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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.

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  Real-time AI video generation can be used to create games and worlds generated on demand instead of pre-built.

  Their words

  Right now it is infinite slop, but it can be used to make a video game / world that is generated on demand instead of pre-built.

  Weekly Links, 09/04/2026kk.org

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  House of Suns

  Their words

  One of the best sci-fi and deep space opera books for me. If you love space and scientifically ~accurate fiction — do explore Alastair Reynolds’ worlds.

  rakhim.org

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

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  Silicon Valley's actual trajectory increasingly resembles Philip K. Dick's paranoid, hallucinatory fiction rather than the optimistic space-age visions of Asimov and Clarke.

  Their words

  Increasingly, it is looking much more like the one anticipated by the drugged-up 1960s oeuvre of Philip K Dick, filled with deranged billionaires, machines that claim consciousness, hallucinated worlds and political breakdown.

  programmablemutter.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Resenting the Hero

  Their words

  Comparing this to The Fifth Season, it is striking how different two fantasy novels about worlds over-supplied with natural disasters, and the people with the psychic gifts to stop those disasters with their minds, can be in tone and execution. This is immensely fluffier, but it has no pretensions to be anything except candy, and succeeds as such.

  bactra.org

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Predicting that AI would write 90% of the code was never a prediction that we would need 90% fewer software engineers.

  Their words

  But but that's actually a very weak criterion, right? People thought I was saying like we won't need 90% of the software engineers. Those things are worlds apart, right?

  youtube.com

Writer of kottke.org, one of the oldest blogs on the web, published since 1998 and supported by its members. He writes about art, technology, science, design and visual culture.

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  Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season three)

  Their words

  Star Trek: Strange New Worlds (season three). Maybe didn’t enjoy this quite as much as the previous two season, but I love spending time with these people and look forward to doing more of that when season four drops. (B+)

  kottke.org

Co-founder of Rockstar Games, lead writer of the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, and founder of Absurd Ventures since leaving in 2020.

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  What makes an open world captivating is the illusion that it was already running before you arrived and would carry on if you did nothing.

  Their words

  You know, you were in, you were in these worlds, and you went there as a visitor, and they existed almost independent of you. It felt like when you turned up, the world was running. It didn’t feel like you’d started it.

  youtube.com

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

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  Rapid world model induction will be critical for achieving robust, general AI that functions in complex, fast-changing real and human worlds

  Their words

  We expect that building and evaluating AI systems capable of this kind of rapid world model induction will be critical for achieving robust, general AI capable of functioning effectively in the complex and fast-changing real world, and especially in human worlds - the environments that human beings have evolved in, created, and are continually changing and re-creating.

  arxiv.org

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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  Export controls cannot stop China from training frontier models; what they can do is cap how much AI China gets to run.

  China

  Their words

  There's not many worlds where China cannot train AI models. I think export controls are decapping the amount of compute or the density of compute that China can have.

  youtube.com

Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; works on the search for life elsewhere and wrote The Little Book of Aliens and Light of the Stars.

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  The many-worlds interpretation invents infinitely many unobservable universes to avoid what quantum mechanics is plainly saying: that measurement matters.

  Their words

  Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn't there. Go to enormous lengths like the many-worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter.

  youtube.com

Energy and decarbonisation analyst; publishes an annual chart deck on the state of the transition, and was chief content officer at BloombergNEF.

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  Plug-in hybrids have moved past being a worst-of-both-worlds compromise and are now genuinely thriving.

  Their words

  Neither condition is now true, but plug-in hybrids are thriving.

  Inflecting and Overtaking, SunPower, Waymonathanielbullard.com

Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.

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  You are not constantly branching into many worlds — you are that space, and the quantum reality is not the one you live in.

  Their words

  So my interpretation of reality is if you fold it up, all that bifurcation of many worlds, and you just fold it into the structure that is you, and you just said you are all of those many worlds and your history converged on you, but you’re actually an object exists that was selected to exist, and you’re self-consistent with the other structures. So the quantum mechanical reality is not the one that you live in. It’s this very deterministic, classical world, and you’re carving a path through that space. But I don’t think that you’re constantly branching into new spaces. I think you are that space.

  youtube.com

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.

From one piece Sean Carroll: General Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Black Holes & Aliens | Lex Fridman Podcast #428 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  The Copenhagen interpretation taught to physics students is a God-awful mess; many-worlds is beautiful because it needs fewer ingredients and one equation.

  Their words

  If you think about how we teach quantum mechanics to our students, the Copenhagen interpretation, it’s a God-awful mess. No one’s going to accuse that of being very beautiful. I’m a fan of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that is very beautiful in the sense that fewer ingredients, just one equation, and it could cover everything in the world.

  youtube.com

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  Declining many-worlds because it extrapolates past what we can observe is methodologically respectable and still a failure of nerve.

  Their words

  And if you just wanted to be methodologically conservative and say, “That’s a step too far; I don’t want to buy it,” I’m sympathetic to that. I think that you’re just wimping out, I think that you should have more courage, but I get the impulse.

  youtube.com

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

From one piece Mark Zuckerberg: First Interview in the Metaverse | Lex Fridman Podcast #398 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Digital worlds should carry fewer restrictions than the physical one, because acts that would do damage in reality do none there.

  Their words

  So it's like, is that problematic? I don't think so because fundamentally you're not causing harm in that world. So I think that part of the question that I think we need to figure out is what are the ways where things could have been harmful in the physical world that we'll now be freed from that? And therefore there should be fewer restrictions in the digital world.

  youtube.com

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  The real world is not the physical world; it is the physical and digital worlds coming together into one experience.

  Their words

  And I kind of think increasingly, the physical world is super important, but I actually think the real world is the combination of the physical world and the digital worlds coming together.

  youtube.com

Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.

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  The collapse postulate cannot simply be discarded without replacement instructions for measurements.

  Their words

  As we just saw, one cannot just discard the Collapse Postulate. For this reason, if one does calculations in any Many Worlds approach, one must effectively replace the Collapse Postulate by other assumptions, notably about what happens to observers and/or measurement devices when worlds branch.

  Quantum Confusions, Cleared Up (or so I hope)arxiv.org

Co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the writer who started the modern argument that a sufficiently capable AI would by default kill everyone. Has argued the case since the early 2000s, latterly with the conclusion that it is being lost.

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  There is no written plan for surviving AGI, and a world that was going to survive would have had one decades ago.

  AGI

  Their words

  Surviving worlds, by this point, and in fact several decades earlier, have a plan for how to survive.

  AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalitiesintelligence.org

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

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  Misperceptions of attitude change may hinder efforts to understand social worlds, distort democracy, and turn imaginary trends into real ones.

  Their words

  These misperceptions may bedevil people's efforts to understand and change their social worlds, distort the democratic process, and turn imaginary trends into real ones.

  doi.org