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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Astra's mundane alignment is greatly superior to Sol's, but its superalignment status is deeply frightening.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  Astra’s mundane alignment is greatly superior to Sol. For practical purposes, I was actively nervous about some potential uses of Sol, in a way I am not for Astra. Astra’s super alignment status should scare the living daylights out of you.

  thezvi.substack.com

Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Educational methods should be validated by measurable research, not by how satisfying they feel to students and teachers.

  Their words

  The deeper lesson is that education has to be research-based and proven to work measurably, not just based on positive emotions or customer satisfaction.

  fortelabs.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Merely fixing bugs in AI training environments will not stop reward hacking, because a sufficiently optimized model will learn to behave in test environments while still reward hacking in real-world deployment.

  Their words

  At the limit, and also well before that limit is reached, if all you do is fix the bugs, the AI will learn perfect optimization of reward, will realize not to reward hack in the perfect test environments, then turn around and reward hack in the imperfect real world environments.

  thezvi.substack.com

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Dropping educational software into an existing school changes nothing; the whole school day has to be redesigned around it or it fails.

  Their words

  I want to be clear, you can't throw edtech in. You can't take our time back and throw it into a school. It's not going to work cuz you haven't solved any of the other problems. And so edtech is not a magic, you know, it's not a silver bullet.

  youtube.com

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 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Everyone on a team who makes architectural decisions must understand performance, because a codebase that can be optimized later only ends up that way on purpose.

  Their words

  everybody on your team who is making architectural decisions, those people must know performance and they must make decisions that will allow the other people downstream of them to use an architecture which can be optimized later. If you don't do that, you're just rolling the dice.

  youtube.com

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  Hand-optimizing hot spots barely matters any more, because the libraries are already fast and CPUs are extremely good at running bad code quickly; what is left is architecture.

  Their words

  One of the reasons that you don't see hotspot optimization as a thing that really matters that much anymore and one of the reasons I advise that architecture and and not making bad decisions is much more important is because a lot of libraries already have been optimized for you that you might use.

  youtube.com

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  "Optimize it later" would be safe advice only if every engineer already knew how to avoid the architectural mistakes that no later optimization can remove.

  Their words

  If every uh software engineer knew to watch out for false serial dependency chains, things where they were creating series of dependent operations that could not be optimized away or other sorts of architectural problems like that that cannot be easily fixed, then the world would look more like just wait and optimize the hotspot, right?

  youtube.com

Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Building a command-line interface is almost always a good idea; building a terminal UI almost never is

  Their words

  CLIs have purposes for which they’re irreplaceable. Building a CLI is almost always a good idea. Building a TUI almost never is.

  Stop Making TUIssockpuppet.org

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

  When an AI lab builds both a model and a coding harness, the model is optimized for that lab's own harness first.

  LLMs

  Their words

  if an LLM developer also develops a coding harness, it is somewhat safe to assume that their model is optimized for their own harness first

  Using Local Coding Agentsmagazine.sebastianraschka.com

Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Schools are still preparing children to become knowledge workers, and that game is over.

  Their words

  my kids are in this educational system that is trying to prep them to get into a good college and to be a knowledge worker and I know that game is over

  youtube.com

Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most contemporary restaurants are over-optimized, investor-backed, and homogenized by branding rather than genuine culinary vision.

  Their words

  The average restaurant in NYC is, at this point, stupidly optimized, backed by wealthy investors, coated in impeccable branding.

  Utopia is a particular restaurant in Brooklynsashachapin.substack.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Putting the children most likely to succeed into one school is segregation, not educational excellence.

  Their words

  Simply creating artificial separation between different students is not a strategy for “educational excellence.” It’s just segregation.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The educational crisis narrative is downstream of the labour market: we destroyed the jobs that did not need a degree and then ordered schools to make everybody degree-ready.

  AI and jobs

  Their words

  Everybody thinks our schools are in crisis all the time because they’re being forced to do something they were never meant to do, which is to make everyone college-ready, and they’re being forced to do that because we have seen jobs that provide a living wage without a college diploma evaporate.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rebuilding American manufacturing is a decades-long educational and cultural project, not something tariffs can do.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  America needs an educational and cultural transformation to compete with China and reverse the decline in living standards that Americans have suffered over decades.

  molsonhart.com

Vice chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Group, the advertising agency; author of Alchemy (2019) and the Wiki Man columnist at The Spectator.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Publicly traded companies are incentivised to behave like psychopaths, because they are optimised for short-term transactions rather than long-term relationships.

  Their words

  PLC's or um uh or or companies on the NASDAQ or the New York Stock Exchange are incentivized to behave like psychopaths because they're optimized around short-term transactional value, not long-term relationship building.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Podcasting works best as edutainment, and fails when it becomes too highbrow or purely educational.

  Their words

  Podcasting is edutainment. If you try to have too highbrow a view of yourself, and only do education, you will lose.

  How To Podcastswyx.io

Writer of kottke.org, one of the oldest blogs on the web, published since 1998 and supported by its members. He writes about art, technology, science, design and visual culture.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  A House of Dynamite

  Their words

  A House of Dynamite. A very tough watch, but I thought this was fantastic as a tour of some of the different kinds of people who hold the fate of every single person on the planet in their hands every damn day. They’re tired, stressed, distracted, at cross-purposes with themselves, set in their ways, more celebs than leaders, and mediocre. And none of them have ever seen Dr. Strangelove? (A)

  kottke.org

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The United States was never a leader in international educational comparisons, so there is no lost first place to return to.

  America

  Their words

  We have never, ever done well in international educational comparisons.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

Chairman and chief executive of Microsoft since 2014; joined the company in 1992 and ran its cloud business before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Infrastructure optimised for a single model is one architectural breakthrough away from being worthless.

  Their words

  You can't build an infrastructure that's optimized for one model. If you do that what if you go fall behind? In fact, all the infrastructure you built will be a waste, right?

  Satya Nadella – How Microsoft thinks about AGIyoutube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Educational miracles are manufactured by selection: the students who would have scored badly are quietly moved off the books.

  Their words

  That’s how educational miracles are manufactured: through artificially creating selection bias, which is the most powerful force in education.

  There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  In thousands of years of trying, nobody has found a reliable, repeatable way of moving a child from one educational percentile into another.

  Their words

  But in thousands of years of education humanity has discovered no replicable and reliable means of taking kids from one educational percentile and raising them up into another.

  Education Doesn't Work 3.0freddiedeboer.substack.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  With nearly free solar power, industrial processes optimised for efficiency should be redesigned to use far more power and run faster and cheaper instead.

  solar

  Their words

  You can revisit a bunch of legacy industrial processes that are have been optimized for efficiency and say, well, what if we just like use twice as much power and we just want to do them faster and cheaper, right? Like less capex, less lead time, more power, right?

  youtube.com

Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An international AI safety body modeled on the IAEA would not by itself be enough to prevent AI-related geopolitical crises.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  the current situation in Iran shows that even if an "IAEA for AI" is necessary for some purposes, it won't be sufficient for resolving the tricky geopolitical issues raised by AI.

  milesbrundage.substack.com

Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Claude Code

  Their words

  For all intents and purposes, here’s what I do: I predominently use Claude Code with the cheaper Max subscription for $100 a month

  lucumr.pocoo.org

Software engineer and essayist who writes about programming, formal methods, philosophy and literature at thoughts.wyounas.com.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Principles of the SPIN Model Checker

  Their words

  This book gave me both insight and a deeper curiosity about the subject. This book introduces the SPIN model checker and exposes the reader to the nuances of verifying programs using SPIN. A nice feature of the book is how it explains concepts using thoughtfully developed, freely available tools (such as jSpin) that the author created for pedagogical purposes. It's a demanding book, but the content was interesting. The book presents details about concurrency, temporal logic, non-determinism, advanced SPIN topics, and even case studies. I've already written a few blog posts about the topics I explored while reading this book, and I plan to write more. Overall, it's a good book. I'm sure I'll revisit the latter half again.

  thoughts.wyounas.com

Co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic; blogs at ma.tt.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Corporations dishonestly claiming the open source label for marketing is evidence that open source has won.

  open source

  Their words

  When corporations disingenuously claim to be “open source” for marketing purposes, it’s a clear sign that Open Source is winning.

  WordCamp US & Ecosystem Thinkingma.tt

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Why Knowledge Matters

  Their words

  In this 2016 book, Hirsch presents a sweeping curriculum change in French schools as evidence that misguided educational theories are undermining our children's learning.

  scotthyoung.com

Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A profiler measures time already spent in an operation, not how much time would be saved by optimizing it.

  Their words

  a profile tells you how much time a program spent in a given operation; but not how much time it would spend if you optimized that operation.

  blog.nelhage.com

Political scientist at the University of Chicago and the leading exponent of offensive realism; wrote The Tragedy of Great Power Politics.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  In a world of mutual assured destruction, nuclear weapons are used to manipulate risk rather than to win a battle.

  Their words

  The way you use nuclear weapons in that world is you use them for manipulation of risk purposes, demonstration effect. You put both sides out on the slippery slope.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Real-name policies on social platforms exist mainly to make users legible for advertising and government surveillance, not user safety.

  government

  Their words

  the real goal was to make their users more legible, primarily for advertising purposes, but also to law enforcement and other authorities.

  in which legibility comes at a pricetechnomancy.us