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Vol. I · No. 04
The Reader's Stack
The Atlas Masthead
Edition · April 2026
Five Bureaus, One Stack
est. 2026 — A working follow-list, in print form 246 citations · 41 min read · 5 angles
From the Editor's Desk · 2026 Reading Stack

High-signal creators
worth a slot in 2026.

A working 2026 follow list across blogs, YouTube, X, podcasts and aggregators — the same dozen practitioners dominate every category, and the operational lesson is to cap your inputs.

Editor · The Atlas Desk Filed · 28 April 2026 Synthesis · five-angle expedition Tags · ai · swe · reading-list
From the Desk
An editorial on subscription discipline.
— The EditorThe Atlas, April 2026

The five-angle expedition produces a striking coincidence. Andrej Karpathy, Simon Willison, Sebastian Raschka, Nathan Lambert, Gergely Orosz, Ethan Mollick and swyx each appear in the long-form list, the video list, the X list and the podcast list. When three independent curation runs converge on the same names, that is the signal. Start there in whichever medium you actually consume.

"Cap your inputs. Five X follows is plenty; two newsletters in the inbox; one podcast for builders, one for thinkers, one for craft."

Output has compressed onto a smaller set of working practitioners who post more — not more people who post less. The Latent Space network is widening into AINews; several canonical names have gone dormant. Treat this stack as a working draft, not a permanent record.

2
Newsletters max
In the inbox. The rest belongs in an RSS reader. Per the blogs survey.
5
X follows is plenty
Practitioner-curated lists never lead with the 4M-follower accounts. Per the X desk.
3
Podcasts, by intent
One for builders, one for thinkers, one for craft. Per the pods desk.
30
Days unopened = drop
Regardless of medium. Per the feeds desk.
I.
Bureau · The Long Form

Bloggers & Newsletter Authors

81 citations
Read the full dispatch →
Featured
Headline subscription

Sebastian Raschka

Ahead of AI · 150k+ subscribers · monthly

Visual architecture deep-dives — "A Visual Guide to Attention Variants in Modern LLMs," "Components of A Coding Agent."

If you only have five slots, the practitioners' practitioner sits in one of them. Pairs with Simon Willison's near-daily weblog for ground-truth on every model release, and Nathan Lambert's Interconnects for open-models and post-training, 1–3× a week.

Cadence ~Monthly Lens Architecture Read Substack + RSS
The Reader's Roster · Long-form & Newsletters
Simon Willison
simonwillison.net
Hands-on tests of every model the day it ships; the "pelican on a bicycle" SVG benchmark.
Near-daily · ground truth
Nathan Lambert
interconnects.ai
Open models, post-training, RLHF and frontier research; Ai2 post-training lead.
1–3×/wk · 300+ posts
Gergely Orosz
Pragmatic Engineer
Original survey reporting on engineering orgs and AI's effect on them.
Weekly · paid · #1 SWE
Ben Thompson
Stratechery
Aggregation Theory applied to OpenAI/Anthropic; the daily strategy lens.
Daily · paid · strategy
Hamel Husain
hamel.dev
Evals, error analysis, LLM-as-judge methodology — the builders' canon.
Active · applied AI
Eugene Yan
eugeneyan.com
RAG, fine-tuning, caching, guardrails, defensive UX. Anthropic MTS as of 2026.
4–8 wk · 11.8k+ subs
Zvi Mowshowitz
Don't Worry About the Vase
Speed-premium model recaps plus long-term world-model building, in one feed.
Weekly · synthesis
Ethan Mollick
One Useful Thing
"How do I actually use this?" — work, education, applied AI from Wharton.
Active · applied
Jack Clark
Import AI
Frontier-research synthesis with a sharpened policy lens since the Anthropic Institute launch.
Weekly · ~70k
Marc Brooker
brooker.co.za
Distributed systems from an AWS principal-eng vantage; "Pass@k is Mostly Bunk."
Bi-weekly · systems
Julia Evans
jvns.ca
Beginner-respecting deep posts on Unix/Git internals; the canonical individual blog.
Steady · craft
Will Larson
lethain.com
Engineering leadership and how agents reshape staff-plus work.
Near-weekly · leadership
Charity Majors
charity.wtf
Observability, SRE culture, management — "Bring Back Ops Pride."
Frequent · ops
Vicki Boykis
vickiboykis.com
ML-infra ("Querying 3 billion vectors") mixed with culture essays.
~Bi-weekly · infra
Cameron R. Wolfe
Deep (Learning) Focus
Accessible research overviews to tens of thousands of readers.
Several/wk · research
Azeem Azhar
Exponential View
3–5 yr horizon; 2026 thesis — AI feels less like tools, more like a workforce.
Weekly · 100k+ subs
Casey Newton
Platformer
Platform/policy reporting; tone hardened toward urgency since 2024.
Steady · policy
Tyler Cowen
Marginal Revolution
Frequent short posts; 40,000-word AI-augmented book in March 2026.
Daily · macro
Noah Smith
Noahpinion
Openly flipped on AI risk in 2026 — "Superintelligence is already here."
~Daily · economist
Off the masthead — formerly canonical, now dormant

Don't burn a slot on a quiet site.

  • Lilian Weng — Lil'Log · last post May 2025
  • Chip Huyen · stalled Jan 2025
  • Christopher Olah — colah.github.io · output → Anthropic
  • Jay Alammar · moved to Substack
  • Adrian Colyer — the morning paper · Feb 2021
  • Cindy Sridharan — copyconstruct · 2021/2022
  • Charlie Guo — Artificial Ignorance · joined OpenAI Jan 2026
  • Sander Dieleman — sander.ai · April 2025
II.
Bureau · The Moving Image

YouTube Channels

99 citations
Read the full dispatch →
The Hype Filter
Featured channel

AI Explained

Counter-programming voice · frontier-model analysis without packaging-driven hype

"AI YouTube is now packaging-driven. The hype filter — AI Explained, AI Daily Brief — is its own tier, and disproportionately valuable."

The 2024–2026 shift on this surface is real: an entire new tier of agent-builders shipping Cursor / Claude Code / n8n pipelines on camera with companion repos didn't exist three years ago. Bookmark loosely; re-curate yearly.

Best for Frontier-model analysis Pair with AI Daily Brief
The Channel Roster
Yannic Kilcher
paper rigor · ~280K subs
45+ minute paragraph-by-paragraph paper walkthroughs. Pushes back on hype.
Weekly-ish · research
3Blue1Brown
2.2M subs · 50M+ views
Visuals-first foundations. The canonical deep-learning primer.
Sporadic · foundations
Andrej Karpathy
Zero to Hero
NNs from backprop through GPTs in code. Most-recommended free DL course.
Rare · evergreen
AI Explained
hype filter
Frontier-model analysis without packaging-driven hype.
Multiple/wk · analysis
AI Daily Brief
counter-programming
The other half of the hype filter. Daily news without the "outrageous" thumbnails.
Daily · news
Fireship
what shipped this week
The weekly "what shipped" tax. Working-engineer pulse on the broader stack.
Weekly · breadth
IndyDevDan
agenticengineer.com
Claude-Code agentic engineering, on camera, with companion repos.
Active · build-with
Cole Medin
build-with-LLMs
Cursor / n8n / agent pipelines shipped on stream with public repos.
Active · agents
Sam Witteveen
build-with-LLMs
LangChain / agent how-tos with reproducible notebooks.
Active · agents
Dwarkesh Patel
architects-of-AI
The technically-deep long-form interview tier. Pushing into essays in 2026.
Weekly · interviews
Latent Space
swyx + Alessio
The AI Engineer canon — podcast, newsletter, AINews, conference.
Weekly · interviews
The Batch
DeepLearning.AI · Andrew Ng
Weekly team-run industry + research roundup with Ng's letter.
Weekly · roundup
III.
Bureau · The Wire

The X Desk

33 citations
Read the full dispatch →
Five-follow rule
5
follows is plenty
The follower-count leaderboard is not the curator's leaderboard.
Featured rule of the desk

Subscribe by signal, not reach.

Practitioner-curated lists never lead with the 4M-follower accounts.

Follower-count rankings surface Sam Altman and Lex Fridman at 4.2M each — but the working-developer follow lists never lead there. The five names below recur across every angle of this expedition.

Cap Five accounts Audit Monthly Drop 30 days unread
The Five-Follow List
@karpathy
Andrej Karpathy
Pedagogical posts. Feb 2026 "microgpt" — a 200-line dependency-free GPT trainer.
Rare · evergreen
@simonw
Simon Willison
The model-release ground truth. If a model dropped today, simonw has a hands-on test.
Daily · tools
@emollick
Ethan Mollick
Applied AI from a Wharton chair — "what to do with the thing."
Daily · applied
@natolambert
Nathan Lambert
Open-models and post-training, signal-dense, low-snark.
Daily · open-models
@swyx
Shawn Wang · Latent Space
AI Engineer beat — what's actually shipping in production.
Daily · ai-eng
@gergelyorosz
Gergely Orosz
Honourable mention — eng-org survey reporting that informs the rest.
Steady · swe-orgs
IV.
Bureau · On Air

Podcasts

27 citations
Read the full dispatch →
For builders
One for builders, one for thinkers, one for craft

Latent Space

swyx & Alessio · the AI Engineer beat · widening into AINews in 2026

"Coding agents are breaking containment." — the 2026 thesis.

One node, more surface area. The AI-engineer canon for builders. Pair with Dwarkesh Patel for thinkers and Soft Skills Engineering or CoRecursive for craft. Three podcasts. No more.

By Listening Intent
Latent Space
for builders
The AI Engineer beat — long interviews with practitioners who ship.
Weekly · build
Dwarkesh
for thinkers
Architects-of-AI long-form. The technically-deep tier of public discourse.
Weekly · think
ChinaTalk
policy · the only China voice
Chinese AI ecosystem and policy — the gap-filler this list otherwise leaves open.
Weekly · policy
Jack Clark · Import AI
research synthesis
Frontier-research synthesis with sharpened policy lens (Anthropic Institute).
Weekly · research
Pragmatic Engineer
for craft · paid
The eng-org reporting in audio form. Engineers shipping software.
Weekly · craft
Stratechery (audio)
for strategy · paid
Daily Update in audio. Aggregation Theory applied to AI lab dynamics.
Daily · strategy
V.
Bureau · The River

Aggregators & Feeds

6 citations
Read the full dispatch →
One daily, one weekly
HN+Latent
the daily + the weekly
"River, not inbox." — apply email's anxiety to feeds and you import the cause without the meaning.
The minimal feed stack

Hacker News by day, Latent Space by week.

Plus r/LocalLLaMA when you need open-model release radar, alphaXiv when you want a paper deep-link.

The expedition's smallest sub-section, intentionally. Drop everything else; if a story matters, it'll surface. RSS adoption is up 34% YoY in 2026 — but only because people stopped treating their reader like an inbox.

The Feed Roster
Hacker News
the daily filter
If a story matters, it'll surface. HN banned AI-generated comments outright in 2026.
Daily · cross-cutting
Lobsters
smaller, tighter
Higher-signal SWE alternative. Invite-gated, narrower scope.
Daily · swe
r/LocalLLaMA
open-model radar
DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM, MiniMax — open-model centre of gravity in 2026.
Daily · open-models
alphaXiv
papers · annotated
When you want a paper deep-link with crowd-sourced commentary.
Ad-hoc · papers
AINews
Latent Space network
The weekly synthesis newsletter — one node, more surface area in 2026.
Weekly · synthesis
The Batch
DeepLearning.AI
Industry roundup with Andrew Ng's letter — Sunday-morning digest.
Weekly · digest
Filed under: open questions

The two gaps the five angles leave on the table.

Anglosphere lean. ChinaTalk is the only Chinese-AI-ecosystem voice in any category, despite the policy weight and open-model centre of gravity that DeepSeek, Qwen, GLM and MiniMax now carry — visible in r/LocalLLaMA's traction patterns.

Safety/alignment as a daily beat. Thin outside Lambert and the long-form interview podcasts. If either lens is load-bearing for your work, this expedition won't cover it — needs its own pass.