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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

Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.

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  Food safety regulation is an essential government role that cannot be left to the private sector or to individuals doing their own research.

  government

  Their words

  And this is not something that you can leave up to the private sector. It’s not something where you can do your own research. It’s a very complicated world out there. And the informational burden of trying to figure out whether the people responsible for your package of hamburger are actually following safe procedures, that’s beyond everybody.

  Where’s the Beef (Coming From)?paulkrugman.substack.com

Co-founder of Ximian and Xamarin; CEO of GitHub from 2018 to 2021; now an independent investor and funder of open technical projects, including the Vesuvius Challenge to read the Herculaneum Papyri.

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  The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful

  Their words

  The cultural prohibition on micromanagement is harmful Great individuals should be fully empowered to exercise their judgment

  Nat Friedmannat.org

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

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  Unplanned systems where individuals act opportunistically, exploiting gaps, can still function well, like water flowing around obstacles.

  Their words

  It’s not orderly. But neither is water flowing in a stream. It flows around obstacles. Everything is opportunistic, selfishly taking the effective path, exploiting available gaps. It’s natural.

  Bangalore India hospital flowsive.rs

Neurologist at Oxford; studies apathy, motivation and attention after brain injury, and edits the journal Brain.

From one piece How to Improve Motivation & Overcome Procrastination | Dr. Masud Husain 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Alzheimer's disease and dementia are not the same thing: a fifth to a third of people whose brains carry the pathology never became demented.

  Their words

  Alzheimer's disease does not necessarily equal dementia. people can have Alzheimer's disease and not get dementia. So, we found this out from post-mortem studies. People have been followed as they age. Uh they've donated their brains and it turns out that perhaps 20 to 30% of these individuals who never had dementia have Alzheimer pathology.

  youtube.com

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  Apathy in an otherwise healthy older person doubles their risk of Alzheimer's, which means the disease changes behaviour long before it touches cognition.

  Their words

  What we find is that those individuals who score highly on just self-reported questionnaires for motivation, if they score highly for apathy, they have twice the risk of developing Alzheimer's disease than people who don't.

  youtube.com

Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.

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  The population of modern humans that expanded out of Africa around 50,000-60,000 years ago numbered only a few thousand individuals at most.

  Their words

  All the evidence, both ancient and modern, points to a tiny non-African ancestry population between 50 and 60,000 years ago, a few thousand individuals at most

  razibkhan.com

Investing columnist for The Wall Street Journal and editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor.

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  Behavioral economics is not a cure-all, but it is a useful tool for individuals and for systemic change alike.

  Their words

  My view: Behavioral economics is no panacea, but it can be an extremely useful tool for individuals and for systems as well.

  Some Summer Readingjasonzweig.com

Head of Instagram since 2018, previously head of Facebook's News Feed.

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  Power is shifting from institutions to individuals across every industry: players are now more relevant than the teams they play for.

  Their words

  power shifting from institutions to individuals across industries, the easiest example is sports where players are more relevant than teams now.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Meta Platforms, the company he started as Facebook in 2004.

From one piece “Curing All Disease by next century is too conservative" - Mark Zuckerberg 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Progress has never come from centralization; it comes from individuals trying things the mainstream had written off.

  Their words

  that's how progress has always been made historically, right? It's not um through centralization. It's through empowering individuals to try things that are somewhat out of the mainstream that other people didn't think were good ideas

  youtube.com

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  Social media and open-source AI come from the same conviction: hand the technology to individuals.

  Their words

  I mean to some degree it's like why you create something like social media, right? To give people a voice.

  youtube.com

Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.

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  As AI lets individuals handle many roles at once, large organizational bureaucracies will lose value relative to small founder-led ventures.

  startups

  Their words

  The value of bureaucracies will go down, and the value of founders will go up.

  🌻 conversations on culture in the AI agejasmi.news

Co-founder and chief executive of Figma, the collaborative design platform he started in 2012 and took public in 2025.

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  Craft is a competitive strategy rather than a nicety: a company wins by having the best craft and the best design, so that is what it should hire for.

  Their words

  we're looking for high judgment individuals, people that are going to roll up their sleeves and do a lot, whether they're IC's or managers, and people that are going to get the details and perfect their craft, because we know that's how we're going to win is by having the best craft, the best design.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

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  AI has made individuals capable enough that the boundaries between engineer, designer, researcher and product manager should be dissolved.

  Their words

  And so the main thing that I felt so excited about and this is something I tell my team all the time is we need to dissolve the boundaries of these traditional roles.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, an AI answer engine; previously a research scientist at OpenAI and a PhD student at UC Berkeley.

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  The dangerous concentration of power in AI comes from who can afford the compute, not from who holds the model weights.

  Their words

  It’s less about access to a model’s weights, it’s more access to compute that is putting the world in more concentration of power and few individuals. Because not everyone’s going to be able to afford this much amount of compute to answer the hardest questions.

  youtube.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Between Us: How Cultures Create Emotions

  Their words

  Cultural psychology, studying emotions through the lens of culture. Your emotions are created by your culture. You should not be too sure that you share the emotional experiences of individuals from other cultures. Culture and emotion make each other up. Great insights!

  sive.rs

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."

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  The lower a layer sits in the software stack, the harder it is for an individual developer to build in it.

  Their words

  the lower we go in the stack, the harder it is for individuals to build.

  huyenchip.com

Development economist; argues that letting people move to rich countries does more for the poor than aid, and wrote Let Their People Come.

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  Innovation that answers a policy-made price rather than real scarcity leaves the world no better off, however good the science inside it.

  Their words

  But, whether it makes financial sense or not for the individuals involved, they are responding to distorted prices, not scarcity, and the world is not better off from their invention and innovation.

  Choose Peoplelampforum.org

Research psychologist, instrumental in founding the field of naturalistic decision making; developed the recognition-primed decision model, the PreMortem method and the ShadowBox training method, and wrote Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don't.

From one piece Insights for Making Better Decisions | Gary Klein | Knowledge Project 144 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Groups as a rule make terrible decisions; one person should decide and the group should only supply input.

  Their words

  I have problems with group decisions. I think groups as a rule like a heuristic make terrible decisions. Individuals should make decisions. Groups should provide input. Um but there should be one sort of person making the decision.

  youtube.com

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  Brainstorming together produces no more ideas and no better ones than having people generate ideas privately before sharing them.

  Their words

  the research on like brainstorming where all brainstorming together the research shows that brainstorming does not produce more ideas or more innovative ideas. And I think teams would be and groups would be better having individuals generate their own concepts and then after they've done it independently and privately sharing it with the others.

  youtube.com

Writer and researcher on how people organise online; wrote Working in Public, on the maintenance of open-source software, and Antimemetics.

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  Company sponsorships, not individual ones, are where open source funding has to come from.

  open source

  On changing their mind

  I’ve seen recurring comments to the effect of “This is great, but individuals aren’t where the money’s at, it’s companies”, which is a position I’ve also previously taken.

Writer and researcher on how people organise online; wrote Working in Public, on the maintenance of open-source software, and Antimemetics.

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  Individual and corporate sponsorship of open source are two different products: a company buys support and visibility, a person buys a relationship.

  open source

  Their words

  With companies, open source developers are selling a product. With individuals, they’re selling themselves.

  The Twitch argument for GitHub Sponsorsnadia.xyz

Engineering leader and writer; wrote An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer and The Engineering Executive's Primer, and blogs at Irrational Exuberance.

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  A group of fewer than four people is not a team: it behaves like a set of individuals, and a single departure knocks it back into maintenance.

  Their words

  Small teams (<4) are not teams. I’ve sponsored quite a few 1-2 person teams, and each time I’ve regretted it. To repeat: I have regretted it every single time.

  Sizing engineering teams.lethain.com

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

• Readrcmnd.app

  4 Disciplines of Execution

  Their words

  Podcast. A system for pursuing goals, keeping track of progress, and making sure they ultimately get done. Useful in organizations and individuals. You won’t find the ideas very innovative, but the approach is helpful, and yet not something we tend to do. Worth a read if you have goals you have trouble actually finding time for.

  radex.io

Chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway from 1970 to 2025, when Greg Abel became CEO; chairman as of 2026. Wrote the annual Letters to Berkshire Shareholders from 1977 to 2024, read closely across the investing world for decades.

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  His advice to his own estate's trustee is the same advice he gives everyone: almost all of it into a low-cost S&P 500 index fund, not with a high-fee manager.

  government

  Their words

  My advice to the trustee could not be more simple: Put 10% of the cash in short-term government bonds and 90% in a very low-cost S&P 500 index fund. (I suggest Vanguard’s.) I believe the trust’s long-term results from this policy will be superior to those attained by most investors – whether pension funds, institutions or individuals – who employ high-fee managers.

  Berkshire Hathaway 2013 Chairman's Letterberkshirehathaway.com

Former NASA flight director and space shuttle programme manager; writes about how the shuttle was actually flown and what went wrong.

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  Disasters come from organisational conditions, not from bad individuals, so blaming a person prevents the fix.

  Their words

  So don’t blame an individual; looks for the organizational factors that lead to that kind of a mindset.

  After Ten Years: Working on the Wrong Problemwaynehale.wordpress.com