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Noah Smith
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20 September
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
A lot of our discussions about merit, talent, and ability are going to look pretty silly in a decade or two Related
I believe in ineffective altruism, meaning that I'd nuke all y'all to give my rabbit 10 more minutes of happiness Related
18 September
Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.
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.
and all it took was to add a proper extension system to claude code (sorry thariq, could not resist :D) Quoting @trq212 We're adding support for AGENTS.md to Claude Code. Starting today in version 2.1.277, if there is no CLAUDE.md in a folder, Claude will check for and use AGENTS.md. You can toggle this behavior in /config. Anthropic Related
Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.
Delicious meta thought from this morning: The table pounding from the AI-skeptical software engineers, shouting "they can't build proper, scalable, performant programs!", sounds especially thin when you consider that right now nearly everyone is looking for where this is going and no one knows yet. Building something "proper" and "scalable" and "performant" before you have PMF is a tricky thing to pull off (there's exceptions, of course, where PMF comes from being one of the three) and now it seems like most companies are looking for PMF every 3 months. Related
Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.
Their words
Effective Altruism lets you appear rational and moral - the ultimate ego trip.
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@naval on X x.com
16 September
Founder and chief executive of Replit. Previously an engineer at Facebook and Codecademy. Writes essays on programming, philosophy and entrepreneurship at amasad.me.
If you’re curious about Effective Altruism, the origins of the cult, their tactics, and their influence network — check out my conversation with Tucker from two years ago: Quoting @TuckerCarlson Tech CEO Amjad Masad on the cults of Silicon Valley. This is the deepest and most interesting explanation of AI you’ll ever see. (0:00) Artificial Intelligence (10:01) Bitcoin (22:30) The Extropians Cult (29:15) Transhumanism (34:04) Longtermism (40:24) Are Machines Capable of Thinking? (43:11) The… Related
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.
15 September
Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.
If anyone wants a nice side project... The fast number parsing fast_float (part of GCC, and other important systems like MySQL) is not always exact when dealing with 16-bit float parsing (specifically float16_t). That is, some number strings can lie in between two numbers and the rounding is wrong. In fact, nobody has done a proper analysis of the implementation to insure that it is correct. Yeah. I could ask my AI, but it is still work, especially because I do not trust anyone, not even an AI, to get it correct the first time around. Contributions invited. github.com
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14 September
Entrepreneur and founder of Blueprint. Publishes a detailed, freely available longevity protocol documenting the food, supplements, devices and measurements he uses on himself.
New PR 265 lbs Heel elevated front box squat. +10 lbs from last week. I'm getting proper shoes for these lifts. The slant board was missing so we improvised. I'm training to dunk: > 49 yrs old >6’0” >180 lbs > standing reach: 91” (7’7”) > basketball rim: 120” (10’) > needed vertical: ~35” > NBA ave 34” Here are the thresholds I need to meet: > takeoff velocity 14.5 ft/s > ground force: 585 lbs > time to take off: 0.2 sec > peak power: 14.8 hp (11 kW) Landing is even more intimidating > creates load equal to 6-10x body weight > 1,080 to 1,800 lbs of ground reaction force Injury risk > 3-5x rup… Related
12 September
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.
Stimulating piece on Scottish education in @asteriskmgzn: https://t.co/jyTk8uTT1J. I suspect that discussions of canon, culture, and shared context to return to the fore in the coming years, as many skills, narrowly-construed, are ceded to AI, and as some of the excesses of de-Arnoldization, and the processes that Arendt described in her writing on education, start to recede. I’m curious on the causal linkage between PISA scores and the reforms he describes. It feels like a very exciting time to be a theorist of education, and I assume that the best work will come from surprising places. Related
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
I agree with Dario that we need to pace the frontier. This has been a primary topic of discussions we've had at OpenAI in recent weeks. Committing to having independent evaluators with employee-like access is a great idea, and we will do the same. We'll have more to share soon. Quoting @DarioAmodei We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so. Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our systems, so that they… OpenAI Related
11 September
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom since July 2026 and leader of the Labour Party. MP for Makerfield since a by-election in June 2026; Mayor of Greater Manchester from 2017 before that.
In my kitchen there is a jar of honey gifted to me by Phil Rosenberg, the President of the Board of Deputies, who insisted I take it home for my family, along with a bag of apples, because it would not be a proper new year otherwise. So let me begin the simple way: Shana tova u'metuka. A good and sweet new year to every Jewish family in Britain. The custom of dipping an apple in honey is one of the most hopeful things I know. It is not a claim that the year gone by was sweet. It is a decision that the year ahead should be. And I know that the year behind us has been anything but. Two Jewish m… Related
Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.
10 September
General partner at Benchmark Capital for over two decades; was the lead analyst on Amazon's IPO before moving into venture capital. Writes Above the Crowd on tech and marketplace economics.
Sound like many employees at Anthropic share Jacob's POV, as many posted yesterday that (1) they agree, and (2) said that many more inside the company do also. It would be useful to name this "belief system" so that we can talk about it in a reasonable way. I suspect "doomer" seems derogatory, and "accelerationist" has others uses. If there a word we can use so that we can have proper discourse? I'm very serious. I think it would be helpful. Anthropic Related
9 September
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
In light of kind of insane AI safety discussions recently: 1. AI progress is very fast 2. we should be careful about how we roll out the tech 3. the world is not actively ending AI alignment Related
2 September
Australian moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics emeritus at Princeton University; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.
24 August
Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@danluu/111037093079443322 With the discussions of how bot traffic is flooding websites, I was surprised to find that my CDN is "only" using 3.5 TB/mo, up 3x in 3 years. Human traffic is probably down because I haven't been active for the last couple years, so maybe we can call that a 4x to 5x increase due to bots? Maybe my site just isn't very appealing to bots, but from the way people talk, I was expecting a higher ratio. I would've guessed >= 100x from how people are talking; 10x would be nothing in terms of load. Related
28 July
Writer of the personal-finance blog Of Dollars And Data and author of Just Keep Buying and The Wealth Ladder. Chief Operating Officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management.
16 July
Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.
I have some news. But first a little backstory. Almost exactly four years ago, I drove down to Mountain View for my first day as a Google employee. I was fifty-four years old, and somehow had managed to avoid ever having a proper job over that entire period, other than a few startups that I had founded in my twenties and thirties. At that point Google Labs, which had just been formed a few months earlier, was headquartered in a fairly anonymous looking suburban office park off 101, closer to Office Space than Silicon Valley on the Mike Judge spectrum. And as it happened, my first day at Googl… Google startups Related
13 July
Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.
The internet doesn't bring out the worst in people. It makes the worst people more visible. Across all 30 countries studied, those who are nasty in online political discussions are nasty in real life, too. They seek status through hostility. Don't feed the hand that bites you. Related
7 July
Co-founder of Modem and a founding engineer at Sentry, where he went on to be VP of Engineering. Co-author of Third-party JavaScript, and co-host of the State of Agentic Coding podcast with Armin Ronacher.
🛠️ hunk 0.17.0 is out Patches from 10 new contributors, w/ small fixes & quality-of-life improvements like: - official homebrew install (brew install hunk) - launch hunk w/o menu bar - better session reliability - esc no longer quits, proper transparent bg colours, & more Related
29 June
Game designer and programmer, co-founder of id Software and co-creator of Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein 3D. Now runs Romero Games in Galway, Ireland.
Hi Sandy, I hope you’re well. I have appreciated the recent discussions. I do not agree with your framing. Regarding piracy, DOOM is a complicated example because shareware was the model. DOOM’s first episode was designed to be freely copied, passed around, uploaded, installed, and played. That enormous unpaid audience was not the same thing as piracy. It was part of how DOOM reached the world. By the mid-90s, DOOM had something like 20 million shareware installs and more than 2 million paid copies sold. Those 20 million people were not “pirates” by default. A huge number of them were playing… Quoting @SandyofCthulhu @GameStalgiaX F*ck pirates, as a man who designed video games from 1988 through 2012. 70-90% of Doom's players pirated it. If not for that we would literally have had so much more for our workspace and upcoming projects - Quake may not have gutted id Software. At least 50% of Age of Empires was pir… Related
26 June
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.
A while ago, @regehr was tooting about optimizing brainfuck, and I speculated that peeling off the first iteration of a loop might make the loop body easier to optimize: https://mastodon.social/@nelhage/113241955294210125 Today I learned that RPython/PyPy use a very similar idea to support loop optimizations in their trace optimizer: https://dl.acm.org/doi/epdf/10.1145/2480360.2384586 By peeling off a single loop iteration, the optimizer can "see" that the body proper is dominated by the first iteration, and specialize much harder. Related
AI researcher at OpenAI; built the poker systems Libratus and Pluribus and the Diplomacy agent Cicero, and works on reasoning models.
benchmarks
Their words
my claim is the proper way to evaluate the models now is you either have some kind of budget for the benchmark whether it's tokens or cost or time or whatever or you plot the performance as a function of the amount of test time compute that's going into the model
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youtube.com
2 June
Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.
Logic for Programmers extra credits So I said there wasn’t a proper newsletter this week, since I’m in Budapest prepping for a conference. But I still got a thing for y’all. There’s a lot of interesting topics I wanted to cover for Logic for Programmers,…
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5 April
Machine learning engineer working on recommender systems, personalization and information retrieval. Previously worked on LLMs and LLM infrastructure at Mozilla.ai and on ML and recsys at Duo, Tumblr, Automattic and Comcast; wrote the 'What are embeddings?' text and ran the Normconf conference.
NASA Elements of Engineering Excellence I stumbled across this report from NASA, “Elements of Engineering Excellence”, published in 2012, The inspiration for this paper originated in discussions with the director of MSFC Engineering in 2006 who as…
Related
14 March
American senior staff engineer working on developer and user experience and open source; writes at adamdehaven.com.
31 January
Writer of MacSparky and author of the MacSparky Field Guides on Apple productivity software. A lawyer for 30 years before going full-time on the site, he co-hosts the Mac Power Users and Focused podcasts.
Their words
NotePlan is more conservative, but it’s a native Mac app, which makes it easier to use on mobile and gives you all the traditional Mac benefits like Shortcuts integration and proper window management.
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macsparky.com
20 January
Web infrastructure engineer and standards editor; chaired the IETF HTTP working group and co-authored core HTTP and Atom specifications.
The Open Web means several things to different people, depending on context, but recently discussions have focused on the Web's Openness in terms of access to information -- how easy it is to publish and obtain information without barriers there. mnot.net
Related
22 December 2025
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
A very good and readable book on this interaction, with excellent discussions of Donna Summer, Stevie Wonder, La Monte Young, and Penderecki, among many others.
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marginalrevolution.com
14 December 2025
Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.
Their words
I got the bamboo one because I thought it might fit the shape of my toilet best but I didn't get it for the look. It's ugly of course. Nevertheless I've become deeply committed to proper poop posture. I hate pooping without it!!!
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haleynahman.substack.com
10 December 2025
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
6 December 2025
Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.
11 September 2025
Machine learning engineer and consultant focused on RAG and retrieval systems. He writes about applied AI engineering at jxnl.co and is the author of the instructor library.
Why Cognition does not use multi-agent systems A deep dive into why multi-agent systems might not be the optimal approach for coding contexts, exploring context engineering, challenges of context passing between agents, and how single agents with proper context mana…
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13 August 2025
Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.
7 June 2025
Cognitive scientist and long-standing critic of deep learning's claims; writes Marcus on AI and wrote Rebooting AI.
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.
27 September 2024
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
Their words
Next to proper ownership of your own work, my favorite thing about POSSE is that it massively expands what you can publish, far beyond the limitations imposed by most social media (and especially microblogging) platforms that try to enforce some uniformity in post style, length, and appearance.
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citationneeded.news
21 July 2024
Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.
2 April 2024
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
31 March 2024
German web developer, writer and conference speaker. Publishes the Web Weekly newsletter and blogs about the web platform at stefanjudis.com.
Their words
For proper lighting I use two Elgato Key Lights (they're pricey but absolute worth it) and the Sony ZV-1 as a fancy webcam. If you're aiming for a high quality in your recordings I can highly recommend this setup.
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stefanjudis.com
Their words
For proper lighting I use two Elgato Key Lights (they're pricey but absolute worth it) and the Sony ZV-1 as a fancy webcam. If you're aiming for a high quality in your recordings I can highly recommend this setup.
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stefanjudis.com
17 January 2024
Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.
21 December 2023
Journalist and author writing on politics, liberalism and ideas; a contributor to Quillette and co-author of a book on Christopher Hitchens.
From one piece
How Effective Altruism Lost Its Way
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
10 December 2023
Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.
Their words
Instead of meetings, I used Workplace posts (Meta’s internal version of Facebook Group posts) to share thoughts, start discussions, and make announcements.
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borischerny.com
9 November 2022
Research scientist at Anthropic; co-creator of the Variational Autoencoder and, with Jimmy Ba, of the Adam optimizer, two of the most widely used tools in deep learning.
This might be blasphemy over here, but to support longer/deeper discussions on Mastodon, I think it'd be nice if Mastodon would implement options for non-chronological lists of posts, e.g. similar to reddit's default 'hot" view. Could be as simple as sorting threads based on most recent reply. This could be opt-in and can co-exist with the current chronological view. Related
17 June 2022
Runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind; worked on interpretability at Anthropic under Chris Olah before that, and teaches the field to newcomers.
Their words
In particular, most EA careers and most careers to do with AI are competitive as fuck.
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neelnanda.io
11 January 2022
Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.
Their words
Though this book frequently digresses into discussions of the cultural impact of the Star Wars franchise, it also contains one of the most thoroughly-researched biographies of Lucas currently available.
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calnewport.com
19 October 2021
Philosopher and historian of existential risk; wrote Human Extinction, and coined "TESCREAL" with Timnit Gebru for the cluster of ideologies they argue underpins the AI industry.
7 September 2021
Astrophysicist and coffee researcher; author of The Physics of Filter Coffee and The Physics of Espresso, and writer of the Coffee ad Astra blog on brewing science and equipment.
Their words
I highly recommend watching all three of his videos, because the tests and discussions he presented are of a very high quality.
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coffeeadastra.com
11 January 2021
Co-founder and co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management; author of the Oaktree memos.
22 December 2017
Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.
Nothing matches. Show everything
What is a korrent?
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.
Got it