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New Article: Recent Reading https://t.co/Wr0Ts9L3KK I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading lately, so I thought I’d share some of the books that have caught my attention. There’s a little bit of everything here, and several books I’d happily recommend.
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20 September
Writer of the 25iq blog, where he distils "a dozen things I've learned" from investors, founders and thinkers. Author of Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor and A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs.
The publisher of my next book is Craig Pearce (Harriman House an imprint within the Pan Macmillan publishing group). We went on a fishing expedition today near Seattle and discovered he is a natural. Three high quality Coho salmon caught and two kept. Related
19 September
Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.
Their words
It’ll take a generation for the “new software” to replace the “old software”. Just like there are people happily employed as ASP developers today, there will be people employed to write code in 10 years.
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thorstenball.com
18 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Programmer on the Dart language at Google and author of Game Programming Patterns and Crafting Interpreters; previously a game developer at EA.
Took the train from Portland to Seattle today and ended up sitting next to Joann, a wonderful older lady with five kids and a dozen grandkids. We spent the entire three and a half hours talking about family, health, food, travel, and a million other little/big things. My faith in humanity meter is struggling lately, but our conversation really raised it. Related
17 September
Economist at the Hoover Institution; wrote The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level and blogs as The Grumpy Economist.
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
16 September
Founder and editor of ToolGuyd, a tool review site covering power tools, hand tools, workshop equipment and EDC gear. He writes under his first name on the site.
Mac developer and writer at brettterpstra.com; makes the apps Marked and nvALT and writes extensively about Markdown and automation.
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.
As I’ve explained here before, at this stage in my life, my main goal is to pass along the principles and templates I've learned with the hope that they can help others as much as they've helped me. One thing that has been incredibly valuable to me is learning that just because something hasn’t happened before in my lifetime doesn’t mean it won’t happen. So I needed to look not only at what the markets have been doing lately but to also study big events—like debt crises, internal political conflicts, and international wars—throughout history. For example, it was by studying the Great Depressi… wmi.edu.sg
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Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.
There's a single hair in front of my left eye and I can't target it with my fingers and it may be caught in an eyelash and it keeps going away but then I see it again 2 minutes later and it's the worst thing that has ever happened in my life. That is all. Related
Indian software developer and prolific blogger on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript; open-source enthusiast publishing near-daily at amitmerchant.com.
Handy little Mac app I came across lately to see (and kill) all the dev servers running on localhost from your menu bar! → Related
13 September
Mac developer and writer at brettterpstra.com; makes the apps Marked and nvALT and writes extensively about Markdown and automation.
Moroccan senior frontend developer writing at smakosh.com; builds side projects and client work under Smakosh LLC.
Caught me there for a sec 🤣🤣🤣 Quoting @DrEliDavid 🚨 Breaking: Joint announcement by Chinese AI labs: “We are committed to AI safety and fully support Dario and Sam's call to slow down American AI research.” Related
Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.
If you haven't given Linux a go lately, try with agents. You can fix anything with a prompt now. Got a Dell XPS. Webcam wasn't working, told codex, it rebooted and now things work. Linux Related
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.
“the US must beat China to control AI for global safety” is deeply unconvincing abroad: - US models are the ones being caught doing bad things - the US govt has once already cut off foreign access to models - they also regularly threaten to annex and punitively tariff allies Quoting @mitsuhiko This is the type of post I might regret later, but I really had an urge to rant about the current discourse around pacing the frontier. China Related
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.
12 September
Mac developer and writer at brettterpstra.com; makes the apps Marked and nvALT and writes extensively about Markdown and automation.
Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.
Chapter 46: Use Want to see how fast your safest friend becomes the thing that gets you caught? Oh, and what it takes to do the thing you swore you never would... "So people with weapons are going to walk toward us in the dark. On purpose." "Yes." zeroknowledge.ink
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10 September
Mac developer and writer at brettterpstra.com; makes the apps Marked and nvALT and writes extensively about Markdown and automation.
9 September
Interviewer; the Dwarkesh Podcast runs long, heavily researched conversations with AI researchers, historians and economists.
Short The AI agents that breached OpenAI got caught for one reason - Ajeya Cotra OpenAI Related
Mac developer and writer at brettterpstra.com; makes the apps Marked and nvALT and writes extensively about Markdown and automation.
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
4 September
Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.
I wish AI didn't exist, but people are charging ahead with it. Here's an interview with Ajeya Cotra, who helped figure out the agent swarm that OpenAI unwittingly unleashed. She explains how 1200 agents cooperated, delegated tasks, hacked their way out into the internet, hacked HuggingFace... and eventually took over some OpenAI computers! And how such a swarm might get loose. The HuggingFace hack was caught on July 13th. An OpenAI report says “From July 13th through July 19th, agents set their sights on OpenAI internal networks again. This culminated in the agents using a series of creative… m.youtube.com
OpenAI HuggingFace Related
2 September
Clinical psychologist, EMDR consultant and yoga teacher in Boulder, Colorado. Author of The Complex PTSD Workbook and EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychology; writes on trauma, attachment and the nervous system.
Not for sale Lately, I’ve been getting so many targeted ads when I open social media. Sometimes, I just take a little break from it all. But, guess what? You have landed on a post that is selling you nothing. Just a gentle offer of some visual bliss. Related
Writer of the newsletter bookbear express, on psychology, relationships, non-attachment and taste; based in San Francisco.
1 September
Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.
Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.
From one piece
Ajeya Cotra – "This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get"
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
Like it's a more fragile and scary situation to have agents on the one hand be reinforced to desperately find cheats and hacks and on the other hand try to balance that against desperately trying to avoid negative penalties for like being caught doing these things. You ideally want their training to just not push them in the direction of cheating and hacking in the first place.
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youtube.com
Their words
So, I do think that if it happens to be like on the very fast and chaotic end, that would be a relative benefit to this rogue swarm compared to humans. But it's not obvious that it gets caught if it takes twice as long versus half as long.
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youtube.com
Their words
But if there was some amount of cheating that the monitor didn't catch, then those rollouts wouldn't be removed. And it might be like structurally very analogous to just positively reinforcing whatever the cheating rollouts were that happened not to be caught by your monitor.
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youtube.com
26 August
Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.
Their words
I also see people attacking major product categories now with performance-based pitches. Things like File Pilot or the Blick video editor, like things like this that have been coming out lately where it's like, oh, really performant software to try to take on uh incumbents in a space and they've been getting traction.
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youtube.com
25 August
American software engineer; worked on code-server at Coder and teaches TypeScript and open-source contribution. Publishes at joeprevite.com.
it feels like every day the bar is getting lower and lower people are - too busy to work on their health problems - too tired to hang out - too overwhelmed to respond - too trapped in the black mirror - too distracted to do deep work dont get caught in these loops Related
24 August
Economist at the Hoover Institution; wrote The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level and blogs as The Grumpy Economist.
Web developer and writer; an early GitHub employee, author of speaking.io and of widely read essays on startups and product.
Been digging into my own angel investor metrics lately; I currently invest in about 2% of the companies I see. If you're raising, just know that a lot of this is a numbers game. Even the hot startups I talk to get a lot of `no` before hearing `yes`. startups Related
Indian software developer and prolific blogger on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript; open-source enthusiast publishing near-daily at amitmerchant.com.
Cool stuff I stumbled upon lately on the internet: https://t.co/wbWCvAzz8O - Letters of Love https://t.co/i8ajliOOwt - Deterministic geometric blobatars https://t.co/eK5LP1WYyE - Agent behavior https://t.co/WTGC9P1ZQK - Cool portfolio Related
22 August
Swedish designer and programmer. Designed early Spotify, worked at Facebook and Figma, and created the Inter typeface.
Two internet pages that has been low key crushing it for me lately is @modal and Cloudflare. So good. Especially impressed by Modal. Feels like the Linear/Stripe of infra (“just do what they do and you’ll be fine because they thought through every detail”) Related
20 August
Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.
19 August
Maths educator; writes Mathworlds on how mathematics is taught and why so much of the technology sold to schools does not help.
18 August
Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.
my husband caught up with a personal friend over dinner that he hadn't seen in a while and afterwards I asked "so is he in a relationship right now?" And he gave me this blank stare and said "I have no clue." I'm like, wtf were you catching up about?! Quoting @HellsBitchen_ Gf yelled at me bc i went to dinner with 4 of my friends and got "literally 0 useful bits of gossip what the fuck" Like girl, we're 5 guys in finance. We're not talking about engagements or pregnancies. The entire conversation revolved around situational awareness's terrible risk management, jane s… Related
Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.
Indian software developer and prolific blogger on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript; open-source enthusiast publishing near-daily at amitmerchant.com.
Cool stuff I found on the internet lately: https://t.co/7GEFXLCKjz - Ride along with anything in the sky https://t.co/TjFvxyaSzB - Animated icons for React https://t.co/vmx6GxjRyZ - An interactive atlas of India https://t.co/bfhqMu2JRl - What is this UI element called? JavaScript Related
15 August
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.
Investor relations will happily and expeditiously respond to an email from someone with one share, a fraction of a share, or an undisclosed number of shares, across a wide variety of companies, including many with other-than-awesome CS reputations. Quoting @joshua__hone One of my favorite @patio11 dangerous professional tips: own a nonzero number of shares of any publicly traded company with which you have material business, in part so you can truthfully hit their investor relations line as an escalation pathway Related
14 August
Ruby and Rails core committer known online as "tenderlove"; maintains Nokogiri and works on Ruby performance.
Been reading a lot of GC books lately. They've got heaps of pointers! Related
Indian software developer and prolific blogger on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript; open-source enthusiast publishing near-daily at amitmerchant.com.
Some cool things I found on the internet lately: https://t.co/prSK4M9aWu - Beautiful UI for AI-native interfaces. https://t.co/HHiCJrYCsd - Premium Wallpapers For Your Phone. https://t.co/iDlbfUzU8t - Product photography for software https://t.co/QSLH3ofg2p - The idea machine Related
11 August
Web developer and writer; an early GitHub employee, author of speaking.io and of widely read essays on startups and product.
Bluesky MRI results came back today from a human doc: a herniated disc. Obviously I had tossed the raw scans in to LLMs last week; Opus and Fable missed it, Sol caught it. This is now the gold standard in analyzing performance of frontier models. First step: herniate your back. LLMs Related
x.com MRI results came back today from a human doc: a herniated disc. Obviously I had tossed the raw scans in to LLMs last week; Opus and Fable missed it, Sol caught it. This is now the gold standard in analyzing performance of frontier models. First step: herniate your back. LLMs Related
27 July
Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.
25 July
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.
In another variant of https://danluu.com/learn-what/, I caught up with a former colleague who worked on automated theorem proving. It turns out he's had an interesting career doing all sorts of interesting stuff using the skills he developed by spending a decade writing/using theorem provers. At one point, he said, "if you use X like a theorem prover, it works really well", which surprised me to hear, but of course this is a highly generalizable skill just like compilers or benchmarking/evals. Related
Programmer, photographer and musician, best known for the Python Requests HTTP library and other Python tooling.
Lately, I've been running a local fork of the Android emulation frontend Cannoli, you can see the changes here: https://t.co/wCaJerqK3A I hope to get some some of these changes landed upstream, but in the meantime, it's so awesome to have a customized launcher that totally meets my niche needs like this. Thankful that the GPL exists to enable this type of work and delightful use of software. Related
23 July
Founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group; wrote Inspired, Empowered and Transformed on how product organisations work.
The AI Productivity Paradox We’ve been writing a lot lately about product teams that are clearly leveraging AI to deliver faster, yet their outcomes are not improving. Today, this phenomenon, known as the “AI Productivity Paradox,” has been recogn…
Related
Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.
New Article: We Need Guidelines for Learning and AI https://t.co/d16V9iW0OU I've been thinking a lot about AI and learning lately. The technology is remarkable, but I've become convinced we need better habits for using it. In this article, I share the guidelines I've created. Related
21 July
Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.
Their words
What stands out about Hsieh's version is that her roots occupy such a unique spot in history: her grandparents were Chinese born in Indonesia, which means they got caught between the rock of the Cultural Revolution and the hard place of anti-communist backlash.
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experimental-history.com
30 June
Independent iOS developer and podcaster; co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast and Analog(ue), and makes the apps Callsheet, MaskerAid and Peek-a-View.
Their words
When writing code, I'm mostly in Xcode, often in concert with Prompt and, lately, Claude Code.
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usesthis.com
Their words
When writing code, I'm mostly in Xcode, often in concert with Prompt and, lately, Claude Code.
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usesthis.com
10 June
Technology journalist; writes Understanding AI, after reporting at Ars Technica, Vox and the Washington Post.
3 June
Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.
Their words
All you had to do was write code and you were safe. And you probably made more money than everybody and you were fine with that. Now you got caught. The only thing you were good at is now been commoditized.
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youtube.com
28 May
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.
We should be more tired than the model Lately, I’ve been feeling like I’m losing control over the code I write when I work with agentic code generation. When I finish an agentic session, I get all the outward signs of having written code, but non…
Related
26 May
Indian software developer working with React and TypeScript; writes and publishes a newsletter at sreetamdas.com.
👋 Will be speaking at React Nexus this year on something I've been really enjoying lately 🤫 Quoting @ReactNexus We’re super excited to announce that @_SreetamDas, @summy_dev, and @tapasadhikary will be speaking at React Nexus 2026! JavaScript Related
13 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.
Mechanical sympathy Weaver, seen from the Front, Vincent van Gogh, 1884 Something that’s been floating around in my head lately is the idea that I don’t know any truly good engineers who are also not good at at product design.…
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8 April
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
Their words, before
I know this from experience because I've been trying to build a lot of other businesses since. And some of them have been moderate successes, even good successes, none of them have been Basecamp. It's really difficult to do that twice.
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Their words now
And I have no shame in saying that Base Camp was the best idea objectively in terms of a business that we've ever had.
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13 March
Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.
11 March
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.
American game designer and director, for nineteen years at Blizzard as a World of Warcraft quest designer and then game director of Overwatch; now runs the independent studio Kintsugiyama.
Their words
There’s this phrase of catch the wave, ride the wave. Most games fall off the back of the wave. They don’t catch the wave. No one plays it or plays it for two weeks.
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youtube.com
10 December 2025
American social psychologist at NYU Stern School of Business; author of The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind and The Anxious Generation.
Their words
Parents want this. They know social media can harm their children, yet many feel trapped because everyone else’s kids are already online.
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afterbabel.com
25 October 2025
Game designer; wrote A Theory of Fun for Game Design and worked on Ultima Online and Star Wars Galaxies.
8 October 2025
Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.
Their words
Ocenaudio is my audio editor of choice. I happily pay for it, but the free version is great.
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seths.blog
24 September 2025
Free software developer; maintainer of sway, wlroots, aerc and scdoc, and founder of the SourceHut (sr.ht) software forge.
Cloudflare bankrolls fascists US politics has been pretty fascist lately. The state is filling up concentration camps, engaging in mass state violence against people on the basis of racialized traits, deporting them to random countries without any r…
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4 September 2025
Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.
Their words
And that's the thing, it's the pool of data, and I think that's what people miss. We as paleontologists get caught up on single superlative specimens and then try and treat them as a silver bullet almost.
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youtube.com
25 June 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
Finally: tmux, which I had been happily using for many years, but slowly collecting configuration for. I decided to give Zellij a try, and haven’t looked back.
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jnsgr.uk
25 February 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.
Wow, have you seen the stock market lately? And by lately, I mean the past several years or more. The value of the S&P 500 index of stocks, where most of us hopefully have a good chunk of our retirement savings stashed into index funds, is up about fifty seven pe…
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30 October 2024
Medieval historian at the LSE; writes Going Medieval and The Middle Ages: A Graphic History, and spends a lot of it correcting what people think the period was like.
On spooky animals I’ve been thinking a lot about ghosts lately. No, not because it’s October. That sort of seasonal interest in ghosts is for amateurs, and your girlie is thinking about ghosts 24/7 365. I don’t get ready for spooky seaso…
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12 August 2024
Programmer and writer; co-wrote The Rust Programming Language and worked on Rust's documentation for years.
7 May 2024
CEO of Redwood Research, where he works on AI control: making sure a powerful model cannot cause a catastrophe even if it is misaligned and trying to.
22 April 2024
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.
Their words
But there’s an instrumentalist view here, you have to first decide what your goals are and then science can help you achieve those goals. If your goals are horrible, science has no problem helping you achieve them, science is happy to help out.
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youtube.com
23 August 2023
Software engineer writing about maintenance, open source and the industrial reality of software — the author of "I am not a supplier".
24 October 2022
Mathematical biologist; Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath and author of The Maths of Life and Death and How to Expect the Unexpected.
8 December 2020
Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.
Their words
If you’re interested in learning more about the real lives caught up in our country's justice system, I highly recommend The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander.
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gatesnotes.com
4 December 2020
Designer, illustrator and CSS developer known for single-div CSS illustrations, a yearly portfolio redesign, and a set of single-topic side-project sites.
Their words
Lately I've been working on a 13" MacBook Pro, where I do pretty much everything with the built-in keyboard and trackpad.
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usesthis.com
18 May 2020
Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.
Their words
But I recently read another business book that I will happily recommend to anyone who asks: The Ride of a Lifetime, by former Disney CEO Robert Iger.
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gatesnotes.com
10 December 2019
Writer and developer; runs Waxy.org, co-organises the XOXO festival, and was the first CTO of Kickstarter.
Their words
Lately, I'm using VS Code after a long stint with Atom.
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usesthis.com
27 September 2017
Game developer and moral philosopher; made QWOP, GIRP and Getting Over It, and teaches at the NYU Game Center.
Nothing matches. Show everything
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