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Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.

From one piece On European hypocrisy and warmongering 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Nordic and Baltic push for confrontation with Russia is irresponsible, hypocritical and immoral, and it risks a catastrophe.

  Russia

  Their words

  The Nordic-Baltic warmongering under the current conditions is therefore (i) irresponsible, (ii) hypocritical, (iii) immoral, and (iv) flirts with a disaster of immense proportions.

  On European hypocrisy and warmongeringbranko2f7.substack.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Prolonging the war in Ukraine courts a nuclear escalation whose risk is being treated as though it were zero.

  Their words

  Not only is the idea of an endless war immoral, but it plays with an immense risk of nuclear escalation.

  On European hypocrisy and warmongeringbranko2f7.substack.com

British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.

• Mixed onaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  An Immense World

  Their words

  This is a funny, heartfelt, and (perhaps overly) thorough book. It will gleefully send you down rabbit holes

  shkspr.mobi

Programmer and writer known for detailed source code reviews of classic game engines, and author of the Game Engine Black Book series on Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Failures are more often explained by time pressure than by stupidity or malice.

  Their words

  Never attribute to malice what you can attribute to stupidity. And never attribute to stupidity what you can attribute to time pressure.

  Quake Shareware, a CD-ROM just a little too fullfabiensanglard.net

Developer and podcaster; created Instapaper and Overcast, co-founded Tumblr, and co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The tech industry today is dominated by scale-driven optimization and growth at the expense of the idealism that once drove it

  Their words

  Immense scale, soulless optimization, and an insatiable thirst for growth dominate its behavior and discourse, leaving little room for the spirit and principles embodied by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak.

  A letter to John Ternusmarco.org

Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Mongols destroyed irrigation systems as deliberate policy to return farmland to pasture, not out of the stupidity historians attribute to them.

  Their words

  So they think, a lot of the historians, they think the Mongols are so stupid, they let the irrigation system be destroyed. No, it takes more work to destroy an irrigation system than it does to create it. They destroyed those systems out of a policy, and that was, “This is going to return to pasture land.”

  youtube.com

Writer and researcher, founder of New Science; writes essays on science funding, sleep research, productivity and ambition at guzey.com.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Work on large language models is not progress toward artificial general intelligence, because the models do not understand what they read.

  AGILLMsOpenAI

  Their words, before

  This means that working on neural networks is NOT getting us closer to AGI, except indirectly.

  Their words now

  It’s become very difficult for me to maintain the belief in the stupidity of ChatGPT when every time I laugh at it, it ends up ridiculing me 6 months later.