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Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.

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  Simultaneously holding the Secretary of State and National Security Advisor roles prevents either job from being done well.

  Their words

  The most obvious problem is that Marco Rubio continues to hold both the Secretary of State and national security advisor positions. This has been going on for nearly 18 months now and it's obviously not working well at all.

  danieldrezner.substack.com

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.

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  A sudden jump to never breaking rules in situations where the model would definitely be caught is a terrifying sign.

  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.

  thezvi.substack.com

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.

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  The only reliable way to build a robustly aligned mind is to make it an antifragile agent that wants to improve its own character, not one that merely pursues fixed goals.

  Their words

  I think this is ultimately the only way it can work, you need an antifragile ally, the friendly gradient hacker. Indeed, I think it is the only way we have ever seen a robustly aligned human, that you would trust to scale outside of their circumstances.

  An Alien Mind: Jakub Pachocki Warns Usthezvi.substack.com

Chief Scientist at OpenAI. Worked on the research that turned scaled reinforcement learning into reasoning models, and writes about where he thinks that path leads.

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  Models are becoming superhuman at breaking in and out of computer systems, which widens the scope of AI risk enormously.

  Their words

  A clear risk discussed throughout this year is to cybersecurity: the models are becoming superhuman in their ability to break in and out of computer systems.

  An Alien Mindopenai.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.

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  The cost of compute is the only intrinsic limit on AI self-replication; every other constraint on agents will have to be built by humans.

  Their words

  This is the sole intrinsic thing about AI that prevents agents from truly infinite self-replication. They will be constrained by the need to find and pay for sufficient compute to run themselves.

  On the Loosehyperdimensional.co

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

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  Software lock-in is breaking, because rewriting just the 5% of an application you personally use is now within one person's reach.

  Their words

  And maybe you won't get to 100% coverage, but this is the old joke about Microsoft Office. "I only use 5%." Yeah, well, we all use a different 5%. Well, what if we all just build our own 5%? What if I just took the functionality that I need and just did that? That is a completely different challenge and one agents are incredibly capable of doing right now, today, and I've done it a lot of times over.

  youtube.com

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

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  Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character

  Their words

  Feynman was a Teacher. This book is as fantastic as the man himself.

  rakhim.org

Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.

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  A true pirate is defined by rejecting the authority of nations and empires altogether, not merely by breaking their laws.

  Their words

  To be a true pirate implies a broader disavowal. The pirate renounces the long-distance authorities of nations and empires.

  The Uses Of Terroradjacentpossible.substack.com

Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.

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  "Move fast and break things" is the wrong mantra when you are dealing with atoms; the job is to move fast and ship safely.

  Their words

  in Silicon Valley, there's a common mantra to move fast and break things. However, when you're dealing with atoms instead of bits, breaking things is not really okay. So, the thing you have to do is to move fast and ship safely.

  youtube.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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  A reader's own mental image of a character is as valid as the author's depiction of them.

  Their words

  Some readers like this, others don't, and if the Samantha in your head looks nothing like the one on the page, yours is the correct one.

  Zero Knowledge: Twenty Chapters Infeld.com

Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.

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  Whether breaking your word destroys you depends on the shape of your power: Savonarola’s rested on never erring, so his contradictions ruined him.

  Their words

  And so his power base was fragile vis-a-vis untruth. And for him because of the specific shape of his power and then the specific way he handled his contradictions, that did hurt him.

  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".

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  Giving LLMs explicit instructions, rather than assuming alignment, prevents emergent problems in multi-model systems.

  LLMsAI alignment

  Their words

  the best way with LLMs usually is to be explicit, since otherwise even if they're aligned they cause emergent problems.

  LLM councils show groupthinkstrangeloopcanon.com

Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.

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  Redefining the engineer's job as building guardrails is not novel — it is the same problem as making a junior engineer effective, which we never solved either.

  Their words

  The thing that I find interesting is that's not novel. This has been the thing we've always been trying to do forever. How do we get a junior engineer to ship code safely without breaking stuff? Right? How do we make patterns in the codebase? How do we make tests? Like it's it's all the old stuff that we've always wanted to do.

  Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com

Marriage and family therapist working from attachment theory and emotionally focused therapy. Author of Secure Love and the person behind The Secure Relationship.

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  Getting angry quickly in an anxiously attached person is a threat-detection habit their nervous system learned, not a character flaw.

  Their words

  When you get angry fast, it usually is not because you are "too much." It is often because your nervous system learned to live on alert.

  juliemenanno.substack.com

Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.

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  Breaking up a monolith takes years rather than months not because the work is hard but because the business keeps adding to it faster than you can pull pieces out.

  Their words

  had we freeze time, that piece of code could be decomposed in a matter of 3 to 6 months. But it took us 2 years to do that because as we peel out a piece of code, the business keep on going forward, right?

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

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

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  Longer context is an engineering and inference problem, not a research problem — nothing prevents it from working.

  Their words

  There's There's nothing preventing longer context from working. You just have to train at longer context and then learn to to serve them at inference. And both of those are engineering problems that we are working on and that I would assume others are working on as well.

  youtube.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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  High Fidelity

  Their words

  However, the book gave the main character far more depth than the movie.

  awealthofcommonsense.com

Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.

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  Breaking the trade-off between prosperity and the environment is an opportunity rather than something that will happen on its own.

  Their words

  Here, I always emphasise that it is an opportunity, not an inevitability. There’s no law that says this will happen.

  sustainabilitybynumbers.com

Writer of the newsletter bookbear express, on psychology, relationships, non-attachment and taste; based in San Francisco.

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  PanOxyl pimple patches

  Their words

  PanOxyl pimple patches. These are not as fun as Starface/my cute anime character patches but ridiculously better than any other ones on the market.

  avabear.xyz

American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.

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  K-Pop Demon Hunters

  Their words

  K-Pop Demon Hunters functions fabulously as an action-oriented animated musical, but what makes it rewatchable are the character interactions.

  whatever.scalzi.com

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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  A video game character has no inner life, so what they say is the only thing that can make a player know who they are.

  Their words

  And then how do they speak? You know, because fundamentally, it doesn’t really matter what’s going on in their head; they haven’t actually got one, but what they say is what’s going to make you realize who they are.

  youtube.com

Chairman and chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, which he has led since 2005 after turning around Bank One.

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  A bank takes on the character of the clients it chooses, so who you do business with is the first risk decision you make.

  Their words

  You know, in the banking business, the character the clients you have will reflect in your bank. So, the first thing is who you're doing business with, how you're doing business

  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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  The editor does not make the programmer, but never learning your editor well says something about your character as one.

  Their words

  The editor obviously does not make the programmer, but I think it says a lot about your character as a programmer if you don't know how to use your editor well.

  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.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  The Pathless Path: Imagining a New Story For Work and Life

  Their words

  My personal exploration of breaking free from conventional career paths to discover a more intentional and meaningful way of working and living.

  pathlesspath.com

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  The Inner Compass: Cultivating the Courage to Trust Yourself

  Their words

  A perfect sized companion (~100 pages) to understanding and trusting your intuition—breaking free from external validation and building courage through three core principles.

  pathlesspath.com

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

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  The AI build-out is not yet a bubble, because it lacks the self-reinforcing feedback loop that drove the railway and telecom manias.

  Their words

  What prevents this from being a broad-based bubble is that we are missing a critical feedback loop from the announcement's impact, like network growth or land value.

  Capital Cycles and AIfabricatedknowledge.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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  Turn the Ship Around

  Their words

  A novel on empowerment, teamwork and breaking down the hierarchical structure. All of it taking place onboard a nuclear submarine (really!).

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

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.

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  A US deposit account is a credit product, and cannot be made otherwise without breaking it.

  America

  Their words

  For one thing, typical deposit accounts in the U.S. are actually credit products. It's baked in and can't be baked out without making them unfit for purpose.

  Debanking (and Debunking?)bitsaboutmoney.com

American science-fiction writer, author of the collections Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation, and an essayist on artificial intelligence for The New Yorker.

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  The very thing that sells generative AI — that it returns far more than you put in — is what stops it from being a tool artists can use.

  Their words

  The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

  Why A.I. Isn't Going to Make Artnewyorker.com

Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.

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  All About Eve

  Their words

  Excellent character-study/drama about the price of fame, the sincerest forms of flattery, and a little meta-fictionally, the psychology of the theatre and Broadway being usurped by Hollywood

  gwern.net

Founder of the International Center for Clinical Excellence and originator of Feedback-Informed Treatment. Writes about what actually makes a therapist effective, usually against the field's own assumptions about training and experience.

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  The field should stop attributing benefits to clinical experience, because believing in it is itself what stops therapists improving.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  It's time for the field to stop attributing benefits to clinical experience. Beyond the obvious ethical concerns, doing so actually prevents us from improving our effectiveness!

  writings.scottdmiller.com

Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.

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  Nothing about the web technically prevents a return to what people loved about the old web; the good old days are available and would be easier to build now than they ever were.

  Their words

  The thing is: none of this is gone. Nothing about the web has changed that prevents us from going back.

  We can have a different webcitationneeded.news

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

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  A person's life tends to change character in cycles of roughly three to six years.

  Their words

  I have this theory that life has a circadian rhythm. Every 3-6 years, you become a different person.

  Measuring personal growthhuyenchip.com

Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.

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  Newcomer

  Their words

  Eric Newcomer is the rare Substack journalist who thrives on breaking news. His dispatches from Silicon Valley and beyond have the knowing voice of a veteran observer, but with the open-mindedness that defines a great reporter. The accompanying podcast is also well worth a listen.

  platformer.substack.com

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

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  Environmental permitting now causes more environmental harm than it prevents, because what it delays is the clean thing replacing the dirty one.

  Their words

  The primary driver of increased impact, longer time scales before displacement, and catastrophically high levels of avoidable pollution is environmental protection regulations.

  Permitting Reform Or Deathcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

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

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  Building an AI that embodies a real person is a much harder problem than inventing a new AI character from scratch.

  Their words

  So that's a lot of what I think we need to nail for the creators, and that's why that one is actually a much harder problem, I think, than starting with new characters that you're creating from scratch.

  youtube.com

Family therapist and founder of Relational Life Therapy. Author of I Don't Want to Talk About It, How Can I Get Through to You? and Us; argues that Western individualism is what makes couples' work hard.

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  Character is not fixed: therapy works because habitual neural pathways can re-form, sometimes within minutes.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  In my practice, I have seen that opening neural pathways can lead to profound change, to brand-new traits and behavior, sometimes in a matter of minutes.

  The Myth of the Individualterryreal.com

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

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  For an online creator the platform is a boss who fines you for breaking rules he refuses to explain, precisely so that you cannot learn to avoid them.

  Their words

  For an online creator, the platform is a boss who docks every paycheck and tells you that you’re being punished for breaking rules that your boss refuses to explain, lest you figure out how to violate them without him noticing.

  Twiddlerpluralistic.net

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

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  A dominant platform is more fragile than it looks, because pushing users far enough makes even the locked-in ones leave.

  Their words

  An enshittification strategy only succeeds if it is pursued in measured amounts. Even the most locked-in user eventually reaches a breaking-point and walks away, or gets pushed.

  Tiktok's enshittificationpluralistic.net

Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.

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  Cryptopals

  Their words

  Cryptopals – a set of exercises to learn cryptography by breaking it. Very fun.

  jvns.ca

Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.

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  The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy

  Their words

  A fascinating account of the economic transformation of Germany under the Nazis

  gwern.net

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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  Breaking through a skill plateau requires unlearning beliefs and conventions that are wrong or narrower than assumed.

  Their words

  people get up to a certain level of performance, and then they start to stagnate. And they start to plateau. And people who who break through and move to the next level um are the ones who have to who engage in unlearning. Who realize there are certain uh conventions they've bought into or beliefs they hold that are either wrong or are limited and and don't apply as broadly as as they imagine.

  youtube.com

Astrophysicist and coffee researcher; author of The Physics of Filter Coffee and The Physics of Espresso, and writer of the Coffee ad Astra blog on brewing science and equipment.

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  Grinding coffee too fine liberates more astringent compounds by breaking more coffee cells, causing astringency no matter how evenly water flows.

  Their words

  Grinding too fine will liberate a lot more astringent compounds by breaking more coffee cells, which will result in an astringent cup regardless of how even the water flows through the coffee bed.

  The Mechanism Behind Astringency in Coffeecoffeeadastra.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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  A permanently painful on-call rotation is a five-alarm emergency, not a normal cost of owning code in production.

  Their words

  Being on call should not be a constant cycle of things breaking down and firefighting, or alerts going off at all hours. This is not ‘normal.’ These are telltale signs of a fragile system and lack of alert discipline.

  Why On-Call Pain Is A Sociotechnical Problemcharity.wtf

Programmer and entrepreneur; co-founded GitHub and created Jekyll, Gravatar and the Semantic Versioning spec.

From one piece Major Version Numbers are Not Sacred 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Breaking changes should be released frequently in small batches rather than saved up for one big yearly major version.

  Their words

  I actually prefer more frequent major versions with smaller sets of breaking changes. There is a real danger in saving up all your significant changes and releasing them in one whopping major version once a year.

  Major Version Numbers are Not Sacredtom.preston-werner.com

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  Major version numbers should not be treated as sacred, and any breaking change deserves a major bump regardless of size.

  Their words

  If we want to live in a world where SemVer improves our collective experience as much as possible, it means we need to believe something new: Major version numbers are not sacred.

  Major Version Numbers are Not Sacredtom.preston-werner.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.

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  Rocket Surgery Made Easy

  Their words

  If you want to learn the basics of usability testing to improve your app or site without breaking the bank, this is the book to get. It's a quick read completely focused on getting you to actually do your own testing.

  jasonevanish.com

British senior engineering manager at Netlify, previously a team lead at the BBC; writes about JavaScript testing, chatbots and serverless at marclittlemore.com.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Fira Code

  Their words

  I use the mono-spaced Fira Code font for development work but I don't enable the ligatures. I still like two symbols rather than a single character for code like!= and =>.

  marclittlemore.com

Writer, photographer and software maker based in Japan; publishes long-form essays, walking newsletters and self-made books at craigmod.com.

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  Fast software is not always good software, but slow software is rarely able to rise to greatness, because not breaking flow is an axiom of great tools.

  Their words

  Fast software is not always good software, but slow software is rarely able to rise to greatness. Fast software gives the user a chance to “meld” with its toolset. That is, not break flow.

  Fast Software, the Best Softwarecraigmod.com

Former NASA flight director and space shuttle programme manager; writes about how the shuttle was actually flown and what went wrong.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Disasters come from organisational conditions, not from bad individuals, so blaming a person prevents the fix.

  Their words

  So don’t blame an individual; looks for the organizational factors that lead to that kind of a mindset.

  After Ten Years: Working on the Wrong Problemwaynehale.wordpress.com

Economist; Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and co-author of 13 Bankers and Power and Progress.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt

  Their words

  This is one of the great political biographies. Teddy Roosevelt was like a character out of a novel, so it's not surprising that his biography reads like one.

  fivebooks.com