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17 September
Writer of kottke.org, one of the oldest blogs on the web, published since 1998 and supported by its members. He writes about art, technology, science, design and visual culture.
Bluesky The Rumpus Book Club event for this month is a conversation between Debbie Millman, Roxane Gay, and Emily Wilson about Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Sept 25th at 7pm ET on Zoom, free for all. therumpus.net
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Mastodon The Rumpus Book Club event for this month is a conversation between Debbie Millman, Roxane Gay, and Emily Wilson about Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Sept 25th at 7pm ET on Zoom, free for all. therumpus.net
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Blog The Rumpus Book Club event for this month is a... nversation between Debbie Millman, Roxane Gay, and Emily Wilson about Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey. Sept 25th at 7pm ET on Zoom, free for all.
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16 September
Product discovery coach; wrote Continuous Discovery Habits and writes Product Talk.
14 September
Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.
The best thing you learn in consulting is how work gets done at every layer of an org, the different types of communication (and how to translate between them), and then how dramatically different industries work Quoting @VinIyengar A lot of VCs (myself included) used to shit on the ex-banker/consultant founder archetype. But I'm increasingly realizing I was wrong. In an age where building is easier and distribution/execution is still hard, these programs are the perfect training grounds. 2 years at McK/GS/etc. teaches you how… 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.
I'm fascinated by the laurel forests of La Gomera, one the Canary Islands. They're full of different species of trees with shiny, waxy leaves. Mosses and lichens grow on the branches, and the ground is covered with a green mantle of dripping ferns and liverworts thriving in the permanent damp. The place has a mysterious, prehistoric air. The lower altitudes of this island are deserts, but the upper parts catch fog, known locally as "horizontal rain" (lluvia horizontal). Near-constant northeasterly trade winds carry moist Atlantic air that condenses into a persistent low cloud layer. This "sea… Related
10 September
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.
Their words
Most of the software layer has already disappeared or will completely disappear for normies
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@levelsio on X x.com
9 September
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
6 September
Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.
4 September
JavaScript programmer; creator of the jQuery library, author of Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, and long-time engineer at Khan Academy.
I love giving Fable problems that I 100% would've never done otherwise, such as collecting Japanese prints out of static image auction catalogs written entirely in Japanese. Uses OpenCV to do segmenting, GPT-5.6 Luna to do text extraction + translation. OpenAI Related
2 September
Product designer and entrepreneur; author of Mobile First and Web Form Design; formerly a product director at Google; now building AI products.
we spent decades learning to use GUI applications. future generations won't. the next abstraction layer means agents handle application use, not us. Related
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
A lot of hype around OpenAI's Astra model here on my timeline today. Apparently, this goes back to a new article from The Information, which said Astra is a "recurrent depth or looped transformer". It's always interesting to read about new or different approaches (including rumors about what the closed labs may be up to), but let's debunk this a bit. About 2 months ago, I shared the architecture details of Nanbeige, for example, where "Nanbeige4.2-3B is pretrained from scratch on 28T tokens with a Looped Transformer that reuses the layer stack to increase capacity without adding parameters."… OpenAI Related
Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.
30 August
Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku, author of The Twelve-Factor App, and a researcher at Ink & Switch.
Screenshot diffing, feedback inboxes, PWAs, and of course local-first sync layer with self-hosted backend. Matches up pretty well with my approach on personal apps thus far into the LLM coding age. Curious to hear from others. Quoting @flourish.org I vibe coded three personal apps that I'd wanted for a while. They work on mobile and web, sync offline first between them, and are polished. This write up describes why, how, and what I learnt. www.flourish.org/2026/08/pers... LLMs Related
29 August
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.
Between wallets for agents with @link (and @privy), MPP, Tempo, MCP, Stripe CLI, Agentic Commerce Suite, sandboxes, OpenRouter, Metronome/metered billing, Radar and distillation/token fraud, it turns out that "the economic infrastructure for AI" implicates a lot. Pretty much every layer of the Stripe stack is changing, and it’s a very good time to join if you want to build high-scale software that facilitates the practical deployment of this new intelligence. MCP Related
28 August
Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.
Creator of Homebrew, the macOS package manager, and a Swift developer.
Automic Vault means your CLI tools don’t perform sensitive actions without your approval. This applies to agents and supply chain attacks both. We patch tools at the *packaging layer*. Blessed Scripts allow you to make small, vetted scripts that escalate tool capabilities. Reentrant Blessed Scripts are a scripting pattern that allow you to “weave” in agent capabilities. Interleaving deterministic work with escalated Tool capabilities and secrets with applied intelligence. Perfect for automations. Quoting @AutomicVault We have documented the concept of `Reentrant Blessed Scripts` that describe our suggested mechanism of giving Agent Automations a set of escalated capabilities and secrets. Have the automation execute a Blessed Script with Automic Vault front-matter for the capabilities and… Related
12 August
Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.
Their words
The translation & dubbing was a huge amount of work (which I deeply care about) with humans & AI collaborating. Thanks to the amazing team at @ElevenLabs for their help.
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x.com
8 August
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.
Their words
I usually do not enjoy poetry in translation, but this is so fiery and full of passion that I am happy to recommend it.
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marginalrevolution.com
7 August
Designer and engineer; formerly principal research engineer at GitHub Next; writes at wattenberger.com.
"generative AI" puts the focus in the wrong place. what I think is actually the new superpower is * translation * between languages, but also between mediums. sketch <> figma design <> code <> image also, they do an inverted form of lossy compression: input + priors = input inflated with understanding of the world we're so focused on changing the input, but swapping out the priors is interesting as well what happens when we intentionally replace the priors with a different mindset / a different culture? can we trick ourselves into a rubber hand illusion, but for experiencing the world as some… Related
21 July
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.
wizard zines has its first translation! How Git Works (wizardzines.com/zines/git) is now available in Korean, translated by ByteFreaksStudio inf.run/XYiAR I do not know how to read Korean but it's very cool to see :) Related
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.
Their words
So you went from a business chain of customer > app > ai model provider To customer > ai model provider The app layer is possibly getting removed!
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levels.io
4 July
Machine-learning researcher; has written the Lil'Log survey posts on how a model technique works since 2017, and worked at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly leading its safety systems team.
1 July
Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.
Air Traffic Control Keith Adams has spent his career at the systems layer, with nine years at VMware, the founding of Facebook's HHVM team, and a run as chief architect at Slack.
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24 June
Product designer and entrepreneur; author of Mobile First and Web Form Design; formerly a product director at Google; now building AI products.
26 May
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
16 May
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
30 April
Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.
Their words
I can have no opinion about whether the translation is accurate, but it is pretty good English verse.
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bactra.org
22 April
Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
From one piece
Designing Data-intensive Applications with Martin Kleppmann
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
You're building higher-level business logic, actually I think it's just fine for people not to care about memory management.
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youtube.com
Their words
And now suddenly people are building databases on top of object stores, for example. And now the replication happens at the object store level, no longer at the database level.
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youtube.com
11 April
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
7 April
Programmer based in Vancouver who writes at scattered-thoughts.net about databases, programming language design and developer tools; author of the Imp, Dida and Zest language experiments.
29 March
Chilean web engineer building web experiences since 2006; co-founder of Media Creators and writes at iolivares.com.
Their words
Always my first layer and the secret to scale without surprises in your billing.
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iolivares.com
7 March
Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.
RE: https://phpc.social/@stefanzweifel/116188833343980807 This was a productive train ride: I finally updated the Lambda Layer powering sidecar-browsershot to Puppeteer v24 and added automation to make maintenance much easier. https://github.com/stefanzweifel/sidecar-browsershot-layer sidecar-browsershot was updated as well. github.com
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1 January
Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.
Their words
There is something deeply satisfying with reading out loud phrases like: “for in mere breath did it come, and into darkness it goes, and in darkness its name is covered.” Though King James is iconic, Robert Alter better conveys overall the literary power of the Hebrew Bible.
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danwang.co
28 December 2025
Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.
Their words
Trust by Hernan Diaz is an onion of a novel in which every chapter peels back a layer to reveal yet more beneath. Following the meteoric rise of a Wall Street financier in the early 20th century, the intricately plotted story will seduce you, transport you, stimulate you, mislead you, and, ultimately, move you.
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eliotpeper.substack.com
20 December 2025
Indonesian fullstack engineer, speaker and instructor; writes about JavaScript, SvelteKit and Linux tooling at kalwabed.com.
Their words
elements, JavaScript reigns supreme. SvelteKit's efficiency and reactivity make it my framework of choice, and TypeScript's type annotations bring a welcome layer of confidence to my codebase.
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kalwabed.com
12 December 2025
Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum; reads cuneiform, and wrote The Ark Before Noah and The First Ghosts.
Their words
Well, you know, the truth about translation is that you never really have a word in one language which precisely equates another. You never do.
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youtube.com
18 November 2025
Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.
17 October 2025
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
Their words
and we'll gradually layer all this stuff everywhere and there will be fewer and fewer people who understand it and that there will be a sort of this like scenario of a gradual loss of control and understanding of what's happening that to me seems most likely outcome of how all this stuff will go down.
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youtube.com
18 August 2025
Co-founder of the AI agent company Sierra, and previously an eighteen-year Google executive who ran product for Workspace, virtual and augmented reality, and Google Labs.
From one piece
How is AI Different Than Other Technology Waves? (With Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor) [ACQ2]
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
This kind of zone of the barely doable, it's super important that to the largest extent possible, you be able to kind of control your own technology destiny.
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youtube.com
Their words
many of the breakthroughs that we've had that have enabled us to to deliver such quality and cost savings and more have come through novel agent architectures and and really going down a click or two in in the stack to innovate at at lower levels of the technology stack.
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youtube.com
Co-founder and chief executive of Sierra, chairman of the board of OpenAI, and formerly co-chief executive of Salesforce and chief technology officer of Facebook.
Their words
it has to be consolidated because to basically make the money back on the pre-training and post-training process you need relatively few players that are collecting taxes you know from all the players on top or you just can't make the the math work.
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youtube.com
31 May 2025
Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.
I have just launched a "Lean companion" to my textbook "Analysis I": github.com/teorth/estim... . This gives a Lean translation (or paraphrasing) of the various definitions, theorems, and exercises in the textbook into Lean. Further discussion at terrytao.wordpress.com
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30 April 2025
Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.
Their words
It's very readable, and captures a sense of what is, fundamentally, a very alien, and often ugly, story in a very alien, and often ugly, world, related in magnificent language.
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bactra.org
18 April 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.
Interesting paper from Google that challenges a core assumption in translation evaluation—a single metric can measure both accuracy & naturalness. They found that the best systems had neural metrics that did not correlate with human preferences. arxiv.org
Google Related
14 March 2024
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."
Their words
the lower we go in the stack, the harder it is for individuals to build.
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huyenchip.com
10 October 2023
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."
1 April 2022
Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.
Transformers for software engineers Ever since its introduction in the 2017 paper, Attention is All You Need, the Transformer model architecture has taken the deep-learning world by storm. Initially introduced for machine translation, it has become the to…
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1 January 2021
Psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. Writes Psychiatry at the Margins on the philosophical and scientific arguments inside psychiatry and the psy-sciences.
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A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Got it
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
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