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Technology writer of Spyglass, a newsletter about technology and media. Previously a reporter at TechCrunch and an investor at GV.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A product can be technically impressive yet fail because it launched before a real market for it existed.

  Their words

  It's certainly an impressive piece of technology, but it was clearly launched far too early, with no large market to find.

  Apple Unveils the CEO Handoffspyglass.org

Mathematician and Senior Lecturer in the Mathematics department at Columbia University. Author of the book Not Even Wrong and of the long-running physics blog of the same name.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Mathematicians using AI agents to produce proofs should have to disclose in detail how the agents were used, the way experimental scientists must describe their methods.

  Their words

  the math community needs to adopt a version of the ethical standards of experimental science. If you are using AI agents, you can't just give a proof (formalized or not), but need to also provide a detailed explanation of how these agents were used to get the result.

  A Modest Proposalmath.columbia.edu

Writes Stratechery, a subscription newsletter on the business and strategy of technology, and hosts the Dithering and Sharp Tech podcasts.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Consumer AI agents aimed at everyday people will have more impact on people's lives than AI solving elite math problems.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  OpenAI solving one of the most famous math problems is extremely impressive, and of little impact to most people's lives; Meta's Muse agent launch has the potential to be the exact opposite.

  stratechery.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

  Every impressive new Chinese AI model release triggers a wave of claims that America is falling behind, and this pattern will keep repeating.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  We are going to keep doing this ‘omg the new Chinese model is so good, America is cooked’ cycle for a while. Best get used to it.

  AI #184: Post Post Mortemthezvi.substack.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The absence of a visible productivity jump from AI proves nothing, because a real ten percent uplift across the board would be impressive and almost invisible from outside.

  Their words

  Then there's another possibility which is that it actually already has worked but just the productivity boost isn't as big as would be obvious if people got 10% more productive. That would still be pretty impressive because it's hard to get a 10% across the board uplift.

  youtube.com

Systems and developer-tools engineer at Cloudflare as of 2026, on durable infrastructure for AI agents; worked on React and PartyKit before that. Writes at sunilpai.dev.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Agent autonomy is a capability, not a product direction: what the person is actually trying to do decides whether more of it helps or ruins the thing.

  Their words

  we tend to describe progress in agents as progress in autonomy: first they could do five minutes of work, then an hour, now we talk seriously about agents running for days. that’s impressive, but autonomy is a capability, not a product direction! the Job To Be Done tells you whether to use it.

  the task isn't the jobsunilpai.dev

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Success in cultural and professional fields is driven more by chance and path dependence than by talent.

  Their words

  much cultural success is stochastic (the experimental evidence suggests that talent only moderately predicts success in culture markets), and that path dependence shapes chances of success

  No-One Makes You Shop at Amazonprogrammablemutter.com

Chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety and AI control.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Token prices have stayed flat because labs deliberately kept models smaller than expected in order to get more experimental cycles.

  Their words

  I think one reason why um the the AIs have been scaled up less than you would have otherwise expected and like for example cost of of per token hasn't increased as much as you might have thought is because there's a benefit to doing more of your um work at small scale where you can run more training runs and get more cycles in

  youtube.com

Swedish programmer with degrees in engineering and psychology, author of Your Code as a Crime Scene and founder of CodeScene.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Let Over Lambda

  Their words

  Let Over Lambda by Doug Hoyte is perfect for those three people in the world who find The Art of the Metaobject Protocol underwhelming. One of the most impressive books I've read.

  adamtornhill.substack.com

Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Learned approximations of slow simulators change what science is possible, by turning a six-month screening run into something you do over lunch.

  Their words

  And I think there's a lot of room in a lot of domains for much faster validation models, possibly learned valu validation models that can uh you know get you a a approximation to the true answer much much more rapidly. And that changes how those experimental loops can be thought of and how quickly you can go around those loops.

  Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com

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.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Glasslands

  Their words

  This is clearly an amateur effort (there was a whole repeated paragraph), but as such it's very impressive and I am happy to have paid money for it.

  bactra.org

Rust engineer at Google working on Android; maintains Tokio and works on Rust in the Linux kernel.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Rust is no longer experimental in the Linux kernel — the maintainers agreed that at their December 2025 summit.

  Linux

  Their words

  The big news were that at the Linux kernel maintainer summit, we agreed that Rust is no longer experimental in the kernel. That was really big for us compared to the previous year.

  Why Rust is different, with Alice Ryhlyoutube.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI will revolutionise mathematics by giving it an experimental side: large-scale data on which methods work, rather than the careful solving of individual problems.

  Their words

  So, I think AI-type tools we really will will actually revolutionize the ex- the experimental side of math where where um you don't care so much about uh individual problems and and the process of solving them, but you you want to gather just large-scale data about about what things work, what things don't.

  youtube.com

Programmer, teacher and speaker; long-time Microsoft developer-community figure, host of the Hanselminutes podcast and author of the hanselman.com blog.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Impressive one-shot AI coding demos are not a good way to judge AI coding ability.

  Their words

  People should not be judging AI-augmented coding by "1 shots."

  The danger of glamourizing one shotsfeeds.hanselman.com

Writer and researcher on China, technology and industry; author of Breakneck, research fellow at Stanford, known for a widely read annual letter.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Piranesi

  Their words

  I’d like to read more experimental books like this one. Susannah Clarke’s Piranesi is a glittering jewel.

  danwang.co

• Likedrcmnd.app

  The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear

  Their words

  Nan Z. Da’s The Chinese Tragedy of King Lear also has an experimental form. Da is a professor of literature at Johns Hopkins who emigrated from Hangzhou before she was 7.

  danwang.co

Novelist, author of twelve books including Foundry, Bandwidth and Cumulus. Sends a newsletter of monthly book recommendations.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Thursday Murder Club

  Their words

  The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman is a delightful whodunnit set at a retirement home in the English countryside. Great characters. Fun twists. An endearing sense of humor. Nothing fancy or experimental, just a pleasure to read (and what more can you ask from a book, really?). If, like me, you enjoy mysteries, you'll be in good hands with Osman.

  eliotpeper.substack.com

China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  The Secret of Our Success

  Their words

  Not every plank in his argument is convincing, and the research has evolved since the book first came out a decade ago, but the ambition is impressive and the framework holds up.

  andrewbatson.com

Author of The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titans, and host of The Tim Ferriss Show podcast.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Elgato Wave 3

  Their words

  Most impressive to me, it seems to cancel bounce and echo far better than my pro studio gear.

  tim.blog

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.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  GLM 4.6

  Their words

  I keep an eye on China’s open models, and it’s impressive how quickly they catch up. GLM 4.6 and Kimi K2.1 are strong contenders that slowly reach Sonnet 3.7 quality

  steipete.me

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Kimi K2.1

  Their words

  I keep an eye on China’s open models, and it’s impressive how quickly they catch up. GLM 4.6 and Kimi K2.1 are strong contenders that slowly reach Sonnet 3.7 quality

  steipete.me

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies

  Their words

  Despite my gripes above, this is an impressive book.

  astralcodexten.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

  Education can raise how much everyone knows, but it almost never changes who is ahead of whom.

  Their words

  Decades of grading data; standardized test scores; cross-sectional, longitudinal, observational, and experimental studies; along with many other types of ancillary and convergent evidence, ultimately tell the same story: education can raise the absolute performance of most students modestly, but it almost never meaningfully reshuffles the relative distribution of ability and achievement

  Education Doesn't Work 3.0freddiedeboer.substack.com

Technology journalist; writes Understanding AI, after reporting at Ars Technica, Vox and the Washington Post.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A good robotaxi demonstration in one city does not mean the company is ready to scale the service.

  self-driving cars

  Their words

  But I don’t think Tesla’s accomplishments over the last two weeks—impressive as they are—mean that Tesla is ready to quickly scale up its service.

  understandingai.org

Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Current AI models cannot produce insights beyond human understanding, however impressive they seem

  Their words

  You should remember that the best AIs can perform at the level of a very smart person on some tasks, but current models cannot provide miraculous insights beyond human understanding.

  Using AI Right Now: A Quick Guideoneusefulthing.org

Professor at Wharton studying how people actually use AI, and author of Co-Intelligence. Writes One Useful Thing, where the claims are dated and testable because the thing they describe keeps changing under them.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Veo 3

  Their words

  Generally, ChatGPT is stronger. On video creation, however, Gemini’s Veo 3 is very impressive, and you get several free uses a day

  oneusefulthing.org

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Lean and tools like GitHub will let experimental mathematics scale far beyond what one mathematician's spaghetti code allows today.

  Their words

  I think the platform that Lean and other software tools, so GitHub and things like that will allow experimental mathematics to scale up to a much greater degree than we can do now.

  youtube.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

  Impressive-looking benchmark improvements often result from comparing against a poorly-tuned baseline rather than a genuine advance.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  It's easy to get impressive-looking results if you're comparing against a poorly-tuned baseline, and that observation turns out to explain a surprising fraction of supposed improvements.

  blog.nelhage.com

Founder and chief analyst of SemiAnalysis; reports on semiconductor supply chains, AI datacentre economics and what the chip export controls actually do.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  OpenAI's 2022 bet on GPT-4 was a larger gamble than any training run since: all of its compute, for months, on an architecture nobody at Google believed in.

  OpenAIGoogle

  Their words

  I think it's even more impressive what OpenAI did in 2022. At the time, no one believed in mixture of experts models at Google who had all the researchers. OpenAI had such little compute and they devoted all of their compute for many months, all of it, 100% for many months to GPT-4 with a brand-new architecture with no belief that, "Hey, let me spend a couple of hundred million dollars, which is all of the money I have on this model." That is truly YOLO.

  youtube.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

  Current AI models still fall short of expert human performance.

  Their words

  Also, current models, while impressive, still fall well short of expert human performance.

  Building personal software with Claudeblog.nelhage.com

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

  Creativity in Science

  Their words

  This book surveys theories of creativity, contrasting four competing explanations: expertise, genius, society, and chance, in offering a model for how creativity works. Simonton's work provides a nice hybrid between the purely anecdotal work of biographers and the data-driven work of experimental scientists.

  scotthyoung.com

Theoretical physicist and cosmologist, Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, working on particle physics, extra dimensions and dark matter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A far-fetched idea earns its place in physics only when you can go out and look for its observational consequences.

  Their words

  That’s also why I like the dark disk because there’s a scientific story behind it. As far-fetched as it might sound, you could actually go and look for the experimental consequences, for the observational consequences to test whether it’s true.

  youtube.com

Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AlphaGo and MuZero are far more impressive than large language models, because they play beyond the best humans while the models write middle-school essays.

  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.

  youtube.com

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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Star Maker

  Their words

  It’s really impressive how Stapledon just casually scatters around handfuls of jewels that lesser authors might belabor singly throughout an entire book.

  gwern.net

Co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, and a 2024 Nobel laureate in Chemistry for the protein-structure work behind AlphaFold.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Contemporary physical and evolutionary structure-prediction approaches fall far short of experimental accuracy without a close experimental homologue, limiting biological utility.

  Their words

  Despite these advances, contemporary physical and evolutionary-history-based approaches produce predictions that are far short of experimental accuracy in the majority of cases in which a close homologue has not been solved experimentally and this has limited their utility for many biological applications.

  doi.org

Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.

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  The Fish that Ate the Whale

  Their words

  One of the craziest, most impressive stories of business smarts I’ve come across and from someone otherwise unknown. Like a real-life Francisco d’Anconia from Atlas Shrugged.

  nateliason.com

Full-stack developer, creator of Tailwind CSS; writes at adamwathan.me and makes courses and screencasts for web developers.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Figma

  Their words

  Figma is like Sketch but a million times more performant and cross-platform. It's the most impressive web app I've ever used.

  adamwathan.me

Physician and author on addiction, stress and childhood development. Wrote In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts and The Myth of Normal, and developed the Compassionate Inquiry approach taught to therapists.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Facing Addiction in America: The Surgeon General’s Report on Alcohol, Drugs, and Health

  Their words

  Facing Addiction in America is also the first governmental attempt to ground policy not in prejudice but in research, not in conjecture but in science. It collates an impressive body of evidence to illuminate the pathological processes and impacts of substance addiction in the human brain and body, and suggests evidence-based practices for treatment and prevention.

  drgabormate.com

Physicist and information theorist at Cambridge; wrote Sustainable Energy — Without the Hot Air and Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms, and was the UK's chief scientific adviser on energy from 2009 to 2014. Died in 2016.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Assuming the nuclear fusion problem will be solved is reckless, even though estimating fusion's potential power output is still worthwhile.

  Their words

  Fusion power is speculative and experimental. I think it is reckless to assume that the fusion problem will be cracked, but I’m happy to estimate how much power fusion could deliver, if the problem is cracked.

  Sustainable Energy — without the hot airinference.org.uk