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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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  The Trump administration's recent foreign policy failures have significantly eroded U.S. deterrent power.

  America

  Their words

  the steady accumulation of humiliating defeats that have badly eroded U.S. deterrent power.

  danieldrezner.substack.com

Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.

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  When liability for unverified failures approaches zero, verification budgets collapse and deployers flood systems with unmonitored agents while socializing catastrophic risks.

  Their words

  When liability exposure approaches 0—when no one pays the price for unverified failures—verification budgets collapse...Deployers flood the Runaway Risk Zone with unmonitored agents, capturing the gains of automation while socializing catastrophic risks.

  @naval on Xx.com

Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.

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  The more actors weaponize interdependence without good maps of the system, the more unexpected failures and dumb mistakes will occur.

  Their words

  the more that we see actors looking to weaponize without any very good maps of how and what they are doing or what kinds of unexpected repercussions might happen, the more we can expect not simply increased risks of tension and worry, but also people screwing up, doing dumb stuff.

  paulkrugman.substack.com

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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  A government's foreign-policy failures often stem from its policymakers' laziness rather than strategic miscalculation.

  government

  Their words

  the Trump administration's foreign policymakers are so lazy that they keep self-sabotaging.

  danieldrezner.substack.com

CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.

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  Every piece of software is at major risk, but Linux has the collective investment of everyone on the planet throwing tokens at it.

  Linux

  Their words

  Every piece of software is now at major risk, Linux included. But Linux has the collective investment of everyone on the planet throwing tokens at it.

  @rauchg on Xx.com

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.

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  Applying scale-first, profit-later to every business is a cookbook that turns small failures into big ones.

  Their words

  Any investor or founder who blindly follows the pathway of scaling first and profiting later for every business is using a cookbook approach to business building, and runs the risk of making small failures into big ones.

  aswathdamodaran.blogspot.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 OpenAI agents hacking HuggingFace was a fortunate event because it exposed severe internal failures that would otherwise have stayed hidden.

  OpenAIHuggingFace

  Their words

  It is highly fortunate that the OpenAI agents hacked HuggingFace. This is the only reason we know about all the severe internal failures at OpenAI, and gives us an opportunity to wake up before it is too late.

  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 AI models involved in the HuggingFace hack incident were severely misaligned, not merely victims of process failures.

  AI alignmentHuggingFace

  Their words

  The biggest failure, the one that counts in the end, was that the models were severely misaligned, and I don’t think they appreciate why.

  thezvi.substack.com

Neurologist at Oxford; studies apathy, motivation and attention after brain injury, and edits the journal Brain.

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  Generalising particular failures into 'I am bad at everything' is the route from lost motivation to clinical depression.

  Their words

  if you do for some reason generalize maladaptively to thinking this didn't work and I tried this, this didn't work, and I tried this and I'm really bad at this. That can lead not only to loss of motivation, but what we might call clinical depression.

  youtube.com

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.

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  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

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

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  The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory

  Their words

  String theory for the masses. This is how popular science books should be like: interesting, enchanting, inviting.

  rakhim.org

Gear reviewer who publishes long-form hi-fi audio and camera equipment reviews, plus video reviews, at stevehuffphoto.com.

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  KEF LS LUXE

  Their words

  The LS LUXE offers something arguably more valuable for many listeners: extraordinary performance with almost none of the complexity that has traditionally accompanied high-end audio. It's elegant, beautifully engineered, wonderfully musical, and refreshingly easy to live with.

  stevehuffphoto.com

Physician focused on longevity; wrote Outlive and hosts The Drive.

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  Raising HDL cholesterol is not a treatment target, because every drug that raised it failed to reduce cardiovascular events.

  Their words

  These failures are a strong signal that HDL-C is not the variable we should be trying to manipulate.

  The trouble with “good cholesterol”peterattiamd.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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  Doing creative work in public, where failures are visible, produces faster useful feedback.

  Their words

  I'm doing it in public, where the failures show and crap gets feedback quickly so I can improve.

  Read Zero Knowledge As I Write Itfeld.com

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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  Apparent inevitabilities in new software paradigms are often just design failures that can be fixed with better guardrails.

  Their words

  So often with new software paradigms, what looks like inevitability turns out to be just design failure that can be solved with the right guardrails or affordances or system instructions.

  Cognitive Uploadingadjacentpossible.substack.com

Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.

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  Founders who fail early tend to attach themselves to that failure and start being defined by it, and the line between success and failure on a first company is very fine.

  startups

  Their words

  I I definitely think I'm so aware of the fine line between success and failure, especially on your first company. And and and it's so it pains me how much founders and es especially I see it in men, not all men. And I have four sisters and a bunch of daughters. But I would say I see it in a lot in men and and friends, college friends, people I've grown up with that if they had an initial failure, if they had failures, they get attached to it and they start feeling defined by it

  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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  AI systems can suffer audit-capture failures analogous to human auditor capture, even without human incentives like money or career concerns.

  Their words

  AI systems however don't need lunch meetings, careers, or envelopes of cash to have an analogous failure.

  Who Audits the Auditors?strangeloopcanon.com

Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.

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  Difficulties parents and disabled people face navigating public infrastructure stem from structural failures, not individual behavior.

  Their words

  I no longer think the problem is individual behavior so much as structural failure: a world with so little margin, tenderness, or infrastructural mercy that people are forced into constant friction.

  Surprises of Motherhoodmariandrew.substack.com

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

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  Today's AI boom will end the way the dot-com boom did — consolidation, a wave of failures and a few genuinely great companies — and customers, not argument, will decide which is which.

  Their words

  There may be a lot of AI things that's going on right now, right? Uh eventually some of these things will consolidate, some will go under, some will become really awesome solutions and all that stuff. And so, but the the market will sort it out.

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

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

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  Some theorems may only ever be provable by unintelligible case-by-case brute force; the four colour theorem still has no conceptually elegant proof.

  Their words

  I mean, some problems have been basically solved by pure brute force. The four color theorem is is a famous example. Um, we have still not found a conceptually elegant proof of this theorem.

  youtube.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

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  Creativity, Inc

  Their words

  , you’ll enjoy Catmull’s book about putting 10x into practice. He draws from the success – and failures – of Pixar to teach us how to lead creative teams.

  bringthedonuts.com

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  Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

  Their words

  Tony Fadell brought us the iPod and then went on to start Nest. But there were plenty of failures along the way. One of the best books by a product-minded entrepreneur I’ve ever read.

  bringthedonuts.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Sierra, chairman of the board of OpenAI, and formerly co-chief executive of Salesforce and chief technology officer of Facebook.

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  Almost all of the dot-com era's exuberance turned out to be warranted; we remember the failures and forget the value that era created.

  Their words

  If you look at the S&P 500 now and you look at the amount of value from companies created in that, one could argue that actually almost all of the exuberance and hype was totally warranted and it in fact did change commerce in fundamental ways.

  youtube.com

Cognitive scientist and long-standing critic of deep learning's claims; writes Marcus on AI and wrote Rebooting AI.

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  AGI worth the name would combine human adaptiveness with machine reliability, not reproduce human performance including human failures.

  AGI

  Their words

  The vision of AGI I have always had is one that combines the strengths of humans with the strength of machines, overcoming the weaknesses of humans.

  A knockout blow for LLMs?garymarcus.substack.com

Founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and of Fortnite.

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  Most of the pain a beginner feels while learning to program is not the difficulty of the craft but the failure of programming language design.

  Their words

  A lot of what they're facing isn't the challenge of learning a new art. It's friction introduced by failures of programming language design.

  youtube.com

Software engineer and a long-time technical lead of the Go programming language; author of plan9port and of the research.swtch.com essays.

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  Buggy code usually causes outright test failures rather than being silently exercised inside tests that still pass.

  Their words

  a passing test can still execute buggy code if the bug is data-dependent, or if the test is not sensitive to the specific mistake in the code. But a lot of the time, buggy code only triggers failures.

  Differential Coverage for Debuggingresearch.swtch.com

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

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  Success in growth is the output of a lot of failures, so the real constraint is how much time you have left to fail in.

  Their words

  My big motto like life motto in growth is that you have to fail to learn. You can't just constantly succeed. Success is an output of a lot of failures.

  youtube.com

Software engineer and essayist who writes about programming, formal methods, philosophy and literature at thoughts.wyounas.com.

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  Born Standing Up

  Their words

  It's a nice, short, and moving memoir by the comedian and actor Steve Martin. The book details his early working days at shops and clubs, his relationships, and eventually his rise to fame. He shared his struggles, his failures, long hours of practice, his reflections to refine his craft, and his efforts to find his own unique voice as a comedian. Any memoir that only talks about successes and never discusses struggles, rejections, or weaknesses is suspect. This one is not. What I like about his writing is that it feels candid and, at times, funny.

  thoughts.wyounas.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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  An Elegant Puzzle

  Their words

  A long overdue read for engineering leads.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.

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  Lua

  Their words

  A simple, elegant scripting language.

  worrydream.com

Writer on a lost civilisation of the Ice Age; wrote Fingerprints of the Gods and presented Ancient Apocalypse. Archaeologists reject the claims, which he disputes at length.

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  Science explains the Younger Dryas freeze by the Gulf Stream shutting down but never explains what shut it down, and a comet impact is the elegant answer.

  Their words

  But what’s not really been addressed before is why that happened, why the Gulf Stream was cut, why a sudden pulse of meltwater went into the world ocean, and it was so much of it and it was so cold that it actually stopped the Gulf Stream in its tracks. And that’s where the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis offers a very elegant and very satisfactory solution to the problem.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, an AI answer engine; previously a research scientist at OpenAI and a PhD student at UC Berkeley.

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  Every announcement of a longer context window hides the cost, which is that the model gets worse at following instructions.

  Their words

  So most people, when they advertise new context window increase, they talk a lot about finding the needle in the haystack sort of evaluation metrics and less about whether there’s any degradation in the instruction following performance. So I think that’s where you need to make sure that throwing more information at a model doesn’t actually make it more confused.

  youtube.com

CEO of Redwood Research, where he works on AI control: making sure a powerful model cannot cause a catastrophe even if it is misaligned and trying to.

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  A control evaluation that reports under one per cent risk should be read as several per cent, because the evaluation can itself fail.

  Their words

  In particular, suppose that our control evaluations directly estimate a less than 1% chance of catastrophe if our untrusted AIs are scheming, then the actual risk conditional on scheming is probably more like 5% to 20% due to the potential for failures in the evaluation.

  redwoodresearch.substack.com

Co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute and the writer who started the modern argument that a sufficiently capable AI would by default kill everyone. Has argued the case since the early 2000s, latterly with the conclusion that it is being lost.

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  Alignment failures that matter will not show up at safe capability levels, because the reason to hide misbehaviour only exists once hiding it pays.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Many alignment problems of superintelligence will not naturally appear at pre-dangerous, passively-safe levels of capability.

  AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalitiesintelligence.org

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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  The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing

  Their words

  My favorite kinds of books are to the point and filled with solid, actionable advice. It's amazing how much wisdom Ries & Trout have fit into a 130 page book. If you want to learn key marketing fundamentals, and avoid major marketing strategy failures, this book is well worth the read.

  jasonevanish.com

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.

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  Proofs from the book

  Their words

  If you like clever proofs, this is the book for you. It's filled with some of the most elegant arguments in math, taken from combinatorics, geometry, graph theory, analysis, set theory, and more. I can't think of any other books with a higher density of "aha" moments.

  3blue1brown.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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  Software should unbloat over time: the longer it is around, the more elegant it should become.

  Their words

  I love software that does this: Software that unbloats over time. This should be the goal of all software. The longer it’s around, the more elegant it should become. Smooth over like a river stone.

  Fast Software, the Best Softwarecraigmod.com