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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.

From one piece Where’s the Beef (Coming From)? 2 beliefs · paulkrugman.substack.com

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  The Trump administration is trying to undo even the most essential functions of government and turn the country back to the 19th century or before.

  government

  Their words

  It’s an administration that’s trying to turn us back to the 19th century or before. It’s really just trying to undo even the most essential functions of government.

  Where’s the Beef (Coming From)?paulkrugman.substack.com

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  Food safety regulation is an essential government role that cannot be left to the private sector or to individuals doing their own research.

  government

  Their words

  And this is not something that you can leave up to the private sector. It’s not something where you can do your own research. It’s a very complicated world out there. And the informational burden of trying to figure out whether the people responsible for your package of hamburger are actually following safe procedures, that’s beyond everybody.

  Where’s the Beef (Coming From)?paulkrugman.substack.com

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

From one piece Paul Graham On Startups, Ambition, and Great Founders 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Y Combinator getting bigger does not change what it is like to be in it, because each startup lives inside a pod the size of the whole of YC in 2012.

  startups

  Their words

  if you if you divide the YC up into little bits where each startup is part of a pod of 70 startups, then it's just like they were back in 2012 when there were 70 startups.

  youtube.com

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  AGI is not a finish line to be crossed but a smear with width, and we are already standing on it.

  AGI

  Their words

  some bits of AI are way across the finish line, some bits are like maybe in the middle of it. Who knew the line had dimension? The finish line is actually this sort of smear. And I think the best answer you can give is like we're on the smear.

  youtube.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

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  Programmers who loved the mechanical act of coding are under threat; those who wanted to build things are not.

  Their words

  I think you're gonna have a hard time coping with the new reality if the only thing you loved about programming was the mechanical bits of putting the right logical constructs together to produce something other people told you to produce. Because that mechanical process is under threat. If you are, as you just mentioned, excited about building things, I don't think you're under threat at all.

  youtube.com

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

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  Out of Your Mind: Essential Listening from the Alan Watts Audio Archives

  Their words

  Words are tools to hide truth. I can’t say much about these recordings and books by Alan Watts. It wouldn’t be fair to do so.

  rakhim.org

Co-founder and former chief executive of Uber, now chief executive of CloudKitchens and of Adams, an industrial AI company automating food, mining and transport.

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  Digitising the physical world means treating atoms like bits, with manufacturing as the processor, real estate as the storage and logistics as the network.

  Their words

  But if you're digitizing the physical world, you're treating atoms like bits. And you're like, well, I know that CPU manipulates the bits. What manipulates atoms? That's manufacturing or digitized manufacturing.

  youtube.com

Professor at Stanford working on robot learning and meta-learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence.

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  Letting a robot imagine the next image helps, but it is not essential — the model was surprisingly good without it.

  Their words

  uh the we found that that leads to improvement and we saw in the shirt folding example we saw like a quantitative bump from using that sort of imagination compared to not using it. At the same time I think that the model actually performed surprisingly well without that as well.

  youtube.com

Founder of the Silicon Valley Product Group; wrote Inspired, Empowered and Transformed on how product organisations work.

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  The product role remains essential in the AI era, whatever the tools become.

  Their words

  Ben’s article serves as a great reminder of why the product role is so essential, and is likely to remain essential.

  A Fresh Definition of The Product Rolesvpg.com

Coffee consultant and author of books on espresso, roasting and brewing, including The Professional Barista's Handbook and The Coffee Roaster's Companion; writes about brewing gear and roast control at scottrao.com.

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  Consistent roast color in sample roasting is essential for making fair, informed green-coffee buying decisions.

  Their words

  Roast quality and color can have a big impact on perceived cup score and buying decisions, so if you are serious about choosing the right green for your company, it is a good idea to do your own sample roasting, using a system that yields your preferred roast level consistently.

  Sample Roestingscottrao.com

Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.

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  Any one person or small group placed at the top of the hiring funnel will bottleneck the whole organisation, so first-round review should be distributed across the company as a vote.

  Their words

  And so we can distribute the voting across a lot of the company for this initial review, which is essential because if you're doing anything cool, by the time you get a couple years into it, that top of funnel is overwhelming. And if you place any in any small group of employees or any one person in the way as a bottle bottleneck on this, they will absolutely bottleneck the whole rest of the organization.

  Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.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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  "Move fast and break things" is the wrong mantra when you are dealing with atoms; the job is to move fast and ship safely.

  Their words

  in Silicon Valley, there's a common mantra to move fast and break things. However, when you're dealing with atoms instead of bits, breaking things is not really okay. So, the thing you have to do is to move fast and ship safely.

  youtube.com

Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, the Denver company building the Overture supersonic airliner and its Symphony engine.

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  A team of fifty can build a supersonic jet only by making hardware development look like software development and driving down the cost of iteration.

  Their words

  The key thing is to make hardware development look more like software development to reduce the cost of iteration both in the world of bits and in the world of atoms.

  youtube.com

Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.

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  Details are the essential substance of human communication, creativity and productivity.

  Their words

  Details are the very heart and substance of human communication, creativity, and productivity.

  fortelabs.com

Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".

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  Combining multiple AI models' outputs into one final answer tends to discard most of the good ideas that only one model produced.

  Their words

  the council does not simply keep the best bits from everyone. It keeps a minority of the good ideas, while peer review seems to give consensus ideas an extra push.

  LLM councils show groupthinkstrangeloopcanon.com

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.

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  Success now requires combining the best human intelligence with the best artificial intelligence

  Their words

  I believe that the path to success is best achieved by putting the best human intelligence together with the best artificial intelligence and that the way of thinking I am describing here is essential to understand and use in the new human/artificial intelligence era.

  Principled Thinking and AI Need to Go Togetherraydalio.substack.com

Musician and writer; answers readers' questions weekly at The Red Hand Files, and fronts Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

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  Suffering is not an interruption of a good life but the ground the good things grow out of.

  Their words

  Suffering is the essential and nourishing ground from which all the delightful gifts of life emerge.

  theredhandfiles.com

Entrepreneur and founder of Blueprint. Publishes a detailed, freely available longevity protocol documenting the food, supplements, devices and measurements he uses on himself.

• Usestheir ownrcmnd.app

  Blueprint Longevity Mix

  Their words

  These are in the Blueprint stack including Essential Capsules and Longevity Mix

  protocol.bryanjohnson.com

Economist; Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.

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  Our Dollar, Your Problem

  Their words

  This book manages to pull all of that together in a way that's genuinely readable and engaging, helped along by anecdotes from his own policymaking experience that both clarify the arguments and make them feel concrete and accessible to a much broader audience.

  fivebooks.com

Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.

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  Tony's Chocolonely Lil Bits

  Their words

  Tony's Chocolonely Lil Bits (in Milk Caramel Sea Salt and Cookie Mix), which single-handedly got me through this work year. I shudder to think how many bags of these I ate, but I can barely finish an essay without one.

  haleynahman.substack.com

Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.

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  The effectiveness of a plot twist depends on how carefully a story's point of view relates to its audience.

  Their words

  Point of view is essential for effective twists. Contrast Frozen with Fight Club, where the narrator's unreliability works because the entire story flows through his perspective and he maintains a direct relationship with the audience through fourth-wall breaks.

  Frozen's Lie: How a Tiny Detail Can Ruin a Storynateliason.com

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

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  Letters From an Imaginary Country

  Their words

  Theodora Goss's latest book of short stories is 'Letters From an Imaginary Country,' and it manages to be one of the most voraciously, delightfully readable books I've ever read and it's one of the most writerly books, too. What a treat!

  pluralistic.net

Co-founder of Rockstar Games, lead writer of the Grand Theft Auto and Red Dead Redemption series, and founder of Absurd Ventures since leaving in 2020.

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  Wanting to build a utopia is fundamentally anti-human, because what it says is that you like humans apart from the bad bits.

  Their words

  I think the power and money corrupted him in the end as well, but I also think that there’s something fundamentally anti-human about people who want to build utopias or paradises or heavens, because what they’re saying is, “I like humans apart from the bad bits.”

  youtube.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

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  Maths is essential schooling: it trains you to split big problems into small ones and to think for yourself, the same skill programming, project management and founding a company need.

  Their words

  Yeah. I still think math is essential. It's something that shapes your brain, it teaches you to rely on your logical thinking to split big problems into smaller parts, put them in the right sequence, solve them patiently, trying again if it doesn't work.

  youtube.com

Professor at Berkeley working on robot learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence, and argues that robots will learn from data rather than be programmed.

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  Video never became intelligence the way text did because text arrives already abstracted into the bits humans care about.

  Their words

  Whereas with text, it's already sort of been abstract into those bits that we as humans care about. So the representations are already there and they're not just good representations. They actually like focus in on what really matters.

  youtube.com

Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

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  China Talk

  Their words

  When this is good and on point, it is very, very good, and provides essential perspective I couldn’t have found elsewhere, especially when doing key interviews.

  thezvi.substack.com

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.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Rest

  Their words

  A refreshing counterargument to our culture's obsession with busyness, showing how deliberate rest is an essential component of the good life.

  pathlesspath.com

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  In Praise of Idleness

  Their words

  A collection of timeless essays from philosopher Bertrand Russell, including his famous 'In Praise of Idleness' which challenges our obsession with work and argues that leisure time, properly used, is essential for a fulfilling life and a better society.

  pathlesspath.com

American travel writer and broadcaster. Runs Rick Steves' Europe and writes the guidebooks, packing advice and travel-tip articles published on ricksteves.com.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  Money belt

  Their words

  Money belt. This flat, hidden, zippered pouch — worn around your waist and tucked under your clothes — is essential for the peace of mind it brings.

  ricksteves.com

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

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  Telegram urges people away from default-encrypted messengers while refusing to build the features that would encrypt its own users.

  Their words

  Indeed, it no longer feels amusing to see the Telegram organization urge people away from default-encrypted messengers, while refusing to implement essential features that would widely encrypt their own users’ messages.

  Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?blog.cryptographyengineering.com

Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.

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  Ringing Bell

  Their words

  There are not many anime from the 1970s which could be said to be as worth watching now as the day they were made, but Chirin no Suzu manages to be one of them for its unflinching honesty.

  gwern.net

Neuroscientist at UC Davis; studies memory and wrote Why We Remember.

From one piece Charan Ranganath: Human Memory, Imagination, Deja Vu, and False Memories | Lex Fridman Podcast #430 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Remembering is an imaginative construction: we do not replay the past, we reassemble a plausible version of it out of fragments.

  Their words

  So what he concluded was that he called remembering an imaginative construction, meaning that we don’t replay the past, we imagine how the past could have been by taking bits and pieces that come up in our heads.

  youtube.com

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  There is no such thing as a true or a false memory: every memory is a mix of fragments of what happened with the theories and inferences we used to fill the gaps.

  Their words

  Well, I like to say there’s no such thing as true or false memories. It’s like Johnny Rotten from the Sex Pistols, he had a saying that’s like, “I don’t believe in false memories any more than I believe in false songs.” And so the basic idea is that we have these memories that reflect bits and pieces of what happened, as well as our inferences and theories.

  youtube.com

Biologist at the MIT Media Lab; invented CRISPR gene drives and then spent years arguing for safeguards against their misuse and against engineered pandemics.

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  Every synthetic DNA order should be screened for hazardous sequences and shipped only to researchers whose work a biosafety authority has approved.

  Their words

  That makes it essential to ensure that all synthetic DNA orders are screened to determine whether they contain hazardous sequences, which should be shipped only to legitimate researchers whose work has been approved by a biosafety authority.

  media.mit.edu

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.

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  Search Engine

  Their words

  It's a deeply humane project that also manages to be formally inventive; I never feel like I'm in surer hands as a podcast listener than when Vogt is telling me about what he has learned.

  platformer.substack.com

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

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  Not the End of the World

  Their words

  His life and work have influenced my own tremendously—and just a few pages into Ritchie’s essential and hopeful new book, Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet, it became clear that she was carrying on his tremendous legacy.

  gatesnotes.com

Research scientist at Meta in Berlin working on multilingual models and evaluation; led the multilingual team at Cohere and was a research scientist at Google DeepMind before that.

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  As models keep scaling up, modularity will become essential to how they are developed.

  Their words

  Given the trend of pre-training larger and larger models, we believe modularity will be crucial.

  Modular Deep Learningruder.io

Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.

• Dislikedrcmnd.app

  End the Fed

  Their words

  It's a book by a politician, about what you expect. Some interesting tid bits on the history of the Fed but you could get it from Wikipedia.

  nateliason.com

Psychotherapist who trained with Jeffrey Young from 1989 and founded The Cognitive Therapy Center of New Jersey and the Schema Therapy Institutes of NJ-NYC-DC. Wrote Disarming the Narcissist.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  Schema Therapy Training Institute video series

  Their words

  This video series is grounded in an understanding, both conceptually and practically, of the essential value of the therapy relationship in schema therapy

  disarmingthenarcissist.com

Singaporean writer and author of FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD; blogs at visakanv.com about ambition, writing and thinking in public.

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  The Nasty Bits

  Their words

  The Nasty Bits, by Anthony Bourdain. I read this book not too long before Anthony Bourdain died. I remember really enjoying his voice, his style, his sense of flair.

  visakanv.com

Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Licensing is a political and social construct, so an unlicensed profession can still be doing engineering.

  Their words

  licenses exist because we are part of society and have legal requirements, not because they are essential to what it means to do engineering

  Are We Really Engineers?hillelwayne.com

Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

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  The Knack: How Street-Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up

  Their words

  If you're deep into building a company, or serious about building something that lasts, this is an excellent read. Written by a man who has built multiple $100Mn+ revenue companies. He has a great, matter of fact language and lessons that are key to the most essential parts of building a business. This is a must read for any serious founder.

  jasonevanish.com

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Mathologer

  Their words

  Half of the appeal here comes from the delightful bits of math this channel covers, often with novel ways of presenting otherwise extremely complicated topics to make them easier.

  3blue1brown.com

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  Chaos: Making a New Science

  Their words

  This is one of my all-time favorite books, closely followed by everything else Gleick has written. It gives an inspiring look at the birth of a new field, and unlike many popular science books, it manages to talk substantively about the math that was being discovered.

  3blue1brown.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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  Black Diamond Sprint 225

  Their words

  The Sprint 225 uses one TriplePower LED bulb. Its light pattern is wonderfully smooth, with no distracting rings; it seems almost perfectly optimized for night-running and night-hiking — it focuses most of the light ahead, but still manages to illuminate the periphery.

  andrewskurka.com

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Secret of Our Success

  Their words

  The Secret Of Our Success by anthropologist Joseph Henrich manages to be an amazing book anyway.

  slatestarcodex.com

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

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  A Gentleman in Moscow

  Their words

  A Gentleman in Moscow is an amazing story because it manages to be a little bit of everything.

  gatesnotes.com

Author of The Talent Code, The Little Book of Talent and The Culture Code, writing on how skills and group cultures are built.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Power of Moments

  Their words

  You should check out Chip and Dan Heath's new book, which is essential reading for anybody who cares about culture and leadership.

  danielcoyle.com

Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Combinatorial Auctions

  Their words

  This is one of those books where each chapter is by a different author. Despite that, it still manages to be coherent and I didn't mind reading it straight through.

  danluu.com

Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.

• Readrcmnd.app

  The Now Habit

  Their words

  A guide to procrastination: why we do it, how we do it, and a number of tips and strategies to help overcome it. Overall a dry read, but there are a few bits I found useful.

  radex.io

Mathemusician and video maker known for the Doodling in Math Class series; directed the eleVR virtual reality research group at the Communications Design Group.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  MouseRug

  Their words

  My mousepad is a MouseRug. It is essential to my mental health that my mouse live on this tiny Persian rug with fringe and everything.

  usesthis.com

CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Minimizing network round trips is essential to a good user experience, because bandwidth keeps improving and latency will not.

  Their words

  The bandwidth capacity of your users' connections might improve noticeably, as it steadily has, but the latency needle won't move much at all. This means that minimizing the number of roundtrips you make to display information on page is essential to great user experience and responsiveness.

  7 principles of rich web applicationsrauchg.com

Game developer and moral philosopher; made QWOP, GIRP and Getting Over It, and teaches at the NYU Game Center.

• Dislikedrcmnd.app

  Audacity

  Their words

  For making games, I'm using Audacity for editing sounds, which somehow manages to be less usable than Sound Forge was ten years ago.

  usesthis.com

Industrial designer; head of design at Braun from 1961 to 1995; designer of Vitsœ's 606 shelving system; author of the ten principles for good design.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Good design is as little design as possible: less, but better, because it concentrates on the essentials.

  Their words

  Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials.

  Dieter Rams: ten principles for good designvitsoe.com

Statistician at Columbia; writes Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and wrote Bayesian Data Analysis.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases

  Their words

  This work started out as a bit of a curiosity in the field of psychology, but we get a lot of insight from it, it is absolutely essential to understanding how humans think.

  fivebooks.com