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Ben Kuhn x.com
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.
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19 September
18 September
15 September
14 September
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Their words
foundation is ostensibly a sci-fi series about empires, psychohistory, and hard technology, but really it's about individuals with extreme agency and puzzle-solving ability having wildly outsized impact on a universe that would otherwise just sit there waiting to decay
12 September
11 September
From one piece @mitchellh on X 2 beliefs · x.com
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korrents.com
The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency.Their words
The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency.
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Their words
I can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea.
10 September
8 September
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Their words
At a fundamental level, they’re just hostile to the idea of expertise in any domain, in pretty much every agency where there’s something to know, where there’s technical stuff that you need to know to make good decisions. The people who actually know things, or the people who are willing to speak up about what they know, have been silenced, purged.
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korrents.com
In an age of abundant information, a person's judgment, taste and perspective are their primary value as a writer.Their words
Information is ridiculously abundant. Your judgment, taste, and perspective are literally all you have to work with now.
7 September
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Their words
especially with AI now I'd say anyone can try, and non-technical people with the best ideas, creativity/taste and understanding of whatever cultural zeitgeist we're in can win
2 September
1 September
From one piece Measles deaths debacle, Covid-19 protection for immunocompromised, and more 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Political actors, not scientific staff, are the ones altering official health agency data in this case.Their words
Clearly, scientists aren't updating the data. Politicians are.
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korrents.com
A federal health agency withholding local disease-death data signals it distrusts states' own reporting.Their words
So, withholding the data signals that CDC is choosing not to trust the states' account. This is an unprecedented move.
31 August
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korrents.com
Human initiative to experiment without waiting for instructions is increasingly important for getting value from AI.Their words
Human agency, the willingness to push, experiment and act without waiting for instructions, seems increasingly important to getting value out of AI
26 August
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Their words
The other thing I'd say is that most organizations don't know what they want. They don't know how to make it better. They're not bottlenecked on implementation. They're bottlenecked on ideas. They're bottlenecked on vision. They're bottlenecked on taste. And if you don't have those element in excess of your implementational capacity, it doesn't help. So you can make a lot of shitty ideas come true, then what?
24 August
16 August
14 August
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Their words
making intelligence cheap does not automatically make “agency” cheap. people are constrained by time, money, confidence, health, education, institutions, family, geography; a model does not magic any of that away. there’s a perfectly believable future where these tools mostly compound the advantage of people who already have the skill, taste, money and the spare time to use them well.
12 August
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Their words
Something intertwined with this story, which I stumbled upon when thinking about agents, is how your pace of understanding won't increase by using agents.
11 August
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
Clean CodeTheir words
Clean Code is another standard recommendation, but that one wasn't for me. There are useful design principles in there worth studying, but the book as a whole is too narrow and a bit too dogmatic for my taste. Your mileage might vary.
10 August
From one piece Using AI to Increase Your Intelligence & Enrich Humanity | Dr. Fei-Fei Li 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
we need to think about AI as a tool that helps us in our agency. It does it should not take away our agency and people who lead in today's AI should not try to talk like that this this work will take away agency from people.
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Their words
The other kind of danger is in the name of agency and and uh and motivation the tools are denied to our students because we're worried you cheat or worry you only got your answer from Chad GBT. That is very bad as well
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korrents.com
The worst outcome of AI for young people is that it takes away their agency and their motivation to learn.Their words
The absolute bad outcome is that our young generation, their agency and human level motivation of learning and living is taken away by tools. So doom scrolling, passive watching of shorts, all this are not helping agency, human agency.
9 August
6 August
From one piece On the Perils of Self-Assessing... 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
Could this phrase or sentence or paragraph or section be improved, even a little? That is, can I make myself (on this very localized turf) make myself dislike it less?
On the Perils of Self-Assessing...georgesaunders.substack.com
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korrents.com
A first draft should not be graded good or bad; it is only the material that taste then gets to act on.Their words
Just don’t do it. Accept it, whatever it is, as a starting place in the long game of exerting your taste on your own prose.
On the Perils of Self-Assessing...georgesaunders.substack.com
5 August
30 July
From one piece Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
When agents do the building, the scarce skill is taste: choosing which problem is worth the time at all.Their words
Yeah, I mean I think it's really having incredibly good taste in what you ask your agents to work on, right? That is the the crux of you know from my background uh a research problem. You know, a researcher can have all the tools and all the techniques, but often most of the battle is what problem are you gonna spend your time on?
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Their words
Um, another way you can get more experience for yourself is to just write down a bunch of things you think might be important in the next 12 months. And maybe you pick one of them to work on, but go back and evaluate in 12 months of these other things, which ones actually seemed important or which ones did other people in the world go out and and create and which ones did they did not seem to do yet.
29 July
From one piece Alexandr Wang: “This is a Once-in-a-Civilization Opportunity” 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The scarce resource is about to stop being intelligence or agency and become vision and ambition.Their words
all of a sudden, the scarce resource isn't going to be intelligence or agency. I really think it's going to be vision and ambition.
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Their words
we believe that everybody in the world, you know, all the billions of people in the world are going to have a super intelligence that is adapted and tailored to them, that is enables them to accomplish their goals, knows their context, and ultimately is an expander of their own agency.
28 July
From one piece Sam Altman: "Never a Better Time to Do a Startup" 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
if every year people have more freedom and agency to spend more of their time doing the stuff they want to do and they feel like the quality of life and the quality of their time is going up year after year, we'll probably be mostly okay.
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Their words
there's like one dystopia that I'm particularly nervous about 10 years from now is we overreact to AI safety.
22 July
19 July
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Their words
It was instead a very strongly held opinion that that you get to excellence by giving people a lot of agency and accountability. By pushing decisions as deep in the organization as possible, hiring great people who can be trusted to have good judgment and make good decisions.
14 July
10 July
9 July
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korrents.com
AI tends to flatten outputs toward sameness, so personal taste and perspective become the main way to stand out.Their words
AI flattens everything it touches. The way you stand out is by getting clearer about what you really want, your taste, your perspective, your opinions.
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Their words
you've got these other generalists doing design, you've got engineers doing design, product staff doing design, but I'm actually pretty long on design or designers because they tend to have taste and I think that is something that is much more difficult to imagine being automated away.
5 July
From one piece If You Want Taste, You're Gonna Have to Eat 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
AI has made ability nearly free, making taste the main bottleneck separating good creators from mediocre ones.Their words
As AI has allowed more and more people to create things, the biggest differentiation, the biggest skill people are lacking, is taste itself.
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korrents.com
Taste is not about consensus or criticism, but the courage to value what genuinely resonates with you.Their words
Taste isn't consensus. It's not judgment first, either. It's easy to be a critic. Curiosity has to come first, because without curiosity you never broaden your horizons.
30 June
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Rishi Dandelion GingerTheir words
Rishi Dandelion Ginger. Extraordinary and surprising. And most things taste better mixed with tonic.
29 June
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korrents.com
AI models default to generic, lowest-common-denominator output unless a user actively pushes back against them.Their words
If the user doesn't actively push back against the AI model, then they get the generic output, the lowest common acceptable denominator of aesthetics and taste.
26 June
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korrents.com
Models have no research taste yet, which is why they complement researchers rather than replace them.Their words
one thing I see for research in particular is they don't have very good research taste right now and so I think they're actually a very good complement to researchers
24 June
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Their words
I think like in startups the term is agency. Like somebody who's high agency who's just going to get things done, who's never going to like say no to something. I think like that attitude is really important of like okay, if I don't know something, I'll just learn it.
20 June
7 June
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Their words
crema is composed of lots of carbon dioxide, fines, oils, and bitter compounds.
30 May
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korrents.com
A digital-service team embedded in an unchanged agency produces no lasting change once it moves on.Their words
A digital service team that works with an agency that continues to hire and manage for the same jobs they did last year, and structures the work in the same way it did last year, is just a tourist.
28 May
24 May
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Their words
GPT 5.5 is the only model though that has the sense of agency and confidence to just like rip out old code and just like actually rewrite from first principles.
20 May
6 May
3 May
1 May
2 April
26 March
From one piece Why tech bros are obsessed with "taste" 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
The online ecosystem has become so degraded that it has impaired people's ability to exercise taste.Their words
Another conclusion might be that the online ecosystem has become so polluted-so fragmented, deceptive, overstimulating, ersatz-that it has warped our ability to exercise taste at all.
Why tech bros are obsessed with "taste"kylechayka.substack.com
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korrents.com
AI companies promote themselves around 'taste' because their products are unappealing outside tech circles.Their words
A.I. companies need to associate themselves with taste precisely because their tools are not very palatable, much less cool, to anyone outside of Silicon Valley.
Why tech bros are obsessed with "taste"kylechayka.substack.com
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korrents.com
Tech's embrace of 'taste' is an attempt to dress anti-humanist technology in humanist branding.Their words
We might call what's going on now "taste-washing," an attempt to give anti-humanist technologies a veneer of liberal humanism.
Why tech bros are obsessed with "taste"kylechayka.substack.com
25 March
9 February
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korrents.com
Craftsmanship, taste, and human judgment remain valuable in software development despite AI-assisted coding tools.Their words
There is value in good taste, there is value in craftsmanship, and there is value in human judgment.
1 January
28 December 2025
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Lovedrcmnd.app
There Is No Antimemetics DivisionTheir words
There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm is a mind-bending psychological thriller about a secret agency tasked with fighting dangerous "antimemes"—ideas that refuse to be remembered. Plenty of stories start with a clever high-concept premise and just let it play out. This one pushes its premise to extremes I never imagined possible, ratcheting up an astonishing amount of tension along the way.
28 November 2025
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korrents.com
Dripper diameter, with other brew variables held fixed, does not change extraction or taste — only batch size.Their words
changing the dripper diameter, keeping all other important variables fixed, has no impact on the brew mechanics and the resulting cup, in an "idealized" scenario
26 November 2025
16 October 2025
From one piece Figma’s CEO: Why AI makes design, craft, and quality the new moat for startups | Dylan Field 4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
I think the best, you know, designers on the product side can turn it on and off. They can go, I have my own taste. I know what I like. And then, okay, you're going for this. And that might be different than what I like, but I can match it brand as well.
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korrents.com
A lot of people can match a framework for taste; almost nobody can create one, and creating one is the rare skill.Their words
I think that for those who can create and then articulate a framework around what is taste for us that is really a important skill and uh then I think people can a lot of people can basically match a framework not many people can create the framework.
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Their words
It's just this loop of okay, I'm having an experience of any sense. Maybe I'm looking at art, maybe I'm hearing music, maybe I'm literally eating food and tasting something, you know, but like do I like it? Do I not like it? Why?
+ 1 more
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Their words
And there is something about judgment in there too. you know, uh, implied in taste is that some things are good and some things are bad. So, I think you have to be willing to lean into that yourself in terms of uh, being high judgment.
7 October 2025
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korrents.com
As AI lowers the barrier to building software, personal taste becomes a more valuable differentiator.Their words
But along with the question of what you're willing to maintain, as the barriers to creation drop the value of taste will only increase.
5 October 2025
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Their words
I saw some of the highest performers just being people that had very high agency, had that clock speed, had that energy. Um, yes, they they cared about the mission, but they didn't necessarily need to have deep experience on that matter. And in fact, sometimes that experience could be a crutch in certain ways. Especially in this world where the grounds are shifting so fast with AI, a lot of your like learn habits actually need to be intentionally discarded. You know, you need to have a beginner's mind on this type of stuff.
1 October 2025
21 September 2025
19 August 2025
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Their words
My model is that research requires a mix of skills. The day-to-day coding and execution is crucial. But there's also a set of harder-to-learn conceptual skills, collectively called research taste. These skills take a long time to gain because they have poor feedback loops, but they take very little time to use.
25 July 2025
23 July 2025
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Their words
So picking the right question is the hardest part of science and making the right hypothesis. And that's what today's systems definitely they can't do. So I often say it's harder to come up with a conjecture, a really good conjecture than it is to solve it.
24 June 2025
12 June 2025
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korrents.com
Today's NASA is a shadow of the agency it once was.Their words
It is clear, however, that today’s NASA is but a shadow of its former self.
3 June 2025
19 April 2025
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korrents.com
Different people's areas of strongest judgment or taste rarely overlap much with each other.Their words
it's quite rare for different people's "zone of best taste" to overlap very much.
25 March 2025
From one piece The Death of Product Development as We Know it 2 beliefs · lg.substack.com
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Their words
Welcome to the era of AI-native companies, where individual contributors (ICs) reign supreme.
The Death of Product Development as We Know itlg.substack.com
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Their words
Good taste: taste is the ability to distinguish excellence from mediocrity. The hand can never consistently produce better than the eye can discern.
The Death of Product Development as We Know itlg.substack.com
5 March 2025
19 January 2025
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Their words
But to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, uh often a million dollars plus
22 December 2024
From one piece Adam Frank: Alien Civilizations and the Search for Extraterrestrial Life | Lex Fridman Podcast #455 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Large language models will not get to real agency, because a mind has to be embedded in a world through a body.Their words
But they said, "Look, in the end, actually the only way to actually get a real brain in the VAT is actually to have a brain in a body." And it could be a robot body, but you still need a brain in the body. So I don't think LLMs will get there because they can't. You really need to be embedded in a world, at least that's the E-four idea.
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Their words
And what I've come to now is the most important question for physics is, what is life? What the hell is the difference between a rock and a cell, fundamentally? And what I really mean by this, this is where I'm going to go non-traditional, is that really the fundamental question that is agency.
16 December 2024
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Mixed onrcmnd.app
First, Break all the RulesTheir words
Gallup interviewed thousands of high-performing teams and managers and found a dozen of things each of these teams had in common. While the insights are good, the content itself was quite dry for my taste.
2 October 2024
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Their words, before
The required organizational transition is equivalent in scope and difficulty to the Apollo program, and will be made or broken during the tenure of the next NASA administrator.
Their words now
At the time I was optimistic, now I am not.
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Their words
This is symptomatic of an agency who, compromising their technical integrity on their flagship program, subsequently lost the ability to maintain technical integrity anywhere else.
22 April 2024
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Their words
What a large language model is trying to do is to predict text. That’s what it does. And it is leveraging the fact that we human beings for very good evolutionary biology reasons, attribute intentionality and intelligence and agency to things that act like human beings.
5 February 2024
3 February 2024
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Likedrcmnd.app
ArabsTheir words
3000 years of factual Arab history, and personal insights from this Oxford Brit who lived in Yemen for 37 years, translates classical Arabic, and clearly cares a lot. Huge and thorough but really wonderful for those with the interest. I loved his writing style and poetic asides. Read my notes here for a taste. What a great book.
10 January 2024
From one piece How to be more agentic 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
In my way of thinking, radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant.
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Their words
Most subject matter is learnable, even stuff that seems really hard. But beyond that, many (most?) traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite malleable if you (1) believe they are and (2) put the same kind of work into learning them as you would anything else.
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korrents.com
A drop in agency is the earliest sign of burnout, arriving before you consciously notice you are burning out.Their words
Burnout is the ultimate agency-killer. This is so true that I’ve learned to identify a reduction in agency as one of the first signs of burnout, one that shows up even before I consciously realize what’s happening.
28 September 2023
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Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app
CuckooTheir words
It turns out that a breakthrough rice cooker is a bargain, even if it seems expensive at first. The Cuckoo is an extraordinary device. It comes in many shapes and colors, most of them will not be to your taste, but persist until you find one.
1 September 2023
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korrents.com
Beauty is agency: a thing is beautiful because it has agency, not because of how it looks.Their words
To me, beauty is agency. To me, something that has agency, it is beautiful.
12 January 2023
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Their words
Just giving more support to agencies in their current configuration is not going to help. To the contrary, it only confirms that profligacy gets rewarded.
High Costs are not About Precaritypedestrianobservations.com
19 August 2022
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Lovedrcmnd.app
Steam DeckTheir words
The Steam Deck was my first taste of PC gaming in a handheld form factor and I love the snot out of my deck.
10 October 2020
Nothing matches.
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