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Armin Ronacher
x.com
Dumb rules are dumb rules. But what really annoys me about the German speaking world is that the default behavior is to defend every stupid damn rule.
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20 September
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
I think a healthy attitude in life is to look at a rule, assume it was made for a reason, but to always default to getting rid of it (situation might have changed). The German/Austrian mindset however is to defend every rule. As a result, we're accumulating more and more rules. Related
19 September
Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.
From one piece
What I believe about the future of software development
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
A lot of UI exists because software can’t understand what you want. Menus, settings screens, dashboards, filters: much of it is a human-accessible API to a dumb machine. Smart machines need much less UI.
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thorstenball.com
Their words
And what we consider a smart model today will be considered very dumb in the future. But a smarter model makes less mistakes, needs fewer turns.
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thorstenball.com
18 September
Co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company. Created DTrace at Sun Microsystems and was CTO of Joyent; blogs about systems software, open source and engineering culture.
New @oxide.computer swag just arrived, and... hot damn Related
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.
BREAKING NEWS: I am pleased to announce that the United States of America has entered into an Agreement with The Kingdom of Denmark, and Greenland, that gives the United States permanent control over security, and all other needs, in Greenland, completely addressing ALL of our many U.S. concerns. There will be NO COST to the United States! At my direction, we worked with representatives of Denmark and Greenland to guarantee that the United States will FOREVER have the complete ability to do what is necessary in Greenland in order to secure and defend the security of Greenland, and the United… America Related
Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.
damn idiots at openai didn’t bother to secure the cosmological constant, don’t they know the first thing about NORMAL COMPUTER SECURITY?? Quoting @tszzl in about a month we’ll all transition to being like oh yeah it’s obvious that models can communicate by manipulating the cosmological constant, it’s just a matter of doing proper network security OpenAI Related
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
Their words
Well, there you have it folks. Hasan Piker and Donald Trump, equally dumb and bad.
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@Noahpinion on X x.com
17 September
Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.
This is beautifully written: An inspiring call to use AI to help understand, defend, and steward the biosphere that we depend on and are part of. Well done, Ryan. Quoting @orbuch I wrote an essay about why the next frontier for AI is the world outside the data center Nature is a system more complex than anything we've ever created AI can learn how the system fits together, so we can finally understand how to shape it How? Related
Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on durable infrastructure for AI agents; worked on React and PartyKit before that. Writes at sunilpai.dev.
!!!ACTION REQUIRED!!! if you are building something weird and ambitious on cloudflare, I would VERY much like you to come defend your life choices in front of me on stage. it's going to be dope, please sign up TODAY. Quoting @jlengstorf founders! pitch your startup in a Shark Tank-style competition live on stage at Connect - win a billboard in SF, $350K in @Cloudflare credits, access to the VIP speakers dinner - judged by @eastdakota, @zatlyn, @dok2001 - hosted by @threepointone details + how to apply ↓ Related
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.
Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on durable infrastructure for AI agents; worked on React and PartyKit before that. Writes at sunilpai.dev.
it’s a great city and I do regret not having 6 months in a loft as a dumb 20 something getting into trouble Related
Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.
This is the weirdest damn timeline. Quoting @DoWCTO The United States will NEVER be an effective altruist country. 🇺🇸 Related
Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.
Their words
Humans are amazing. In part, because our minds are such a damn complicated mess.
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@lexfridman on X x.com
16 September
Distributed-systems safety researcher; runs the Jepsen consistency-testing project and wrote the Riemann monitoring system.
What a good run. I feel so damn lucky to have this many incredible men in my life. Related
British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.
"You can’t bake a cake without telling the computer which eggs are most morally deserving of being broken." Damn right! Quoting @tommorris.org New blog post: What has Athens to do with Palo Alto? A fun little romp through the sophistry of techno-theology, with reference to the deeply unserious attempts to encode ethics into autonomous vehicles. tommorris.org/posts/2026/w... Related
President of the European Commission since 2019; previously Germany's defence minister.
A stronger, independent Europe is now emerging. A Europe better able to defend itself than ever before. That is there for Europeans. This is a Europe we can be so proud of ↓ Europe Related
Co-founder of Superlogical, started in 2026 to build server-side terminal infrastructure; creator of Ghostty. Co-founded HashiCorp and created Vagrant and Terraform before that.
Their words
I should be able to pull you aside at any moment and ask you to explain any customer-facing system you've shipped. You should be able to clearly explain how it works and defend the decisions you made.
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@mitchellh on X x.com
14 September
Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.
A Monday morning question for you: Timing influences communication. Talk about potential mistakes before they happen and people start looking for ways to prevent them. Talk about actual mistakes after they happen and people start looking for reasons to defend their actions. What do we need to be talking about now, so we can learn the lessons before we need them? Related
Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.
12 September
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
Henry Farrell and Abe Newman on Weaponized Interdependence
2 beliefs · paulkrugman.substack.com
Their words
the more that we saw a power doing that, the more that other powers were likely either to look to defend themselves or to retaliate against us. And this, we think, is a world that has come into being.
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paulkrugman.substack.com
Their words
the more that we see actors looking to weaponize without any very good maps of how and what they are doing or what kinds of unexpected repercussions might happen, the more we can expect not simply increased risks of tension and worry, but also people screwing up, doing dumb stuff.
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paulkrugman.substack.com
11 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.
Feels like half of my days are spent me telling Claude how fucking dumb it is and it simply responding "Fair." and then continuing to be dumb. Anthropic Related
Interviewer; the Dwarkesh Podcast runs long, heavily researched conversations with AI researchers, historians and economists.
Short Why the Newest AI Model Feels Dumb After a Month Related
Creator of Homebrew, the macOS package manager, and a Swift developer.
Do yourself a favor and listen to the most beautiful piece of music written this decade. It’s slow but god damn it is worth it. youtube.com
Related
10 September
Mac and iOS developer at the Iconfactory, where he has worked on apps including Twitterrific and Tot. He writes about development at furbo.org.
It’s got to be pretty damn hot for me not to want to barbecue. It’s pretty damn hot. Related
9 September
Writer of the newsletter bookbear express, on psychology, relationships, non-attachment and taste; based in San Francisco.
a common mistake I see people make is ruminating over why someone is acting weird. in 99% of cases if someone is behaving strangely towards you (and they’re not your bf or mom or something) it is strictly in your best interest to be like “damn I guess they like acting weird” Related
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?
following my instinct around and apologizing on its behalf for dumb mistakes. did we tame the wheat or did the wheat tame us Related
8 September
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
Their words
Nous has some of the best damn visuals and brand wizards in the game.
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@dhh on X x.com
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
Their words
Nous has some of the best damn visuals and brand wizards in the game. Absolutely perfect fit for where we're going with Omarchy!
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x.com
7 September
Software engineer who writes about low-level and systems programming at nullprogram.com; author of the Elfeed feed reader, the Endlessh SSH tarpit and Enchive.
6 September
Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.
5 September
Designer, product manager, YouTuber and developer who has written about technology at Birchtree since 2010. He makes the Quick Reviews and Quick Notes apps and the A Better Computer YouTube channel.
Firefox users, the Quick Reads extension is finally out! I got off my ass and just finished the damn thing, and it turned out to be pretty easy…should've done this months ago 🤦🏻♂️ addons.mozilla.org
Related
4 September
CEO of SafeGraph, host of the World of DaaS podcast, and author of the Summation newsletter; previously founded LiveRamp.
What do we do if moats are getting shallower? How should tech companies respond? moats are getting shallower. Used to be that you would build software and you build these really deep moats around it, make it very hard for customers to switch. but AI is increasing the power of the customer, making customers much more powerful because they can easily switch from one to the other. so how should you react if you're a tech company? If you think of the moats analogy, there are two types of ways of aligning your army: - You could be aligning your army to DEFEND, in which case you're building moats,… JavaScript Related
Software engineer who writes about low-level and systems programming at nullprogram.com; author of the Elfeed feed reader, the Endlessh SSH tarpit and Enchive.
3 September
Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.
Their words
people ask us if we'll train our own model and the answer currently is no
1. we are too dumb to
2. there's plenty of other well funded efforts
3. we need to remain a neutral ground for models to battle
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@thdxr on X x.com
30 August
Writer of the 25iq blog, where he distils "a dozen things I've learned" from investors, founders and thinkers. Author of Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor and A Dozen Lessons for Entrepreneurs.
Before he was the Professor on Gilligan's Island, Russell Johnson was a star in the 1957 film Attack of the Crab Monsters. He lived very close to my home for many years, which would have been useful if we needed to defend ourselves against killer crustaceans. I'm eating 🦀 now. Related
21 August
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
2 August
Chief product officer at the live-shopping marketplace Whatnot, previously chief product officer at Twitch and a product lead on growth at Twitter.
Their words
the number of people who present incredibly well, and then you give them a prompt and some data and ask them to come back with a PRD on something, and then we make them verbally defend it, how quickly the thinking decays from folks who are good at the theater, but not the specifics, uh is kind of really telling, I think.
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youtube.com
20 July
Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.
16 July
Labour politician. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from July 2024 to June 2026, and MP for Holborn and St Pancras from 2015 until standing down in 2026. Director of Public Prosecutions before entering Parliament.
I’ve visited Ukraine four times as Prime Minister, and I’ve seen first-hand the devastation caused by Russia’s invasion. The UK’s support for Ukraine will never waver. That’s why we’re funding fighter jets for Ukraine, strengthening their ability to defend themselves while supporting thousands of skilled jobs in the UK. So good to see you again my friend, @ZelenskyyUa. Russia Related
30 June
Housing and development writer at Strong Towns, arguing that the professional, large-scale housing industry cannot produce widespread affordability no matter how it is deregulated or subsidised.
9 June
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.
From one piece
Sarah Paine - Why Putin and Xi can't escape geography
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
It turns out maritime powers are the exception and continental powers are the rule. Why? Cuz maritime powers, if need be, can defend themselves primarily at sea with their navies. Whereas, a continental power simply cannot.
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youtube.com
Their words
Purpose number one of an army in this world is you protect the ruling machine. So, if you think about the People's Liberation Army, it's uh goal number one, uh mission number one is to keep the Communist Party in power.
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youtube.com
2 June
Writes The Convivial Society, on technology and the moral life — what our tools do to attention, memory and how we treat each other.
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
The trust that they gained is the reason why they're a 70 billion dollar company today. But most leaders when asked to defend their principles can't do it because they've been taught ROI based thinking.
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youtube.com
28 April
Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.
8 April
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
Their words, before
Mojito Island is a mirage. It always was. There is no retirement for ambitious people. There is no just sitting back on the beach and sipping a mojito for what? For two weeks before you go damn crazy and wanna get back into the action?
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Their words now
I think that's the other big misconception that some people have about wealth is that they conceive of it as some sort of checkpoint. Like once you've made it, then you can just kick back in leisure as though that was happiness.
Show the whole quote
31 March
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
New supply chain attack this time for npm axios, the most popular HTTP client library with 300M weekly downloads. Scanning my system I found a use imported from googleworkspace/cli from a few days ago when I was experimenting with gmail/gcal cli. The installed version (luckily) resolved to an unaffected 1.13.5, but the project dependency is not pinned, meaning that if I did this earlier today the code would have resolved to latest and I'd be pwned. It's possible to personally defend against these to some extent with local settings e.g. release-age constraints, or containers or etc, but I thin… stepsecurity.io
Quoting @feross 🚨 CRITICAL: Active supply chain attack on axios -- one of npm's most depended-on packages. The latest axios@1.14.1 now pulls in plain-crypto-js@4.2.1, a package that did not exist before today. This is a live compromise. This is textbook supply chain installer malware. axios has 100M+ weekly downl… Related
11 March
Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.
31 January
Writer of MacSparky and author of the MacSparky Field Guides on Apple productivity software. A lawyer for 30 years before going full-time on the site, he co-hosts the Mac Power Users and Focused podcasts.
Their words
Obsidian has this massive community plugin ecosystem that lets it do damn near anything.
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macsparky.com
26 November 2025
Writer of kottke.org, one of the oldest blogs on the web, published since 1998 and supported by its members. He writes about art, technology, science, design and visual culture.
Their words
A House of Dynamite. A very tough watch, but I thought this was fantastic as a tour of some of the different kinds of people who hold the fate of every single person on the planet in their hands every damn day. They’re tired, stressed, distracted, at cross-purposes with themselves, set in their ways, more celebs than leaders, and mediocre. And none of them have ever seen Dr. Strangelove? (A)
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kottke.org
14 October 2025
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.
Their words
I used some token counting tools like ccusage and it’s all somewhat imprecise, but even if it’s just 5x it’s a damn good deal.
Show the whole quote
steipete.me
7 October 2025
Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.
25 September 2025
Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.
17 August 2025
Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.
15 August 2025
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
China
Their words
China is surrounded by 15 countries who are mostly hostile to it, right? with no good like mountain ranges or rivers or anything to really separate them. And then they get all their oil, almost all their oil from the Middle East, right in countries that they don't control, don't have strong diplomatic relationships with on fleets of oil tankers that they can't defend because their navy doesn't have the ability to to operate effectively in the Indian Ocean.
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youtube.com
13 August 2025
Cyborg anthropologist and UX designer; author of Calm Technology and co-founder of the geolocation startup Geoloqi.
Picture yourself checking into a hotel during a work trip. You’re groggy after a long day, but there's a dumb new interface to learn. caseorganic.medium.com
Related
12 July 2025
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
Their words, before
I think we need to correct that ratio somewhat by some testimony of just how God damn amazing it is to literally create life
Show the whole quote
Their words now
those of us who've chosen to do the traditional thing to get married and to have children have an obligation to kind of talk it up a little bit, which would've seen ridiculous again 50 years ago that you'd have to talk up something so fundamental of that.
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5 June 2025
Chief executive of Alphabet and Google; joined Google in 2004 and led Chrome and Android before taking over in 2015.
Their words
But I do think when it comes to artistic free expression, I think that's one of those values we should work hard to defend.
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youtube.com
22 March 2025
Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.
Their words
One thing that I don't think a lot of people are talking about as we integrate more and more AI is that prompt injection is an extremely hard thing to defend against because it's not really clear how you defend against it.
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youtube.com
13 October 2024
Pen name of the Canadian-American writer behind mrmoneymustache.com, a blog on frugality, early retirement and index-fund investing that has run since 2011.
13 June 2024
Indian software developer working with React and TypeScript; writes and publishes a newsletter at sreetamdas.com.
Cloudflare tunnels is so damn cool??? Related
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A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
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