Related posts

Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The right starting point for studying AI is treating it as genuinely powerful while its consequences unfold unpredictably through multiple complex social processes.

  Their words

  a recognition that AI is powerful (and will reshape power relations among humans) but that the consequences will flow messily through multiple complex processes that we really need to start mapping and understanding

  How should social science think about AI?programmablemutter.com

Co-founder of Superlogical, started in 2026 to build server-side terminal infrastructure; creator of Ghostty. Co-founded HashiCorp and created Vagrant and Terraform before that.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Investing in strong fundamentals and invisible supports makes good outcomes follow naturally

  Their words

  Invest in building strong fundamentals, invisible supports, and outcomes flow like water.

  @mitchellh on Xx.com

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

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience

  Their words

  It’s one of those things that make perfect sense once you think about it. Great book, very important premise and a short and concise explanation. Can’t recommend enough.

  rakhim.org

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

From one piece Accelerate Learning & Increase Cognitive Capacity | Dr. Tommy Wood 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Flow is not required to perform at your best: a clutch state, in which you perform well and it still feels like hard work, is just as legitimate a peak state.

  Their words

  And both of those are perfectly reasonable states in which to perform. And assuming that you have to be in flow to perform just isn't true if you look at like how you know athletes perform in the moment.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Learning cannot happen in flow, because getting better at a skill means working beyond the level at which you can express it.

  Their words

  If you want to get better at that skill, you have to work even further beyond your current capacities which which will move you out of flow, right?

  youtube.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Doxies Penalty

  Their words

  Mind candy: continuing Robins's series of historical mysteries set in a very-slightly-alternate Regency London. (I re-read the last one, Sleeping Partner, before turning to this.) Robins continues to be great and I hope that many more of these will flow from her pen.

  bactra.org

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".

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Institutions fail not because people are wicked, but because evidence, incentives, discretion, and review rights flow in the wrong direction.

  Their words

  institutions don't fail because people are wicked. Evidence, incentives, discretion, and review rights might be flowing in the wrong direction.

  Who Audits the Auditors?strangeloopcanon.com

Member of technical staff at Anthropic. He has led ML/AI teams at Amazon, Alibaba and Lazada, and writes about LLMs, recommender systems and engineering at eugeneyan.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The practices that make someone effective at working with an AI model are the same practices that make someone effective at onboarding any new human collaborator.

  Their words

  none of this is specific to AI. It's simply how you onboard and work with any new collaborator.

  How to Work and Compound with AIeugeneyan.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Flow is a people problem before it is a tooling problem — it needs clear direction, scope and purpose, which no tool supplies.

  Their words

  Uh well, tech is easy, people are hard. And so, you know, sometimes getting the flow really is about understanding what I'm doing, having very clear direction and goals and and knowing what my what my work is doing.

  youtube.com

Programmer and essayist who has worked at Amazon, Google, Grab and Sourcegraph. Best known for the long-form essays collected as Stevey's Drunken Blog Rants and Stevey's Blog Rants.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A vibe-coded codebase grows heresies: wrong ideas that take root among the agents, keep coming back, and are very hard to weed out.

  Their words

  Where an idea can take root among the agents that's incorrect. It's It's It's a wrong architecture or or wrong data flow or whatever that's that's causing an impedance mismatch for the rest of your code. And what happens is I call it a heresy because they have the tend They have a tendency to to grow and to come back and they're really hard to weed out, okay?

  From IDEs to AI Agents with Steve Yeggeyoutube.com

Software engineer and educator; creator of Testing Library and of the EpicWeb.dev and EpicReact.dev courses.

• Usesaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Wispr Flow

  Their words

  Wispr Flow - Voice to text (AI)

  kentcdodds.com

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

From one piece The surprising advice from a founder who built 2 unicorns | Jason Cohen (WP Engine) 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most cancellation happens in a customer's first days, so small onboarding changes have effects that later changes never have.

  Their words

  Um all almost all companies have a whole lot more uh cancellation in the first day, 30 days, 90 days, depends, right? But the first period than the whole rest of the customer's life. And also small changes in the onboarding can have large effects on cancellation.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A cancelling customer already survived an improbable gauntlet to buy, which makes churn an emotional emergency before it is ever a metric.

  Their words

  They actually had the budget and bought the stupid thing. Then they went through onboarding and invested their time etc etc. That is a crazy gauntlet that almost no one gets through.

  youtube.com

Writer and artist, author of Steal Like an Artist; publishes a weekly newsletter and an annual list of the books he read.

• Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Anna Karenina

  Their words

  I love Tolstoy because you get a third of a way into his book about a lady having an affair and the best chapter is about a dude experiencing a state of "flow" while mowing a field with his country peasants.

  austinkleon.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

  A mature product's growth comes from resurrecting dormant users, so the returning-user experience deserves to be designed as deliberately as onboarding.

  Their words

  And it's actually worth spending some time making sure that that kind of resurrected, for lack of a better word, experience inside the product is really excellent and that you find novel ways to try to bring them back.

  youtube.com

Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  SuperWhisper

  Their words

  AUDIO KEYBOARD - I used to use SuperWhisper but have now shifted to Wispr Flow

  swyx.io

Astrophysicist at Barnard College; wrote Black Hole Blues and How the Universe Got Its Spots, and directs sciences at Pioneer Works.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The hardest step on the road from chemistry to us was multicellularity, and it was strictly a problem of energetics.

  energy

  Their words

  I would say, multicellularity which is strictly an energy problem, I think. Again, it’s just like can electrons flow the right way. And is it energetically favorable for multicellularity to exist because if it’s energetically expensive, it’s not going to succeed.

  youtube.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  "Simplify onboarding" is an action, not a problem, and a roadmap line written that way will not work.

  Their words

  But, if you ever have a line item on your roadmap that says simplify onboarding, please please cross it out. It's not going to work because simplifying onboarding is an action.

  youtube.com

Software engineer and a long-time technical lead of the Go programming language; author of plan9port and of the research.swtch.com essays.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Debugging by reasoning backward from a bad state is inherently harder than reasoning forward from a known decision point.

  Their words

  One of the hardest things about debugging is running a program backward: there's a data structure with a bad value, or the control flow has zigged instead of zagged, and it's very difficult to understand how it could have gotten into that state.

  research.swtch.com

Designer and engineer; formerly principal research engineer at GitHub Next; writes at wattenberger.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Good tools let the user choose when to switch between implementing and evaluating; a chatbot forces the switch every few seconds and kills flow.

  Their words

  Good tools let the user choose when to switch between implementation and evaluation. When I work with a chatbot, I'm forced to frequently switch between the two modes.

  Why Chatbots Are Not the Futurewattenberger.com

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

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The primordial soup is a miracle story: life needs a continuous flow of reaction, and a soup can never provide one.

  Their words

  So, how did they do that? You may as well say that a miracle happened. I don’t believe in soup. I think what we have in a vent is a continuous conversion, a continuous growth, a continuous reaction, a continuous converting a flow of molecules into more of yourself, you might say, even if it’s a small bit.

  youtube.com

Astrophysicist and coffee researcher; author of The Physics of Filter Coffee and The Physics of Espresso, and writer of the Coffee ad Astra blog on brewing science and equipment.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Avoiding astringency in coffee is fundamentally a filtration problem rather than simply a matter of flow evenness.

  Their words

  Therefore, avoiding astringency is not directly a matter of flow evenness, it is actually a filtration problem !

  The Mechanism Behind Astringency in Coffeecoffeeadastra.com

Astrophysicist and coffee researcher; author of The Physics of Filter Coffee and The Physics of Espresso, and writer of the Coffee ad Astra blog on brewing science and equipment.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Adding hydraulic resistance beneath an espresso puck reduces channeling by slowing the flow of water and making it more even across the coffee bed.

  Their words

  I now suspect that adding a source of hydraulic resistance under the puck that is non-negligible compared with the espresso puck itself is desirable to reduce the impact of channels because it slows down the flow of water where it would tend to become otherwise too fast and as a consequence less even across the surface of the coffee bed.

  More Even Espresso Extractionscoffeeadastra.com

Astrophysicist and coffee researcher; author of The Physics of Filter Coffee and The Physics of Espresso, and writer of the Coffee ad Astra blog on brewing science and equipment.

• Mixed onrcmnd.app

  AeroPress

  Their words

  While I have enjoyed the AeroPress a lot in the past especially when travelling, I have always had one big complaint about it: getting a thick coffee bed to minimize uneven flow when pressing out the water limits the brew ratios that can be used.

  coffeeadastra.com

Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Don't Make Me Think

  Their words

  The original usability book by Steve Krug is the best starter for anyone looking to learn the basics of the subject. Nothing I've read helps crystallize as well the idea of your complicated user flow actually being a mess.

  jasonevanish.com

Writer, photographer and software maker based in Japan; publishes long-form essays, walking newsletters and self-made books at craigmod.com.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Fast software is not always good software, but slow software is rarely able to rise to greatness, because not breaking flow is an axiom of great tools.

  Their words

  Fast software is not always good software, but slow software is rarely able to rise to greatness. Fast software gives the user a chance to “meld” with its toolset. That is, not break flow.

  Fast Software, the Best Softwarecraigmod.com

Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Deep Work

  Their words

  Podcast. Yes, yes, yes! We live very distracted lives and most of our working days are filled with shallow tasks and interruptions. Although programmers get the importance of flow, it’s so hard to achieve. Our environments don’t support it, and shallow work is just easier. The book makes a compelling case for why we should double down on deep work, and offers some practical strategies for achie…

  radex.io