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Chad Fowler
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I have long argued that software components should be tiny: small enough to understand, change, or throw away. This paper suggests something I hadn’t considered then: The developers can be tiny too. 1,000+ finite-lived agents build a 250K-line compiler. The project persists. The programmers don’t.
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18 September
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.
The people dismissing this as preposterous are telling on themselves as not having thought about superintelligence seriously. I hadn’t considered this particular idea but you should expect, by definition, that something much smarter than you would have ideas you didn’t think of Quoting @firesidealpha OpenAI's Noam Brown says air-gapping the computers may not stop a misaligned AI, because two air-gapped machines can still talk by running a CPU hot and reading the temperature change "But I think the major takeaway from the incident is that people underestimated the AI. And we never want to be in… AI alignment Related
Criminal defence lawyer in New York; writes Simple Justice, mostly about how criminal law works in practice rather than in theory.
14 September
Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.
Too much screen time may be bad for kids, but I can't wish scenes like this hadn't happened. Related
13 September
Artist and developer who makes esoteric software, games and tools aboard a sailboat as part of Hundred Rabbits with Rekka Bellum; creator of the Uxn virtual machine and the Orca livecoding environment.
A day spent exploring Infinity in mutisets rewriting systems. Picked by Cantor for the first infinite ordinal number, infinity is expressed as the letter Omega, ω. It indicates the limit of the sequence of natural numbers 1, 2, 3, 4.. For example, apple^ω means an infinity of apples. Infinity is a saturating value, no finite quantity can be added to or removed from it. wiki.xxiivv.com
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9 September
Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.
Physicists should put together a list of mathematically well-defined problems that could advance the field. Such as, eg, what constitutes a low-temperature superconductor, what are the lattice conditions for cold fusion (or why do they not exist), what is a local completion of quantum mechanics, what is the simplest (in terms of computational complexity) way to obtain the masses and coupling constants of the standard model, what is the UV-completion of MOND or why isn't there any, is there any provably UV-finite version of quantum gravity, etc etc Related
8 September
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.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@tristanbuckmaster/117233413705701198 A remarkable achievement: Alpöge and Buckmaster have managed to push one of the major promising approaches towards constructing blowup solutions to fluid equations --- as developed by Cordoba and Martınez-Zoroa --- to establish finite time blowup for many key fluid equations, including 3D incompressible Euler, with a smooth forcing term. (Previous work by these authors on similar equations could obtain a smooth forcing term for the IPM equation, and a subcritical but not smooth regularity for other equations.) The arguments hav… Related
7 September
Technology writer of Spyglass, a newsletter about technology and media. Previously a reporter at TechCrunch and an investor at GV.
I hadn't considered that Apple could actually be in favor of making the App Store rules *more* onerous. spyglass.org
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4 September
Co-founder and CEO of Every. Writes the Chain of Thought column about working with AI tools and hosts the podcast AI & I.
Astra one-shotted the first draft of its own vibe check for @every 🤯 we learned Astra was launching at 3 am yesterday morning. by 7 am we had a 3,000 word vibe check written. i can't tell you how impressive it is that i woke up to a google doc with a well-written, well formatted article with all of the usual sections, a good headline, and even appropriate screenshots. written in @kplikethebird's i didn't realize Katie hadn't written it herself, she just prompted Astra and it did the rest totally new world! Google Related
27 August
Programmer, musician and author of The Passionate Programmer; organised RubyConf and RailsConf and has worked as a CTO.
I've long argued that components should be tiny: small enough to understand, change, or throw away. This paper suggests something related: The developers can be tiny too. 1,000+ finite-lived agents build a 250K-line compiler. The project persists. The programmers don’t. arxiv.org
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26 August
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
Linux
Their words
Linux conquered everything else. All the AI infrastructure that everyone runs off, it's all running on Linux. All the systems, all the servers, everything is Linux. So it was kind of a curiosity that the desktop and the personal computers we were using really hadn't been captured, but clearly it was just waiting for this moment. Linux spent the time from '91 to now waiting for agents to fully flourish as an end user operating system.
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youtube.com
18 August
Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.
my husband caught up with a personal friend over dinner that he hadn't seen in a while and afterwards I asked "so is he in a relationship right now?" And he gave me this blank stare and said "I have no clue." I'm like, wtf were you catching up about?! Quoting @HellsBitchen_ Gf yelled at me bc i went to dinner with 4 of my friends and got "literally 0 useful bits of gossip what the fuck" Like girl, we're 5 guys in finance. We're not talking about engagements or pregnancies. The entire conversation revolved around situational awareness's terrible risk management, jane s… Related
12 August
Interactive fiction author and hacker; wrote Spider and Web and Hadean Lands, and designed the Glulx virtual machine.
I absolutely intend to get to AdvX someday. Until then, you should go. (I actually had a UK trip line up once. I got to the place where AdvX was, but I hadn't pre-registered so I failed to get in. Oh well.) Quoting @adventurex.bsky.social Tickets for #AdvX26 are now on sale! Event page: buytickets.at/adventurexconferencescic/2339289 More info: adventurexpo.org/faq AdventureX brings together narrative gaming pros and enthusiasts, this year taking place in London on 7-8 November at the LSBU Hub building. Let us know you're joining! Related
8 August
Swedish designer and programmer. Designed early Spotify, worked at Facebook and Figma, and created the Inter typeface.
I’ve been wondering where weird LLM language like this comes from. Much of it I hadn’t seen before LLMs, so —intuitively at least—it doesn’t seem to come from training data. Perhaps it’s reverb; echo in recent corpus from its past self’s attempts..? Another example is “I ran a smoke to explore” (where it means “smoke test” but abbreviates it like a cool teenager) Quoting @geoffreylitt Any writing experts who can explain why this is a weird sentence? LLMs Related
6 August
Polyglot; founded Fluent in 3 Months and argues for speaking from day one rather than waiting until you are ready.
21 April
Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.
Great writeup by @mozilla: Mythos found 271 vulns (fixed in Firefox 150); Opus 4.6 found 22 (fixed in Firefox 148) https://t.co/wzTCxmTKbe > "So far we’ve found no category or complexity of vulnerability that humans can find that this model can’t." > "The defects are finite, and we are entering a world where we can finally find them all." ❤️ Related
3 March
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
Notes on the Fermi Paradox I recently realized I hadn’t written much in this blog about the Fermi Paradox, though I do write about it elsewhere. So here is a quick note. The Fermi Paradox, sometimes paraphrased as “where are they?” is a question…
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4 September 2025
Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.
Their words
But yeah, there's been a back and forth about whether dinosaurs were already on their way out or were they a bit limited by the very end of the Cretaceous. I think the more recent analyses have shown that's probably not the case, because in other words, they were basically doing fine right up to the extinction event. And so yeah, if the asteroid hadn't hit, there's no reason to think that they were on some kind of terminal decline.
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youtube.com
2 August 2025
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
Their words
Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine is a memoir I couldn't believe I hadn't read earlier. Many of her observations about engineering culture feel as relevant today as when she was a programmer in the 1980s
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jasmi.news
27 April 2025
Co-founder of Ximian and Xamarin; CEO of GitHub from 2018 to 2021; now an independent investor and funder of open technical projects, including the Vesuvius Challenge to read the Herculaneum Papyri.
13 June 2024
Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.
Their words
So death is a way to make room in the universe for other things to exist that wouldn’t be able to exist otherwise.
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youtube.com
9 December 2023
Social scientist turned small-scale farmer; wrote A Small Farm Future and argues against the case for feeding the world from factories.
Their words
One clue to the difficulties I faced, if I hadn’t been too naïve to see it, is that almost nobody works in small-scale, local, agroecological market gardening in Britain and most other rich countries. There’s a reason for that.
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chrissmaje.com
30 November 2023
Research psychologist, instrumental in founding the field of naturalistic decision making; developed the recognition-primed decision model, the PreMortem method and the ShadowBox training method, and wrote Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don't.
10 October 2023
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.
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.
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sive.rs
3 September 2021
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.
Their words
Everyone should read this book of little essays about listening. It teaches your ears to pay more attention. It calls your attention to sounds you hadn’t noticed. It’s beautifully written, and makes your life better. I read it twice, 24 years ago, and reading it again this week, it was even better than I remembered.
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sive.rs
6 March 2021
Singaporean writer and author of FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD; blogs at visakanv.com about ambition, writing and thinking in public.
Their words
I remember Antifragile blowing my mind several times when I first read it. It didn't exactly have anything dramatically new to say that I hadn't heard before in some way, but it brought together things in a way that I found compelling. It made me rethink and reevaluate a lot of my life and gave me a useful frame for making sense of things with.
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visakanv.com
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
The explanations are delightful and I've watched some of the videos more than once just to watch Bernhardt explain things.
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danluu.com
2 November 2014
Developer and podcaster; created Instapaper and Overcast, co-founded Tumblr, and co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast.
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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.
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