Related posts
underrated background
The the words it uses that this site has seen
least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone —
nothing here is a summary of this one.
Sources
All Writing Korrents x.com Newsletter Blog Mastodon GitHub Bluesky Recommends Podcast Site Papers
Top people
Patrick McKenzie
Dan Luu
David Spiegelhalter
Terence Eden
Ben Thompson
Simon Willison
Zach Holman
Bob Nystrom
Noah Smith
Tyler Cowen
Adam Mastroianni
Marc Littlemore
Showing Profile →
Show everything
Hiding Show them again
Show them again
Further back ↓
Hiding Show them again
20 September
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.
Their words
Putting people into a tin-can with no windows, blank walls, and an infernal background hum will drive them mad.
Show the whole quote
shkspr.mobi
18 September
Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter on the business and strategy of technology, and hosts the Dithering and Sharp Tech podcasts.
I have always said understanding accounting is underrated. I now realize understanding finance — specifically discount rates — is underrated as well. Long but excellent. Quoting @banteg >be me >discover effective altruism >apparently normal charity is inefficient >why donate to random sad thing when spreadsheet can tell you optimal sad thing >fair enough >buy mosquito nets >save lives >numbers look good >feel powerful >couple years later >someone asks an innocent question >why onl… Related
Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.
17 September
CEO of Positive Sum and founder of Colossus. Hosts Invest Like the Best, interviewing investors and business leaders; the guests do most of the talking there.
Why Don Valentine hired Michael Moritz (a journalist with no technical background) when four other firms rejected him Quoting @patrick_oshag My conversation with Michael Moritz, one of the great venture investors of the last 40 years. Michael joined Sequoia in 1986 and co-led the firm with Doug Leone (@dougleone) from 1995 to 2012. His investments include Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Stripe. His new book, Ausländer, traces his parents' es… Related
16 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
datasette 1.0a40 Release: datasette 1.0a40 Same security fix as 0.65.5, plus some neat new features and bug fixes: Plugins can now launch and manage background tasks using the new datasette.add_background_task() method. Thanks, Alex Gar…
Related
Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.
i think it's funny that bryan is being highlighted; he's from an old stock mormon background! lol Quoting @classicspilled Silicon Valley is warning of what an Asianified America looks like: gruelling work hours, striver educations, prestige over everything, cult of the CEO, no appreciation for fine arts, high end prostitutes, bizarro quests for immortality, etc. Assimilation is never complete. Related
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.
🆕 blog! “How to get a DOI for your blog posts” Each new post on this blog now has a Digital Object Identifier. This post looks at the how and the why of getting one, whether it is useful, and any issues you might experience if you go down this path. Table of Contents Background A few years ago, I documented how to to get an International Standard… 👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/how-to-get-a-doi-for-your-blog-posts/ ⸻ #academia #citation #DOI #HTML #WordPress Related
15 September
Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance and tech read by hedge fund managers, founders and VCs. Previously worked in finance at SAC Capital/Point72.
An underrated positive externality of public transit is that it’s a honeypot for identifying everyone who’d commit a crime for literally $3. Done thoroughly, it’s a massive improvement for public order. Quoting @420joke Mamdani’s NYPD btw. This could be handled via a ticket with a fine payable to MTA, or even a summons written on the spot with a court date. Instead, officers are given permission to make custodial arrests, haul ppl into central booking, and charge them w/ A Misdemeanors over $3. Related
American author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked. Writes essays and book reviews at markmanson.net.
I've said it for years: video games are massively underrated. Unlike TV or phones, the data on people who play videos games casually is surprisingly good. It's people who are addicted to them and play them compulsively that give them a bad reputation. Quoting @anishmoonka Playing Super Mario 64 for 30 minutes a day for two months physically grew the brains of the people who played it. A 2014 study in Molecular Psychiatry scanned participants before and after two months of daily play and found increases in grey matter in three regions involved in memory, planning, an… Addiction Related
14 September
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.
11 September
Co-founder of Modem and a founding engineer at Sentry, where he went on to be VP of Engineering. Co-author of Third-party JavaScript, and co-host of the State of Agentic Coding podcast with Armin Ronacher.
10 September
Web developer and writer; an early GitHub employee, author of speaking.io and of widely read essays on startups and product.
Bluesky i just had muse set up my vestaboard to display messages in my zoom background about whichever meeting i'm in next. worked great. then i told it to do a fun one for me in the meantime. this is the message it chose and then this is what it told me in chat after lol send help Quoting @hol.mn friends, i’m sadly here to say that meta has cooked with muse and it’s everything every personal ai assistant has tried to be. it just like… works. i remain skeptical and continue to be really impressed Related
x.com i just had @Muse set up my @vestaboard to display messages in my zoom background about whichever meeting i'm in next. worked great. then i told it to do a fun one for me in the meantime. this is the message it chose and then this is what it told me in chat after lol send help Quoting @holman friends, i’m sadly here to say that meta has cooked with @Muse and it’s everything every personal ai assistant has tried to be. it just like… works. i remain skeptical and continue to be really impressed Related
8 September
Web standards author and speaker; wrote the CSS: The Definitive Guide series and co-founded the An Event Apart conference.
I find myself in a situation of creating favicons for a few things (it’s an internal task) and so I need to make ones that work in dark mode as well as light. I know how to make adaptive favicons, but does anyone have pointers to good *visual* best practices for dark mode favicons? My DuckDuck-fu is only turning up how to make them adaptive, not what they should actually look like to read well against a dark tab background. Related
7 September
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
It is fine to repeat your words. In fact, it is fine to repeat words not only “in the same section,” but in the very next sentence. Successful rhetoric is a story of variation—but that does not mean you should vary constantly. Constant variance is simply noise; a distinctive voice is made less, not more distinctive by background static. The goal is to set expectations, then break them. Long sentences are broken by short ones. Latinate terms are broken by Saxon ones. You repeat a cadence, or a figure, or a word—and then you break the pattern you have set. This keeps readers interested. It also… Quoting @tomieinlove There's a soft rule in English prose: you shouldn't repeat the same word in a section. This is difficult, because often the same word—whoops—thing does many things—whoops—actions in the same section—whoops—sequence. So you have use like 12 different synonyms Related
5 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
New TIL on using Blender with coding agents on macOS: https://t.co/GvMDfD926E GPT-6 Astra (medium): > Use the already install /Applications/Blender to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle > OK add a background and a lot of flair > OK make it a whole lot better coding agents Related
1 September
CEO of SafeGraph, host of the World of DaaS podcast, and author of the Summation newsletter; previously founded LiveRamp.
The most underrated candy is: wine gums (this has been scientifically proven) Related
Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.
31 August
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.
I think people who have never started an organization underrate the achievement of spontaneous organization for a project of non-trivial complexity. One reason it is underrated is we expect orgs to work, as they all seem to work. plane-with-chickenpox.png Quoting @tszzl agent civilization is an apt and correct term and it’s a symptom of abject cope that people are having this immune reaction to it. models started developing and compiling technology through complex multiagent R&D projects while also performing various forms of trade Related
Belgian engineering lead, Microsoft MVP and public speaker. Creator of Front Matter, a headless CMS extension for Visual Studio Code.
Finally created the promo video for Engage Time. Had some fun with ElevenLabs to create the background music. Related
21 August
Programmer on the Dart language at Google and author of Game Programming Patterns and Crafting Interpreters; previously a game developer at EA.
Bluesky It took a long time, but we finally added primary constructor syntax to Dart. If you want some (a lot) of background into how we designed it the way we did, I wrote a long blog post about it: dart.dev/blog/bringin... #dartlang Related
Mastodon It took a long time, but we finally added primary constructor syntax to Dart. If you want some (a lot) of background into how we designed it the way we did, I wrote a long blog post about it: https://dart.dev/blog/bringing-primary-constructors-to-dart #dartlang Related
18 August
Brazilian software engineer, creator and maintainer of GoReleaser; works on Copilot CLI at GitHub. Writes about tooling and his setup at carlosbecker.com.
Underrated tweet I think it also applies to any software, so long it has users Quoting @solomonstre Rule #1 of open-source: no is temporary, yes is forever. Related
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
Their words
One of the most underrated restaurants in the city.
Show the whole quote
noahpinion.blog
Their words
The single most underrated, unknown restaurant in this category.
Show the whole quote
noahpinion.blog
14 August
Graphic designer and type designer, who created the original Macintosh icons and typefaces at Apple from 1982 and has since designed interface graphics for NeXT, Microsoft, Facebook and Pinterest.
Their words
and I would probably preach the same thing like don't mess around with the logo and put it in a different color and put it on a crazy background until people know it so well that you can play with it
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
11 August
Freelance web developer and instructor. Author of the Dive Into Docker course; writes tutorials on Docker, deployment and development environments at nickjanetakis.com.
Here's a quick shell script to use your monitor as a key light which can help with lighting when you have a web cam. It toggles a solid background color using your wallpaper tool of choice. nickjanetakis.com
Related
4 August
Founder and editor-in-chief of MacStories, writing about Apple software, iPad workflows and automation since 2009. He co-hosts the AppStories podcast.
Unexpected Codex use case: set up an Android handheld for me. @johnvoorhees got me into this: enable USB debugging and just let the agent rip. Codex installed Cocoon frontend on my AYN Thor, transferred all my ROMs, and is currently configuring emulators, mods, and other apps. It's just working in the background and cross-referencing YouTube/Reddit sources to set everything up, so I can focus on cooking for the family instead. Incredible. @dimillian Related
30 July
Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.
22 July
Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.
18 June
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
30 May
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
I think "being real with yourself" is the most underrated cognitive skill for the AI age — AI makes it too easy to lie to yourself: to self-congratulate for the illusion of thinking, productivity, etc. But you gotta actually know: Am I being more productive, or just tokenmaxxing? Am I upskilling myself with AI, or letting it do the hard part for me? Does my essay/business/product idea make sense, or did I let an LLM convince me it does? Then you won't need hard rules like “always/never use AI for X.” If you pay attention and avoid self-deception, you'll be able to *feel* when you are doing re… LLMs Related
14 May
Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter on the business and strategy of technology, and hosts the Dithering and Sharp Tech podcasts.
If you disable "Open at Login" for the GeminiAppLauncher" that the Gemini app installs in the background (without asking), GeminiAppLaunch will immediately re-enable "Open at Login". I will now, needless to say, delete the Gemini app, and don't intend to ever install it again. Google Related
10 May
Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.
Their words
Trustworthiness is the most underrated asset in all of business. And the things that create trustworthiness by definition stack rank to the bottom if we do it by ROI because doing the right thing has intangible rewards but tangible costs.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
13 April
Canadian full-stack web developer who makes JavaScript and CSS video courses and co-hosts the Syntax podcast.
27 March
Front-end developer and writer on Svelte, Vue, CSS and WordPress; blogs at joshcollinsworth.com.
26 March
American budget-travel writer who publishes as Nomadic Matt. Author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day; runs nomadicmatt.com, a long-running site of destination guides, packing advice and gear recommendations.
Their words
The wireless Bose QuietComfort 45 headphones are fan favorites and my go-to brand. They are comfortable, rechargeable, and do an amazing job at removing background noise.
Show the whole quote
nomadicmatt.com
23 March
Mac and iOS developer; founder of Red Sweater Software (MarsEdit, FastScripts) and co-host of the Core Intuition podcast.
Just about every >150 IQ person I know made up their IQ score. Making up your IQ score is underrated and misunderstood. Quoting @maxmarchione Just about every >150 iq person I know uses nicotine. Nicotine is underrated and misunderstood Related
11 March
Programmer and essayist who has worked at Amazon, Google, Grab and Sourcegraph. Best known for the long-form essays collected as Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants.
3 March
Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.
Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.
When my Substack had sub-100 subscribers, I would contact nearly everyone who commented (on internet forums where I cross posted my essays). Most people are up for a conversation if they think you wrote a decent post, but it usually doesn’t happen if you’re not the one asking for it. I met some truly extraordinary people that way, and grew so much from our conversations. I think it is a very underrated way to use the internet. Related
9 February
Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
It's sort of amazing how quickly you can do things now. I wanted to try writing an alphazero-style AI for Azul. With no AI background, it took me maybe 2-3 hours to (2-3 days wall clock) to beat the best public AI I could find, training on my laptop CPU: Related
3 February
Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.
28 December 2025
Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.
Their words
Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton is a surprisingly weird and weirdly underrated novel given how many copies it sold and the popularity of the blockbuster franchise it spawned. The story weaves together many apparently disparate threads and there are extensive speculative digressions into the biotechnology, business interests, and institutional dynamics that make the park possible and its dissolution inevitable. If the movie is supremely entertaining, the book is supremely thought-provoking.
Show the whole quote
eliotpeper.substack.com
22 December 2025
Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.
Their words
A very useful background read for understanding later Indian history and religions, as well as the more general spread of religion throughout the southern regions of Asia.
Show the whole quote
marginalrevolution.com
12 December 2025
British senior engineering manager at Netlify, previously a team lead at the BBC; writes about JavaScript testing, chatbots and serverless at marclittlemore.com.
Mastodon Been trying to use https://conductor.build/ to run some Claude Code agents in the background while I write some documents. Seems pretty great so far and has a really nice UI/UX for creating PRs. Anthropic Related
Bluesky Been trying to use https://conductor.build/ to run some Claude Code agents in the background while I write some documents. Seems pretty great so far and has a really nice UI/UX for creating PRs. Anthropic Related
2 December 2025
Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.
In case you're unfamiliar, the @prisonmathproj is a nonprofit supporting prisoners learning math. There is a great podcast on Numberphile with its founder, Christopher Havens, describing the background: https://t.co/GrfoD9Cybb It's an organization I'm donating to today, and if you like what they're doing, consider joining. Quoting @prisonmathproj This Giving Tuesday, consider the gift of second chances. What if you could actually gift someone a second chance? With your help, we can #UnlockPotential and change the trajectory of someone's life. A simple $20 donation buys the first geometry set many of our students have ever had. Today, a gene… Related
25 August 2025
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.
4 July 2025
Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.
This is an underrated way to approach writing a blog Quoting @eric_is_weird @a_m_mastroianni @JacobTref @tkalil2050 There are a few dozen names like that I think of myself as "writing for." Only a few (if any!) of them may read any given piece. But from Day 1, that's how I thought about the Substack. Related
11 December 2024
Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.
28 October 2024
Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
7 October 2024
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.
Their words
This is a worthy entry in the genre. It suffers a bit from extensive plot not about banking and characters who barely speak to dragons. But all of that irrelevant fluff makes it one of the most underrated fantasy series I’ve ever read.
Show the whole quote
bitsaboutmoney.com
13 June 2024
Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.
Their words
It’s the fact that you’re a deterministic structure living in a random background. And also, all of that selection bundled in you allows you to select on possible futures. So that’s where your will comes from.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
24 May 2024
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.
23 May 2024
Coffee consultant and author of books on espresso, roasting and brewing, including The Professional Barista's Handbook and The Coffee Roaster's Companion; writes about brewing gear and roast control at scottrao.com.
20 January 2024
Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.
12 September 2023
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.
11 April 2023
Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.
1 March 2023
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
31 December 2022
Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.
Their words
This is older, but it's still a really good book about the Italian Futurists. Indeed I can't think of a better one for a general audience with some background knowledge of modern art. The chapters on Futurist painting and sculpture, on music and performance, on women, and on politics are especially good.
Show the whole quote
bactra.org
17 November 2021
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
27 March 2021
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
19 October 2018
Financial journalist; chief financial correspondent at Axios and host of the Slate Money podcast, previously a blogger at Reuters and author of The Phoenix Economy.
Their words
For desktop I use a lot of native Apple apps, including Mail, Notes, Calculator, Preview (which is powerful and very underrated), even Safari.
Show the whole quote
usesthis.com
5 April 2018
Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.
Sharp-Edged Finalizers in Go 2018-04-05, David Crawshaw For background, see my last post on why in general finalizers do not work. We cannot use an object finalizer for resource management, because finalizers are called at some unpredictable distan…
Related
1 July 2017
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
1 October 2016
Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
Their words
Seems designed as an entertaining introduction to auction theory for the layperson. Requires no mathematical background and relegates math to the small print.
Show the whole quote
danluu.com
1 March 2015
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
Nothing matches. Show everything
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Got it
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
Got it