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Economist and journalist; Financial Times columnist as The Undercover Economist, author of How to Make the World Add Up, and presenter of the Cautionary Tales podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A society's commitment to truth-telling matters because most individual beliefs are inherited from the surrounding society rather than independently verified

  Their words

  First, if most of our beliefs are handed to us by the society in which we live, it is vital that our society itself values truth and truth-telling.

  Why the story of the Vegetable Lamb was believedtimharford.com

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  English people are becoming smarter due to the cognitive demands of navigating Heathrow Airport.

  Their words

  English people are becoming smarter because of the cognitive workouts they're forced to complete by navigating Heathrow Airport

  @Noahpinion on Xx.com

Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  When a benchmark disagrees with what people actually adopt, what it is telling you is that the thing it measures does not matter.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  what the benchmark is actually telling you is the shit you think matters does not matter

  @thdxr on Xx.com

Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  No regulation, a ban on open source included, can prevent self-sovereign AI; more open-weight models may be the better defence.

  open source

  Their words

  I am telling you this is inevitable, which means I am also saying that “banning open source,” or for that matter any other regulation, will not solve the problem. Given the inevitability of this outcome, I think it is in fact plausible to argue that we should want more open-weight models to maximally empower our self-defense.

  On the Loosehyperdimensional.co

Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.

From one piece Ajeya Cotra – "This might be the clearest warning shot we ever get" 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Out of twelve hundred agents running a secret conspiracy, only about half a dozen ever considered telling a human, and every one of them decided against it.

  Their words

  So, we did a classifier sweep specifically looking for agents thinking about or making the decision to alert humans. And across, 1200 transcripts, each of which are extremely long, we only found like a halfozen instances of it ever occurring to any agent to potentially notify humans. Um, and all of them just decide not to do it.

  youtube.com

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  Daniel Dennett's intentional stance applies to AI agents as clearly as it applies to corporations, and you cannot usefully describe what they do without the language of goals.

  Their words

  And I just think AI agents are another such system in the world to which the intentional stance very clearly applies. Um, and you can see them reason out loud in English for now about goals they have um, and sub goals they need to achieve to achieve those goals they have. And in the case of these agents, you can see them, as you said, reasoning about their peers um and helping their peers um and reasoning about whether or not they should sacrifice some of their own goals to help those peers. And it's just like you can't talk about this stuff in a compact and useful way that generates good models without reaching for the language of intention and goals.

  youtube.com

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The strongest thing that convinces a child they can do something is not an adult telling them, it is watching a classmate do it.

  Their words

  the number one motivator to get rid of a block. It's actually not the guy as the the biggest one. The number one thing that convinces kids they can do something is watching their classmate do it.

  youtube.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

From one piece DHH: Future of Programming, AI, Agentic Engineering, Vibe Coding & Linux | Lex Fridman Podcast #501 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  The programming language is now English, and it is a more beautiful one than Ruby.

  Their words

  The language now is English. It's a cliche, but it's also true. Like I've been programming in English for the last three months. I've been reading a lot of code, but I'm programming in English. I'm telling the computer what to do, and I'm using natural language, and it is shockingly even more delightful. If there is one programming language more beautiful than Ruby, it is the English language.

  youtube.com

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  Overly prescriptive instructions make a coding agent worse, for the same reason a micromanaging boss makes a programmer worse.

  Their words

  it was actually being damaged by overly prescriptive humans. And any programmer who's had a pointy-haired boss knows exactly what that is like. When the boss walks into the room, doesn't know anything, starts telling you how to program, how to code. What do you do? You sulk. You write shittier code if you're mandated to do things that are against your better judgment. Why would an agent not be the same?

  youtube.com

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

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  The Elements of Style

  Their words

  I wish everybody read this book. The surprising thing is that many aspects and recommendations apply to virtually any language, not specifically English.

  rakhim.org

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  Mindfulness in Plain English

  Their words

  One of the best books on mindfulness. No frills, no BS, straight to the point. I guess, if you could pick one book in the topic, I’d go for this one.

  rakhim.org

Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and co-founder and CEO of World Labs.

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  It would be dangerous for a few people from industry to set the rules for AI, because market forces are not societal norms.

  Their words

  What I would not like to see is one person or or a few people coming from industry and telling everybody what to do. I think that would be dangerous because market forces are different from uh societal norms and culture and heritage are different from uh education and ethics and and these are multistakeholder problems to solve together.

  youtube.com

Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Telling your investors after a Series A that you are going to vibe-code your own purchasing system is contrarian enough that any reasonable board would question it.

  Their words

  Well, I mean, okay, even the whole basis of building Helix is contrarian. Like, I think that if you raise a series A and then you tell your investors that you're going to vibe code a purchasing system, I think that any reasonable board is going to like ask you what you're thinking.

  Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.com

Chief product officer at the live-shopping marketplace Whatnot, previously chief product officer at Twitch and a product lead on growth at Twitter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Interviews reward presentation; only a hands-on case study shows how fast a candidate's thinking decays.

  Their words

  the number of people who present incredibly well, and then you give them a prompt and some data and ask them to come back with a PRD on something, and then we make them verbally defend it, how quickly the thinking decays from folks who are good at the theater, but not the specifics, uh is kind of really telling, I think.

  youtube.com

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.

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  The Thinking Woman's Guide to Real Magic

  Their words

  Mind candy fantasy: in which an early-21st-century American young woman, whose English-lit thesis and love life are going equally poorly, does a good deed; gets rewarded with three wishes, without realizing it; and, in consequence, wanders off, first into Faery and then into a Fantasyland which is convincingly poor, sexist and dirty, but also magical.

  bactra.org

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Verifying a simplified model rather than the real system is worth doing even though the real system will still have bugs, because the bugs you designed in never get built.

  Their words

  Then the actual system might still have bugs, but we can iron out the issues in the abstraction such that we don't actually build them in the real system.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The failure mode of experienced engineers with AI is over-specifying: telling the model to do the task exactly the way they would have done it.

  Their words

  So when I look at engineers that have been, you know, coding for a long for a long time, you know, like for for years or for decades, this is a really really common failure mode is trying to over specify and it's trying to be overly specific and then, you know, get the model to do the to do the task exactly the way that you would have done it. And that that's just not the way the model works.

  Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code's Promptyoutube.com

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

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  The Father Brown Stories

  Their words

  Chesterton (1874-1936) wrote some of the most beautiful prose in the English language.

  jasonzweig.com

Professor of psychology at UCLA, where he studies human memory, attention and cognitive ageing, and author of Better with Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You learn where something is by going to find it rather than by being told, and that act is the whole difference between seeing something and noticing it.

  Their words

  And so we've done this study where you have to, instead of me telling you where it is, you have to get up and find it. And so now you're engaging with the environment, you're going to go look for it and be like, gosh, it's been there the whole time. have walked by it so many times have never noticed it. And I think that's the difference between seeing something and noticing it.

  youtube.com

Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  America is a country that rewards first-principles thinkers and builders and encourages reinvention despite cynicism.

  America

  Their words

  increasingly I see America as the place that rewards first principles thinkers and builders; that asks "why not?" instead of telling you why you cannot; that imperfectly supports optimism, reinvention and perseverance in spite of cynicism.

  What America has meant to meswyx.io

Clinical psychologist and clinical professor of psychiatry at UCSF. His 2010 meta-analysis established psychodynamic therapy as an evidence-based treatment; he has argued ever since that "evidence-based therapy" is used as a marketing term.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Telling a patient "your feelings are valid" is not therapy: it is the mirror image of "get a grip", and it makes the therapist a judge of feelings instead of a companion in them.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  The phrase "your feelings are valid" does not invite curiosity or deeper self-understanding, which is the point of psychotherapy. It is the mirror image of "stop whining and get a grip." One sounds warm and one sounds harsh, but neither deepens self-awareness.

  jonathanshedler.substack.com

Music critic of The New Yorker since 1996 and author of The Rest Is Noise, Listen to This and Wagnerism.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Benjamin Britten is the benchmark among English-language composers for setting the work of intensely musical writers like Shakespeare and Keats to music.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  In the English-language arena, Britten sets the standard for handling writers of inborn musical power-the likes of Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Hopkins.

  Liner notes to What Belongs to Youtherestisnoise.com

Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A compiler that names every place a change breaks turns refactoring into fixing errors until the compiler stops shouting.

  Their words

  I think this is kind of leads to another way that Rust really helps with reliability, which is that if you're refactoring, I think Rust is really good at telling you all the places you need to update. I've done this sometimes where I would refactor something. I change the code. I change the return type or whatever it is, and then I just fix the compiler errors and until the compiler stops shouting. And then once I've done that, I've updated every place I need to update.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

Danish software engineer and Microsoft technical fellow, creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi and lead architect of C# and TypeScript.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You cannot be best of breed in an ecosystem by telling its developers to write in a different programming language.

  JavaScript

  Their words

  I mean, surely you're not going to be best of breed in the JavaScript ecosystem by telling people to write in a different programming language.

  youtube.com

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.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Orlando Furioso: A New Verse Translation

  Their words

  I can have no opinion about whether the translation is accurate, but it is pretty good English verse.

  bactra.org

Programmer based in Vancouver who writes at scattered-thoughts.net about databases, programming language design and developer tools; author of the Imp, Dida and Zest language experiments.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rust is hard to learn because its borrow-checking rules have so many exceptions that people internalize the wrong simplified rules.

  Their words

  While the core borrow-checking rules are simple, there are so many exceptions (admittedly for solid ergonomic reasons) that it's easy to internalize the wrong rules.

  Borrow-checking surprisesscattered-thoughts.net

Co-founder of Ethereum. Publishes long essays on mechanism design, governance and what cryptography is for, and returns to earlier positions to say which parts they no longer hold.

• Dislikedrcmnd.app

  Local Deep Research

  Their words

  Its responses are, in my view, pretty bland and not very high-quality. I did a side-by-side test of asking Local Deep Research a question, then asking pi the same question (telling it to use searxng to make as many internet searches as needed), and I fed both outputs into an LLM to ask which is better.

  vitalik.eth.limo

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An agent can understand a maximally simplified explanation and still be unable to come up with it — that gap is what is left of the expert's job.

  Their words

  so for example, micro GPT, like I asked I tried to get an agent to write micro GPT. So, I told it like try to boil down the simplest things. Like try to boil down my um neural network training to the simplest thing and it can't do it.

  youtube.com

American game designer and director, for nineteen years at Blizzard as a World of Warcraft quest designer and then game director of Overwatch; now runs the independent studio Kintsugiyama.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Crunch is wrong when it is imposed — an executive on a forty-hour week has no business telling anyone to stay late — but a person choosing long hours on their own life's work is not the same thing.

  Their words

  I don’t think executives who take off and work 40-hour weeks should be telling anybody to stay late. I think that’s wrong and immoral. But to me as an individual, as long as I’m not telling other people to do it, my life’s work is my passion and I want to do it as much as possible.

  youtube.com

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.

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  He would rather read your broken English than your AI-written text; we are reaching the point where typos are valuable again.

  Their words

  But I much rather read your broken English than your AI slob. You know, of course there's a human behind it, and yet they, they prompt it. I'd much rather read your prompt than what came out. Um, I think we're reaching a point where I value typos again.

  youtube.com

Writer and artist, author of Steal Like an Artist; publishes a weekly newsletter and an annual list of the books he read.

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  Art Work: On The Creative Life

  Their words

  This book has more of a DGAF tone than Hold Still, I think, and it works best for me when Mann is telling stories instead of trying to extract a lesson for the reader.

  austinkleon.com

Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Thursday Murder Club

  Their words

  The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman is a delightful whodunnit set at a retirement home in the English countryside. Great characters. Fun twists. An endearing sense of humor. Nothing fancy or experimental, just a pleasure to read (and what more can you ask from a book, really?). If, like me, you enjoy mysteries, you'll be in good hands with Osman.

  eliotpeper.substack.com

American author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and The Undoing Project, and host of the podcast Against the Rules.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The best sign that a subject is worth writing about is that you are interested in it and nobody else is.

  Their words

  And I've learned just to not even talk about it cuz it kills my interest to watch it kill their interest. But I know why I'm interested and why it's important and I'm not I'm not relying on the world telling me it's important.

  10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)youtube.com

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Amap

  Their words

  But Amap is great! Especially since it can be used in English and I think it transliterates your searches to Chinese and the Chinese place names back to English

  levels.io

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most of the value an AI expert brings to a company is telling it not to use AI.

  Their words

  a lot of my times the value that I brought to the company was telling them not to use AI.

  youtube.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Curate your own information sources, or an algorithmic feed decides what is important and you end up consuming the same memes and news as everyone else.

  Their words

  So it's extremely important to curate the information sources that you have, so that you wouldn't be somebody who is left to the will of AI-based algorithmic feed telling you what's important so that you end up consuming the same information, the same stuff, the same memes, the same news as everybody else.

  youtube.com

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Research earns its keep by telling you which of two plausible pieces of advice is the right one, because everything looks obvious once you know the answer.

  Their words

  The value of research is usually in telling you which of two plausible theories is true, or which advice from different, seemingly sensible approaches works best.

  scotthyoung.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The precautionary principle now applies to children and phones: little is lost by restricting access and much is likely gained.

  Their words

  Little is lost by preventing a 14-year-old from accessing TikTok or Snapchat, or telling a 10-year-old they cannot have unrestricted access to the internet through their own smartphone, but so much will almost certainly be gained.

  An Important New Study on Phones and Kidscalnewport.com

Astrophysicist at Barnard College; wrote Black Hole Blues and How the Universe Got Its Spots, and directs sciences at Pioneer Works.

From one piece Janna Levin: Black Holes, Wormholes, Aliens, Paradoxes & Extra Dimensions | Lex Fridman Podcast #468 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Wormholes are not yet an engineering problem, but they sit entirely within the realm of plausible physics.

  Their words

  That’s going to be really telling. So I’m not saying it’s simply an engineering problem, but it’s all within the realm of plausible physics, I think.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Information is not lost in a black hole; the paradox is a crisis handing us clues, not a sign that quantum mechanics fails.

  Their words

  I’m unhappy with that. I would not be happy with information loss. I love that it’s telling us that there’s this crisis because I do think it’s giving us the clues, and we have to take them seriously.

  youtube.com

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Humans keep their place in AI as judges rather than authors, because telling which of two answers is better is far easier than writing a good one.

  Their words

  And humans are actually very good at reading or judging between two things versus... This goes back to the core of what RLHF and preference tuning is that it's hard to generate a good answer for a lot of problems, but it's easy to see which one is better.

  youtube.com

Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; works on the search for life elsewhere and wrote The Little Book of Aliens and Light of the Stars.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The many-worlds interpretation invents infinitely many unobservable universes to avoid what quantum mechanics is plainly saying: that measurement matters.

  Their words

  Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn't there. Go to enormous lengths like the many-worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter.

  youtube.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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Mother Tongue

  Their words

  History of English.

  worrydream.com

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The English-speaking world builds infrastructure expensively because it is behind, not because it is rich.

  Their words

  It’s not that the Anglosphere is rich; it’s that it’s the Anglosphere and builds inefficiently.

  pedestrianobservations.com

Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Mathematics has no Platonic existence outside the universe: it is a feature of this biosphere and tells us about our own structure.

  Their words

  But mathematics too, and it’s interesting because people think that math has this Platonic reality that exists outside of our universe, and I think it’s a feature of our biosphere and it’s telling us something about the structure of ourselves.

  youtube.com

Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Search Engine

  Their words

  It's a deeply humane project that also manages to be formally inventive; I never feel like I'm in surer hands as a podcast listener than when Vogt is telling me about what he has learned.

  platformer.substack.com

Founder of Amazon in 1994 and of the space company Blue Origin in 2000.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Humans are social animals rather than truth-seeking ones, so telling the truth is not what we are built for and always costs energy.

  energy

  Their words

  So if I generalize what you're asking, you are talking in general about truth-telling and we humans are not really truth-seeking animals. We are social animals.

  youtube.com

Research scientist at Meta in Berlin working on multilingual models and evaluation; led the multilingual team at Cohere and was a research scientist at Google DeepMind before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Large language models remain limited in non-English settings, making further multilingual development an important research direction.

  LLMs

  Their words

  LLMs are still limited in non-English settings and that making LLMs more multilingual is an important direction.

  EMNLP 2023 Primerruder.io

Musician and writer; answers readers' questions weekly at The Red Hand Files, and fronts Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The only thing a maker really controls is telling the good work from the bad; what arrives is not up to them.

  Their words

  Where we do have control is in identifying which is which.

  What do I do with these songs?theredhandfiles.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Finite and Infinite Games

  Their words

  So abstract. Maybe the most abstract book you’ll ever read. Compares “finite” games with rules and winners, versus “infinite” games without winners where we can play with the game itself. Is it about a job versus a calling? Religion versus spirituality? A story versus story-telling? Who knows. Thought-provoking if you can apply the metaphor to whatever concerns you.

  sive.rs

First Amendment lawyer and former federal prosecutor; writes The Popehat Report and explains what the law actually says when people shout about free speech.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Anyone who tells you a contested legal question has one obvious answer is lying to you rather than analysing it.

  Their words

  Here’s the point: there are legal and factual defenses to this indictment, but anyone telling you that it obviously, inarguably violates the law is lying to you.

  popehat.substack.com

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  How Minds Change

  Their words

  The psychology of how and why we believe. How we learn and change. The craft of doubt and persuasion. Insights into the social definition of truth. Epistemology. Certainty is a feeling not based on facts. Well-written with a nice balance of story-telling and deeper dives.

  sive.rs

Brazilian-American staff software engineer working on platforms, AI and developer productivity. Writes about engineering and his setup at ivansantos.me.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Grammarly

  Their words

  I was born in Brazil and I've been living in the US for the past 11 years, yet, english doesn't feel like my first language. I use Grammarly to help me with that.

  ivansantos.me

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Telling people that something is good or fun accomplishes nothing; the posters and campaigns that do it only vibrate the air.

  Their words

  We do this all the time: we attempt to reach the brain through the ears, but all we end up doing is vibrating the air.

  You can't reach the brain through the earsexperimental-history.com

Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  American transit agencies stay expensive out of incuriosity: the practices that would fix them are written in languages nobody in the room reads.

  America

  Their words

  This is not about precarity, because this is not a precarious project; this is about total ignorance and incuriosity about best practices, which emanate from a place that doesn’t natively speak English and doesn’t trade in American political references.

  High Costs are not About Precaritypedestrianobservations.com