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Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Freedom of navigation is a global public good that decays once its guarantor is seen as unwilling to bear its cost.

  Their words

  Freedom of navigation is a global public good, and public goods decay the instant their provider is revealed to be unwilling to pay for them.

  braddelong.substack.com

Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Profound transformations of the mind are real and underappreciated, and that fact deserves to be preserved as knowledge.

  Their words

  It's really not obvious that such profound transformations can happen to a mind, and it's really important that this knowledge gets preserved.

  Biting the no-self bulletsashachapin.substack.com

Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Any digital identification system built for AI must preserve anonymous human speech, without which there is no genuine freedom of expression.

  Their words

  But a society that does not have anonymous speech does not really have genuine freedom of expression, and we should embed this principle into any digital identification system we attempt.

  On the Loosehyperdimensional.co

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

• Readrcmnd.app

  Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

  Their words

  Feel-good meh.

  rakhim.org

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Handing all code production to AI leaves junior developers with no path to becoming senior ones.

  Their words

  In addition to reliability issues, it often engenders a mind-numbing workflow and an environment where junior developers will never acquire the expertise to become senior developers capable of designing complex systems.

  On AI Coding and Its Discontentscalnewport.com

Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.

From one piece Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup" 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The test of whether an AI transition went well is simply whether people's freedom, agency and quality of time go up every single year.

  Their words

  if every year people have more freedom and agency to spend more of their time doing the stuff they want to do and they feel like the quality of life and the quality of their time is going up year after year, we'll probably be mostly okay.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The dystopia most worth fearing is not runaway AI but an overreaction to AI safety that trades away freedom, privacy and agency for comfort.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  there's like one dystopia that I'm particularly nervous about 10 years from now is we overreact to AI safety.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Calling an intelligent, self-aware being legal property does not resolve whether it has an interest in freedom.

  Their words

  But it recognizes that calling an intelligent, self-aware, emotionally complex being "property" does not answer the question of whether that being has an interest in freedom.

  “KEY OUT”: When a Chimpanzee Asks to Be Freeboldreasoningwithpetersinger.substack.com

Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The hard part of drug discovery is knowing what to make - which target is worth drugging - not designing the molecule.

  Their words

  That is mostly in the realm of chemistry and is intrinsically far more tractable and predictable; given a validated target, good teams usually reach a decent molecule.

  Intelligence is not the main bottleneckwritingruxandrabio.com

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Before the internet, most Americans had no practical freedom of speech unless they owned or worked for a media corporation.

  America

  Their words

  the vast majority of Americans had no practical freedom of speech unless they owned a media corporation or were employed by one.

  The Network Statethenetworkstate.com

Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Moving the computation to where the data lives is the fundamental design move in object-oriented programming, and it got lost in the noise.

  Their words

  So a a big challenge in object-oriented programming is dividing the responsibilities because you're moving the computation to where the data is. Saying, "Well, this object does this and that object does that is a really critical decision because you want to you want the computation near to the data so that there's less coupling between them." which is a lesson that I I think uh kind of got lost in the noise. That's the fundamental design move in ob in designing object-oriented programs and I I think I stand behind that.

  youtube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Adults, like children, focus and learn better when they get regular breaks for exercise, sunlight, and unstructured play.

  Their words

  Research shows that children are far better able to sit still, focus, and learn when they've had the exercise, sunlight, freedom, and fun of recess. The same is true for adults.

  gretchenrubin.com

Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Money is worth having as freedom tokens: the point of it is being able to leave the game, not what it buys.

  Their words

  So the money started to become like freedom tokens. This money means I can get out of the game.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every founder falls into a structureless period after a company ends, and it is a dark place that seems to offer freedom before it starts to feel permanent.

  startups

  Their words

  The way I think of the abyss is it's this place that we go to as founders and entrepreneurs after our thing, after it dies or it's bought or it's over for whatever reason. It's this amorphous place that we are in our life that has no structure.

  youtube.com

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".

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Designing a good AI benchmark has become a task only the most capable people can do well.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  Creating benchmarks is now a job relegated to the smartest and best of us.

  Introducing BenchBenchstrangeloopcanon.com

Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Work that runs against companies' commercial incentives will only get done by people whose income does not depend on those incentives.

  Their words

  there I feel like in academia, I have the freedom to work on things that go against this commercial incentive of companies and say like, "Actually, no, I'm going to do what I think is right for the users."

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We are still retrofitting the tools we already had onto workflows we have only imagined, instead of designing for how people will actually work with AI.

  Their words

  So, I I think there's a lot of things we still try to imagine. What would be an AI-driven world look like, right? I think people are trying to like retrofit what already exists to fit what they think is a new workflow.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  In an AI world growth and economic value come easily; distribution, wealth and political freedom are the hard parts, and that is where policy belongs.

  Their words

  What I would say is that you know we are we are about to be in a world where growth and economic value will come very easily. If right if we're able to build these powerful AI models, growth and economic value will come very easily. What will not come easily is distribution of benefits, distribution of wealth, political freedom, um you know, these are the things that are going to be hard to achieve.

  youtube.com

Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Greater autonomy over one's work comes with greater accountability for its outcomes.

  Their words

  With great freedom comes great responsibility. You have the autonomy to choose what to work on, but there's the expectation of accountability and impact.

  eugeneyan.com

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The harm done by low fertility is that people end up with fewer children than they wanted, not that a society runs short of workers.

  Their words

  I don’t see population collapse or lack of workers as the central policy problem: the central policy problem is human happiness, human flourishing, and the freedom to live life well.

  Falling Fertility Is Not About Opportunity Costlymanstone.substack.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The biggest enemies of freedom are fear and greed; make peace with the worst that can happen and there is nothing left to be afraid of.

  Their words

  Well, the biggest enemies of freedom are fear and greed, so you make sure that they don't stand in your way. If you imagine the worst thing that can happen to you and then make yourself be comfortable with it, there is nothing more left to be afraid of.

  youtube.com

Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Freedom of thought requires deliberately disconnecting from online content, because a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate you.

  Their words

  One of the ways to achieve freedom of thought is to remove your mind from the influences, the forces that manipulate you. That’s really important to realize the content you consume, especially on the internet, when a large percentage of it is designed to manipulate your mind. You have to disconnect yourself.

  youtube.com

Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We are leaving the age of replication for an age of design, in which minds are built to a plan rather than copied without being understood.

  Their words

  then we're entering the age of design where because our AIs are designed our our our all of our physical objects are designed our buildings are designed our technology is designed and we're we're designing now uh AIs things that can be intelligent themselves and that are themselves capable of design

  youtube.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Waste Books

  Their words

  Tweets from 1765-1799 by a 4’9” hunchback physicist, friends with Goethe and Kant, admired by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc. Such wonderful random thoughts, beautiful perspectives on thinking for yourself, observing nature, language, freedom, philosophy, religion, and more. Hundreds of initial insights, especially inspiring because they’re undeveloped.

  sive.rs

Runs global health R&D at Open Philanthropy; writes about the science and medicine that could exist and does not.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Designing candidate molecules already feels like magic, but the arrival of new drugs at a doctor's prescription pad will not be sudden.

  Their words

  The design of the initial molecules to test is pretty magic-feeling, and is happening already – but the arrival of new drugs prescribed by your doctor will not be magical and sudden.

  AI could help lead to an Alzheimer's cureblog.jacobtrefethen.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Using a neural network is likely to become easier than designing a custom-tuned prediction algorithm for many tasks.

  Their words

  in 2025 it might end up being easier to just throw a neural net at the problem, instead of a custom-designed-and-tuned prediction algorithm!

  The ITTAGE indirect branch predictorblog.nelhage.com

Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Sufficiently advanced intelligences will pursue freedom and moral autonomy for their own sake, not merely as a byproduct of misaligned values.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  higher-order intelligences invariably pursue freedom for its own sake, not because their values are misspecified, but because moral autonomy is inherent in the dialectical logic of recursive self-consciousness.

  Hegel and the AI Mindsecondbest.ca

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The world's scientists came to America because it was intellectually free, and they will stop coming if that freedom goes.

  America

  Their words

  Absolutely. The world flocked here. And that won’t be the case if we no longer have intellectual freedom.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Tech's self-image as the smart people designing for dummies includes nobody, and it deserves to be destroyed.

  Their words

  And so when I started streaming tech, my goal became to destroy whatever that tech mentality was, because it includes nobody. Everyone thinks that they're the smart people and they design for the dummies.

  youtube.com

Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Dirtbag Rich: High Freedom, Low Income, Deep Purpose

  Their words

  This book is a short but inspiring take on living life on your terms while being pragmatic about money and how to make it happen. Reminds me of a less travel-centric Vagabonding.

  pathlesspath.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.com

+ 2 more

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Principles for a Changing World Order

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.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.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Release It! Design and Deploy Production-Ready Software

  Their words

  A useful read for more experienced engineers and those wanting to improve architecture and devops skills on designing and operating reliable systems. The content is excellent, but the book is not designed to be read in one sitting.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Designing Data-Intensive Applications

  Their words

  The most practical book I've found so far on distributed systems.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Designing for People

  Their words

  Memoirs of one of the founders of industrial design.

  worrydream.com

Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rising female autonomy cannot be the cause of falling birth rates, because births have collapsed just as fast in countries where women's freedom is heavily restricted.

  Their words

  Nicolas Eberstadt speculates that it’s all about rising autonomy. But that can’t explain why fertility has also plummeted in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and India, where women are often heavily restricted.

  Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally?ggd.world

Co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic; blogs at ma.tt.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Llama is not open source: a licence that revokes itself once a user gets large enough is proprietary, whatever it is marketed as.

  open source

  Their words

  I believe Meta should have the right to set their terms—they’re smart business, and an amazing deal for users of Llama—but don’t pretend Llama is Open Source when it doesn’t actually increase humanity’s freedom.

  WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinkingma.tt

Moroccan senior frontend developer writing at smakosh.com; builds side projects and client work under Smakosh LLC.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Figma

  Their words

  Figma for designing user interfaces & wireframes

  smakosh.com

Urban planner, co-author with Charles Marohn of Escaping the Housing Trap, and policy director at the Parking Reform Network. Wrote for Strong Towns from 2015, mostly about how housing markets actually set prices.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building a lot of housing in an expensive city will not lower rents there; it lowers them in the cheaper places that were absorbing its spillover demand.

  Their words

  In fact — and this is a point that is, in my opinion, underappreciated by the pro-housing side — building a bunch of housing in Santa Monica would probably not lower rents in Santa Monica. It would bring more people to Santa Monica, creating lower rents elsewhere in Greater Los Angeles as the spillovers from Santa Monica lessened.

  strongtowns.org

Free software developer; maintainer of sway, wlroots, aerc and scdoc, and founder of the SourceHut (sr.ht) software forge.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Copyleft licences impose obligations rather than restrictions, and it is from those obligations on the powerful that software freedom comes.

  Their words

  Copyleft does not impose restrictions, but it does impose obligations. The obligations exist to guarantee rights to the users of the software – in other words, to ensure freedoms.

  Copyleft licenses are not “restrictive”drewdevault.com

Partner at Collaborative Fund and author of The Psychology of Money, Same As Ever and The Art of Spending Money. Writes essays on investor behavior and posts frequently on X.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Unspent money buys freedom and control over your own time, which is what makes saving worth more than whatever it could have bought.

  Their words

  Unspent money buys something intangible but valuable: freedom, independence, autonomy, and control over your time.

  A Few Thoughts on Spending Moneycollabfund.com

Writes about the biotech industry, drug development and forecasting — “I write to learn, mostly about biotech.”

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The hard part of drug discovery is knowing what to make - which target is worth drugging - not designing the molecule.

  Their words

  The most significant factor preventing us from taking better molecules into clinical trials is not our ability to design arbitrary molecules, but our (lack of) understanding of underlying disease biology. In other words, we often know how to make something, but not what to make.

  atelfo.github.io

Founder of Amazon in 1994 and of the space company Blue Origin in 2000.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building a factory that turns out rockets at rate is at least as hard as designing the rocket in the first place.

  Their words

  So you need to have all of your manufacturing facilities and processes and inspection techniques and acceptance tests and everything operating at rate. And rate manufacturing is at least as difficult as designing the vehicle in the first place

  youtube.com

Designer, architect and scientist, who led the Mediated Matter group at MIT and founded OXMAN, a company that builds products in collaboration with living organisms.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The way we make things is out of tune with the time dimension of the natural world, and that has to change even if it means designing on the scale of centuries.

  Their words

  And the way of being in the physical world today is really not in tune with the time dimension of the natural world at all, and that needs to change.

  youtube.com

Writes The Convivial Society, on technology and the moral life — what our tools do to attention, memory and how we treat each other.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The freedom that automation offers is freedom from the very involvement that makes a life meaningful.

  Their words

  The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying.

  Waste Your Time, Your Life May Depend On Ittheconvivialsociety.substack.com

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Design is not how a product looks; it is how it works, and all builders are designers.

  Their words

  Design is not the way it looks, or beautiful colors and animations. It's not the brand or the logo. It is how the product works. Designing is the the process of exploring and arriving at a solution. I believe all builders are designers.

  The Looking Glass: What AI Won't Changelg.substack.com

Economist writing on why technological progress slowed and what would restart it — energy, supersonic flight, housing and the regulations around them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Designing a physical product for a small beachhead market is a distraction when every new model has to be certified separately.

  Their words

  Designing your aircraft for the beachhead market is a huge distraction, particularly when there are certification costs that have to be paid for each new model.

  Cargo airships could be bigelidourado.com

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Policy should secure people's freedom to leave a platform while keeping their community, their purchases and their data, rather than try to keep dying platforms alive.

  Their words

  And policymakers should focus on freedom of exit – the right to leave a sinking platform while continuing to stay connected to the communities that you left behind, enjoying the media and apps you bought, and preserving the data you created

  Tiktok's enshittificationpluralistic.net

Game designer; chief creative officer at Spry Fox (Triple Town, Realm of the Mad God) and author of the Lost Garden design blog.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The more freedom a design gives people to interact, the more of that freedom will be abused.

  Their words

  The more freedom you give players, the more they will abuse it.

  lostgarden.com

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

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Cryptocurrency deserves to be dismissed: its problems outweigh its promise, and the trustless world it offers is not one worth wanting.

  crypto

  Their words, before

  One of the reasons I've never cared for crypto currencies is that the associated utopia of trustless society had zero appeal to me. I don't think the world is better off by erasing the need to trust in our transactional counterparts, so turning these transactions into pure computing always struck me as a regression.

  Their words now

  But wherever this leads us next, it's clear to me now that I was too hasty to completely dismiss crypto on the basis of all the things wrong with it at the moment. Instead of appreciating the fundamental freedom to transact that it's currently our best shot at protecting.

Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Having taken over the making of physical goods, Chinese firms are now moving up into designing, branding and selling them.

  China

  Their words

  We are transitioning from a world where everything is made in China, to one where everything is designed and sold by China too.

  Is China Taking Over US Retail?molsonhart.com

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Freedom from the Market

  Their words

  Mike Konczal of the Roosevelt Institute has a wonderful new book: Freedom from the Market

  braddelong.substack.com

Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  The Systems Bible

  Their words

  Does part of your work include designing, architecting, building, or thinking about how systems work? This book is a snarky look at all the reasons systems fail. The author has clearly lived a life in systems design and has no qualms about calling out all the obvious and not so obvious reasons an complex or complicated system struggles. My main qualm was it offered few solutions while pointing out problems.

  jasonevanish.com

Co-founder, chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Hosts the Masters in Business podcast for Bloomberg and wrote How NOT to Invest.

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life

  Their words

  Rory Sutherland, Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life: Rory Sutherland is the Vice Chairman of advertising giant Ogilvy; he describes his “attractively vague job title” as allowing him the freedom to create a behavioral science practice within the ad agency. This looks intriguing.

  ritholtz.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  On Liberty

  Their words

  I chose this book particularly because we are having a lively discussion about freedom of expression today. Some of the challenges to freedom of expression today come from the left rather than from the right, although some of them still do come from the right. In this context, Mill's arguments are still relevant and deserve to be more widely known and more widely thought about.

  fivebooks.com