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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Social competence has to run automatically, because doing it deliberately imposes a cognitive load that becomes an impediment in itself.

  Their words

  you need to somehow internalize it and it has to be relatively effortless and automatic. It has to become automatic at some level and then you can move through life fairly smoothly in a socially very complex way.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Every. Writes the Chain of Thought column about working with AI tools and hosts the podcast AI & I.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every new model makes yesterday’s human competence cheap and therefore commoditised; the human job is to take that frozen competence and make something new with it.

  Their words

  What models do in general is they make yesterday's human competence cheap. And so, it becomes commoditized. It's not valuable anymore. What humans do is we go in there and we're like, "Yeah, we have all this frozen human competence from yesterday. How do I use this like make something new and interesting?"

  youtube.com

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

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  AI is welcome as a better search engine and a pair programmer that does not drive, but writing the code itself is not something to hand over to it.

  Their words, before

  I love chiseling my code and the way I use AI is in a separate window. I don't let it drive my code. I've tried that. I've tried the cursors and the wind surfaces and I don't enjoy that way of writing. And one of the reasons I don't enjoy that way of writing is I can literally feel competence draining out of my fingers.

  Their words now

  I will now start any project I'm starting with. I'm starting agent first and that's a massive shift

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  The meme that programmers no longer need to be competent is a trap: the path is competence, and AI does not change that.

  Their words, before

  Where I get fired up, and this ties back to the AI discussion, is when that's turned into this meme, that programmers no longer have to be competent. I mean the AI is gonna figure it out. The generators is gonna figure it out. I don't need to know SQL, active record is gonna abstract it away from me. No, no, no dude, hold up. The path here is competence.

  Their words now

  really good programmers are currently more valuable than ever because they're the ones who are able to get the most out of the AI acceleration.

Long-time Debian developer and free-software maintainer (remctl, INN, pam-krb5) who has published book reviews on his personal site since the 1990s.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Politics on the Edge

  Their words

  The stand-out non-fiction book of the year was Rory Stewart's Politics on the Edge. I have a lot of disagreements with Stewart's political positions (the more I listen to him, the more disagreements I find), but he is an excellent memoirist who skewers the banality, superficiality, and contempt for competence that has become so prevailing in centrist and right-wing politics. It's hard not to read this book and despair of electoralism and the current structures of governments, but it's bracing to know that even some people I disagree with believe in the value of expertise.

  eyrie.org

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  I Shall Wear Midnight

  Their words

  I Shall Wear Midnight was the best of the remaining Pratchett novels. It's the penultimate Tiffany Aching book and, in my opinion, the best. All of the elements of the previous books come together in snarky competence porn that was a delight to read.

  eyrie.org

Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Duolingo's real competence is motivation and habit formation, and language learning was only the first thing it applied that to.

  Their words

  I actually in many ways see language learning as like their first vehicle. And what they have a superpower in is that again, the motivation, the habits, etc.

  youtube.com

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

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  The meme that programmers no longer need to be competent is a trap: the path is competence, and AI does not change that.

  Their words, before

  it's a luxury good like you're not paying the penalty for that the people who embrace it and think that they can just ask AI for everything or they can just look everything up but they don't have to understand the copy pasta that they slam into their project they're the ones who going to suffer

  Their words now

  Where I get fired up, and this ties back to the AI discussion, is when that's turned into this meme, that programmers no longer have to be competent. I mean the AI is gonna figure it out. The generators is gonna figure it out. I don't need to know SQL, active record is gonna abstract it away from me. No, no, no dude, hold up. The path here is competence.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  AI is welcome as a better search engine and a pair programmer that does not drive, but writing the code itself is not something to hand over to it.

  Their words, before

  I enjoy it even almost like as a sort of pair programmer AI pair programmer who doesn't drive who's just there to give suggestions to know the API to do all these other things but the second it starts wanting to autocomplete my code I'm like yeah I'm out bro

  Their words now

  I love chiseling my code and the way I use AI is in a separate window. I don't let it drive my code. I've tried that. I've tried the cursors and the wind surfaces and I don't enjoy that way of writing. And one of the reasons I don't enjoy that way of writing is I can literally feel competence draining out of my fingers.

Writes The Convivial Society, on technology and the moral life — what our tools do to attention, memory and how we treat each other.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A good life rests on things that demand skill and effort from you, not on goods that arrive requiring none.

  Their words

  A good life is supported by a diverse array of focal things and practices, which tend to reward us with deeper, more meaningful experiences; a gratifying measure of bodily skill and competence; and possibly even a stronger fabric of relationships.

  The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Lifetheconvivialsociety.substack.com