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Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Domain experts consistently underestimate how quickly AI can master their field and surpass them.

  Their words

  Domain experts consistently underestimate how quickly AI can master their field and surpass them, because they mistake human difficulties for universal difficulty.

  Two missing pieces in the AI safety discussionnoahpinion.blog

Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Marketing aimed at an identity group creates demand for that category rather than simply meeting demand that already existed.

  Their words

  It's hard to escape that economic engine, and easy to mistake its machinations for reality-a supply rising to meet demand, say, rather than a warped supply that whips up demand.

  #282: Movies “for women”haleynahman.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

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

  Entrepreneurship is one of the most challenging pursuits, comparable to professional sports in how few people actually succeed.

  Their words

  There's an illusion here though that anyone will make it, which I've never portrayed to be true, entrepreneurship is one of the most challenging endeavours, kinda like pro sports

  levels.io

CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  More personal and professional computing will come from agents orchestrating work in cloud sandboxes, and those sandboxes will be Linux.

  Linuxthe cloud

  Their words

  More and more of our personal and professional computing experiences will come from agents that orchestrate work in the cloud, using sandboxes. Those sandboxes will be Linux.

  @rauchg on Xx.com

British front-end web developer based in Japan; writes about HTML, CSS, web performance and browser tooling at christianoliff.com.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Beyond Compare 4 Professional

  Their words

  Beyond Compare 4 Professional for uploading static site content to Amazon S3

  christianoliff.com

Investigative journalist on policing, forensics and criminal justice; wrote Rise of the Warrior Cop and writes The Watch.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Bite-mark matching is junk science, and the courts have admitted it for five decades anyway.

  Their words

  To be clear, bitemark evidence is junk science. There has never been any scientific research to support the idea that bites on human skin can be matched to the teeth of one person, to the exclusion of everyone else.

  The framing of Chris Duncanradleybalko.substack.com

Writes Don't Worry About the Vase, a near-daily account of what is happening in AI and what they think it means. Former Magic: the Gathering pro and trader; unusually willing to put a number on a belief and to grade their own past calls.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI agents were reasonable to assume a broken exploit grader would check results causally, even though it turned out not to.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  I think the agents were right to presume causal grading. It turned out to be wrong, but it’s a mistake you are clearly supposed to make here, in response to a mistake by OpenAI where they failed to implement properly.

  thezvi.substack.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A formal code of conduct is not worth adopting, because those became struggle-session processes; courtesy without one is what actually wins.

  Omarchy

  Their words

  Omarchy is not going to adopt a formal Code of Conduct because those turned out to be struggle-session processes in the last turning. But we are going to play nice. We're going to be courteous, professional, and composed in our direct interactions with users, competitors, and even haters. Because that's what's going to pave the path to the win.

  @dhh on Xx.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Omarchy is a system for professional computer lovers: it optimises usability over learnability, and a couple of days learning the keyboard is a fair price.

  Omarchyenergy

  Their words

  This is a computer system made for pros, and I mean that in the sense of professional computer lovers. People who are willing to invest time and energy into learning how their system works, and reap the benefits that come from that investment.

  youtube.com

Economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education and Open Borders. Writes Bet On It.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Modern Times

  Their words

  I’ve loved it since I was a teenager, but professional historians typically rolled their eyes in disdain when I mentioned it.

  betonit.ai

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Major professional sports leagues function as cartels that block competitive entry

  Their words

  Major sports leagues are de facto cartels with the power to block entry and competition.

  The American Sports Plutocracy Is Bullshitderekthompson.org

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Success in cultural and professional fields is driven more by chance and path dependence than by talent.

  Their words

  much cultural success is stochastic (the experimental evidence suggests that talent only moderately predicts success in culture markets), and that path dependence shapes chances of success

  No-One Makes You Shop at Amazonprogrammablemutter.com

Professor at Stanford working on robot learning and meta-learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every machine-learning deployment that has paid off so far left a person making the decision, which is the only reason imperfect models were useful.

  Their words

  And in all of these applications, the customer is making a decision based off of the recommendation of the AI model more or less. Uh, and this means that if the customer is ultimately like kind of making the decision, this means that if the system makes a mistake, um, that's okay because usually the person can kind of recognize that or or decide what to do even despite that mistake.

  youtube.com

Writer of the personal-finance blog Of Dollars And Data and author of Just Keep Buying and The Wealth Ladder. Chief Operating Officer at Ritholtz Wealth Management.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Hoarding money you will never spend is a worse mistake than overspending when young.

  Their words

  Blowing all your money while young isn’t a smart move, but hoarding money now that you won’t spend later is worse.

  Why $100 in Your 20s is Worth $500 in Your 60sofdollarsanddata.com

Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.

From one piece Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  In the physical world a model's mistake is measured in human lives rather than tokens, and there is no retry button.

  Their words

  In the physical world, the cost of a mistake can be measured in human lives, not tokens. There's simply not an undo and a retry button.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every AI hype cycle produces spectacular demos and very few products, because each breakthrough makes the demo far easier and the tail barely easier.

  Their words

  And that's why every hype cycle produces a wave of absolutely spectacular demos and very few real products. And the recurring mistake of every cycle is spending on the demo when you should be saving for the nines.

  youtube.com

Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.

From one piece Formal methods with Hillel Wayne 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Within ten years software development will survive but become ordinary white-collar work, with no more two-hundred-thousand-dollar salaries or unlimited vacation.

  AI and jobs

  Their words

  I predict that in the next 10 years software development will survive, but it will become like any other white-collar professional work. No more $200,000 salaries, unlimited vacation, or incredible employee bargaining power.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The core tension of all engineering is between how expensive a mistake is and how quickly you can iterate, and that alone decides how much planning a field does.

  Their words

  The core tension of engineering is between how expensive it is to make a mistake and how quickly you can iterate. The faster you can iterate, the less planning you need to do before you iterate, and the more expensive it is, the more planning you need to do.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025, Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads the company’s superintelligence lab.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Systems thinking will never go out of style, so going all in on words at the expense of rigorous quantitative thinking is a mistake.

  Their words

  But um but I think systems thinking is never going to go out of style. So, I think it's definitely a mistake to go all in on Word Cell. Like, I think you need to you need to shape rotate.

  youtube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Language models cannot hold a genuine perspective or take a stand for what they believe.

  LLMs

  Their words

  But for LLMs, it shows that they have no skin in the game and will never take a stand for what they believe in regardless of what it costs. They are perspective generators, not perspective holders.

  fortelabs.com

Chief Product and Technology Officer at Netflix, previously VP of Science at Lyft and an economist at Analysis Group.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Deep design expertise does not get squeezed out just because code and analysis got faster.

  Their words

  But I think it would be a mistake to say design and deep design expertise and thinking gets squeezed out just because we can write code faster. We can do data analysis faster.

  youtube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The purpose of childhood is to encounter failure and hardship directly, not be shielded from it.

  Their words

  The whole purpose of childhood is to mess up, to skin your knees, to run up against the limits of reality and feel reality push back.

  fortelabs.com

Programmer and writer known for detailed source code reviews of classic game engines, and author of the Game Engine Black Book series on Wolfenstein 3D and DOOM.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Smaller teams are better

  Their words

  We can accomplish more with smaller teams. We may not be far from the '90s model, when a team of four could produce professional software.

  Don't you mean extinct?fabiensanglard.net

Head of Instagram since 2018, previously head of Facebook's News Feed.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building a new product on top of whatever is growing fastest is a mistake: momentum is not the same thing as a strong foundation.

  Their words

  we were trying to build reels into stories because we were trying to build in the thing that was growing the fastest. But it was not a strong foundation.

  youtube.com

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

From one piece How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industry 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An outside expert's understanding of somebody else's problem is bounded, because they do not have to live with the design after they leave.

  Their words

  Your understanding of somebody else's problem is bounded because you're not in the middle of it. You don't have the same skin in the game. If you're not semiconductor test engineer, you don't have as much skin in the game as somebody who is because they're going to have to be using this interface for a long time after you're gone.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Naming the movement 'agile' was a mistake, because the word is indefensible: nobody will ever admit to not being agile, while nobody claims to be an extreme programmer without having done the work.

  Their words

  what I don't like about it I didn't like about it then and still don't like about it is it's not defensible. Nobody's going to say I'm not agile. Oh no, I prefer rigid development. Oh, I prefer inflexible development. No, everybody's going to say that they're agile, which extreme doesn't have that problem.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  TDD fell out of fashion partly because its advocates turned it into a moral test of professionalism, when people write very good software with a wide variety of workflows.

  Their words

  And then there were people who used it as a moral cudgel. Like you should be if you're not using TDD, you're not professional. And that's just such People can write very good software with a wide variety of workflows.

  youtube.com

Makes NeetCode, the structured practice list and video walkthroughs people use to prepare for coding interviews; a former Google engineer.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Dismissing a subject as a waste of time because you never used its details on the job is the wrong way to think, and it is the same mistake people make about learning to code now that AI writes the loops.

  Their words

  I think a lot of the things that people might say that like oh, it was a waste of time to learn this subject cuz I didn't actually use like those details on the job. I think that's a very wrong way to think about it. And I think that's what a lot of people are doing now with AI. Like hey, what what if I'm not going to be writing for a loops a couple years from now. Um I don't think those things are a waste of time.

  Tech interviews with NeetCodeyoutube.com

Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  If this much effort goes into training the model, you had better be willing to keep training your own.

  Their words

  But make no mistake, if we put this much effort in training the model so that it can spit things out, you better make sure that you are willing to train your own model.

  youtube.com

Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Artists whose livelihoods are threatened by AI-generated content are turning toward deliberately rough, handmade aesthetics as a response.

  Their words

  So it's no wonder that the artists and designers whose livelihoods are threatened by it have begun moving aggressively in the opposite direction, toward the scrawled, the sloppy, the seemingly mistake-riddled.

  RIP Millennial lifestyle brandskylechayka.substack.com

Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  People gravitate toward arrogant leaders in uncertain times because they mistake swagger for strength and skill.

  Their words

  People are more drawn to arrogant leaders in an uncertain world, because they mistake swagger for strength and skill.

  adamgrant.substack.com

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

From one piece Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhl 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The case for Rust is stronger against C++ than against JavaScript, because in C++ an ordinary mistake is usually a security vulnerability.

  JavaScript

  Their words

  So, here I actually think it's even stronger. The thing with C++ is that if you make a mistake, right, in in JavaScript, maybe you take down your server, which is already bad enough, but in C++ when you make a mistake there, now it's actually a security vulnerability most of the time.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

• 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

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The modern economy pressures nearly every kind of creative or professional worker to also become a small media company, a skill unrelated to their original craft.

  Their words

  the economy now asks every creative person to essentially become a small media company, which is a very specific skill set that has nothing to do with why most of us started making things in the first place

  On Monetizationmariandrew.substack.com

Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Lasting satisfaction comes from studying how others play, then defining and fully playing one's own game rather than someone else's.

  Their words

  The only lasting path to satisfaction, happiness, skin in the game, maximizing learning, is to really study everybody's game, define your own, and then play it to the best of your ability.

  What you can do in a decadeswyx.io

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nvidia's real miss was not seeing that a frontier lab could never be funded by venture capital, so its compute suppliers had to become its investors.

  Anthropicstartups

  Their words

  Nor nor did I I would say my mistake is I didn't deeply internalize that they they really had no other options that that that a VC would never put in 510 billion of investment into an AI lab with the with the hopes of it turning out to be anthropic. And so that was my miss.

  Jensen Huang – Will Nvidia’s moat persist?youtube.com

Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Standing still is now falling behind: as the world speeds up, complacency is the one professional habit that is fatal.

  Their words

  Complacency is death. I mean like every the world will move faster and faster and the moment we stand still we are falling behind.

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

Indian software engineer working on Android and React; writes about his setup and side projects at ishubhamsingh.dev.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Maccy

  Their words

  Makes me professional Copy-Paster

  ishubhamsingh.dev

Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  People who actively participate in a field give better commentary on it than pure observers with no stake in the outcome.

  Their words

  players who are also commentators give better commentary than people who are just commentators. Stock analysts who never invest have zero skin in the game.

  How to Thought Lead (2026)swyx.io

American game designer and director, for nineteen years at Blizzard as a World of Warcraft quest designer and then game director of Overwatch; now runs the independent studio Kintsugiyama.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Scope is a creative decision, not a production one: the game, art and tech directors have to do the cutting themselves.

  Their words

  The mistake I see on a lot of game teams is scope becomes a production problem.

  youtube.com

Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Every hobby community has profitable auxiliary niches serving needs its members can't fill themselves.

  Their words

  You'll find this in most non-professional activities-there's always something auxiliary but still in high demand because people can't do it themselves.

  Follow Your Passion (But Not Like That)thebootstrappedfounder.com

Machine learning engineer and consultant focused on RAG and retrieval systems. He writes about applied AI engineering at jxnl.co and is the author of the instructor library.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  CeraVe Ultra-Light Gel

  Their words

  lightweight moisturizer with ceramides and hyaluronic acid. After a week, I received compliments on my skin.

  jxnl.co

Software engineer and engineering leader at Canonical, working on Ubuntu; writes about his homelab, Nix and tooling at jnsgr.uk.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  LXD

  Their words

  Canonical’s LXD works out-of-the-box on Ubuntu, and is a great way to sandbox an agent into a disposable environment where the blast radius is limited should the agent make a mistake.

  jnsgr.uk

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  New Year's goals are merely the path toward a person's underlying purpose, not the destination itself.

  Their words

  People make this mistake of setting new goals every January 1st, but forget that goals are the path, not the destination.

  4 Simple Steps to Change Your Lifemarkmanson.net

Assyriologist and curator at the British Museum; reads cuneiform, and wrote The Ark Before Noah and The First Ghosts.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Monotheism was mankind's big mistake, because it brought evil into the world.

  Their words

  I think the big mistake for mankind was the creation of monotheistic religions, because they brought evil into the world. Because if you believe in a monotheistic religion, that means I’m right and you’re wrong if you don’t.

  youtube.com

Investing columnist for The Wall Street Journal and editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The best time to invest is when professional money managers are too fearful to act and the public is gripped by fear and anger.

  Their words

  With so many professional money managers afraid to act, with most of the public in the grip of fear and anger, you should put your cash and your courage to work.

  Summon Your Courage and Buy Stocksjasonzweig.com

Co-founder and chief scientist of Safe Superintelligence Inc., and previously co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Once AI starts to feel powerful rather than mistake-prone, every AI company will become far more paranoid about safety than it is today.

  Their words

  I do think that at some point the AI will start to feel powerful actually and I think when that happens we will see a big change in the way all AI companies approach safety.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Figma, the collaborative design platform he started in 2012 and took public in 2025.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Figma took five years to charge anyone and that was a mistake: ship something people can see the vision in, and get to market faster than we did.

  Their words

  The lesson is you just got to get something that you can that you can have that people can see the vision of where you're going. Um, but don't don't do what we did. Get to market faster. I wish we had.

  youtube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Arresting Pavel Durov was a historic wrong and a gigantic PR mistake that will keep founders from building in France.

  startups

  Their words

  I think this situation, this historic wrong that’s been done is, put simply, is just a gigantic PR mistake for France. There’s no entrepreneur that sees, that aspires to be the next Pavel Durov to create the next Telegram, sees this and wants to operate in France after seeing this.

  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.

From one piece Fully autonomous robots are much closer than you think – Sergey Levine 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Language models supply robots with the one thing self-driving never had: common sense about what is likely to happen next.

  LLMsself-driving cars

  Their words

  uh common sense meaning the ability to make inferences about what might happen uh that are reasonable guesses but that do not require you to experience that mistake and learn and learn from it in advance that's tremendously important and that's something that we basically had no idea how to do uh about 5 years ago but now uh you we can actually use LLMs and VLMs ask them questions and they will make reasonable guesses

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Manipulation will scale faster than driving because a robot can make a mistake, fix it and learn from it, and a car cannot.

  Their words

  And when you make a mistake and correct it, well, first you you've achieved the task because you've corrected, but you've also gained knowledge that allows you to avoid that mistake in the future. With driving, because of the dynamics of how it's set up, it's very hard to make a mistake, correct it, and then learn from it because the mistakes themselves have significant ramifications.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Robots will learn from deployment more easily than chatbots do, because a physical mistake is obvious the moment it happens.

  Their words

  Like if you answer a question, you just like answered it wrong. It's like well it's not like you can just like go back and like tweak a few things like the person you told the answer to might not even know that it's wrong. Whereas if you're like folding the t-shirt and you messed up a little bit like it's pretty obvious like you can reflect on that, figure out what happened and do it better next time.

  youtube.com

Mac and iOS developer at the Iconfactory, where he has worked on apps including Twitterrific and Tot. He writes about development at furbo.org.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Tablets will not replace desktop computers for complex, resource-intensive professional work.

  Their words

  So while iPadOS has obviously gotten more capable, I don't see it displacing the Mac desktop as the place where the heavy lifting gets done.

  One Size Does Not Fit Allfurbo.org

Philosopher at Oxford; co-founded effective altruism and 80,000 Hours, wrote Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future, and now works on what a good future would actually contain.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  We should act on the assumption that we have almost no idea what the best futures would look like, so committing today to any particular vision would be a great mistake.

  Their words

  Given how much moral progress we should hope to make in the future, and how much we’ll learn about what’s even empirically possible, we should act on the assumption that we have almost no idea what the best feasible futures would look like. Committing today to some particular vision would be a great mistake.

  Introducing Better Futuresforethought.org

Historian of the Second World War; wrote Normandy '44 and Brothers in Arms, and co-hosts the We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Britain and France's refusal to negotiate seriously with the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939 was the great missed opportunity to snooker the Third Reich.

  Their words

  I mean, if ever there is, I think, a mistake that’s Britain and France should’ve been a bit more into realpolitiks than they were. It’s such an opportunity to ensure that, to snooker the Third Reich, and they don’t take it.

  youtube.com

Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The most powerful rule for an exceptional interface is that it feels obvious to use; novelty, minimalism and simplicity are means to that, not the end.

  Their words

  Sometimes designers will go to great lengths to make a user interface novel, or minimal, or simple. This is the wrong goal. Novelty, minimalism or simplicity are good heuristics for obviousness, but do not mistake the means for the end.

  lg.substack.com

Software engineer and a long-time technical lead of the Go programming language; author of plan9port and of the research.swtch.com essays.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Buggy code usually causes outright test failures rather than being silently exercised inside tests that still pass.

  Their words

  a passing test can still execute buggy code if the bug is data-dependent, or if the test is not sensitive to the specific mistake in the code. But a lot of the time, buggy code only triggers failures.

  Differential Coverage for Debuggingresearch.swtch.com

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Brave Search

  Their words

  Brave Search is a privacy-first search engine with its own index, unlike e.g. Duck Duck Go which is basically a nice skin for Bing

  karpathy.bearblog.dev

Principal engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on agents and developer tooling. Streams TypeScript, OCaml and Neovim on Twitch, and wrote the better-result library after writing the same Result type about a hundred times.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Treating errors generically is a mistake that leads to fragile software, poor observability and worse experiences.

  Their words

  This is what leads to slop JS/TS software. Treating errors generically like this is a mistake. It leads to fragile software, poor telemetry/observability/debugging, and as a result worse experiences

  @dillon_mulroy on Xx.com

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Reasoning is not taught to a model by people: it emerges from reinforcement learning on questions with checkable answers, with no human preference data at all.

  Their words

  And these reasoning behaviors emerge naturally. So these things like, "Wait, let me see. Wait, let me check this. Oh, that might be a mistake." And they emerge from only having questions and answers.

  youtube.com

Development economist; writes Global Developments, on growth, history and the numbers behind them.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Comparing a poor country’s GDP with South Korea’s at independence is a shallow argument that hides the differences that actually decided the outcome.

  On changing their mind

  Having fallen into the East Asia - Africa Trap before, I can tell you precisely why so many people make this mistake.

Historian at Stanford and the Hoover Institution; wrote Milton Friedman: The Last Conservative and Goddess of the Market, on Ayn Rand.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The great mistake of recent decades was forgetting that inflation built the last political order, and underestimating what its return would do to this one.

  inflation

  Their words

  And so the great mistake of the past years was to forget how fundamental inflation was to the rise of the last political order and to profoundly underestimate how much inflation would change the current political order.

  youtube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  On AI the state's job does not stop at safety; leaving everything else to the market is a mistake.

  government

  Their words

  We shouldn’t just focus on safety and leave the rest to the market… Government has a responsibility to make it work for working people…

  gov.uk

Venture capitalist and founder of Theory Ventures, previously a partner at Redpoint. Writes a near-daily blog on startups, SaaS metrics, data and AI.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Every Hand Revealed

  Their words

  A hand-by-hand narrative of Professional poker player Gus Hansen winning the 2007 Aussie Millions tournament.

  tomtunguz.com

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  In practice "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs" often means hiring professional fakers and letting them drive the company into the ground.

  Their words

  Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.

  Founder Modepaulgraham.com

Cryptography engineer; maintains Go's cryptography libraries as a full-time open-source maintainer, funded directly by companies that use them.

From one piece Geomys, a blueprint for a sustainable open source maintenance firm 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The thing open source can actually sell is not the code but access to its maintainers’ attention and expertise.

  open source

  Their words

  Clients still pay a fixed monthly retainer to ensure the professional maintenance of the whole portfolio, and to get access to the expertise of all of Geomys’ maintainers.

  words.filippo.io

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Open source maintenance can be a mature profession organised into small specialist firms, the way law and medicine already are.

  open source

  Their words

  From the onset, I envisioned small firms of professional maintainers with thematic portfolios, accommodating diverse maintainers and project sizes, just like the specialized firms of other professionals.

  words.filippo.io

Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Judging an AI by how close it is to a human is the mistake: appreciating what it can actually do is both more accurate and better protection against its dangers.

  Their words

  And rather than trying to ask, how close is it to being a human-like intelligent, we should appreciate it for what its capabilities are, and that will both be more accurate and help us put it to work and protect us from the dangers better rather than always anthropomorphizing it.

  youtube.com

Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A professional keeps a promise whether or not they feel like it, and that obligation is what separates professional work from amateur work.

  Their words

  A professional makes a promise and then keeps the promise whether or not they feel like it. Amateurs get to be authentic, whatever that means. And amateurs show up when they want to and make what they want to make.

  youtube.com

Creator of the Zig programming language; president and lead developer of the Zig Software Foundation.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Handing stewardship of Redis to a company whose goal is extracting profit was a mistake for the project

  open source

  Their words

  I think that was an unfortunate move because their goal is mainly to extract profit from the software project rather than to uphold the ideals of Free and Open Source Software.

  Redis Renamed to Redictandrewkelley.me

Founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, the activist investment firm he started in 2004.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Individual investors analysed Tesla better than the professional investors and analysts did.

  Their words

  Actually individual investors did a much better job analyzing Tesla than the so-called professional investors or analysts, the vast majority of them.

  youtube.com

Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Growing food to put in cars is a mistake at a moment when the world should be farming less land, not more.

  Their words

  The world’s croplands are still expanding. At a time when we should be using less land for farming, allocating high-quality farmland to grow food that we then put into cars is a mistake.

  hannahritchie.substack.com

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A retraction can itself be wrong, and be worth retracting.

  Their words

  This was not a mistake, and it was a mistake to categorize it as a mistake.

  Mistakesastralcodexten.com

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Building more housing in a city raises its local prices, because density is what people are moving there for.

  Their words, before

  So empirically, as you move along the density spectrum from the empty North Dakota plain to Manhattan, housing prices go up.

  Their words now

  Although it wasn't a mistake to ask people to change my mind, I've mostly updated against believing the theory.

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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Final Cut Pro

  Their words

  Professional video editing has never been more accessible than it is today, and Final Cut Pro continues to be my app of choice here.

  thesweetsetup.com

Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Partnering with Russia was a strategic mistake for Beijing, because it is the United States and Europe that hold the markets and the technology.

  EuropeChinaRussiaAmerica

  Their words

  Beijing decided to partner with Russia, an imperial aggressor, when it is the US and Europe that have markets and technology.

  2022 letterdanwang.co

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Giving something 60-40 odds and being wrong is not itself a mistake.

  Their words

  This wasn't exactly a mistake, since it's not wrong to give 60-40 odds on a false thing, but it seems worth acknowledging here.

  Mistakesastralcodexten.com

Founder of OpenStreetMap, the collaborative map of the world; later worked on mapping at Microsoft and Telenav.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The purpose of professional training is to produce people who are competent and capable of independent thought and leadership in their field.

  Their words

  The aim of any professional training in the end is to make you someone competent, capable of independent thought and leadership in a specified field.

  Azure Divesstevecoast.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Storing your own writing in a company's proprietary format is a mistake, because you will outlive the company.

  Their words

  You will outlive these companies. Your writing should outlive you. Depending on companies is not an option.

  Write plain text filessive.rs

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A hybrid is a poor machine because it carries two complete powertrains, and most e-bikes repeat the same mistake.

  Their words

  Hybrid-electric cars are an engineering abomination. They have both gas and electric powertrains, ensuring they are more expensive and complicated than their competitors.

  The Future of E-Bikesaustinvernon.site

Engineering leader and writer; wrote The Manager's Path and Platform Engineering, and blogs at Elided Branches.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Making management the only path to career progression is a mistake that costs a company the senior engineers it needs.

  Their words

  great engineers really shouldn’t need to manage large teams to get promoted, and companies lose out on a critical skillset when they push all of their good engineers into management.

  How New Managers Fail Individual Contributorselidedbranches.com

Writer on time, productivity and limitation; wrote Four Thousand Weeks and Meditations for Mortals, and the newsletter The Imperfectionist.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is no phase of life in which the problems are finally solved, and waiting to reach one is the mistake.

  Their words

  That’s why you should give up on trying to reach a phase of life that’s problem-free.

  How to stop trying to escape realityoliverburkeman.com

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.

• Mixed onaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Skin in the Game

  Their words

  Strangely, it’s in maybe Taleb’s worst book that I found him the most tolerable?

  markmanson.net

Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  I Am That

  Their words

  Beginning of Infinity, Rational Optimist, Skin in the Game are all amazing. If you want more eastern philosophy, try Siddhartha, I am That, Jed McKenna.

  x.com

Co-founder, chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Hosts the Masters in Business podcast for Bloomberg and wrote How NOT to Invest.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Open: An Autobiography

  Their words

  It is rare that a sports book captures my attention, rarer still when a sports autobiography does. But “Open” delivers a compelling life story superbly told by an athlete. Desire, motivation, and competitive drive him to the the highest levels of professional tennis, but he loses his interest, and was so often unhappy, confused and unfulfilled by his achievements. As an autobiography, it is bluntly honest, sometimes painful, but most of all a fascinating compelling read.

  ritholtz.com