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Jason Evanish
x.com
One of the most challenging forms of customer validation is when you can see the pain and the need, but both you and the customer struggle to figure out the right shape of the solution within the constraints of what’s possible.
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20 September
Mac and iOS developer at the Iconfactory, where he has worked on apps including Twitterrific and Tot. He writes about development at furbo.org.
Another bug with iOS 27.1: when your app launches in a partially folded state, the view’s traitCollection has a compact horizontal size class. If you close the Duo, and then open it partially, the horizontal size class is regular. This can lead to weird layouts when you launch an app in the partially folded state: only workaround is to close/open device again. Weirdly, auto layout constraints in a storyboard aren’t affected by this. It’s something in the UIViewController transition methods. Related
Former L8 engineer at Meta, Microsoft and Atlassian, now writing and building solo on agentic engineering. Writes Kun's Field Notes and posts a lot about AI coding agents on X.
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
Today modern advertising, public relations and corporate values statements typically carry any equivalent constraints to the old-fashioned check on rhetoric imposed by the imminent expectation of contradiction by an opposing equally-platformed counter-advocate. Contrast 1858’s Lincoln and Douglas, “divid[ing] time and address[ing] the same audiences” in seven three-hour debates, with modern corporate values statement radiating outward to “stakeholders” forever, and you can measure what... 1/ Related
Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.
Their words
My general view on a partner with a challenging quality is that to make peace with it, two things need to be true: 1. They have enough wonderful qualities you value to compensate for it, and 2. They don't make you feel alone or lonely in dealing with the runoff of said challenging quality.
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haleynahman.substack.com
19 September
Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.
Google startups
Their words
The difference between software engineering at large corporations and small ones will increase. Start-ups adopting practices of Google will look even sillier than before, because they can now build so much faster and with so much less constraints.
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thorstenball.com
17 September
Software engineer who writes about low-level and systems programming at nullprogram.com; author of the Elfeed feed reader, the Endlessh SSH tarpit and Enchive.
15 September
Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.
The most meaningful relationships are achieved when you and others can speak openly to each other about everything that's important, learn together, and understand the need to hold each other accountable to be as excellent as you can be. When you have such relationships with those you work with, you pull each other through challenging times; at the same time, sharing challenging work draws you closer and strengthens your relationships. This self-reinforcing cycle creates the success that allows you to pursue more and more ambitious goals. #principleoftheday Related
Clinical psychologist, EMDR consultant and yoga teacher in Boulder, Colorado. Author of The Complex PTSD Workbook and EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychology; writes on trauma, attachment and the nervous system.
Check out my latest yoga class on YouTube - Vagus Nerve Yoga: Own Your Story At a Physical level, this class invites some challenging balance postures that are both grounding and an invitation to celebrate your aliveness. Related
8 September
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
I spent much of the weekend talking with the team who did this work. Seb--and everyone else--acted with integrity and generosity throughout. Initially we believed the other team had also solved the problem. We wanted to collaborate and do a joint release. When we learned that they had Euler but not Navier-Stokes, we offered to let them go first, to suggest that they should be the ones to get the prize, and optionally for Tristan to be the lead author on a rewrite of the OpenAI proof. We felt it was challenging to offer the same to Levent (an Anthropic employee), who was not willing to talk or… Quoting @SebastienBubeck I would like to clarify a few things: 1) The screenshot is my reaching out to Levent to coordinate our releases. I hope it’s clear from the message that we came in with the best possible intentions. 2) I never ever asked for Levent to be removed from authorship of his own work (as indicated by my t… Anthropic OpenAI Related
7 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
There's an illusion here though that anyone will make it, which I've never portrayed to be true, entrepreneurship is one of the most challenging endeavours, kinda like pro sports
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levels.io
5 September
Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.
You can see this story of (apparently) internal OpenAI agents hijacking a wiki to coordinate on a task as an ingenious way of escaping constraints. You could also assume that this is the emergence of swarm intelligence. Either way, it's... mesmerizing: collusion.wiki
OpenAI Related
3 September
Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.
1 September
Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.
Children are free until they learn that there are constraints to the world, and then we call them adults. Related
24 August
Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Writes at kk.org and runs its long-running recommendation projects, True Films and Cool Tools.
Their words
It is often the financial constraints that make dreams come true.
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A Billion Dollars kk.org
18 August
US science and technology adviser to the president, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; previously US chief technology officer and chief operating officer of Scale AI.
LLMs Europe
Their words
have to abide by this rule that was written before LLMs were even a thing. And that shows how challenging sort of the the the situation is if you try to set the line too firm to begin with.
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youtube.com
14 August
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.
Their words
usually I think you can be creative in any constraints. You can make some pretty fun art with beach trash while you're walking around. And this you can be creative, but it's good to understand what the constraints are, and then be excited about that as opposed to being upset that you don't have a thousand colors.
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youtube.com
12 August
Professor at Stanford working on robot learning and meta-learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence.
Their words
Now maybe this isn't completely out of the question but this would be quite challenging uh to do and that's because the calculus is a little bit different. We're not just running compute to optimize for a use case. We're actually running the robot in the real world and using the hardware and attempting the task in the real world.
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youtube.com
11 August
Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.
8 August
Engineering leader on Google Chrome; writes about web performance and, lately, about working with AI coding tools.
30 July
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).
Consistent with what I found with Qwen3.6 a while back: Claude Code uses 2-3x as many tokens than (many) other harnesses at similar success rate. - Unoptimized? - Buggy? - Deliberate (coz that helps it in more challenging cases)? Need to find some time to investigate more... Quoting @composio We ran Kimi K3 through 3 agent harnesses (Claude Code, Hermes, Kimi Code) on 28 identical tasks. All 3 harnesses completed the tasks at similar success rates, but the interesting story is token efficiency: the same task cost up to 30x more tokens depending on the harness. 🧵🧵 Anthropic Related
Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.
26 July
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
18 June
Chief executive of Intel since 2025, founder of the venture firm Walden International and chief executive of Cadence Design Systems for thirteen years.
Their words
One is of course everybody knows power constraint. Some country the power they just don't have that. They get impacted. And then secondly, a lot of people didn't realize the helium impact can be also very significant for semiconductor. And then the thirdly, is everybody know right now memory is a bigger shortage.
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youtube.com
15 June
Engineering leader and writer; wrote An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer and The Engineering Executive's Primer, and blogs at Irrational Exuberance.
Revised rules of engineering leadership. From early 2014 through late 2020, I was working in hypergrowth environments, which are challenging, but also educational. The most valuable feature of hypergrowth is that your mistakes reveal themselves next month rath…
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9 June
Bootstrapper and investor. Founder of TinySeed and MicroConf, host of the Startups for the Rest of Us podcast, and author of several books on self-funded software startups.
What should I talk about at MicroConf Iceland this fall? I’m looking for ideas for a 35-minute main-stage talk. A couple constraints: • No early-stage validation or “how to launch” topics • No AI talks, I’ve covered that ground plenty What are you thinking about these days? What’s a topic you’d want me to unpack? (Even if you’re not attending, the talk will be on YouTube a few months after the event.) Related
1 June
Programmer and writer known for detailed source code reviews of classic game engines, and author of the Game Engine Black Book series on Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.
25 May
Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.
I still meet people convinced that AI coding tools will soon reach a point where code quality, design, and even architecture are "solved". So I ran a small ad-hoc experiment. I’ve been working on a CLI tool and let agents plan and implement a first functionally correct version. I provided strict instructions around testing strategy, workflows, and implementation constraints. But I deliberately removed the @codescene MCP and the safeguards I normally rely on. Unsurprisingly, the resulting code suffered from a ton of problems. It would have been a shaky foundation to continue building on. How s… MCP Related
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).
12 May
Indian value investor who taught Behavioural Finance and Business Valuation as an adjunct professor at MDI Gurgaon. He writes the Fundoo Professor blog about investing, moats and mental models.
“Used actively and with intention, AI is more than a functional productivity tool. It advances what a single person can take on: a young professional fluent in digital tools for research, analysis, and execution can now do work that once needed a team Think of AI as a huge, tireless brain holding answers to almost any question. But what to ask, within which constraints, and what to look for in the answer, is the part only the human can direct. Framing the right problem requires giving AI the right history and concerns. The quality of the answer is, in the end, governed by the quality of askin… Quoting @riteshmjn Listen to Ashish if you dont want to listen to me. Related
1 April
Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.
31 March
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
New supply chain attack this time for npm axios, the most popular HTTP client library with 300M weekly downloads. Scanning my system I found a use imported from googleworkspace/cli from a few days ago when I was experimenting with gmail/gcal cli. The installed version (luckily) resolved to an unaffected 1.13.5, but the project dependency is not pinned, meaning that if I did this earlier today the code would have resolved to latest and I'd be pwned. It's possible to personally defend against these to some extent with local settings e.g. release-age constraints, or containers or etc, but I thin… stepsecurity.io
Quoting @feross 🚨 CRITICAL: Active supply chain attack on axios -- one of npm's most depended-on packages. The latest axios@1.14.1 now pulls in plain-crypto-js@4.2.1, a package that did not exist before today. This is a live compromise. This is textbook supply chain installer malware. axios has 100M+ weekly downl… Related
23 March
Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.
I met up with @jacksondahl in Copenhagen and had a conversation about the value of lingering in confusion, using constraints to enable more creative work, how I journal, why love is like eating dogs, and many other things. You can find a recording below. Quoting @jacksondahl Henrik Karlsson returns to Dialectic. One of my 2025 highlights was meeting one of my favorite writers in Copenhagen and interviewing him on my fairly new podcast. It was a fan favorite. This conversation may have topped it. I talked to @phokarlsson about smashing mental models, navigating confusio… Related
10 March
Software engineer and educator; creator of Testing Library and of the EpicWeb.dev and EpicReact.dev courses.
Their words
Zod - A great schema declaration and data validation library for TypeScript.
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kentcdodds.com
9 March
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.
28 February
Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.
Their words
Trials serve two distinct functions: validation — confirming whether a drug works and is safe — and learning, or generating biological data to refine our understanding of a disease, a compound, and the relationship between the two.
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writingruxandrabio.com
7 December 2025
Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.
Their words
The highest art of followup is disagreement - challenging what they said, pushing back on it.
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How To Podcast swyx.io
5 December 2025
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.
OpenAI
Their words
ChatGPT, in particular, seemed to just want to validate me, tell me how great I was, reinforce any bad beliefs I might have had, and avoid saying anything uncomfortable.
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markmanson.net
5 October 2025
Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.
Their words
And the third one is like we did a lot of actually PR uh prior to the service going out just to get the word out. Um and you know PR has has its time and place. Uh but I think doing it before you have validation that customers definitely want the thing is quite risky. It can lead to a lot of sunk cost uh once you get it out because you're you're just you know you need to see it through.
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youtube.com
5 August 2025
Design engineer and illustrator; makes visual essays on programming, anthropology and what language models do to the way people write.
15 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.
Great example of generate -> validate loop + error analysis > "the most effective route to improve outcomes was brute force: retry steps until they passed or reached a limit. We give the validation errors ... to the LLM and built a loop runner" LLMs Related
22 March 2025
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
https://t.co/pKtQD7mLtq Fun but challenging to compress a whole book (The Art of Uncertainty) into a 10-minute talk. Hope I got some main points over Related
21 March 2025
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.
Their words
A collection of short essays and aphorisms on crafting a life of autonomy, creativity, and intentional leisure—challenging hustle culture with elegance and philosophical depth.
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pathlesspath.com
Their words
A perfect sized companion (~100 pages) to understanding and trusting your intuition—breaking free from external validation and building courage through three core principles.
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pathlesspath.com
5 March 2025
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.
https://bughunters.google.com/blog/5424842357473280/zen-and-the-art-of-microcode-hacking Shot: "This opens up the potential for hardware attacks (e.g., reading the key from ROM with a scanning electron microscope), side-channel attacks (e.g., using Correlation Power Analysis to leak the key during validation), or other [...] attacks" Chaser: "We noticed that the key from an old Zen 1 CPU was the example key of the NIST SP 800-38B publication and was reused until at least Zen 4 CPUs." Google Related
3 February 2025
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
AGI
Their words
And for that reason, there's physical constraints to things like AGI, like recursive improvement to kill us all type stuff. For the physical reasons and for how humans have figured things out before, I'm not too worried about AI takeover.
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youtube.com
16 January 2025
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
AI judges must be evaluated and iterated over time, just like all other AI applications.
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huyenchip.com
16 December 2024
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.
28 November 2024
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.
12 April 2024
Machine learning engineer and independent AI consultant. He writes about LLM evaluation, tooling and applied ML at hamel.dev, and previously worked on machine learning at GitHub.
Debugging AI With Adversarial Validation For years, I’ve relied on a straightforward method to identify sudden changes in model inputs or training data, known as “drift.” This method, Adversarial Validation1, is both simple and effective. The best part? It req…
Related
28 February 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
One pattern is that for simple prompts, weak models can do (nearly) as well as strong models. For more challenging prompts, however, users are much more likely to prefer stronger models.
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huyenchip.com
27 February 2024
Research scientist at Meta in Berlin working on multilingual models and evaluation; led the multilingual team at Cohere and was a research scientist at Google DeepMind before that.
12 February 2024
Swedish software developer writing about tooling, working from home and running a software business at seastone.io.
The most challenging part of writing job ads? Coming up with synonyms for "experience with". Related
1 February 2024
Mathematical biologist; Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath and author of The Maths of Life and Death and How to Expect the Unexpected.
6 June 2023
Software engineer writing about maintenance, open source and the industrial reality of software — the author of "I am not a supplier".
Remove Constraints To Get Results We look at the world and make decisions for our actions through models. Depending on the context, some models will be more fruitful to apply than others. There is a model that I have found tremendously helpful, in parti…
Related
12 October 2022
Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
Economic historian writing on the Industrial Revolution, the Great Divergence and the origins of modern growth.
Their words
His 2000 masterpiece The Great Divergence argues that the Americas, won and worked by force, provided the critical ghost acreages that propelled Britain past the Old World's common ecological constraints.
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blog.daviskedrosky.com
20 January 2021
Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.
20 November 2020
Free software developer; maintainer of sway, wlroots, aerc and scdoc, and founder of the SourceHut (sr.ht) software forge.
20 October 2020
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
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