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19 September
Professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and co-author, with Abraham Newman, of Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.
years ago, my colleague Steve Teles and @mschmitt9.bsky.social wrote what I think is still the definitive piece on how to think about this - hewlett.org
Quoting @donmoyn.bsky.social Arguably Leonard Leo has been the most successful convertor of money to political outcomes in recent decades. He also is unethical and a bit corrupt, and seems to bet mostly on ideological allies and I doubt asks for metrics on ROI. www.propublica.org/article/we-d... Related
15 September
Mathematical biologist; Senior Lecturer in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Bath and author of The Maths of Life and Death and How to Expect the Unexpected.
x.com Delighted that my friend and colleague Alex Bellos has been awarded the 2026 Christopher Zeeman medal for communicating mathematics. Well done Alex. Here we are at the recent opening of Maths World in London alongside the excellent Alexander Masters. Related
Bluesky Delighted that my friend and colleague Alex Bellos has been awarded the 2026 Christopher Zeeman medal for communicating mathematics. Well done Alex. Here we are at the recent opening of Maths World in London alongside the excellent Alexander Masters. lms.ac.uk
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Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.
This is 100% the right thing to do The number one thing people say about my books is that they love reading my honest personal reflections. It enables them to connect to it If you water it down to pure ideas maybe you can crush a mass market but no one will connect with it Quoting @colossusjeremy I'm grateful to the readers complaining that I put myself in this piece too much, to which I say: -Human watermarks are more important now -I'm tired of gen z bullying everyone into fear of being cringe, we need to let it all hang out Related
4 September
Founder and chief executive of Replit. Previously an engineer at Facebook and Codecademy. Writes essays on programming, philosophy and entrepreneurship at amasad.me.
Ken Thompson’s “Reflections on Trusting Trust” feels super relevant to AI. He bootstrapped a “poisoned” compiler that left no traces of the poison in the source code because it compiled itself. You can imagine the same thing happening with models where one poisoned generation helps train the next while removing any traces of the poison. Related
2 September
Economics professor at George Mason University and author of The Myth of the Rational Voter, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, The Case Against Education and Open Borders. Writes Bet On It.
Reflections on Americans’ Net Worth I’ve been an economics professor for almost 30 years, but I don’t think I’ve ever before seen anything like the table below. I knew that claims that “58% of Americans can’t afford a $1,000 car repair” were laughable cli…
America Related
1 September
Mathematician at UCLA, working mainly in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations. Writes What's new, a long-running blog on their research, open problems and expository notes.
The Polymath8b upper bound of 246 on the gap between consecutive primes that appear infinitely often, has held since 2014, but has finally been shaved down to 240 in this recent preprint of Julia Stadlmann: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31126 . Her paper is a remarkable effort in the spirit of the original Polymath8b argument, except now done by one mathematician (with the assistance of traditional numerical computation, but not modern AI tools). Ever since the seminal work of Goldston, Pintz, and Yildirim, the progress on this problem has proceeded by carefully designing a "sieve" of bounded in… Related
31 August
Writer on the intersection of technology and finance. Author of the Bits about Money newsletter and host of the Complex Systems podcast; previously at Stripe.
This talk by (my former colleague) @kevinriggle is a superb 80/20 for startup founders who want to do more than nothing re: security but are not sure where to start with a small team. Quoting @MicroConf Kevin Riggle did security at Akamai, Stripe, and Lyft before starting his own consultancy. He argues at MicroConf that most cybersecurity advice is written for computers we stopped using twenty years ago. Here's what to do instead. 🧵 startups Related
12 August
Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.
10 August
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.
5 August
FreeBSD developer and former FreeBSD Security Officer; founder of the Tarsnap online backup service and author of the scrypt key derivation function.
Amazon is now publishing "AI Insights" with information about the pricing of FreeBSD in the @awsmarketplace. Apparently someone thought that "it's free" was too complicated for customers to understand without AI assistance. Related
31 July
Software developer and entrepreneur; co-founder of Heroku, author of The Twelve-Factor App, and a researcher at Ink & Switch.
30 July
Co-founder of WordPress and founder of Automattic; blogs at ma.tt.
Possible Futures of Happiness At Automattic, we don’t have customer service or support, we have Happiness Engineers. 🙂 There’s also a #ceo Slack channel where anyone can drop in and request a meeting, which my esteemed colleague Damianne President…
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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
23 July
Data scientist at Our World in Data and author of Not the End of the World. Writes By the Numbers, working through energy and climate questions with the numbers in front of them, and revising in public when they say something unexpected.
6 July
Founded Bridgewater Associates in 1975 and led it until stepping back from control in 2022. Author of Principles, The Changing World Order and How Countries Go Broke; publishes economic analysis at economicprinciples.org.
2 June
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.
Their words
So I I don't do one-on- ones. My friend Bing told me that Jeff Bezos wouldn't ever do one-on ones because it created politics and it was a huge waste of his time. I was like, I love that. No one ones.
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youtube.com
27 April
Engineering leader and writer; wrote An Elegant Puzzle, Staff Engineer and The Engineering Executive's Primer, and blogs at Irrational Exuberance.
26 April
Software engineer who writes about low-level and systems programming at nullprogram.com; author of the Elfeed feed reader, the Endlessh SSH tarpit and Enchive.
22 April
Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.
2 March
Clinical psychologist, EMDR consultant and yoga teacher in Boulder, Colorado. Author of The Complex PTSD Workbook and EMDR Therapy and Somatic Psychology; writes on trauma, attachment and the nervous system.
23 February
Writes Hyperdimensional, a newsletter on AI policy and governance. A White House AI policy adviser in 2025; joined OpenAI on 6 July 2026 to lead its Strategic Futures team.
31 January
Programmer; wrote Redis and hping, and blogs about C, systems programming and working alone.
Automatic programming In my YouTube channel, for some time now I started to refer to the process of writing software using AI assistance (soon to become just "the process of writing software", I believe) with the term "Automatic Programming"…
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28 January
Swedish essayist who writes Escaping Flatland, a newsletter of essays on relationships, thinking, writing and homeschooling.
7 January
Executive coach for product leaders. Previously a partner at GV (Google Ventures) and a product manager at Google. Writes at Bring the Donuts, including a standing essential-reading list for product managers.
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. Understanding how we grow and develop will help you become a better leader and a more empathetic colleague. More accessible than his academic work, this book also provides a framework for understanding underlying beliefs and motivations that might be holding you back.
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bringthedonuts.com
1 January
Roboticist; co-founded iRobot and Rethink Robotics, directed the MIT AI Lab, and publishes a scorecard grading his own dated predictions about AI, robots and self-driving.
31 December 2025
Writer and former Substack product manager; publishes essays and interviews on technology, culture and China at jasmi.news.
20 December 2025
Programmer; wrote Redis and hping, and blogs about C, systems programming and working alone.
Reflections on AI at the end of 2025 * For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots: probabilistic machines that would: 1. NOT have any representation about…
LLMs Related
5 October 2025
Head of growth at Chess.com, previously growth and monetization lead at Grammarly and Duolingo and a product manager at Google.
Their words
And I think what's also kind of interesting is that just human nature is that if you have a question that you feel like, you know, you might be a bit embarrassed to ask or you don't want to bother someone, you just don't ask the question, right? And so by the nature of having these tools, you get actually a pretty large explosion of questions being asked.
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youtube.com
21 September 2025
Co-founder of Sundial; former vice president of product design at Facebook; author of The Making of a Manager; writes The Looking Glass.
Their words
You can shortcut like hard feelings because now you can just watch TikTok instead of actually dealing with the very difficult emotion or tension that you had with a colleague or with your partner or with your children.
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youtube.com
22 March 2025
Runs the mechanistic interpretability team at Google DeepMind; worked on interpretability at Anthropic under Chris Olah before that, and teaches the field to newcomers.
Their words
Though note that people's opinions are often substantially reflections of the people they speak to most, rather than what's actually true.
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neelnanda.io
21 March 2025
Writer and former McKinsey/BCG strategy consultant; author of The Pathless Path and Good Work, about leaving the default career track. Publishes the Boundless newsletter and podcast.
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Ben's personal reflections on reinventing himself at "midlife" (though relatable at any age). I love how he leaned into a new version of himself without dramatically blowing up his life.
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pathlesspath.com
11 February 2025
Independent AI policy researcher; led policy research at OpenAI from 2018 to 2024, latterly as senior adviser for AGI readiness.
30 January 2025
Creator of Flask and Jinja. Writes about software at lucumr.pocoo.org.
Their words
It is a fork of Visual Studio Code with AI-based auto completion and code generation built-in. It’s my go-to for programming with AI assistance at the moment.
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lucumr.pocoo.org
27 January 2025
Software engineer who writes the blog Made of Bugs about performance, debugging and understanding computer systems. Previously worked at Anthropic on interpretability, at Stripe on Sorbet, and at Ksplice.
Claude impressed me recently! A yak shave I was expecting to code by hand, and Claude did essentially all of it, instead. An experience report, and some reflections: blog.nelhage.com
Anthropic Related
6 January 2025
Co-founder and CEO of OpenAI; previously president of Y Combinator.
Reflections The second birthday of ChatGPT was only a little over a month ago, and now we have transitioned into the next paradigm of models that can do complex reasoning. New years get people in a reflective mood, and I wanted to…
OpenAI Related
4 January 2025
Design engineer and illustrator; makes visual essays on programming, anthropology and what language models do to the way people write.
30 December 2024
Software engineer and essayist who writes about programming, formal methods, philosophy and literature at thoughts.wyounas.com.
Their words
It's a nice, short, and moving memoir by the comedian and actor Steve Martin. The book details his early working days at shops and clubs, his relationships, and eventually his rise to fame. He shared his struggles, his failures, long hours of practice, his reflections to refine his craft, and his efforts to find his own unique voice as a comedian. Any memoir that only talks about successes and never discusses struggles, rejections, or weaknesses is suspect. This one is not. What I like about his writing is that it feels candid and, at times, funny.
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thoughts.wyounas.com
Their words
Some of his essays are thought-provoking. His reflections on education, nationalism, and other topics are not only stirring but also showcase literary brilliance. The man could write.
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thoughts.wyounas.com
19 December 2023
Professor at Carnegie Mellon working on self-driving-car safety; writes Safe Autonomy on how autonomous vehicles are and are not shown to be safe.
Bulgarian-born writer and founder of The Marginalian (formerly Brain Pickings), a reader-funded blog on books, science, art and philosophy running since 2006.
Their words
The secret pulse-beat of joy is what Jean-François Beauchemin explores in Archives of Joy: Reflections on Animals and the Nature of Being
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themarginalian.org
26 October 2023
Software engineer and a long-time technical lead of the Go programming language; author of plan9port and of the research.swtch.com essays.
1 May 2023
Family therapist and founder of Relational Life Therapy. Author of I Don't Want to Talk About It, How Can I Get Through to You? and Us; argues that Western individualism is what makes couples' work hard.
22 November 2021
Economist and journalist; Financial Times columnist as The Undercover Economist, author of How to Make the World Add Up, and presenter of the Cautionary Tales podcast.
Their words
Gillian Tett, Anthro-Vision – my colleague Gillian Tett makes the case for thinking like an anthropologist in business and in life. The description of how KitKats took Japan by storm is a particular delight.
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timharford.com
1 January 2021
Psychiatrist and clinical assistant professor at Case Western Reserve University. Writes Psychiatry at the Margins on the philosophical and scientific arguments inside psychiatry and the psy-sciences.
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