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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.

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  Tinybeans

  Their words

  Tinybeans (an app I use to share photos of kids) tweaked its upload UI to remove segmenting photos by date - which was how I used it all the time

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Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.

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  A society cannot remove the desire for status, only change what earns it.

  Their words

  We may not be able to remove the desire for status, but we can change what earns status.

  Some Status Games Are Worth Playingrobkhenderson.com

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

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  A worked example whose scaffolding is progressively removed teaches faster than making a child figure the problem out unaided.

  Their words

  The better way to learn, the faster way to learn is to give you them a worked example where you show them and then you progressively remove the parts of the example where they're having to progressively go up and then by the end they can solve the problem with no scaffolding.

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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.

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  Eliminating paper-writing as a student assignment would remove a core skill needed for most professions requiring a graduate degree.

  Their words

  I am extremely concerned that this trend will eliminate paper-writing as an assignment, and that is a core function of most professions requiring a graduate degree.

  The Professor and the Plutocrat and AIdanieldrezner.substack.com

Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

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  "Optimize it later" would be safe advice only if every engineer already knew how to avoid the architectural mistakes that no later optimization can remove.

  Their words

  If every uh software engineer knew to watch out for false serial dependency chains, things where they were creating series of dependent operations that could not be optimized away or other sorts of architectural problems like that that cannot be easily fixed, then the world would look more like just wait and optimize the hotspot, right?

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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.

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  Excessively AI-polished proofs can remove natural friction and become easy to read but hard to learn from.

  Their words

  An excessively AI-polished proof may sand away both the "artificial" friction (typos, awkward phrasing, disorganization) and the "natural" friction, leaving a text that is easy to read and hard to learn from.

  Mathematics in the age of AIarxiv.org

Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, the Denver company building the Overture supersonic airliner and its Symphony engine.

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  The way to settle an argument about how quiet supersonic flight must be is to remove the boom entirely, so there is nothing left to argue about.

  Their words

  by making the sonic boom disappear entirely, we are able to put aside a question that had long plagued people talking about supersonic flight, which is how quiet is quiet enough? If there's no boom at all, there's nothing to argue about.

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Creator of the iPod and co-creator of the iPhone at Apple, founder of Nest, and author of Build.

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  Devices should be built voice-first, with keyboard and touch demoted to second and third, the exact reverse of how the smartphone was layered.

  Their words

  We need to flip it. We need to absolutely flip it, and we have to say, and this is what I always wanted to do with Nest, which is I want to remove displays, and we need to have voice as the number one primary feature, and you build around voice.

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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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  Every product put into the world removes the need for imagination, because it becomes something anyone can point AI at and copy.

  Their words

  And the more you build, right? The more you put things out there, you remove the need for imagination. You can say, "Okay, now I like that website. Do that for me."

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Austrian developer. Created the libGDX game framework, and more recently the pi coding agent, which moved with them to Earendil — Armin Ronacher's company — in April 2026. Writes at mariozechner.at.

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  The human bottleneck is a safety property: remove it and small, individually harmless coding errors compound at a rate nobody feels until it is too late.

  Their words

  With an orchestrated army of agents, there is no bottleneck, no human pain. These tiny little harmless booboos suddenly compound at a rate that's unsustainable. You have removed yourself from the loop, so you don't even know that all the innocent booboos have formed a monster of a codebase. You only feel the pain when it's too late.

  Thoughts on slowing the fuck downmariozechner.at

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

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  The only guaranteed defence against a prompt-injection attack is to remove one of its three legs — private data, exposure to untrusted content, or a way to send data out.

  Their words

  I call it the lethal trifecta because the only guaranteed solution is to cut off one of the legs.

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

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  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

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.

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  Reaching a senior level requires putting oneself on the critical path, but excelling beyond it requires removing oneself from it.

  Their words

  To get to principal, you need to put yourself on the critical path. To be effective as a principal and go beyond it, you need to actively remove yourself from it.

  eugeneyan.com

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

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  AI does not remove a job so much as change what it consists of, and knowing exactly where a model's capabilities stop is now part of being a good engineer.

  Their words

  take prompting and as an engineer, there's a range of prompting abilities. uh the way you discretize and split up your task matters. And if you assume that uh a model can do more than it can do, then you're going to have a bad time.

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Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

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  We overuse pills: a painkiller mutes the signal without removing the cause, and the makers are not incentivised to remove it.

  Their words

  No, I'm not saying that you should never take pills. There are obviously some diseases that you can only fight with antibiotics, for example. So, I'm not suggesting we go back to the Middle Ages, but what I'm saying is we overuse pills.

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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.

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  Freedom of thought requires deliberately disconnecting from online content, because a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate you.

  Their words

  One of the ways to achieve freedom of thought is to remove your mind from the influences, the forces that manipulate you. That’s really important to realize the content you consume, especially on the internet, when a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate your mind. You have to disconnect yourself.

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Runs global health R&D at Open Philanthropy; writes about the science and medicine that could exist and does not.

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  Not every bottleneck on medical progress is one AI can remove, and which ones will remain can be guessed at now.

  Their words

  But I don’t think all bottlenecks on medical progress are equally AI-able in the next decade, and I don’t think all will become irrelevant.

  What does AI progress mean for medical progress?blog.jacobtrefethen.com

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

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  Censoring a fact out of a language model is practically impossible, because you would first have to remove that fact from the internet.

  Their words

  I almost think it's practically impossible because you effectively have to remove them from the internet.

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Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.

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  Consciousness and free will are not illusions: being emergent and non-fundamental is exactly as real as a table is.

  Their words

  That’s different than something being emergent or non-fundamental, but also real. This table is real, even though I know it’s made of atoms, that doesn’t remove the realness from the table. I think that consciousness and free will and things like that are just as real in tables and chairs.

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

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  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

Alignment researcher at Anthropic; co-led OpenAI's superalignment team until 2024, and writes Musings on the Alignment Problem.

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  The dangerous capability that matters most for misalignment is whether a model can exfiltrate its own weights, because that is the one that removes it from your control.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  If a model was capable of self-exfiltration, it would have the option to remove itself from your control.

  Self-exfiltration is a key dangerous capabilityaligned.substack.com