high when performing tasks, and whether the design is pleasant — even enjoyable — to use.

  jakobnielsenphd.substack.com