korrents · subjects

Subjects

172 subjects somebody has spoken to, 2 more in the vocabulary waiting for a claim

The words this archive files claims under. Each one opens a chronology: every dated position that matches it, oldest to newest, with who holds it.

Why the list is short, and why some terms are not links.

The vocabulary is curated and closed. Pulling proper nouns out of the text automatically was the obvious alternative, and it produces chips of equal weight for "Amazing", "Instead" and "Rust" — so a term goes in when somebody has read the claims it would gather. That means the list runs slightly ahead of the archive: a term nobody has spoken to yet is printed here without a link, because its page would render perfectly and hold nothing, which reads as a broken link rather than an honest empty one.

The count is people, not claims. Four claims under one subject can be one person four times, and the question worth answering before you click is how many people have spoken to it.

design 249 people
How things should be made and judged: what makes a design good, who should do the designing, and what an interface is for.

Which mental models should a designer think with?
LLMs 214 people
innovation 174 people
Where new things come from and how they spread: invention against diffusion, and being near the factory floor.
America 170 people
government 169 people
What states are for and what they are worse at than markets and networks: legitimacy, moral hazard, and who may be entrusted with power.
behavioural science 162 people
Applying how people actually decide to policy, rather than assuming how they should.
ambition 137 people
How much to take on and how hard to push: superlinear returns to effort, focus, slack time, and procrastination.

Why is ambition important?
education 116 people
How children are taught and tested: schools, tutoring, what a lesson at the right level does, and what AI changes.
AI and jobs 114 people
Whether AI displaces human work, which jobs go first, and what replaces them.

Will AI take the jobs?
management 113 people
Running the place: an executive's calendar, dissent, severance, and what a manager is actually for.
agency 112 people
Acting on the world rather than waiting: what it does for work, whether it can be learned, and whether AI widens or takes it.

Why does agency matter?
energy 112 people
Where does the energy come from, and what is stopping it?
AI alignment 108 people
How dangerous is AI, and how soon?
AI agents 107 people
Agents beyond the editor: software that acts on your behalf, and what independence it should be given.
politics 102 people
How people actually hold political views: tribes, partisanship, and whether anybody reasons their way in.
startups 95 people
happiness 93 people
What makes a life go well: whether it is meaning, love, virtue, enough money, or simply expecting less.

What makes a good life?
simplicity 93 people
Less, but better: reduction as the way to make something good, and the argument about when it goes too far.

When does an abstraction help, and when does it hurt?
creativity 90 people
Making something new: where ideas come from, what conditions let them come, and whether a machine can have them.

Where does creativity come from?
taste 89 people
Whether good and bad exist in made things, and how a maker comes to tell them apart.

What is taste, and why does it matter now?
coding agents 84 people
What do coding agents change about software work?
motivation 84 people
What makes effort feel worth it: the neuroscience of wanting to act, apathy, dopamine, and habit.
software quality 84 people
Whether a program is any good and how anyone would know: tests, review, debt, and what a suite cannot cover.

What are tests for, and how much testing is enough?
product management 83 people
What a product manager is for, who decides what gets built, and what happens to that job once delivery is cheap.

What is a PM for, now that building is cheap?
developer tools 81 people
ideas vs execution 81 people
Whether the idea or the execution behind it is what actually decides an outcome, and who deserves the credit.
humility 76 people
Knowing what you do not know: whether it makes you learn and decide better, or costs you the self-belief that gets things done.

Why does humility matter?
open source 75 people
investing 73 people
Putting money into markets on purpose: what a portfolio is for, whether active management earns its cost, and what money is actually a means to.
AGI 70 people
writing 70 people
Prose as thinking: writing well, writing by hand while a model offers to do it, and who will still be able to.
optimism 69 people
Expecting things to go well: whether it is what gets things built, or a bias that forecasts keep paying for.

Why be optimistic?
benchmarks 68 people
hiring 64 people
Finding people and judging them: referrals, open calls, contests, and reading the work rather than the CV.

How should software engineers be interviewed?
war 64 people
Armed conflict and preparing for it: military spending, alliances, and what changes when machines are in the loop.
infrastructure 63 people
Building the large physical things -- reservoirs, roads, pipelines -- and why some countries have stopped being able to.
social media 63 people
Feeds and the platforms that rank them: what an algorithm decides is important, and what curating your own sources costs.
Europe 59 people
religion 59 people
Faith as a thing a society runs on, and what has been tried in its place.
capitalism 53 people
Markets as a system rather than a market: what it is for, what it costs, and what people mean when they say they are retiring from it.
China 51 people
curiosity 50 people
Wanting to know for its own sake: what it does for good work, learning, creativity and a long life, and what happens to it with age.

Why is curiosity important?
AI and human skill 49 people
Practised abilities decaying because a machine now does them: writing, thinking, reading anything long.
empathy 49 people
Feeling what others feel: whether it makes better makers, leaders and people, or is a poor guide that should give way to compassion.

Does empathy make us better?
OpenAI 49 people
team size 49 people
How many people a thing needs, and what the extra ones cost: headcount, coordination, and the small-team claim.
health and fitness 48 people
The body as something you decide about: sleep, exercise, drugs of every legality, and how far optimising it is worth taking.
Anthropic 47 people
cybersecurity 47 people
Attack and defence in software: vulnerabilities, hardening, and what changes when a model is good at finding them.
documentation 46 people
AI writing 45 people
Prose a model wrote: what gives it away, what it does to reading, and whether anyone should publish it.
Google 45 people
neural networks 45 people
The architecture almost all modern machine learning is built on, and what changes when it gets deeper.
scaling laws 44 people
Whether more compute keeps buying more capability, and where the curve now bends -- pre-training, post-training, test-time.
SaaS 43 people
AI and science 42 people
Models used to do science rather than to write: rediscovering laws from data, compressing decades of biology, refereeing a proof.
Psychotherapy 42 people
Treatment by conversation between a therapist and a patient, and the arguments about what in it actually does the work.

What makes psychotherapy work?
physics 41 people
Fundamental physics: unification, relativity and quantum mechanics, and whether string theory is still the candidate.
code generation 40 people
Machines emitting code and files, and whether the volume they produce is a cost somebody eventually pays.
data centers 37 people
mathematics 36 people
Doing mathematics: proof, conjecture, and what mathematicians want that other fields do not.
vibe coding 36 people
Building software by describing what you want and accepting what comes back, without reading much of it.
climate change 35 people
Warming and what would actually move it: emissions, carbon, and the difference between a gesture and a lever.
discipline 35 people
Doing the work when you do not feel like it: whether showing up is the whole secret, or systems and enjoyment beat willpower.

Is discipline the answer?
market efficiency 35 people
metascience 35 people
Research about research: whether published findings hold up, and what makes a field more or less reliable.
robotics 34 people
Machines that act in the world: humanoids, training data for robots, and how far behind language models they run.
semiconductors 34 people
The chips and the companies that make them: NVIDIA, TSMC, ASML, and what a fab can and cannot do.
Silicon Valley 34 people
The place as an idea: its appetite for disruption, its moonshots, and what it has given up on.
AI slop 33 people
Low-quality generated content at volume, and what it does to the places it lands in.
patience 33 people
Waiting for results: whether patience compounds into the thing that wins, or impatience is how work gets done fast.

Is patience a virtue?
censorship 32 people
Who gets to remove what: speech, code and money, and whether a state prosecuting a platform is regulation or something else.
family 32 people
Children, partners and inheritance: the peak experience, and what to hand on.
software performance 32 people
Speed as a mark of quality: bloat, boot times, and software that got slower on hardware that got faster.
chat interfaces 31 people
The text box as the way into a model: whether chat is the future of software or a terrible interface, and what replaces it.
courage 31 people
Acting despite fear: whether it waits for the fear to go, how it is built, and why so few people show it.

What does courage take?
consciousness 30 people
What it is for there to be something it is like to be a system, and whether that can be measured.

Can a machine be conscious?
journalism 30 people
How reporting is made and why to believe it: sourcing conventions, incentives, and reading across biased accounts.
solar 30 people
How cheap does solar get, and what does that change?
JavaScript 29 people
the cloud 29 people
Rent the cloud or own the servers?
Apple 28 people
The App Store toll, the turn to services, and whether the company that made the machines is still that company.
stock market 28 people
Equities as a whole: what returns have been, whether prices carry information, and what attention does to them.
evolutionary biology 27 people
Natural selection as an explanation, including the problem of how cooperation survives it.
housing 26 people
What a place to live costs and why: how much gets built, zoning, and who is blamed for the price.
privacy 26 people
Keeping what people say to each other between them: end-to-end encryption, backdoors, and what a company will shut down rather than break.
Russia 25 people
Addiction 24 people
Compulsive use that continues through the harm it causes — and the argument about whether it is a disease, a choice, or a response to pain.
aviation 24 people
Flying and the machines that do it: propulsion, airlines, runways, and what happened to Boeing.
inflation 24 people
measuring intelligence 24 people
What it would mean to measure intelligence in a machine, as opposed to measuring how well it does one task it was trained for.
sustainability 24 people
Whether human wellbeing and environmental impact still have to trade off against each other.
democracy 23 people
Elections, the losers accepting them, and the rules that keep power answerable to voters.
fiscal policy 22 people
The spending-and-taxing half of macro, as against the central-bank half: multipliers, stabilisers, stimulus.
reinforcement learning 22 people
Training by reward: environments, verifiable tasks, value functions, and whether it works or merely beats what came before.
video games 22 people
Games as software and as storytelling: how they are made, by how few, and what the medium does better than film.
demographics 21 people
Who there will be: birth rates, population decline, and what a shrinking cohort does to everything downstream.
immigration 21 people
self-driving cars 21 people
interest rates 20 people
Does public debt cost what we think it does?
venture capital 19 people
Raising money and what it does to the product: the funnel that forces hard choices, and what happens without it.
mental models 18 people
Thinking tools borrowed across disciplines: inversion, second-order effects, circles of competence, probabilities, incentives.

Which mental models help you think better?
Microsoft 18 people
The company and its bets: Copilot, the office tools business, and what agents do to both.
attitude change 17 people
How public opinion moves over decades, and how badly people misjudge that movement.
batteries 17 people
Storage as the thing that decides how much intermittent generation is worth building.
crypto 17 people
friendship 17 people
The company you keep: whether the people around you make you better or worse, and how to choose them.

Do you become the people you spend time with?
space 17 people
Getting off the planet, and why anybody thinks it matters.
AI sentience 16 people
Whether there is anything it is like to be one of these systems, and whether the question is even well posed.
compilers 16 people
Programs that turn programs into programs: what a compiler can name, assembly, and building one that serves an editor.
recursive self-improvement 16 people
AI that improves AI: the loop where a model writes the code or the data that makes the next one.
tariffs 16 people
Taxes on imports: whether they close a trade deficit, what they do to prices, and what they are really for.

Do tariffs do what they are imposed to do?
transformers 16 people
The architecture that dropped recurrence in favour of attention, and that almost every large model since is built on.
electric vehicles 15 people
Cars on batteries: adoption forecasts, what drag and weight cost, and what they do to oil demand.
Japan 15 people
Stagnation, demographics, finance and industry, and what the rest of the world reads into them.
nuclear power 15 people
Fission as an energy source: what it costs, what it risks, and whether anything else can do the job.
economists 14 people
The economists themselves and the schools they founded -- Smith, Mill, Keynes, Hayek, Friedman -- rather than any one economic question.
remote work 14 people
language learning 13 people
How an adult picks up a second language: input against speaking practice, immersion against slow habit, and whether a teacher can do it for you.
Trauma 13 people
What overwhelming experience leaves behind, and whether it is stored in the body, the memory, or the loop between them.
computer vision 12 people
Teaching a machine to interpret images: recognising, classifying and organising what is in a picture.
permitting 12 people
The review a project must pass before it can be built, and the argument that it now blocks more than it protects.

Can a rich country still build things?
personal websites 11 people
Publishing on something you own: plain text, formats that outlive their vendor, and syndicating from your own site outward.
value investing 11 people
world models 11 people
Internal representations of an environment that an agent builds and revises, and whether machines can build them fast.
CBT 10 people
Cognitive behavioural therapy: brief, structured, usually delivered from a manual, and the most heavily trialled form of talking treatment.
MCP 10 people
The Model Context Protocol, an open standard for connecting AI models to external tools and data.
peer review 10 people
How science checks itself, and the case that the checking mostly does not work.
psychedelics 10 people
racism 10 people
Treatment by race, the words that excuse it, and what standing against it asks of people.
libertarianism 9 people
Escaping politics rather than winning it, and whether there is anywhere left to escape to.
Linux 9 people
cryptography 8 people
Keeping a computation secret from the machine running it -- obfuscation, permutations, and what has been proved.
dementia 8 people
Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and cognitive decline: what raises the risk, what is preventable, and what ageing well protects.
epidemiology 8 people
How a disease moves through a population, and what modelling it can and cannot settle.
HuggingFace 8 people
Psychodynamic therapy 8 people
The tradition descended from psychoanalysis: open-ended sessions working on self-knowledge and the therapy relationship, rather than a manual.
public debt 8 people
quantum mechanics 8 people
The theory itself and the arguments about what it means -- measurement, collapse, and whether nature is locally causal.
TypeScript 8 people
A typed superset of JavaScript that compiles to plain JavaScript.

Do static types make software better?
pruning 7 people
Cutting connections that are not doing the work — in a trained network, and in a developing brain.
Python 7 people
Attachment theory 6 people
That early bonds shape how a person seeks and avoids closeness for the rest of their life, and the couples work built on that claim.
CSS 6 people
formal proof 6 people
Machine-checked mathematics: proof assistants such as Lean, and what changes when correctness is certified rather than refereed.
gender equality 6 people
Equal rights and treatment for women and men, and what feminism is for.
network science 6 people
Why systems as different as a genome and the web share the same connection patterns.
EMDR 5 people
Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing: a trauma therapy in which the patient recalls a memory while moving their eyes from side to side. Recommended as a first-line PTSD treatment; whether the eye movements themselves do anything is still argued about.
price gouging 5 people
Whether a price should be allowed to spike in a shortage, and what happens to supply when it is not.
prompt injection 5 people
Getting an agent to follow instructions it found instead of the ones it was given.
SQLite 5 people
An embedded SQL database engine that runs inside the application rather than as a separate server.
Telegram 5 people
The messaging platform and the positions its founder has taken about running it.
protein structure prediction 4 people
Predicting the three-dimensional shape a protein folds into from its sequence, a problem structural biology worked on for decades before AlphaFold.
animal welfare 3 people
How animals are treated, factory farming above all, and what eating them costs.
gun policy 3 people
Who may own which firearms, and what checks, ages and waiting periods would actually change.
music industry 3 people
How music is paid for and owned: streaming, albums, labels and who holds the masters.
Narcissism 3 people
From a trait to a personality disorder, and whether the people at the far end of it can be treated at all.
Nix 3 people
A package manager and build system built on reproducible, declarative package definitions, and the NixOS distribution built on it.
Omarchy 3 people
An opinionated Arch Linux and Hyprland desktop setup created by DHH and released in June 2025. 37signals adopted it company-wide the following August.
optimizers 3 people
The algorithms that actually move a model's weights during training, and the trade-offs between them.
quantitative easing 3 people
Ruby 3 people
The language itself rather than the framework: duck typing, Matz, and whether it should ever get static types.
self-sovereign AI 3 people
Agents running on compute no human owner can switch off: whether they are inevitable, and what they would do for money.
ARC-AGI 2 people
A benchmark created by Francois Chollet that tests whether a system can solve novel reasoning tasks it was not trained on.
degrowth 2 people
Deliberately shrinking output as a climate strategy, and the arithmetic of who pays for it.

Do we shrink our way out of the climate problem, or grow our way out?
GANs 2 people
Two networks trained against each other, one generating fake examples and one judging them, until the generator's output is convincing.
Hyprland 2 people
A tiling window manager for Wayland, known for its looks and for shipping with almost nothing configured.
Schema therapy 2 people
An approach developed by Jeffrey Young for personality disorders, working on the life patterns laid down in childhood and the modes a person switches between.
surgical outcomes 2 people
Measuring and publishing how individual surgeons and hospitals perform, and what those numbers can honestly support.
Arch Linux 1 person
A rolling-release Linux distribution known for shipping software early and leaving configuration to the user.
Polyvagal theory 1 person
Stephen Porges’s account of the vagus nerve as the switch between defence and social connection. Widely used in trauma therapy and contested in physiology.
Ruby on Rails 1 person
The web framework created by DHH and released in 2004.

In the vocabulary, nobody has spoken to it yet

Keras · psychosurgery

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