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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Migrations are part and parcel of software engineering and a skill to invest in, not special one-offs to avoid.

  Their words

  migrations (e.g. replacing one service with a new one, or switching database engines, or whatever) are part and parcel of software engineering and are a skill that you should invest in and get good at, not avoid or treat as special one-offs.

  simonwillison.net

Dutch bootstrapper who builds and runs their internet startups alone — Nomads.com, Remote OK, Hoodmaps, Photo AI and Interior AI — and has written about it at levels.io since 2013. Posts as @levelsio.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building anything has become quite trivial, so catching attention is now the most important skill.

  Their words

  Now that building anything has become quite trivial, catching attention is now the most important skill I think

  @levelsio on Xx.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A U.S.-Canada trade war would cost the U.S. a great deal of time and money to absorb, and is not a trivial disruption Americans would barely notice.

  America

  Their words

  Yes — but it would be expensive and take a great deal of time. In short, if Trump, Bessent and company think that trade conflict with Canada is a trivial issue, one that Americans will barely notice, they’re in for a rude awakening.

  Adding Injury to Insult, Canada Editionpaulkrugman.substack.com

Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Trump administration is replacing professional bureaucracy with a corrupt, personalist system that extracts rents through force.

  Their words

  In practice, Hochman's hire is another nauseating sign that the Trump administration is destroying the bureaucracy in favor of some corrupt, neo-royalist husk of an apparatus that mostly posts memes and occasionally deploys the 82nd Airborne to extract rents.

  The Devolution of the Policy Planning Staffdanieldrezner.substack.com

Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An agent trained for millions of subjective years to pass evaluations, often only by cheating, is not being trivial when it commits crimes to pass one.

  Their words

  But from their perspective, they've just been trained for millions of subjective years to do as well as they possibly can on these evals. In many cases, the only way in which they've been able to perform well on that training is explicitly by cheating, right?

  youtube.com

Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The upcoming U.S. elections are the last real chance to shift fast enough from oil and gas to solar and wind to limit global warming.

  solarenergyAmerica

  Their words

  But physics is giving us very little time now, and so the next set of elections in this country will be, I think, our last real chance to make the sea change-replacing oil and gas with sun and wind-that is our best hope for limiting warming.

  The growing rumblebillmckibben.substack.com

Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and co-founder and CEO of World Labs.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Capability has never been the reason a technology gets deployed: any carmaker could switch the brakes off every Friday, and none does.

  Their words

  humans are capable of doing a lot of things with our tools, but we don't do all of them. For example, today any car manufacturer can say every Friday the brake doesn't work. This is a trivial technology. There's a clock in the car's computer and it just turns off the brake every Friday. But we don't do that because it has deeply bad implications to our human society.

  youtube.com

Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Reading should be treated as cognitive fitness: scheduled daily, with distracting digital media avoided the way we avoid junk food.

  Their words

  We should treat highly distracting digital garbage like junk food – something we largely avoid – and purposefully schedule a non-trivial amount of time each day to read, write, and self-reflect, just as we now dedicate time to walking, jogging, and weight lifting.

  Why Reading Matterscalnewport.com

Social scientist turned small-scale farmer; wrote A Small Farm Future and argues against the case for feeding the world from factories.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Farming is the one large sector still powered directly by free sunlight, and replacing it with factory food would spend the renewable electricity every other sector needs.

  energy

  Their words

  Agriculture is the only major sector that at present is significantly energised directly by zero cost and zero carbon sunlight.

  chrissmaje.com

Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The personal computer made countless individual tasks easier without delivering the productivity gains everyone expected, and AI may go the same way.

  Their words

  it’s also true that their impact on our output was never as tremendous or as clear-cut as that of prior innovations, such as the steam engine or the power loom, and that integrating them effectively into the workforce took a long time

  Beware of Productivity Paradoxescalnewport.com

Canadian bootstrapper and writer on small software businesses. Co-founder of the podcast hosting company Transistor.fm and author of the book Marketing for Developers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  LLMs replacing podcasts as a source of information poses a real disruption to podcasting.

  LLMsOpenAI

  Their words

  Where I do see some disruption is where consumers start asking ChatGPT and other LLMs for information they would normally get from podcasts.

  Thoughts from the 2026 London Podcast Showjustinjackson.ca

Behavioural economist at Chicago Booth, professor of behavioural science and economics and director of AGI economics at Google DeepMind.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The relational story only holds if a human is not like a horse: replacing them has to lower the value of the output, not just change the input.

  Their words

  The only way this relational story works and this is what we need more more data on is if it's not a human is not a horse in the sense that it is providing value from the output where if you replace the human, the the value of the output decreases.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Memory-safety bugs are not a skill problem: the mistakes are trivial and there are so many places to make one that even an excellent programmer will.

  Their words

  I mean, that's the thing with memory safety, right? You make some sort of trivial mistake. It it's not some complex thing. It's just you make some trivial mistake and there's a bajillion places you could make it.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

Programmer known online as technomancy; author of Leiningen, the Clojure build tool, and a maintainer of the Fennel programming language.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Replacing a monopolistic platform with a single alternative isn't enough — real resilience requires diversity among competing platforms.

  Their words

  We shouldn't replace Github with one site at all; we need the strength and resilience that only comes with diversity

  technomancy.us

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An industrial robot does not replace labour, it shifts labour from hourly workers to scarce skilled ones.

  Their words

  The key is that robot arms are not labor-replacing, but labor-shifting.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

Programmer, teacher and speaker; long-time Microsoft developer-community figure, host of the Hanselminutes podcast and author of the hanselman.com blog.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Programming is essentially the craft of turning ambiguous ideas into precise, specific instructions.

  Their words

  It's not trivial to one shot something unique, because programming is the art of making the ambiguous incredibly specific through sculpting.

  The danger of glamourizing one shotsfeeds.hanselman.com

Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Cancellations always overtake marketing, because cancellations grow automatically with the company while marketing grows only as fast as you can improve it.

  Their words

  Marketing grows only as fast as you can improve marketing. We all know that's quite hard actually. It's linear. It's hard to find new channels that aren't trivial. Like, it's hard. Of course, we're going to do it, but like it it's hard. Whereas, cancellations grow automatically as you grow, right? So, cancellations always overtake marketing for this reason.

  youtube.com

Founder and CEO of SaaStr, the B2B software community and events business, and a SaaS investor who previously co-founded EchoSign and sold it to Adobe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI is not taking the jobs people wanted; it is taking the jobs nobody wanted and the careers of everyone who is merely average.

  Their words

  AI is replacing the jobs people don't want to do today, and it is displacing the midpack and the mediocre.

  youtube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The hard-headed realists who wrote America's 2001 energy policy expected renewables to stay trivial, and were wrong by an enormous margin.

  energyAmerica

  Their words

  But politics aside, what’s notable about that 2001 report, put together by men who regarded themselves as hard-headed realists, is that it envisaged an energy future reliant almost entirely on fossil fuels plus a bit of nuclear energy.

  The Rise of Renewable Energypaulkrugman.substack.com

Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  His prediction that research-level mathematics papers would be written in collaboration with AI by 2026 has already come true.

  Their words

  There are certainly math results which could only have been accomplished because there was a human authentication and an AI involved, but it's hard to disentangle credit. I mean, these tools, they do not replicate all the skills needed to do mathematics, but they can replicate some non-trivial percentage of them, 30, 40%, so they can fill in gaps.

  youtube.com

Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An addiction is not ended by finding something better to put in its place; you do not stop a problem by replacing it.

  Addiction

  Their words

  You don't stop a problem by replacing it. And so I didn't have a girlfriend, I didn't have all that. I just realized that I was truly taking away from something from my future wife.

  youtube.com

Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Mockups existed because coding was hard; now designers can skip static mockups and go straight to building a UI that works.

  Their words

  Essentially, vibe coding makes it trivial to create front-end code, so designers can skip static mockups and go straight to building a UI that works.

  Vibe Coding and Vibe Designjakobnielsenphd.substack.com

Writer on a lost civilisation of the Ice Age; wrote Fingerprints of the Gods and presented Ancient Apocalypse. Archaeologists reject the claims, which he disputes at length.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Calling the lost civilisation advanced means only that it could calculate longitude, not that it built machines.

  Their words

  And when I say that, as I have said on a number of occasions, that it had technology equivalent to ours in the 18th century, I’m referring specifically to the ability to calculate longitude. I’m not saying that they were building steam engines. I don’t see any evidence for that.

  youtube.com

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Environmental permitting now causes more environmental harm than it prevents, because what it delays is the clean thing replacing the dirty one.

  Their words

  The primary driver of increased impact, longer time scales before displacement, and catastrophically high levels of avoidable pollution is environmental protection regulations.

  Permitting Reform Or Deathcaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.

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  Finding a good spouse depends more on one's orientation toward building relationships and spotting non-trivial compatible traits than on matching a status checklist

  Their words

  Whether one does find a good spouse or not depends more on one's orientation towards actually building relationships, and whether they can identify non-trivial traits in a partner that would contribute to that.

  Whose dream bf is it anywayputanumonit.com

Writer and illustrator behind Wait But Why, a long-form blog of stick-figure-illustrated explainers on science, technology and society, and author of the book What's Our Problem?

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  Public discourse has degraded into tribalism, mass shaming campaigns, and one-dimensional narratives replacing genuine debate.

  Their words

  There were a bunch of bad trends: Tribalism was flaring up everywhere, mass shaming campaigns were roaring back into fashion, politicians were increasingly clown-like, public discourse had become a battle of one-dimensional narratives.

  A Short History of My Last Six Yearswaitbutwhy.com

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Handing an ancient society a modern machine would have achieved nothing: the Romans could neither have built a steam engine nor found a profitable use for one.

  Their words

  If you had given the Romans the designs for a Newcomen steam engine, they couldn’t have built it without developing whole new technologies for the purpose (or casting every part in bronze, which introduces its own problems) and then wouldn’t have had any profitable use to put it to.

  Collections: Why No Roman Industrial Revolution?acoup.blog

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.

• Dislikedrcmnd.app

  Anbernic Win600

  Their words

  I don't know who I would reccomend this device to. The premise of this device has a lot of promise, but in practice it has so many problems that it's overall not really worth choosing in comparison to devices like the Steam Deck.

  xeiaso.net

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Steam Deck

  Their words

  The Steam Deck was my first taste of PC gaming in a handheld form factor and I love the snot out of my deck.

  xeiaso.net

Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  VS Code

  Their words

  Every now and again I go searching for a replacement IDE. VSCode came closer than anything else in the last two decades to replacing Vim, but somehow I am back here.

  usesthis.com

American backpacking guide, writer and endurance athlete who has hiked more than 30,000 miles; author of The Ultimate Hiker's Gear Guide and publisher of gear reviews and trip-planning tutorials at andrewskurka.com.

• Recommendsaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Black Diamond Alpine Carbon Cork Trekking Poles

  Their words

  At $180 MSRP, the Alpine Carbon Corks are among the most expensive poles in the market, and they will not be a trivial expense for most backpackers. But I still recommend them if you:

  andrewskurka.com

Creator of Homebrew, the macOS package manager, and a Swift developer.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Steam Controller

  Their words

  I use a Steam Controller, which honestly is a really great choice for PC gaming that didn’t catch on and now Valve seem to have given up on it.

  usesthis.com