I was showing Hannah my feed reading system yesterday, and I didn’t get a chance to seed an initial list of blogs to follow, so I thought I might do that here.
I follow almost 1000 blogs, feeds, and newsletters, which includes more than a few that are completely defunct and the overwhelming majority of which don’t even post once a month. These are just a few that I thought she’d like.
- Simon Willison’s blog. Python developer and AI/LLM researcher. He keeps up with the state of open source LLM models and maintains a tool for running them locally.
- Aella’s Substack. Really interesting perspectives and strange experiences. Thoughtful, but weird. Full content requires subscription; I do recommend it if you like the free stuff.
- Astral Codex Ten, the new(ish) Substack home of Slate Star Codex. All the good stuff here is free.
- default wisdom, the Substack of Default Friend aka Katherine Dee. More thoughtful than most Internet culture writers.
- Supernuclear, a Substack about coliving communities.
- Stratechery, a blog about technology and business. I think you’ll like the business strategy analysis. I’m just a subscriber to the free feed, which doesn’t post too often.
- Slime Mold Time Mold, pseudonymous citizen science. You won’t agree with their thoughts on obesity, but I think you’ll like reading them anyway.
- Bits About Money, a newsletter/blog about how the financial system backends work.
- Casey Handmer’s Blog on big moonshot speculative hard science, like terraforming Mars.
- Austin Vernon’s blog on short term hard science, like what’s on the near term horizon for geothermal/nuclear/solar, and possible paths for the US military.
- DYNOMIGHT INTERNET WEBSITE, including some philosophy, some science, and some miscellaneous. Always an enjoyable read.
- Waxy.org, Andy Baio’s blog. Lots of deep Internet lore and links to labors of love. Posts pretty often.
- Yassine Meskhout’s Substack, by a public defender in California.
And a few tricks for following and reading feeds:
- I use Feedbin as the sync server that keeps track of all my feeds and which articles I’ve read. It has a web frontend and a mobile app to use as frontends, but most of the time I don’t use those.
- Almost all the time I am using NetNewsWire on my iPhone to read feeds. It also has a Mac version. It’s free and supports Feedbin as a sync server.
- However, I also recommend Unread on iOS. It has a share sheet item that enables a great workflow: any time you see an article in iOS Safari on a blog, you can share it to the Subscribe in Unread extension, and it will find the RSS feed (if one exists) and subscribe to it. Unread also supports Feedbin. Lots of sites have RSS feeds that don’t mention them anywhere on the page itself but programs like Unread can detect them.
- Feedbin has great newsletter support. it gives you an email address to send newsletters to, and any email sent there is shown in your feed reader. I recommend setting up email rules to forward all substack email to Feedbin and delete it from your inbox. (It’s crazy to me how popular long email newsletters are considering how terrible it is to read a lot of text in most email clients.)
- All Mastodon accounts have RSS feeds you can use unless the account is private. If you want to follow someone’s Mastodon account without having one yourself, you can do it from Feedbin.
- It’s nice to have an Instapaper account so you have somewhere to send articles that you keep skipping in the feed reader because they’re too long. Part of this is that it is just a dumping ground for stuff that you might never get around to, but Instapaper does a better job than my feed readers at keeping your place within an article, which is really handy for longer pieces.
I hope you find something nice to read :)