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Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Modern institutional speech does face adversaries, through journalism, litigation, regulators, social media, and whistleblowers.

  Their words

  it is not true that modern institutional speech faces "no adversary": we have journalism, litigation, regulators, social media pile-ons, whistleblowers, and o on.

  braddelong.substack.com

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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  The plan to hijack airplanes and destroy the World Trade Center was an eccentric, unlikely scheme rather than a natural or inevitable one.

  Their words

  I think appreciation of the contingency starts with observing that the whole idea of hijacking airplanes in order to destroy the World Trade Center is eccentric.

  We’re still underrating 9/11’s impactslowboring.com

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Substack

  Their words

  Typing out a tag and pressing enter in Substack on a post no longer auto-focuses the textfield (impossible to add tags quick now, or just via keyboard I have to move the mouse to click).

  x.com

Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein, a staff writer at The Atlantic from 2008 to 2025, and host of the Plain English podcast.

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  AI industry leaders publicly call for slowing AI development while continuing to accelerate it themselves.

  Their words

  Judging by their words, AI luminaries are begging the world to force them to hit the brakes. Judging by their work, these same people are pressing down on the accelerator with every fiber of their being.

  AI Safety Is Having a Momentderekthompson.org

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

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  The phrase people familiar with the matter, when used in journalism, signals reporters have anonymous insider sources they find credible.

  Their words

  I’ve written about the people familiar with the matter pattern before—it means Reuters have anonymous insider sources that their reporters (and editors) find credible.

  simonwillison.net

Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.

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  Reviewing agent-written code is risk management rather than reading: how long the change took and how big it is tell you when to look closely.

  Their words

  Part of it is just like you develop a little bit of a feeling how long something should take. So if I do a small tweak that should like change how dragging works and it takes three hours, I know something's wrong. I'll look closely. But otherwise, part of code review is simply like observing, looking how big it changes and trusting your gut.

  Peter Steinberger: "Fun Is Velocity"youtube.com

Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.

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  Current AI systems are very unlikely to be close to achieving genuine sentience.

  Their words

  the most pressing question is not whether the machines are on the verge of sentience, since the likelihood of that seems low.

  Notebooks And The Extended Mindadjacentpossible.substack.com

Historian of maritime strategy at the US Naval War College; wrote The Wars for Asia and works on why continental and maritime powers fight differently.

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  A continental power fights on its invader's timetable; for a maritime power, whether and when to intervene at all is a matter of strategy.

  Their words

  Whereas if you're a maritime power observing someone else being invaded cuz in theory it's pretty tough to invade you by sea, it's a major point of strategy as to whether you're going to intervene at all and if you are, what is the timing?

  youtube.com

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

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  Sharding across machines has faded as a concern because hardware got more powerful, not because the cloud made it easy.

  the cloud

  Their words

  But, at least this sort of sharding across multiple machines is maybe become less of a pressing issue just because more and more workloads can just run on a single machine. Some people still have very large-scale workloads that do have to be sharded across multiple machines. So, it's not going away entirely.

  youtube.com

American author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and The Undoing Project, and host of the podcast Against the Rules.

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  Starting from what worked rather than from what failed is a different starting point from almost all journalism, and a journalist who did it would be accused of hagiography.

  Their words

  In fact, if most journalists started there, they'd be accused of heography

  10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)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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  Once a robot is good enough, you can teach it with words instead of with demonstrations, and language becomes a training signal for motor skill.

  Their words

  Like now, like basically learning is not for these systems is not just learning from raw actions. It's also learning from words eventually be learning from observing what people do from the kind of natural feedback that you receive when you're doing a job together with somebody else.

  youtube.com

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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Waste Books

  Their words

  Tweets from 1765-1799 by a 4’9” hunchback physicist, friends with Goethe and Kant, admired by Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, etc. Such wonderful random thoughts, beautiful perspectives on thinking for yourself, observing nature, language, freedom, philosophy, religion, and more. Hundreds of initial insights, especially inspiring because they’re undeveloped.

  sive.rs

Chief executive of Alphabet and Google; joined Google in 2004 and led Chrome and Android before taking over in 2015.

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  News and journalism will matter in the future, and Google's commitment to that ecosystem will become a way it differentiates itself.

  Google

  Their words

  Look, I think news and journalism will play an important role in the future. We are pretty committed to it, right? So I think making sure that ecosystem, in fact, I think we'll be able to differentiate ourselves as a company over time because of our commitment there.

  youtube.com