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Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.

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  "Carbon intensity" metrics let oil companies claim climate progress even as their total emissions rise from increased production.

  Their words

  "Carbon intensity" is a greenwashing term: It measures pollution per barrel, allowing oil companies to claim climate progress even as rising production drives up total overall emissions.

  heated.world

Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.

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  Local optimizations of easily measured code metrics do not produce global optimums, and matter less the fewer people look at the output.

  Their words

  All those things you can easily measure in isolation, and you can also optimize for them quite locally. But these local optimizations do not produce global optimums, and the fewer of us are looking at the output, the less it matters.

  Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again?lucumr.pocoo.org

Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering

  Their words

  Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering by Robert L. Glass. In essence, this is a book about an industry that refuses to learn. That was true 25 years ago when this book was published, and it's probably twice as true today. (Just think about all the AI adoption metrics being rolled out — back to productivity mistaken for lines of code produced, only more elaborate. And expensive). What I like about this book is that Glass doesn't present anything new. Quite the opposite, actually. Rather, it's about research lessons that we all should know, but tend to forget. Ever had to do an estimate, or plan according to a requirements spec? Or maybe you thought that enough eyeballs make all bugs shallow? Then this book is for you. A great work by a fantastic author.

  adamtornhill.substack.com

Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.

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  The model is table stakes; evaluation and metrics are the strategic moat, and they should be built before the technology.

  Their words

  that your model is really table stakes, but eval and metrics, that's your most important. That's your strategic moat. So, build your eval before you build your technology.

  youtube.com

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

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  Deciding on averages is how product teams destroy the small group for whom a barely-used feature is everything.

  Their words

  there are real downstream impacts to people's businesses that often come from just like a lack of nuance in understanding metrics, particularly averages.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.

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  By every objective metric Stripe can see, there has never been a better time to start a business.

  Their words

  Uh, business are uh, the time to revenue for new companies incorporated with Atlas is declining. And so, by all the kind of objective metrics we can look at, uh, it seems to be a better time than ever to start a business.

  youtube.com

Freelance climate and energy analyst in Oslo, writing on Europe, the US and Australia; worked in the Australian renewables industry before that.

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  Google is knowingly choosing the more climate-damaging path while using narrow efficiency metrics to obscure that choice.

  Google

  Their words

  Both hide the fact the company is simply choosing the climate-wrecking road, consciously.

  ketanjoshi.co

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.

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  Delegating a task to an AI agent only works if the output can be verified, which requires defining success criteria first.

  Their words

  You can't delegate what you can't verify, so this requires first defining success criteria and metrics.

  How to Work and Compound with AIeugeneyan.com

Chilean web engineer building web experiences since 2006; co-founder of Media Creators and writes at iolivares.com.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  PostHog

  Their words

  Metrics, metrics, metrics. You can't improve what you don't measure.

  iolivares.com

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

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  Anthropic saw the coming shortage of chips before Google did, and bought Google's own TPUs out from under it.

  AnthropicGoogle

  Their words

  Because Enthropic saw it before Google. And then Google had Nano Banano and Gemini 3 which caused their user metrics to skyrocket and leadership at Google was like oh and then they started making the statement of we have to double compute every is it 6 months or I don't remember the exact number that they said.

  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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  How to Lie with Statistics

  Their words

  Product managers need a solid foundation in statistics to be metrics-driven. This classic book is a lively and fun book will leave you smarter and more skeptical.

  bringthedonuts.com

Vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group, the advertising agency; author of Alchemy (2019) and the Wiki Man columnist at The Spectator.

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  The marketing metrics finance departments trust are the ones that sell technology, not the ones that build customer value over time.

  Their words

  the marketing metrics the finance department has faith in and demands from marketing are not those metrics which are most conducive to building brand and customer value over time. They're the metrics which are most conducive to selling tech solutions to the companies.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Figma, the collaborative design platform he started in 2012 and took public in 2025.

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  Striking down the boring blockers one by one moves retention and activation as visibly as any new feature does.

  Their words

  we literally at some point had a team that would that was called blockers and they just went and one by one struck them down and each time we saw uh improvement in retention, improvement in activation the metrics for as we addressed each one you could literally see the change in the graph.

  youtube.com

Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.

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  Growth is not metrics hacking: the job is to connect users to the value of the product.

  Their words

  I like to describe growth as the the job is to connect users to the value of your product.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

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  Numbers offer a false precision: which metrics you choose to look at, and whether a five percent rise is good, are both art rather than science.

  Their words

  Because it's like okay we got these numbers and the numbers go up. It's like no, the fact that you still have to choose which things you look at is an art, not a science. And your interpretation of if the number went up 5%, is that good? Is that not good? Is also an interpretation and is an is an art, not a science.

  youtube.com

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.

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  LLM-based evaluation methods are more reliable and nuanced than traditional automated metrics

  LLMs

  Their words

  This is why model-based evaluation is increasingly popular-it offers more reliable and nuanced evals than traditional metrics.

  eugeneyan.com

Writes Where's Your Ed At and hosts Better Offline; runs a tech PR firm, and argues at length that the AI business does not add up.

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  The modern executive is symbolic: what gets rewarded is the appearance of doing work rather than any output anyone can measure.

  Their words

  We live in the era of the symbolic executive, when "being good at stuff" matters far less than the appearance of doing stuff, where "what's useful" is dictated not by outputs or metrics that one can measure but rather the vibes passed between managers and executives that have worked their entire careers to escape the world of work.

  The Era Of The Business Idiotwheresyoured.at

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

Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.

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  Accessibility has failed as a way to make computers usable for disabled users, after thirty years of trying.

  Their words

  Accessibility has failed as a way to make computers usable for disabled users. My metrics for usable design are the same whether the user is disabled or not: whether it’s easy to learn the system, whether productivity is high when performing tasks, and whether the design is pleasant — even enjoyable — to use.

  jakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Journalist and author writing on politics, liberalism and ideas; a contributor to Quillette and co-author of a book on Christopher Hitchens.

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  Spending on existential risk cannot be held accountable, because there is no measurement that would ever show it failing.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Unlike other interventions EA has sponsored, there are scant metrics for tracking the success or failure of investments in existential risk mitigation.

  How Effective Altruism Lost Its Wayquillette.com

Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

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  Nobody chose cloud backup: a handful of Silicon Valley executives made the choice for everyone in pursuit of adoption metrics.

  Their words

  A handful of Silicon Valley executives made the choice for us, in pursuit of adoption metrics and a “magical” user experience.

  Why encrypted backup is so importantblog.cryptographyengineering.com