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Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Less technology and less wealth increase the risk of human extinction, rather than reduce it.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  In fact, the risk of human extinction is assuredly higher if we are poorer and have less technology.

  Fear Is Not an Argumentlemire.me

Cardiologist and founder of the Scripps Research Translational Institute; writes Ground Truths on biomedical research, and wrote Super Agers and Deep Medicine.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Inflammation's role in coronary artery disease is proven, not hypothetical; what is missing is a safe and potent way to reduce it.

  Their words

  The “inflammation hypothesis” is not a hypothesis.

  The Coronary Artery Inflammation Controversyerictopol.substack.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Expanding North Sea oil drilling would not reduce UK energy prices, because oil prices are set on a global market.

  energy

  Their words

  This would accomplish nothing to reduce energy prices, since oil prices are set on a global market and there's not enough crude left off UK shores to influence that number.

  The growing rumblebillmckibben.substack.com

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

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Syncthing

  Their words

  I switched to using Syncthing to avoid the overhead of running a server instance, which works particularly well when combined with Tailscale.

  jnsgr.uk

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Health optimisation has overshot: minimising a measured risk is not worth it if the cost is not having lived.

  Their words

  And this is the myopia of modernity, that we reduce things down to like, well, one glass on this long run study meant that you had a 0.1% greater risk of some heart defect. Yes, but if you didn't live at all, what's the point?

  youtube.com

Demographer; writes on fertility, marriage and population, and directs the Pro-Family Initiative at the Institute for Family Studies.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A model fitted only to trends in its own outcome cannot forecast anything, because it contains no variable anyone could change.

  Their words

  The demand for explanations of low fertility is entirely a demand for variables which will reduce these technical trends to near zero.

  We Actually Know A Lot About Fertility Declinelymanstone.substack.com

Founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, a nuclear-reactor company founded in 2023.

From one piece How Nuclear Will Unlock Energy Abundance with Valar Atomics Founder Isaiah Taylor 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nuclear safety should be pursued by reducing the consequence of an accident rather than its odds, because something unpredictable always happens.

  Their words

  The alternative way that you can reduce risk is actually just reducing consequence, right? And we would argue that that's a much better way to reduce risk. Odds uh are stochastic, right? Even if you do an enormous amount of risk reduction on odds and you do all this engineering, something's still going to happen, right? like just something's going to come out of left field and you can't predict everything.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Energy demand is set by price: reduce the price and you create the demand, which makes the market for cheap energy effectively infinite.

  energy

  Their words

  energy being a commodity, the demand is set by the price, right? So if you can reduce the price, you increase the demand.

  youtube.com

Software engineer and writer; worked on Mapbox and built Placemark and Simple Statistics, and blogs at macwright.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Longer device upgrade cycles are beneficial because they reduce e-waste, pollution, and churn.

  Their words

  But either way, it's good that upgrade cycles are longer: it means less e-waste, less pollution, less churn overall.

  Technology optimism hourmacwright.com

Professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M; writes The Climate Brink with Zeke Hausfather.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Newly discovered, costly climate impacts like wildfire smoke should strengthen the case for cutting greenhouse gas emissions.

  Their words

  This should turbocharge our resolve to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases.

  ♫ Smoke Gets in Your Eyes ♫theclimatebrink.com

Coffee consultant and author of books on espresso, roasting and brewing, including The Professional Barista's Handbook and The Coffee Roaster's Companion; writes about brewing gear and roast control at scottrao.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most air roasters perform best near full capacity because larger batches reduce air bypass.

  Their words

  Air bypass is the reason most air roasters function best near full capacity (larger batches allow less air bypass.)

  Sample Roestingscottrao.com

Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, the Denver company building the Overture supersonic airliner and its Symphony engine.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A team of fifty can build a supersonic jet only by making hardware development look like software development and driving down the cost of iteration.

  Their words

  The key thing is to make hardware development look more like software development to reduce the cost of iteration both in the world of bits and in the world of atoms.

  youtube.com

Climate scientist and energy systems analyst; writes The Climate Brink with Andrew Dessler and leads climate research at Stripe.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Local fuel treatments protect communities but cannot reduce total wildfire area across the remote boreal

  Their words

  Fuel management is valuable around communities, but is essentially useless across the remote boreal.

  theclimatebrink.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.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  ASUS ROG Swift PG27UCDM

  Their words

  Since I switched the monitor, I have never experienced a failure. The system works perfectly, flawlessly waking the laptop and bringing the desktop online in under a second.

  fabiensanglard.net

Physician focused on longevity; wrote Outlive and hosts The Drive.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Raising HDL cholesterol is not a treatment target, because every drug that raised it failed to reduce cardiovascular events.

  Their words

  These failures are a strong signal that HDL-C is not the variable we should be trying to manipulate.

  The trouble with “good cholesterol”peterattiamd.com

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

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  HUANUO Dual Monitor Stand

  Their words

  I prefer using monitor arms over the default stand that most monitors come with, and at the end of 2022 I switched to the HUANUO Dual Monitor Stand. It's a single mount with two monitor arms, and it holds the monitors in place nicely. Each arm is flexible in where I can position them.

  randallwilk.dev

Founder of what became Bloomberg New Energy Finance; writes and speaks on clean energy, hydrogen and the economics of the transition, and hosts the Cleaning Up podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Gulf conflict and closure of the Strait of Hormuz will accelerate the global shift away from fossil fuels

  energy

  Their words

  What the current conflict in the Gulf - in particular the closure of the Strait of Hormuz - is going to do is to provide a further push to global attempts to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

  liebreich.com

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).

• Our readingkorrents.com

  As reasoning models and agents retain more tokens for longer, KV-cache size and attention cost become the main constraint on scaling context.

  LLMs

  Their words

  As reasoning models and agent workflows keep more tokens around (for longer), KV-cache size, memory traffic, and attention cost quickly become the main constraints, and LLM developers are adding a growing number of architecture tricks to reduce those costs.

  magazine.sebastianraschka.com

Danish software engineer and Microsoft technical fellow, creator of Turbo Pascal and Delphi and lead architect of C# and TypeScript.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Locality is what makes a language good for AI: if a single file states what it imports and what it offers, a model never has to hold the whole program at once.

  Their words

  but but if you have good locality where you you clearly stating what you're importing and whatever and and you can analyze just a single source file and from that extract its protocol to the outside world without having to to know anything deeper. Do you do you know what I mean? I think those are important aspects just simply to reduce the size of the of the of the context window and also make it easier to summarize each module in a program, right?

  youtube.com

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nobody wants a slow model, which is why labs will not trade inference speed for cheaper memory even though they easily could.

  Their words

  They could release claw slow mode and have an increase in tokens per dollar by a significant amount. Um they could probably like reduce the price of Opus 46 by you know 4x 5x and reduce the speed by another by maybe just like 2x like the curve on inference throughput versus speed is there already just on hm um and yet they don't um because no one actually wants to use a slow model

  youtube.com

Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The 2025 American tariffs did not reduce the trade deficit they were imposed to reduce.

  America

  Their words

  In fact, the U.S. trade deficit for all of 2025 was about the same as it was in 2024.

  Attack of the Zombie Tariffspaulkrugman.substack.com

Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  He runs tests locally and pushes straight to main, DHH-style; there is no develop branch and main should always be shippable.

  Their words

  I even switched to local CI, you know, like DHH inspired where I don't care so much more about the CI on GitHub. We still have it. It's still, it still has a place, but I just run tests locally and if they work locally, I push to main.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most regulatory delay is dead calendar time that could be cut without changing a single safety test.

  Their words

  There is a massive scope to reduce calendar time without even altering testing protocols.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Complex systems do not have one root cause, so root-cause analysis is the wrong thing to be doing.

  Their words

  Another as a sidebar, I hate the idea of a root cause. Complex systems do not have one root cause. They often have many interlocking things that could be done to detect earlier or to change it or to reduce or and not one root cause.

  youtube.com

Freelance web developer and instructor. Author of the Dive Into Docker course; writes tutorials on Docker, deployment and development environments at nickjanetakis.com.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  KeePassXC

  Their words

  For password management I used a command line tool called pass. I switched to KeepassXC in mid-2025.

  nickjanetakis.com

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Microsoft PowerToys

  Their words

  For launching applications, I used Keypirinha in about 2017 and then I switched to Microsoft PowerToys in May 2020.

  nickjanetakis.com

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Firefox

  Their words

  I used Opera as a browser in 2006 for ~8 years, then I tried Firefox and went to Chrome until March 2025 when finally I switched back to Firefox.

  nickjanetakis.com

Indonesian fullstack engineer, speaker and instructor; writes about JavaScript, SvelteKit and Linux tooling at kalwabed.com.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Fira Code

  Their words

  Fira Code: my favorite dev font since I first encountered it. And now I switched to Iosevka for good reason.

  kalwabed.com

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Arch Linux

  Their words

  Arch Linux: has become my go-to distro after years of using EndeavourOS. I've recently switched to Hyprland as my window manager, and it's been a game-changer. Currently, I'm using CachyOS with KDE. It's been a great experience so far! Here's my

  kalwabed.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  For the first time in history it is possible to improve human wellbeing and reduce environmental impact at the same time.

  Their words

  My argument is simple: for the first time in history, we can improve human wellbeing while reducing our environmental impact.

  sustainabilitybynumbers.com

Swiss full-stack developer working mostly with Laravel and Vue; author of the widely used git-auto-commit-action GitHub Action.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Safari

  Their words

  I switched to Firefox when Safari 15 was released. John Gruber summarized the issues I had with it perfectly. Since Apple reverted their design changes in recent releases, I'm back at using Safari as my primary

  stefanzweifel.dev

Computer performance engineer working on datacenter performance at OpenAI, previously Netflix and Sun/Joyent. Author of Systems Performance and BPF Performance Tools, and creator of flame graphs.

From one piece On "AI Brendans" or "Virtual Brendans" 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Widespread AI-driven performance tuning agents will meaningfully reduce global energy waste.

  energy

  Their words

  In future there will be AI performance agents that can be run on everything, helping to save the planet by reducing energy usage.

  On "AI Brendans" or "Virtual Brendans"brendangregg.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Relying on AI to replace performance engineers reduces an organization's overall technical expertise over time.

  Their words

  If a company spends less on performance engineers as it's considered AI'd, it will reduce the company's effective "performance IQ."

  On "AI Brendans" or "Virtual Brendans"brendangregg.com

Indian technology consultant and writer. Former editor of Beautiful Pixels; writes about Apple hardware and Mac software at nuclearbits.com.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Pixelmator Pro

  Their words

  is an Incredible image & photo editor. I switched to it completely from Photoshop about a year ago and haven’t looked back.

  nuclearbits.com

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Photoshop

  Their words

  is an Incredible image & photo editor. I switched to it completely from Photoshop about a year ago and haven’t looked back.

  nuclearbits.com

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Unread

  Their words

  I was using Reeder 5 for the longest time, but since that seems to have been abandoned, I’ve switched to Unread as my RSS app recently.

  nuclearbits.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Industrial policy that grows a poor country’s economy does not automatically reduce its poverty.

  Their words

  But, peering past the hype around Morowali reminds us that we should be careful before assuming that industrial policy must be pro-poor.

  Indonesia Climbs the Chainglobal-developments.org

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

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Starship

  Their words

  I switched to zsh around 2013 and have used it every day since: starting with the infamous Oh My Zsh, powerlevel9k, and subsequently powerlevel10k, and finally settling on Starship with a couple of zsh plugins such as zsh-autosuggestions and zsh-syntax-highlighting.

  jnsgr.uk

Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  LLMs can write a large fraction of the tedious code a developer will ever need to write, and most code on most projects is tedious.

  LLMsGoogle

  Their words

  LLMs can write a large fraction of all the tedious code you’ll ever need to write. And most code on most projects is tedious. LLMs drastically reduce the number of things you’ll ever need to Google.

  My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nutsfly.io

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Tariffs on Chinese clean energy reduce the total number of clean-energy jobs, because most of those jobs are in deployment rather than manufacturing.

  energyChina

  Their words

  That’s because most clean energy jobs are in deployment and maintenance rather than manufacturing, and since higher costs slow down the rollout of renewables, increasing prices reduces the total number of people working in clean energy (even if the number working in manufacturing increases).

  sustainabilitybynumbers.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Letting more people write software in natural language does not reduce the work; it snowballs the amount of software that has to be maintained.

  Their words

  I mean, all I see is that if you say natural language can be used in the pipeline, you've just made that many more people can become programmers, which means that much more software will eventually be created, which means there's that much more software that will need to be maintained, and just becomes a real big snowballing effect.

  youtube.com

Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  England switched from wood to coal because deforestation had made firewood scarce.

  On changing their mind

  As I set out last time, the usual story — that this was caused by deforestation, making firewood so scarce that people resorted to burning an inferior but cheaper fuel — simply does not stack up.

Pen name of the Canadian-American writer behind mrmoneymustache.com, a blog on frugality, early retirement and index-fund investing that has run since 2011.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Google Fi

  Their words

  I switched to Google Fi in 2015 for worldwide, $20-per-month phone service that just works.

  mrmoneymustache.com

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  Safeco

  Their words

  So I switched to Safeco, and so far rates have been stable. I am paying about $500 per year for a $275,000 rebuild coverage with $5k deductible.

  mrmoneymustache.com

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building fabs in America does not reduce dependence on Taiwan: without Hsinchu, TSMC's Arizona plant would stop producing within a couple of years.

  America

  Their words

  Arizona is a paperweight. If Hsinchu disappeared off the face of the planet, within a year, couple years, Arizona would stop producing too.

  youtube.com

Swedish software developer writing about tooling, working from home and running a software business at seastone.io.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Kindle

  Their words

  Audiobooks is what got me started on my reading journey. I've since switched to the Kindle for the majority of my reading but I keep Audible specifically for biographies.

  seastone.io

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Audible

  Their words

  Audiobooks is what got me started on my reading journey. I've since switched to the Kindle for the majority of my reading but I keep Audible specifically for biographies.

  seastone.io

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI will structurally advance human health and reduce poverty, but there is no strong reason to expect it to structurally advance democracy or peace.

  Their words

  Unfortunately, I see no strong reason to believe AI will preferentially or structurally advance democracy and peace, in the same way that I think it will structurally advance human health and alleviate poverty.

  Machines of Loving Grace (October 2024)darioamodei.com

Thai software engineer; publishes a public digital garden at garden.narze.live and builds developer and productivity tooling.

• Dislikedrcmnd.app

  Notion

  Their words

  Notion - Too slow to use, and my current team switched to Jira.

  garden.narze.live

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.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Nix is worth switching your day-to-day package management to, over Homebrew.

  Nixdeveloper tools

  Their words, before

  I’m also still not sure how much I like nix – it’s very confusing! But it’s helped me compile some software that I was struggling to compile otherwise, and in general it seems to install things faster than homebrew.

  Their words now

  I’ve mostly switched back to Homebrew, nix was interesting but overall I think it’s not worth the complexity for me

CEO of Redwood Research, where he works on AI control: making sure a powerful model cannot cause a catastrophe even if it is misaligned and trying to.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Controlling a scheming model needs no research breakthrough, which is what makes it the tractable half of the problem today.

  Their words

  We think no fundamental research breakthroughs are required for labs to implement safety measures that meet our standard for AI control for early transformatively useful AIs; we think that meeting our standard would substantially reduce the risks posed by intentional subversion.

  redwoodresearch.substack.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The West's biggest blindspot is repeatedly underestimating China's speed and capabilities.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  I worry however that one of America’s superpowers is to spin up yarns to reduce the urgency for action.

  2023 letterdanwang.co

American front-end engineer and design-systems specialist; built the Pantsuit design system for Hillary for America and has worked at Slack and IBM.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Arc Browser

  Their words

  I recently switched to Arc Browser, so some of these no longer apply.

  mina.codes

Brazilian-American staff software engineer working on platforms, AI and developer productivity. Writes about engineering and his setup at ivansantos.me.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Raycast

  Their words

  I've been using Alfred for many years and have many workflows but have recently switched over to Raycast which is a very powerful alternative!

  ivansantos.me

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Access to large-scale generalist AI systems that could be weaponized should be limited, meaning their code and neural network parameters should not be released open-source.

  Their words

  At the same time, in order to reduce the probability of someone intentionally or unintentionally bringing about a rogue AI, we need to increase governance and we should consider limiting access to the large-scale generalist AI systems that could be weaponized, which would mean that the code and neural net parameters would not be shared in open-source and some of the important engineering tricks to make them work would not be shared either.

  FAQ on Catastrophic AI Risksyoshuabengio.org

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Cargo ships can be electrified with a cheap, heavy, low-performance battery, because carrying heavy things cheaply is the one thing ships are good at.

  energy

  Their words

  Ships are great at carrying bulky and heavy stuff with minimal cost and energy usage. We need a battery chemistry that leans into that and sacrifices performance to reduce cost.

  Why Battery Powered Cargo Ships are Compellingaustinvernon.site

Astrophysicist and coffee researcher; author of The Physics of Filter Coffee and The Physics of Espresso, and writer of the Coffee ad Astra blog on brewing science and equipment.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Adding hydraulic resistance beneath an espresso puck reduces channeling by slowing the flow of water and making it more even across the coffee bed.

  Their words

  I now suspect that adding a source of hydraulic resistance under the puck that is non-negligible compared with the espresso puck itself is desirable to reduce the impact of channels because it slows down the flow of water where it would tend to become otherwise too fast and as a consequence less even across the surface of the coffee bed.

  More Even Espresso Extractionscoffeeadastra.com

Economist; former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Central bank purchases of government bonds are not bailouts and do not automatically cause inflation, since they only change the composition of the consolidated government's liabilities, not their total.

  inflationinterest ratesgovernment

  Their words

  Governments have not been bailed out by their central banks. As I discussed earlier, central bank intervention does not reduce the overall liabilities of the consolidated government, just their composition. And it does not automatically lead to more inflation: It increases the size of the balance sheet of the central bank, but it does not increase the size of the non-interest-paying money stock.

  Fiscal Policy under Low Interest Ratesdirect.mit.edu