Related posts

Founding executive editor of Wired and author of What Technology Wants and The Inevitable. Writes at kk.org and runs its long-running recommendation projects, True Films and Cool Tools.

From one piece Robot Basketball 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  General-purpose humanoid robots will end up less useful than many specialized robots.

  Their words

  The greater lesson I think we will learn is that a general humanoid robot is not going to be that useful.

  Robot Basketballkk.org

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Specialized robots will invent techniques in their domain that humans never thought of or could not do.

  Their words

  Basketball robots are likely to invent new basketball moves that humans didn't think of doing, or couldn't do easily.

  Robot Basketballkk.org

Statistician and software engineer who writes R packages for reproducible research and publishing, including knitr, bookdown and blogdown.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The vast majority of open-source software developers are unpaid and go unnoticed.

  Their words

  A great many (perhaps the vast majority) of open-source software developers are unpaid and even unnoticed.

  Should I Ask for Sponsorship?yihui.org

Essayist; writes Astral Codex Ten, previously Slate Star Codex.

From one piece God Help Us, Let’s Try To Learn About Mechanistic Interpretability Techniques 2 beliefs · astralcodexten.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Neural networks do not have a one-to-one mapping between individual neurons and concepts.

  Their words

  researchers started by seeking a 1:1 mapping between neurons and concepts, like a neuron that always fired when the AI was thinking about cats, but quickly learned that nothing like that existed.

  astralcodexten.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Removing a concept from a mind can damage unrelated systems or push the mind toward incompetence or insanity.

  Their words

  empirically concepts can get their tentacles into weird places, and removing one can topple seemingly unrelated systems or push a mind nonspecifically in the direction of incompetence or insanity.

  astralcodexten.com

Economics writer; author of the Noahpinion newsletter.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  True AI alignment is impossible because obedience and benevolence are fundamentally incompatible goals.

  AI alignment

  Their words

  AI alignment will forever be balancing the tradeoff between paperclip-maximizing and disempowerment, because these two rival concepts of alignment are fundamentally incompatible.

  Roundup #87: Technology BAD!!noahpinion.blog

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The world has achieved universal access to school and nowhere near universal learning, and closing that second gap is the whole problem left in education.

  Their words

  We have universal access. What we are trying to do is bring universal learning. So there's a vast disparity in how much kids learn during that 12 years that while they may have access to it, learning is very different.

  youtube.com

Writes Strange Loop Canon, on the intersection of technology, economics and business — "building models of the world to understand these problem areas and to define them better".

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most AI lab revenue comes from non-frontier models, where cheaper comparable alternatives already exist elsewhere.

  Their words

  what this tells us is that the vast majority of the labs' revenue comes from non-frontier models, for which cheaper, comparable alternatives are already available elsewhere.

  Who Wins As Intelligence Commodifies?strangeloopcanon.com

Co-founded Neuralink and founded Science Corp, which is building a retinal implant; writes about neural interfaces and biology.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Concepts are represented with strikingly similar geometry inside large AI models and inside brains.

  Their words

  And so when you look inside these big AI models, the mathematical objects that you see look a lot like the things that you see in neuroscience. So if you look at how do how do these AI models represent um just like represent concepts and you look at the parts of the brain that represent concepts, you see these you see very similar geometry.

  youtube.com

Senior space editor at Ars Technica; wrote Liftoff and Reentry on SpaceX, and reports on launch and rocket programmes.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Almost nobody in America is paying attention to the space race with China, and a Chinese landing at the lunar south pole will change that.

  ChinaAmerica

  Their words

  This will likely serve as a wake-up call to those not paying attention to the US-China space race—which, to be clear, is the vast majority of Americans.

  arstechnica.com

Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience and Biology at Caltech, where he studies the neuroscience of emotion and social cognition.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The famous body maps of emotion record where people believe they would feel things, not where anything in the body actually changes.

  Their words

  it's ultimately about people's concepts of how emotions correspond to changes in the body, not the real actual changes in the body.

  youtube.com

Machine-learning researcher on open language models; writes the Interconnects newsletter and the RLHF Book, after leading post-training at Ai2.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Open models will end up serving a long-tail of specialized uses while closed models retain the most valuable applications.

  Their words

  open models are still incredibly useful, but fill a long-tail ecosystem relative to the closed counterparts that have monopoly ownership stakes in the most valuable areas like knowledge work collaboration, drug discovery, SWE, etc.

  Teaching Everyone to Fish for Tokensinterconnects.ai

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Ignorance is a permanent feature of complex, specialized societies rather than a problem that will eventually be solved.

  Their words

  Ignorance is not a temporary defect that we will eventually eliminate. It's the permanent burden of increasing specialisation and living in a complex world.

  Nobody Knows Anythingstrangeloopcanon.com

Programmer; builds Mac and iOS apps, wrote WatermelonDB, and writes about tools, focus and software craft.

• Readrcmnd.app

  Factfulness

  Their words

  The world is bad, but better. The vast majority of westerners believe the world is poorer, more violent, deadly, primitive, and awful than it actually is. This book beautifully illustrates our ignorance, updates your knowledge, and gives you tools for a fact-based worldview.

  radex.io

Co-founder and former chief executive of Uber, now chief executive of CloudKitchens and of Adams, an industrial AI company automating food, mining and transport.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Industrial-scale automation will be done by specialised machines that move on wheels, not by humanoid robots, which only suit low-scale tasks in human environments.

  Their words

  If you're doing highcale tasks, industrial scale tasks, you are going to make specialized machines that move and act in the physical world. The key part is move. If they're moving, they got to have wheels.

  youtube.com

Professor at Stanford working on robot learning and meta-learning; co-founded Physical Intelligence.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Combining an avocado and a chair into one image is evidence a model conceptually understands both, not that it memorised pictures of them.

  Their words

  when you can basically bridge the concept of an avocado and a chair and show that you kind of can combine those two, it means that the model has at least some kind of conceptual understanding of what an avocado is and what a chair is to the point that it can combine them into something that exhibits both concepts at the same time.

  youtube.com

Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Almost every recent AI breakthrough has been in code and mathematics, the two domains with highly structured languages and huge specialised training sets.

  Their words

  But if you zoom out, it becomes clear that almost every “breakthrough” since last summer has concerned the narrow domains of computer code and math, which are defined by highly structured languages and come accompanied by massive amounts of specialized training data.

  On AI Coding and Its Discontentscalnewport.com

Chief Scientist at Google DeepMind and Google Research, at Google since 1999, where he co-created MapReduce, Bigtable, TensorFlow and the TPU.

From one piece Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AI 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A chip that can do nothing but low-precision dense linear algebra is enough for machine learning, even though it cannot run Chrome.

  Their words

  And um if you build a specialized chip for low precision dense linear algebra and can't do anything else that turns out to be really useful for machine learning inference uh even though it can't run Chrome or Word or whatever.

  Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Inference, not training, is now the constraint, and specialized low-energy hardware will beat general-purpose GPUs and TPUs on latency.

  energy

  Their words

  Yeah, I mean it's a little different, but I think uh you're going to see more and more uh uh high performance and um low energy uh inference hardware systems because I think everyone is now realizing that inference is the key to making you know these agent-based systems be available to more and more people and that latency is really important and that specialization of the hardware is a really key way you can make uh things that are more energy efficient and lower latency than more general purpose uh computational devices like say GPUs or TPUs

  Jeff Dean: The 1% Rule for Building in AIyoutube.com

General partner at Andreessen Horowitz from 2013 to 2018 and CTO of Coinbase from 2018 to 2019; co-founder of Counsyl and Earn.com. Wrote The Network State (2022), free in full at thenetworkstate.com, and founded the Network School.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Before the internet, most Americans had no practical freedom of speech unless they owned or worked for a media corporation.

  America

  Their words

  the vast majority of Americans had no practical freedom of speech unless they owned a media corporation or were employed by one.

  The Network Statethenetworkstate.com

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  To reward the instinct that a new idea is worth having, training would have to score the smallness of the concepts a solution needs, not just whether it solved the problem.

  Their words

  Uh but I don't think it's easy but I do think it's something you would have to do in order to uh reward the gawwa like instinct rather than just rewarding have you solved a problem.

  youtube.com

Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Claude Connectors

  Their words

  This is why I recommend ignoring the vast web of custom and “community-built” MCP servers you can find out there, and focusing your attention on the two safer bets instead

  fortelabs.com

Author of The Lean Startup and Incorruptible, and founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange, who advises companies on corporate governance and mission protection.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Shareholder primacy is about forty years old rather than a natural law, and for centuries before it a corporation existed to pursue a specific beneficial purpose.

  Their words

  this idea is old enough that we now have a generation of people who have been raised as if this was a natural law. This is how capitalism has always been. But that's wrong. For the vast majority of the time, for hundreds of years, we have had joint stock corporations. Only the last 40 have we had this idea.

  youtube.com

Economist at George Mason University. Writes Overcoming Bias on prediction markets, signalling and the far future, and wrote The Age of Em and The Elephant in the Brain.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The world is shaped by how consistently incompetent governance is, and competent governance would remake it

  Their words

  As an econ professor who specialized in governance, I can assure you that the world is greatly structured by the fact that we typically have pretty incompetent governance.

  My Best Idea: Decision Marketsovercomingbias.com

Writer and developer. He runs the Latent Space newsletter and podcast about AI engineering, and writes essays on software and careers at swyx.io.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Shortened versions of hard hobbies profit mainly from casual participants riding a legacy sport's superstar mythology, not from elite-level players.

  Their words

  It's interesting that the Shorter hobby businesses all draft off superstars in the legacy hobby, but make their vast majority of their money from people who will of course never come close to the level superstars - you'd still go to pickleball and talk Nadal vs Federer, you'd still go to Top Golf and make Tiger Woods jokes.

  Take a hard game, and make it shorterswyx.io

Economist at George Mason University, co-author of Marginal Revolution, host of Conversations with Tyler. Writes in short, dense claims about economics, culture and AI, and has moved position on AI in public more than once.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces that Shape Your Life

  Their words

  Alex Mayyasi, Planet Money: A Guide to the Economic Forces that Shape Your Life is a useful introduction to economic concepts.

  marginalrevolution.com

Geneticist and writer on human population genetics, deep history and evolution; author of the Unsupervised Learning newsletter.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life

  Their words

  Few will deeply read as many works of literature across the Western canon as Barzun did, given his exceptionally long career in academia, but From Dawn to Decadence grants the humble reader an extraordinary vantage, thanks to Barzun’s vast corpus of knowledge and his perspicacious observations about cultural currents across half a millennium.

  razibkhan.com

Co-founder and co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management; author of the Oaktree memos.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Nobody can yet know whether the current enthusiasm for AI is excessive, so anyone claiming conviction about how it resolves is overreaching.

  Their words

  Given the vast potential of AI but also the large number of enormous unknowns, I think virtually no one can say for sure.

  Is It a Bubble?oaktreecapital.com

Palaeontologist at Queen Mary University of London; studies dinosaur behaviour and writes about what the fossil record can and cannot tell us.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Almost all real predation is on prey far smaller than the predator, so the documentary staple of a T. rex taking an adult Triceratops shows the rare exception, not the rule.

  Their words

  These are weird and rare outcomes. These don't usually happen. The vast majority of active predation is on stuff much, much, much smaller than you.

  youtube.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The stable one-profession career is becoming a thing of the past; what will still be needed alongside AI is reasoning with abstractions and problem-solving when things go wrong.

  Their words

  It's becoming much more a thing of the past. So I think you just have to be adaptable and flexible. I think people will have to get skills that are transferable, like learning one specific programing language or one specific subject of mathematics or something. That itself is not a super transferable skill, but sort of knowing how to reason with abstract concepts or how to problem solve when things go wrong.

  youtube.com

Historian of the Second World War; wrote Normandy '44 and Brothers in Arms, and co-hosts the We Have Ways of Making You Talk podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  On the scale of Barbarossa the operational level of war decides everything: it does not matter how good your commanders at the front are if the backup is not there.

  Their words

  So when you’re talking about Operation Barbarossa, to go back to your original question, Lex, you’re dealing with an operation on such a vast scale, that that operational level of war is absolutely vital to its chances of success or failure. It doesn’t matter how good your individual commanders are at the front. If you haven’t got the backup, it’s not going to work.

  youtube.com

Founder and CEO of Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Engine and of Fortnite.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Concurrency should stop being the programmer's problem and become the language designer's: it is better to impose vast pain on a few people than on a million.

  Their words

  And by doing this, removing this from being a programming problem for the programmer to deal with, to being a language problem for us language designers to deal with. And we're moving a vast amount of pain that would be imposed on a million people, instead to a vast amount of pain imposed on a small number of people to have to actually make this work.

  youtube.com

Founder of the toy manufacturer Viahart; writes about manufacturing, importing and why bringing production back to America is harder than it sounds.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A humanoid robot is the wrong tool on a factory floor, because a machine specialised in the task beats it.

  Their words

  They are not useful in industrial environments where, if a humanoid robot can do it, an industrial machine which is specialized in the task can do it even better.

  molsonhart.com

Software engineer; co-founder and former CTO of Tailscale, previously on the Go team at Google.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  LLMs will push software development toward more specialized code, fewer generalized packages, and more readable tests.

  LLMs

  Their words

  So I foresee a world with far more specialized code, with fewer generalized packages, and more readable tests.

  How I program with LLMscrawshaw.io

Software engineer and essayist who writes about programming, formal methods, philosophy and literature at thoughts.wyounas.com.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Principles of the SPIN Model Checker

  Their words

  This book gave me both insight and a deeper curiosity about the subject. This book introduces the SPIN model checker and exposes the reader to the nuances of verifying programs using SPIN. A nice feature of the book is how it explains concepts using thoughtfully developed, freely available tools (such as jSpin) that the author created for pedagogical purposes. It's a demanding book, but the content was interesting. The book presents details about concurrency, temporal logic, non-determinism, advanced SPIN topics, and even case studies. I've already written a few blog posts about the topics I explored while reading this book, and I plan to write more. Overall, it's a good book. I'm sure I'll revisit the latter half again.

  thoughts.wyounas.com

Venture capitalist and founder of Theory Ventures, previously a partner at Redpoint. Writes a near-daily blog on startups, SaaS metrics, data and AI.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

  Their words

  Rovelli describes quantum concepts in an approachable way.

  tomtunguz.com

Writes The Pragmatic Engineer, the software-engineering newsletter, and wrote The Software Engineer's Guidebook. Formerly an engineering manager at Uber, and at Microsoft/Skype and Skyscanner before that.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  A Philosophy of Software Design

  Their words

  There are few books like this, that discuss software design in a simple and approachable way, while leaving the reader novel and practical concepts to use.

  blog.pragmaticengineer.com

Interface designer and researcher, known for the talks Inventing on Principle and Media for Thinking the Unthinkable and for essays on dynamic representations of ideas. Founder of Dynamicland, where he is building a communal computer.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Understanding Comics

  Their words

  The pedagogical potential of the comic form is vast and mostly untapped.

  worrydream.com

Archaeologist of the Maya and the ancient Americas; directs the Maya Exploration Center and presents the ArchaeoEd podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Civilization is triggered by humans learning to stay in one place, not by anything they invented there.

  Their words

  For the vast majority of human existence, we’ve been nomadic and we’ve done these wider or tighter nomadic circles, depending on the geographic region, but they’d move. So once humans figured out how to stay in a place, that’s the initial trigger to what would become civilization.

  youtube.com

Cryptographer; teaches cryptography at Johns Hopkins and writes A Few Thoughts on Cryptographic Engineering.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Almost every one-to-one Telegram chat, and every group chat, is readable on Telegram’s own servers.

  Their words

  The practical impact is that the vast majority of one-on-one Telegram conversations — and literally every single group chat — are probably visible on Telegram’s servers, which can see and record the content of all messages sent between users.

  Is Telegram really an encrypted messaging app?blog.cryptographyengineering.com

Cryptography engineer; maintains Go's cryptography libraries as a full-time open-source maintainer, funded directly by companies that use them.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Open source maintenance can be a mature profession organised into small specialist firms, the way law and medicine already are.

  open source

  Their words

  From the onset, I envisioned small firms of professional maintainers with thematic portfolios, accommodating diverse maintainers and project sizes, just like the specialized firms of other professionals.

  words.filippo.io

Founder and chief executive of Pershing Square Capital Management, the activist investment firm he started in 2004.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Individual investors analysed Tesla better than the professional investors and analysts did.

  Their words

  Actually individual investors did a much better job analyzing Tesla than the so-called professional investors or analysts, the vast majority of them.

  youtube.com

Engineer writing about the physical economy — oil and gas, manufacturing, batteries, drones and what it costs to build things.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Shipbuilding productivity depends on clustering yards and suppliers in one place, and it decays when the cluster thins out.

  Their words

  Specialized suppliers need multiple shipyards in one location to steady their business.

  Revitalizing US Navy Shipbuildingaustinvernon.site

Programmer; founded comma.ai and tinygrad, and was the first to unlock the iPhone.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Anyone who cannot write a full software stack for NVIDIA's generic GPUs has no chance of writing one for their own, more specialised, AI chip.

  Their words

  It’s always harder to write software for more specialized hardware. A GPU is pretty generic. If you can’t write an in Nvidia stack, there’s no way you can write a stack for your chip. My approach with Tinygrad is first write a performant NVIDIA stack.

  youtube.com

Guardian columnist and environmental campaigner; wrote Feral and Regenesis, and argues for rewilding and against the food system as it is.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  A romantic, low-yield farming system would need far more land and would produce more hunger, not less.

  Their words

  But it leads, if enacted, to hunger, ecological destruction or both, on a vast scale. Our arcadian fantasies devour the planet.

  Fantasy Farmingmonbiot.com

Urban planner, co-author with Charles Marohn of Escaping the Housing Trap, and policy director at the Parking Reform Network. Wrote for Strong Towns from 2015, mostly about how housing markets actually set prices.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Affordability will be decided by what happens to the price of the homes that already exist, not by how many new ones get built.

  Their words

  Affordability for the masses will live or die not by what we build this year or next, but by what happens to the price of homes that already exist, in which the vast majority of people live.

  There's No Such Thing as Affordable Housingstrongtowns.org

Design engineer and illustrator; makes visual essays on programming, anthropology and what language models do to the way people write.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Writing that is specific, local and grounded in a real life is the cheapest available proof that a person wrote it, because models default to generics.

  Their words

  Referencing obscure concepts, friends who are real but not famous, niche interests, and recent events all make you plausibly more human.

  The Dark Forest and Generative AImaggieappleton.com

Pseudonymous essayist. Writes at gwern.net on AI scaling, statistics, genetics and long-running internet research, with heavy citation and a habit of revising old essays in place rather than leaving them wrong.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Stories of Your Life and Others

  Their words

  He is the closest thing to a modern Jorge Luis Borges in melding high concepts with literature to create something better than either

  gwern.net

Research psychologist, instrumental in founding the field of naturalistic decision making; developed the recognition-primed decision model, the PreMortem method and the ShadowBox training method, and wrote Sources of Power and Seeing What Others Don't.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Brainstorming together produces no more ideas and no better ones than having people generate ideas privately before sharing them.

  Their words

  the research on like brainstorming where all brainstorming together the research shows that brainstorming does not produce more ideas or more innovative ideas. And I think teams would be and groups would be better having individuals generate their own concepts and then after they've done it independently and privately sharing it with the others.

  youtube.com

Co-founded GiveWell and led Open Philanthropy; writes Cold Takes, on the most important century and how to think about it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Almost everything anyone believes rests on trusting other people, and there is no alternative to that.

  Their words

  I think it's completely reasonable to form the vast majority of one's beliefs based on trust like this. I don't really think there's any alternative.

  Minimal-trust investigationscold-takes.com

Co-founder of Microsoft and of the Gates Foundation. Writes Gates Notes on global health, energy and climate, and on whatever they have been reading.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Range

  Their words

  I learned this from reading a good, myth-debunking book called Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

  gatesnotes.com

Founder and CEO of Get Lighthouse, a management-coaching software company, and previously a product lead at KISSmetrics. Writes about leadership, management and product at jasonevanish.com.

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Different: Escaping the Competitive Herd

  Their words

  In today's world of massive consumer choice, it's easy to end up locked in competitive battles where no one stands out. Harvard professor Youngme Moon makes a great series of cases for how you can still stand out. What I particularly liked about this book was it's not like your average marketing book; instead it's like an extended conversation with Moon exploring key concepts on differentiation without the heavy-handedness of specific rules.

  jasonevanish.com

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Economics in One Lesson

  Their words

  This economics thought experiment is a classic book originally written in 1946. Like most books that follow Nassim Taleb's "all books worth reading are at least 20 years old" rule, it has timeless lessons throughout. It tackles all kinds of ongoing political/economic concepts like rent control, minimum wage, tariffs, "saving industries", and more.

  jasonevanish.com

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Enchantment

  Their words

  It's a decent coverage of the concepts of planning how to delight your customers from your product's design to how you support and serve them. However, it felt a bit like a poor man's Thank You Economy, with less novel ideas and some filler.

  jasonevanish.com

+ 2 more

• Likedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  What Customers Want

  Their words

  This book was written before the Lean Startup movement, but espouses many of the same concepts. If you feel like you're starting at zero in understanding what to do to become customer driven, this is a good place to start.

  jasonevanish.com

• Dislikedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  The Lean Startup

  Their words

  If you actually want to learn how to actually BE a lean startup or how to actually do it, this book will not help you. If you want to learn the high level concepts only then this is a great book. The other books I have above I encourage you to read before this one if you want to truly learn and implement lean practices. 7. On the Shortness of Life by Seneca (3.13.18)

  jasonevanish.com

Ancient and military historian; writes A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, long series checking what history actually says against how popular culture tells it.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Farmers were the overwhelming majority of every pre-modern agrarian society — 80 to 90 per cent of it — and that single fact shapes everything else about how those societies worked.

  Their words

  Because these folks – these farmers – make up the majority of the population of basically all agrarian societies in the pre-modern period. And when I say ‘the majority’ I mean the vast majority, on the order of 80-90% in many cases

  acoup.blog

• Lovedaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  An Introduction to Thermal Physics

  Their words

  Despite my aim to keep this list purely about math books, I cannot help but include this one in the list. Simply put, it's one of the most enjoyable textbooks I've ever read, giving a very satisfying first-principles understanding of what thermodynamic concepts like temperature and entropy really are, and how we can to understand them.

  3blue1brown.com

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.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  Sunburst and Luminary

  Their words

  The only reason it isn't higher on this list is that the content is a bit specialized and narrowly focused on the landing and the software and adjacent topics; it's definitely one of my favorite books here.

  blog.nelhage.com

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Most distributed-systems outages would have been prevented by slightly more comprehensive ordinary testing, not by better tools.

  Their words

  In fact, the vast majority of distributed systems outages could have been prevented by slightly-more-comprehensive testing.

  Why Don't People Use Formal Methods?hillelwayne.com

Statistician and Chief Scientist at Posit (RStudio). Author of the ggplot2, dplyr and tidyverse R packages and of books on R programming and data science.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming

  Their words

  Another similar and also interesting book is Concepts, Techniques, and Models of Computer Programming, which explains all the models of computer languages and how they fit together.

  fivebooks.com

Game developer and moral philosopher; made QWOP, GIRP and Getting Over It, and teaches at the NYU Game Center.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Creative work is better served by a diverse toolkit of specialized tools than by one universal tool.

  Their words

  I don't want a single tool that I can use for any game... I want a digital toolshed that looks like Depeche Mode's synth collection.

  Hidden Homework (updated 2021)foddy.net

• Readrcmnd.app

  The Culture Code

  Their words

  Ideas about developing teams that work together better. Underwhelming — took just a few base concepts and then stretched them very thin by applying to them a dozen different (not always compelling) stories.

  radex.io

Software engineer working on distributed systems and databases; creator of rqlite, the distributed database built on SQLite.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Unix Programming Environment

  Their words

  The Unix Programming Environment is a book you can't read too soon. It's something I wish I'd come across years before I actually did. An authoritative and comprehensive manual for using Unix as a programmer, it clearly explains concepts such as inodes, hard and soft links, system calls, and the power of joining programs together via stdin and stdout. By the time I came across this book I already knew these concepts, but had never studied them before in one place, and in such a coherent manner.

  philipotoole.com

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.

• Mixed onaffiliate linkrcmnd.app

  Operating System Concepts

  Their words

  It covers concepts at a high level and hits the major points, but it's lacking in technical depth, details on how things work, advanced topics, and clear exposition.

  danluu.com

Swedish designer and programmer. Designed early Spotify, worked at Facebook and Figma, and created the Inter typeface.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Cooperative multitasking suits coherent, specialized systems better than general-purpose operating systems.

  Their words

  These systems often benefit from cooperative multitasking, in particular coherent, specialized systems (unlike operating systems which are general by nature).

  Sol — a sunny little virtual machinersms.me