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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Children develop by struggling and failing on the road to success while a caring adult supports them, and school should be running that loop all day instead of leaving it to after-school sports.

  Their words

  The key to developing a child is that they struggle and fail on their road to success supported by a caring adult. And you just want to run that loop.

  youtube.com

Climate scientist and energy systems analyst; writes The Climate Brink with Andrew Dessler and leads climate research at Stripe.

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  Making AI compute cheaper per token drives enough extra usage that total AI energy consumption rises rather than falls (a Jevons paradox effect).

  energy

  Their words

  This is the Jevons paradox in action: making compute cheaper per token in turn tends to lead to greater levels of AI use.

  The real energy use of agentic AItheclimatebrink.com

Software engineer in Chicago; writes the cassidoo.co blog and a weekly developer newsletter.

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  The best way to pull back from encroaching burnout is to step away, reflect, do something enjoyable, and talk to someone who cares.

  Their words

  Really the only tip I could ever give someone at this point is to pull away, reflect, do something you like, and talk to a human who cares about your current spiraling.

  On the edge of burnoutcassidoo.co

Makes NeetCode, the structured practice list and video walkthroughs people use to prepare for coding interviews; a former Google engineer.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  What AI has exposed is a shortfall of effort and caring, not of intelligence: people who cannot say why they moved a button never thought about it.

  Their words

  Like me looking at their site for 5 minutes, I can articulate things about their design better than they can. And it's just disappointing. It's like I don't think that's like a matter of intelligence. I don't think it is. I think it's a matter of like effort and caring and probably skill set as well.

  Tech interviews with NeetCodeyoutube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Feeling unable to help with a problem is a major risk factor for burnout and learned helplessness.

  Their words

  There's extensive evidence that feeling unable to help is a major risk factor for burnout and learned helplessness.

  Silence Is Not Necessarily Violenceadamgrant.substack.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Human life is paradoxically both very long and very short, and there is more time available than people make use of.

  Their words

  The paradox of human life is that it's so long and so short; we have so much time and we could use so much more of it.

  Take your timemariandrew.substack.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Peak programmer has passed: the economic value of writing code by hand has peaked, and Jevons' paradox will not bail every programmer out.

  Their words, before

  It may no longer have as much economic value as it once did. I think that I'm quite convinced is true that we perhaps have seen the peak.

  Their words now

  So, I do think it is correct for the average programmer to think maybe we've seen the best of the golden days.

Researcher on developer productivity; co-wrote Accelerate and the DORA research, and created the SPACE framework.

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  Working too hard is not burnout, it is tiredness; burnout needs your values to be out of alignment with the work.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  It's working too hard, right? But that actually isn't burnout. That's just like getting tired. Another piece that's super critical to burnout is not having your values aligned.

  youtube.com

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.

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  Burnout is not working too much; what ground him down at his company was people: co-founder conflict and high-stress customers.

  Their words

  The stuff that burned me out was mostly people stuff. I, I don't think burnout is working too much. Maybe to a degree. Everybody's different.

  youtube.com

Professor at Berkeley working on robot learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence, and argues that robots will learn from data rather than be programmed.

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  A robot needs far less memory than it seems, because Moravec's paradox says the cognitively demanding tasks are the ones that need context, not the physical ones.

  Their words

  But the reason why it's not the most important thing for the kind of skills that you saw when you visited us, it at some level I think it comes back to Moravik's paradox. So Morovik's paradox is basically that it's like you know if you know one thing about if you want to know one thing about robotics it's like that's that's the thing. Morovik's paradox says that basically uh in AI the easy things are hard and the hard things are easy.

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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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  What sets mathematicians apart is caring whether something holds in 100 percent of cases, when 99.99 percent is good enough for everyone else.

  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.

  youtube.com

Astrophysicist at Barnard College; wrote Black Hole Blues and How the Universe Got Its Spots, and directs sciences at Pioneer Works.

From one piece Janna Levin: Black Holes, Wormholes, Aliens, Paradoxes & Extra Dimensions | Lex Fridman Podcast #468 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Information is not lost in a black hole; the paradox is a crisis handing us clues, not a sign that quantum mechanics fails.

  Their words

  I’m unhappy with that. I would not be happy with information loss. I love that it’s telling us that there’s this crisis because I do think it’s giving us the clues, and we have to take them seriously.

  youtube.com

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  The thing to give up in the information paradox is locality: keep the empty event horizon, and let things be connected non-locally by wormholes.

  Their words

  I’m going back to the vacuum. The empty space, the beautiful event horizon I’ll give up locality, meaning that I will allow things to be connected non-locally by a wormhole.

  youtube.com

Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.

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  What an LLM cannot supply is caring about the craft: it completes the task, where a person goes back and makes the thing better.

  LLMs

  Their words

  It doesn't actually care about the craft. But when you work with an intern or you work with somebody else, they care. When they factor something, they actually go over and go, "Oh yeah, this is actually kind of bad. I'm going to come back to that." They finish this, they go back over here and they make this even better. They actually care about the thing itself.

  youtube.com

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

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  Cheaper models raise the demand for compute rather than lowering it: H100 rental prices went up in the weeks after DeepSeek launched.

  Their words

  But the funniest thing I think that comes out of this is Jevons paradox is true. AWS pricing for H100s has gone up over the last couple of weeks, since a little bit after Christmas, since V3 was launched, AWS H100 pricing has gone up.

  youtube.com

Semiconductor analyst; writes Fabricated Knowledge on the chip industry and the companies in it.

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  Cheaper AI will be used more in the long run and still strand the hardware built for it in the short run, exactly as unlit fibre did after 2001.

  Their words

  And so, while the Jevons paradox case was 100% correct in the long run, 97% of the fiber laid in 2001 was unlit.

  DeepSeek: Is this Jevon's Cope?fabricatedknowledge.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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  There is no Fermi paradox from the great silence: nobody has looked, for the entirely mundane reason that nobody funded the search.

  Their words

  So, we'll call that the indirect Fermi paradox and there absolutely is no indirect Fermi paradox for the most mundane of reasons, which is money. There's never been any money to look.

  youtube.com

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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  Radical Candor

  Their words

  The definite book about giving good and candid feedback - and a very useful read for new(ish) managers. The book is a list of ideas around the theme of caring personally and challenging directly.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Environmental researcher; writes on land use, agriculture and whether decoupling human welfare from nature is possible.

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  The claim that higher yields backfire and end up increasing farmland is much weaker than the literature assumes.

  Their words

  In sum, land sparing is common at the local level and the norm at the global scale, in contrast to recent appeals to Jevons' paradox.

  Raising Agricultural Yields Spares Landthebreakthrough.org

Writes Useful Fictions on agency and how to get better at things; a former appellate lawyer and the top-ranked woman in professional poker in 2017.

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  A drop in agency is the earliest sign of burnout, arriving before you consciously notice you are burning out.

  Their words

  Burnout is the ultimate agency-killer. This is so true that I’ve learned to identify a reduction in agency as one of the first signs of burnout, one that shows up even before I consciously realize what’s happening.

  How to be more agenticusefulfictions.substack.com

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

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  The people who can be moved by deaths from neglected tropical diseases are the same people who can be moved by pandemics and by AI risk, because both come from reasoning about importance rather than from the news.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  And I notice that the tiny handful of people capable of caring about 200,000 people dying of neglected tropical diseases are the same tiny handful of people capable of caring about the next pandemic, or superintelligence, or human extinction.

  In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruismastralcodexten.com

Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?

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  Expecting parents should be required to take a mandatory course before caring for a newborn.

  Their words

  There should obviously be like a mandatory four-hour course every expecting parent has to take before they're actually in charge of a newborn.

  10 Thoughts from the Fourth Trimesterwaitbutwhy.com

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

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  Burnout comes from not caring and from not feeling needed, not from working the hardest.

  Their words

  The times I have come closest to burnout or flaming out have never been when I was working the hardest, but when I cared the least.

  The Hierarchy Is Bullshit (And Bad For Business)charity.wtf

Writer on happiness, habits and human nature. Author of The Happiness Project, Better Than Before and The Four Tendencies, and host of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  The Four Tendencies

  Their words

  Our Tendency shapes every aspect of our behavior, so understanding this framework lets us make better decisions, meet deadlines, suffer less stress and burnout, and engage more effectively.

  gretchenrubin.com

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.

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  When two options are almost perfectly balanced the choice does not matter, and those are exactly the decisions people agonize over.

  Their words

  And we get to this point, these are the hardest decisions people ever wrestle with. And the paradox is if the advantages and disadvantages of the two options are almost perfectly balanced, it doesn't matter which one we pick. And yet we will spend days and weeks going around in a funk, which one am I going to choose?

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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.

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  Longtermism is not the same thing as caring about the long-term future or about future generations; it goes far beyond that.

  Their words

  The initial thing to notice is that longtermism, as proposed by Bostrom and Beckstead, is not equivalent to ‘caring about the long term’ or ‘valuing the wellbeing of future generations’.

  Against longtermismaeon.co