Related posts
Sabine Hossenfelder
x.com
fun fact: in German, writers are usually paid by character not by word, because the word-length distribution has such a long tail
length tail writers
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 Site Blog x.com Korrents Mastodon Newsletter Podcast Recommends Bluesky Papers
Top people
Nelson Elhage
Dmitri Dolgov
Alex Ross
Kyle Chayka
Jasmine Sun
Paul Graham
ZeroAir
Maria Popova
Scott Hanselman
Phillips P. O'Brien
Eric Meyer
Amit Merchant
Showing Profile →
Show everything
Hiding Show them again
Show them again
Further back ↓
Hiding Show them again
18 September
Pseudonymous reviewer who publishes measured, standardised flashlight and knife reviews at zeroair.org, including runtime, output and tint measurements.
17 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.
9 September
Programmer, teacher and speaker; long-time Microsoft developer-community figure, host of the Hanselminutes podcast and author of the hanselman.com blog.
Have you seen the new full length Visual Studio @code documentary? It was a crazy time! Related
6 September
Professor of strategic studies at St Andrews; wrote How the War Was Won and The Strategists, and writes weekly on the war in Ukraine.
2 September
Web standards author and speaker; wrote the CSS: The Definitive Guide series and co-founded the An Event Apart conference.
I’m trying to reattach interior pieces of a decades-old violin case. The pieces were originally affixed by staples that have a 4.5mm crown, 10mm leg length, and are made from wire that’s 0.75mm thick. I have searched a bunch permutations of those dimensions (metric and imperial-converted) with various terms (“narrow crown”, “upholstery”, “trim”, etc.) and am still coming up empty for what these staples are and where I could get new ones, and what kind of device I would need. Anyone here know? Related
Indian software developer and prolific blogger on PHP, Laravel and JavaScript; open-source enthusiast publishing near-daily at amitmerchant.com.
30 August
CEO of SafeGraph, host of the World of DaaS podcast, and author of the Summation newsletter; previously founded LiveRamp.
does anyone read op/ed sections anymore? When I was younger it seemed like a lot of the most interesting opinions were on the op-ed pages of newspapers. You had these really interesting opinion columnists like George Will, Thomas Friedman, and others that wrote very interesting columns back in the day (when I was a kid). but today it seems the op-ed pages are for ghosts and people over 70 years old. all the interesting opinion writers have moved to creating their own newsletter, writing on X, etc. I still read the "print" edition of the Wall Street Journal every day - cover to cover ... with… Related
17 August
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
10 August
Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and co-founder and CEO of World Labs.
Their words
that child who learns about what you say kitty cat would not have the chance to download the internet of images of cat. They likely have seen three cats, 10 cats at most, but yet they're able to identify that tail as a cattail instead of a fox tail through a different kind of learning pathway.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
9 August
China economy researcher based in Beijing who writes on his personal blog about Chinese political economy, history, books and music.
“Trump tuba tariffs” is such a gift to headline writers Quoting @scottlincicome Also, LOL Related
3 August
Co-CEO of Waymo and a founding member of Google's self-driving car project, which he joined in 2009.
From one piece
Waymo Co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov: The Demo Is Only 1% Of The Work
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
Their words
And at scale, the long tail is the problem space, is your entire problem statement. When you drive millions of miles per week, a rare event that might happen once in a million miles, that just becomes your daily reality.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
Their words
And that's why every hype cycle produces a wave of absolutely spectacular demos and very few real products. And the recurring mistake of every cycle is spending on the demo when you should be saving for the nines.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
29 July
Co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic; blogs at ma.tt.
Jose-Miguel x Ryo Fukui I was only able to catch the tail end, but Jose-Miguel Yamal, alongside Thomas Helton and Sam Knight, did an awesome tribute celebrating the 50th anniversary of Ryo Fukui’s Scenery at Echoes in Houston. Jose-Miguel is t…
Related
22 July
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.
When evaling models, we anchor on the median task. But this is like how devs estimate the median task accurately but underestimate the mean which tends to be ~2x estimated (thus "double your estimates"). This applies to models too—we optimize for time/cost on median tasks. But it's the tail tasks that determine a project's completion, and reliable models (like Fable and Opus) are the diff between success and failure. Work with models as collaborators, not tools. Go beyond pair-programming, where given a narrow spec, the tool just executes in minutes. Instead, explain your intent and what succ… Quoting @Steve_Yegge Fable is careful. None of the other models are careful. GPT-5.6 Sol, Opus, Kimi, Grok. You can compare them all day long on capabilities, and it doesn't matter, because in order to use a model for real production work, it must first and foremost be careful. That's the only dimension that matters to… Related
15 July
Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.
12 July
Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.
29 June
Security researcher; built Report URI and Security Headers, and writes about web security in practice.
Their words
HTTPS is now simply how the web works, and the long tail of plain-HTTP sites is shrinking every year.
Show the whole quote
scotthelme.co.uk
17 June
Music critic of The New Yorker since 1996 and author of The Rest Is Noise, Listen to This and Wagnerism.
From one piece
Liner notes to What Belongs to You
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
12 June
Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.
7 June
Creator of the iPod and co-creator of the iPhone at Apple, founder of Nest, and author of Build.
Their words
there's too many people who chase their tail and chase whatever the hottest thing is. When it's already hot, it's already too late to be in it.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
4 June
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.
This Is Something You Have To Get Good At I’ll tell you, very few people become writers because they want to stand up in front of a room full of strangers and talk. Often, in fact, it’s the opposite. What draws most people to writing in the first place is that…
Related
2 June
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
My full talk on the future of AI & media is up! I used @alexolegimas's prompt of "What will be scarce?" to propose 4 ways that media is changing, and how writers can still win in the AI age: 1) Secrets > summaries Reporting is the act of taking private knowledge and making it public: when you get a source to tell you about corporate malfeasance, or venture to a remote town that few people have been to, or sneak your way into an underground party, you are working in a space where there is no training data. 2) Live interaction > static content We’re not far from a world where AI can replicate a… Quoting @Substack How AI will change media: “The value of polish is going to go down and the value of personal charisma, style, and weirdness is going to go up,” says @jasminewsun Related
20 May
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.
7 April
Programmer based in Vancouver who writes at scattered-thoughts.net about databases, programming language design and developer tools; author of the Imp, Dida and Zest language experiments.
29 March
Engineer and writer on machine-learning systems; author of Designing Machine Learning Systems and AI Engineering. "I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design."
Their words
So, I think of them as the top of the long long tail long tail problem. Like, something very common issues that a lot of people experience. AI will get really good at it. And over time AI will cover more more edge cases, but the edge cases will never go away.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
23 March
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
19 March
Usability pioneer; co-founder of Nielsen Norman Group and founder of UX Tigers; author of the ten usability heuristics and of Jakob's Law.
4 March
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.
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
7 January
Robert Gray Dodge Professor of Network Science at Northeastern University; discovered scale-free networks and, with Reka Albert, proposed the Barabasi-Albert model.
From blood vessels to neurons, physical networks are modeled as wires optimized for length. In @Nature we how surface minimization, via a surprising link to string theory, explains brain and vascular architecture, including neuronal sprouting. Paper: Related
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.
Their words
Product managers need to be good writers, and this is how you learn from one of the masters of the craft.
Show the whole quote
bringthedonuts.com
29 December 2025
Venture capitalist and founder of Theory Ventures, previously a partner at Redpoint. Writes a near-daily blog on startups, SaaS metrics, data and AI.
Their words
White, New Yorker editor, Charlotte’s Web author, Elements of Style co-creator, is among my favorite writers.
Show the whole quote
tomtunguz.com
18 December 2025
Artist and writer based in Oakland, California; author of How to Do Nothing and Saving Time, and a longtime teacher of digital art.
I interviewed some writers about… SPORTS!! (bonus: you get to hear about me taking PE Bowling in high school) thebeliever.net
Related
15 November 2025
Freelance research analyst and writer of the blog Aceso Under Glass, known for 'epistemic spot checks' of non-fiction claims.
27 August 2025
Staff writer at The New Yorker, where he writes the Infinite Scroll column, and author of Filterworld and The Longing for Less.
4 July 2025
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.
25 May 2025
Psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. Writes Psychiatry at the Margins on the philosophical and scientific arguments inside psychiatry and the psy-sciences.
Their words
Recently I reviewed Adrian Kind’s 2025 book, “How Does the Psychiatrist Know?: On the Epistemology of Psychiatric Diagnostic Reasoning,” on this substack. I had mentioned that Kind’s book is the first systematic, in-depth, book-length philosophical investigation into how psychiatrists arrive at their diagnostic conclusions.
Show the whole quote
psychiatrymargins.com
9 March 2025
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.
1 March 2025
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.
@kees Actually you're probably the right person to ask: For unrelated reasons, I've noticed that -fzero-call-used-regs triggers before indirect tail calls, but *not* computed gotos, despite both compiling into similar indirect `jmp`s. Should those be made consistent? Do we worry about indirect `jmp`s being useful ROP gadgets? It seems clear they *could* be, but maybe in practice they're not actually helpful? Example: godbolt.org
Related
7 February 2025
American travel writer and broadcaster. Runs Rick Steves' Europe and writes the guidebooks, packing advice and travel-tip articles published on ricksteves.com.
Their words
Use a sturdy journal designed to last a lifetime, rather than a floppy spiral notebook. A great brand with a cult following among travel writers is Moleskine.
Show the whole quote
ricksteves.com
2 December 2024
Scottish crime writer, author of the Tony Hill and Karen Pirie novels; former journalist and broadcaster.
Royal Literary Fund applications for hardship grants for professional writers rose almost five-fold to 400% in the first financial quarter of 2024. RLF makes grants to authors who have traditionally published at least two books who are experiencing “reduced income” or “a change in circumstances”. Related
16 October 2024
Writer on a lost civilisation of the Ice Age; wrote Fingerprints of the Gods and presented Ancient Apocalypse. Archaeologists reject the claims, which he disputes at length.
Their words
But the Great Pyramid, to go to that length to create a tomb, to make it a scale model of the earth, to orient it perfectly to true north, to make it 6 million tons. This is not a tomb. This is something else. This is a curiosity device.
Show the whole quote
youtube.com
1 October 2024
Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.
From one piece
Writes and Write-Nots
2 beliefs, in the piece's order there
27 September 2024
Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.
Their words
Next to proper ownership of your own work, my favorite thing about POSSE is that it massively expands what you can publish, far beyond the limitations imposed by most social media (and especially microblogging) platforms that try to enforce some uniformity in post style, length, and appearance.
Show the whole quote
citationneeded.news
31 August 2024
American science-fiction writer, author of the collections Stories of Your Life and Others and Exhalation, and an essayist on artificial intelligence for The New Yorker.
3 July 2024
Monetary economist known for NGDP-level targeting. Wrote TheMoneyIllusion until it closed in 2024 and now writes The Pursuit of Happiness.
Their words
About Dry Grasses (Turkey, CC) 3.9 This is my favorite film directed by Ceylan, and that’s high praise. At times it feels like a long Russian novel. Engrossing from beginning to end, despite its 3¼ hour length. This one also could have been entitled “Evil Does Not Exist”.
Show the whole quote
themoneyillusion.com
28 May 2024
Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.
I’m running a blog post competition! Winners get cash, a feature on Experimental History, and added to my recommendations. I’ve been hurting for good stuff to read recently, so I’m hoping to discover some new writers and help them reach more people. experimental-history.com
Related
10 November 2023
Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.
1 December 2021
Physicist and science communicator. Writes Backreaction and makes videos explaining new physics and astronomy results, frequently to argue that the headline about them overstates the case.
Nothing matches. Show everything
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