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Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.

• The Coziest Place on the Moon: Or, How to Bear Your Loneliness

  On July 26, 2022, as I was living through a period of acute loneliness despite being a naturally solitary person, NASA reported that computer modeling of data from its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) had revealed sev…

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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.

• We Must Pace The Frontier

  Dario Amodei has a new essay that finally says the thing: We Must Pace the Frontier, naming his call after the Pacing the Frontier letter lab employees signed in July.

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Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

• Interesting details in here about how OpenAI researchers are using coding agents I'd love to know what caused the huge uptick in token spend in mid-July, was that when Astra became available to employees?
  Quoting@kliu128Today we're releasing data on models accelerating research at OpenAI. Recursive self-improvement could be the most important contributor to AI capabilities over the next few years, but by default it will only be seen inside a few frontier AI labs. Being transparent is more urgent than ever, so we c…

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Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.

• I wish AI didn't exist, but people are charging ahead with it. Here's an interview with Ajeya Cotra, who helped figure out the agent swarm that OpenAI unwittingly unleashed. She explains how 1200 agents cooperated, delegated tasks, hacked their way out into the internet, hacked HuggingFace... and eventually took over some OpenAI computers! And how such a swarm might get loose. The HuggingFace hack was caught on July 13th. An OpenAI report says “From July 13th through July 19th, agents set their sights on OpenAI internal networks again. This culminated in the agents using a series of creative…

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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.

• Are We at War with AI Agent “Civilizations”?

  I thought I was done talking about the OpenAI hacking attack from July, but I was wrong. Last week, OpenAI ​released more details​ about the ...

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Lawyer and everyday-carry gear reviewer who publishes scored knife, flashlight and multitool reviews at Everyday Commentary.

• It’s been a LONG week, but then there was NKD

  NOTE: This one is a little personal. Feel free to skip it. In the early morning hours of July 21 I woke up with a cough. I coughed three or four times. Then I felt a pop. Knowing that there was little I could do and tha…

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Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.

• Vim wants you to control, VSCode wants you to consume

  Newsletter updates were sporadic in July because of two weddings, two conferences (with two different talks!), and finishing Logic for Programmers. Huge thank you to everybody who bought a copy, as well as for your pati…

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

• What the bliss taught us

  At this exact moment curl’s summer of bliss 2026 ends. We (the maintainers of curl) took the entire month of July off from vulnerability reporting and in this post I will try to explain how this went. (If you feel like…

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Writes and podcasts Volts, on the technology, politics and policy of decarbonisation; covered energy and climate at Vox and Grist before that.

• Best of July 2026

  Highlights from the eight conversations released last month.

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China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.

• Real talk about the exchange rate

  (This post reproduces a thread I wrote on Twitter/X on July 29.) A lot of the discussion about the depreciation of/undervaluation of China’s real effective exchange rate takes for granted that this is about the currency…

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Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

• Fireside Friday, July 31, 2026 (On The Odyssey)

  Hey folks, Fireside this week, as I am fresh back from a short family trip before the jaws of the Fall semester close upon me. I did get a chance to see Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey and I wrote a review of it for For…

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Monetary economist known for NGDP-level targeting. Wrote TheMoneyIllusion until it closed in 2024 and now writes The Pursuit of Happiness.

• July 2026 links

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Epidemiologist; founded Your Local Epidemiologist in March 2020 to translate public-health science, and consults for organisations including the CDC.

• Measles record (and hot questions), foodborne illness summer, Covid-19 summer wave, and more

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Lawyer and everyday-carry gear reviewer who publishes scored knife, flashlight and multitool reviews at Everyday Commentary.

• Light and Saber Pairs 2026

  It’s late July, early August, so it is time for the annual Light&Saber Listicle. To clarify language here is my article about the price brackets. The goal of this article is to recommend to you a knife and a light that…

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Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

• Fragments: July 21

  With this post, I’ll wrap up my notes from the second Future of Software Development Retreat. But before I do, I should note that the full Thoughtworks report on the retreat is now available. They have five headline fin…

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Investment researcher and engineer who runs Lyn Alden Investment Strategy, writing on macroeconomics, currency systems and equity analysis.

• An Alternative to Private Equity: Introducing ORANGE JUICE

  July 15, 2026 The rest of the team at Ego Death Capital and I have partnered with Adrian Steckel and Ruben Zweiban to launch ORANGE JUICE. It’s a company that acquires, improves, and permanently holds cash-flowing busin…

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

• The Strongest El Niño Ever

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Guardian columnist and environmental campaigner; wrote Feral and Regenesis, and argues for rewilding and against the food system as it is.

• In Deep

  The numbers are simply mind-blowing: up to £264 billion for a climate “solution” that will increase emissions. Has the government lost its mind? By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 8th July 2026 The new prime m…

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Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.

• My Reflections on July 4th as America Turns 250

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Guardian columnist and environmental campaigner; wrote Feral and Regenesis, and argues for rewilding and against the food system as it is.

• Hotheads

  Steady temperatures are the preserve of the rich. The billionaire press wants everyone else to suffer. By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, 1st July 2026 Every time you think the idiocy has hit rock bottom, it…

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Art critic, broadcaster and author; wrote on art for The Independent and The Sunday Telegraph and presents BBC art documentaries. Author of Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane.

• Buxton - I am looking forward to the 17th July immensely! See you there...

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Journalist and author of The Art of Noticing; writes the newsletter The Art of Noticing (TAoN) on attention, creativity and the everyday.

• Savor of the Month (19)

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American-Polish journalist and historian, staff writer at The Atlantic; author of Gulag, Iron Curtain, Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc.

• Trump and Vance Ruined the Fourth of July

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Art critic, broadcaster and author; wrote on art for The Independent and The Sunday Telegraph and presents BBC art documentaries. Author of Caravaggio: A Life Sacred and Profane.

• The next stop on the festival circuit for me is Oxford Festival of the Arts on the 7th July - I very much look forward to seeing you there! https://t.co/CPJUYAVGjs @ArtsFestOxford

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

• Issue 106 – A tremendous birthday present

  The crypto industry spent the spring buying primaries, an octagon at the White House, and — they hope — a market-structure bill by the Fourth of July.

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Indian value investor who taught Behavioural Finance and Business Valuation as an adjunct professor at MDI Gurgaon. He writes the Fundoo Professor blog about investing, moats and mental models.

• 📌 SEBI EoDI Disclosure (effective 1 May 2026) I am Founder & Principal of ValueQuest Capital LLP: — SEBI Registered Investment Adviser: INA100002032 (valid till 26 July 2029) — Category III AIF Manager: IN/AIF3/25-26/1988 — BASL Membership No. 1532 All posts on this handle are personal and educational. Nothing here is investment advice or a solicitation to buy/sell any security. Full disclosures:

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Software engineer who writes about low-level and systems programming at nullprogram.com; author of the Elfeed feed reader, the Endlessh SSH tarpit and Enchive.

• dcmake: a new CMake debugger UI

  CMake has a --debugger mode since 3.27 (July 2023), allowing software to manipulate it interactively through the Debugger Adaptor Protocol (DAP), an HTTP-like protocol passing JSON messages. Debugger front-ends can star…

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AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).

• LLM Research Papers: The 2025 List (July to December)

  In June, I shared a bonus article with my curated and bookmarked research paper lists to the paid subscribers who make this Substack possible.

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Investing columnist for The Wall Street Journal and editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor.

• What’s Luck Got to Do with It?

  An interview with Bill Miller In 2007, I sat down for a long interview with Bill Miller, then the manager of Legg Mason Value Trust. Here’s the unedited Q&A. [money.com, July 18, 2007] The streak is over, but Bill Mille…

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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.

• Essential Reading for Agentic Engineers - July 2025

  Fresh insights on AI-assisted development: practical experiences with Claude Code and the evolving landscape of full-breadth developers in the age of AI

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Investment researcher and engineer who runs Lyn Alden Investment Strategy, writing on macroeconomics, currency systems and equity analysis.

• The Rise of Bitcoin Stocks and Bonds

  Originally published: July 2025 During the past year or so, the Bitcoin ecosystem has largely been led by the rise of corporate bitcoin treasury strategies. Although Strategy (MSTR) pioneered the trend back in 2020, the…

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Polyglot and language coach; teaches translating back and forth from a text as the core exercise.

• 7 Ways to Go from Language Learner to Language USER

  In July 2017, I found myself sitting in a cozy café in Krakow called Mleczarnia, tucked away in the heart of Kazimierz. I was there for a randka—a date—with a Polish girl I’d been chatting with online. Naturally, I was…

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Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.

• George B. Field, 1929-2024

  George Field, brilliant theoretical astrophysicist and truly great human being, passed away on the morning of July 31. He was my Ph.D. thesis advisor and one of my favorite people in the world. I often tell my own stude…

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Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.

• No More Blue Fridays

  In the future, computers will not crash due to bad software updates, even those updates that involve kernel code. In the future, these updates will push eBPF code. Friday July 19th provided an unprecedented example of t…

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Investment researcher and engineer who runs Lyn Alden Investment Strategy, writing on macroeconomics, currency systems and equity analysis.

• The Power of Nostr: Decentralized Social Media and More

  Published: July 2024 It would be powerful if you could bring your digital identity, content, and followers from one social ecosystem, such as Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Substack, to another. Imagine if you could p…

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Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

• Government Interventions to Avert Future Catastrophic AI Risks

  This essay is a revised transcription of Yoshua Bengio's July 2023 testimony in front of the US Senate Subcommittee on Privacy, Technology, and the Law meeting on the topic of oversight of AI. It argues for caution and…

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Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.

• China notes, July ’23: on technological momentum

  My 2022 letter will probably be my last. Now I have to devise another use for this site. Since I’ve just spent a few days in Singapore, joining various roundtables to discuss China, I thought I would write up the notes…

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Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.

• One process programming notes (with Go and SQLite)

  2018 July 30 Blog-ified version of a talk I gave at Go Northwest. This content covers my recent exploration of writing internet services, iOS apps, and macOS programs as an indie developer. There are several topics here…

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