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British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.

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  ActivityPub

  Their words

  Evan Prodromou has the unenviable task of making the whole ecosystem easy to understand. Thankfully he does that well. Things are logically laid out, there are comprehensive descriptions of even the most obscure parts of the spec, and it builds up nicely from the fundamentals.

  shkspr.mobi

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

Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.

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  The Code Breaker

  Their words

  I mistakenly expected this to be a somewhat shallow, generic popular science book, but it was a very thorough account of how CRISPR gene editing emerged from decades of obscure basic research into bacterial immune systems.

  scientificdiscovery.dev

Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.

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  Subscription platforms like Substack and OnlyFans tend to become a Girardian bubble, where a few visible successes obscure the many who quietly give up after failing to build an audience.

  Their words

  I suspect that both Substack and OnlyFans may become a Girardian bubble. Everyone joins after hearing from the few people who succeed; the thousands who slink away after months of effort netted them a mere 17 subscribers usually do so quietly.

  putanumonit.com

Researcher and science writer. Co-founder and editor at Works in Progress magazine, formerly a researcher at Our World in Data, and author of the Scientific Discovery newsletter on science, global health and medical innovation.

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  Longevity is not one problem waiting to be cracked: lifespans rose because many separate problems were worked on continuously.

  Their words

  To me, one of them is that longevity isn’t one obscure problem that needs to be ‘cracked’ in order for us to live longer.

  scientificdiscovery.dev

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

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  The Republic

  Their words

  To my surprise, I really enjoyed The Republic. It is both well-written and weird, which puts it above many other famous philosophical books that are too obscure to be easily read.

  scotthyoung.com

Design engineer and illustrator; makes visual essays on programming, anthropology and what language models do to the way people write.

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  Writing that is specific, local and grounded in a real life is the cheapest available proof that a person wrote it, because models default to generics.

  Their words

  Referencing obscure concepts, friends who are real but not famous, niche interests, and recent events all make you plausibly more human.

  The Dark Forest and Generative AImaggieappleton.com

Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.

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  A small amount of obscure code that almost no one understands or knows about is critical infrastructure, and removing it would cause widespread system failure.

  Their words

  Others are the golden threads of this world, holding it together at the seams with no more than a dozen people knowing about it. Remove one of these and it all comes crashing down.

  How can you not be romantic about programming?thorstenball.com