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Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI scaling laws require exponentially more compute and resources to produce only linear gains in model intelligence.

  Their words

  all of our scaling laws show that you need exponential compute and resources to make linear improvements in intelligence.

  Why I still haven’t bought into true RSIinterconnects.ai

CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The recent wave of AI has everyone excited about building, which is an immeasurably good development for the world.

  Their words

  The coolest thing about the recent wave of AI is that everyone is excited about building. All short-term drama aside, this is an immeasurably good development for the world.

  @rauchg on Xx.com

Co-founder of Superlogical, started in 2026 to build server-side terminal infrastructure; creator of Ghostty. Co-founded HashiCorp and created Vagrant and Terraform before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Engineers should be able to explain any customer-facing system they have shipped and defend the decisions they made.

  Their words

  I should be able to pull you aside at any moment and ask you to explain any customer-facing system you've shipped. You should be able to clearly explain how it works and defend the decisions you made.

  @mitchellh on Xx.com

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI is becoming as fundamental to knowledge work as electricity was to industry.

  energyAmerica

  Their words

  For knowledge work, which is roughly half of the U.S. economy, AI is as fundamental as electricity (or quickly will be so, with rapid improvements to agents in the next 18 months).

  When will average people feel AI’s impact?interconnects.ai

Lawyer and everyday-carry gear reviewer who publishes scored knife, flashlight and multitool reviews at Everyday Commentary.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  High-end knife steel upgrades have hit diminishing returns, needing far more resources for gains that aren't noticeable based on specs alone.

  Their words

  We are at a point metallurgically where video games were at the start of the last console generation-upgrades aren't necessarily noticeable based on specs alone. And noticeable improvements require a huge increase in resources.

  Spyderco SpyNano Revieweverydaycommentary.com

Gear reviewer who publishes long-form hi-fi audio and camera equipment reviews, plus video reviews, at stevehuffphoto.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A revised version of an established product is usually just different from the original, not actually better.

  Their words

  Many companies take a perfectly great speaker and every year or two release a "V2" with claims of big improvements. Usually it's just differences rather than being better.

  My Fave Speakers Ever and Why. Fleetwood Helios.stevehuffphoto.com

CEO of Vercel; creator of Next.js and Socket.IO. Writes at rauchg.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Optimizing JavaScript chunking strategy can produce significant efficiency gains at internet scale

  JavaScript

  Their words

  Improving Next.js chunking can yield massive efficiency improvements at internet scale.

  @rauchg on Xx.com

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI is education's microscope: the first instrument that gives learning science a closed measurement loop at the level of one child.

  Their words

  AI because it's on a onetoone basis is giving us a data loop that nobody in learning science no one in education has ever had and we have it. It's a closed loop and that magical data loop is what's allowing us to get the five to 10 times improvements in education because it's our microscope.

  youtube.com

Engineering leader on Google Chrome; writes about web performance and, lately, about working with AI coding tools.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A site's need to monetise is not a defence of an experience that shifts the page under the reader; those are separate questions.

  Their words

  even if you set aside, you know, maybe there's some validity around a business needs to monetize, those things shouldn't cause a really bad experience.

  youtube.com

Lawyer and everyday-carry gear reviewer who publishes scored knife, flashlight and multitool reviews at Everyday Commentary.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Manufacturers generally prefer cutting per-unit production costs over retooling a design for small improvements.

  Their words

  Over time companies would vastly prefer to decrease the cost per unit rather than retool for a small tweak.

  Benchmade Mini Bugout in S90V Revieweverydaycommentary.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The way to settle an argument about how quiet supersonic flight must be is to remove the boom entirely, so there is nothing left to argue about.

  Their words

  by making the sonic boom disappear entirely, we are able to put aside a question that had long plagued people talking about supersonic flight, which is how quiet is quiet enough? If there's no boom at all, there's nothing to argue about.

  youtube.com

Physician and neuroscientist at the University of Washington; researches brain health, metabolism and athletic performance.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Putting older adults into activities that are genuinely new to them improves cognitive function in randomised trials, with executive function the most reliable gain.

  Their words

  However, there's an increasing body of literature that shows that by engaging older adults in novel cognitive activities, you see improvements in function. So that can be language learning. Uh that can be uh complex like coordinative movement or exercise. You see the same things with um like musical training like people learning a new musical instrument or learning um musical theory trying to identify different patterns in music. And you see in randomized control trials improvements particularly in executive function that seems to be most common across those different interventions.

  youtube.com

Machine-learning researcher; has written the Lil'Log survey posts on how a model technique works since 2017, and worked at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly leading its safety systems team.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Harness improvements help deploy a model better, but the model's underlying intelligence remains the core driver of capability.

  Their words

  harness improvement enables better deployment of the model but intelligence is still the core.

  Harness Engineering for Self-Improvementlilianweng.github.io

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  It would be disappointing and surprising if the next five years of AI progress in mathematics produced no economically valuable improvements traceable to it.

  Their words

  but it would be a little bit disappointing and a little bit surprising if there weren't over the next 5 years like, uh, economically valuable improvements that were made that were directly like referable to the like AI progress in math.

  youtube.com

Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Over-indexing on small daily improvements causes a business to miss bigger, more impactful opportunities.

  Their words

  if you over-index on the idea of small improvements, then you stop seeing the pivotal, critical mass movements that you might make.

  thebootstrappedfounder.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Factory-built construction has not raised productivity: the countries that prefabricate most, Sweden and Japan, have had flat construction productivity for decades.

  Their words

  Sweden, for instance, is often praised for its high adoption of prefabricated construction, but since the 1990s Sweden has had roughly flat construction labor productivity, even as it has made more extensive use of prefabrication.

  construction-physics.com

Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Cheap clean energy has broken the old trade-off between raising living standards and cutting environmental harm.

  energy

  Their words

  The rapid drop in renewable energy costs in the last decade (alongside huge improvements in battery technologies) has started to break this deadlock.

  sustainabilitybynumbers.com

Writer of kottke.org, one of the oldest blogs on the web, published since 1998 and supported by its members. He writes about art, technology, science, design and visual culture.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Fantastic Four

  Their words

  Fantastic Four. It was ok? Aside from a few things, I’m having trouble getting excited about post-Infinity Saga Marvel. There was just a special alchemy about that whole arc that is proving impossible to reproduce. (B)

  kottke.org

Co-founder and chief scientist of Safe Superintelligence Inc., and previously co-founder and chief scientist of OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The human value function is extraordinarily robust — addiction aside — which is why a person can judge their own performance at a skill they have only just started.

  Addiction

  Their words

  They have a general sense which is also by the way extremely robust in people like whatever it is the human value function whatever the human value function is with a few exceptions around addiction it's actually very very robust

  youtube.com

Chairman and chief executive of Microsoft since 2014; joined the company in 1992 and ran its cloud business before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most of the gain in tokens per dollar per watt comes from software, not from new hardware — 5x, 10x, sometimes 40x on one model family.

  Their words

  the improvement software improvements of really throughput in terms of tokens per dollar per watt that we're able to get uh you know quarter over quarter year over year is massive uh right so it's 5x 10x maybe 40x in some of these cases

  Satya Nadella – How Microsoft thinks about AGIyoutube.com

Economist and Nobel laureate. Wrote a New York Times column for 25 years until December 2024 and now publishes several times a week on Substack.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The hard-headed realists who wrote America's 2001 energy policy expected renewables to stay trivial, and were wrong by an enormous margin.

  energyAmerica

  Their words

  But politics aside, what’s notable about that 2001 report, put together by men who regarded themselves as hard-headed realists, is that it envisaged an energy future reliant almost entirely on fossil fuels plus a bit of nuclear energy.

  The Rise of Renewable Energypaulkrugman.substack.com

Labour politician. Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from July 2024 to June 2026, and MP for Holborn and St Pancras from 2015 until standing down in 2026. Director of Public Prosecutions before entering Parliament.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Means-testing the winter fuel payment is a tough decision that has to be taken, and it should stand.

  Their words, before

  No Prime Minister wants to do what we have to do in relation to the winter fuel allowance, but we have to take the tough decision to stabilise our economy to ensure that we can grow it for the future.

  Their words now

  However, I recognise that people are still feeling the pressure of the cost of living crisis, including pensioners, and as the economy improves, we want to make sure that people feel those improvements each day as their lives go forward. That is why we want to ensure that more pensioners are eligible for winter fuel payments as we go forward.

Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Innovation depends on being near the factory floor; you cannot improve what is thirty hours of travel away.

  Their words

  When the factory floor is down the hall, instead of 30 hours of travel away, it’s easier to make improvements and invent.

  molsonhart.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

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

  AI tooling and interface design lags behind the underlying models' actual capabilities.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Overall, though, this experience reinforced my belief that the tooling and interface design around LLMs is lagging way behind the actual capabilities, and is an area of active experimentation and development, even aside from any future model improvements.

  Building personal software with Claudeblog.nelhage.com

Social scientist at King's College London; writes The Great Gender Divergence on why societies differ in how they treat women.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The fall in childbearing in rich countries is concentrated among the less educated, not among female graduates.

  Their words

  Slurs of ‘childless cat ladies’ usually target female graduates, but in the US, Sweden and Finland the real decline is happening among people with less education.

  Why is Fertility Collapsing, Globally?ggd.world

Environmental researcher; writes on land use, agriculture and whether decoupling human welfare from nature is possible.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Without the yield improvements of the last half-century the world would have cleared more than twice as much cropland.

  Their words

  Without yield improvements, therefore, we would have seen more than double the cropland expansion.

  Raising Agricultural Yields Spares Landthebreakthrough.org

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Solar has got cheaper faster than even its most optimistic forecasters expected.

  solar

  Their words

  A number of commentators have consistently predicted that solar cost improvements will level out “this year” since about 1990, and yet if anything deployment, cost decline, and the learning rate have only improved.

  Radical Energy Abundancecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  An inability to see the viewpoints of people unlike oneself is a genuine weakness in a social scientist, not merely a separate moral failing.

  economists

  Their words

  It is a sign that Hayek was not so great at seeing the viewpoints of other people, and that (political moralizing aside) also should count as a weakness of him as an economist and social scientist.

  tylercowen.com

American backpacking guide, writer and endurance athlete who has hiked more than 30,000 miles; author of The Ultimate Hiker's Gear Guide and publisher of gear reviews and trip-planning tutorials at andrewskurka.com.

• Mixed onaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Garmin inReach Mini 2

  Their words

  I own an inReach Mini, used it for several years, and have no intention of upgrading to the Mini 2 because I don't see $400 of value in these improvements (or even $250, if I was able to sell my used Mini for $150).

  andrewskurka.com

Former NASA flight director and space shuttle programme manager; writes about how the shuttle was actually flown and what went wrong.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Wanting badly to launch is itself a hazard: the pressure to fly is what turns small anomalies into accidents.

  Their words

  Temptation is very high to wave away issues, ignore anomalies, squeeze the rules, or brush aside inconsistencies just to GET ON WITH IT.

  Launch Feverwaynehale.wordpress.com

Civil engineer and land use planner, founder and president of Strong Towns, author of Escaping the Housing Trap. Argues that the American pattern of development since the Second World War does not generate enough wealth to maintain the infrastructure it obliges cities to keep.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Cities have only ever built wealth incrementally, by many small improvements over a long time, not by big projects.

  Their words

  Yet, incremental investment is how cities have always built wealth.

  The Power of Growing Incrementallystrongtowns.org