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Dario Amodei's essay on how AI could transform biology, neuroscience, poverty, governance, and work - if we get the safety part right.

“The CEO of Anthropic giving his most optimistic take yet. Unusually specific about mechanisms - not just 'AI will be great' but how each domain could actually change. The biology section alone is worth the read.”

Ethan Mollick on why the latest wave of AI capabilities represents a genuine phase change - not incremental progress. Based on his research at Wharton.

“Ethan is one of the few people writing about AI who is both rigorous and practical. He uses these tools daily in teaching and research, so his observations come from real use.”

Thomas Ptacek on the economics of LLM inference - why tokens are the new compute primitive and what this means for how we build and price AI products.

“Thomas brings his security-engineer rigor to AI economics. The analysis of inference cost curves vs. pricing is the clearest I've seen anywhere.”

Will Larson on the patterns that make senior engineers hard to work with - and how to distinguish between genuinely difficult people and people who are just operating at a different level.

“Nuanced take on a problem every team faces. The distinction between 'principled disagreement' and 'being difficult' is one I use in every performance review now.”

Michael Hopkins on cruise ships as a natural experiment in progress. While aviation and building heights stagnated on land, cruise ships kept getting bigger, better, and more innovative - free from land-based regulation.

“A genuinely novel argument. When innovation is free from NIMBYism and excessive regulation, it doesn't stagnate - it accelerates. Cruise ships prove that the Great Stagnation is a policy choice.”

Marc Andreessen's 2011 WSJ essay — the one that named an era. His argument that software was going to disrupt every major industry now reads as obvious, but it wasn't when he wrote it.

“Remarkable for being right at the exact moment everyone else was wrong. Worth reading not just for the thesis but for the specific companies and industries Andreessen called out — most of the predictions landed.”

Baldur Bjarnason's long analysis of what's actually happening to the open web - algorithmic feeds, AI scraping, the enshittification cycle, and what alternatives look like.

“Goes beyond the usual doom takes to actually analyze what's happening structurally. The section on how AI scrapers are changing the incentives for publishing is especially important.”

Connor Tabarrok on Paris's century-long struggle to clean the Seine - from the 2024 Olympics promise to the engineering, politics, and infrastructure required to make a river swimmable.

“Connor writes about infrastructure with the narrative skill of a journalist and the rigor of an engineer. The Seine story is a microcosm of every infrastructure challenge - the tech exists, the politics are the hard part.”

Peter Norvig's essay on why learning to program well takes years, not days — a direct rebuttal to 'learn X in 24 hours' books that still rings true decades later.

“Still one of the most useful things to send someone who's starting to code. The point about deliberate practice vs. just coding is criminally underappreciated.”

Bob Nystrom explains why mixing async and sync code in most languages creates two incompatible worlds — and why that's a deeper design problem than most people realize.

“The moment I read this I understood why async/await felt off. The 'color' metaphor is perfect — it explains a real language design flaw that no amount of tooling can fully paper over.”

Jakob Nielsen's classic 10 heuristics for evaluating user interfaces — still the most actionable framework for spotting UI problems without user testing.

“Print this out. Give it to everyone who ships interfaces. Reference it in design reviews. 30 years old and every heuristic still applies.”

Visual, interactive explainer of CSS Grid

“The best CSS Grid tutorial on the internet. Interactive examples make it click.”

The 'notice problems' essay — Paul Graham on how the best startup ideas come from noticing things that are missing or broken in your own life, and why trying to think of ideas usually doesn't work.

“Made me completely change how I approach ideation. The 'live in the future' framing is much more useful than most 'find your passion' advice.”

How Charlie Munger uses inversion to avoid stupidity

“Instead of asking how to succeed, ask how to fail - then avoid that. Deceptively powerful.”

How a $10B gaming company runs with tiny teams

“Small autonomous cells beating big teams. Relevant for any startup org design.”

Comprehensive guide to robotic manipulation research

“Manipulation is the hardest unsolved problem in robotics - this is the best primer I have found”

RMI analysis of the accelerating clean energy transition

“Data-driven analysis showing the energy transition is happening faster than models predict”