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17 September
Entrepreneur and founder of Blueprint. Publishes a detailed, freely available longevity protocol documenting the food, supplements, devices and measurements he uses on himself.
We were surprised yesterday to learn that Kate was being asked to fill her vagina with ultrasound gel. The MRI was to characterize her endometriosis. A disease where endometrial tissue develops outside the uterus and grows. It's a gnarly and painful disease with serious health complications. It affects 1 in 10 women and currently takes on average 6.6 years to diagnose. We hustled and diagnosed Kate's endometriosis in 42 days via four speciality different tests (blood, MRI, salvia, transvaginal ultrasound). The fastest and most comprehensive ever, I think. We are doing this MRI because we have… Quoting @_katetolo I had to fill my vagina with ultrasound gel yesterday for an MRI... I had no idea this was a protocol for measuring endometriosis! how cool It's a technique called vaginal opacification... the vagina is normally a collapsed space, and on an MRI, collapsed walls are hard to tell apart from the tissu… Related
15 September
Author of Shape Up; formerly head of strategy at Basecamp, where he worked on product design for seventeen years; now runs Felt Presence.
Watched a bit of @poteto + team on the Grok Bot stream today. Surprised by how normal the work is, but faster. So many micro judgements and steps that weren't automated. You could pause at many moments and be like "wait why that?" and it would lead to an interesting discussion. Related
Independent iOS developer and podcaster; co-hosts the Accidental Tech Podcast and Analog(ue), and makes the apps Callsheet, MaskerAid and Peek-a-View.
There are several features in Callsheet that were either inspired by or requested by literally one person. Admittedly, they’re small features, but they’re features. Ask, and don’t be an asshole about it, and you’d be surprised what an indie dev is willing to do. hachyderm.io
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11 September
Australian moral philosopher, Professor of Bioethics emeritus at Princeton University; author of Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics and The Life You Can Save.
I was surprised and rather amused to discover that the BBC now considers me part of history. Listen to the full Witness History episode on BBC 🎧 www.bbc.com/audio/play/w... #PeterSinger #EffectiveAltruism #Philosophy #Ethics #BBCHistory Related
10 September
Programmer and writer; co-founder of Stack Overflow and Discourse, and author of the Coding Horror blog, which he has written since 2004.
Basically we need diversity in wealth, rather than intense, unprecedented wealth concentration. I like to think of it as Y Combinator for the rest of us. Guaranteed Minimum Income is investing in the most vulnerable among us – those who are currently suffering the most. You might be surprised what these folks are capable of when you give them the resources they need to do more than just survive. rgmii.org
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Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
I've been surprised to find that sometime in past six months or year, ChatGPT has generally started returning better results than Google for me. OpenAI probably has fewer employees than Google Search alone, and what fraction of OAI works on search? On the order of 1%? Arguably an unfair comparison because ChatGPT takes 20x longer to return a result, but Google doesn't have a "20x slower but don't return https://danluu.com/seo-spam/ knob" OpenAI Google Related
30 August
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.
OpenAI HuggingFace
Their words
Overall, I’m very surprised at how little media coverage there’s been around the OpenAI / Hugging Face attack. It’s clearly one of the most important things to happen this year.
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@patrickc on X x.com
26 August
Creator of Ruby on Rails, CTO of 37signals, and creator of Omarchy.
Their words
Why are we surprised? Even if you're a good programmer, if you finish a job and you ask your also very good peer to review it, you're gonna end up with better code. Of course you're gonna end up with better code. So build that into your process.
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youtube.com
24 August
Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
RE: https://mastodon.social/@danluu/111037093079443322 With the discussions of how bot traffic is flooding websites, I was surprised to find that my CDN is "only" using 3.5 TB/mo, up 3x in 3 years. Human traffic is probably down because I haven't been active for the last couple years, so maybe we can call that a 4x to 5x increase due to bots? Maybe my site just isn't very appealing to bots, but from the way people talk, I was expecting a higher ratio. I would've guessed >= 100x from how people are talking; 10x would be nothing in terms of load. Related
20 August
Professor of finance at NYU's Stern School of Business, known for his work on valuation. He publishes his data, spreadsheets and classes free at Damodaran Online and writes the Musings on Markets blog.
15 August
Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.
in case you’re not living in the tech bubble, as a general rule i’ve been surprised by how infrequently top tier folks actually meet/know each other. as an outsider i might have assumed that everyone is in secret illuminati group chats. those exist, but are very much short lived exceptions rather than the rule. what you see of the major headlines is pretty much what they also see. i guess one way to interpret this is also simply that most effort is still on doing the work rather than working the narrative or the gossip. and that, to me at least, is genuinely quite reassuring, this far in to m… Quoting @TechEmails Anthropic cofounder emails Noam Shazeer November 21, 2021 Related
12 August
Professor at Stanford working on robot learning and meta-learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence.
Their words
So, you might be surprised to hear that most state-of-the-art foundation models for robotics have no memory or no context. They're just operating on the current sensor observations, the current camera readings, uh, and predicting actions based off of that.
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youtube.com
5 August
Web standards author and speaker; wrote the CSS: The Definitive Guide series and co-founded the An Event Apart conference.
Firefox Nightly just auto-updated me to the “new look” for Firefox and I… kinda like it? The frame edge around the lower part of the window is taking a little getting used to, but I’m (surprised to be) down with the overall feel. Related
2 August
Chief product officer at the live-shopping marketplace Whatnot, previously chief product officer at Twitch and a product lead on growth at Twitter.
Their words
if you are using these systems right you can just grow more quickly you can build more things you can take on more stuff so you know I would be surprised actually if we ended up with like net fewer
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youtube.com
1 August
Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.
I am surprised at how little coverage the LLM transformation of mathematics is getting. Kind of a big deal for those of us who spent (cumulative) months in the university library learning to construct proofs. LLMs Related
31 July
Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku, author of The Twelve-Factor App, and a researcher at Ink & Switch.
26 July
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.
25 July
Programmer and writer on computer architecture, performance, and software reliability. He has worked on CPU design at Centaur Technology and on software at Google and Microsoft, and writes long-form technical essays at danluu.com.
In another variant of https://danluu.com/learn-what/, I caught up with a former colleague who worked on automated theorem proving. It turns out he's had an interesting career doing all sorts of interesting stuff using the skills he developed by spending a decade writing/using theorem provers. At one point, he said, "if you use X like a theorem prover, it works really well", which surprised me to hear, but of course this is a highly generalizable skill just like compilers or benchmarking/evals. Related
26 June
AI researcher at OpenAI; built the poker systems Libratus and Pluribus and the Diplomacy agent Cicero, and works on reasoning models.
Their words
And I wouldn't be surprised if you know 6 months or a year from now, the model is able to do zero shot an entire poker solver, basically my entire PhD thesis in one go.
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youtube.com
4 June
Behavioural economist at Chicago Booth, professor of behavioural science and economics and director of AGI economics at Google DeepMind.
Their words
And if you look at Ricardo's predictions, they're actually right. If you look at all those jobs that made money in Ricardo's time, they got automated. So, if I was David Ricardo and I woke up and somebody told me all those jobs did get automated. And you ask me David Ricardo, like what do you think the prime age employment rate is in 2026? I think he would be surprised if you told him it was the highest it's ever been other than 2000.
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youtube.com
3 June
Engineer and teacher; wrote Kubernetes the Hard Way, was a distinguished engineer at Google Cloud, and retired from full-time work in 2023.
Their words
And so you have been part of the change to other industries and other people yourself. What did you think about that? Did you even think about it at all? So let's not be surprised if you find no sympathy from all the other professions that you've helped force change upon.
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youtube.com
15 May
Writes Very Serious, a newsletter on politics, the economy and culture, and hosts the podcast of the same name.
20 March
Software entrepreneur who bootstrapped and sold FeedbackPanda and now builds Podscan; writes The Bootstrapped Founder.
5 February
American writer and long-term traveller. Blogs at tynan.com about travel, owning few possessions, habits and the gear he carries; author of Superhuman by Habit and Make It Big.
Surprised no one noticed the Easter egg in the gear post this year.... Related
1 January
Long-time Debian developer and free-software maintainer (remctl, INN, pam-krb5) who has published book reviews on his personal site since the 1990s.
Their words
The best book I read last year was Mark Lawrence's The Book That Wouldn't Burn, which much to my surprise did not make a single award list for its publication year of 2023. It was a tour de force of world-building that surprised me multiple times.
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eyrie.org
16 November 2025
Software engineer writing about maintenance, open source and the industrial reality of software — the author of "I am not a supplier".
12 October 2025
Indian technology consultant and writer. Former editor of Beautiful Pixels; writes about Apple hardware and Mac software at nuclearbits.com.
Their words
This is the best screenshot utility for Macs. You’d think how much can there be in a screenshot utility, and CleanShot X will still color you surprised.
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nuclearbits.com
26 March 2025
Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.
17 December 2024
French software engineer, public speaker and fully remote nomadic worker; writes about frontend development at maxpou.fr.
Not really surprised. I migrated my blog from Gatsby to Astro last February. No regrets, it just works like a charm ✨ If you're looking for something to build your blog or any other content-driven website, I highly recommend it! Quoting @astro.build The State of JS is out. Astro is now the #2 most-used framework, and #1 in retention and positivity. Thanks for showing up this year astronauts 🏆 Related
29 June 2024
Gwern Recommends 29 Jun 2024
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.
Their words
It is excellent to watch on a big screen in 3D despite how silly it ultimately is, so I’m not surprised it’s been successful.
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gwern.net
12 May 2024
Software engineer and writer; former CTO of Wave, now at Anthropic. Blogs at benkuhn.net on attention, engineering management and doing hard things well.
A bit surprised by how little I've heard about GCP literally fat-finger *deleting a customer account.* Seems like their business was only saved by cross-cloud backups, a practice I previously thought was compliance theater bullshit and will never, ever, ever, question again. Related
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