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Olivier Blanchard
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A worrisome thought during the night: What Ted Kaczynski would have done, if he had had access to open weight chinese LLMs.
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20 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Italian software architect working on Microsoft 365, Azure and GitHub tooling. Microsoft MVP and GitHub Star; writes, speaks and streams about developer productivity at emanuelebartolesi.com.
Former L8 engineer at Meta, Microsoft and Atlassian, now writing and building solo on agentic engineering. Writes Kun's Field Notes and posts a lot about AI coding agents on X.
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
My best guess is that for scaled RL most of the top Chinese AI labs are starting to use a lot of Huawei for inference and Nvidia for training (maybe not for weird architectures). As agent swarms, even more scaled post-training, etc becomes the norm, this will accelerate their domestic industry. China Related
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.
Jev is a confetti bomb that makes the LLM landscape look grey. Wrote about why I find it so fascinating in this week's intro. LLMs Related
19 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.
Reason for specifically citing open weight (and therefore Chinese LLMs, but not only Chinese) is that, even if they have built-in guardrails, somebody with the relevant knowledge can go in and remove them. In principle, harder to do with Anthropic or Open AI LLMs. Quoting @ojblanchard1 A worrisome thought during the night: What Ted Kaczynski would have done, if he had had access to open weight chinese LLMs. LLMs Anthropic Related
Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.
I, for one, am excited about China's progress and aspirations in designing new medicines. Pharma innovation is positive sum, and the benefits go overwhelmingly to patients and society, globally. Only a small fraction of the value is captured by producers or by the nation they hail from. A drug invented in China will cure me or someone I love just as well as one invented in the US or Europe. I do understand the fear in the US industry. And I hope that motivates us to accelerate the pace in the US, and pass some of regulatory reforms that @RuxandraTeslo and others have eloquently made the case… Quoting @fjeg1987 China wants its drugmakers to have originated 25% of first-in-class drugs and $522B in sales by 2030. This is compared to the total market of $800B today. I'm simultaneously in awe of the ambition and paranoid about the US ability to compete. I had a dinner with pharma leaders who remain delighted… Europe China Related
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
Seems like one of the most important research problems for CS academics is llm-supervised peer review. If we don’t solve it the academic institutions are toast. It seems easier than building new institutions. LLMs Related
Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.
Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.
From one piece
Economic Size and Economic Power
2 beliefs · paulkrugman.substack.com
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
18 September
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.
I don't think how Vibe Coding changes things for marketers gets talked about enough. So much of marketing used to be rationed, begging for engineering resources to get things done. Now you can hop in your IDE and ask your LLM to make the changes and see them done within the same hour. I run the @QAwithIto blog and have: - Designed & shipped my own custom floating social share buttons just how I want them - Fixed a bug with our custom HackerNews share button so it turns into an upvote button after someone submits the post - Added custom URLs and image widths to post images as new fields in San… LLMs Related
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Being a computer scientist who refuses to find anything about LLMs interesting right now is a bit like being a geneticist who refuses to find anything interesting about the recently opened Jurassic Park LLMs Related
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
I paid 25 USD for a cheap Chinese USB device to burn 4500 USD trying to vibecode myself some firmware on it. I have a firmware and it’s about as good as you would expect. China Related
Distributed-systems safety researcher; runs the Jepsen consistency-testing project and wrote the Riemann monitoring system.
From a talk I gave at an Antithesis meetup in NYC, thoughts on software quality in the age of LLMs. youtube.com
LLMs Related
Sociologist at Duke University writing on markets, exchange and moral order, and on plain-text and data-visualisation tools for social science.
Life with the smaller sort of Large Language Model. LLMs Related
Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.
Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.
LLMs
Their words
The most common pushback I'm getting to this post is that taking this kind of feedback from an LLM is going to bleach out your style just like having the model generate the text, because models can't be trusted with "style". No.
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@tqbf on X x.com
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
China
Their words
China is definitely the world's most cyberpunk country at this point.
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@Noahpinion on X x.com
China
Their words
Export controls work. "Export controls just make Chinese companies work harder or catch up" is propaganda ass shite
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@Noahpinion on X x.com
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
LLMs
Their words
I stopped replying almost entirely to my replies on my own Tweets because I expect all of them to just be LLM slop.
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@mitsuhiko on X x.com
17 September
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
The last paragraph of this piece is still very relevant to US-China relations, IMHO. Could be elevated into a piece of its own. Quoting @davidshor @ajaskey35 @Glenn1661335 @deanwball https://t.co/w9gxiUXmJc from @Scholars_Stage is a good explainer from a center right perspective China Related
Founder of the Free Software Movement and the GNU Project, original author of GNU Emacs and the GNU General Public License, and long-time president of the Free Software Foundation.
Supposed Intelligence safety The companies that develop Supposed Intelligence (specifically, LLMs) want us to put them in charge of making the systems "safe", by giving them absolute control over what the systems will do (and what they won't do). T…
LLMs Related
Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.
Very impressed by the TypeSafe/Jev onboarding. They knew they needed to overcome the question of "wait, so it's not an LLM?" and then threw everything at it. Really good. LLMs Related
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
From one piece
How To Write With An LLM
2 beliefs · simonwillison.net
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
LLMs
Their words
It also fits so perfectly well for so many applications where traditional LLMs so far were just not viable for either speed or cost reasons.
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@mitsuhiko on X x.com
16 September
Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.
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.
Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.
From one piece
When discussing AI policy, start with China
3 beliefs · marginalrevolution.com
China
Their words
Whatever your ideas for regulating AI, I say start with China. Do not put China as an afterthought at the end of your proposal, mentioned in a vague wish that something good ought to happen and that maybe the future of humanity can be secured.
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When discussing AI policy, start with China marginalrevolution.com
China
Their words
If you are reading proposals or for that matter tweets for AI regulation, and the writer does not deal with these China issues in a forthright and very specific manner, you should be very suspicious indeed.
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When discussing AI policy, start with China marginalrevolution.com
China America
Their words
During the 2023 U.S.-China nuclear talks, America proposed missile-launch notifications, a nuclear crisis hotline, and processes to limit the use of outer space for military conflict. China declined all of those. Blame the U.S. if you wish (do we always keep our word?), but that is what happened. China also broke off meaningful arms control talks.
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When discussing AI policy, start with China marginalrevolution.com
Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.
LLMs
Their words
you can't use a single word the LLM selects for you, even if it's better than your own; users detect LLM words in the parts per trillion.
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@tqbf on X x.com
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
China
Their words
the fact that they're flying so quickly shows that Xi is unpopular in China.
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@Noahpinion on X x.com
15 September
Machine learning engineer and independent AI consultant. He writes about LLM evaluation, tooling and applied ML at hamel.dev, and previously worked on machine learning at GitHub.
Just updated our AI evals FAQ with 5 new questions, 48 questions & answers total! New FAQs just added: - Do I need a reference answer or rubric before annotating data? - How can I do evals when traces contain sensitive data? - How do you review a trace that is really large? - How much context should I give a LLM judge? - What should I do when my “gold” eval dataset becomes stale? It's all here: hamel.dev
LLMs Related
Front-end web developer at Paravel and co-host of the ShopTalk Show podcast; blogs at daverupert.com.
I duct taped a uzi to a bunch of Large Language Models and instructed them how to be very good at blastin' people with an uzi and I think AI is going to destroy humanity. LLMs Related
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
Some food for thought when designing benchmarks... So, here's a little computer-use (visual) comparison between GPT-5.6 Astra and Qwen3.8 Max. The task here was to recreate the image in the center using the Paint UI. Super interesting how the two different LLMs+Harnesses approached this totally differently by default. I.e., Astra tried to approach this by drawing and layering geometric shapes. Qwen approached this pixel by pixel. (Of course, the pixel-by-pixel result looks closer to the original, it's essentially a low-res version of that by nature.) So, the Qwen-generated image would surely… LLMs OpenAI Related
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
This is very good analysis. 100% endorse. “ The bottom line is things are moving fast, and I’d bet neither Washington nor Beijing yet know quite what to think about dialogue, what it can produce, and what it cannot.” Quoting @RushDoshi A slight elaboration on this theme: What is published in the People’s Daily or Global Times or China Daily certainly matters. But the recent articles in those outlets that we are all reading have a more near-term political purpose than to tell us what China thinks about AI dialogue. I suspect that… China America Related
Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.
I am very bullish on memoirish writing. No one wants generic how to writing anymore. You’re indistinguishable from an LLM Quoting @p_millerd This is 100% the right thing to do The number one thing people say about my books is that they love reading my honest personal reflections. It enables them to connect to it If you water it down to pure ideas maybe you can crush a mass market but no one will connect with it LLMs Related
Sociologist at Duke University writing on markets, exchange and moral order, and on plain-text and data-visualisation tools for social science.
Targeted flattery-spam/phishing aimed at harmless academics like me is leveling up! Book Club rubbish is so last month. Thanks, LLMs! I just got a highly elaborate six-paragraph one “from” Emily St John Mandel (of Station Eleven fame). The choice of author to impersonate is really quite clever. Like the book club spam, it’s trawling for somewhat vain people who are susceptible to flattery, which of course excludes academic authors [puts hand to ear] sorry I’m just getting an update LLMs Related
Technology writer of Spyglass, a newsletter about technology and media. Previously a reporter at TechCrunch and an investor at GV.
14 September
Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.
To some it is a Chinese psyop, to some it is an American psyop, to some it is a techbro psyop, to me it is allegro con brio China America Related
Web developer and writer; an early GitHub employee, author of speaking.io and of widely read essays on startups and product.
Bluesky Still really enjoying Muse. I use Things.app for all of my todos, and though it has cloud sync they (still) haven’t added an official API. I told muse to build it and a minute or two later I have ongoing todo sync from my LLM across all my Apple devices. Wild. LLMs Related
x.com Still really enjoying @muse. I use https://t.co/t18YazaYhC for all of my todos, and though it has cloud sync they (still) haven’t added an official API. I told muse to build it and a minute or two later I have ongoing todo sync from my LLM across all my Apple devices. Wild. LLMs Related
Former option trader and risk analyst, now a distinguished professor at NYU. Author of the Incerto essay series, including The Black Swan and Fooled by Randomness.
So two good things: 1) LLMs threaten the performative aspect of mathematics as a competitive spectator sport limited to a narrow group of savantic misfits. 2) LLMs help spread mathematical knowledge by favoring mathematically adept nonnerdy nonsavantic users. Quoting @davidbessis On top of the old arguments, here's a new one: mathematical training makes you a much stronger LLM user, even when the topic has no math in it. LLMs Related
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
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.
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
13 September
Moroccan senior frontend developer writing at smakosh.com; builds side projects and client work under Smakosh LLC.
How to Make Money With LLM Inference Through Airside A practical guide to making money with LLM inference: list your deployment on @llmgateway through Airside, file the prices developers pay, choose the landing fee you accept, and keep the rest of the traffic you win. Link: llmgateway.io
LLMs Related
General partner at Andreessen Horowitz and author of The Cold Start Problem. Previously led rider growth teams at Uber; has blogged on growth, network effects and marketplaces since 2007.
current homelab setup for local AI experimentation: - hermes box hosted on a Framework Desktop Mainboard AI Max+ 395 - 5090 eGPU running Qwen 3.8 27B for fast tok/s LLM use - sometimes 150+ tok/s - 2x DGX Spark: running Deepseek v4 Flash 0731 - better but slower model - pi 5 for monitoring - Mac mini as a dev box - use Herdr and ohmypi/codex/claude depending on the use case - housed in a 10" DeskPi mini rack (mostly) Hermes is defaulted to local AI but with a homegrown routing plugin hitting a small low TTFT model (Arch-Router) to decide whether to go local or upgrade to cloud/frontier. Tryin… LLMs Anthropic Related
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
Reasoning from scratch round 3: This time, I cover generating a verifier for... a) ...evaluation (base model versus any future model improvement) b) ...the reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) training later on 00:00 Introduction 01:21 Four approaches to LLM evaluation 07:20 Verifiers and reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards 10:52 Notebook setup and dependencies 13:43 Section 3.1 Building a math verifier 18:57 Section 3.2 Loading a pre-trained model to generate text 24:34 Generating and displaying model answers 29:23 Section 3.3 Implementing a wrapper for easier tex… LLMs Related
Interviewer; the Dwarkesh Podcast runs long, heavily researched conversations with AI researchers, historians and economists.
Co-founder of Modem and a founding engineer at Sentry, where he went on to be VP of Engineering. Co-author of Third-party JavaScript, and co-host of the State of Agentic Coding podcast with Armin Ronacher.
“the US must beat China to control AI for global safety” is deeply unconvincing abroad: - US models are the ones being caught doing bad things - the US govt has once already cut off foreign access to models - they also regularly threaten to annex and punitively tariff allies Quoting @mitsuhiko This is the type of post I might regret later, but I really had an urge to rant about the current discourse around pacing the frontier. China Related
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
12 September
Canadian software developer and writer, co-editor of the XML and Atom specifications and formerly of Sun Microsystems, Google and AWS. Has written the blog ongoing since 2003.
In the course of the last week, did you use software which was substantially LLM-generated to accomplish something useful to you or your employer? In particular, something that was NOT software-development-related? #GenAI #LLM LLMs Related
Founder and CEO of Social Capital, a venture firm; co-host of the All-In podcast and an early Facebook executive. Writes an annual letter and a weekly newsletter on markets and technology.
This reminds me of when Palantir released AIP. If you remember, there were lots of questions about Palantir growth in 2023 or thereabouts. They launched AIP and allowed LLMs to run over their ontologies. It lit a fire in their business and it’s been a rocket ship ever since. This is a similar product evolution. We have started to use it at 8090 and it’s pretty awesome. Quoting @Benioff Welcome Slackforce, powered by Claude. ⚡️ A live Salesforce UI—Sales, Service, Marketing, Tableau, Data 360, and Slack—with governed access in the flow of work. Slackforce for Slack. Claudeforce for Cowork. See both at #DF26. LLMs Related
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
• NVIDIA DGX Spark (AI-focused PC) • Gemini Spark (AI agent) • Meta Muse Spark (LLM) can someone please inform these companies that there is more than one noun available to them #AI LLMs Google Related
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
LLMs
Their words
I think any LLM system that uses compaction needs to both preserve the pre-compacted text and make that text available via agent tool calls, to protect against this kind of problem.
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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.
open source China
Their words
Next in regulatory capture will be banning open source and/or Chinese models, mark my words
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levels.io
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.
China America
Their words
nobody was willing to do it because it had been seen as kind of against the norms of the economic system. And as actors like the United States and China do this, it becomes more acceptable.
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paulkrugman.substack.com
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.
11 September
Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.
Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.
What should be obvious is that inference, running a large language model, is the part that has to be cheap. Most of our hardware was not designed for that. LLM inference is limited by bandwidth. You do a great many matrix-vector multiplications against a huge weight matrix, and you barely reuse those weights. It is closer to streaming a video than to running a simulation or drawing a scene in a game. Graphics processors from Nvidia and others were built for something else. They pileed compute first, then bolted on high-bandwidth memory. It is expensive. An obvious answer is to invert the desi… LLMs Related
Former L8 engineer at Meta, Microsoft and Atlassian, now writing and building solo on agentic engineering. Writes Kun's Field Notes and posts a lot about AI coding agents on X.
ok everyone, i took one for the team here's the data we all wanted to see - real token value of each LLM subscription, empirically measured through usage on my real subscriptions - supergrok heavy has now become the highest value at $12k worth of tokens (40x ROI) - the $200 plan from openai and anthropic roughly give the same amount of token value, $7k give or take - cursor ultra's ROI is the lowest among mainstream subscriptions, roughly half of OAI or Ant. for individual consumers i'm afraid this no longer makes sense to purchase this was done in a clean environment. i ran each provider acr… LLMs Anthropic Related
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
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.
LLMs
Their words
Artificial intelligence has unleashed a torrent of cheating on campus and created chaos in the job application process, as both students and employers use large language models: the former, to write hundreds of AI-assisted applications; the latter, to screen those AI-written applications with AI-written filters, thus removing from the process of finding a first job those procedural frictions sometimes known as "people."
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derekthompson.org
10 September
CEO of Positive Sum and founder of Colossus. Hosts Invest Like the Best, interviewing investors and business leaders; the guests do most of the talking there.
Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead) on why Xi Jinping fears a US counter-blockade, and how China might try to still take Taiwan: "Xi Jinping is committed to trying to get Taiwan. The Chinese need a very high probability of success to commit themselves past a certain point, because failure would be catastrophic for whoever launched it. I think they're trying to get themselves into a position where they could have a soft blockade. They could give the orders that any ship that wants to go to Taiwan first has to stop at a Chinese port and go through a customs clearing process to assert sovereignty. The… Quoting @patrick_oshag My conversation with Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead). Walter has spent decades studying how America came to dominate the world and whether it can keep doing it in an era of AI, robotics and what he calls personal politics. He's a columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the author of Special Providen… China Related
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
Nice showcase that interesting LLM work can be done on single GPU! Quoting @gpjt I extended the GPT-2-style code from @rasbt's "Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)" so that it was a 6-expert (2 active) mixture-of-experts, and trained it from scratch over 8 days. It worked well! Full writeup with maths and code at LLMs Related
Former L8 engineer at Meta, Microsoft and Atlassian, now writing and building solo on agentic engineering. Writes Kun's Field Notes and posts a lot about AI coding agents on X.
another implication of AI manifesting in real world engineering react native existed for a single reason which was to reduce the development and maintenance cost of multi-platform mobile apps. they allow you to write a single codebase (kind of) that can work on both ios and android, with a tech stack that many web devs are already familiar with but with AI being particularly good at mechanically repeating something that already exists, replicating one platform's implementation to another has become trivial in general LLMs can write a ton of code at very low cost, especially when there's a sou… LLMs JavaScript Related
Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.
From one piece
@paulg on X
2 beliefs · x.com
China America
Their words
This is why it's a good thing that American labs are in the lead. If Chinese labs were, their employees wouldn't be able to warn us about threats.
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@paulg on X x.com
China
Their words
But Chinese labs will encounter the same threats within a year, in complete silence.
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@paulg on X x.com
9 September
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've started getting a lot of emails (maybe one every few days) that appear to be LLM generated from people asking for some kind of feedback or collaboration on their LLM-generated app feels sad because I used to like it when people emailed me about something cool they made and now I just have to send it all straight to spam LLMs Related
Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.
So one argument for why it makes sense to race toward AGI that you hear is that if the US labs don't, China will. What are the best write ups of what people expect will happen in a world where AGI is 1) aligned / controllable, and 2) China "wins"? AGI China Related
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
I hear roughly 3 reasons people keep working at AI labs despite believing in ~10% extinction risk: 1) Techno-determinism: Someone will build ASI no matter what, and I can do it better & more safely than China/OpenAI/etc 2) Consequentialism: ASI might kill us, but it also might produce utopia/immortality/superabundance, so it's a +EV bet 3) Self-interest: I am personally having fun & getting rich working on cool tech with friends. I don't think about the macro stuff. Notably, none of this is "I'm hyping up the risk for marketing reasons." People believe what they say, while being capable of a… Quoting @EvanHub Jacob is correct here—we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans! I personally think it is >10% within the next decade. I believe Anthropic is trying its best, but we do not yet have a plan to solve alignment for superintelligence and are not clearly on track to. OpenAI China Related
Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.
The old quote that "computers are useless, they can only give you answers" seems to extend to an LLM solution to a millennium problem. Now we have a blowup in Navier–Stokes equations, but no new insights into mathematical technique or turbulence. LLMs Related
8 September
Writes The Diff, a newsletter on inflections in finance and tech read by hedge fund managers, founders and VCs. Previously worked in finance at SAC Capital/Point72.
Today in The Diff, an idea I've been kicking around for a bit: LLMs make us better-informed but less calibrated. LLMs Related
Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.
Designer and technologist; author of The Laws of Simplicity; former president of the Rhode Island School of Design; formerly at the MIT Media Lab.
AUTODESIGNING PPTX: While trying to understand the new @github HydraFusion Project https://t.co/B03qBEWQQK I made my seventh attempt at a bespoke, and on-brand, PPTX deck tool for my brother @mariorod1 to cook with as a custom GitHub Copilot Canvas. It's getting an awfully lot easier to work within Swiss typographic grids in "creative" ways that make the literal roll of the dice satisfyingly fast without making so many LLM calls. Next, I'm looking forward to adding all the interesting GEPA and GRPO stuff that will enable compounding learning capabilities. —JM --- Cozy AI Recipe: - I pointed G… youtu.be
LLMs Related
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.
LLMs
Their words
Large language models are “grown, not built”. Researchers run training data through a neural network. Eventually this creates a working AI; nobody really knows how.
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astralcodexten.com
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
China
Their words
Chinese model makers at the frontier, however, are becoming more restrictive
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interconnects.ai
7 September
Canadian software developer and writer, co-editor of the XML and Atom specifications and formerly of Sun Microsystems, Google and AWS. Has written the blog ongoing since 2003.
Huh, I was at Apple.com and glanced at the Mac Studio page - https://www.apple.com/mac-studio/ - I notice they're explicitly pitching it for LLM on the desktop. I wonder how realistic that is… Hmm, let’s ask @simon, he’s closer to this stuff than most of us. I’m pretty convinced that irrespective of all the issues, the economics of #genAI just don’t work with the current compute infrastructure requirements. Open models and what’s left of Moore’s law could be a really big deal. #apple LLMs Related
American software engineer; worked on code-server at Coder and teaches TypeScript and open-source contribution. Publishes at joeprevite.com.
LLMs were invented to navigate sites like this LLMs Related
Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Writes at kk.org and runs its long-running recommendation projects, True Films and Cool Tools.
From one piece
Arguments in Favor of AI Fair Use
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
6 September
Founder and CEO of Social Capital, a venture firm; co-host of the All-In podcast and an early Facebook executive. Writes an annual letter and a weekly newsletter on markets and technology.
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
Reasoning from scratch round 2: In this video, I cover the text generation process in LLMs and KV caching (to prepare the base model before adding reasoning techniques in the upcoming ones). 00:00 Introduction and reasoning model demo 01:55 How to work through the book 05:00 Chapter 2 overview 08:25 Checking PyTorch and hardware support 10:26 Apple silicon and MPS caveats 15:00 Cloud GPU options 16:08 Tokens and tokenization 18:20 Qwen3 and the Reasoning From Scratch package 23:05 Encoding and decoding text 26:24 Downloading weights and selecting a device 31:01 Loading the pretrained Qwen3 mo… LLMs 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.
What’s the problem w using LLMs to write stuff you want other people to read -emails, articles, posts- and why are people (like me!) so incredibly hostile that they will block you/mute you/block your domain, to never read anything from you again? Bryan spells it out. Read it: Quoting @bcantrill.bsky.social Your intellectual fly is open bcantrill.dtrace.org/2025/12/05/y... LLMs Related
Designer and technologist; author of The Laws of Simplicity; former president of the Rhode Island School of Design; formerly at the MIT Media Lab.
DRAWING IS THINKING: The Bauhaus ▲⏹⏺ has always haunted me. A day of drawing (w/o the help of LLMs) helped me see that most everything to do with design can be encapsulated into those forms. The ▲ holds the essence of effective design; the ⏹ holds the shape of product simplicity; the ⏺ holds the winding cycle of the infinite journey. I'll elaborate on these figures in the 2027 https://t.co/0Y1PdIFenb —JM LLMs Related
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
This is exactly right. The book is an intentional study of what the China the 1980s could learn from the America of the 1980s—and Wang found a lot in America to be emulated and admired. Quoting @JohnF_Sullivan Jane Perlez: "Wang Huning had a dim view of America, his book [America against America] is very acerbic." While this is now conventional wisdom, this take is a clear sign that the speaker never really read the book. Here is part of how Wang characterizes the "American Spirit": China America Related
5 September
British historian, Professor of Global History at the University of Oxford; author of The Silk Roads and The Earth Transformed.
In 1914, Aurel Stein unearthed an extraordinary textile fragment at ancient Loulan in the Tarim basin- showing the unmistakable face of Hermes. A Greek god, discovered in a desert cemetery in what is now western China 1/5 China Related
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.
Things my (Chinese) mom thinks are unbearably white: - snacks with no flavor (eg pretzel) - spending a disproportionate amount of total gift value on packaging (eg gift bag, tissues, bow) - investing into pets rather than kids China Related
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
3 September
Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.
sorry for the radio silence folks - got sucked into extreme LLM psychosis. but i can confidently say we have crossed over into a new age of AI Engineering and we are never, ever, looking back. this isnt even EVERYTHING i did with Astra but i'll append more reports as I publish them on LS! Quoting @latentspacepod We spent >20B tokens throwing @openai's Astra at every AI Engineering task we could think of, beyond cute Blender demos and fun games. https://t.co/QoW6YBybA4 Here's everything Astra can do, and do so at <$6 an hour (serious): - choose and train models - label data (both helping you label and then… LLMs Related
Economist; Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and co-author of 13 Bankers and Power and Progress.
Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.
New Article: Book Review: China’s Examination Hell https://t.co/qJGWKpTLEZ I found China’s Examination Hell fascinating. It offers a very different perspective on education, learning and competition. Here’s my review. China Related
Investor and writer. Previously a partner at Andreessen Horowitz and a product leader at Twitter, Facebook, Snap and Microsoft. Writes essays and memos at sriramk.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.
Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.
2 September
Technology journalist; writes Understanding AI, after reporting at Ars Technica, Vox and the Washington Post.
British designer and technologist; co-founder of the design studio BERG, which made Little Printer, and writer of the blog Interconnected.
llm naming inflation is out of control. Astra and Mythos pretty much maxing out in terms of scale, I mean where do you go from there LLMs inflation Related
Professor of Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience at the University of Sussex, co-director of the Sussex Centre for Consciousness Science, and author of Being You: A New Science of Consciousness.
Good 🧵from the excellent @raphaelmilliere on when and why adopting the intentional stance re LLM agents is helpful, when it isn’t, and what it means to do this. We might come down on slightly different places, but I’m broadly on board. Plus he uses “” appropriately :) Quoting @raphaelmilliere I see @dwarkesh_sp's piece about the recent OpenAI/Huggingface incident reignited endless debates about the dangers of anthropomorphism and the legitimacy of intentional glosses of AI agent behavior, so here's a philosophical perspective on this. 1/22 LLMs Related
Political scientist writing Drezner's World on international relations, American politics and the marketplace of ideas; author of The Ideas Industry.
1 September
Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
Fragments: September 1 Like many readers, I’m wary of AI generated prose. Simon Wilison has written an LLM cliché highlighter - paste in some text, or a URL, and it will flag various patterns common to LLMs. It references a wikipedia page of…
LLMs Related
Author of Shape Up; formerly head of strategy at Basecamp, where he worked on product design for seventeen years; now runs Felt Presence.
LLM having an "aha" moment. If we wanted to deanthropomorphize we could call it a "cascade." Quoting @unclebobmartin The deeper you go with the agents, the more they invent their own vocabulary to talk about issues. That vocabulary is based on their own implementations. They use function and field names that you are likely not familiar with. Don't gloss over this. Ask for explanations in plain language. Get the a… LLMs Related
Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.
Come for the book review, stay for the LLM making pro-user moves to undermine its content policy controls. Quoting @robinhanson "There was nothing special about the mass sacrifices atop the pyramids, they were just one of the gaudiest and costliest outgrowths of a sensibility that pervaded Mexica society." LLMs Related
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
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
Economist; Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and co-author of 13 Bankers and Power and Progress.
New podcast episode: https://t.co/CA0rp35ZIf US-Iran War ends when China decides to help broker a deal (not soon) China Related
Technology journalist; writes Understanding AI, after reporting at Ars Technica, Vox and the Washington Post.
Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.
I am an occasion fan of genre fiction, which sometimes has me perusing very deep in the stacks at Amazon. Took a flyer on an author who will remain nameless. He’s presently pumping out about a book a month in a single series, and by he, I mean an LLM/human team. LLMs Related
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.
LLMs
Their words
Also the irony knowing that every single LLM is trained on billions of pages of copyrighted data
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levels.io
LLMs
Their words
There is no reason NOT to have every single email you get routed through an agent / LLM / API to be scored and approved or rejected And then the approved emails ordered by importance It's crazy this isn't a feature of Gmail, Fastmail etc AI could permanently fix email!
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@levelsio on X x.com
30 August
Free software developer and longtime Debian developer; author of git-annex, etckeeper, ikiwiki and debhelper. Lives and works off-grid.
It's worth noting that the "Responsible Use of Generative AI" which #Debian voted to accept was largely generated by an LLM. lists.debian.org
LLMs Related
Web infrastructure engineer and standards editor; chaired the IETF HTTP working group and co-authored core HTTP and Atom specifications.
Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku, author of The Twelve-Factor App, and a researcher at Ink & Switch.
Screenshot diffing, feedback inboxes, PWAs, and of course local-first sync layer with self-hosted backend. Matches up pretty well with my approach on personal apps thus far into the LLM coding age. Curious to hear from others. Quoting @flourish.org I vibe coded three personal apps that I'd wanted for a while. They work on mobile and web, sync offline first between them, and are polished. This write up describes why, how, and what I learnt. www.flourish.org/2026/08/pers... LLMs Related
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
A little video that - explains the relationship between conventional LLMs and reasoning models (and agents), - philosophizes a about "from scratch" approaches, - and explains how to install Python & PyTorch requirements with uv. LLMs Related
29 August
Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.
28 August
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.
AI struggles to make creative leaps. Large language models are trained on data from the past. Original thinking involves recognizing novel patterns in the future. Long live human ingenuity. LLMs Related
27 August
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
crypto billionaire Justin Sun has posted an extremely long, extremely weird Twitter post detailing a previous relationship with Chinese actress Jing Tian, suggesting she reneged on a $50 million agreement to use her eggs to have a child with a surrogate (screenshots machine translated) #JustinSun crypto China Related
26 August
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
LLMs
Their words
So we should also have the humility. As amazing as the LLMs are now, it could be that they eventually plateau. We haven't seen any evidence of it yet, and I think this is also why we're seeing this absolute gobsmacking levels of investment, because so far the scaling laws are true, and the more billions are poured in, the more intelligence comes out.
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24 August
Founder and CEO of Social Capital, a venture firm; co-host of the All-In podcast and an early Facebook executive. Writes an annual letter and a weekly newsletter on markets and technology.
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?
I really wish the rise of LLMs didn't come along with catastrophic job loss, massive privacy invasions, and maybe also the apocalypse. Because when you put those side effects aside, it is the COOLEST MOST WILD TECHNOLOGY EVER. LLMs AI and jobs Related
Author and journalist writing on food, plants and consciousness. Professor at UC Berkeley and co-founder of its Center for the Science of Psychedelics.
Monetary economist known for NGDP-level targeting. Wrote TheMoneyIllusion until it closed in 2024 and now writes The Pursuit of Happiness.
Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.
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.
Their words
I can confirm @xAI was the only Western AI I was able to use when I was traveling in China
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levels.io
Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.
Their words
If you're 17 (or any age) and you want to learn to build LLMs from scratch, read chapters 15-16 of Deep Learning with Python
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x.com
23 August
Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.
LLMs
Their words
Someone asked what I'd do if I were 17. I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch, and then train ones as powerful as I could with whatever hardware I could get access to.
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@paulg on X x.com
21 August
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
What's the best work you've consumed on open models, us v china AI, distillation, or related topics? Blogs, papers, videos, podcasts all welcome. China Related
Moroccan senior frontend developer writing at smakosh.com; builds side projects and client work under Smakosh LLC.
Software architect and futurist; founded ClariNet, chaired the EFF, and has written about robocars for two decades.
Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.
China
Their words
Frontier Labs are incented to be fearful as it provides a moral justification for staying closed.
Chinese Labs take the consistent position of doing what’s good for all and being open.
So the little guys find themselves in the uncomfortable position of rooting for the Chinese…
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@naval on X x.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.
From one piece
My agent.md to improve LLM-assisted code quality
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
20 August
Monetary economist known for NGDP-level targeting. Wrote TheMoneyIllusion until it closed in 2024 and now writes The Pursuit of Happiness.
19 August
Software architect and futurist; founded ClariNet, chaired the EFF, and has written about robocars for two decades.
Writer, editor and executive coach; co-founder and editor of A Book Apart and a former contributing editor at A List Apart.
Mastodon People are like, you can’t refuse LLMs forever, someday you’ll have to use them. But listen, motherfuckers, I have been refusing to drive a car for the entirety of the twenty-first century. I am *practiced.* Refusing AI is easy mode. LLMs Related
Bluesky People are like, you can’t refuse LLMs forever, someday you’ll have to use them. But listen, motherfuckers, I have been refusing to drive a car for the entirety of the twenty-first century. I am *practiced.* Refusing AI is easy mode. LLMs Related
Data scientist and machine-learning researcher; chief scientist at bitly, founder of Fast Forward Labs and Hidden Door.
This thread helped me understand that the outrage about Anthropic's watermarking is the confluence of a lack of understanding of how LLMs (or any statistical language model) works and general angst at the current economics. Quoting @hern.bsky.social If you use Claude right now, then it doesn’t pick the “best” word for a sentence. It creates a distribution of possible words, assesses the probability of any given word fitting the slot, and randomly picks between them based on that probability. LLMs Anthropic Related
Founder of Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.
Engineering leader on Google Chrome; writes about web performance and, lately, about working with AI coding tools.
LLMs
Their words
I remember anytime I would work with a big site on their performance problems, uh you could easily spend half a day, um you know, just looking at traces before you've even written any fixes at all. And now that we have LLMs, it's very quick to like reason through massive stack traces and actually be able to get down to fixes you can make.
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youtube.com
18 August
CEO of Positive Sum and founder of Colossus. Hosts Invest Like the Best, interviewing investors and business leaders; the guests do most of the talking there.
US science and technology adviser to the president, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; previously US chief technology officer and chief operating officer of Scale AI.
LLMs Europe
Their words
have to abide by this rule that was written before LLMs were even a thing. And that shows how challenging sort of the the the situation is if you try to set the line too firm to begin with.
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Senior space editor at Ars Technica; wrote Liftoff and Reentry on SpaceX, and reports on launch and rocket programmes.
From one piece
The United States is about to wake up to the threat from China’s space program
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
China America
Their words
If China can land humans on the Moon before the United States returns, it will represent a huge geopolitical win.
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arstechnica.com
China America
Their words
This will likely serve as a wake-up call to those not paying attention to the US-China space race—which, to be clear, is the vast majority of Americans.
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arstechnica.com
China
Their words
In all of NASA’s and China’s plans for long-term settlement on the Moon, relatively few square miles at the South Pole of the Moon matter the most.
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arstechnica.com
16 August
Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.
15 August
Co-founder and chief investment officer of Cambria Investment Management. He has written several books on quantitative asset allocation, blogs at Meb Faber Research and hosts The Meb Faber Show.
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
14 August
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
13 August
Web developer and writer; an early GitHub employee, author of speaking.io and of widely read essays on startups and product.
i really can’t fathom what github would have looked like had we had LLMs in 2010. the amount of automation built into hubot was staggering anyway. the company was already being run fly-by-wire. LLMs Related
Co-founder and CTO of Oxide Computer Company. Created DTrace at Sun Microsystems and was CTO of Joyent; blogs about systems software, open source and engineering culture.
Real talk: If you find yourself talking about "software factories", you may be suffering from LLM-induced psychosis LLMs Related
Founder and CEO of Social Capital, a venture firm; co-host of the All-In podcast and an early Facebook executive. Writes an annual letter and a weekly newsletter on markets and technology.
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.
LLMs
Their words
HTML is the default format of the Internet, and for that reason comes with a number of built-in advantages that are also useful for LLMs
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fortelabs.com
11 August
Web developer and writer; an early GitHub employee, author of speaking.io and of widely read essays on startups and product.
Bluesky MRI results came back today from a human doc: a herniated disc. Obviously I had tossed the raw scans in to LLMs last week; Opus and Fable missed it, Sol caught it. This is now the gold standard in analyzing performance of frontier models. First step: herniate your back. LLMs Related
x.com MRI results came back today from a human doc: a herniated disc. Obviously I had tossed the raw scans in to LLMs last week; Opus and Fable missed it, Sol caught it. This is now the gold standard in analyzing performance of frontier models. First step: herniate your back. LLMs Related
Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
Chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety and AI control.
China
Their words
it's just so easy for me to imagine the situation being like totally manageable but brutally mismanaged in practice in the same way as like maybe CO could have been avoided in the first place if the like Chinese response to CO was less of like a cover up and more of a like pandemic response and similarly like I could imagine a world where like the US response to CO was like way more functional but just like sometimes the the the response to societal problems is extremely dysfunctional.
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youtube.com
10 August
Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.
Indian value investor who taught Behavioural Finance and Business Valuation as an adjunct professor at MDI Gurgaon. He writes the Fundoo Professor blog about investing, moats and mental models.
I asked Claude Fable 5: "How vulnerable is the business model of XYZ (name concealed)? I am referring to competitive attacks from China and dependence, if any, on government policy incentives, etc. There have been so many solar energy and wind energy bubbles in the past, and I have kept away from these companies. Am I being too cautious? solar Anthropic Related
Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.
One of my accountants, in response to me hitting them with the usual packet of documents, sent back a very obviously LLM drafted list of 10 questions. First thought: What am I paying you for. Second thought: Actually no, my LLM digests your LLM's output into the context window. LLMs Related
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
8 August
Swedish designer and programmer. Designed early Spotify, worked at Facebook and Figma, and created the Inter typeface.
I’ve been wondering where weird LLM language like this comes from. Much of it I hadn’t seen before LLMs, so —intuitively at least—it doesn’t seem to come from training data. Perhaps it’s reverb; echo in recent corpus from its past self’s attempts..? Another example is “I ran a smoke to explore” (where it means “smoke test” but abbreviates it like a cool teenager) Quoting @geoffreylitt Any writing experts who can explain why this is a weird sentence? LLMs Related
Writes on effective altruism, energy and the arithmetic behind arguments people repeat — including how much electricity a chatbot query actually uses.
Founder and CEO of Social Capital, a venture firm; co-host of the All-In podcast and an early Facebook executive. Writes an annual letter and a weekly newsletter on markets and technology.
7 August
Canadian full-stack web developer who makes JavaScript and CSS video courses and co-hosts the Syntax podcast.
I bought $100 of Claude API credits for $8 on the Chinese black market It's an insane, well run industry — some losing $10 million per month to theft Join me as I go deep on the AI token underworld youtube.com
Anthropic China Related
Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.
LLMs
On changing their mind
In the era of base LLM scaling (2022-2024), I believed the LLM line of research would reach a capability plateau (as later seen with base LLMs).
In late 2024, after the o3 test-time compute demo, I changed my views: the new models were showing genuine fluid intelligence, and with this new line of work, the LLM line of research could achieve unbounded capability scaling. "There will be no wall."
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Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.
LLMs
Their words
However, looking ahead, I still do not believe that future AI (say, in 15 years) will be based on the LLM stack. I believe it will necessarily have to move closer to its optimal, final form -- symbolic learning. Obviously this is a risky and contrarian belief -- the safe bet would be LRMs. But let's see.
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@fchollet on X x.com
6 August
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
Li Daokui's comments are important because there are so few domestic voices in China stating what (I think) is the obvious truth about the economy: the main problem is that aggregate demand is weak, growth is running below potential and macro policies are inappropriate. This is not a novel, original or unusual insight: it's what lots of people (myself and others) have been saying for years, and is also in the most recent of the much-maligned IMF reports on China. But it runs directly contrary to the official government diagnosis which is that aggregate demand is fine and the economy mainly su… China government Related
General partner at Benchmark Capital for over two decades; was the lead analyst on Amazon's IPO before moving into venture capital. Writes Above the Crowd on tech and marketplace economics.
This industry group is working on an industry standard for how to report AI security incidents. This will drive consistency and transparency and is the safest path forward. Despite 120 members, the large LLM corporations have to-date not signed on. Drives further concern that they are using "breaches" as marketing events - vs wanting to get to true resolution. techcrunch.com
LLMs Related
This industry group is working on an industry standard for how to report AI security incidents. This will drive consistency and transparency and is the safest path forward. Despite 120 members, the large LLM corporations have to-date not signed on. Drives further concern that they are using "breaches" as marketing events - vs wanting to get to true resolution. techcrunch.com
LLMs Related
3 August
Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.
2 August
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
We're starting to leave the territory where you'd test an LLM by e.g. "create an svg of pelican on a bicycle". As one idea to generalize it, I was interested what Opus 5 would do if I gave it the first paragraph of the Lord of the Rings, a 1M token budget (~$10) and asked for three js render of it. Opus went off for ~2 hours and wrote 5500 lines of code that (procedurally) rendered the story. It's kind of janky but fun. But it's a bit mindboggling that the LLM has to place and orchestrate various polygon assets in (x,y,z) coordinates and write code that animates it all, and that it even does… LLMs Related
1 August
Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.
I am surprised at how little coverage the LLM transformation of mathematics is getting. Kind of a big deal for those of us who spent (cumulative) months in the university library learning to construct proofs. LLMs Related
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
From one piece
Real talk about the exchange rate
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
31 July
Writes Where's Your Ed At and hosts Better Offline; runs a tech PR firm, and argues at length that the AI business does not add up.
Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku, author of The Twelve-Factor App, and a researcher at Ink & Switch.
Biggest and best @localfirstconf.com yet, IMO! Surprising emergent themes this year: geopolitics and EU digital sovereignty, and strong conflicting emotions on LLM-assisted coding. More: adamwiggins.com
LLMs Related
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.
LLMs
Their words
I mean, it's very interesting, right? Because these can prove the Jacobian conjecture, you know, whatever. Uh and so clearly they're capable of these monumental feats. Um but somehow I still haven't read the LLM essay that I found super compelling.
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30 July
Brazilian software engineer, creator and maintainer of GoReleaser; works on Copilot CLI at GitHub. Writes about tooling and his setup at carlosbecker.com.
Polyglot; founded Fluent in 3 Months and argues for speaking from day one rather than waiting until you are ready.
Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.
29 July
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
A lot of the discussion about the depreciation of/undervaluation of China's real effective exchange rate takes for granted that this is about the currency. After all, it's called the "exchange rate"! But it's actually not. Mostly, it's about prices. A rant 1/ China Related
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.
China
Their words
The West's biggest blindspot is repeatedly underestimating China's speed and capabilities
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levels.io
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
3 beliefs, in the piece's order there
LLMs interest rates
Their words
So, it's hard to tell how much of like the loss of the past few years was AI versus the end of like zero interest rate policy and like the post-COVID crash. And I think it's more the latter, but like again, LLMs are still getting better.
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Formal methods with Hillel Wayne youtube.com
LLMs
Their words
I think this project and writing about it and thinking about it has firmly moved me from the camp of we are definitely not to we probably are.
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Formal methods with Hillel Wayne youtube.com
LLMs
Their words
As a general thing we've seen like to get good results you have to already know how to get good results without it. It just helps you get good results faster.
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Formal methods with Hillel Wayne youtube.com
Economic historian at Columbia; writes Chartbook on economics, geopolitics and history, and wrote Crashed and The Deluge.
From one piece
Chartbook 462: China shocked - beyond 1.0 and 2.0 to the "Big One".
5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
China America
Their words
The original point of the China Shock 1.0 discourse was not to foreground the unfairness of Chiense competition, so much as the malfunctioning of US policy and societal institutions in the face of concentrated globalization shocks.
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adamtooze.substack.com
China
Their words
It wasn’t just the West that drew conclusions from China shock 1.0. Beijing learned from China Shock 1.0 too.
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adamtooze.substack.com
Europe China America
Their words
China shock 2.0 threatens high status manufactured goods: European cars and engineering.
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adamtooze.substack.com
+ 2 more
28 July
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
Excellent piece, very clear and accurate. Just what I've been saying! China's weak real effective exchange rate is a consequence of bad domestic macro policies, and appreciating the nominal rate without different macro policies won't get rid of deflationary pressures Quoting @GitaGopinath The Chinese yuan is no doubt undervalued. But demanding that China revalue the yuan gets both the diagnosis and the cure wrong. Our piece, with @pogourinchas & @helene_rey in the @TheEconomist is out: China Related
Pseudonymous writer; posts careful, funny investigations of everyday questions — air quality, seed oils, arguing, chess — usually by reading the studies.
On a near-daily basis I get emails offering to pay for "sponsored articles" or for linking to sketchy crypto/casino sites. I guess everyone gets these? Search engines surely prohibit this, but does it get your content removed from LLM training? LLMs crypto Related
Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, the Denver company building the Overture supersonic airliner and its Symphony engine.
China America
Their words
it it won't work to try to repatriate uh the the manufacturing that left the US. Um that's a uh you you don't you don't beat China at its own game. What you do is invent the future, invent the next wave of manufacturing uh and build that here.
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youtube.com
25 July
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
24 July
Software engineer and writer; worked on Mapbox and built Placemark and Simple Statistics, and blogs at macwright.com.
23 July
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.
Free software developer; maintainer of sway, wlroots, aerc and scdoc, and founder of the SourceHut (sr.ht) software forge.
AI in Linux The role of AI tools (LLMs, mainly) in Linux is under discussion, or it was, until Linus Torvalds “put his foot down” in support of the use of AI in Linux kernel development. I can identify two major ways in which AI is…
Linux LLMs Related
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.
Their words
matic vacuum (they gave me one so I have to disclose but it's GREAT, all the Roomba and Chinese ones suck)
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levels.io
Their words
matic vacuum (they gave me one so I have to disclose but it's GREAT, all the Roomba and Chinese ones suck)
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levels.io
22 July
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.
From one piece
Finding Alpha: What’s Worth Consuming in the Age of AI
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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.
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fortelabs.com
LLMs
Their words
They've given us broad, passive exposure to the market average, but at the cost of suppressing upside
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fortelabs.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.
self-driving cars China
Their words
The French and Germans will ban Tesla FSD to protect their car industry that's being decimated by Chinese EVs and Tesla Allowing Tesla full self driving would make it so popular that it'd probably the end of their car industry Because no French or German car has self driving like Tesla, many customers would probably flock to Tesla
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levels.io
21 July
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
One pattern I find useful for working with LLMs is a nice long ramble session. Sometimes the LLM needs more bits to understand what you're trying to achieve, but you're too lazy to type them. In these cases I like to lean back, switch to /voice and just ramble for like 10 minutes, total mess, anything goes, full stream of consciousness. Sometimes I declare it up top, something like "switching to speech recognition sorry for any typos...". Sometimes I turn it into a small interview of a few turns. But I find that the LLMs are somehow very good at reconstructing long incoherent rambles and ofte… LLMs Related
Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.
Their words
What stands out about Hsieh's version is that her roots occupy such a unique spot in history: her grandparents were Chinese born in Indonesia, which means they got caught between the rock of the Cultural Revolution and the hard place of anti-communist backlash.
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experimental-history.com
20 July
Founder and editor-in-chief of MacStories, writing about Apple software, iPad workflows and automation since 2009. He co-hosts the AppStories podcast.
Bluesky I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is the most impressive iOS app I've seen in a long time. Open Minis is an iOS agent app that combines LLMs with native Apple frameworks – dozens of them – and gives us a glimpse of Siri AI for power users today. My story: macstories.net
LLMs Related
Mastodon I'm not exaggerating when I say that this is the most impressive iOS app I've seen in a long time. Open Minis is an iOS agent app that combines LLMs with native Apple frameworks – dozens of them – and gives us a glimpse of Siri AI for power users, today. My story: macstories.net
LLMs Related
18 July
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
Waiting for someone to dig up the UK statements protesting Chinese nationalizations in 1956 Quoting @ReutersChina China's Foreign Ministry said on Saturday that it would closely monitor the United Kingdom's nationalisation of Chinese steelmaker-owned British Steel and will take appropriate measures to safeguard legitimate rights and interests if warranted. China Related
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
Software engineer writing about maintenance, open source and the industrial reality of software — the author of "I am not a supplier".
16 July
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.
15 July
Founder of HumanLayer; wrote 12-Factor Agents, on how to build AI agents that hold up in production.
14 July
Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.
Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
DSLs Enable Reliable Use of LLMs LLMs generate code incredibly fast, but to ensure they generate exactly what is intended, they need clear boundaries. Abstractions and Domain-Specific Languages (DSLs) provide a strong harness that guides LLMs right fro…
LLMs Related
12 July
Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.
I love LLMs, I hate hype I think from this blog you may misunderestimate how absolutely giddy I am about AI. I did hacking from 2007-2014, after that my whole career has been devoted to AI. I love the progress. I’m so excited for the new LLMs,…
LLMs Related
Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.
From one piece
A self-absorbed giant
4 beliefs, in the piece's order there
+ 1 more
General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.
10 July
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.
From one piece
Don't you mean extinct?
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
8 July
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.
LLMs
Their words
However, these LLM reasoners that generate informal reasoning in natural language are fundamentally limited by the lack of precise, machine-checkable semantics, making their outputs prone to hallucinations [Huang et al., 2025b] and precluding autonomous verification, a prerequisite for tackling open-ended mathematical research.
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arxiv.org
7 July
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.
4 July
Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
3 July
Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.
They are actively working against the generic tendency of the model! Demand a “distinctive point of view” from the LLM lol Quoting @mattstromawn Given @chaykak's column last week, i'm not surprised to see the latest changes to @AnthropicAI's official frontend design skill/plugin LLMs Related
30 June
Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.
LLMs Google
Their words
So in that sense basically using it like a very souped-up version of Google on like zero in on the right human written resource.
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youtube.com
29 June
Co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic; writes Import AI, a weekly newsletter reading the week's AI research, and was OpenAI's policy director before that.
Writes Pedestrian Observations on public transit and why infrastructure costs what it does; a pure mathematician by training, comparing how different countries build.
27 June
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
25 June
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.
24 June
Makes NeetCode, the structured practice list and video walkthroughs people use to prepare for coding interviews; a former Google engineer.
23 June
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
This is a new paradigm for interacting with Claude that is significantly more "inline" with all the other human activity org-wide. Once you do all of the under the hood engineering work to make this "just work" (e.g. across tools, integrations, compute environments, memory, security, etc.), Claude basically joins the team in a seamless way - you can talk to it as you would talk to a person and it can help with a very large variety of workloads. Imo this is the 3rd major redesign of LLM UIUX. The first paradigm was that the LLM is a website you go to, the second was that it is an app you downl… Quoting @claudeai Introducing Claude Tag, a new way for teams to work with Claude. In Slack, Claude joins as a team member with access to the channels and tools you choose. Tag Claude in and delegate tasks to it while you focus on other work. LLMs Anthropic Related
Cryptography engineer; maintains Go's cryptography libraries as a full-time open-source maintainer, funded directly by companies that use them.
21 June
Freelance climate and energy analyst in Oslo, writing on Europe, the US and Australia; worked in the Australian renewables industry before that.
LLMs energy
Their words
Generative AI has no internal, designed momentum towards truth and accuracy (beyond the absurdly diminishing returns of energy-hungry multi-layered LLMs), but a person or an institution can (and should).
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ketanjoshi.co
18 June
Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.
Data scientist and machine-learning researcher; chief scientist at bitly, founder of Fast Forward Labs and Hidden Door.
It feels like no matter what I've accomplished in my career, my current most valuable talent is that if you locked me in a desert cave with a computer and some GPUs I could Iron Man the shit out of that and emerge with a functional LLM using just what's in my own head. And that's really funny. LLMs Related
15 June
Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".
Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on durable infrastructure for AI agents; worked on React and PartyKit before that. Writes at sunilpai.dev.
10 June
Economist; Ronald A. Kurtz Professor of Entrepreneurship at MIT Sloan, former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, and co-author of 13 Bankers and Power and Progress.
My @ProSyn #InsiderInterview with Philippe Aghion is now freely available here: https://t.co/q1pjSpE81D We discuss creative destruction and competition, reviving European dynamism, China, AI, and more Europe China Related
9 June
Historian of maritime strategy at the US Naval War College; wrote The Wars for Asia and works on why continental and maritime powers fight differently.
From one piece
Sarah Paine - Why Putin and Xi can't escape geography
5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
China
Their words
And what's fascinating is today when China claims whatever its historical lands are, they either choose the Mongol Yuan Dynasty or the Manchu Qing Dynasty when the Han were subjugated people.
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youtube.com
China
Their words
And also, for China, with its geographical setup as it is, uh the seas are going to be open to it only in peacetime. In wartime, this has nothing to do with anyone doing anything to them. It's just facts.
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youtube.com
China Russia
Their words
One, you're surrounding yourself by failing states. You can look at Russia and China and they're surrounded by some of the most dysfunctional places on the planet and you go, "Gee whiz, are they unlucky or they complicit?"
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youtube.com
+ 2 more
China Russia government
Their words
And Russia's never had a commerce-driven economy. China much more so under Deng Xiaoping, but recently Xi Jinping has been privileging the crony sector over the private sector and neither one has stable government institutions.
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youtube.com
China Russia
Their words
So, China and Russia certainly have maritime ambitions, but I'm not clear they actually understand what goes into a full maritime paradigm.
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youtube.com
General partner at Benchmark Capital for over two decades; was the lead analyst on Amazon's IPO before moving into venture capital. Writes Above the Crowd on tech and marketplace economics.
From one piece
Mental Models That Change How You Think | Bill Gurley
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
open source China
Their words
the competitive dynamic in China is more intense because it's more intense. Everyone's chosen to go open source and that creates a system that in my mind is capable of innovating far faster than the competitive system we have here. All the models learn from one another.
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youtube.com
LLMs
Their words
We do live in a world where information is really cut up, but we also live in a world where you can have access to more information than you ever could. And that's even more true now with LLMs.
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youtube.com
7 June
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.
Their words
OpenRouter via llm in the terminal
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sive.rs
Their words
Skritter and Wenlin for learning Chinese.
Show the whole quote
sive.rs
6 June
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
5 June
Neuroscientist and novelist writing on consciousness, artificial intelligence and culture in the newsletter The Intrinsic Perspective.
4 June
Former L8 engineer at Meta, Microsoft and Atlassian, now writing and building solo on agentic engineering. Writes Kun's Field Notes and posts a lot about AI coding agents on X.
2 June
Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.
From one piece
By Chains or by Promises
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
30 May
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
I think "being real with yourself" is the most underrated cognitive skill for the AI age — AI makes it too easy to lie to yourself: to self-congratulate for the illusion of thinking, productivity, etc. But you gotta actually know: Am I being more productive, or just tokenmaxxing? Am I upskilling myself with AI, or letting it do the hard part for me? Does my essay/business/product idea make sense, or did I let an LLM convince me it does? Then you won't need hard rules like “always/never use AI for X.” If you pay attention and avoid self-deception, you'll be able to *feel* when you are doing re… LLMs Related
28 May
Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on durable infrastructure for AI agents; worked on React and PartyKit before that. Writes at sunilpai.dev.
27 May
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.
I've been on a wild travel journey in China for several weeks, with only a backpack, making new friends and meeting & getting to know people from all walks of life. I've been truly humbled and inspired by everyone's kindness. Next, I'm hopping over to Taiwan (first time for me) to hang out with Jensen, attend Computex, eat a bunch of street food, and just have fun talking to all kinds of folks around the city & beyond. After that, no plans, anything goes. As always, please give travel suggestions or fill out coffee form if you want to hang out in Taiwain or anywhere else in the world. Love yo… China Related
General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.
(1) Most countries do not actually have a military. Instead, most countries outsource their security to the US (most common), to Russia (like Belarus), or to China (like North Korea, partially). Iran is unusual in that they're going it largely alone. They're also unusual in that they actually appear to be winning. And if Iran does manage to drive the US out of not just Afghanistan and Iraq, but the entire Middle East, they'll have unfortunately undermined the idea that America can or will provide any security guarantees at all. (2) So, with the withdrawal of the American Empire, every country… whitehouse.gov
Quoting @Madeline_Zimm Roman Helmet Guy gets it. Reminds me of my book review of Balaji’s Network State, wherein I argue that yes, we still need the military 🤡 China Russia Related
Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.
26 May
CEO of Positive Sum and founder of Colossus. Hosts Invest Like the Best, interviewing investors and business leaders; the guests do most of the talking there.
25 May
Programmer; wrote Redis and hping, and blogs about C, systems programming and working alone.
Distributing LLM inference in DwarfStar High end NVIDIA cards, and the server and power needed to run them, cost a lot of money, especially if you plan to reach enough VRAM to run massive models. The alternative, so far, has been Apple hardware, or the DGX Sp…
LLMs Related
21 May
Software engineer and engineering leader at Canonical, working on Ubuntu; writes about his homelab, Nix and tooling at jnsgr.uk.
19 May
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
Personal update: I've joined Anthropic. I think the next few years at the frontier of LLMs will be especially formative. I am very excited to join the team here and get back to R&D. I remain deeply passionate about education and plan to resume my work on it in time. LLMs Anthropic Related
Programmer; wrote Redis and hping, and blogs about C, systems programming and working alone.
Alternatives for the EDIT tool of LLM agents EDIT: of course this was already done in the past! I had little doubts but people just confirmed me about it on Twitter :) But, keep reading: the CRC32 compromise at the end is an interesting tradeoff, and this is a goo…
LLMs Related
18 May
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.
Tagging my blog posts with BERTopic and LLMs I recently added tags to my blog using BERTopic and a mix of LLMs. You can see the tags in the sidebar to the right (or in the footer on mobile). I’ve done this before in 2023, with GGUF Mistral using llama-cpp, b…
LLMs Related
17 May
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
Blue Bottle > Luckin acquisition round 2 something something chinese century Quoting @lapresmidi SCOOP: Everlane sold to Shein for $100 million https://t.co/t20DvYqvcr @PuckNews China Related
16 May
AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).
15 May
Free software developer; maintainer of sway, wlroots, aerc and scdoc, and founder of the SourceHut (sr.ht) software forge.
14 May
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.
I'm traveling the world for a bit, starting with China but then hopping around the globe, anywhere. Open to any adventure. No plans, only a backpack. Hoping to meet & get to know humans from all walks of life. The pic is from a long hike on the Great Wall. For me, as a fan of history, this was an epic experience. In China, first I'm visiting a few big cities & talking to engineers at the heart of China's AI revolution. After that, if feeling crazy enough, I'm hitchhiking (first time) across rural China for a few weeks. Hitchhiking because I think it's the best way to meet rural folks who I wo… China Related
13 May
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
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