Another year, another low-hanging fruit idea to juice those post numbers. I think 2023 was dominated by short-form reading, mostly beacuse I was wrapped up with things this year that robbed me of my leisure reading time. Off the top of my head, in 2023 I:
- got laid off,
- started a company,
- did YCombinator,
- raised funding,
- got married (an American ceremony in June and an Indian one in December) and
- bought a house.
Writing this before filling out the below list, my theory is that a lot of the reading dovetails with the above life events (barring all the reading material about mortgages, home ownership or electric outlet standards). Let’s see how accurate that is.
Final caveat as always, this probably doesn’t encompass everything I read - but I definitely did a better job tracking this year than the last.
History & Non-Fiction
- SPQR - Mary Beard
- Biosemiotics - Examination into Signs of Life & Life of Signs - Jesper Hoffmeyer . Still working through this!
- Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World - Rene Girard
- Dawn of Everything - Graeber . Read Debt the year before, planning on Utopia of Rules for 2024.
- The End of the Old Order, Napoleon and Europe 1801-1805, Frederick Kagan . Way too dry for a Napoleon history.
- Grant - Ron Chernow . Was looking for a Civil War history book this year, the first half of this book is as good as it gets.
- The Price of Time (The Real Story of Interest) - Edward Chancellor . This was a fun one, another in the theme of “human history as told through x.” Went looking for more like these and have a bunch lined up for this year.
- The Head Beneath the Altar - Hindu Mythology and the Critique of Sacrifice - Collins . Lost my copy in Dubai, so only made halfway through this.
- The Manager’s Path - Fournier
Papers/Academic Stuff
Bunch of AI papers this year - for obvious reasons. Also trimming for the most memorable or the ones I’ve taken extensive notes on.
- Contact Inequality/Halo Drive . A post about the bayesian jiu jitsu in this paper’s been sitting in the drafts for a while now.
- LoRA - Low Rank Adaptation of LLMs
- Kernel-As-A-Service
- Decentralized Training of Foundation Models in Heterogenous Environments
- Why Linux is Not an RTOS
- Are There Price Asymmetrics In the US Beef Market?
- The Case For Modular Redundancy In Large Scale High Performance Computing Systems
- Notes on Koopman Operator Theory
- The Fundamental Thermodynamic Costs of Computation . Also have a post about this in the drafts.
- Positional Encoding in Transformer Architecture . Also draft post etc etc
- Causes and Consequences of Representational Drift
- Secrecy in Consequentalism
- Elements of Information Theory - Thomas M . (very) slowly working through this.
- Concurrency in Go - Katherine Cox-Buday
- Information Theory, Inference & Learning Algorithms - Mackay
Articles
Again, I skimmed a lot of articles this year, but also read a lot of them. I’ve trimmed the list from my read-it-later system to include the most memorable or impactful.
- Every: Foreign Exchanges . My morning phone routine was replaced from doomscrolling to FX early this year. Jury’s out whether that’s a net positive.
- Deep Thought, Deep Learning and the World’s Total Computing Resources . Come work for us if this is interesting to you :)
- Cultivating a State of Mind Where New Ideas are Born
- Schlep Blindness
- Superlinear Returns
- You and Your Research - Richard Hamming . This + the above PaulG essays helped me build conviction around Cedana. If you’re exploring some ideas and are reticent about jumping feet first, highly recommend these as well as the next item in this list.
- The Independent Researcher & PhD . I always come back to these two posts, because I got lucky and found them my senior year of undergrad, when I was torn between going into a PhD program or going straight to work. I’ve always been envious of how much time is dedicated to learning and exploring during a PhD, and Nadia’s posts have helped me find the balance to bring a “personal PhD” mindset to exploring the things I’m interested in without the need for enrollment in a program.
- How AWS Will Lose the Future of Computing . Read a ton of semianalysis this year.
- Fixing the Mess that Is Penn Station
- The Poverty of the National Interest
- Find Computation, Find Life
- Intravenous Caffeine
- How is LLaMa.cpp possible?
- Anything Can be a Message Queue if you Use it Wrongly Enough . Great read - starting to think about S3 as malloc was a paradigm shift for me.
- Shape is Not Enough to Distinguish Life from Abiotic Systems
- My Approach to Building Large Technical Projects
- Valve Reflects on Orange Box, 10 Years Later
- Using Livestock Guardian Dogs in Small-Scale Commercial Sheep Operation
- Britain Is Dead
- Violent Enough to Stand Still
- So Fine Dining is Dead?
- Why Dark Matter Feels Like Cheating (And Why It Isn’t)
- The Scandal of FInancial Nihilism
- Cruel Optimism (and Lazy Pessimism)
- Tyler Cowen on China
- Stripe and Solid State Economics
- A Cap Tradeoff In the Wild
- Most: Matt Levine Columns
Fiction
- Anathem - Neal Stephenson . Predicted I’d reread this year, last year.
- Pale Fire - Nabokov
- Quicksilver, Confusion, System of the World - Neal Stephenson . Most of the year was dominated by reading these tomes - made it to halfway through System of the World before losing steam.
- Permutation City - Greg Egan . Escalated to personal bible status.
- Diaspora - Greg Egan . I spent some time jumping between scifi books this year, and none could scratch the Greg Egan itch. I think no one else writes hard sf the way he does, without devolving into being a straight up paper. I re-read Blindsight this year though, and happy to report that Peter Watts is right up there.
- Blindsight - Peter Watts
- Echopraxia - Peter Watts
- Starfish - Peter Watts
- Exhalation - Ted Chiang . Remains one of my favorite short story collections.
- Sputnik Sweetheart - Murakami
- House of Suns - Alastair Reynolds
- Gnomon - Nick Harkaway
- Too Like the Lightning - Ada Palmer . Didn’t catch me as well as I’d hoped, bailed out a couple chapters in.
- Foucault’s Pendulum - Umberto Eco
- Between Two Fires - Christopher Buehlman