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Nick Maggiulli
x.com
"Every year you spend with options is another year you don't spend on the thing you eventually commit to." My latest on the problem with optionality:
optionality commit options
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20 September
Swedish open source developer; creator and lead maintainer of curl and libcurl, and a co-founder of the Rockbox project.
19 September
Programmer, musician and author of The Passionate Programmer; organised RubyConf and RailsConf and has worked as a CTO.
“A local, agent-first store that links the written intent behind a code change to its VCS commit and to stakeholder systems such as Jira, Confluence and Linear.” ❤️ rubygems.org
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17 September
Swedish open source developer; creator and lead maintainer of curl and libcurl, and a co-founder of the Rockbox project.
Former options market maker who writes Moontower, a newsletter on trading, volatility, decision-making and how to think about risk outside markets too.
The option arbitrage stuff via yesterday's poll, @DeepDishEnjoyer dividend, and the silver early exercise post has spawned a bunch of chats on TL & DMs. Seems to be a lot of people screwing with options but missing fundamental education. Another first-principles type example: Related
CEO of Positive Sum and founder of Colossus. Hosts Invest Like the Best, interviewing investors and business leaders; the guests do most of the talking there.
Neko is opening in NYC They’ve created a truly remarkable experience at crazy low cost compared to other options. A 30 min full scan AND report—bloods, skin, heart, strength, body composition. I need to fix a few small things, and will b/c of Neko Future is here! Related
Swedish open source developer; creator and lead maintainer of curl and libcurl, and a co-founder of the Rockbox project.
Engineer at Vercel Labs as of 2026. Ships a steady stream of small developer tools — agent-browser, portless, json-render, native-sdk, the v0 SDK — and lists every one of them at ctate.dev.
Their words
Every agent harness can now use Jev npm install -g ai-cli → ask yes/no questions → choose between options → score against your criteria https://t.co/dpgmcdCj8F
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x.com
16 September
Pseudonymous reviewer who publishes measured, standardised flashlight and knife reviews at zeroair.org, including runtime, output and tint measurements.
Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.
Former options market maker who writes Moontower, a newsletter on trading, volatility, decision-making and how to think about risk outside markets too.
Worth reboosting this. One of those litmus test posts where if you think you know options but don't grok this, let's just say you'll be surrounded by lots of friends and compliments Related
15 September
Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance and tech read by hedge fund managers, founders and VCs. Previously worked in finance at SAC Capital/Point72.
An underrated positive externality of public transit is that it’s a honeypot for identifying everyone who’d commit a crime for literally $3. Done thoroughly, it’s a massive improvement for public order. Quoting @420joke Mamdani’s NYPD btw. This could be handled via a ticket with a fine payable to MTA, or even a summons written on the spot with a court date. Instead, officers are given permission to make custodial arrests, haul ppl into central booking, and charge them w/ A Misdemeanors over $3. Related
Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.
"Behaviorally, we often see that men seem to calm down when they become fathers—they take fewer risks and commit fewer crimes...They are suddenly living not just in pursuit of their own gratification, but in service to their spouse and children" ifstudies.org
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14 September
Swedish open source developer; creator and lead maintainer of curl and libcurl, and a co-founder of the Rockbox project.
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Built a little local web app to help edit commit messages for a repo Related
13 September
Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.
If there really is a high chance of AI leading to the extinction of humanity within years/decades, then the only rational stance towards safety monitoring and research pacing should be stringent, top-down government involvement and universally ratified international treaties. Similar to what we have been doing for a long time with nuclear energy and nuclear weapons non-proliferation. If that's not what we're doing, then we must infer that the risk isn't being seriously considered by anyone involved. There are only two options that make sense here: 1. The near-term species extinction risk is r… energy government Related
Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.
Their words
The only way to avoid extreme power concentration is to ensure we have multiple independent providers of frontier AI models, including open-source options.
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@fchollet on X x.com
12 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
10 September
CEO of Positive Sum and founder of Colossus. Hosts Invest Like the Best, interviewing investors and business leaders; the guests do most of the talking there.
Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead) on why Xi Jinping fears a US counter-blockade, and how China might try to still take Taiwan: "Xi Jinping is committed to trying to get Taiwan. The Chinese need a very high probability of success to commit themselves past a certain point, because failure would be catastrophic for whoever launched it. I think they're trying to get themselves into a position where they could have a soft blockade. They could give the orders that any ship that wants to go to Taiwan first has to stop at a Chinese port and go through a customs clearing process to assert sovereignty. The… Quoting @patrick_oshag My conversation with Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead). Walter has spent decades studying how America came to dominate the world and whether it can keep doing it in an era of AI, robotics and what he calls personal politics. He's a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the author of Special Providen… China Related
American author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked. Writes essays and book reviews at markmanson.net.
How to win at life: - Step 1: Commit to doing a hard thing. - Step 2: Do the hard thing. - Step 3: Feel good about doing the hard thing. - Step 4: Become someone who enjoys doing hard things. Related
Co-founder of Modem and a founding engineer at Sentry, where he went on to be VP of Engineering. Co-author of Third-party JavaScript, and co-host of the State of Agentic Coding podcast with Armin Ronacher.
🏛️ announcing hunk v0.22.0 - now w/ `hunk log` - TUI for reviewing git/jj history - quickly jump from commit → diff - OR multi-select a commit range - supports mouse + all colour themes also in this release: multi-line comments, lower memory usage, more efficient --watch mode, and more! (🔈) Related
7 September
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
Their words
The 29(!!) automated translations of the Omarchy website are being powered by @AIatMeta's Muse Spark model running as a post-commit hook on GitHub.
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x.com
6 September
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
Reasoning from scratch round 2: In this video, I cover the text generation process in LLMs and KV caching (to prepare the base model before adding reasoning techniques in the upcoming ones). 00:00 Introduction and reasoning model demo 01:55 How to work through the book 05:00 Chapter 2 overview 08:25 Checking PyTorch and hardware support 10:26 Apple silicon and MPS caveats 15:00 Cloud GPU options 16:08 Tokens and tokenization 18:20 Qwen3 and the Reasoning From Scratch package 23:05 Encoding and decoding text 26:24 Downloading weights and selecting a device 31:01 Loading the pretrained Qwen3 mo… LLMs Related
4 September
Author of Shape Up; formerly head of strategy at Basecamp, where he worked on product design for seventeen years; now runs Felt Presence.
A friend turned me on to asking Fable to wireframe different options when I have a tricky UI problem with a lot of requirements and too many possible paths. Game changing. Gives me flashbacks to what @bmoesta taught me about using orthogonal arrays when an engineering problem has too many variables. It's not about one-shotting the answer. It's about getting enough contrast between options to clarify which variables (aka "factors") are most important. Not which solution is best -- which variables matter more. THEN I can use that knowledge to decide to fix certain variables and narrow the space… Related
3 September
American open-source program lead working on WordPress; a WordPress core contributor and release lead who writes at jeffpaul.com.
1 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.
Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.
Their words
I do think I want to push back on the cyber on the brain hypothesis that you raised a couple of times. We didn't find like particular evidence for the cyber nature of the task making all the hacking and crimes that they did more likely versus the impossible nature of the task.
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youtube.com
31 August
Mathematical biologist; Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath and author of The Maths of Life and Death and How to Expect the Unexpected.
A nice piece here on BBC FUTURE about decision making in insects. https://t.co/fpUmYEnBoo Here’s the part about our recent work with locusts and humans. "Getting people to change their minds is hard, especially when a group is split between two options. 1/10 Related
26 August
Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.
17 August
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
Personal milestone: 1000 true fans of my newsletter Interconnects! Hitting a very long term goal feels great. I’m happy to get to be an independent voice in AI. Cultivating a paid base helps me commit to that longer term, and scale Interconnects’ impact. Related
Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.
Their words
if you have massive frontal lobe lesions that make it the case that you're no longer emotionally responding to stimuli the consequences are devastating which is that you cannot make decisions complex decisions in your life you can't organize your life you're not motivated to take the right path through life because you don't feel one one way or the other about the different options that are available.
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youtube.com
14 August
Author of The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans, and host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast.
12 August
Author of The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans, and host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast.
28 July
Writer of the personal-finance blog Of Dollars And Data and author of Just Keep Buying and The Wealth Ladder. Chief Operating Officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management.
The issue with optionality only hit me after I had my first child. I realized that every year I spent single in my early 30s was a year I wouldn't get to spend with my future grandchildren. Optionality has hidden costs. Quoting @dollarsanddata "Every year you spend with options is another year you don't spend on the thing you eventually commit to." My latest on the problem with optionality: Related
Writer of the personal-finance blog Of Dollars And Data and author of Just Keep Buying and The Wealth Ladder. Chief Operating Officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management.
From one piece
The Problem with Optionality
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
22 July
Founder and editor-in-chief of MacStories, writing about Apple software, iPad workflows and automation since 2009. He co-hosts the AppStories podcast.
Apple seriously added search to the TestFlight app, *and* removed sorting options, with the default now being alphabetical sorting only…? WTF? This makes TestFlight unusable for me. macstories.net
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21 July
Latvian full-stack WordPress developer and course creator at WPElevator; blogs since 2007 about the open web, electronics, home automation and sustainable living.
We often overlook how WordPress was THE vibe coding of the previous decades. Now there are just way more options available. Related
15 July
Founder of HumanLayer; wrote 12-Factor Agents, on how to build AI agents that hold up in production.
10 July
Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.
Their words
Once you commit to HTML, an enormous amount of complexity simply evaporates.
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yihui.org
1 July
Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.
Their words
the genie runs out of g runs itself out of options it can't make further forward progress and so I'll wipe it away start over I won't try and tweak I'll start over and say all right well if I implement things in a different order. If I implement with this markdown file or if I implement it with this commit hook, we collectively need to try absolutely everything.
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youtube.com
28 June
Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.
12 June
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
9 June
Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.
30 May
Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.
10 May
Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.
Their words
harder is easier is a principle that says if you're willing to do the work upfront to commit to quality, to design, to ethics, to integrity, to safety, whatever the thing, I don't want to tell you what your values are, you tell me what they are. If you're willing to be principled in your decision-making, you will get these unexpected rewards.
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youtube.com
7 May
Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.
The agent principal-agent problem 2026-05-07 Code review is broken. The industry-established code review process, review-then-commit, was a straightforward mechanism that allowed a relatively low-trust group of engineers to collaborate. It appears to ha…
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24 April
Investigative journalist on policing, forensics and criminal justice; wrote Rise of the Warrior Cop and writes The Watch.
20 April
Computer scientist and director of the MIT Digital Currency Initiative; her research covers distributed systems, databases and digital currency.
Follow up on Bitcoin and Quantum: A proposed roadmap. https://t.co/QoOrvnxeOe tl;dr: we should work towards activating a PQ-safe output type with PQ signatures now. everything else (including escape hatches, zk proofs, commit/reveal, to freeze or not) can, and should, wait. Related
15 April
Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.
23 February
Latvian full-stack WordPress developer and course creator at WPElevator; blogs since 2007 about the open web, electronics, home automation and sustainable living.
The Connectors screen in WP 7.0 would really benefit from encrypted options unless we want to expose those API keys to anyone with access to wp-admin/options.php Related
22 February
Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.
25 January
Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.
Their words
And I realized it was the first one on the list and I thought, huh, I wonder if people are just picking the first one. So then then we randomized the list so everyone saw a different order of the list and now all the items were picked equally
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youtube.com
23 January
Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku, author of The Twelve-Factor App, and a researcher at Ink & Switch.
1 January
Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.
16 November 2025
Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.
30 September 2025
Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.
Their words
I believe this is the right answer. We're often being manipulated by politicians, by corporate leaders to make a choice from two suboptimal options. And then when we are forced to make this choice and we make this choice, it's almost as if it's something that we have to assume responsibility for. I don't think we should be buying into that.
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youtube.com
19 September 2025
German writer and historian; wrote Blitzed, on drug use in Nazi Germany, and Tripped.
Their words
And I spoke with my father, who had been a high judge in Germany. What does the law actually say? And the law says if you plan a crime and then maybe when you commit it, you are under the influence, it does not diminish your responsibility.
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youtube.com
18 August 2025
Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.
7 July 2025
Software engineer working on distributed systems and databases; creator of rqlite, the distributed database built on SQLite.
rqlite, the lightweight distributed database build on SQLite, now supporting automatic backup-and-restore to Google Cloud Storage. Improved Disaster Recovery options. philipotoole.com
Google SQLite Related
9 June 2025
Irish independent game developer, maker of VVVVVV, Super Hexagon and Dicey Dungeons.
Just released a v1.1 patch for my Other Games. Things are feeling pretty stable, so this might be the last one? Highlights are: it shows a pop-up on itch for achievements now, it has improved accessibility options, and I added Japanese and LATAM Spanish localisations: terrycavanagh.itch.io
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1 June 2025
Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.
14 May 2025
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
the tool is used when you are overwhelmed with too many options. You've said yes to too many things, and you need to raise the bar all the way up so that almost everything doesn't pass the bar. It's a tool for a certain situation so I rarely use it. I would not call it a approach to life that everyone should use all the time.
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sive.rs
17 December 2024
Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.
30 November 2024
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
30 April 2024
Partner at Collaborative Fund and author of The Psychology of Money, Same As Ever and The Art of Spending Money. Writes essays on investor behavior and posts frequently on X.
17 April 2024
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."
From one piece
Measuring personal growth
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
15 October 2023
Founder of OpenStreetMap, the collaborative map of the world; later worked on mapping at Microsoft and Telenav.
Their words
It's important to look around you for solutions instead of accepting the current unavailability of options.
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Orbitals stevecoast.com
1 October 2023
Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.
Their words
You thus can see that the prosperity of the modern world does not refute Malthus. We faced the Malthusian dilemma and opted for one of his options, namely vice.
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tylercowen.com
20 April 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.
On changing their mind
There's always a chance I might never see my family again. Because of that, I often regret it. It's usually best to keep options open.
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9 November 2022
Research scientist at Anthropic; co-creator of the Variational Autoencoder and, with Jimmy Ba, of the Adam optimizer, two of the most widely used tools in deep learning.
This might be blasphemy over here, but to support longer/deeper discussions on Mastodon, I think it'd be nice if Mastodon would implement options for non-chronological lists of posts, e.g. similar to reddit's default 'hot" view. Could be as simple as sorting threads based on most recent reply. This could be opt-in and can co-exist with the current chronological view. Related
9 August 2022
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.
Their words
And we get to this point, these are the hardest decisions people ever wrestle with. And the paradox is if the advantages and disadvantages of the two options are almost perfectly balanced, it doesn't matter which one we pick. And yet we will spend days and weeks going around in a funk, which one am I going to choose?
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youtube.com
25 November 2021
Reviews sports technology at DC Rainmaker — watches, power meters and bike computers — in exhaustive detail, having tested them himself.
Their words
In some ways, it’s really a disservice to assume that because these are budget options that they’re somehow bad.
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dcrainmaker.com
15 October 2019
Writer and education-technology critic; published Hack Education for a decade and wrote Teaching Machines.
Their words
I export HTML from Byword into Sublime Text. My website runs on Jekyll and I use the GitHub desktop tool to commit files to my site.
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usesthis.com
20 August 2019
Full-stack developer, creator of Tailwind CSS; writes at adamwathan.me and makes courses and screencasts for web developers.
Their words
I register all of my domain names through Hover. I think it's a little more expensive than some of the other options, but the UI is simple and reliable and not loaded with dark patterns like some of the cheaper competitors.
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adamwathan.me
13 June 2018
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
Nothing matches. Show everything
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.
Got it