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Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.

From one piece The open houses at the edge of disaster 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Surviving without damage so far is not evidence a property is prepared for future climate risk

  Their words

  Surviving up to now is not evidence that a property is prepared for what comes next, she said-especially when the conditions around it are changing.

  The open houses at the edge of disasterheated.world

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  Sellers and real estate agents are financially incentivized to avoid learning about or disclosing climate risk

  Their words

  sellers and agents are incentivized not to know about climate risk or communicate it. Everyone involved only needs the property to look safe long enough to pass it along

  The open houses at the edge of disasterheated.world

Writes Slow Boring, a near-daily newsletter on American politics and public policy; co-founded Vox in 2014 and left it in 2020.

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  Large national investments in girls' athletic opportunities translate into better international sports results.

  America

  Their words

  America has made unusually large investments in athletic opportunities for girls and it pays off.

  Destroying women’s sports in order to save itslowboring.com

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

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  The EU's large economic size does not translate into geopolitical clout.

  Europe

  Their words

  The European Union is big - the third largest economy in the world, but it has great difficulty in transforming economic strength into geopolitical clout.

  Canada is cosying up to Europeprogrammablemutter.com

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

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  Elon Musk was flagrantly incompetent when he took on a government role, contradicting predictions that his business talent would translate there.

  government

  Their words

  What we do know is that the actual Elon Musk that we have to live with on this here timeline was flagrantly incompetent in government, contrary to Noah's previous predictions.

  The Acemoglu Wars Are All About AIprogrammablemutter.com

Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

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  The speed of a system is set by its longest serial dependency chain, which is a property of the architecture and cannot be parallelised away afterwards.

  Their words

  the performance of your software is generally determined by the longest serial dependency chain because it's something that cannot be parallelized.

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Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.

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  Switching between tasks carries a real and measurable cost, and switching well is a trainable skill rather than a fixed property of a brain.

  Their words

  So, as soon as you switch into something, there's a cost carried over from the previous task, and you're much slower and more difficult for the couple of next trials on the new task. So, there's always a switching cost

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Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.

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  Translating software from one programming language to another is where coding agents already excel, because the existing code is a perfect specification.

  coding agents

  Their words

  Um, and to give you an example of a a a use of a coding agent that works extremely well is you can ask today's models to translate software from one computer language to another very effectively because in that case you actually have a incredibly detailed specification.

  Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com

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

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  Formal methods are a niche tool; property-based testing is the one most engineers should adopt, and stopping there is a fine place to stop.

  Their words

  I love formal methods, but I think it's a fairly niche tool for most people and I think like property-based testing is in general going to be useful for more people.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.

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  Prompt work does not transfer across model generations: what you wrote three months ago for one model may be worth nothing to the next.

  Their words

  And the reason is every model is very different. So, something that you did for one model maybe 3 months ago, it just might not translate at all to the next model.

  Boris Cherny: We Cut 80% of Claude Code's Promptyoutube.com

Australian moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics emeritus at Princeton University; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.

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  Calling an intelligent, self-aware being legal property does not resolve whether it has an interest in freedom.

  Their words

  But it recognizes that calling an intelligent, self-aware, emotionally complex being "property" does not answer the question of whether that being has an interest in freedom.

  “KEY OUT”: When a Chimpanzee Asks to Be Freeboldreasoningwithpetersinger.substack.com

Makes NeetCode, the structured practice list and video walkthroughs people use to prepare for coding interviews; a former Google engineer.

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  The data-structures-and-algorithms interview never tested a skill that transfers to the job; what it tested was whether somebody can think.

  Their words

  And DSA interviews were never the best for that. Well, thinking, sure. But in terms of like does that skill translate to what you're doing on the job? It never really translated to that. It was more about evaluating like does somebody think?

  Tech interviews with NeetCodeyoutube.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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  Audit independence is a property of the surrounding system and its evidence flows, not an inherent property of the auditing model itself.

  Their words

  audit independence is not a property of the model. It is a property of the system around the model.

  Who Audits the Auditors?strangeloopcanon.com

Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.

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  A mission statement is not a mission; a mission is an emergent property of the organization and has to be built in rather than labelled on.

  Their words

  as leaders we get so focused on value statement mission statements we forget the mission statement is not the mission. The map is not the territory. Mission is an emergent property of the living superorganism of the thing we're birthing.

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Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

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  Scalability is not a property a system has; it is the set of mechanisms it has for coping with a change in load.

  Their words

  Scalability is just like what mechanisms we have for dealing with changes in load. If load increases, how can we add computing capacity to a system, for example, so that the system still continues working?

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Austrian developer. Created the libGDX game framework, and more recently the pi coding agent, which moved with them to Earendil — Armin Ronacher's company — in April 2026. Writes at mariozechner.at.

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  The human bottleneck is a safety property: remove it and small, individually harmless coding errors compound at a rate nobody feels until it is too late.

  Their words

  With an orchestrated army of agents, there is no bottleneck, no human pain. These tiny little harmless booboos suddenly compound at a rate that's unsustainable. You have removed yourself from the loop, so you don't even know that all the innocent booboos have formed a monster of a codebase. You only feel the pain when it's too late.

  Thoughts on slowing the fuck downmariozechner.at

Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.

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  The human data an AI model would need to predict trial outcomes can only come from trials in people, so the loop runs no faster than the trials themselves.

  Their words

  But remember that such data can only come from trials in people (mice are nice, but most animal results simply do not translate.)

  writingruxandrabio.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.

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  Careful step-by-step thinking is a property of the developer, not something a tool or framework can enforce

  Their words

  Notebooks don't force you to write clean code. AI tools don't force you to think carefully. Discipline comes from the developer, not the environment.

  Why I Stopped Using nbdevhamel.dev

Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum; reads cuneiform, and wrote The Ark Before Noah and The First Ghosts.

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  Translating Akkadian statements as certainties when they were possibilities changes the whole meaning of a text.

  Their words

  And if you translate, “He will,” in a literary text, “He might,” then the whole text is different. The whole text is different.

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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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  New intellectual property needs single-player games, because launching a multiplayer game on a world nobody knows yet is extremely hard.

  Their words

  Luckily, if you want to do what we’re forced to do and also what I want to do, which is make new IP, you need single-player games. You can launch a multiplayer game with new IP. It’s just extremely hard.

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Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

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  Headcount does not translate into product quality, and often the opposite: too many people spend their time coordinating, and the idle ones demotivate the rest.

  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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Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

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  Boredom is a missing skill rather than a property of the situation: there is infinity in every direction, including a blank wall.

  Their words

  And so it's not really about the environment or the wall. It's really about how we see it and whether we can find the thing that is deep and rich and infinite in that direction.

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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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  What destroyed Kodak was not missing digital photography but that digital cameras were an undifferentiated low-margin commodity.

  Their words

  film was this high margin product where they had a bunch of unique intellectual property and digital cameras are a low margin um commodity where they were competing with the entire consumer electronics industry with no differentiation.

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

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  Respect for trademarks and other intellectual property is part of what open source means, not a departure from it.

  open source

  Their words

  WordPress is licensed under the GPL; respect for copyright and IP like trademarks is core to the GPL and our conception of what open source means.

  WPE & Trademarksma.tt

Indian software developer working with React and TypeScript; writes and publishes a newsletter at sreetamdas.com.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Maccy

  Their words

  Maccy for lack of better words, a copy-paste manager? allows you to search through your historical copy-s, super helpful

  sreetamdas.com

Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, an AI answer engine; previously a research scientist at OpenAI and a PhD student at UC Berkeley.

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  The obstacle to search is not the competition but the fact that people are not naturally good at turning curiosity into a question.

  Their words

  There is a skill to asking good questions, and everyone’s curious though. Curiosity is unbounded in this world. Every person in the world is curious, but not all of them are blessed to translate that curiosity into a well-articulated question.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

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  Hierarchy is not intrinsically authoritarian: it is a property of self-organising systems that emerges for the benefit of the parts.

  Their words

  But hierarchy is not intrinsically authoritarian. Hierarchy did not originate as a political structure that humans invented for controlling and dominating one another, it is in fact a property of self-organizing systems, and it emerges for the benefit of the subsystems.

  charity.wtf

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.

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  Violations of Bell inequalities reveal only properties of models, not of nature itself.

  Their words

  Since Local Causality is a property of a model, observing violations of Bell's inequality cannot tell us anything about nature itself, but merely about the properties of the model that we use to describe nature.

  Quantum Confusions, Cleared Up (or so I hope)arxiv.org

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

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  Color as perceived is not an objective property of objects, but a construct generated by the perceiving brain.

  Their words

  Redness is not "objective" in the sense of being "in the object", it only exists in the models generated by the sort of brains which are hooked up to eyes.

  Seth Explains Consciousnessputanumonit.com

Urban planner, co-author with Charles Marohn of Escaping the Housing Trap, and policy director at the Parking Reform Network. Wrote for Strong Towns from 2015, mostly about how housing markets actually set prices.

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  Affordability is not a property of a building; it is a price set in a transaction, so there is no such thing as affordable housing, only affordable prices.

  Their words

  Because affordability is not, and has never been, an intrinsic quality of a building.

  There's No Such Thing as Affordable Housingstrongtowns.org

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

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  AI will out-think us, but it will not become conscious, because consciousness is a property of life.

  Their words

  But in terms of what we value the most as humans, which is to say our feelings, our emotions, our sense of what the world is in a very personal way that I think means as much or more to people than their information processing. And that’s where I don’t think that AI necessarily will become conscious because I think it’s the property of life.

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