Related posts
Venkatesh Rao
x.com
Ribbonfarm readers may enjoy this podcast. Longest one I’ve ever done.
ribbonfarm longest readers
The the words it uses that this site has seen
least often elsewhere. Posts are matched on those words alone —
nothing here is a summary of this one.
Sources
All
Writing
Blog Korrents x.com Newsletter Site Mastodon GitHub Recommends Bluesky
Top people
Jack Clark
Venkatesh Rao
Julia Evans
Troy Hunt
Casey Handmer
John Cochrane
Thomas Ptacek
Terence Eden
Andrew Gelman
Paul Graham
Ann Handley
Tanner Greer
Showing
Profile →
Show everything
Hiding
Show them again
Show them again
Further back ↓
Hiding
Show them again
20 September
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
How deep is Tulainyo Lake? Regular readers may recall that I put a visit to Tulainyo Lake on my bucket list a few years ago. Last week I did it. Impossibly remote, otherworldly beauty, and an enduring mystery. Just how deep was this lake? Wikiped…
Related
17 September
Economist at the Hoover Institution; wrote The Fiscal Theory of the Price Level and blogs as The Grumpy Economist.
16 September
Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.
LLMs
Their words
you can't use a single word the LLM selects for you, even if it's better than your own; users detect LLM words in the parts per trillion.
Show the whole quote
@tqbf on X x.com
15 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.
[RSS Club] Sorry for breaking your feed readers! You're part of the Groovy Gang because you're a member of RSS Club! These posts are only available on my RSS and Atom feed. This post is not available in the shops, on the web, via FTP, or anywhere else. So, yeah, sorry…
Related
14 September
Statistician at Columbia; writes Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science, and wrote Bayesian Data Analysis.
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.
Show the whole quote
@paulg on X x.com
Wall Street Journal bestselling author on marketing and writing, partner at MarketingProfs, and writer of the fortnightly Total Annarchy newsletter.
Their words
Despite literal years of evidence that people value true connection, most of us rarely respond back.
Show the whole quote
annhandley.com
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
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.
6 September
Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.
Stats: 1572 sessions, longest 9603 turns, 0 amulets kinda disappointed in the X crowd right now 😁 Quoting @tobi I always liked nethack. This 42 year old marvel is one of the deepest adventure games ever made. It also looks like crap, at least out of the box. GPT6 Astra made a headless version for me. You can now use its brain as a library or as mcp or via javascript library. Meet Related
3 September
Forecaster, founder of FiveThirtyEight, author of The Signal and the Noise and On the Edge. Writes Silver Bulletin, where the predictions come with numbers and the numbers are later checked against what happened.
1 September
Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.
Fragments: September 1 Like many readers, I’m wary of AI generated prose. Simon Wilison has written an LLM cliché highlighter - paste in some text, or a URL, and it will flag various patterns common to LLMs. It references a wikipedia page of…
LLMs Related
31 August
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.
I'm working on phase 2 of Project Improve Git's documentation and I need beta readers! Here's a signup form: https://forms.gle/swn1jhCULndnCxG87 The first topic is going to the docs on merge conflicts. I'd love signups from anyone who uses Git on the command line and who would be interested in reading the current version of some man pages and leaving feedback about what's confusing. Especially if you're not 100% comfortable with Git! documentation 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.
Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.
29 August
Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.
Kind of thrilling as an author to see that "Use with @Gemini_Notebook" option on the @GooglePlay bookstore page for one of my books. (Most of mine are now available as part of Expert Intelligence.) This is going to open up entirely new ways for readers to experience my work. Google Related
26 August
Programmer; makes Handmade Hero and teaches Performance-Aware Programming, and argues loudly about how software got slow.
Their words
the performance of your software is generally determined by the longest serial dependency chain because it's something that cannot be parallelized.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
25 August
Economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education and Open Borders. Writes Bet On It.
Krakowski, Claude, and *Modern Times* Many readers wanted to know how Ariel Krakowski ran his AI proofread of Modern Times, so he’s written a guest post to answer your questions. Here’s Ariel: Outside of the tech world, many people are unfamiliar with how a…
Anthropic Related
24 August
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.
Security researcher; founded Have I Been Pwned, and writes and speaks about data breaches.
Weekly update is up! IoT Doorlock Nirvana with UniFi: All the UniFi Access Bits: Door Hub, Electric Strike, Drop Bolts, Readers, NFC Cards, Buttons, (and Much More): troyhunt.com
Related
20 August
Security researcher; founded Have I Been Pwned, and writes and speaks about data breaches.
Going live with my weekly vid in 5 mins! All the UniFi Access Bits: Door Hub, Electric Strike, Drop Bolts, Readers, NFC Cards, Buttons, (and Much More) youtube.com
Related
17 August
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.
Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.
Their words
So, I thought this was a really cool study because it showed very clearly that there is temporal persistence in emotions and sadness probably has one of the longest time constants as we know from personal experience. But it's separate from just declarative memory.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
12 August
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).
Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch) is now finally also available on Amazon! Thanks so much to everyone who preordered! One important note for readers in India: please avoid ordering through @amazon India (@amazonIN) for now since they are selling counterfeit black-and-white copies. The genuine book is printed in color this time and includes a code for registering the book on Manning’s website. If you are based in India, I recommend ordering directly from Manning. (If you received a counterfeit copy, please return it. I am very sorry about the hassle.) Unfortunately, these counterfeit sale… Related
10 August
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.
1 August
Software engineer and engineering leader at Canonical, working on Ubuntu; writes about his homelab, Nix and tooling at jnsgr.uk.
29 July
Founder of Scale AI and, since 2025, Chief AI Officer at Meta, where he leads the company’s superintelligence lab.
Their words
the other piece of advice I would have is try to identify what is the what is the exponential in the world that has both the steepest curve and will go the longest. And you know many decades ago this curve was was Moore's law and that probably was you know that was at the time like clearly the right thing to invest on. I think right now it's AI progress
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
24 July
Co-founder of Foundry Group and of Techstars. Has blogged at Feld Thoughts since 2004 and has written or co-written nine non-fiction books on startups and venture capital.
21 July
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
data center road trip // day 4-5 the AI backlash is bipartisan & showing up in politics in a big way - Abdul El-Sayed brought Bernie and AOC to rally with him in Lansing. all 3 decried AI oligarchy (Bernie with the longest spiel) - in WI, DSA member Francesca Hong is leading the Dem governor’s primary. she hopes to win rural conservatives as the only candidate backing a data center moratorium - a canvasser for Will Lawrence in MI7 told me that 90% of the doors she knocked on Saturday named data centers as a top issue these are purple battleground states, yet pollsters are finding Dems and Rep… Quoting @jasminewsun I’m spending the next week driving around Wisconsin and Michigan to get a firsthand view of the data center buildout and backlash am visiting sites, talking to tons of people — tradespeople, activists, planners, residents — then writing up a story lmk what questions I should dig into! data centers Related
14 July
Investing columnist for The Wall Street Journal and editor of the revised edition of Benjamin Graham's The Intelligent Investor.
Their words
Carlson, author of the aptly named blog A Wealth of Common Sense, brings a similar approach to this book. While much of it might seem familiar to sophisticated readers, Carlson's clean and clear use of data — both in charts and text — makes basic points memorable.
Show the whole quote
jasonzweig.com
2 July
Climate journalist; founded HEATED in 2019 after reporting on climate at The New Republic and ThinkProgress.
30 June
Independent iOS developer and podcaster; co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast and Analog(ue), and makes the apps Callsheet, MaskerAid and Peek-a-View.
Their words
For data storage, my NAS is Synology DS1621+. I was a Synology evangelist for the longest time, but I'm starting to fall out of love with them. Their insistence on using first-party drives is a real turn-off.
Show the whole quote
usesthis.com
29 June
Technology journalist; writes Understanding AI, after reporting at Ars Technica, Vox and the Washington Post.
25 June
Data scientist and machine-learning researcher; chief scientist at bitly, founder of Fast Forward Labs and Hidden Door.
I love our team @hiddendoor.co and we're all big readers -- we had so much fun sharing our favorite queer book recommendations and I hope y'all love them, too! Quoting @hiddendoor.co HOW IS YOUR TBR PILE? Looking for some new books to read? Well! In honor of pride month, our team has put together a list of queer book reccs. And when you buy our faves from Bookshop.org during their anti-Prime-day sale, you'll get FREE SHIPPING (through the 26th)! Related
22 June
Novelist and critic, author of The Body Scout and Metallic Realms; writes the newsletter Counter Craft on fiction craft and the publishing industry.
29 May
Software engineer and writer; worked on Mapbox and built Placemark and Simple Statistics, and blogs at macwright.com.
Their words
e-Readers: Kobo Libra Color and a basic Kindle.
Show the whole quote
macwright.com
28 May
Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.
9 May
Writer and consultant on technology, organizations and history; founded the blog Ribbonfarm and now writes the Contraptions newsletter.
Ribbonfarm has been resurrected as a museum blog with an AI curator. Details: https://t.co/InHymQ7kS3 The old reading experience is preserved intact, with significantly improved speed and cleaner reading layout, but there’s now a lot more intelligent scaffolding for exploring. Related
6 May
Software engineer who writes about low-level and systems programming at nullprogram.com; author of the Elfeed feed reader, the Endlessh SSH tarpit and Enchive.
Concurrent, atomic MSI hash tables Readers will be familiar with Mask-Step-Index (MSI) hash tables, a technique for building fast, open-addressed hash tables in a dozen lines of code. If multiple threads or processes access an MSI table with at least one…
Related
4 May
Indian value investor who taught Behavioural Finance and Business Valuation as an adjunct professor at MDI Gurgaon. He writes the Fundoo Professor blog about investing, moats and mental models.
One consequence of Mr. Buffett taking a back seat is that we now get to learn from the people who have moved into the front seat. For the longest time, Ajit Jain operated undercover. Now he is teaching the world how he thinks about pricing risk. Berkshire’s role as a teacher of business and investment management is far from over. Quoting @TrungTPhan Ajit Jain was asked when Berkshire Hathaway will start insuring ships in the Strait of Hormuz. “Depends on the price” Related
27 March
Writer and technology executive; blogs at anildash.com, was CEO of Glitch, and helped build Movable Type and ThinkUp.
13 March
Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.
data centers
Their words
Yeah, I think the biggest bottleneck is compute and for that the longest lead time supply chains are not power or data centers. They're actually the semiconductor supply chain themselves, right? It switches back from being power and data center uh as a major bottleneck to chips.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
4 March
Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.
An underappreciated thing about Substack is that it has slow virality. That social media thing where you have to churn out content because it is forgotten after three days is much less the case here. If you want to, you can put in serious effort into making a properly good piece, and it will keep getting read for years. This is a very good thing for both readers and writers, and I wish more people leaned into making few but exceptional pieces: doing things well is a viable strategy here in a way that it wasn’t on older platforms. Related
8 January
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.
8 November 2025
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
How to support FreeBSD on your cloud As most of my readers are aware, I ported FreeBSD to run on the Amazon EC2 cloud, and have been maintaining the platform ever since. Between this and my (far more recent) role as FreeBSD release engineering lead, I some…
Related
12 October 2025
Indian technology consultant and writer. Former editor of Beautiful Pixels; writes about Apple hardware and Mac software at nuclearbits.com.
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.
Show the whole quote
nuclearbits.com
11 September 2025
Machine learning engineer and consultant focused on RAG and retrieval systems. He writes about applied AI engineering at jxnl.co and is the author of the instructor library.
30 June 2025
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.
14 December 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.
ADVANCED HOOPING Now that I’ve used the Ceado Hoop brewer for several months, I have a few tips to share with readers. Although the Hoop produces beautiful extractions more easily than any other brewer, every brewer has a…
Related
6 December 2024
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.
11 October 2024
Writer and consultant on technology, organizations and history; founded the blog Ribbonfarm and now writes the Contraptions newsletter.
30 June 2024
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
Mind candy fantasy for younger readers, in which Mr. and Mrs. Middle America's beloved adoptive daughter turns out to be from Somewhere Else, which comes calling. It's very fluffy, which I was in the mood for, and Wrede is always reliably enjoyable.
Show the whole quote
bactra.org
15 June 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.
19 January 2024
Writer and consultant on technology, organizations and history; founded the blog Ribbonfarm and now writes the Contraptions newsletter.
Ribbonfarm (the Wordpress blog) is experimenting with a rough, notebook style in 2024, with shorter, more frequent journal style entries (2-3/week, sometimes more), so not all links will be tweeted. If you want to keep up, you should probably sign up for the newsletter digest. Related
31 December 2022
Design engineer and illustrator; makes visual essays on programming, anthropology and what language models do to the way people write.
29 December 2022
Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.
21 September 2022
Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.
8 September 2022
Writer on happiness, habits and human nature. Author of The Happiness Project, Better Than Before and The Four Tendencies, and host of the Happier with Gretchen Rubin podcast.
Their words
The Happiness Project synthesizes the wisdom of the ages with current scientific research, as Rubin brings readers along on her year to greater happiness.
Show the whole quote
gretchenrubin.com
4 March 2022
Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.
Their words
Science journalist Jacob Ward warns about a future in which AI technology forms a tight cybernetic feedback loop with the biases ingrained into the human brain, pushing our day-to-day existence in frightening directions. It's sort of like a version of The Terminator in which Danny Kahneman plays a starring role. As longtime readers and listeners of mine know, a big theme in my techno-criticism is the under-appreciated degree to which technologies exert powerful, unintended consequences on our personhood and culture, so Ward's warning hits a sweet spot with me.
Show the whole quote
calnewport.com
24 June 2020
Founder of Pinboard; writes Idle Words — talks and essays on the web, aviation, politics and travel.
Alyse Galvin on Coronavirus in Alaska Last week I spoke by video chat with Alyse Galvin, who is running for Congress in Alaska's sole, enormous Congressional district in a rematch against Don Young, the longest-serving member of Congress. Young, who just tu…
Related
Nothing matches. Show everything
What is a korrent?
A korrent is a belief a person has stated in their own words: one
sentence stating the claim, backed by a quote and a source, kept at
korrents.com .
Under a name here, the quoted block is what they actually said.
The korrent beneath it is the claim those words support, in
korrents' wording — tap it to see the record, its source, and who
else holds it.
Nobody here wrote their own korrents. They are compiled from public
statements, and a person can change their mind, which is recorded too.
Got it
About the English under a post
Some people here publish in a language other than English. Where they
do, this site shows a machine translation beneath the post, in
this typeface — the site's own, not theirs.
The post itself is never changed, moved or hidden: what is set in the
serif above is exactly what the person published, and it is what to
quote them on. A translation can be wrong in ways that matter,
especially about tone.
Only the post's own words are translated. A quoted post, a linked
article and a belief on korrents.com
are left in their original language.
Got it