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Nick Maggiulli
x.com
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.
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19 September
President of the United States, the 45th from 2017 to 2021 and, as of 2026, the 47th; before politics a New York property developer who ran the Trump Organization, and the host of The Apprentice from 2004 to 2015.
18 September
Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.
The social scene around AI and AI safety is more unpleasant than I realized. I'm sure there are other sides to it. But when you get a lot of men with too much money who think they're saving the world, surrounded by groupies, what do you expect? Read the long Bluesky thread about this, collected on one page: https://skywriter.blue/@segyges.bsky.social/3mvom4b4dn22q I can't confirm this stuff - I stay far away from this scene. And the sentence "AI Safety is Mostly a Sex Cult" is a massive exaggeration. But... (1/n) AI alignment Related
Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.
i had fable doing some inference optimization work, it was making a ton of progress then it realized what it was doing and started to reject my requests so i switched to astra and told it to spawn fable subagents to do the work back in business Related
Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.
16 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.
One time, when I was much younger and less responsible, I was arguing with someone online. I checked Wikipedia, realized I was wrong, edited the article to change “is” to “is not,” and then sent the link. (And then fixed it a few minutes later.) So, relatable. Related
14 September
Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.
Tfw you realized the entire fan base wants you to sell the team Quoting @Steven_Ballmer For my Los Angeles Clippers followers This has been a very difficult time for everybody associated with the Clippers, and for that, I have sincere regrets. I want to apologize to our fans, employees, and my fellow NBA team owners for the distraction and distress this matter has caused, for which I… Related
12 September
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.
Been reading all these 9/11 stories today and realized that there are so many heroes that walk among us. We just never find out because we are so blessed to never have to live through a moment that requires them. Never forget that the vast majority of people are profoundly good. Related
11 September
Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.
When there were just a few of us, we had meaningful relationships because we knew and liked each other. When we grew to between fifty and a hundred people, we had a community; when we grew beyond that, the sense of community began to slip because we didn't all know each other in the same way. That's when I realized that having groups (departments) of around a hundred (give or take about fifty) that are bound collectively by our common mission was the best way to scale the meaningful relationship. While bigger companies tend to be more impersonal, that is just another challenge that has to be… Related
10 September
Former L8 engineer at Meta, Microsoft and Atlassian, now writing and building solo on agentic engineering. Writes Kun's Field Notes and posts a lot about AI coding agents on X.
more and more products realized they need to offer a firstmate-like experience :) folks using firstmate have been a few months ahead of the pack to experience this it couldn’t have been more clear that talking to a single coordinator agent is the next level Quoting @cursor_ai Introducing Projects, a new way of working in Cursor. Rather than creating a chat for every task, you work with a coordinator agent in a single, persistent thread. Like @bot, your agent is always on, proactively manages work with subagents, and improves over time. Related
Distributed-systems safety researcher; runs the Jepsen consistency-testing project and wrote the Riemann monitoring system.
Just realized I could probably put the boy in a neck restraint to keep him still and use a laser level to give him a decent flat top. Related
8 September
Writer of the newsletter bookbear express, on psychology, relationships, non-attachment and taste; based in San Francisco.
just realized replies to my substack posts to have been going to spam for, oh, about a year. SORRY IF YOU EMAILED ME 💔💔💔 Related
30 August
Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin. Writes at arslan.io about Go, tooling, industrial design and books.
I think I’ve realized that GUIs, even though they have much better primitives for displaying all sorts of information and interacting with it, are also very restrictive. There’s usually only one way of doing things in a UI. You either love it or hate it. Which brings me to terminals and multiplexers. When you think about it, a terminal is basically a small GUI builder, letting you create your own environment from small, well-crafted tools that each do one thing well. So it’s no wonder people keep coming back to terminals. Quoting @mitchellh Quick Superlogical demo to end the week. This demo is just of the basic functionality, but I want to highlight just how FAST it is. There's a WHOLE lot more functionality already present and coming but I wanted to keep the demo short. But seriously, check out that speed. I'm showing the macOS app h… Related
26 August
Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.
Their words
I want to recommend that people read a paper. I'm trying to get more people to just to just read papers because I realized I read a ton of papers.
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20 August
Founder and editor-in-chief of MacStories, writing about Apple software, iPad workflows and automation since 2009. He co-hosts the AppStories podcast.
19 August
Software engineer and founder of Block Party; previously an engineer at Pinterest and Quora, and a co-founder of the non-profit Project Include and the tech diversity data project Where are the Numbers?
i’ve been using claude for all things home-related and it’s amazing. (just dump all files in and let claude index, summarize, and organize.) even better than being a repository of all receipts, it helps me maintain a spreadsheet that i can download and send to accountants, draft emails for correspondence with service providers, and proactively flag issues that i wouldn’t have realized otherwise. Quoting @money_cruncher Open a new gmail as soon as you buy a house (123house@gmailcom) Then save/forward every single receipt, invoice, quote etc to this email for all your home improvements: - replacing an entire roof - new flooring - new hvac system - building a new deck - etc These improvements raise your cost basis,… Anthropic Related
6 August
Economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education and Open Borders. Writes Bet On It.
27 July
Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.
26 July
Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.
21 June
Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.
Short But I realized I didn't quit just to make more money, or make the same amount of money. I wanted to Related
28 May
Founder and editor of ToolGuyd, a tool review site covering power tools, hand tools, workshop equipment and EDC gear. He writes under his first name on the site.
Their words
I pulled out my W.Steps Prime telescoping ladder test sample today, and realized that I've grown to really like it.
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toolguyd.com
13 May
Danish software engineer and Microsoft technical fellow, creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi and lead architect of C# and TypeScript.
From one piece
TypeScript, C# and Turbo Pascal with Anders Hejlsberg
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
TypeScript
Their words
And the reason they came, I think, is absolutely because of the the better tooling. And I think we were totally right there that like adding a an erasable type system and then using that to enable great tooling is really where the pro where the programmer productivity boost is realized.
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youtube.com
Their words
And so, we kind of realized at that point, too, that maybe it's not a great strategy to to place your your development platform bet on on technology that's licensed from a competitor.
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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
I looked down the panel and I realized not a single one of these companies has standard governance. That's how bad it is.
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youtube.com
7 April
Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.
Their words
Um and so, it's not a big leap to realize, "Oh, we have a big problem here." Um and so, you know, that's kind of the that's the forcing function there. It's it's you've realized that your old explanation is not sufficient. You need something new.
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25 March
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
Basecamp becomes agent accessible In the past 18 months, we've experimented with a ton of AI-infused features at 37signals. Fizzy had all sorts of attempts. As did Basecamp. But as Microsoft and many others have realized, it's not that easy to make some…
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19 March
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Anthropic OpenAI
Their words
OpenAI and Anthropic have both realized that code is the most important thing to optimize the models for, cuz that's where the money is. Like coders will spend $200 a month on a plan if it's good enough, it turns out.
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youtube.com
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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6 February
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.
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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26 December 2025
Software engineer at PlanetScale and creator of the vim-go plugin. Writes at arslan.io about Go, tooling, industrial design and books.
17 November 2025
Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.
startups China
Their words
I just realized the only 2 countries left with actual substantial startup activity now are literally only the US and China The rest of the world can't really do startups, doesn't have the funding, can't grow them and it's more like performative hobby projects for their governments Which might tell us where the future wealth will be concentrated in the world
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levels.io
30 September 2025
Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.
From one piece
Pavel Durov: Telegram, Freedom, Censorship, Money, Power & Human Nature | Lex Fridman Podcast #482
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
Well, what we realized really early is that quantity of employees doesn't translate the quality of the product they produce. In many cases, it's the opposite. If you have too many people, they have to coordinate their efforts, constantly communicate, and 90% of their time will be spent on coordinating the small pieces of work they're responsible for between each other.
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youtube.com
Their words
Because there's no such thing as an unbiased source of information. When the war in Ukraine started in 2022, I instantly realized Telegram is going to be used to spread propaganda by both sides.
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youtube.com
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.
22 March 2025
Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.
From one piece
ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Addiction
Their words
You don't stop a problem by replacing it. And so I didn't have a girlfriend, I didn't have all that. I just realized that I was truly taking away from something from my future wife.
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youtube.com
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.
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youtube.com
24 December 2024
Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.
14 October 2024
Economist writing on why technological progress slowed and what would restart it — energy, supersonic flight, housing and the regulations around them.
startups
Their words, before
My suggested approach would be more capital intensive while retaining a lot of risk until fairly late in development. I am not sure it’s fundable.
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Their words now
Cargo airship margins, therefore, can be much higher than I had realized.
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18 March 2024
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
AGI
Their words
I used to love to speculate on that question. I have realized since that I think it’s very poorly formed, and that people use extremely different definitions for what AGI is. So I think it makes more sense to talk about when we’ll build systems that can do capability X or Y or Z, rather than when we fuzzily cross this one mile marker.
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26 January 2024
Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.
I am slowly trying to figure out Nix/NixOS. I just realized something I'm very confused by: Is it really the case “pinning’ in NixOS prototypically means “pinning a single version of the entire package repository, and then pulling in whatever versions it contains”? I mean, "it's all just code" and it seems to be *possible* to mix and match via `fetchTarball`. But is pinning the universe as-a-unit really the normal pattern? Nix Related
7 February 2023
Writer and researcher, founder of New Science; writes essays on science funding, sleep research, productivity and ambition at guzey.com.
Their words, before
Experiencing sleepiness is normal and does not necessarily imply that you are undersleeping.
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Their words now
Therefore, I realized that it’s very important to be as awake as possible and that my model of sleepiness where you can be “awake”, “sleepy” and “asleep” is dumb.
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1 June 2022
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.
The wave function as a true ensemble In quantum mechanics, the wave function predicts probabilities of possible measurement outcomes, but not which individual outcome is realized in each run of an experiment. This suggests that it describes an ensemble of…
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