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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A computer scientist refusing to find LLMs interesting is like a geneticist ignoring Jurassic Park.

  LLMs

  Their words

  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.

  Note on 18th September 2026simonwillison.net

Writer of the newsletter bookbear express, on psychology, relationships, non-attachment and taste; based in San Francisco.

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  Love makes it possible to bridge the fundamental gap between two people; alienation is refusing to try.

  Their words

  To me, the possibility of partnership is the feeling that despite the fundamental chasm between two human beings, love allows us to bridge the gap; alienation is the feeling that the gap cannot be bridged, and moreover, that I do not want to.

  bridging the gapavabear.xyz

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

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  The whole point of reinforcement learning is to produce goal-directed beings, so refusing to describe AI agents as having motives is silly rather than rigorous.

  Their words

  and they're creatively pursuing goals much like very ambitious aggressive power-seeking humans creatively pursued their goals And so there are just structural analogies here that make it silly to not talk about agents as having motives and goals.

  youtube.com

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

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  You can keep using a company's product while disliking its politics; refusing everything you disagree with is not required.

  Anthropic

  Their words

  The world would be so fucking boring if we constantly sought 100% compatibility in our opinions and in our politics. And when it comes to my code generator, which is what Claude is, I don't need it to share all my politics.

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Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.

From one piece Why performant code matters (but gets widely ignored), with Casey Muratori 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Refusing to write code with AI can be a philosophical decision rather than a productivity one: the reason to program something is that you want to program it.

  Their words

  it's more about what do you want to do? Like what why are you spending this time, right? It's a philosophical question, not a productivity question.

  youtube.com

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  Much of the wisdom programmers pass on to each other is nonsense that nobody ever tested, and refusing to be dogmatic about untested practice is what marks out a good engineer.

  Their words

  I find there's a lot of like received programming wisdom that's just nonsense. Like clearly no one's ever tested it and if they did they would have found out that it's that there's no actual basis for it.

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

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  Refusing to commit is the right strategy inside a portfolio and the wrong one everywhere else in life.

  Their words

  In investing, non-commitment leads to better than average outcomes for the typical investor.

  The Problem with Optionalityofdollarsanddata.com

Polyglot who speaks twenty languages and co-founded LingQ; argues that comprehensible input, not study, is what does the work.

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  Learning from input does not mean refusing grammar books; the point is to notice patterns, not to master the rules.

  Their words

  Some people think CI means you reject grammar books. I disagree. I often reference grammar materials and find these explanations useful. However, the focus of my learning is not to “master the rules”. Grammar resources simply help me notice and make sense of patterns in the language.

  blog.thelinguist.com

Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.

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  A human life has no overall narrative arc, so nothing is lost by refusing to see it as a story that needs an ending.

  Their words

  But there’s no overall narrative arc—it’s just been one thing after another.

  Immortality Sounds Pretty Good, Actuallysmallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

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

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  Successful founders are distinguished by knowing what to give up and when, not by refusing to ever quit.

  startups

  Their words

  The founders who succeed aren't the ones who never give up-they're the ones who know what to give up and when.

  Don’t Give Up… Your Assumptionsthebootstrappedfounder.com

Founder of Telegram, and before it of VK.

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  Telegram leaves perhaps 80 percent of its potential revenue on the table by refusing to exploit personal data for advertising.

  Their words

  So premium is one source of our revenue. We also have ads, but they're context-based, not targeted. Of course, we leave probably 80% of value on the table because we're not ready to engage in all this practices, exploiting personal data.

  youtube.com

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

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  The Bitter Lesson is misread as being about scale; it is about refusing to add human priors, because a clever specific fix always loses to a simple scalable one.

  Their words

  The scale word gets a lot of attention in this. The interpretation that I use is effectively to avoid adding the human priors to your learning process. And if you read the original essay, this is what it talks about is how researchers will try to come up with clever solutions to their specific problem that might get them small gains in the short term while simply enabling these deep learning systems to work efficiently, and for these bigger problems in the long term might be more likely to scale and continue to drive success.

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Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

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  Telegram urges people away from default-encrypted messengers while refusing to build the features that would encrypt its own users.

  Their words

  Indeed, it no longer feels amusing to see the Telegram organization urge people away from default-encrypted messengers, while refusing to implement essential features that would widely encrypt their own users’ messages.

  Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?blog.cryptographyengineering.com

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

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  Leaving an old relationship for a new one is usually shopping for novelty rather than refusing to honour a sunk cost.

  Their words

  a new relationship is like fresh powder. It is new and shiny and exciting but it will not be a new relationship for long. And then you're still stuck with an old relationship and the question is will your old relationship a year from now be better than your old relationship that you currently have is? And if the answer is yes then yes sunk costs completely apply. But if the answer is no then what you're really doing is shopping for novelty not ignoring sunk costs.

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