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Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on durable infrastructure for AI agents; worked on React and PartyKit before that. Writes at sunilpai.dev.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Foundation is really about individuals with extreme agency and puzzle-solving ability having outsized impact on a universe that would otherwise decay

  Their words

  foundation is ostensibly a sci-fi series about empires, psychohistory, and hard technology, but really it's about individuals with extreme agency and puzzle-solving ability having wildly outsized impact on a universe that would otherwise just sit there waiting to decay

  @threepointone on Xx.com

Graphic designer and type designer, who created the original Macintosh icons and typefaces at Apple from 1982 and has since designed interface graphics for NeXT, Microsoft, Facebook and Pinterest.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Icon work is not really about the grid of pixels; it is about the metaphor, the idea and the meaning behind everything on the grid.

  energy

  Their words

  But um I think the whole point of that project and the graphics was it isn't really just about a grid of pixels. It's the metaphor and the idea and the meaning behind everything.

  youtube.com

Climate scientist and energy systems analyst; writes The Climate Brink with Andrew Dessler and leads climate research at Stripe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The carbon intensity of the electricity grid, not compute efficiency, is the lever that matters most for AI's climate impact.

  energy

  Their words

  Which is why the lever that actually matters most is the carbon intensity of the electricity.

  The real energy use of agentic AItheclimatebrink.com

AI researcher at OpenAI; built the poker systems Libratus and Pluribus and the Diplomacy agent Cicero, and works on reasoning models.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every lab knows the benchmark grid is the wrong way to present a model, and publishes it anyway because everybody else does.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  And so you kind of end up in this this bad equilibrium where everybody kind of knows that it's a bad equilibrium, but like nobody wants to break out. And I I felt like, okay, well, if I just hopefully come out and say like, look guys, let's all recognize that we're in a bad equilibrium and let's move to this different equilibrium where we're we're plotting things with an X-axis

  youtube.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Adding ants to a puzzle makes it get solved faster while adding humans makes it worse, unless the humans are carefully aligned.

  Their words

  The more ants you put in the puzzle, the faster the solution. But the more humans you add, the worse. Unless the humans are very carefully aligned, this is the key lesson for organizational design.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat, which he started in 2011 while studying product design at Stanford.

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  Network effects are not a sufficient moat, because software features get copied however many patents you hold.

  Their words

  network effects are certainly an important piece of the puzzle for sure, um but I don't think they're enough when it comes to these sorts of software uh you know, software cloning.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

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  Data centres should be built to degrade gracefully when the grid needs its power back, instead of demanding perfect uptime from utilities that have idle capacity most of the year.

  data centersenergy

  Their words

  Now, the second thing is we have to build data centers that gracefully degrade.

  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

  About a fifth of the US grid could be freed for data centres just by covering the yearly peak with batteries or peaker plants.

  data centers

  Their words

  Then all of a sudden, you've unlocked 20% of the US grid for data centers because most of the times that capacity is sitting idle and it's really only there for that peak, right? Which is a day or two, right?

  youtube.com

Entrepreneur and founder of Blueprint. Publishes a detailed, freely available longevity protocol documenting the food, supplements, devices and measurements he uses on himself.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Waterpik

  Their words

  Waterpik: the first thing I do when waking up is use a water pick. It uses a high-pressure stream of water to remove food, plaque, and bacteria from hard-to-reach places. Morning & night.

  protocol.bryanjohnson.com

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

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Batteries will replace transmission as the cheapest way to keep the lights on, and the grid will shrink rather than grow.

  energy

  Their words, before

  we will see batteries aggressively displace transmission as the most cost-effective way to ensure continuity of electricity supply, leading to an eventual pruning of the grid and drastic reduction in the average distance that power travels between production and consumption, even as the average time that power is stored increases.

  Their words now

  Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Batteries will replace transmission as the cheapest way to keep the lights on, and the grid will shrink rather than grow.

  energy

  Their words

  Do we need to drastically expand the grid in order to metabolize renewables? No.

  Energy Predictions 2025caseyhandmer.wordpress.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.

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  Tetris on the Game Boy is perfect game design, and from a pure puzzle perspective nothing else comes close.

  Their words

  And when you link two together with the cable and if I got four, it would push yours forward. It was like the perfect game design. So from a pure puzzle perspective, nothing comes close.

  youtube.com

Professor at Berkeley working on robot learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence, and argues that robots will learn from data rather than be programmed.

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  A robot that can run a household is a single-digit number of years away, and the missing pieces are a synthesis of ideas we already have rather than new ones.

  Their words

  Uh but it uh I think we kind of like know like roughly the puzzle pieces and it's something that we need to work on and I think if we work on it and we're a bit lucky and everything kind of goes as planned I think single digit is reasonable.

  youtube.com

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  An off-grid data centre needs nothing connecting it to the world but an optical fibre — no transmission line, no interconnection, no grid at all.

  data centers

  Their words

  But then all you need to connect that to the outside world is like an optical fiber, right? An optical fiber cable which you can string up on poles, you can run underground, you could even use microwave links if you really wanted to.

  youtube.com

Software engineer and engineering leader at Canonical, working on Ubuntu; writes about his homelab, Nix and tooling at jnsgr.uk.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Tactile

  Their words

  I took inspiration from Omakub, which is where I discovered Tactile - a GNOME extension for tiling windows to a custom on-screen grid using the keyboard. I’ve found this to be invaluable, and easily the best window management experience for GNOME.

  jnsgr.uk

Designer and co-founder of Lux, makers of Halide, Spectre and Kino; formerly a designer at Apple.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Skeuomorphism never meant gloss and gradients; it meant easing users from what they were used to into what things had become.

  Their words

  It actually means that to make it easier for users to transition from something they were used to — in this case, phones typically being slabs with a grid of buttons on them — to what things had become — phones were all-screen, so they could show any kind of button or interface imaginable.

  Physicality: the new age of UIlux.camera

Founder of what became Bloomberg New Energy Finance; writes and speaks on clean energy, hydrogen and the economics of the transition, and hosts the Cleaning Up podcast.

From one piece Lessons from Spain 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Blaming renewable energy for grid disruptions is driven by political culture-war motives rather than genuine technical understanding.

  energy

  Their words

  It's all part of the political culture wars where everything gets weaponised to push an agenda, score points against opponents or curry favour.

  Lessons from Spainliebreich.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The failure of wind or solar power to show up has never been the primary cause of a major grid blackout.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  While renewables are almost always blamed in the aftermath of major power cuts or grid disruption - and the way they have been integrated into the grid has certainly been found to compound problems - the simple failure of wind or solar power to show up has never yet been found to be the primary cause.

  Lessons from Spainliebreich.com

Energy and decarbonisation analyst; publishes an annual chart deck on the state of the transition, and was chief content officer at BloombergNEF.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Solar power now adds more new capacity to the global grid each year than any technology ever has, and will soon lead in annual electricity added too.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  this technology, consistently underestimated, now adds more capacity to the global grid than anything ever and will soon add more power in any given year than anything ever as well.

  Traveler’s Talesnathanielbullard.com

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  The bottleneck on America's AI buildout is transmitting power, not generating it: in parts of the US, moving electricity costs more than making it.

  energyAmerica

  Their words

  Interesting thing is certain regions of the US transmitting power cost more than actually generating it because the grid is so slow to build. And the demand for power, and the ability to build power, and re-ramping on a natural gas plant or even a coal plant is easy enough to do, but transmitting the power's really hard.

  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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The true unit of life is not DNA and not the cell but the biosphere — the whole community.

  Their words

  Because the bacteria, even though they're individual examples of life, and I believe this the true unit of life, it's not DNA, it's not a cell, it's the biosphere. It's the whole community.

  youtube.com

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  An Elegant Puzzle

  Their words

  A long overdue read for engineering leads.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The comparative cost of hydrogen fuel-cell cars versus battery EVs depends on which infrastructure costs are counted and to whom they are allocated

  Their words

  The only way you can make H2FC cars look cheaper than BEVs is to underestimate or ignore the cost of hydrogen production and infrastructure, socialise it, and then load the entire cost of grid build-out onto the marginal BEV.

  Are BEVs more expensive than H2FC cars?liebreich.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Data centres and the grid that feeds them run on incompatible clocks: one is a two-year project, the other a multi-decade investment.

  data centersenergy

  Their words

  Utility companies see major electrical infrastructure as a long-term investment to be built in response to sustained demand growth.

  How to Build an AI Data Centerconstruction-physics.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

From one piece How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordable 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Letting generators cover one per cent of the year is what makes an off-grid solar data centre affordable, because the last few gloomy days set the whole array size.

  solardata centersenergy

  Their words

  The optimal scenario is typically when the generators supply 1% of yearly electricity (shown below).

  How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Off-grid data centres will win the way electric cars did, by redesigning the machine around the new power source instead of swapping the power source in.

  data centers

  Their words

  Efforts to improve efficiency and remove vestigial features pay off handsomely.

  How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An off-grid data centre can delete its uninterruptible power supplies entirely, because the battery bank outside already is one.

  data centers

  Their words

  Deleting the UPSs could knock off ~$750/kW after considering equipment, installation, and square footage reduction.

  How to Make Off Grid Data Centers Affordableaustinvernon.site

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The end state of the grid is not a fifth solar backed by spinning generation, but twice the demand in solar with days of storage behind it.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  The logical end state of this displacement is not some hybrid grid with around 20% solar backed up by spinning generation, but a much more dynamic, versatile grid with around 200% solar generation and hours to days or weeks of battery storage, fully decoupling time of generation and consumption.

  Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

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

From one piece Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel bad 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  A puzzle whose categories can only be seen by the broadly educated is elitist by construction.

  Their words

  But it’s fundamentally elitist — it basically requires you to have a broad education to find the categories in the first place.

  Why NYT’s Connections makes you feel badraphkoster.com

• 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

Designer, architect and scientist, who led the Mediated Matter group at MIT and founded OXMAN, a company that builds products in collaboration with living organisms.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Genetic modification is not one ethical question: a silkworm must never be modified, and bacteria are not in the same ethical range at all.

  Their words

  With silkworms, absolutely let's not modify it genetically. Let's not modify it genetically. And then some. Because why did we get there to begin with 4,000 years ago in the Silk Road? And we should never get to a point where we evolve life for the service of mankind at the risk of these wonderful creatures across the across the kingdom of life. I don't think about the same kind of ethical range when I think about bacteria.

  youtube.com

Biochemist at University College London; writes about the origin of life and the role of energy in evolution, in The Vital Question and Transformer.

From one piece Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Life probably arose only once on Earth, and the deep split between bacteria and archaea is the evidence for it.

  Their words

  But there’s a very interesting deep split in life between bacteria and what are called archaea, which look just the same as bacteria. And they’re not quite as diverse, but nearly, and they are very different in their biochemistry. And so any explanation for the origin of life has to account, as well, for why they’re so different and yet so similar. And that makes me think that life probably did arise only once.

  youtube.com

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  There are far fewer alien civilizations than people would like to believe, because the road from bacteria to humans has huge gaps in it.

  Their words

  Well, the universe is very big, but not as many as most people would like to think is my view, because the idea that there is a trajectory going from simple cellular life like bacteria, all the way through to humans, seems to me there’s some big gaps along that way, that the eukaryotic cell, the complex cell that we have is the biggest of them.

  youtube.com

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  Bacteria never became complex because the barrier is structure, not information — they explored genetic space far more thoroughly than eukaryotes and still got stuck.

  Their words

  So they have explored genetic sequence space far more thoroughly than eukaryotes ever did because they’ve had twice as long at least, and they’ve got much larger populations, and they never got around this problem. So why can’t they? It seems as if you can’t solve it with information alone. So what’s the problem? The problem is structure.

  youtube.com

+ 2 more

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  There is no necessary trajectory from simple life to complexity: without photosynthesis or eukaryotes, the planet could have stayed bacteria and nothing else.

  Their words

  So, there is no necessary trajectory towards great complexity in human beings at the end of it. It’s very easy to imagine that without photosynthesis arising or without eukaryotes arising, that the planet could be full of bacteria and nothing else.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Re-run Earth a million times and at least a few hundred thousand of those runs give you bacteria again.

  Their words

  I think at the level of bacteria, not much variety. I think we would get how many times you say you want to run it a million times? I would say at least a few hundred thousand will get bacteria again.

  youtube.com

Distributed-systems safety researcher; runs the Jepsen consistency-testing project and wrote the Riemann monitoring system.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Sakura technical pens

  Their words

  Some of my talk slides are drawn using Sakura technical pens and Whitelines grid notebooks.

  usesthis.com

Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.

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  The Vital Question

  Their words

  A fascinating book exploring the role of energy in biology and evolution. It explains how eucaryotic life emerged and why it grew in complexity, while bacteria have remained unchanged in their simplicity for billions of years. It also presents the best theory of abiogenesis we have, and a lot more.

  radex.io

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  This Is Your Brain on Parasites

  Their words

  Another biology-related book. Explores the role of parasites (and bacteria, disease, disgust) in human behavior, attraction, even politics, morality, religion. Some of this is is cutting-edge, speculative, or not fully proven — but very interesting stuff indeed.

  radex.io