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Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Some tasks inherently need a continuous stretch of time, so an appointment that splits the afternoon can leave no block long enough to finish them, and this is not limited to people with ADHD.

  Their words

  It's isn't just to people with ADHD that this happens. Some tasks inherently take a certain amount of time. An appointment that breaks the afternoon into two blocks of time could leave you with no block long enough to complete a task.

  @paulg on Xx.com

Chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety and AI control.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Very capable AI will be harder to align than current systems, because the loop of spotting a bad behaviour and patching the training that caused it breaks down.

  Their words

  when AIs are extremely extremely capable my view is that those AIs will be harder to align than current systems. So for current systems, we have this feedback loop where we basically like we create an AI. We do some evaluations on it. We see that it has some kind of messed up behavior that we can kind of quickly understand. Then we like can like go look in training and be like, "Oh, the these training environments led to this problematic behavior. Let's like tweak that training data. Let's introduce some additional training data to like correct this other issue and then move forward from there." But in a regime where the AIs are extremely situationally aware, very very very very capable and um you know uh we don't necessarily understand what they're doing, this feedback loop breaks down.

  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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  Adding a config option so nobody breaks compounds into permutations no test suite can cover, because it is infinitely harder to evolve software that has users.

  Their words

  If you count all the permutations, you can write all the tests you want. It is impossible to cover all of these and not break things from time to time. It is infinitely harder to evolve software that has users.

  Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com

Swedish open source developer; creator and lead maintainer of curl and libcurl, and a co-founder of the Rockbox project.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Open source work is largely voluntary, so its maintainers need periodic breaks too.

  open source

  Their words

  it helps sending a signal and a reminder that Open Source is to a large extent done voluntarily and even maintainers need a break at times.

  What the bliss taught usdaniel.haxx.se

Chief Product and Technology Officer at Netflix, previously VP of Science at Lyft and an economist at Analysis Group.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The code today’s models and agents write is very hard to follow: you get better performance without knowing why, and no way to fix it when it breaks.

  Their words

  So looking at some of the code that some of these models or agents are writing they're very hard to follow. It's like I know I'm getting better performance from this but I have no idea why and if this thing breaks I'm going to have no idea how to fix it.

  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

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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Evidence for Modern Physics

  Their words

  One of my favorite lecture series he has given is The Evidence for Modern Physics where he breaks down the experiments that validate some of the weird laws of physics we have, and what it would take to validate even the weirder ones.

  x.com

Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.

From one piece Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhl 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Examples in documentation should be compiled and run as tests, so that changing the code breaks the docs instead of quietly outdating them.

  documentation

  Their words

  Now the thing is you can of course write examples in your documentation and Rust makes all examples into tests. This means that if you change the underlying code now your test fails. And so this means that you can't even you can't forget to update your examples in your documentation.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A compiler that names every place a change breaks turns refactoring into fixing errors until the compiler stops shouting.

  Their words

  I think this is kind of leads to another way that Rust really helps with reliability, which is that if you're refactoring, I think Rust is really good at telling you all the places you need to update. I've done this sometimes where I would refactor something. I change the code. I change the return type or whatever it is, and then I just fix the compiler errors and until the compiler stops shouting. And then once I've done that, I've updated every place I need to update.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

Director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Writes the A Wealth of Common Sense blog and co-hosts the Animal Spirits podcast with Michael Batnick.

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  The Breaks of the Game

  Their words

  I’ve heard numerous sportswriters call Halberstam’s chronicle of the Portland Trailblazers’ 1979-80 season the best sports books ever written.

  awealthofcommonsense.com

Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The effectiveness of a plot twist depends on how carefully a story's point of view relates to its audience.

  Their words

  Point of view is essential for effective twists. Contrast Frozen with Fight Club, where the narrator's unreliability works because the entire story flows through his perspective and he maintains a direct relationship with the audience through fourth-wall breaks.

  Frozen's Lie: How a Tiny Detail Can Ruin a Storynateliason.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

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  He would rather lose everything than yield to government pressure to block channels, because submitting to something fundamentally wrong breaks a person inside.

  government

  Their words

  And I would rather lose everything I have than yield to this pressure because, if you submit to this pressure and agree with something that is fundamentally wrong and violates rights of other people as well, you become broken inside, you become a shell of your former self on a deep biological and spiritual level.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A hired chief executive can become the author of a company's culture by giving it a re-founding event, as Satya Nadella and Jamie Dimon did.

  Their words

  I think both of them have given re-founding events to their companies. I think they are actually um uh they have made such large changes with such clear breaks from the past that they are actually are the authors of their companies' cultures now.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of the AI agent company Sierra, and previously an eighteen-year Google executive who ran product for Workspace, virtual and augmented reality, and Google Labs.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Great customer service has always been a luxury only a Hermès or a Four Seasons could afford, and AI is what breaks the trade-off between its cost and its quality.

  Their words

  And the reason this is important is what we're trying to do in a way is resolve this age-old tension between the cost and quality of customer experience where I think every great business wants to deliver an amazing experience to their customers. But unless you're like Hermes or the Four Seasons, it's too expensive to do.

  youtube.com

Historian at Stanford and the Hoover Institution; wrote Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market, on Ayn Rand.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Money works only because everyone believes in it, which makes a currency a measure of social trust that fails when the trust does.

  Their words

  And to go back to thinking about money, money works because we all believe in it. It's a form of social trust, and it's a form of belief and faith in our society and in the other people in it. And when that breaks down, the money system will break down as well.

  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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Working Effectively with Legacy Code

  Their words

  Legacy code has no test and is not written to be testable. Touching it this sphaghetti code somewhere breaks the system. And to refactor safely, we'd need to have tests first... but where to start? This book gives practical suggestions

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Thai software engineer; publishes a public digital garden at garden.narze.live and builds developer and productivity tooling.

• Dislikedrcmnd.app

  iTerm

  Their words

  iTerm: Tmux is slow, prompt layout breaks when resizing the window.

  garden.narze.live

Programmer known online as technomancy; author of Leiningen, the Clojure build tool, and a maintainer of the Fennel programming language.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Mastodon's web client is a heavy React app that breaks without scripting and loads slowly on old hardware.

  JavaScript

  Their words

  when you send someone a link to a post, they can't read it without loading the entire Mastodon frontend app into their browser, which will is a monster React codebase that will break if they have scripting disabled and also can take up to 30 seconds on older hardware.

  technomancy.us

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Founder mode breaks the rule that a CEO engages with the company only through direct reports, and makes skip-level meetings the norm.

  Their words

  Whatever founder mode consists of, it's pretty clear that it's going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports.

  Founder Modepaulgraham.com

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.

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  Unshackled: A Practical Guide For Highly-Skilled Immigrants To Thrive In The United States

  Their words

  breaks down how legal immigration works in America in a way that is friendly, accessible, and human

  feld.com

Cryptography engineer; maintains Go's cryptography libraries as a full-time open-source maintainer, funded directly by companies that use them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Employing a maintainer inside a large company breaks down exactly when the project succeeds: the workload grows while its value to the employer stays flat.

  Their words

  As a project gets more popular in the ecosystem, the workload increases but the value of that project for the company stays the same, so resources don’t increase accordingly.

  words.filippo.io

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.

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Tested Advertising Methods

  Their words

  If you want to learn the art and science of copywriting, then this is the book for you. An expert copywriter for decades, Caples breaks down in detail what makes a great ad versus a failing one. It's loaded with examples and the kind of insights only a veteran can provide. You do need to provide a little imagination as he focuses on mail in based advertising in magazines, which isn't common today. But really, how different is that from downloading free whitepapers today?

  jasonevanish.com

Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Automated tooling that works nearly all the time still imposes an ongoing maintenance cost, because it breaks unpredictably at the edges.

  Their words

  Another thing that needs to be fixed when it ultimately breaks down, another bit of automation that works 99% of the time, but starts making funny noises when you slip into the 1%

  But does it help you ship?thorstenball.com

American software engineer; worked on code-server at Coder and teaches TypeScript and open-source contribution. Publishes at joeprevite.com.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Stretchly

  Their words

  Stretchly is a handy app for reminding me to take breaks.

  joeprevite.com

Writer and education-technology critic; published Hack Education for a decade and wrote Teaching Machines.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  MacBook Air

  Their words

  I use a MacBook Air that's four or five years old. (My god, I hope it never breaks because the new MacBooks suck.)

  usesthis.com