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18 September
Author and clean-energy analyst who writes on solar cost curves.
Excellent essay. It's plain that there are risks of damage from AI. Every technology ever invented has caused some harms, and this is a powerful one that will cause some harms along with the many benefits it will bring. That's distinct from fears of the end of the world. Quoting @clairlemon The belief that AI would eventually herald the end of humanity is not a new one. It has not arisen in response to the release of the LLMs of ChatGPT and Claude. It has not emerged as a response to recent technological developments. The story starts in the 90s, with @allTheYud. A precocious youngste… Related
Security technologist and author of books including Applied Cryptography and Data and Goliath; writes the Schneier on Security blog and the monthly Crypto-Gram newsletter.
Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.
I'm going to come right out and say it: statistical extrapolation is *fine*. One of the most useful ways to understand the present and anticipate the future is to measure the things that happened in the past, find the correlations among them, and extrapolate likely future outcomes from those correlations. - If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read/share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: https://pluralistic.net/2026/09/18/surprise/#wow-signal 1/ Related
17 September
Security technologist and author of books including Applied Cryptography and Data and Goliath; writes the Schneier on Security blog and the monthly Crypto-Gram newsletter.
16 September
Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.
pretty cool an essay like this can hit 1M long post-hustle Quoting @jonnym1ller After months of writing, 'How to Unclench' is finally live! It's an interactive essay packed with stories, science & guided practices to help you unclench. → Related
15 September
Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.
J.R.R. Tolkien on How to Fall in Love with Life In 1964, Pantheon Books invited J.R.R. Tolkien (January 3, 1892–September 2, 1973) to write an introduction to George MacDonald’s The Golden Key, which he had praised in Tree and Leaf — the small, splendid essay collect…
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Security technologist and author of books including Applied Cryptography and Data and Goliath; writes the Schneier on Security blog and the monthly Crypto-Gram newsletter.
Criminal defence lawyer in New York; writes Simple Justice, mostly about how criminal law works in practice rather than in theory.
Tuesday Talk*: AI, AI, AI, The Hoax The CEOs of the major Artificial Intelligence companies say it’s a potential existential threat to humanity. The president’s statement followed a weekend essay from Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, callin…
Anthropic Related
Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.
I think at least 50% of my unclenching over the years is attributable to Jonny in some way 2015 vs 2026 Check out the essay Quoting @jonnym1ller After months of writing, 'How to Unclench' is finally live! It's an interactive essay packed with stories, science & guided practices to help you unclench. → Related
14 September
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.
13 September
Cognitive scientist and long-standing critic of deep learning's claims; writes Marcus on AI and wrote Rebooting AI.
10 September
Statistician at Columbia; writes Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and wrote Bayesian Data Analysis.
Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.
8 September
Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.
Their words
if you have good enough transitions, an essay will feel as if it has a good structure. And vice versa: when readers complain about lack of structure, the reason is often simply that they're bothered by clumsy or abrupt transitions.
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@paulg on X x.com
6 September
Economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury. Author of Slouching Towards Utopia and writer of the Grasping Reality newsletter.
When the written product no longer proves the learning process: the end of the essay-, the problem-set-, the take-home-exam-as-proxy. This is really an opportunity, or a challengatunity for all education. This is truly an opportunity to excel, in different ways for different institutions with different functions. So go read Halina Bennet on this, and then go read the MIT Report https://aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/>: **(NOT A) CROSSPOST: HALINA BENNET: The Return of Institutional Purpose [to... 1/ Related
4 September
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.
Great essay from @clarabcollier: https://t.co/H1LpUNid9O. (You should subscribe to @asteriskmgzn, in addition to @WorksInProgMag of course. They have a very good print edition.) Related
3 September
Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.
1 September
Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.
25 August
Writer on habits and decision-making; author of Atomic Habits and the 3-2-1 newsletter, and publisher of long-running book recommendation lists.
Improvement is a battle that must be fought each day anew. Your next workout doesn't care how strong your last one was. Your next essay doesn't care how popular your last one was. Your next investment doesn't care how smart your last one was. Your best effort, again. Related
20 August
Programmer, photographer and musician, best known for the Python Requests HTTP library and other Python tooling.
I wrote a new essay about a strange inversion in AI-assisted programming. Old-school programming made sustained attention the scarce resource. You entered a tight loop with the machine, and the difficulty itself kept you engaged. Agentic coding changes that. To reach the same intensity, you keep more work in flight, run more agents, and consume more inference. Flow becomes throughput, then the usage meter appears. There are legitimate economic reasons for limits. But when higher plans are explicitly sold as freedom from interruption, uninterrupted access to your own momentum becomes the produ… kennethreitz.org
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18 August
Journalist and author of The Art of Noticing; writes the newsletter The Art of Noticing (TAoN) on attention, creativity and the everyday.
11 August
Journalist and author of The Art of Noticing; writes the newsletter The Art of Noticing (TAoN) on attention, creativity and the everyday.
Their words
A few months ago I read an essay about silence by Amir Zadnemat in 3 Quarks Daily, called "The Symphony of Silence: An Exploration of the Sound of Absence"*. The most interesting section was a riff on various kinds of silence, especially in spoken language, each communicating something very distinct despite the fact that objectively each silence sounds (or I guess doesn't sound) identical:
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robwalker.substack.com
31 July
Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.
LLMs
Their words
I mean, it's very interesting, right? Because these can prove the Jacobian conjecture, you know, whatever. Uh and so clearly they're capable of these monumental feats. Um but somehow I still haven't read the LLM essay that I found super compelling.
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youtube.com
28 July
Pseudonymous writer; posts careful, funny investigations of everyday questions — air quality, seed oils, arguing, chess — usually by reading the studies.
24 July
Neuroscientist and novelist writing on consciousness, artificial intelligence and culture in the newsletter The Intrinsic Perspective.
22 July
Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.
21 July
Economist at the Hoover Institution; wrote The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level and blogs as The Grumpy Economist.
29 June
Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.
should i write an essay titled 'taste zombies' Quoting @chaykak 🧟♂️🧟♂️🧟♂️taaaaaaaaassteeee🧟♂️🧟♂️🧟♂️ Related
Co-founder and head of policy at Anthropic; writes Import AI, a weekly newsletter reading the week's AI research, and was OpenAI's policy director before that.
2 June
Artist and writer based in Oakland, California; author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time, and a longtime teacher of digital art.
a new essay adapted from my Earth Day lecture at the College of Idaho - inspired by my friend Tom, the Santa Cruz Mountains, and James Cameron's 1989 film, The Abyss: longreads.com
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Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.
31 May
Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.
30 May
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
I think "being real with yourself" is the most underrated cognitive skill for the AI age — AI makes it too easy to lie to yourself: to self-congratulate for the illusion of thinking, productivity, etc. But you gotta actually know: Am I being more productive, or just tokenmaxxing? Am I upskilling myself with AI, or letting it do the hard part for me? Does my essay/business/product idea make sense, or did I let an LLM convince me it does? Then you won't need hard rules like “always/never use AI for X.” If you pay attention and avoid self-deception, you'll be able to *feel* when you are doing re… LLMs Related
22 April
Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.
Their words
We don't ask the students to write essays because we love reading their amazing essays. We ask them to write essays because they we want them to go through a thought process, which helps them learn something.
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youtube.com
23 March
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
29 January
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
20 January
Journalist; wrote We Are Eating the Earth on food and climate, and writes the newsletter Emissions.
15 January
Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.
14 January
Writer and artist, author of Steal Like an Artist; publishes a weekly newsletter and an annual list of the books he read.
Their words
Probably the most illuminating thing I read about Tolstoy was Isaiah Berlin's long essay, The Hedgehog and The Fox.
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austinkleon.com
14 December 2025
Writer living in Brooklyn and former Man Repeller features director; writes the weekly newsletter Maybe Baby on culture and consumption.
Their words
Tony's Chocolonely Lil Bits (in Milk Caramel Sea Salt and Cookie Mix), which single-handedly got me through this work year. I shudder to think how many bags of these I ate, but I can barely finish an essay without one.
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haleynahman.substack.com
25 November 2025
Co-founder and chief scientist of Safe Superintelligence Inc., and previously co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI.
AI alignment
Their words
Like basically I think I think that there is a big benefit from AI being in the public and that would be a reason for us to not be quite straight shot.
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youtube.com
1 September 2025
Mac and iOS developer at the Iconfactory, where he has worked on apps including Twitterrific and Tot. He writes about development at furbo.org.
3 August 2025
Philosopher at Oxford; co-founded effective altruism and 80,000 Hours, wrote Doing Good Better and What We Owe the Future, and now works on what a good future would actually contain.
9 June 2025
Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.
3 June 2025
Journalist; wrote We Are Eating the Earth on food and climate, and writes the newsletter Emissions.
3 February 2025
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
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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youtube.com
30 December 2024
Software engineer and essayist who writes about programming, formal methods, philosophy and literature at thoughts.wyounas.com.
Their words
This book is a collection of essays, and some of them are quite profound. One of his essays on Dostoevsky is particularly insightful; it left such an impression on me that I reflected on it and wrote an essay of my own.
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thoughts.wyounas.com
14 December 2024
Journalist; wrote We Are Eating the Earth on food and climate, and writes the newsletter Emissions.
4 July 2024
Artist and writer based in Oakland, California; author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time, and a longtime teacher of digital art.
really happy to see my essay on Rosa Luxemburg’s herbarium in the latest issue of Lux Magazine (in very good company). It was a chance not only to consider her beautiful specimens, but also to read her letters from prison(s), a surprising mix of political fervor with mentions of “the titmouse with whom I am friendly.” You need a subscription to read it online, but imho Lux is something very worth subscribing to. I can’t remember the last time I read a magazine cover to cover 🫨 Related
15 April 2024
Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.
5 December 2023
Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.
11 October 2023
Writes about the biotech industry, drug development and forecasting — “I write to learn, mostly about biotech.”
7 October 2023
Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.
3 July 2023
Journalist; wrote We Are Eating the Earth on food and climate, and writes the newsletter Emissions.
29 June 2023
Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.
LLMs
Their words
I think things like MuZero and AlphaGo are so much more impressive because these things are playing beyond the highest human level. The language models are writing middle school level essays and people are like, wow, it’s a great essay.
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youtube.com
16 January 2023
Musician and writer; answers readers' questions weekly at The Red Hand Files, and fronts Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.
OpenAI
Their words
What ChatGPT is, in this instance, is replication as travesty. ChatGPT may be able to write a speech or an essay or a sermon or an obituary but it cannot create a genuine song.
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theredhandfiles.com
1 January 2023
Founder of Pinboard; writes Idle Words — talks and essays on the web, aviation, politics and travel.
Why Not Mars For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled. — Richard Feynman Entrance to underground cavern on Pavonis Mons. HiRISE, 2011 The goal of this essay is to p…
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