Related posts
Max Howell
x.com
One confusing thing about agents for me is their compulsion to use “Sentence case” over “Title Case” for titles.
titles confusing sentence
The the words it uses that this site has seen
least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone —
nothing here is a summary of this one.
Sources
All Writing Mastodon Bluesky Blog x.com Newsletter Korrents Site GitHub Recommends Changed their mind
Top people
Jason Kottke
Derek Sivers
Peter Singer
Simon Willison
Julia Evans
Ethan Mollick
Ada Palmer
Molly White
John Baez
Ben Carlson
Ryan Singer
Razib Khan
Showing Profile →
Show everything
Hiding Show them again
Show them again
Further back ↓
Hiding Show them again
18 September
Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.
The social scene around AI and AI safety is more unpleasant than I realized. I'm sure there are other sides to it. But when you get a lot of men with too much money who think they're saving the world, surrounded by groupies, what do you expect? Read the long Bluesky thread about this, collected on one page: https://skywriter.blue/@segyges.bsky.social/3mvom4b4dn22q I can't confirm this stuff - I stay far away from this scene. And the sentence "AI Safety is Mostly a Sex Cult" is a massive exaggeration. But... (1/n) AI alignment Related
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.
17 September
Director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Writes the A Wealth of Common Sense blog and co-hosts the Animal Spirits podcast with Michael Batnick.
16 September
Author of Shape Up; formerly head of strategy at Basecamp, where he worked on product design for seventeen years; now runs Felt Presence.
Here's one of the many little ways that AI is changing expectations about UI. I'm building this thing I want for teams I manage to more clearly define review points. (A bit like Shopify's phase transitions in their GSD system). I have a handful of tasks that should be checked in a review. It used to be normal practice that any list in a UI needs a title. Eg "List" or "Untitled" etc. But this was always a drag, right? Naming a list just to have a group of things is extra work. But without a name it's hard to scan and find and all lists look the same. Now AI can generate titles for anything. Li… Related
Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.
high vs low time preference is confusing because intuitively ppl think it should be inverted Related
Australian moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics emeritus at Princeton University; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.
15 September
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.
Three short sentences from the Supreme Court, and a lot to say about such a very cryptic short utterance. Steve Vladeck unpacks what the Supreme Court said by barely saying anything. The real content of the Supreme Court’s three-sentence decision is a warning to lower courts that Trump is going to lose his USPS ballot suppression case in the end, and a reminder of how corrupt and lawless Alito and Thomas have long been: **CROSSPOST: STEVE VLADECK: 250. What We Learned from USPS v... 1/ Related
9 September
Founder of Farnam Street (fs.blog) and host of The Knowledge Project podcast. Writes and curates on decision-making, mental models and rational thinking.
When the gap between where you are and where you want to be is large, focus on the next step. One sentence in the book. One workout. One email. While the ultimate goal helps you navigate, focusing on it keeps you from achieving it. Related
8 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Wrote up my thoughts on the whole OpenAI Navier–Stokes Millennium Prize Problem story, and how it highlights the still confusing question of what using my data "to improve model performance" actually means OpenAI Related
7 September
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
It is fine to repeat your words. In fact, it is fine to repeat words not only “in the same section,” but in the very next sentence. Successful rhetoric is a story of variation—but that does not mean you should vary constantly. Constant variance is simply noise; a distinctive voice is made less, not more distinctive by background static. The goal is to set expectations, then break them. Long sentences are broken by short ones. Latinate terms are broken by Saxon ones. You repeat a cadence, or a figure, or a word—and then you break the pattern you have set. This keeps readers interested. It also… Quoting @tomieinlove There's a soft rule in English prose: you shouldn't repeat the same word in a section. This is difficult, because often the same word—whoops—thing does many things—whoops—actions in the same section—whoops—sequence. So you have use like 12 different synonyms Related
4 September
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.
I've added @sapinker's Sense of Style to all my notebooks with writing projects, asking for a Pinker edit with each draft. I don't always agree with every suggestion but it's invariably productive and stimulating advice. Plus if you're in the US, you can get a free copy of the book, which you can both read and use as an on-demand editor in @Gemini_Notebook. There are twenty other great titles in the promotion as well, though it's a limited time offer, and you can only choose one book. (And yes, Google is paying for the books so authors/publishers will be compensated!) Full list and details he… play.google.com
Quoting @sapinker "Expert intelligence" - new feature of Gemini that allows buyers of an ebook to apply the knowledge in the book to their own projects. In this case, the advice in my writing style manual, The Sense of Style, is applied to a draft of the user's writing. I checked it out and it's really good -- the a… Google Related
1 September
Web standards author and speaker; wrote the CSS: The Definitive Guide series and co-founded the An Event Apart conference.
Article starts out, literally kicks off the opening sentence with, “We’ve all used AI to help us write code” and brudda, let me stop you right the hell there. No, we all have not. Some of us are still resolutely hewing code out of text editors and actual human thinking, and it’s still usually better than whatever your steroidal autocomplete extruded for you. 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.
31 August
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
The problem with Corey is that he is sufficiently weird that when he starts a sentence with "True story", I honestly have no idea whether it's literally true or simply a joke. Quoting @QuinnyPig True story: I did a brief stint at Grindr in 2011. Needed a server for something, and the name I picked was “phallusy,” as in “logical.” Then Randall, who I didn’t know yet, tripped over the rdns entry when the IP got reassigned within AWS. Related
Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.
I'm working on phase 2 of Project Improve Git's documentation and I need beta readers! Here's a signup form: https://forms.gle/swn1jhCULndnCxG87 The first topic is going to the docs on merge conflicts. I'd love signups from anyone who uses Git on the command line and who would be interested in reading the current version of some man pages and leaving feedback about what's confusing. Especially if you're not 100% comfortable with Git! documentation Related
CEO of SafeGraph, host of the World of DaaS podcast, and author of the Summation newsletter; previously founded LiveRamp.
i have never, ever been able to successfully add groceries to a cat that one of my family members is ordering on @Instacart . UI is either too confusing or there is just a big bug. Related
Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.
28 August
Canadian cartoonist and writer: Dinosaur Comics, Marvel's The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, and the choose-your-own-path books To Be or Not To Be and Romeo and/or Juliet.
26 August
Thai software engineer; publishes a public digital garden at garden.narze.live and builds developer and productivity tooling.
19 August
Technical educator, conference speaker and developer relations engineer based in Ottawa, Canada. Author of the Anubis bot filter and of over 400 articles at xeiaso.net.
18 August
Designer, illustrator and CSS developer known for single-div CSS illustrations, a yearly portfolio redesign, and a set of single-topic side-project sites.
Going to spend the next week trying to crush my Nestflix backlog. Can I get the site to 2,000 titles? Stay tuned. Related
12 August
Machine learning engineer working on recommender systems, personalization and information retrieval. Previously worked on LLMs and LLM infrastructure at Mozilla.ai and on ML and recsys at Duo, Tumblr, Automattic and Comcast; wrote the 'What are embeddings?' text and ran the Normconf conference.
7 August
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Their words
I really do think that having separate brand names for the consumer-facing models and the API models is needlessly confusing
Show the whole quote
@simonw on X x.com
6 August
Short-story writer and novelist; won the Booker Prize for Lincoln in the Bardo, and teaches craft weekly in Story Club.
29 July
Pseudonymous writer; posts careful, funny investigations of everyday questions — air quality, seed oils, arguing, chess — usually by reading the studies.
How do you feel about articles with question titles? Related
24 July
Co-founder and CEO of 37signals, makers of Basecamp and HEY; co-author of Rework, Remote and It Does Not Have to Be Crazy at Work.
Their words
Mistaking making for the thing you've made is like confusing the kitchen for the meal or the blueprint for the building. They're connected, but they're not the same thing. One of them matters a whole lot more than the other.
Show the whole quote
world.hey.com
19 June
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.
Read Zero Knowledge As I Write It Zero Knowledge, the crypto-thriller I'm co-writing with my AI, now has a home at zeroknowledge.ink. Six chapters are live, you can mark up any sentence, and the whole thing is being built in the open.
crypto Related
18 June
Product designer and entrepreneur; author of Mobile First and Web Form Design; formerly a product director at Google; now building AI products.
16 June
Historian of the Renaissance at the University of Chicago and a science-fiction novelist; wrote Terra Ignota and Inventing the Renaissance.
From one piece
Machiavelli is the most misunderstood thinker of all time – Ada Palmer
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
And then you look at the actual trial records, and maybe one in a hundred convictions for that crime actually ends in a capital sentence. And almost all of the other ones end in a fine or a public flogging, but not in the sentence that's on the books.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
Their words
And the reason that trial goes all the way to a capital sentence is that he doesn't have a patron. He's the 99th case that time.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
15 June
Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.
What I’ve Learned From Selling 500,000 Books I recently reached an incredible milestone – 500,000 books sold across 8 titles. That includes 5 self-published Kindle ebooks, 1 co-authored book, and 2 traditionally published books, all released from 2017 to 2023. Her…
Related
12 June
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
28 April
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
7 April
Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.
Their words
for a certain type of mind, there is a seductiveness in in just just learning systems and confusing that with with with understanding.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
29 March
Engineering leader and writer; wrote An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer and The Engineering Executive's Primer, and blogs at Irrational Exuberance.
The agentic passive voice. At some point, you will have learned about the passive voice, where the actor in a sentence is unclear. For example, my software didn’t compile. That’s a good example of the passive voice. However, you might…
Related
23 March
Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.
8 March
Programmer; wrote Redis and hping, and blogs about C, systems programming and working alone.
GNU and the AI reimplementations Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. A sentence that I never really liked, and what is happening with AI, about software projects reimplementations, shows all the limits of such an idea. Many p…
Related
29 January
Co-founder and CEO of Until, a reversible-cryopreservation company, and previously the founder of the Longevity Fund.
Their words
and I think most people experience it as like flat triangles and squares in a biology textbook where it's like you know there's an arrow between like this triangle and this triangle is just like doesn't make any conceptual sense and is like confusing and annoying
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
15 January
Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.
Three book titles that made me laugh: There Is No Antimemetics Division The Future of Hegel Centrists of the World, Unite! Related
1 January
Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.
21 December 2025
Economist; Professor of the Practice of Economic Policy at Harvard, nonresident senior fellow at the Peterson Institute, and Chairman of the US Council of Economic Advisers from 2013 to 2017.
Their words
It had the best opening sentence of any nonfiction book I read this year: "In 2012, 146 million children were born. That was more than in any prior year. It was also more than in any year since. Millions fewer will be born this year. The year 2012 may well turn out to be the year in which the most humans were ever born—ever as in ever for as long as humanity exists." Such a simple and obvious fact but I had not known it before. I had to keep reading.
Show the whole quote
fivebooks.com
31 July 2025
Anthropologist; wrote Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World and The Secret History of the Mongol Queens.
Their words
He says, “Now, let us reward our daughters.” It's actually only a phrase. I said it as a complete sentence, but it's not quite complete. The rest is gone, cut out. It's missing.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
25 March 2025
Artist and writer based in Oakland, California; author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time, and a longtime teacher of digital art.
26 January 2025
Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.
Their words
currently has the best Live Mode in its Advanced Voice Mode. The other big advantage of ChatGPT is that it does everything, often in somewhat confusing ways
Show the whole quote
oneusefulthing.org
3 December 2024
Scottish crime writer, author of the Tony Hill and Karen Pirie novels; former journalist and broadcaster.
Off to read the lesson @ St Giles Cathedral this evening. Now there’s a sentence I never expected to utter! 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 to @Trussell for giving me the chance to support their food bank work. Related
1 August 2024
Writes jvns.ca, turning "hard and scary" topics — networking, debugging, Linux internals — into plain explanations and hand-drawn comics. Publishes Wizard Zines, illustrated programming zines. Software developer based in Montreal.
Nix developer tools
Their words, before
I’m also still not sure how much I like nix – it’s very confusing! But it’s helped me compile some software that I was struggling to compile otherwise, and in general it seems to install things faster than homebrew.
Show the whole quote
Their words now
I’ve mostly switched back to Homebrew, nix was interesting but overall I think it’s not worth the complexity for me
Show the whole quote
6 December 2022
Novelist and writer, author of Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore and Sourdough; previously worked at Twitter and Current TV.
22 June 2022
Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.
Their words
It's incredibly written, deeply complex, confusing as hell, and you'll probably throw it at the wall when it's done. But then you'll kinda go "okay... I'm glad I did that" and maybe start it again.
Show the whole quote
nateliason.com
20 June 2022
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.
From one piece
Writing one sentence per line
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
29 March 2022
Alignment researcher at Anthropic; co-led OpenAI's superalignment team until 2024, and writes Musings on the Alignment Problem.
Nothing matches. Show everything
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
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Got it
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
Got it