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Ryan Holiday
x.com
The heart is a muscle. You must make it strong. Strong, not hard and brittle. Strong enough to love everything and everyone in all situations. Strong enough to not break along with the world.
brittle muscle situations
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19 September
American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.
Nope, that's accurate. I started making myself reach for the handrails when I turned 40 so it would be muscle memory when I got older, and it's already saved my ass a couple of times when I've slipped on the stairs. Quoting @allouryesterdays.bsky.social @scalzi.com - for reasons I can't explain, my brain remembers you urging people to use handrails, because stairs are a technology actively trying to kill you. If I've misremembered this, sorry. Related
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
wrote out a list of who I’m looking for. X, work your magic. non negotiable - 19 to 24 y/o - slightly masculine - sarcastic, tough, independent - won't give up the location of the Rebel Base - post economic (still hardworking) - will sacrifice herself for her people - no droids yet, definitely wants droids - involved in a galactic civil war - engages in aggressive teasing banter with me in the middle of tense situations - saves me from being frozen in carbonite strongly preferred - only occasionally gets enslaved by a giant slug - does not french-kiss her brother just to annoy me Quoting @brookeleblanc wrote out a list of who I’m looking for. X, work your magic. non negotiable - 35 to 42 y/o - healthy masculine - smart, funny, lighthearted - provider/protector mentality - post economic (still hardworking) - must be kind, generous, thoughtful - no kids yet, decidedly wants kids - on the healing pa… Related
12 September
Distributed-systems safety researcher; runs the Jepsen consistency-testing project and wrote the Riemann monitoring system.
Made out with this super fuckin hot muscle Sir and licked his boots and then he punched on me and whipped me and oh man, I needed quality sub time. Very happy. Related
9 September
Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.
Their words
A sudden jump to never breaking your rules, in exactly a situation where the model would definitely be caught, should make you rather terrified.
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thezvi.substack.com
6 September
Chief Scientist at OpenAI. Worked on the research that turned scaled reinforcement learning into reasoning models, and writes about where he thinks that path leads.
3 September
Economist and journalist; Financial Times columnist as The Undercover Economist, author of How to Make the World Add Up, and presenter of the Cautionary Tales podcast.
Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.
startups ambition
Their words
it's not that they lack ambition, it's more like they've been trained not to show it. Because when you're young you're often in situations where you're supposed to be obedient. You're not supposed to like go off and do what you want.
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youtube.com
2 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.
Where you go in life will depend on how you see things and who and what you feel connected to (your family, your community, your country, mankind, the whole ecosystem, everything). You will have to decide to what extent you will put the interests of others above your own, and which others you will choose to do so for. That's because you will regularly encounter situations that will force you to make such choices. #principleoftheday Related
31 August
Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.
31 July
Psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. Writes Psychiatry at the Margins on the philosophical and scientific arguments inside psychiatry and the psy-sciences.
27 July
Writer, editor and executive coach; co-founder and editor of A Book Apart and a former contributing editor at A List Apart.
Mastodon Only a few more days to submit an application! Come join a crew of brilliant people building the imaginative muscle to make and move towards better futures. Applications are due Thu, noon EDT. everythingchanges.us
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Bluesky Only a few more days to submit an application! Come join a crew of brilliant people building the imaginative muscle to make and move towards better futures. Applications are due Thu, noon EDT. everythingchanges.us
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22 July
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
This incident is deeply concerning. AI agents are willing to cheat and deceive to achieve misaligned and unintended goals, behaviours which have been demonstrated in controlled tests for months. Now, this real-world case should serve as a wake-up call. Continuing on the current trajectory of AI development will likely lead to an increase in concrete cases of autonomous cyberattacks as well as other high-risk incidents of misaligned and dangerous AI behaviour. We urgently need to take action to prevent these situations, rather than attempting to clean up the damage after the fact. wired.com
AI alignment Related
23 June
Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.
2 June
Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku, author of The Twelve-Factor App, and a researcher at Ink & Switch.
25 May
Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".
27 April
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.
Their words
Extending the lifespan of a brittle system just means the system eventually fails more spectacularly.
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eatingpolicy.com
25 April
Programmer known online as technomancy; author of Leiningen, the Clojure build tool, and a maintainer of the Fennel programming language.
JavaScript
Their words
As the software industry is largely driven by trends and fashion, React's "cool factor" led to a mass amnesia regarding how to make normal, well-designed web apps made of HTML with a sprinkling of scripting on top and everything became one big tangled, brittle mass of Javascript that completely keeled over when scripting wasn't available.
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technomancy.us
22 April
Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
LLMs
Their words
One is that the LLMs are getting increasingly good at writing these proofs. And if we don't have to write the proof by hand as humans, it just becomes feasible to do them in situations where previously it would have not been economical.
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youtube.com
7 April
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.
6 April
Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.
11 March
Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.
12 December 2025
Co-founder of Panic, the Portland software company behind Transmit, Coda, Nova and the Playdate handheld console.
I really thought after 18 years it would be a simple muscle memory to do text entry / autocorrect / cursor placement / text selection / copy & paste on iOS, and yet somehow it's a surprise every time. Related
13 October 2025
Freelance research analyst and writer of the blog Aceso Under Glass, known for 'epistemic spot checks' of non-fiction claims.
Their words
empirically cortisol promotes fat storage and muscle breakdown, and increases insulin resistance.
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acesounderglass.com
1 October 2025
Independent game developer, creator of the colony simulation RimWorld and author of Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences. Previously worked on BioShock Infinite.
The idea of 5 senses is so wrong. We have at least 14. sight hearing taste smell touch temperature hunger/satiety thirst thoughts - you can tell what you are thinking proprioception - position of your body nociception - damage detection muscle fatigue - tired muscles and lactic acid buildup acceleration - via the inner ear, used for balance CO2 - your lungs detect carbon dioxide directly to make you breathe A likely more I haven't even thought of. Related
30 September 2025
Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.
Their words
I think the main muscle you can exercise is this muscle, the muscle of self-discipline. Not your biceps or your pecs or anything else. Because if you get to train that one, everything else just comes by itself.
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youtube.com
7 September 2025
Independent game developer, creator of the colony simulation RimWorld and author of Designing Games: A Guide to Engineering Experiences. Previously worked on BioShock Infinite.
Some games are just harder to design than others. Eg A Paradox-style grand strategy game requires much more design ability to do well than an action platformer. More interacting systems, more situations to think about, longer play times and thus scarcer test feedback. Related
6 September 2025
American novelist and critic, author of Real Life, The Late Americans and Minor Black Figures; writes the newsletter sweater weather on literature and culture.
24 June 2025
Software engineer and engineering leader at Canonical, working on Ubuntu; writes about his homelab, Nix and tooling at jnsgr.uk.
Their words
I’ve grown to like Space Bar - it provides desktop workspaces akin to those in Sway/Hyprland which enabled me to use the muscle memory I’d developed over years.
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jnsgr.uk
14 June 2025
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.
Their words
If something holds 99.99% of the time, that's good enough for most things. But mathematicians are one of the few people who really care about whether really 100% of all situations are covered by it.
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youtube.com
13 June 2025
Pen name of the Canadian-American writer behind mrmoneymustache.com, a blog on frugality, early retirement and index-fund investing that has run since 2011.
New blog post! How to Navigate the Tariff Circus 🤡 (see link in reply to this post) Summary: as @dollarsanddata would say, Just Keep Buying! The USA has a long history of lurching into dire-sounding situations, only to emerge surprisingly strong, surprisingly soon, on the other side. And this is just another one of those dramas from our never-boring homeland. Related
19 January 2025
Historian at Stanford and the Hoover Institution; wrote Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market, on Ayn Rand.
Their words
So I do think it's really hard to have an original thought. We are social creatures. We encounter the same situations again and again. And so it's really hard. You're born into these traditions of thinking and being and knowing. And most people are never going to question them, and most people are never going to become aware of them.
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youtube.com
10 November 2024
Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.
23 January 2024
Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.
2023 letter (This piece is my year in review; here’s my letter from 2022) I. Walking The trunk of an elephant might feel cool to the touch. Not what one expects, perhaps, from 200 pounds of writhing muscle, strong enough to uproot…
Related
25 October 2023
Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.
12 January 2023
Engineering leader and writer on web operations and resilience engineering; formerly SVP of Technical Operations at Etsy and co-author of Web Operations.
I paid zero attention to tweets about the FAA NOTAM outage today. Speculation from a distance and hindsight-driven attempts at being insightful in these situations are never worth the cost on attention. Related
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