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20 September
British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.
Their words
Putting people into a tin-can with no windows, blank walls, and an infernal background hum will drive them mad.
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shkspr.mobi
18 September
British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.
🆕 blog! “Theatre Review: The School for Wives - at Riverside Studios” ★★★★★ The Flywheel theatre company are reviving the rep tradition by having five actors perform five different plays in five weeks. Their interpretation of Molière's classic is gaudy and hilarious. Even the lighting cues are funny! It is fair to say that School for Wives isn't exactly an uncontroversial play. The … 👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/theatre-review-the-school-for-wives/ ⸻ #TheatreReview Related
17 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.
Why Don Valentine hired Michael Moritz (a journalist with no technical background) when four other firms rejected him Quoting @patrick_oshag My conversation with Michael Moritz, one of the great venture investors of the last 40 years. Michael joined Sequoia in 1986 and co-led the firm with Doug Leone (@dougleone) from 1995 to 2012. His investments include Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Stripe. His new book, Ausländer, traces his parents' es… Related
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
A funny thing I miss from old twitter was people posting videos of carpenters and other skilled laborers (per usual definition) working really fast with the caption "There's no such thing as unskilled labor!" Related
British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.
@drstevex.bsky.social may I introduce you to @hayleygullen.com who wrote a brilliant and funny graphic novel about cancer? She'd be excellent for your medicine event. Related
16 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
datasette 1.0a40 Release: datasette 1.0a40 Same security fix as 0.65.5, plus some neat new features and bug fixes: Plugins can now launch and manage background tasks using the new datasette.add_background_task() method. Thanks, Alex Gar…
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Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
Signing into Grok Bot is funny. You sig into cursor by "Sign in with Grok" - > "Log in with X" -> "Grant Permission to SpaceXAI" -> "Sign in to Grok Bot with your Cursor Account" -> "Sign in with SuperGrok" Related
British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.
🆕 blog! “How to get a DOI for your blog posts” Each new post on this blog now has a Digital Object Identifier. This post looks at the how and the why of getting one, whether it is useful, and any issues you might experience if you go down this path. Table of Contents Background A few years ago, I documented how to to get an International Standard… 👀 Read more: https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2026/09/how-to-get-a-doi-for-your-blog-posts/ ⸻ #academia #citation #DOI #HTML #WordPress Related
15 September
Statistician at Columbia; writes Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and wrote Bayesian Data Analysis.
Singaporean writer and author of FRIENDLY AMBITIOUS NERD; blogs at visakanv.com about ambition, writing and thinking in public.
kind of a funny story about these mud-dauber wasp nests Related
14 September
Interactive fiction author and hacker; wrote Spider and Web and Hadean Lands, and designed the Glulx virtual machine.
Bluesky Funny every time: The fans in my M3 iMac are so silent that when I run a real CPU-hog of a task, I can only tell by the *smell*. (You know that warm dust / motherboard smell. Coming out of the iMac's bottom vents. Silently.) Related
Mastodon Funny every time: The fans in my M3 iMac are so silent that when I run a real CPU-hog of a task, I can only tell by the *smell*. (You know that warm dust / motherboard smell. Coming out of the iMac's bottom vents. Silently.) If Apple were consistent, they would put as much engineering effort into smell suppression as sound suppression. Right? Related
13 September
Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.
I have become the Bat Man: I bought a package of small hardwood blanks (walnut, padauk, &c) on Amazon that turned out to be --- this is funny --- painted pine. I have a new life's mission. Related
12 September
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.
something very interesting is happening i’ve been monitoring user sentiment on new model releases and i have now seen 3 latest frontier models in a row where a significant amount of users chose to roll back to use a previous version 1. opus 5 - very negative feedback in general can’t communicate. eager to jump into conclusions without sufficient context. keeps making mistakes it even earned its own website now https://t.co/51pCa0F6KS (it’s really funny) many people (myself included) abandoned opus 5 and went back to 4.6 and 4.8 2. gpt 6 astra seeing more and more people reporting going back t… Related
11 September
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
it's funny to me that the non-RGB versions of computer hardware now sometimes go for ~$20 more than the RGB Related
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.
10 September
Web developer and writer; an early GitHub employee, author of speaking.io and of widely read essays on startups and product.
Bluesky i just had muse set up my vestaboard to display messages in my zoom background about whichever meeting i'm in next. worked great. then i told it to do a fun one for me in the meantime. this is the message it chose and then this is what it told me in chat after lol send help Quoting @hol.mn friends, i’m sadly here to say that meta has cooked with muse and it’s everything every personal ai assistant has tried to be. it just like… works. i remain skeptical and continue to be really impressed Related
x.com i just had @Muse set up my @vestaboard to display messages in my zoom background about whichever meeting i'm in next. worked great. then i told it to do a fun one for me in the meantime. this is the message it chose and then this is what it told me in chat after lol send help Quoting @holman friends, i’m sadly here to say that meta has cooked with @Muse and it’s everything every personal ai assistant has tried to be. it just like… works. i remain skeptical and continue to be really impressed Related
9 September
Interactive fiction author and hacker; wrote Spider and Web and Hadean Lands, and designed the Glulx virtual machine.
The funny thing is, my dream phone at this point is an updated iPhone SE, because that means (a) small and (b) touchid rather than faceid. And the foldyphone satisfies both those criteria! (Small when folded, which is how I’d carry it.) Can’t swing first-gen prices, though. My SE3 will totter on another year. Related
8 September
Web standards author and speaker; wrote the CSS: The Definitive Guide series and co-founded the An Event Apart conference.
I find myself in a situation of creating favicons for a few things (it’s an internal task) and so I need to make ones that work in dark mode as well as light. I know how to make adaptive favicons, but does anyone have pointers to good *visual* best practices for dark mode favicons? My DuckDuck-fu is only turning up how to make them adaptive, not what they should actually look like to read well against a dark tab background. Related
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and author of The Power of Habit, Smarter Faster Better and Supercommunicators. Writes for The New Yorker.
Data shows that 80% of laughter has absolutely nothing to do with humor. It's a signal people use to say "I want to bond with you," not a reaction to something being funny. So if you want to instantly connect with anyone you meet: laugh with them. Here's how the Laughter Paradox works: Related
7 September
Essayist, journalist and independent researcher on Chinese politics, strategy and cultural history; author of the blog The Scholar's Stage.
It is fine to repeat your words. In fact, it is fine to repeat words not only “in the same section,” but in the very next sentence. Successful rhetoric is a story of variation—but that does not mean you should vary constantly. Constant variance is simply noise; a distinctive voice is made less, not more distinctive by background static. The goal is to set expectations, then break them. Long sentences are broken by short ones. Latinate terms are broken by Saxon ones. You repeat a cadence, or a figure, or a word—and then you break the pattern you have set. This keeps readers interested. It also… Quoting @tomieinlove There's a soft rule in English prose: you shouldn't repeat the same word in a section. This is difficult, because often the same word—whoops—thing does many things—whoops—actions in the same section—whoops—sequence. So you have use like 12 different synonyms Related
5 September
Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.
New TIL on using Blender with coding agents on macOS: https://t.co/GvMDfD926E GPT-6 Astra (medium): > Use the already install /Applications/Blender to render a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle > OK add a background and a lot of flair > OK make it a whole lot better coding agents Related
3 September
Economist and journalist; Financial Times columnist as The Undercover Economist, author of How to Make the World Add Up, and presenter of the Cautionary Tales podcast.
Reading the latest analysis of suspected academic fraud by the @DataColada team and having all the feels. It's really remarkable what they do, and often quite funny, but the whole thing is pretty disheartening too. datacolada.org
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Creator of Claude Code at Anthropic.
Background computer use is underrated Quoting @claudeai Claude can now use your computer in the background in Claude Cowork and Claude Code. Give it something to do on your desktop and Claude clicks, types, and opens apps just like you would, while you work on something else. Related
2 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.
It's funny to me watching renters have a realtor contact to rent and then the realtor asks for a finders fee from the landlord. That could be fine, except every case of this they've been more of a pain to deal with than people who are capable of using listing sites themselves and thus have no fee for showing up. Related
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.
The suggested prompt to remove slop is itself, pure slop If it works fine, but feels funny to me ngl Related
1 September
Genomics researcher and writer on science, biotech and the culture of research.
31 August
Belgian engineering lead, Microsoft MVP and public speaker. Creator of Front Matter, a headless CMS extension for Visual Studio Code.
Finally created the promo video for Engage Time. Had some fun with ElevenLabs to create the background music. Related
30 August
Director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Writes the A Wealth of Common Sense blog and co-hosts the Animal Spirits podcast with Michael Batnick.
I kinda hated S1 of Tires It just didn’t work and wasn’t very good Gave S2 a try and thought it was very funny Just finished S3 and I absolutely loved it Funny, creative & weird The season finale is one of the best TV episodes I’ve watched in a while Bravo Shane Gillis Related
26 August
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.
I've been trying to figure out what I (and so many others) dislike about AI writing. It's very clear. It's good at getting the level right, not going over the reader's head but not talking down. Often it's clever, and sometimes even funny. (At least Claude is) ... Anthropic Related
25 August
Co-founder and CTO of Linear; previously an engineer at Uber.
It won’t be this funny when these wash up en masse on Taiwans shores a few years from now. Quoting @TheHumanoidHub Look at this thing go! 100-meter obstacle course final at the 2026 World Humanoid Robot Games Related
21 August
Programmer on the Dart language at Google and author of Game Programming Patterns and Crafting Interpreters; previously a game developer at EA.
Bluesky It took a long time, but we finally added primary constructor syntax to Dart. If you want some (a lot) of background into how we designed it the way we did, I wrote a long blog post about it: dart.dev/blog/bringin... #dartlang Related
Mastodon It took a long time, but we finally added primary constructor syntax to Dart. If you want some (a lot) of background into how we designed it the way we did, I wrote a long blog post about it: https://dart.dev/blog/bringing-primary-constructors-to-dart #dartlang Related
British open-standards and open-source technologist, formerly of the UK Government Digital Service and the W3C Advisory Committee. Blogs at shkspr.mobi, where he posts a book review most weeks.
Their words
This is a funny, heartfelt, and (perhaps overly) thorough book. It will gleefully send you down rabbit holes
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shkspr.mobi
18 August
Librarian, technology instructor and writer in rural Vermont; longtime community manager at MetaFilter and author of a book on the digital divide.
Congratulations billing department you have successfully recreated a gag poster from the 1970s which wasn't really even funny then. (I am fine, I can actually talk to a real human tomorrow, I was just like "I have seen that one before....") Related
14 August
Graphic designer and type designer, who created the original Macintosh icons and typefaces at Apple from 1982 and has since designed interface graphics for NeXT, Microsoft, Facebook and Pinterest.
Their words
and I would probably preach the same thing like don't mess around with the logo and put it in a different color and put it on a crazy background until people know it so well that you can play with it
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12 August
British front-end web developer based in Japan; writes about HTML, CSS, web performance and browser tooling at christianoliff.com.
11 August
Freelance web developer and instructor. Author of the Dive Into Docker course; writes tutorials on Docker, deployment and development environments at nickjanetakis.com.
Here's a quick shell script to use your monitor as a key light which can help with lighting when you have a web cam. It toggles a solid background color using your wallpaper tool of choice. nickjanetakis.com
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6 August
American author of The Obstacle Is the Way, Ego Is the Enemy and Stillness Is the Key. Writes the Reading List book-recommendation email (started 2008) and owns The Painted Porch bookstore in Bastrop, Texas. Hosts The Daily Stoic podcast.
5 August
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
RE: https://hachyderm.io/@molly0xfff/113801357461741537 It's a year and a half after I highlighted the issue, but nice to see: arstechnica.com
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4 August
Founder and editor-in-chief of MacStories, writing about Apple software, iPad workflows and automation since 2009. He co-hosts the AppStories podcast.
Unexpected Codex use case: set up an Android handheld for me. @johnvoorhees got me into this: enable USB debugging and just let the agent rip. Codex installed Cocoon frontend on my AYN Thor, transferred all my ROMs, and is currently configuring emulators, mods, and other apps. It's just working in the background and cross-referencing YouTube/Reddit sources to set everything up, so I can focus on cooking for the family instead. Incredible. @dimillian Related
30 July
Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.
29 July
American author of speculative fiction, including The Paper Menagerie and the Dandelion Dynasty series, and translator of Chinese science fiction. Also a programmer and lawyer.
If you like Douglas Adams and Voltaire, this may be the perfect book for you. Alex's novel is funny and sharp, the best of all possible books. Quoting @alexshvartsman.bsky.social It's book birthday for THE BEST OF ALL POSSIBLE PLANETS! Read about the big idea behind it and then get your copy! whatever.scalzi.com/2026/07/28/t... Related
21 July
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.
18 June
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
11 June
Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.
9 June
Cyborg anthropologist and UX designer; author of Calm Technology and co-founder of the geolocation startup Geoloqi.
Excited to see @mui_labo highlighted by the Government of Japan! Quoting @nobi The Japanese government is lending its support to Calm Tech products from @mui_labo in Japan, helping bring a quieter and more thoughtful vision of technology to the world. government Related
7 June
Data scientist and machine-learning researcher; chief scientist at bitly, founder of Fast Forward Labs and Hidden Door.
I’m really having trouble imagining anyone at any point in history saying the word “knickerbocker” with a straight face, it just has such a funny mouthfeel Related
2 June
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 got to spend all day today with Jensen in Taiwan: talking with thousands of engineers and eating street food at a night market. Jensen is received as a rockstar in Taiwan, like it's Beatles in the 60's. It's mind-blowing and fun to watch. But most importantly, through all the interactions and all my conversations with him, he remained the same humble, kind, thoughtful, funny guy he always was, even as a kid who went to these same night markets many years ago. Btw, we tried a crazy amount of different street food. It's legit some of the most delicious food I've ever had. I can't wait to shar… Related
14 May
Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter on the business and strategy of technology, and hosts the Dithering and Sharp Tech podcasts.
If you disable "Open at Login" for the GeminiAppLauncher" that the Gemini app installs in the background (without asking), GeminiAppLaunch will immediately re-enable "Open at Login". I will now, needless to say, delete the Gemini app, and don't intend to ever install it again. Google Related
13 April
Canadian full-stack web developer who makes JavaScript and CSS video courses and co-hosts the Syntax podcast.
7 April
Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.
Their words
And like, this idea that people have that that that Newton was um sort of the the first modern scientist is is somehow wrong. He I mean, it's there's some truth to it, but he really had this very different way um of of looking at the world that was part sort of superstitious um and part modern. It was a funny hybrid.
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27 March
Front-end developer and writer on Svelte, Vue, CSS and WordPress; blogs at joshcollinsworth.com.
26 March
American budget-travel writer who publishes as Nomadic Matt. Author of How to Travel the World on $50 a Day; runs nomadicmatt.com, a long-running site of destination guides, packing advice and gear recommendations.
Their words
The wireless Bose QuietComfort 45 headphones are fan favorites and my go-to brand. They are comfortable, rechargeable, and do an amazing job at removing background noise.
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nomadicmatt.com
11 March
Programmer and essayist who has worked at Amazon, Google, Grab and Sourcegraph. Best known for the long-form essays collected as Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants.
From one piece
From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yegge
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
12 February
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.
Their words
Some other comparison is like, Opus is like the coworker that is a little silly sometimes, but it's really funny and you keep him around. And Codex is like the, the weirdo in the corner that you don't wanna talk to, but is reliable and gets shit done.
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9 February
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.
It's sort of amazing how quickly you can do things now. I wanted to try writing an alphazero-style AI for Azul. With no AI background, it took me maybe 2-3 hours to (2-3 days wall clock) to beat the best public AI I could find, training on my laptop CPU: Related
23 January
JavaScript programmer; creator of the jQuery library, author of Secrets of the JavaScript Ninja, and long-time engineer at Khan Academy.
jeresign instead of jeresig in Claude Code (w/ Opus) - I wonder how often this happens and how many tokens I end up burning due to this? 🫠 Pretty funny 😆 Anthropic Related
22 December 2025
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.
Their words
A very useful background read for understanding later Indian history and religions, as well as the more general spread of religion throughout the southern regions of Asia.
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marginalrevolution.com
21 December 2025
Director of institutional asset management at Ritholtz Wealth Management. Writes the A Wealth of Common Sense blog and co-hosts the Animal Spirits podcast with Michael Batnick.
Their words
Good Material by Dolly Alderton A simple story about a struggling stand-up comedian going through a difficult break-up. A funny, sweet book. I enjoyed it.
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awealthofcommonsense.com
20 December 2025
American science fiction novelist (Old Man's War, Redshirts, The Kaiju Preservation Society); has run the blog Whatever since 1998.
Their words
I have thought a number of films have been riotously funny, but only A Fish Called Wanda made me laugh so hard that I was in very real danger of pissing myself right there in the movie theater.
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whatever.scalzi.com
12 December 2025
British senior engineering manager at Netlify, previously a team lead at the BBC; writes about JavaScript testing, chatbots and serverless at marclittlemore.com.
Mastodon Been trying to use https://conductor.build/ to run some Claude Code agents in the background while I write some documents. Seems pretty great so far and has a really nice UI/UX for creating PRs. Anthropic Related
Bluesky Been trying to use https://conductor.build/ to run some Claude Code agents in the background while I write some documents. Seems pretty great so far and has a really nice UI/UX for creating PRs. Anthropic Related
2 December 2025
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.
In case you're unfamiliar, the @prisonmathproj is a nonprofit supporting prisoners learning math. There is a great podcast on Numberphile with its founder, Christopher Havens, describing the background: https://t.co/GrfoD9Cybb It's an organization I'm donating to today, and if you like what they're doing, consider joining. Quoting @prisonmathproj This Giving Tuesday, consider the gift of second chances. What if you could actually gift someone a second chance? With your help, we can #UnlockPotential and change the trajectory of someone's life. A simple $20 donation buys the first geometry set many of our students have ever had. Today, a gene… Related
12 November 2025
Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.
An excellent opening to a funny and tragic piece on what it was like to work in Inner Mongolia state media: Related
21 October 2025
Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.
Their words
It's screamingly funny, devilishly inventive, and deeply, profoundly satisfying. With Fever Beach, Hiaasen makes a compelling case for Florida as the perfect microcosm of the terrifying state of America, and an even more compelling case for his position as its supreme storyteller.
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pluralistic.net
20 October 2025
Co-founder of Panic, the Portland software company behind Transmit, Coda, Nova and the Playdate handheld console.
Also at PRGE, I was greatly tempted to buy a CIB Yukawa-edition Dreamcast. For those not familiar, Mr. Yukawa was an actual Senior Managing Director at Sega who became an overnight celebrity in Japan for a series of hilarious self-deprecating commercials about the Dreamcast. When demand temporarily outpaced supply of the consoles, Yukawa was brought out again to make a series of equally funny "apology" commercials: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B_nK7j4G6fQ He was so well known, they literally put him on the box for a while. He even got his own game and a number of cameos in others. Related
21 September 2025
Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.
Their words
So the funny thing, my funny answer to this is I don't actually think a lot of the fast growing companies are using data well at this point. And the main reason why is because traditionally things just didn't grow that fast.
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25 August 2025
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.
13 July 2025
Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.
14 June 2025
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.
Their words
Certainly more on the no than on the yes. The funny thing about P equals NP is that we have also a lot more obstructions than we do for almost any other problem.
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youtube.com
30 December 2024
Software engineer and essayist who writes about programming, formal methods, philosophy and literature at thoughts.wyounas.com.
Their words
It's a nice, short, and moving memoir by the comedian and actor Steve Martin. The book details his early working days at shops and clubs, his relationships, and eventually his rise to fame. He shared his struggles, his failures, long hours of practice, his reflections to refine his craft, and his efforts to find his own unique voice as a comedian. Any memoir that only talks about successes and never discusses struggles, rejections, or weaknesses is suspect. This one is not. What I like about his writing is that it feels candid and, at times, funny.
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thoughts.wyounas.com
11 December 2024
Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.
4 November 2024
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.
A funny side effect of the crackdown on "AI" scraping is that I keep getting banned from sites for browsing too quickly. I barely use reddit anymore and I still managed to get IP banned for scraping (the error message indicated that I should get in touch with them if I want to do bulk accesses). Related
12 September 2024
Writer and author of All the Wrong Moves; his newsletter covers meditation, relationships and creativity, and he co-runs a perfume line.
Their words
Now I have an answer for this query: El Dorado. The funny thing is that "rain smell" isn't what we set out to do, or even the main point of this perfume.
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sashachapin.substack.com
13 June 2024
Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.
Their words
It’s the fact that you’re a deterministic structure living in a random background. And also, all of that selection bundled in you allows you to select on possible futures. So that’s where your will comes from.
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24 May 2024
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.
23 May 2024
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.
16 March 2024
Research scientist at Anthropic; co-creator of the Variational Autoencoder and, with Jimmy Ba, of the Adam optimizer, two of the most widely used tools in deep learning.
Funny how the replies reveal that many people can't actually shape rotate in their mind Quoting @ylecun To people who claim that "thinking and reasoning require language", here is a problem: Imagine standing at the North Pole of the Earth. Walk in any direction, in a straight line, for 1 km. Now turn 90 degrees to the left. Walk for as long as it takes to pass your starting point. Have you walked: 1.… Related
20 January 2024
Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.
9 November 2023
Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008; later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, where he now posts many times a day.
Their words
People think of nature as perhaps some sort of peaceful thing, but in fact it is not. There’s some quite funny Werner Herzog thing where he is in the jungle saying that it’s basically just murder and death in every direction. The plants and animals in the jungle are constantly trying to kill each other every single day, every minute. So it’s not like we’re unusual in that respect.
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youtube.com
28 September 2023
Marketing author and daily blogger; founder of the altMBA and the Akimbo workshops, and author of books including Purple Cow and This Is Marketing.
Their words
My friend Nicole has written a provocative, funny and honest memoir. Nothing Is Missing: A Memoir of Living Boldly. I'll be interviewing her in NYC on October 9.
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seths.blog
12 September 2023
Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.
18 June 2023
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
A funny book explaining the basics of AI! The subtitle is How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It's Making the World a Weirder Place. A great introduction to AI. With a cute cartoon mascot. The title is from her training an AI to write romantic greeting cards.
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sive.rs
1 March 2023
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
31 December 2022
Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.
Their words
This is older, but it's still a really good book about the Italian Futurists. Indeed I can't think of a better one for a general audience with some background knowledge of modern art. The chapters on Futurist painting and sculpture, on music and performance, on women, and on politics are especially good.
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bactra.org
21 November 2022
Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.
Their words
Bono’s new book, Surrender, is packed with funny, poignant moments like this.
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gatesnotes.com
13 October 2022
Gwern Recommends
13 Oct 2022
Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.
Their words
Overall, far more interesting than I had expected. Surprisingly funny or interesting anecdotes.
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gwern.net
19 April 2022
Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.
So funny that when my mind is too scattered to focus on something I go on twitter. “It’s hot today, gonna go cool down in a fire” Related
17 November 2021
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
15 July 2021
British novelist, author of the His Dark Materials and The Book of Dust trilogies.
Their words
I read it because it was a book, and books were fun. I thought it was terrific. Really wonderfully funny. I've gone on thinking that for the subsequent 60 years or so.
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fivebooks.com
Their words
Sophie and her grandmother spend a lot of time pottering about and playing and building little Venetian lagoons for the ants to go into and that sort of thing. It's very funny and very charming. And you think that's all it is—a sweet little book about a child and her grandmother.
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fivebooks.com
27 March 2021
Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".
8 January 2021
Co-founder, chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Hosts the Masters in Business podcast for Bloomberg and wrote How NOT to Invest.
Their words
He was game, and as part of my prep, I read this amusing short collection of his writings. They were fun and funny and informative — everything you could want in a collection about cars.
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ritholtz.com
28 October 2020
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.
Their words
Not only is Tina Fey a very funny writer, it's fascinating to have the opportunity to climb inside the head of a successful female leader. Reading the internal drama within Tina's head as she thought about whether she wanted a second child while considering how it would affect the 100+ employees that worked for her on 30 Rock was priceless. As a manager, it gives me an understanding and level of empathy I wouldn't have had otherwise.
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jasonevanish.com
25 August 2020
Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.
16 September 2019
Mathematical biologist; Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath and author of The Maths of Life and Death and How to Expect the Unexpected.
Their words
Matt is a stand-up comedian and he's a very funny guy. He makes mathematics interesting by making it funny. In this book, he pokes fun at people who've made silly mathematical mistakes, but at the same time he also looks at some issues that are quite serious: bridges collapsing and killing people, for example. He can do the somber, serious stuff as well. It's a great book. As far as I know, it's the first math book that's ever been a number one bestseller.
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fivebooks.com
5 April 2018
Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.
Sharp-Edged Finalizers in Go 2018-04-05, David Crawshaw For background, see my last post on why in general finalizers do not work. We cannot use an object finalizer for resource management, because finalizers are called at some unpredictable distan…
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1 January 2018
Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.
Their words
Podcast. Funny, scary, thought-provoking book. Thesis: what if a large portion of our population performs jobs they secretly know don’t need to be performed, and if they disappeared, no one would notice?
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radex.io
1 July 2017
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
1 October 2016
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.
Their words
Seems designed as an entertaining introduction to auction theory for the layperson. Requires no mathematical background and relegates math to the small print.
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danluu.com
18 August 2015
Co-founder of AngelList. Writes and podcasts at nav.al in short, aphoristic pieces on startups, wealth and judgement rather than long essays.
Their words
There are original Rick and Morty comic books by the same writers. Just as funny, different content. Must read!
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x.com
1 March 2015
Emeritus Professor of Statistics at the University of Cambridge, former president of the Royal Statistical Society, and author of The Art of Statistics.
Nothing matches. Show everything
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