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Epidemiologist; founded Your Local Epidemiologist in March 2020 to translate public-health science, and consults for organisations including the CDC.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The long-term health effects of a disaster deserve as much attention as the disaster itself.

  Their words

  When there is a disaster, it's important to take long-term effects as seriously as the initial event.

  yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.com

Author of Recoding America; founded Code for America and was US deputy chief technology officer from 2013 to 2014. Writes Eating Policy on why governments cannot do what they decide to do.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Well-functioning systems succeed through continuous debugging rather than perfect initial design.

  Their words

  When things work well, it's usually not because they were designed perfectly, but because they are constantly being debugged.

  Checking in on Outcomes Reviewseatingpolicy.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

Founder of HumanLayer; wrote 12-Factor Agents, on how to build AI agents that hold up in production.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Context has two budgets, not one: the information budget everyone thinks about, and an instruction budget, where conflicting instructions cost the model real computation to ignore.

  Their words

  But it's also your instruction budget is like if you give the model too many instructions and especially too many conflicting instructions and that's in your initial prompt and also like if you have a conversation you start going down a path and then you change your mind and you start going down a different you actually I don't want to do any of that I want to do this. It's like a it's a lot of computation the model has to do to notice that it has to ignore that whole thing.

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.com

Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Promising twice the work in half the time without the hard-won technical skills is simply a lie.

  Their words

  And there were people who were willing to say, "Nah, no, no, don't worry about that. This is easy. You can do this. Anybody can do this. Twice the work in half the time." From my perspective, that's just a lie.

  youtube.com

Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

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  Preliminary Report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI

  Their words

  That’s why we’re launching the Preliminary Report of the Independent International Scientific Panel on AI — an initial evidence-based assessment of the current state of AI science — to help the public and policymakers better understand the unprecedented moment we’re in.

  x.com

Full-stack Laravel developer based in Madison, Wisconsin; maintains open-source Laravel, Livewire and Alpine.js packages and writes at randallwilk.dev.

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  UniFi UNAS Pro 8

  Their words

  I've been wanting to get a NAS for a while now, so I decided to go all-in and get the UNAS Pro 8 from UniFi. The initial cost was a lot but for me it's been well worth the investment.

  randallwilk.dev

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

From one piece Manufacturing requirements are killing cell and gene therapy 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Manufacturing and batch-release requirements, not biology, are what kill most promising cell and gene therapies.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  Excessive manufacturing requirements are a pervasive problem, especially in the field of cell and gene therapy and they are killing countless of promising medicines before they ever reach patients.

  writingruxandrabio.com

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  Investment will keep draining out of cell and gene therapy until manufacturing and regulatory risk become possible to underwrite.

  Psychotherapy

  Their words

  Until manufacturing and regulatory risks become easier to underwrite, capital will keep drifting away from one of the most promising technologies of the last century.

  writingruxandrabio.com

Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.

From one piece FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Products 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Leaders are trained fastest by an apprentice who shadows every meeting, which is an unscalable way of scaling an organisation.

  Their words

  it's this nonscalable way to scale your organization and it's through like passing your vampire blood. That's what inside Zinga they called it, Pinkis' vampire blood. What he did that I started to do is you pick someone from the organization who's promising. I usually pick the people who didn't fit in the smart misfits and they become your tech assistant which is not your chief of staff, not your executive assistant.

  youtube.com

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  Founders who fail early tend to attach themselves to that failure and start being defined by it, and the line between success and failure on a first company is very fine.

  startups

  Their words

  I I definitely think I'm so aware of the fine line between success and failure, especially on your first company. And and and it's so it pains me how much founders and es especially I see it in men, not all men. And I have four sisters and a bunch of daughters. But I would say I see it in a lot in men and and friends, college friends, people I've grown up with that if they had an initial failure, if they had failures, they get attached to it and they start feeling defined by it

  youtube.com

Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rust may be the best language for AI agents to write, because the compiler gives an agent the feedback that tells it what to fix.

  Their words

  I think the same kind of principle applies with agents in that they can talk to the compiler. It will tell them what to fix. So I guess this could be a case. We we'll see. But Rust could be a pretty promising candidate for to use for agents because they can get more feedback and it's just hard it's harder to to ship certain type of bugs or maybe impossible to have certain type of bugs.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.

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  How to Work with (Almost) Anyone

  Their words

  My absolute favorite guide to getting a relationship off to a good start. MBS makes it simple to approach that initial ‘keystone conversation’ and keep any relationship healthy and vibrant.

  bringthedonuts.com

Reinforcement-learning researcher; co-wrote the field's standard textbook, wrote The Bitter Lesson, and shared the 2024 Turing Award.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Language models cannot be a prior for learning from experience, because a prior needs a ground truth to be a prior about and they have none.

  Their words

  So there's no ground truth. You can't have prior knowledge if you don't have ground truth because the prior knowledge is supposed to be a hint or an initial belief about what the truth is.

  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.

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  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

Runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind; worked on interpretability at Anthropic under Chris Olah before that, and teaches the field to newcomers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Complete reverse-engineering of neural networks is a less promising research direction than studying model biology and applying interpretability usefully

  Their words

  I'm now fairly pessimistic about ambitious interpretability (i.e. complete reverse-engineering), and I'm excited about model biology (studying qualitative high-level properties of models) and applied interpretability (rigorously doing useful things with interp).

  MATS Applications Open (Due Aug 29)neelnanda.io

Economist specialising in China's economy, international macroeconomics and global trade, and author of The New China Playbook.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Chinese state does not suppress the private sector; local officials' incentives make them work hard to help the best private companies succeed.

  Chinagovernment

  Their words

  Another big misunderstanding, and a fundamental one, is that people somehow think that the state suppresses the private sector. It’s not at all as simple as that. For the most part, if we look at the local government’s incentive system, they want to help the best, private companies, which are the most promising, because it makes them look good.

  youtube.com

Runs global health R&D at Open Philanthropy; writes about the science and medicine that could exist and does not.

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  Designing candidate molecules already feels like magic, but the arrival of new drugs at a doctor's prescription pad will not be sudden.

  Their words

  The design of the initial molecules to test is pretty magic-feeling, and is happening already – but the arrival of new drugs prescribed by your doctor will not be magical and sudden.

  AI could help lead to an Alzheimer's cureblog.jacobtrefethen.com

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Promising that a homepage or marketing-site redesign will drive acquisition is a failed promise, and usually a million-dollar one.

  Their words

  But to ever promise a homepage redesign or marketing site redesign in order to drive more acquisition is a failed promise that is going to be led by lots of agency money spending, uh often a million dollars plus

  youtube.com

Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."

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  Planning is fundamentally a search problem: explore paths, predict outcomes, and pick the best one.

  Their words

  Planning, at its core, is a search problem. You search among different paths towards the goal, predict the outcome (reward) of each path, and pick the path with the most promising outcome.

  Agentshuyenchip.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.

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  System Design Interview - An insider's guide

  Their words

  I've so far not seen good book resources to prepare for the systems design / architecture interview. This book from Alex Xu is the most promising one as of yet.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Civilization is triggered by humans learning to stay in one place, not by anything they invented there.

  Their words

  For the vast majority of human existence, we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the geographic region, but they’d move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, that’s the initial trigger to what would become civilization.

  youtube.com

Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.

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  Treating the universe as deterministic is an artifact of how laws have been written down since Newton, not a fact about the world.

  Their words

  Physics hardly even acknowledges that the universe is random at its base. We like to think we live in a deterministic universe and everything’s deterministic. But I think that’s probably an artifact of the way that we’ve written down laws of physics since Newton invented modern physics and his conception of motion and gravity, which he formulated laws that had initial conditions and fixed dynamical laws.

  youtube.com

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, working on particle physics, extra dimensions and dark matter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  String theorists were overly arrogant at the outset, promising to solve problems they were never going to solve.

  Their words

  I do think that string theorists were a bit overly ambitious… Not overly ambitious, but a little bit overly arrogant in the beginning, thinking they could solve many problems that they weren’t going to solve.

  youtube.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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  LLM-based planning currently works best when combined with external tools rather than relying on the model's own generated plans alone.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Overall, while initial plans of LLMs can be useful as a starting point, LLM-based planning currently works best mainly in conjunction with external tools.

  NeurIPS 2023 Primerruder.io

Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Society's response to AI is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid transformative progress that many experts expect, with safety research lagging and governance lacking mechanisms for misuse, recklessness and autonomy.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Society's response, despite promising first steps, is incommensurate with the possibility of rapid, transformative progress that is expected by many experts. AI safety research is lagging. Present governance initiatives lack the mechanisms and institutions to prevent misuse and recklessness, and barely address autonomous systems.

  arxiv.org

Psychologist and science writer; wrote Science Fictions on how research goes wrong, and writes the newsletter of the same name.

From one piece How growth mindset shrank 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Published effect sizes shrink as more studies are done, and that decline is what the replication crisis is made of.

  Their words

  The decline effect is the idea that scientific findings get smaller over time. That is, initial findings tend to report effect sizes that then crumble away—sometimes to nothing—with subsequent research.

  How growth mindset shranksciencefictions.org

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  A hyped effect shrinking to a small but real one as the studies improve is a sign that a field is working, not failing.

  Their words

  Initial massive exaggeration of the importance of an effect gives way to more realistic, much smaller effects (which might still be useful) after people start doing better studies.

  How growth mindset shranksciencefictions.org

Alignment researcher at Anthropic; co-led OpenAI's superalignment team until 2024, and writes Musings on the Alignment Problem.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Fine-tuning with human feedback is a promising direction for aligning language models with human intent.

  Their words

  Even though InstructGPT still makes simple mistakes, our results show that fine-tuning with human feedback is a promising direction for aligning language models with human intent.

  arxiv.org

Philosopher and historian of existential risk; wrote Human Extinction, and coined "TESCREAL" with Timnit Gebru for the cluster of ideologies they argue underpins the AI industry.

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  Longtermism is not the same thing as caring about the long-term future or about future generations; it goes far beyond that.

  Their words

  The initial thing to notice is that longtermism, as proposed by Bostrom and Beckstead, is not equivalent to ‘caring about the long term’ or ‘valuing the wellbeing of future generations’.

  Against longtermismaeon.co

Product leadership coach and writer of the “Ask Gib” newsletter. Former VP of Product at Netflix and Chief Product Officer at Chegg; speaks and runs workshops on product strategy.

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  Moneyball

  Their words

  This book framed my initial thinking on the importance of metrics.

  askgib.substack.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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  Getting to Plan B

  Their words

  If your company is struggling because your initial idea isn't working, this is the book to read. It provides a great blueprint for thinking through pivots for your business. As oneforty was considering pivots in Fall 2010, this book proved very helpful.

  jasonevanish.com