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Computer science professor who works on fast data processing; co-author of the simdjson parser and a weekly blogger about software performance since 2004.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Scientific and academic evaluation will shift away from published papers as the measure of output, toward valuing real-world results.

  Their words

  I predict that, over time, the focus will move away from "papers as the final output."

  AI is breaking the academic sorting machinelemire.me

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

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  Programmers should be reading research papers and crawling their references, and the fact that almost none of them do is a bigger gap than any book recommendation could close.

  Their words

  I want to recommend that people read a paper. I'm trying to get more people to just to just read papers because I realized I read a ton of papers.

  youtube.com

Founder and CEO of Boom Supersonic, the Denver company building the Overture supersonic airliner and its Symphony engine.

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  America cannot win manufacturing back by repatriating what left; it wins only by inventing the next wave of manufacturing and building that here.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  it it won't work to try to repatriate uh the the manufacturing that left the US. Um that's a uh you you don't you don't beat China at its own game. What you do is invent the future, invent the next wave of manufacturing uh and build that here.

  youtube.com

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.

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  AI-generated junk papers risk overwhelming the hep-th physics field with worthless content.

  Their words

  The result is something completely worthless, but not obviously distinguishable from many other things on hep-th, which is in serious danger of going from something sad and unhealthy to something completely overwhelmed with crud.

  Various and Sundrymath.columbia.edu

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.

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  A stream of AI-written papers with any error rate at all becomes insufferable, because finding the error costs more than the paper is worth even at ninety-nine percent.

  Their words

  It becomes insufferable like as a mathematician because you you would basically be like I'm every single time I see one of these I kind of don't know if it's worth my time even if 99 out of 100 of them are right.

  youtube.com

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

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  Everybody's Perfect

  Their words

  And now it's Everybody's Perfect, a book that pretty much defines what it means for one text to be "in dialog" with another text. In this case, it's Ada Palmer's Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning magnum opus that tells not just the story of the Renaissance, but the story of the story, all the different ways the Renaissance has been used, abused, revised and recovered, starting with the Renaissance itself. It's a book that will make you rethink everything you know about European history, about the world today, and about the very idea of history itself

  pluralistic.net

Co-founder and chief executive of Meta Platforms, the company he started as Facebook in 2004.

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  There is no factory you can pay to produce biological data; each new dataset requires inventing a new scientific method first.

  Their words

  it's not just like there's some factory somewhere that you can pay to produce the the data like you actually need to invent new novel scientific approaches

  youtube.com

Science fiction novelist, journalist and technology activist; writes the daily blog and newsletter Pluralistic, and coined the term enshittification.

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  Inventing the Renaissance

  Their words

  Ada Palmer may just be the most bewilderingly talented person I know: a genius sf writer, incredible librettist and singer, wildly innovative educator, and a leading historian of the Renaissance, and last year, she published her magnum opus, Inventing the Renaissance, a stunning book about so much more than history

  pluralistic.net

Scientist and writer on quantum computing, memory systems and metascience; co-wrote the standard quantum computation textbook and wrote Reinventing Discovery.

From one piece Michael Nielsen – Why aliens will have a different tech stack than us 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Poincare missed special relativity because he knew too much: the leading physicists of the day were prisoners of their own expertise.

  Their words

  his expertise seems to be getting in the way. He knows so much, he understands so much, um and then he's not able to let go of these these things.

  youtube.com

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  No single person can understand a result like the Higgs boson in depth, and that is what a paper with a thousand authors actually means.

  Their words

  and I don't think it's possible for one person to understand everything in depth. Lots of people understand broadly a lot of these ideas but they don't understand sort of everything in in the depth that is actually utilized. That's why there's these, you know, papers with with well over a thousand authors.

  youtube.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.

From one piece Terence Tao – How the world’s top mathematician uses AI 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Within a decade AI will do the bulk of what mathematicians spend their time on, and we will discover that was never the important part of the job.

  Their words

  Um I think with within a decade, a lot of things that mathematicians currently do um we we spend a lot of the bulk of our time doing and a lot of stuff we put in our papers today can be done by AI. Um but we will find that that actually wasn't the most important part of what we do.

  youtube.com

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  AI has made his papers richer and broader, but not deeper.

  Their words

  Uh yeah, so it's it's made papers sort of richer and broader, but not necessarily deeper.

  youtube.com

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

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  AI researchers should contribute ideas but stop enacting them: a single queue of ideas and automated workers should run the experiments.

  Their words

  But okay, they shouldn't actually be enacting these ideas. There is a queue of ideas and there's maybe an automated scientist that comes up with ideas based on all the archive papers and GitHub repos and it funnels ideas in or researchers can contribute ideas, but it's a single queue and there is workers that pull items and they try them out.

  youtube.com

Founding member of OpenAI and former director of AI at Tesla; creator of nanoGPT and the term "vibe coding".

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  A tiny language model inventing a plausible-sounding name is the same phenomenon as a large one confidently stating a false fact.

  OpenAI

  Their words

  microgpt “hallucinating” a name like “karia” is the same phenomenon as ChatGPT confidently stating a false fact.

  karpathy.github.io

Writer and artist, author of Steal Like an Artist; publishes a weekly newsletter and an annual list of the books he read.

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  The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art of Inventing Stories

  Their words

  One of the most gorgeously-produced books I read, with illustrations by Matthew Forsythe.

  austinkleon.com

Historian of invention; writes Age of Invention on where the Industrial Revolution actually came from.

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  Economics journals have made large datasets and heavy statistics the price of making any causal claim at all, which has squeezed qualitative economic history out of the field.

  Their words

  Over the past few decades, journal editors and peer-reviewers have increasingly insisted that papers must present large datasets that have been treated using complex statistical methods in order to make even the mildest claims about what caused what.

  Age of Invention: Joel Mokyr's Nobelageofinvention.xyz

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.

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  An Introduction to the Theory of Spin Glasses and Neural Networks

  Their words

  This is a short (~150 pp), brisk first book on the topic for physicists. Most of the book --- the first ten chapters --- are good introduction to common models of spin glasses.

  bactra.org

Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The papers claiming Spinosaurus was a diver or a strong swimmer rest on very weak evidence at best.

  Their words

  So Spinosaurus is a super weird and exaggerated version of what was already a kind of super weird group of theropods. So Spinosaurus is properly strange. And then, as you kind of hinted at, super controversial as well, because various papers have claimed it's a diver or a really good swimmer, and I think the evidence for that is very weak at best.

  youtube.com

Co-creator of Django and creator of Datasette; writes daily at simonwillison.net.

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  Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections

  Their words

  One of my favorite papers about prompt injection is Design Patterns for Securing LLM Agents against Prompt Injections

  simonwillison.net

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.

From one piece Terence Tao: Hardest Problems in Mathematics, Physics & the Future of AI | Lex Fridman Podcast #472 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  His prediction that research-level mathematics papers would be written in collaboration with AI by 2026 has already come true.

  Their words

  There are certainly math results which could only have been accomplished because there was a human authentication and an AI involved, but it's hard to disentangle credit. I mean, these tools, they do not replicate all the skills needed to do mathematics, but they can replicate some non-trivial percentage of them, 30, 40%, so they can fill in gaps.

  youtube.com

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  When formalising a proof costs no more than writing it, mathematics will flip: papers written in Lean first, and journals refereeing only for significance because correctness is certified.

  Their words

  And that's a phase shift, because suddenly it makes sense when you write a paper to write it in Lean first, or through a conversation with AI, which is generally on the fly with you, and it becomes natural for journals to accept.

  youtube.com

Cognitive scientist and long-standing critic of deep learning's claims; writes Marcus on AI and wrote Rebooting AI.

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  Success on the easy version of a task is evidence of nothing, because it seduces you into believing the model found a general solution when it did not.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Worse, as the latest Apple papers shows, LLMs may well work on your easy test set (like Hanoi with 4 discs) and seduce you into thinking it has built a proper, generalizable solution when it does not.

  A knockout blow for LLMs?garymarcus.substack.com

Astrophysicist at Barnard College; wrote Black Hole Blues and How the Universe Got Its Spots, and directs sciences at Pioneer Works.

From one piece Janna Levin: Black Holes, Wormholes, Aliens, Paradoxes & Extra Dimensions | Lex Fridman Podcast #468 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Nobody really believes there is a firewall at the event horizon, but the firewall papers were what stopped the field from stalling.

  Their words

  I don’t think anyone really believes that at the event horizon you’ll find a firewall. But it did lead to things like the entangled wormholes embroidering a black hole, which was born out of an attempt to address the concerns that AMPS raised. So it did lead to progress.

  youtube.com

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  A self-respecting theoretical physicist kills most of their own ideas rather than waiting for somebody else to do it.

  Their words

  I totally agree. Sometimes I take too long to come to that conclusion, but I will proudly say, as most theoretical physicists should, that I kill most of my ideas myself.

  youtube.com

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  Calling dark matter and dark energy invented names for physicists' ignorance gets it exactly backwards: only extraordinary precision let us see that they are missing.

  energy

  Their words

  And so I would say, yes, we are just giving proxy names to things we don’t understand, but to dismiss that as some kind of, “Oh, they just don’t know…” It is actually quite the opposite.

  youtube.com

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.

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  Good storytelling doesn't require inventing something entirely new; it can be built from existing material.

  Their words

  One myth of good storytelling is that it requires dreaming up something entirely new from scratch. That's not necessary.

  Storytelling for Product Leadersbringthedonuts.com

Astrophysicist at the University of Rochester; works on the search for life elsewhere and wrote The Little Book of Aliens and Light of the Stars.

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  The many-worlds interpretation invents infinitely many unobservable universes to avoid what quantum mechanics is plainly saying: that measurement matters.

  Their words

  Many of them try to pretend the measurement problem isn't there. Go to enormous lengths like the many-worlds interpretation, literally inventing an infinite number of unobservable parallel universes to avoid the thing that quantum mechanics is telling them, which is that measurements matter.

  youtube.com

Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.

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  CiteSeer

  Their words

  Online library of research papers.

  worrydream.com

Structural engineer and senior infrastructure fellow at the Institute for Progress; writes Construction Physics on why physical things cost what they cost.

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  Inventing a manufacturing technology and building a competitive industry on it are separate achievements, and America has repeatedly done only the first.

  America

  Their words

  But in turning these innovations into competitive industries, America has come up short.

  Why Can't the U.S. Build Ships?construction-physics.com

Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, an AI answer engine; previously a research scientist at OpenAI and a PhD student at UC Berkeley.

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  The way to stop a chatbot inventing things is to forbid it from saying anything it did not retrieve, not merely to hand it extra context.

  Their words

  The principle in Perplexity is you’re not supposed to say anything that you don’t retrieve, which is even more powerful than RAG because RAG just says, “Okay, use this additional context and write an answer.” But we say, “Don’t use anything more than that too.” That way we ensure a factual grounding.

  youtube.com

Astrobiologist and theoretical physicist at Arizona State University, working on assembly theory and the physics of life.

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  The frontier of new physics is not high-energy particle physics or quantum gravity, but the problems of life and intelligence.

  energyTrauma

  Their words

  I think for me, the frontier in modern physics, where the new physics lies is not in high energy particle physics, it’s not in quantum gravity, it’s not in any of these sort of traditionally sold, “This is going to be the newest deepest insight we have into the nature of reality.” It is going to be in studying the problems of life and intelligence and the things that are sort of also our current existential crises as a civilization or a culture that’s going through an existential trauma of inventing technologies that we don’t understand right now.

  youtube.com

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.

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  Physicists did not invent dark matter and dark energy to rescue their theories — they would much rather the answer were something cooler, and the data will not allow it.

  energy

  Their words

  I tear my hair out when people who are not physicists accuse physicists, like you say, of losing the plot because they need dark matter and dark energy. I don’t want dark matter and dark energy; I want something much cooler than that. I’ve tried. But you got to listen to the equations and to the data.

  youtube.com

Founder of Amazon in 1994 and of the space company Blue Origin in 2000.

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  Cutting the cost of something is not a lesser achievement than inventing it, because inventing a cheaper way is precisely how the whole world gets richer.

  Their words

  And when you invent a better way, you make the whole world richer. So whatever it was, I don't know how many thousands of years ago, somebody invented the plow. And when they invented the plow, they made the whole world richer because they made farming less expensive. And so it is a big deal to invent better ways. That's how the world gets richer.

  youtube.com

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

From one piece Lisa Randall: Dark Matter, Theoretical Physics, and Extinction Events | Lex Fridman Podcast #403 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  There is probably no bottom level of reality we will ever reach; physics will keep penetrating layers without ever arriving at the last one.

  Their words

  I might not seem so, but I think I’m more humble than a lot of physicists. I’m not sure that we’re ever going to get to that bottom level, but I do think we’re going to keep penetrating different layers and get further.

  youtube.com

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  Physicists actively want the standard model to break down, because only the deviations can tell us what underlies it.

  energy

  Their words

  One of the things we do as physicists is we actually want it to break down at some level, we’re looking for the precision measurement or the energy or whatever it will take where the standard model is no longer working. Not that it’s not working approximately, but we’re looking for the deviations.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and chief executive of Meta Platforms, the company he started as Facebook in 2004.

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  Building an AI that embodies a real person is a much harder problem than inventing a new AI character from scratch.

  Their words

  So that's a lot of what I think we need to nail for the creators, and that's why that one is actually a much harder problem, I think, than starting with new characters that you're creating from scratch.

  youtube.com

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.

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  The Righteous Mind

  Their words

  Brilliant insights into human nature. Moral reasoning, inventing victims, emotional reactions, the elephant (emotions) and its rider (explanations). Intuition reacts then logic confabulates a reason. Survival of the fittest applied to groups. Understanding religion and tradition. Great from start to finish.

  sive.rs

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

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  Gatekeeping in science stamps out the best research along with the worst, because reviewers are least likely to approve what is novel or risky.

  Their words

  Reviewers are less likely to greenlight papers and grants if they’re novel, risky, or interdisciplinary.

  Science is a strong-link problemexperimental-history.com

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

From one piece The rise and fall of peer review 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Peer reviewers miss most of the serious errors in the papers they review.

  Their words

  Scientists have run studies where they deliberately add errors to papers, send them out to reviewers, and simply count how many errors the reviewers catch. Reviewers are pretty awful at this.

  The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com

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  Fraudulent papers pass peer review routinely, which is direct evidence that peer review does not do the job it is supposed to do.

  Their words

  In fact, we’ve got knock-down, real-world data that peer review doesn’t work: fraudulent papers get published all the time.

  The rise and fall of peer reviewexperimental-history.com

Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

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  Default cloud backup has quietly put a copy of nearly everyone’s private papers in a few data centres, and that is a surveillance weapon.

  data centers

  Their words

  It terrifies me, because these data repositories are not only a risk to individual user privacy, they’re effectively a surveillance super-weapon.

  Why encrypted backup is so importantblog.cryptographyengineering.com

Writes Nintil, long researched essays on metascience, biology, economics and whatever he has decided to read the literature on.

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  Pre-grant peer review predicts which research will have impact substantially better than chance does.

  Their words

  I have reviewed before the effectiveness of peer review at figuring out "what's good" in the context of grant awards, finding that peer review as currently practiced does substantially better than chance at predicting future impact, especially for the most impactful of the papers; but at the same time is is far from perfect, leaving plenty of variance unexplained.

  nintil.com

Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.

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  Adobe Acrobat Reader

  Their words

  To read papers, I use Adobe Acrobat Reader and sync them in the cloud. This lets me read, highlight, and sync my papers across devices (work laptop, personal laptop, iPad). Instapaper does the same for online articles.

  eugeneyan.com

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  Instapaper

  Their words

  To read papers, I use Adobe Acrobat Reader and sync them in the cloud. This lets me read, highlight, and sync my papers across devices (work laptop, personal laptop, iPad). Instapaper does the same for online articles.

  eugeneyan.com

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

• Usestheir ownrcmnd.app

  Nexus 9

  Their words

  I have a Nexus 5X Android phone, and also use a Nexus 9 tablet for surfing the web and reading ebooks and technical papers.

  usesthis.com

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  LaTeX

  Their words

  For technical papers, I and my coauthors usually use LaTeX. For giving presentations, I almost exclusively use Google Slides.

  usesthis.com

Full professor of computer science at PUC-Rio in Rio de Janeiro and the lead architect of the Lua programming language, which he has worked on since 1993. Author of Programming in Lua.

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  LuaTeX

  Their words

  I format my papers with LuaTeX.

  usesthis.com

Mathematical physicist at UC Riverside. Wrote This Week's Finds in Mathematical Physics and now the Azimuth blog on mathematics, physics and environmental science.

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  IrfanView

  Their words

  I spend a lot of time writing papers and preparing talks with free software: emacs for text editing, LaTeX for typesetting, and IrfanView for editing images.

  usesthis.com

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  emacs

  Their words

  I spend a lot of time writing papers and preparing talks with free software: emacs for text editing, LaTeX for typesetting, and IrfanView for editing images.

  usesthis.com

Complexity scientist and writer, author of The Half-Life of Facts and Overcomplicated; scientist in residence at Lux Capital.

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  TeXShop

  Their words

  For scientific papers, I use TeXShop, which is a great implementation of LaTeX.

  usesthis.com

Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.

• Usestheir ownrcmnd.app

  knitr

  Their words

  I use my knitr package to generate reports directly from code (literate programming); the "reports" may include homework, blog posts, websites, papers and books.

  usesthis.com

Interactive narrative designer and critic; author of interactive fiction including Galatea and Counterfeit Monkey, and a long-time contributor to the Inform development system.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Papers

  Their words

  Academic PDFs I organize with Papers.

  usesthis.com

Programmer and writer; was Twitter's API lead, co-authored Programming Scala and co-founded Simple.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  Yep

  Their words

  I keep a big library of PDFs (academic papers, presentations, books, &c.) in Yep.

  usesthis.com