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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.

• If you are a Data Scientist, you have never had more alpha than right now. Data Scientists email me all the time. It is no mistake that I'm focused on evals as a former DS. I talk more about this here:

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Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.

• The current moment of AI doomerism reminds me so much of the millenarian, apocalyptic thinking of evangelical Christianity it’s uncanny I think it’s safe to say that the Singularity was modeled directly after the Apocalypse/Tribulation/Rapture/End Times, whether consciously or unconsciously This isn’t widely known, but the bestselling nonfiction book of the entire 1970s was Hal Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth. It claimed to predict the imminent end times by mapping biblical prophecy to current events, like Israel’s founding as a state, the Soviet Union, and nuclear weapons He predicted…

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Prime Minister of Canada since March 2025; formerly governor of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England.

• ShortMême en pleine tempête, le Canada et l’Union européenne peuvent garder le cap.

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Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.

• Who should come speak to the @alpha_founders students?

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Software design writer and chief scientist at Thoughtworks; wrote Refactoring and Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture.

• Nail the Narrative

  Sumeet Gayathri Moghe finds many folks building presentations get tangled in building slides without a coherent narrative. He advises distilling the big idea, visualizing the audience, and building a structured storylin…

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President of the European Commission since 2019; previously Germany's defence minister.

• When we need courage and strength, I believe we should look to our children. In them we will find the purest passion for life. Ukrainian children are a powerful example of this. In the State of Union I will talk about a story that profoundly moved me. 🗓️ 16.09.2026

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President of the European Commission since 2019; previously Germany's defence minister.

• The next frontier of security and defence is right above us. And we need sharp eyes in the sky to protect us and our allies. In the State of the Union, I will tell the story of innovators that make our Union a safer place. 🗓️ 16.09.2026

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President of the European Commission since 2019; previously Germany's defence minister.

• We do not have to accept childhoods shaped by algorithms. We do not have to accept a system that fails our children. Europe has the power to act. To give children the time they need in the real world. I will detail our proposal in my upcoming State of the Union address.

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Writer and novelist. Publishes essays and book notes at nateliason.com; author of the novel Husk and of Crypto Confidential.

• Something we teach at Founders and Alpha is that a great product acts like a magnet. It attracts the right customers. And repels the wrong ones. Sometimes aggressively!

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Software engineer, Wikipedia editor and crypto critic; writes Citation Needed and runs Web3 is Going Just Great.

• Huge congratulations to the US-based Wikimedia Foundation employees who voted with 92% support in favor of unionizing, and shoutout to the tireless work of the organizers. https://wikiworkersunited.org/announcements/2026-09-04-us-wikimedia-foundation-workers-overwhelmingly-vote-to-form-union-with-cwa/ #Wikipedia #WikimediaFoundation

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Economist; writes In My Tribe, and wrote The Three Languages of Politics.

• Education Links, 9/2/2026

  Postwar school consolidation; Bruno V. Manno on college non-completion; Lauren Hall on the research game; Kelsey Piper on Alpha School

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

• This is incredibly good guidance. AI excels at distilling a long rant into meaningful points. It can extract, reduce complexity, increase clarity. It makes salient thoughts and ideas even sharper. It sucks when it just „generates“ because it approximates an average response.
  Quoting@hammer_mtAI writing is only allowed if your input tokens > your output tokens. "Write me an article on X" is slop, "here's an hour of my hard-won experience on X, write it up" is morally defensible and leads to good writing, even if AI wrote the final draft. Divide input tokens (initial idea plus guidance a…

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AI research engineer working on large language models. He writes the Ahead of AI newsletter and is the author of Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch).

• Now we know: The popular Ox Alpha LLM was GLM-5.3-Flash... Compared to GLM-5.2, this new GLM-5.3-Flash model uses: - a Kimi Linear-style 3:1 (super*) hybrid attention pattern with 34 Kimi Delta Attention layers (KDA) and 11 Multi-heat Latent Attention (MLA) / DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) layers; - a scaled-down GLM-5.2-style sparse MoE backbone, going from 744B-A40B to 320B-A18B; - a DeepSeek V4-style mHC residual path with four parallel streams; - plus a native vision encoder (not shown). * "Super hybrid" because both KDA and MLA/DSA are "efficient" components. E.g., Kimi only uses KDA +…
  Quoting@Zai_orgIntroducing GLM-5.3-Flash - Leading capabilities at a highly competitive price - Natively multimodal with a 1M-token context window - A 320B-A18B model released under the MIT License - Previously previewed as Ox Alpha, running entirely on Chinese AI chips Blog: https://t.co/tzOmB7gdZP Available now…

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Belgian engineering lead, Microsoft MVP and public speaker. Creator of Front Matter, a headless CMS extension for Visual Studio Code.

• Just released an alpha version for Windows. Feel free to give it a try and let me know how it works.

  github.com

  Quoting@eliostruyfTideline can now organize files by type into folders like "Installers", "Images", etc. It can catch up on the ones you've already filed away by date. Get more control over your Downloads folder.

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Maths educator; writes Mathworlds on how mathematics is taught and why so much of the technology sold to schools does not help.

• Does Alpha School Work for Regular Kids?

  Here is some new evidence.

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Economist specialising in global income inequality; formerly lead economist in the World Bank research department, now at the CUNY Graduate Center and author of the Global Inequality and More newsletter.

• Ukraine, Lenin and Sultan-Galiev

  Re-reading Richard Pipes’ "The Formation of the Soviet Union"

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Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.

• This piece is out! 4 sites, 10 days, and 6000 words on the politics of data centers in the Midwest: https://t.co/uOL7vmf3wC I talked to union leaders and real estate brokers, activists and local officials, politicians from Kathy Hochul to Abdul El-Sayed. A few takeaways: - Activists are as pissed at their local officials as at AI companies - The bigger the dollar signs, the more skeptical people are - Past corporate failures (Foxconn, GM, DTE) prime community distrust - Even data center proponents regret the NDAs - Media narratives turn local grievances into national movements - Residents fea…
  Quoting@jasminewsunI’m spending the next week driving around Wisconsin and Michigan to get a firsthand view of the data center buildout and backlash am visiting sites, talking to tons of people — tradespeople, activists, planners, residents — then writing up a story lmk what questions I should dig into!

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Chancellor of Germany since May 2025; leader of the CDU.

• Die @cducsubt-Fraktion hat @thorsten_frei zum neuen Vorsitzenden gewählt. Lieber Thorsten, mit Dir gewinnt unsere Fraktion einen erfahrenen und verantwortungsvollen Vorsitzenden. Ich gratuliere Dir herzlich zu deiner überzeugenden Wahl. Ich freue mich auf die weitere erfolgreiche Zusammenarbeit für die Union und unser Land!

  English, from GermanThe @cducsubt parliamentary group has elected @thorsten_frei as the new chairman. Dear Thorsten, with you, our parliamentary group gains an experienced and responsible chairman. I congratulate you warmly on your convincing election. I look forward to our continued successful cooperation for the Union and our country!

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Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.

• Finding Alpha: What’s Worth Consuming in the Age of AI

  On August 31, 1976, a fund manager named John Bogle launched a product that made him the laughing stock of Wall Street. His new fund made no attempt to beat the market. It simply bought every stock in the S&P 500 and he…

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Deep-learning researcher and Turing Award laureate; founder of the Mila institute.

• BlueskyThe EU AI Office has put out a new report, with input from 100 experts, outlining how the European Union can enhance its competitiveness, sovereignty and security in frontier AI.

  digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu

  EuropeRelated

• x.comThe EU AI Office has put out a new report, with input from 100 experts, outlining how the European Union can enhance its competitiveness, sovereignty and security in frontier AI.

  digital-strategy.ec.europa.eu

  EuropeRelated

Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.

• data center road trip // day 2-3 - Port Washington has faced intense protests and a mayoral recall over their data center. residents cite environment and aesthetics, but are fine with the power plant in the middle of town - Mount Pleasant officials were relieved to have Microsoft build, filling the $100m+ debt hole left by the failed Foxconn project - the union guys are making bank, getting $100 cash per diems on top of 6-figure salaries, and farmers became decamillionaires selling their land - the huge numbers on data center deals make residents *more* suspicious, not less! I’ve heard less a…
  Quoting@jasminewsunI’m spending the next week driving around Wisconsin and Michigan to get a firsthand view of the data center buildout and backlash am visiting sites, talking to tons of people — tradespeople, activists, planners, residents — then writing up a story lmk what questions I should dig into!

  data centersAmericaRelated

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.

• Happy Birthday America! To me, the greatest nation on Earth. 250 years of loudly arguing our way toward a more perfect union 😂 We're in this together, I love you all! ❤️ PS: World Cup has been amazing. US in the round of 16, LFG! Also, I'm a long-time huge fan of Argentina and Messi, but Cape Verde vs Argentina was one of the greatest games I've ever seen. That is what the World Cup is all about!

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Chancellor of Germany since May 2025; leader of the CDU.

• Der Westbalkan gehört in der Perspektive zur Europäischen Union. Dass wir seit 13 Jahren keine Mitglieder mehr aufgenommen haben, zeigt auch Versäumnisse der EU. Präsident Macron und ich haben einen konkreten Vorschlag unterbreitet, wie wir jetzt in die nächsten Schritte gehen. Die Europäische Union muss zeigen, dass sie erweiterungsfähig und erweiterungswillig ist.

  English, from GermanThe Western Balkans belong to the European Union in perspective. The fact that we haven't admitted any new members for 13 years also shows failures on the part of the EU. President Macron and I have made a concrete proposal on how we can now move forward. The European Union must show that it is capable of and willing to expand.

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Co-founder and partner at Union Square Ventures in New York. Has written the AVC blog almost every day since 2003, on venture capital, startups, music and crypto.

• I took a walk around the Union Square neighborhood a couple of Fridays ago with our new partner @mignano and we recorded it so everyone can listen to our conversation. We talked about the past, present, and future of startups, VC, and NYC.
  Quoting@mignanoFred Wilson is one of the greatest VCs of all time. He is also my new partner at @USV and I'm lucky to say that. We've known each other for years, but becoming partners felt like a reason to get to know him even better. So a few weeks ago, we walked around Union Square and caught up about what @fre…

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Maths educator; writes Mathworlds on how mathematics is taught and why so much of the technology sold to schools does not help.

• Five Friends Help a Math Teacher Get Out of a Jam

  Also: Alpha School's no good, very bad week.

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Cryptography engineer; maintains Go's cryptography libraries as a full-time open-source maintainer, funded directly by companies that use them.

• The 2025 Go Cryptography State of the Union

  I delivered my traditional Go Cryptography State of the Union talk at GopherCon US 2025 in New York. It goes into everything that happened at the intersection of Go and cryptography over the last year.

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Co-founder and chief science officer of Hugging Face; writes about open models and where he thinks the field is wrong.

• Reachy-Mini update🚨 Good: quality up++, sound/elec better than alpha. First tiny batches ship late Sep. Less good: scaling to thousands units (vs. 100s planned) taking longer than expected Still on track to ship first 3000 pre-orders before Xmas🎄(Lite & Wireless), most shipping early Dec.

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