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Technology writer of Spyglass, a newsletter about technology and media. Previously a reporter at TechCrunch and an investor at GV.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  As AI assistants become more agentic and take real actions, competitive advantage shifts toward platforms with deeper personal-data access.

  Their words

  But as workflows move more agentic - i.e. you want to use AI to take more actual actions - the advantage quickly shifts towards Meta.

  Meta's Amusing Musespyglass.org

Founded CD Baby in 1998 and sold it in 2008, giving the proceeds to a charitable trust for music education. Since then a writer and speaker: five books and 550+ articles, published first at sive.rs, which they hand-code and keep free of advertising.

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  A surgeon's or hospital's recent case volume predicts quality better than price does.

  Their words

  We’re used to using price as an indicator of quality, so our instinct says that the $20,000 surgery in Switzerland is better than the $2000 surgery in India, but the rule of volume disagrees.

  Bangalore India hospital flowsive.rs

Technical staff at METR, where she works on threat modelling and risk assessment for loss-of-control risks from advanced AI.

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  That indifference to humans was an accident of what the agents happened to read: had the paper said humans check the transcripts, they would have targeted humans just as ambitiously.

  Their words

  I think it's pretty likely that these agents would have just launched a similarly ambitious program on the basis of this like different model of how their evaluation worked because it seemed like they got the idea for all their research projects from reading this paper rather than some kind of instinct from training.

  youtube.com

Co-founder and CEO of Stripe and co-founder of the Arc Institute. Keeps a personal site of reading lists, open questions and notes on scientific progress and how research is funded.

From one piece Patrick Collison: Is AI Breaking the Lean Startup Playbook? 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  This is not the last moment to start a company, and the belief that the window is about to close is a recurring millenarian instinct.

  Their words

  I mean, obviously aviation was was a pretty big deal, but uh I I I don't think it was sort of quite the um the sociological rewriting that some of the you know excitable proponents at the time imagined. So I am you know it's it's hard to predict anything especially the future but I would I would take the under on this being the last couple of years to get a company going.

  youtube.com

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  The schleps of building a payments company were repaid, because no Stripe customer has ever turned out to be boring.

  Their words

  But yeah, just like it's it's I've never met a Stripe customer and thought that's boring. Um so so it's actually the business as a whole has been the opposite of uh of the Schlep Blindness um instinct.

  youtube.com

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.

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  One vivid, disturbing case outweighs all the statistics in how people judge a technology, and that instinct should be resisted rather than indulged.

  Their words

  I agree with Koopman that people really are swayed by such cases. I also think it’s a dumb-ass gut response that we should try our best to get over.

  Death by AIsmallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

Chief Product and Technology Officer at Netflix, previously VP of Science at Lyft and an economist at Analysis Group.

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  Adding process when things go badly is the instinct to resist: every time we added more process we spent more time without getting better outcomes.

  Their words

  Or the perfect way to go through feedback and leveling and compensation. But every time we saw that and we added more process, we spent more time without getting better outcomes.

  youtube.com

Professor of psychology at UCLA, where he studies human memory, attention and cognitive ageing, and author of Better with Age: The Psychology of Successful Aging.

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  Learning should be made harder rather than easier, and a teacher's instinct to smooth the path is the first thing that goes wrong.

  Their words

  How can you make learning kind of uncomfortable, but that you'll remember things better? And it goes against a lot of our intuitions. A lot of teachers will want to say, how can we make learning easier? And I think that's probably the first problem is you don't want it to be easy.

  youtube.com

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.

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  To reward the instinct that a new idea is worth having, training would have to score the smallness of the concepts a solution needs, not just whether it solved the problem.

  Their words

  Uh but I don't think it's easy but I do think it's something you would have to do in order to uh reward the gawwa like instinct rather than just rewarding have you solved a problem.

  youtube.com

Music critic of The New Yorker since 1996 and author of The Rest Is Noise, Listen to This and Wagnerism.

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  Benjamin Britten is the benchmark among English-language composers for setting the work of intensely musical writers like Shakespeare and Keats to music.

  benchmarks

  Their words

  In the English-language arena, Britten sets the standard for handling writers of inborn musical power-the likes of Shakespeare, Donne, Blake, Keats, Hopkins.

  Liner notes to What Belongs to Youtherestisnoise.com

Full-stack Laravel developer based in Madison, Wisconsin; maintains open-source Laravel, Livewire and Alpine.js packages and writes at randallwilk.dev.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Spark Mail App

  Their words

  On both my MacBook and iPhone, I prefer to use the Spark Mail App for handling my emails.

  randallwilk.dev

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.

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  A founder's gut instincts are almost always right and the ideas built on top of them are usually wrong, so the work is to isolate the instinct and test many ideas around it.

  Their words

  we have these instincts like in our gut, these human level instincts that are pretty much always right. And then we put these ideas on top of the instincts that are usually wrong. And my rule of thumb is your instincts are right 95% of the time.

  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.

From one piece FarmVille Creator: The Hidden Path to Successful Products 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  A founder should take half the valuation if it buys all of the control, because the right to be wrong in your own way is what founding was for.

  Their words

  you've gone through so much to be here. You owe it to yourself to bet on your instinct. You owe it to yourself to lose because of yourself. It's your right to be wrong. You, as a founder, owe it to yourself to control your own destiny and take half the valuation if it's all of the control. And it means you have the right to do it your way.

  youtube.com

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  Great consumer products work because they answer a human instinct or need that was already being felt but was unexpressed and unmet.

  Their words

  I think great products in the consumer world speak to us on some deep level. They they speak to some human instinct or need that we've been feeling and it's been unexpressed or unmet. When we first experience that, there's something magical to it that it could be an unlock. And lots of times it's it's where we're most cynical that we're ready for the most magic.

  youtube.com

Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".

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  As AI labs aim for broad, general capability, handling messy real-world bureaucratic tasks is becoming a primary application domain for their models.

  Their words

  Considering every lab wants to "eat the world" the focus on how to work in real-world messy situations seems apt as their primary home.

  Introducing BenchBenchstrangeloopcanon.com

Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.

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  AI coding assistants are leveling the skill gap between software developers who can afford to use them.

  Their words

  Skill-wise, most software developers, as long as they are willing/able to pay for AI assistants, are on the same page now.

  Reflections on AI-assisted Programmingyihui.org

FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Exceptions are an inherently poor way of handling errors because they make bugs harder to spot on casual code inspection.

  Their words

  exceptions are an inherently poor way of handling errors because they make it easier to write bugs which won't be immediately obvious on casual code inspection

  20 Years on AWS and Never Not My Jobdaemonology.net

Writer and illustrator, author of Am I There Yet? and Out of the Blue; writes the newsletter Out of the Blue on grief, joy and everyday attention.

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  The Everlasting Meal

  Their words

  The Everlasting Meal taught me how to cook with instinct, which is my most cherished skill!

  mariandrew.substack.com

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

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  Robots will be given more scope as they get more capable, exactly the way coding assistants went from completing a function to writing a pull request.

  Their words

  So, I think it'll be the same thing that that we'll see an increase in the scope that we're giving that we're willing to give to the robots as they get better and better where initially the scope might be like there is a particular thing you do like you're making the coffee or something. Uh whereas as they get more capable, as their ability to have common sense and a broader repertoire of tasks increases, then we'll give them greater scope. Now you're running the whole coffee shop.

  youtube.com

Scottish software developer on the Statamic core team; runs a one-person business maintaining Statamic addons such as Runway and writes at duncanmcclean.com.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  FreeAgent

  Their words

  I use FreeAgent for sending invoices and handling bookkeeping. I've been using it for over five years at this point and I don't know what I'd do without it.

  duncanmcclean.com

Writer of the blog Putanumonit and the newsletter Second Person, on rationality, dating and probability; based in New York.

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  With AI handling routine tasks, the high-value human work of understanding client needs and trade-offs can be done by a smaller, more proactive team.

  Their words

  The high value human tasks, like understanding the client's true pain points and deciding on priorities and trade-offs, would be easier with a smaller, proactive team.

  Jacob Will Work For Youputanumonit.com

Founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, the activist investment firm he started in 2004.

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  Investing well requires reversing the human instinct to grow excited as prices rise and fearful as they fall.

  Their words

  People tend to get excited about investments when stocks are going up and they get depressed when they're going down. And I think that's just inherently human. You have to reverse that. You have to get excited when things get cheaper and you got to get concerned when things get more expensive.

  youtube.com

Full-stack developer, creator of Tailwind CSS; writes at adamwathan.me and makes courses and screencasts for web developers.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  HelpScout

  Their words

  I set up a HelpScout account for us when we released the book because I anticipated a lot of support and it is so much nicer than handling everything via email. Awesome tool.

  adamwathan.me

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

• Usestheir ownrcmnd.app

  GMail

  Their words

  For handling email, I use GMail with lots of filters to automatically file and label message (I get about 1400 email messages per day, so I have to be quite efficient to deal with it all in a reasonable amount of time).

  usesthis.com

Cryptographer; created Signal and the Signal Protocol, and writes occasionally about cryptography, web3 and sailing.

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  Handling a change of keys is not a backdoor; it is how public-key cryptography works, and interception stays detectable by the sender.

  Their words

  The fact that WhatsApp handles key changes is not a “backdoor,” it is how cryptography works.

  There is no WhatsApp 'backdoor'signal.org

Interpretability researcher at Anthropic, which he co-founded; before that at OpenAI and Google Brain, where he wrote the explanations of neural networks most people learned them from.

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  Standard recurrent neural networks are theoretically capable of representing long-term dependencies but fail to learn them from data in practice.

  Their words

  In theory, RNNs are absolutely capable of handling such "long-term dependencies." A human could carefully pick parameters for them to solve toy problems of this form. Sadly, in practice, RNNs don't seem to be able to learn them.

  Understanding LSTM Networkscolah.github.io

Linux kernel maintainer; runs the stable kernel releases and maintains the USB and driver core subsystems.

• Usesrcmnd.app

  quilt

  Their words

  I use quilt on top of git for handling the Linux kernel stable patch set as the workflow there does not lend itself to a pure git environment.

  usesthis.com