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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  High-power amplifiers (e.g. 500 watts) offer no real listening benefit over much lower-power designs.

  Their words

  I have always believed there is no need for massive 500-watt power amps, as I have never personally heard a benefit from having that much power.

  Luxman L-100 Centennial Review. Class A Returns.stevehuffphoto.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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Software lock-in is breaking, because rewriting just the 5% of an application you personally use is now within one person's reach.

  Their words

  And maybe you won't get to 100% coverage, but this is the old joke about Microsoft Office. "I only use 5%." Yeah, well, we all use a different 5%. Well, what if we all just build our own 5%? What if I just took the functionality that I need and just did that? That is a completely different challenge and one agents are incredibly capable of doing right now, today, and I've done it a lot of times over.

  youtube.com

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  A sense of achievement in software survives writing almost none of the code yourself.

  Their words

  So it's strange because it's also perhaps the major software release that I've worked on the least in terms of lines of code. I have the least number of personally hand-chiseled lines of code in Quattro than I've had in any major release I've ever done. And yet, I am insanely proud of what we've accomplished.

  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.

From one piece This CPO regrets that product management exists | Tom Verrilli (CPO of Whatnot) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  People who manage product managers should still spend almost all of their own time doing individual contributor work.

  Their words

  There's like I think four or five people across the team who manage other PMs. All of them would spend 90 plus percent of their time doing IC work. I'm still probably 50% of my time doing IC work personally.

  youtube.com

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  A product leader writing production code is not the best use of their time, even though they should be able to read the codebase.

  Their words

  have I personally shipped some production code and whatnot? Yes. Uh do I think that's really the best use of my time? Not really.

  youtube.com

Climate scientist and energy systems analyst; writes The Climate Brink with Andrew Dessler and leads climate research at Stripe.

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  Earth's equilibrium climate sensitivity to doubled CO2 is closer to 3.5°C than 4.5°C

  Their words

  I'd personally give a central estimate closer to 3.5C than Hansen's ~4.5C

  Why Hansen may end up being right about 2026theclimatebrink.com

Writer on happiness, habits and human nature. Author of The Happiness Project, Better Than Before and The Four Tendencies, and host of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast.

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  People tend to unconsciously overestimate how much they personally contribute to shared work compared to others.

  Their words

  In unconscious overclaiming, we unconsciously overestimate our contributions relative to others.

  gretchenrubin.com

Canadian bootstrapper and writer on small software businesses. Co-founder of the podcast hosting company Transistor.fm and author of the book Marketing for Developers.

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  The most valuable problem to pursue is the hardest one someone is genuinely positioned to solve.

  Their words

  Doing "the hard thing" means pursuing the highest-value problem you can find that still sits inside your zone of expertise; the hardest problem you're personally in a position to win.

  Do the hardest thingjustinjackson.ca

Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Being an all-star at the activity is not impact: the measure is whether the team's queue is empty, not how many calls you personally took.

  Their words

  And it's the first time I learned the difference between activities and impact. activity is you being an all-star answering a bunch of calls, but the ticket queue for the team is still high.

  youtube.com

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

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  Almost every confident prediction about AI is a defence mechanism: people asserting a future in which they personally turn out to be the winner.

  Their words

  It's like everyone is just saying mantras to themselves cuz the root thing that's going on here is we are experiencing a moment of great change. Everyone is very nervous about what that means for their own position in it. a defense mechanism is to confidently assert a future in which you're a winner. And that's almost what every single prediction that you see is happening.

  Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com

Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.

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  This is the golden age of the junior programmer, because AI is an amplifier and the people learning quickly get amplified most.

  AI and jobs

  Their words

  Yeah, AI is an amplifier. And if uh if you're young and learning quickly, AI is going to amplify that or can amplify that. So, I I personally think this is this is the golden age of the junior programmer.

  youtube.com

American budget-travel writer who publishes as Nomadic Matt. Author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day; runs nomadicmatt.com, a long-running site of destination guides, packing advice and gear recommendations.

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  Kindle

  Their words

  Personally, I prefer physical books when I travel. However, I can't argue against the convenience and simplicity of the Kindle.

  nomadicmatt.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 tariffs survived the case for them because their real purpose was the personal power they conferred.

  Their words

  It has been clear from the beginning that a primary motivation for tariffs was that they empowered Trump personally.

  Attack of the Zombie Tariffspaulkrugman.substack.com

Machine learning engineer and independent AI consultant. He writes about LLM evaluation, tooling and applied ML at hamel.dev, and previously worked on machine learning at GitHub.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Jupyter notebooks

  Their words

  As for me personally, I tend to use these tools as a backend data store and use Jupyter notebooks as well as my own custom built annotation interfaces for most of my needs.

  hamel.dev

Technology analyst whose weekly email on tech reaches over 150,000 readers. Publishes essays and an annual presentation on where the industry is going.

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  The belief that this technology will produce bioweapons and kill everyone rests on childish logical fallacies.

  Their words

  Personally, like most people in tech, I think the idea that this is all going to kind of produce bioweapons and take over the world and kill us all is just idiotic. Like I think I think it's just a bunch of kind of childish logical fallacies within that.

  youtube.com

Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.

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  A meeting that wastes everyone's time is a meetings problem, not a communication problem.

  Their words

  I personally hate meetings because a significant percent of meetings when done poorly don’t serve a clear purpose. But that’s a meeting problem, that’s not a communication problem.

  youtube.com

Author of The Simple Path to Wealth and of the jlcollinsnh.com stock series on index-fund investing.

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  Robinhood is designed for active traders rather than long-term investors.

  Their words

  Personally, I wouldn't use Robinhood. This is more of a platform designed for traders.

  jlcollinsnh.com

Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.

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  Coding with an AI assistant slides from copiloting into autopiloting, and the bugs that follow are hard to trace.

  Their words

  For me personally, I kept introducing bugs, and I couldn't figure out why. And what I realized is that I developed... I wasn't copiloting well, I was autopiloting much better.

  youtube.com

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A self-driving car is more trustworthy than a random human driver.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  Personally, I would trust a self-driving car more than the average stranger to give me a lift.

  Agentshuyenchip.com

Neuroscientist and novelist writing on consciousness, artificial intelligence and culture in the newsletter The Intrinsic Perspective.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Sistine Chapel

  Their words

  Which remains my favorite “painting” I’ve personally seen in my whole life.

  theintrinsicperspective.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.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Radical Candor

  Their words

  The definite book about giving good and candid feedback - and a very useful read for new(ish) managers. The book is a list of ideas around the theme of caring personally and challenging directly.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic; blogs at ma.tt.

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  Attacking DHH personally over the WP Engine dispute was wrong; the quarrel is with WP Engine and Silver Lake, not with him.

  Their words

  I am so sorry. I shouldn’t let this stuff get to me, but it clearly did, and I took it out on DHH, who, while I disagree with him on several points, isn’t the actual villain in this story: it’s WP Engine and Silver Lake.

  Response to DHHma.tt

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Inca stones were not fitted by patient pecking with hammer stones; they were fused with acid.

  Their words

  The common archeological wisdom that you’d find out of a textbook is that they just kept pecking away at it with hammer stones and setting them and resetting them until they were perfect, which has to be bullshit, that there is no way that they just were that meticulous. I mean, everybody’s got a hammerstone. I personally think it’s acids.

  youtube.com

Moroccan senior frontend developer writing at smakosh.com; builds side projects and client work under Smakosh LLC.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  TailwindCSS

  Their words

  Side note for CSS, I'm cool to use what ever tech available out there that makes my task done quickly & well, I have personally used Bootstrap 3 & 4, Bulma, Lostgrid, Materliaze, Skeleton, Tailwindcss, Styled-components, emotion, CSS modules, Tachyons & made my own micro CSS framework called Unnamed that has over 200 stars on GitHub. Still I prefer using Tailwindcss.

  smakosh.com

Investigative journalist; wrote Area 51, The Pentagon's Brain and Nuclear War: A Scenario, reconstructing what secret programmes actually did from interviews and declassified records.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  After interviewing hundreds of people inside America's secret military and intelligence programs, there is no reason to believe aliens have ever visited Earth.

  America

  Their words

  Well, not just at Area 51, but in all the different national security and military intelligence and intelligence programs. And I personally have no reason to believe that aliens have ever visited Earth. That’s just me personally.

  youtube.com

Writer and consultant on technology, organizations and history; founded the blog Ribbonfarm and now writes the Contraptions newsletter.

• Dislikedrcmnd.app

  Debt: The First 5000 Years

  Their words

  I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.

  contraptions.venkateshrao.com

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  The World Is Flat

  Their words

  I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.

  contraptions.venkateshrao.com

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  Sapiens

  Their words

  I don’t know about you, but I personally feel starved of ambitious sensemaking frames for recent history that aren’t quite as silly as say Friedman’s World is Flat or Harari’s Sapiens, or quite as ideologically compromised as Graeber’s Debt.

  contraptions.venkateshrao.com

Biochemist at University College London; writes about the origin of life and the role of energy in evolution, in The Vital Question and Transformer.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The eukaryotic cell is the single biggest invention in the whole history of life.

  Their words

  I personally think that’s the single biggest invention in the whole history of life.

  youtube.com

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

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  PlanetScale

  Their words

  That said, I'd personally pick Planetscale in this situation.

  thdxr.com

Engineering leader and writer; wrote The Manager's Path and Platform Engineering, and blogs at Elided Branches.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A manager’s output is the output of their team and of the people they influence, not the work they personally produce.

  Their words

  As a manager, your output is not measured by your individual work. Rather, your output is measured by the work of your team and the people that you influence.

  How New Managers Fail Individual Contributorselidedbranches.com

Polyglot and language coach; teaches translating back and forth from a text as the core exercise.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is no best method in general, but there is a best method for each particular learner, and finding it is the work.

  Their words

  While there is no absolute best and fastest way to learn a language, there definitely is a best and fastest way FOR YOU, personally, to learn a language. A method that is tailored to your likes and dislikes, your learning style, and your schedule.

  The Only True Way to Learn a Languagelucalampariello.com

American backpacking guide, writer and endurance athlete who has hiked more than 30,000 miles; author of The Ultimate Hiker's Gear Guide and publisher of gear reviews and trip-planning tutorials at andrewskurka.com.

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  SAXX Kinetic HD Boxer Briefs

  Their words

  Personally, I thought the original Kinetic was ideal for hiking, but a little light on support for running. The Kinetic HD is just the opposite: they've been comfortable on runs up to 12 miles, but intentionally I no longer wear them for, say, Nordic skiing or office work.

  andrewskurka.com