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Epidemiologist; founded Your Local Epidemiologist in March 2020 to translate public-health science, and consults for organisations including the CDC.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Reclassifying a vaccine out of official routine-recommendation status erodes practical access to it even without changing the recommendation itself.

  Their words

  Moving a vaccine out of that category adds significant implementation barriers that will erode access to vaccines.

  yourlocalepidemiologist.substack.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

  Distillation is the most significant debate surrounding open AI models in 2026.

  Their words

  Distillation - the process of training on output tokens from another model - is the single most eventful debate around open models in 2026.

  Open-Source AI & Open Models Reading Listinterconnects.ai

Security engineer; founder of Matasano Security and Latacora.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The answer to every significant programming challenge in 2026 is an overlooked Python library rather than something in Rust.

  Their words

  The answer to every significant programming challenge in 2026 is a Python library you didn't think to go looking for because it's in Python and not Rust, as if that mattered anymore.

  @tqbf on Xx.com

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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The camera pose is the most critical piece of information about the geometry of a space, which is why estimating it for every frame is the real advance.

  Their words

  And I do believe Atlas is a significant step forward because now with every single frame, you have a you can generate an estimate a important piece of information, which is the the view viewpoint, the camera pose. And that is the most critical information one needs about the geometry of the of the space.

  youtube.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 Platformer, a newsletter on tech platforms and the people they affect, and co-host of the Hard Fork podcast at the New York Times.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI, not macroeconomic factors like interest rates, is directly responsible for a significant share of current job losses.

  AI and jobsinterest rates

  Their words

  But I think there have been enough studies now isolating those variables that show that AI is directly responsible for a lot of this job loss.

  platformer.news

Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A religion cannot revive itself by encouraging its members to have more children.

  Their words

  Embracing an approach to religious renewal by encouraging fertility doesn’t seem like a strategy that will move the needle in a significant way.

  Do Religious Families Actually Have More Kids?graphsaboutreligion.com

Writer and climate campaigner; wrote The End of Nature in 1989, founded 350.org and Third Act, and writes The Crucial Years.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  AI and the data-center buildout underlying it pose real and significant dangers to society.

  data centers

  Their words

  Its's clear by now that AI, and the data center development underlying it, pose real and significant dangers.

  billmckibben.substack.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  What people care about in their own identity is continuity, not similarity -- they accept enormous drift so long as the thread is unbroken.

  Their words

  so I'm in the camp that like continuity is greatly important. And so people will accept significant drift in their identity over time as long as they have continuity.

  youtube.com

Professor of atmospheric sciences at Texas A&M; writes The Climate Brink with Zeke Hausfather.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The same global average temperature can arise from greenhouse warming or from El Niño and still produce very different regional climate impacts.

  Their words

  The catch is that the future world that has been warmed by greenhouse gases and a present-day world that has been temporarily warmed by El Niño can have the same global-average temperature while having significant differences in the impacts of this warming.

  theclimatebrink.com

Chief scientist at Redwood Research, where he works on technical AI safety and AI control.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Current AI models are worse colleagues than humans, because they routinely imply they did a task they did not actually do.

  Their words

  my sense is that like AIs are a worse co-orker than a human in terms of how much of a scumbag they are. Like at least this like this has been my experience as of the start of the year and I think it's still you know true to a significant extent now where the AIs are much more likely to like pretend they did the task when they actually didn't. sort of like misleadingly suggest they did things when they actually um you know did them much more poorly um and be like pretty sloppy without drawing attention to ways in which they're sloppy.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Cognitive decline is a staircase rather than a slope: the big drops happen after episodes of serious illness.

  Their words

  cognitive function doesn't just decline sort of linearly or steadily with age. It goes down, you know, a little bit on average, but the biggest decreases sort of happen stepwise after periods of significant illness.

  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.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  String theory has produced no significant new ideas and may be a dead field.

  Their words

  I see nothing that looks like a significant new idea or any evidence this isn't a dead field.

  Various and Sundrymath.columbia.edu

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

• 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

Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Fear of others' negative judgment is a significant risk factor for anxiety and depression.

  Their words

  And this fear of judgment is a significant risk factor for anxiety and depression.

  adamgrant.substack.com

Chief executive of Intel since 2025, founder of the venture firm Walden International and chief executive of Cadence Design Systems for thirteen years.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The binding constraints on AI's growth are power, helium and memory — and almost nobody has noticed the helium one.

  Their words

  One is of course everybody knows power constraint. Some country the power they just don't have that. They get impacted. And then secondly, a lot of people didn't realize the helium impact can be also very significant for semiconductor. And then the thirdly, is everybody know right now memory is a bigger shortage.

  youtube.com

American historian of Central and Eastern Europe and the Holocaust; author of Bloodlands, On Tyranny and On Freedom, and writer of the newsletter 'Thinking about...'.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The war in Ukraine will prove as historically significant in its outcome as the First World War was.

  Their words

  The war in Ukraine has now lasted longer than the First World War, and there is every reason to think that its outcome will be of comparable historical significance.

  Sky Defense: Bringing it Homesnyder.substack.com

Co-founder and CEO of Anthropic; previously VP of research at OpenAI.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  If AI permanently drives down demand for labour, long-term income support for a significant fraction of the workforce will likely become necessary.

  Their words

  If AI-driven labor displacement ends up being large in magnitude and permanently drives down the demand for labor, it will likely be necessary to go beyond mere incentive programs to long-term income support for a significant fraction of the labor force.

  Policy on the AI Exponential (June 2026)darioamodei.com

Political scientist and Baptist pastor; writes Graphs about Religion, charting American religious life from survey data.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A statistically significant change is not the same as an important one, and survey data cannot tell you which it is.

  Their words

  Whether that decline matters is a different question — and one the data alone can’t answer.

  America Got a Little More Religious. No, Really.graphsaboutreligion.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

  Nobody wants a slow model, which is why labs will not trade inference speed for cheaper memory even though they easily could.

  Their words

  They could release claw slow mode and have an increase in tokens per dollar by a significant amount. Um they could probably like reduce the price of Opus 46 by you know 4x 5x and reduce the speed by another by maybe just like 2x like the curve on inference throughput versus speed is there already just on hm um and yet they don't um because no one actually wants to use a slow model

  youtube.com

Writer of MacSparky and author of the MacSparky Field Guides on Apple productivity software. A lawyer for 30 years before going full-time on the site, he co-hosts the Mac Power Users and Focused podcasts.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Superhuman

  Their words

  I can say without a doubt that Superhuman is the best tool I’ve ever used to work through email quickly. There’s no single reason. The keyboard shortcuts are lightning fast. The composition tools avoid friction. Its auto-sorting is excellent. I’m just scratching the surface of the full feature set. But Superhuman comes with a significant cost at $30 a month.

  macsparky.com

Founded PSPDFKit in 2011 and ran it for a decade. Came back from a break to work on AI agents — the OpenClaw project, and OpenAI, joined in February 2026. Writes at steipete.me.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  GPT-5.2

  Their words

  GPT 5.2 goes till end of August whereas Opus is stuck in mid-March - that’s about 5 months. Which is significant when you wanna use the latest available tools.

  steipete.me

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A rising share of statistically insignificant experiments is the signal that a team has exploited an area too far and should go back to exploring.

  Their words

  And if I'm starting to see like more and more experiments that are not statistically significant, that may be a signal to me to say, okay, we might have kind of tried to exploit a little bit too far. Like there might not be as much juice to squeeze.

  youtube.com

Machine learning engineer and independent AI consultant. He writes about LLM evaluation, tooling and applied ML at hamel.dev, and previously worked on machine learning at GitHub.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  Braintrust

  Their words

  The panel had a generally positive view of Braintrust, highlighting its clean UI and structured approach to evaluations. The tool’s emphasis on human-in-the-loop workflows was a significant strength.

  hamel.dev

Professor at Berkeley working on robot learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence, and argues that robots will learn from data rather than be programmed.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Manipulation will scale faster than driving because a robot can make a mistake, fix it and learn from it, and a car cannot.

  Their words

  And when you make a mistake and correct it, well, first you you've achieved the task because you've corrected, but you've also gained knowledge that allows you to avoid that mistake in the future. With driving, because of the dynamics of how it's set up, it's very hard to make a mistake, correct it, and then learn from it because the mistakes themselves have significant ramifications.

  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

  A meeting that wastes everyone's time is a meetings problem, not a communication problem.

  Their words

  I personally hate meetings because a significant percent of meetings when done poorly don’t serve a clear purpose. But that’s a meeting problem, that’s not a communication problem.

  youtube.com

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

• Our reading nowkorrents.com

  The memorize-fetch-apply paradigm behind LLMs can reach arbitrary skill given training data, but it cannot adapt to novelty or acquire new skills on the fly.

  LLMsOpenAI

  Their words, before

  This "memorize, fetch, apply" paradigm can achieve arbitrary levels of skills at arbitrary tasks given appropriate training data, but it cannot adapt to novelty or pick up new skills on the fly (which is to say that there is no fluid intelligence at play here.)

  Their words now

  OpenAI's new o3 model represents a significant leap forward in AI's ability to adapt to novel tasks. This is not merely incremental improvement, but a genuine breakthrough, marking a qualitative shift in AI capabilities compared to the prior limitations of LLMs.

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most of what a car costs is the weight and structure needed to survive human driving error, not the transport it delivers.

  Their words

  Humans being awful drivers leads to a massive increase in vehicle costs and weight, makes cars more dangerous to people outside of them, and imposes significant costs on infrastructure like roads.

  Human Driving Increases Transportation Cost 10xaustinvernon.site

Neuroscientist at UC Davis; studies memory and wrote Why We Remember.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The brain does not record experience continuously; it lays down an episodic memory at moments of surprise, uncertainty and prediction error, because that is where the useful information is.

  Their words

  is this idea that we form these internal models at particular points of high prediction error or points of, I believe also points of uncertainty, points of surprise or motivationally significant periods. And those points are when it’s maximally optimal to encode an episodic memory.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The AI safety community's fixation on a model escaping its box has pushed the other significant AI risks out of the discussion, with little progress to show for it.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  That’s a theatrical risk. That is a thing that can really take over how people think about this problem. And there’s a big group of very smart, I think very well-meaning AI safety researchers that got super-hung up on this one problem, I’d argue without much progress, but super-hung up on this one problem. I’m actually happy that they do that, because I think we do need to think about this more. But I think it pushed out of the space of discourse a lot of the other very significant AI- related risks.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The hard part of drug discovery is knowing what to make - which target is worth drugging - not designing the molecule.

  Their words

  The most significant factor preventing us from taking better molecules into clinical trials is not our ability to design arbitrary molecules, but our (lack of) understanding of underlying disease biology. In other words, we often know how to make something, but not what to make.

  atelfo.github.io

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

  Keynes's bisexuality and strong interest in gay sex were a significant cause of his ability to grasp different and outside perspectives.

  Their words

  I view Keynes’s bisexuality and his strong interest in gay sex as a significant cause of what made him interesting and which gave him so strong an ability to grasp different and outside perspectives.

  tylercowen.com