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American-Polish journalist and historian, staff writer at The Atlantic; author of Gulag, Iron Curtain, Twilight of Democracy and Autocracy, Inc.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Diplomatic gains with an ally can be secured through quiet negotiation rather than public threats and bluster.

  Their words

  These are all additions to the existing treaty that could have been added without the drama, anger and stupid memes, without Trump blustering about "deals" and without terrifying the inhabitants of Greenland.

  Greenland Foreveranneapplebaum.substack.com

Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.

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  A startup's speed is set by boring internal infrastructure — purchasing, recruiting, spending — and that matters as much as understanding the technology itself.

  startups

  Their words

  And so speed determines success and failure and speed is determined by infrastructure. This is driven by really boring sounding things like how well do your purchasing and recruiting and spending processes work. This is as important as how well do you understand understand the object level technical content of the thing that you're building.

  Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.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

Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.

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  How big a government you want determines necessary tax rates, but any such system depends on people actually paying their taxes.

  government

  Their words

  The necessary tax rates depend on how big a government you want, but all these systems rely on people paying taxes.

  Stop Microlooting the Tax Codejoshbarro.com

Uber's first Chief Technology Officer, from 2013 to 2020; later CTO of Coupang and of Faire.

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  Repeated rewrites are the correct answer under fast growth, because a system specified to scale forever would take so long to build that the company would die before it shipped.

  Their words

  Let's say if my requirement for the engineer was build a system that will scale infinitely to the test of time, it might take a year. We never get there. We'll die before then.

  Scaling Uber with Thuan Pham (Uber's first CTO)youtube.com

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

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  Attitude, not the surrounding circumstances, determines how hard parenting feels.

  Their words

  none of the imagined deficiencies in your situation are more limiting than your attitude.

  nateliason.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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  How people feel at work determines how well they work, and humor is one lever on that feeling.

  Their words

  Humor changes how people feel at work. And how people feel at work changes how they work.

  Why Great Leaders Embrace Humor and Playfulnessbringthedonuts.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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  Alien life should converge on things like legs and wings, but the humanoid body plan is a random accident nobody should expect to see repeated.

  Their words

  And this is important, so yes, you should expect legs or jointed sticks, how many joints they're going to be? Anybody's guess. Do you expect humanoids, things with a sensing apparatus on top of a shoulder with two arms and two legs? That's probably a pretty random set of occurrences that led to that.

  youtube.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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  Commercial shipbuilding keeps moving to whichever country has the cheapest labour, and America has never been that country.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  Shipbuilding is labor intensive, and we see a repeated pattern of it moving to countries with low-cost labor: from Britain to Japan, then to Korea, then to China.

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

American author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked. Writes essays and book reviews at markmanson.net.

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  A person's identity is essentially the sum of their accumulated associations and repeated habits.

  Their words

  Take the sum total of those associations and you get a person's identity.

  How to Conquer Your Biggest Fearmarkmanson.net

American author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck and Everything Is F*cked. Writes essays and book reviews at markmanson.net.

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  How a person treats themselves determines who they let into their life and how those people treat them.

  Their words

  If you treat yourself poorly, then you will also unconsciously seek out and tolerate others who treat you poorly.

  markmanson.net

Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.

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  Repeated vague platitudes without follow-up specifics signal weak first-principles thinking.

  Their words

  If they don't follow this up with a more specific, precise or nuanced claim, they may not be a strong first-principles thinker.

  How I build and run behavioral interviewsbenkuhn.net

Writes about the biotech industry, drug development and forecasting — “I write to learn, mostly about biotech.”

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  A drug discovery scientist starting today will probably retire without ever having worked on a drug that reached the market.

  Their words

  Such prolificacy is unlikely to be repeated any time soon; if current trends hold, a drug discovery scientist starting their career today is likely to retire without ever having worked on a single drug that makes it to market.

  atelfo.github.io

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

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  Historical myths are close to unkillable: once in print they keep being repeated for decades or centuries after being disproved.

  Their words

  Historical myths are especially zombie-like. Even when disproven, they just. won’t. die.

  ageofinvention.xyz

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.

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  K: A History of Baseball in Ten Pitches

  Their words

  As you might expect from a Times reporter, the writing craft is superb. As someone who came to baseball relatively late (my twenties), however, I occasionally found myself drowning in repeated references to players I didn't recognize.

  calnewport.com

Working on @ampcode. Writing registerspill.thorstenball.com. Once authored interpreterbook.com and compilerbook.com.

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  The effort typing requires, not raw typing speed, is what determines whether it becomes a real obstacle to writing.

  Their words

  It doesn't matter if you can type 90 words per minutes or 130, but if it takes you effort to type something and, if given the choice, you'd rather not do it, then we have a problem.

  No, typing can be the bottleneckthorstenball.com