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Designer, product manager, YouTuber and developer who has written about technology at Birchtree since 2010. He makes the Quick Reviews and Quick Notes apps and the A Better Computer YouTube channel.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Apps already built for iPad don't need to be redesigned from scratch to work well on larger foldable displays.

  Their words

  app developers don't have to start from square one and reconceptualize their apps for larger displays because a lot of them have already done that by supporting the iPad.

  birchtree.me

Venture capitalist and founder of Theory Ventures, previously a partner at Redpoint. Writes a near-daily blog on startups, SaaS metrics, data and AI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Safely routing AI tasks to cheaper models requires accumulated observation of many prior task outcomes.

  Their words

  Routing to a cheap model is only safe if you know which tasks it clears, & that knowledge comes from watching ten thousand versions of the same work.

  The Harness Margin Opportunitytomtunguz.com

Creator of the Keras deep-learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark.

• Recommendstheir ownrcmnd.app

  Deep Learning with Python

  Their words

  If you're 17 (or any age) and you want to learn to build LLMs from scratch, read chapters 15-16 of Deep Learning with Python

  x.com

Co-founder of Y Combinator and Viaweb; essayist at paulgraham.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The best thing a 17-year-old could do today is learn to build LLMs from scratch and train the most powerful ones they can get hardware for.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Someone asked what I'd do if I were 17. I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch, and then train ones as powerful as I could with whatever hardware I could get access to.

  @paulg on Xx.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Coding something from scratch is one of the best ways to truly understand how it works.

  Their words

  So this one will not be coding-related, but coding from scratch is actually a very, very useful technique because it really helps you understand how something is implemented.

  How Claude Watermarks AI-Generated Textmagazine.sebastianraschka.com

Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The population of modern humans that expanded out of Africa around 50,000-60,000 years ago numbered only a few thousand individuals at most.

  Their words

  All the evidence, both ancient and modern, points to a tiny non-African ancestry population between 50 and 60,000 years ago, a few thousand individuals at most

  razibkhan.com

US science and technology adviser to the president, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy; previously US chief technology officer and chief operating officer of Scale AI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Legislating AI is riskier than an executive order, because the next administration can revoke a bad executive order and nobody can revoke a bad law.

  Their words

  The thing about executive orders, which is a little secret, is when administration changes, you can just revoke the executive order and and start from scratch again. Um when something is a law, you you can't do that.

  youtube.com

Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Writes at kk.org and runs its long-running recommendation projects, True Films and Cool Tools.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The most fertile way to study neuroscience today is to work on AI models rather than on brains.

  Their words

  I'd bet we learn more about our own brains from building a thousand AIs under a real theory of intelligence than we've learned from a century of neuroscience.

  Without a theory of intelligencekk.org

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

• Readrcmnd.app

  The Hobbit

  Their words

  Having read this after LOTR, it was fun but underwhelming. Starting from scratch, it’s definitely better to start with The Hobbit.

  rakhim.org

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Code

  Their words

  Woah, what a ride! An excellent explanation of how computers work, starting from scratch. Really, from scratch.

  rakhim.org

Founder and CEO of Valar Atomics, a nuclear-reactor company founded in 2023.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Fission will make energy a thousand times cheaper than it is today; the only open question is whether that takes decades or centuries.

  energy

  Their words

  I know that nuclear fision will make energy a thousand times cheaper than it is today. somebody will do that and it's really up to us as a team whether or not that's going to be in the future decades or the future centuries

  youtube.com

Graphic designer and type designer, who created the original Macintosh icons and typefaces at Apple from 1982 and has since designed interface graphics for NeXT, Microsoft, Facebook and Pinterest.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You can be creative within any set of constraints, so long as you understand what they are and get excited about them rather than resent them.

  Their words

  usually I think you can be creative in any constraints. You can make some pretty fun art with beach trash while you're walking around. And this you can be creative, but it's good to understand what the constraints are, and then be excited about that as opposed to being upset that you don't have a thousand colors.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CTO of Honeycomb; previously an infrastructure engineer at Parse, Facebook and Linden Lab, and co-author of Observability Engineering.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  You can now generate ten thousand variants of a function faster than you could write it once, and that economics pushes software towards replacement rather than repair.

  Their words

  I mean, if you if you think about it, you could generate 10,000 variants of a function faster than you could write it once.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Deep tech companies rarely fail because the technology does not work; they fail because nobody built the systems to run the organisation around it.

  Their words

  It's like it's it's uncommon that these deep tech companies that fail because the technology doesn't work. They fail because once you end up with this organization of hundreds of people and thousand hundreds of thousands of square feet of physical infrastructure, you haven't built the systems to manage that.

  Max Hodak: Average Is Not Good Enoughyoutube.com

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

From one piece Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Batching exists only because moving data costs about a thousand times more energy than computing on it.

  energy

  Their words

  Um because if you didn't have that thousandx difference then you know you wouldn't have to do batching but you have to do batching of you know many examples or maybe many tokens at once in order to amortize that data movement

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Today's models see a thousand times more data than an eighteen-year-old and are no better for it, so far more data-efficient algorithms must be possible.

  Their words

  If you think about our large scale models today, they probably see a thousand times as much data as a human does by the age of 18. Yet, the human by the age of 18 is better in a lot of things and, you know, on par uh with those frontier models that have seen way more data. So could you come up with much more data efficient systems that can learn continuously learn from their own actions?

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

Writer and consultant on formal methods and software correctness; author of Practical TLA+ and Logic for Programmers.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Within ten years software development will survive but become ordinary white-collar work, with no more two-hundred-thousand-dollar salaries or unlimited vacation.

  AI and jobs

  Their words

  I predict that in the next 10 years software development will survive, but it will become like any other white-collar professional work. No more $200,000 salaries, unlimited vacation, or incredible employee bargaining power.

  Formal methods with Hillel Wayneyoutube.com

Polyglot who speaks twenty languages and co-founded LingQ; argues that comprehensible input, not study, is what does the work.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A beginner cannot learn from material made for native speakers: at the start, authentic media is noise.

  Their words

  If you are starting a language completely from scratch, authentic media is just noise. You’ll absorb very little. You need highly repetitive, simple input.

  blog.thelinguist.com

Founder of HumanLayer; wrote 12-Factor Agents, on how to build AI agents that hold up in production.

From one piece Context engineering with Dex Horthy 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Research and planning documents are tactical execution artefacts to be thrown away and regenerated, because tokens are cheap and a doc that has drifted from the codebase costs you time.

  Their words

  I do the research I do the plan I do the implementation I throw the docs out and the next time I need research I just do it from scratch because tokens are cheap and my time is expensive

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The point of context engineering is to do as much work as possible in the smart zone — roughly the first hundred thousand tokens of the context window.

  Their words

  How do we control that in such a way that we get the best results possible which means doing as much work as possible in the smart zone the you know first 100,000 tokens of the context window.

  Context engineering with Dex Horthyyoutube.com

Programmer; wrote Extreme Programming Explained and Test-Driven Development, signed the Agile Manifesto, and writes Tidy First?.

From one piece How Kent Beck shapes the software engineering industry 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Letting non-programmers build their own unmaintainable software is still a large step forward, because the alternative was a thousand-page requirements document and an eight-year wait.

  Their words

  You look under the underneath though at the code and it was just a horrible unmaintainable mess. But the fact that people could program the programs that they wanted was a a significant step forward as opposed to I'm going to write a thousandpage requirements document and then wait 8 years and not get what I want which was the alternative that we were offering at the at the time.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  People who vibe-code a replacement for a product will rebuild the visible tip of the iceberg and then discover the downstream problems they never knew existed.

  Their words

  So, we're going to see people get into those where they're like, "Well, I vibe code the tip of the iceberg. I throw away the rest of the iceberg and now I'm in trouble because now I don't know what to do. Now I get to these downstream problems that I didn't even know existed." So, we're going to see on the on the side of the the the vibe coding replacers, we're going to see that kind of a naivity play out.

  youtube.com

Historian of maritime strategy at the US Naval War College; wrote The Wars for Asia and works on why continental and maritime powers fight differently.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Land powers lose people by the million and maritime powers by the hundred thousand, and the reason is simply that the fighting happens at home.

  Their words

  So, the deaths for the the land powers are measured in uh millions, whereas the maritime powers, it's a hundreds of thousands, still not a great number.

  youtube.com

Economist at Oxford's Global Priorities Institute; works on what advanced AI would do to growth, saving and the long-run economy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  There is no single interest rate in a world of rapidly cheapening robots: measured in robots it might be ten thousand per cent.

  interest rates

  Their words

  It might be that every robot now can turn into, you know, 100 robots next year, right? So, in units of robots the interest rate is 10,000%.

  youtube.com

Founder and former CEO of Zynga, the social-games company behind FarmVille, Zynga Poker and Words with Friends; says he founded ten companies in all, and wrote Life at the Speed of Play.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A founder who does not know their own goal dies by a thousand compromises and ends up running a company they do not want to work at.

  Their words

  know your goal or suffer a death by a thousand compromises. Because what I had done my whole career and most of us do is compromise to get that next engineer, CTO, investor. You put a jerk on your board because you impressed with their firm name and the valuation and all your friends are going to be impressed and it's going to be so much easier. We make all these compromises and contort ourselves and eventually we wake up and it's company we don't want to work at.

  youtube.com

Builds developer tools — SST, and now OpenCode at Anomaly. Posts constantly on x.com and writes almost never; the blog stopped in 2021.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Answering every problem, competitor and user request with one more shipped feature does not add up to a good product; it adds up to a horrible one.

  Their words

  If you add that up, you think, "Oh, we shipped a thousand features. Now that adds it to a good product." It actually adds it to a horrible product.

  Building OpenCode with Dax Raadyoutube.com

Geneticist at Harvard; reads ancient DNA to work out how populations moved and mixed, and wrote Who We Are and How We Got Here.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Population size is not what limited human adaptation; time is. A selection coefficient of half a percent works as well in a thousand people as in a million.

  Their words

  So we're talking about strong measurable selection coefficients on the order of half a percent or more in this study and all of those are going to work in small populations or large populations. It's not going to be affected by the population size.

  youtube.com

Mac and iOS developer at the Iconfactory, where he has worked on apps including Twitterrific and Tot. He writes about development at furbo.org.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  iOS should let users rebuild a corrupted Spotlight index themselves, the way macOS does

  Their words

  On the Mac, there is a simple procedure to rebuild the Spotlight index. This same affordance is not available on iOS.

  Spotlight: Not Rightfurbo.org

Co-founder and CEO of Snap Inc., the company behind Snapchat, which he started in 2011 while studying product design at Stanford.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Preciousness about ideas is what holds designers back; if you are producing a thousand ideas it does not matter that most of them are bad.

  Their words

  when you're creating a thousand new ideas, who cares if most of them are not great ideas? That's totally fine, right? What we want to get rid of is that sense of, you know, preciousness that people have around ideas

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Asking what the smallest experiment is that would settle a claim to your own satisfaction has become a thousand times more valuable in the last year.

  Their words

  Yeah, what what's the smallest experiment I can run to verify to my own satisfaction and everybody's level of satisfaction is going to be different whether or not this claim is true. That's That's the skill that is suddenly in the last year become a thousand times more valuable is that skill of saying, "What's the least I can do to validate for my to my own satisfaction whether this claim is true?

  youtube.com

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."

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Because anyone can now rebuild whatever you make, the ordinary incentive to build software has been knocked out from under us.

  Their words

  I feel like now I can build anything I want. But at the same time, anyone can build anything I want. So, what is the incentive structure for me to do anything?

  youtube.com

Co-founder of NVIDIA and, as of 2026, its chief executive; the company designs the GPUs most large AI models are trained on.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Someone paying a thousand dollars per million tokens is just around the corner, because intelligence is a product that segments by grade like phones do.

  Their words

  You know, the idea that somebody's willing to pay $1000 per million tokens is just around the corner. It's not if, it's only when.

  youtube.com

Researcher on developer productivity; co-wrote Accelerate and the DORA research, and created the SPACE framework.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Fast feedback is no longer straightforwardly good: agent-speed loops make you rebuild your mental model dozens of times in half an hour.

  Their words

  Well, now I'm getting feedback so quickly that I'm having to sometimes rebuild my mental model dozens of times in like a 30-minute period.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Working with coding agents is exhausting rather than deskilling, and that exhaustion — not the technology — is what limits how many projects one engineer can run at once.

  coding agents

  Their words

  I think that might be what saves us. I think the fact that no, you can't have one engineer and have him do a thousand projects because after three hours of that he's going to literally pass out in a corner.

  youtube.com

Hosts the Lex Fridman Podcast — long, unhurried conversations with scientists, engineers and public figures. Several of the interviews quoted elsewhere on this site are episodes of it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Being an excellent programmer is a burden rather than an advantage when learning to work with coding agents.

  coding agents

  Their words

  It’s actually how good they are at programming is almost a burden in their ability to empathize with the system that’s starting from scratch. It’s a totally new paradigm of, like, how to program. You really, really have to empathize.

  youtube.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The right tariff rate for a country trying to rebuild its manufacturing is zero.

  Their words

  Zero tariffs are the best way to help them.

  Speed Can Reindustrialize Americaaustinvernon.site

Founder of WP Engine and Smart Bear; writes A Smart Bear, long essays on strategy, pricing and how startups actually fail.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Price selects the market: a serious buyer reads a low price as evidence that the product cannot possibly be good enough.

  Their words

  just think about a company with a thousand employees and 400 million in revenue or whatever. And um if they see a product that's, you know, $2 a month or even $100 a month, their thought is like, well, that can't be good enough. They're not mature enough. It's not going to do enough.

  youtube.com

Programmer and designer who writes at tonsky.me; author of Fira Code, DataScript and AnyBar.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Raw pageview or reader counts are not actionable information for a writer's editorial decisions.

  Their words

  analytics is not actionable: what difference does it make if a thousand people saw my article or ten thousand?

  Statistics made simpletonsky.me

American author of Liar's Poker, Moneyball, The Big Short and The Undoing Project, and host of the podcast Against the Rules.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A writer's audience does not carry from one book to the next: every book is another startup you have to make happen from scratch.

  startups

  Their words

  I see no evidence that I'm dragging people along with me. I feel like each each book feels like another startup and that I've got to go out and make it happen almost as if I've not written one.

  10 Years of Acquired (with Michael Lewis)youtube.com

Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The value of an ambitious experiment target is not hitting it but the conversation about what would have to be true to hit it.

  Their words

  And a thousand experiments by itself, like if you just did that, but you didn't learn, you didn't make an impact, and that's kind of a waste of time, right? The whole point of setting a goal is that you can have conversations about what would need to be true to actually hit that goal.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Shopify; long-time Linux user and Omarchy contributor.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  This is the golden age of humanity and the end of its beginning; in a thousand years these decades will be studied the way we study the end of the Roman Republic.

  Their words

  I I think this is golden age of humanity right now. It's the I think it's the end of the beginning. And and so I think we will um I think people in 1,000 years will um study these times uh the way we are studying um Cicero's times of the end of the Roman Republic

  youtube.com

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

  Some dinosaurs almost certainly survived the impact for hundreds of thousands of years in isolated pockets, and we will almost certainly never find them.

  Their words

  Yes, it's what ultimately killed the dinosaurs, but I'd be amazed if there wasn't some equivalent of Hawaii or New Zealand or some other tucked away island or valley where actually dinosaurs were fine for anything from a few hundred thousand to a couple of million years.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Ten cents of electricity generates a thousand dollars of economic value in AI, so the price of power barely matters to the labs.

  energy

  Their words

  well their cost of serving it is is like maybe a buck per million tokens or something like that and the cost of electricity is about 10% of that. So it's like 10 cents of electricity is generating $1,000 worth of economic value.

  youtube.com

Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  Parents have an obligation to talk up having children, because the case against is made a thousand times louder than the case for.

  Their words, before

  I think we need to correct that ratio somewhat by some testimony of just how God damn amazing it is to literally create life

  Their words now

  those of us who've chosen to do the traditional thing to get married and to have children have an obligation to kind of talk it up a little bit, which would've seen ridiculous again 50 years ago that you'd have to talk up something so fundamental of that.

Founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and of Fortnite.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Society keeps rebuilding itself around credentials, but the companies that build great things hire the people who do great work, not the people with the certificates.

  Their words

  There's ever more pressure to rebuild society more and more around credentials. Do you have this certificate? Do you have that proof? But companies that are focused on just building great products and doing great things gravitate towards people who do the great work.

  youtube.com

Senior economist at the Foundation for American Innovation; writes Second Best, and was the Niskanen Center's director of social policy before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Efforts to rebuild American industry will fail until global trade and financial imbalances rebalance

  America

  Their words

  Until the global economy rebalances, efforts to rebuild American industry are fighting economic gravity.

  The Strategy Behind the Stupiditysecondbest.ca

Programmer and streamer; was an engineer at Netflix, now teaches and argues about editors, Vim and how people learn to program.

From one piece ThePrimeagen: Programming, AI, ADHD, Productivity, Addiction, and God | Lex Fridman Podcast #461 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  To actually understand a piece of technology, rebuild it from scratch rather than read about it.

  Their words

  I highly recommend starting from scratch if you want to understand a concept. You don't know how an HTTP server works, create a TCP socket, learn how to parse HTTP.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A project only shows you whether your design decisions were any good at around five to ten thousand lines, and that is where the most learning happens.

  Their words

  There's a point in which all of your choices add up. And I typically find that right around 5 to 10,000 lines of code. The choices you've made either weigh you down or kind of free you up.

  youtube.com

Pen name of the Canadian-American writer behind mrmoneymustache.com, a blog on frugality, early retirement and index-fund investing that has run since 2011.

• Usesaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Safeco

  Their words

  So I switched to Safeco, and so far rates have been stable. I am paying about $500 per year for a $275,000 rebuild coverage with $5k deductible.

  mrmoneymustache.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

  The danger from powerful AI is not that it kills everyone but techno-fascism: a few thousand people ruling whoever is left and the economy around them.

  Their words

  it won't be one person rule them all, but it will be, the thing I worry about is it'll be few people, hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, maybe millions of people rule whoever's left and the economy around it.

  youtube.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.com

+ 2 more

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.com

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Principles for a Changing World Order

  Their words

  The Knowledge: How to Rebuild Our World From Scratch, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom, How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Principles for a Changing World Order

  balajis.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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

Growth advisor and operator who has led growth at Miro, Amplitude, Dropbox and SurveyMonkey.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  No growth initiative should ever be started from scratch.

  Their words

  And number one thing that whenever you have an initiative or whenever you have a metric that you need to go and move, do not start from scratch ever. Do not start from scratch.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Below about a thousand dollars a kilowatt of capital cost, the right way to run a plant is intermittently on raw solar with no batteries at all.

  solar

  Their words

  For loads below $1000/kW, intermittent operation with some modest solar array oversizing is the winning strategy. Above $1000/kW, we charge and discharge batteries daily to run them.

  Solar and batteries for generic use casescaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Great Sphinx and the megalithic temples beside it date to about 12,500 years ago, thousands of years before dynastic Egypt.

  Their words

  We are pretty sure that the Sphinx, at least, does date back to 12 and a half thousand years ago and with it, the megalithic temples, the so-called Valley Temple, which stands just to the east and just to the south of the Sphinx and the Sphinx temple, which stands directly in front of the Sphinx.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A computational discovery platform does not make a biotech fast, because the thousand other steps of drug development are still the bottleneck.

  Their words

  Another challenge for Class II biotechs is that even if you have a nifty computational drug discovery platform, you are still often bottlenecked by the rest of the drug development process. It takes 1,000 (or more!) small steps to advance a drug through discovery, development, and past the regulators.

  A new breed of biotechatelfo.github.io

Biologist at the MIT Media Lab; invented CRISPR gene drives and then spent years arguing for safeguards against their misuse and against engineered pandemics.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Ordering the synthetic DNA needed to rebuild the 1918 influenza virus is surprisingly easy, even from companies that screen customers' orders.

  Their words

  It should be hard — exceedingly hard — to obtain the synthetic DNA needed to recreate the virus that caused the deadly 1918 influenza pandemic without authorization. But my lab found that it’s surprisingly easy, even when ordering gene fragments from companies that check customers’ orders to detect hazardous sequences.

  media.mit.edu

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A solar system holding a trillion humans is the right thing to aim at, because a population that size would have a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins alive at once.

  solarenergy

  Their words

  I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. If we had a trillion humans, we would have, at any given time, 1,000 Mozarts and 1,000 Einsteins. That our solar system would be full of life and intelligence and energy.

  youtube.com

Social scientist turned small-scale farmer; wrote A Small Farm Future and argues against the case for feeding the world from factories.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Fifteen years of running a small organic market garden in England returned its owners a few thousand pounds a year between them.

  Their words

  My wife and I have averaged a joint annual income of £5,500 from the market garden over the last ten years.

  chrissmaje.com

Founded SpaceX in 2002, joined Tesla's board in 2004 and became its chief executive in 2008; later founded Neuralink, The Boring Company and xAI. Bought Twitter in 2022 and renamed it X, where he now posts many times a day.

From one piece Elon Musk: War, AI, Aliens, Politics, Physics, Video Games, and Humanity | Lex Fridman Podcast #400 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The United States is a historical rarity: after 1945 it could have taken the whole world without losing a soldier, and instead it rebuilt the countries it had defeated.

  America

  Their words

  After World War II, the US could have basically taken over the world in any country, we’ve got nukes, nobody else has got nukes. We don’t even have to lose soldiers. Which country do you want? And the United States could have taken over everything and it didn’t. And the United States actually helped rebuild countries.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  No electric motor suitable for a humanoid robot existed anywhere in the world, so every part of Optimus had to be designed from scratch.

  Their words

  Because you think of how many electric motors are made in the world. There’s like tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of electric motor designs. None of them were suitable for a humanoid robot, literally none.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  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

Designer, architect and scientist, who led the Mediated Matter group at MIT and founded OXMAN, a company that builds products in collaboration with living organisms.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Calling a fragrance bio-derived says nothing about what it cost nature: ten thousand rose bushes are burned through to make five millilitres of it.

  Their words

  But when you look into the fragrance and you understand that in order to get to this bio-derived fragrance, you blew through 10,000 bushes of rose to create 5 mL of a rose fragrance. And all these 10,000 bushes of rose, they take space, they take water management, and so much waste.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Utilitarianism is an abhorrent ideology, because it licenses killing three people to save a thousand.

  Their words

  Utilitarianism is an abhorrent ideology. Well, yeah, we’re going to kill those three people to save a thousand, of course, right.

  youtube.com

Psychologist and science writer; wrote Science Fictions on how research goes wrong, and writes the newsletter of the same name.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Compressing a piece of research into a journal paper's word count is itself a distortion of what was found.

  Their words

  The mere act of squeezing a complex process into a few thousand words—limited by a journal-imposed word count—is itself a distortion of reality.

  Science isn't storytellingsciencefictions.org

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

  The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet

  Their words

  It was surprisingly unliterary and unpostmodern for Mitchell, but in exchange, he nailed the historical details and gave us an adventure which subverted many of the usual tropes

  gwern.net

Biochemist at University College London; writes about the origin of life and the role of energy in evolution, in The Vital Question and Transformer.

From one piece Nick Lane: Origin of Life, Evolution, Aliens, Biology, and Consciousness | Lex Fridman Podcast #318 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  If we found a thousand life forms across the universe, 995 of them would be carbon-based and living in water.

  Their words

  I would say pretty fundamental. I wouldn’t like to say it’s impossible for life to start any other way, but water is everywhere. Water’s extremely good at what it does, and carbon works in water especially well. And carbon is everywhere. So, those things together make me think probabilistically, if we found 1,000 life forms, 995 of them would be carbon-based and living in water.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Re-run Earth a million times and at least a few hundred thousand of those runs give you bacteria again.

  Their words

  I think at the level of bacteria, not much variety. I think we would get how many times you say you want to run it a million times? I would say at least a few hundred thousand will get bacteria again.

  youtube.com

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Urban life in the West did not merely change after Rome, it practically vanished, and had to be built again from scratch centuries later.

  Their words

  the system of social organization that characterized the ancient world practically vanished and would have to be redeveloped centuries later.

  acoup.blog

Co-founder of Netscape and of the venture firm Andreessen Horowitz. Argues at length for building things, mostly in short form.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Young founders who appear to have no track record have almost always been working inside their problem for years already.

  startups

  Their words

  the reality is the kids that make new things work from scratch. It actually turns out that they actually have been deep in the domain for a long time. Almost every case, they've been thinking hard about the problem that they're trying to solve actually for in in a lot of cases for many years.

  youtube.com

Economist and journalist; Financial Times columnist as The Undercover Economist, author of How to Make the World Add Up, and presenter of the Cautionary Tales podcast.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Four Thousand Weeks

  Their words

  Burkeman’s book is one of the hits of the summer and deservedly so.

  timharford.com