Rating: 8.1/10. Book about the science of human childhood and parenting, and how modern practices sometimes conflict with the ways that humans evolved, and why the way children behave have deep biological explanations. We should think of the role of a parent as tending to a garden, where you can create conditions but you can’t completely control…
Category: Topics
The Hardware Hacker by Andrew Bunnie Huang
Rating: 8.0/10. Book by hardware hacker about experiences manufacturing in China and hacking hardware to do interesting things, the author Andrew “Bunny” Huang is an influential figure in the hardware and security hardware community. It describes various experiences related to manufacturing in China, as well as several projects involving electronics (mostly for advanced hobbyists), and his…
Expecting Better by Emily Oster
Rating: 7.8/10. Book by an economist trying to make sense statistics about what to do during and after pregnancy, based on studies in the medical literature. She tries to be as evidence-based as possible, sometimes going against convention when the studies show otherwise. Much of the time, the evidence is weak due to the difficulty…
High Performance Python by Micha Gorelick and Ian Oszvald
Rating: 8.3/10. Book covering some fairly advanced optimization techniques in Python, such as the different types of runtimes or ways to call into C, data structures that are memory efficient or increase cache coherence; libraries that can do operations faster than plain Python, ways to do concurrency, multithreading, and a little bit about distributed systems…
The Grid by Gretchen Bakke
Rating: 8.3/10. Book about the electricity grid, focusing on America and its history. Though the grid is usually hidden away in our lives, it is actually a complex arrangement of different local systems that has physical constraints, as all power generation must match usage at all times because it is not possible to store large…
Cobalt Red by Siddharth Kara
Rating: 7.5/10. Book of investigative journalism covering the DRC (Congo), where 70% of the world’s cobalt mining occurs. Cobalt is a metal that is crucial for the development of high-efficiency lithium-ion batteries that are used in smartphones, other electronic devices, and most importantly, electric vehicles; the Congo has some of the purest forms of the…
Too High and Too Steep by David B. Williams
Rating: 7.8/10. Too High and Too Steep: Reshaping Seattle’s Topography by David B. Williams Book about the history of Seattle focusing on how humans have changed its natural landscape, eg by filling in the shoreline and tide flats, creating artificial islands, and leveling hills near the city center. The landscape has changed quite drastically since…
Digital Empires by Anu Bradford
Rating: 7.6/10. Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology by Anu Bradford Book about models and recent trends in tech regulation — it is written in a fairly academic tone but contains many insights. I found it somewhat heavy and stopped reading about halfway through the book. The tech world is dominated by three…
AI Agents in Action by Michael Lanham
Rating: 7.5/10. Book about the latest developments in AI agents, covering a lot of common patterns like all use agentic loops, using prompt engineering and no-code tools to build and configure their agent and evaluate it. Most of the book consists of walkthroughs of various different agent libraries and platforms and tutorials of how to…
Empire of AI by Karen Hao
Rating: 8.5/10. Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI by Karen Hao Book about the recent history of AI, focusing on OpenAI, but also covering the broader industry as well. It starts with the life of Sam Altman, who was born in 1985 to a middle-class family and quickly proved himself to be…
Journey by James A. Michener
Rating: 8.0/10. Fairly short novel set around 1896 during the Klondike Gold Rush, focusing on a group of English aristocrats who venture into Dawson City, not through any of the conventional routes, but through one of the most difficult routes overland from Edmonton and down the Mackenzie River. It is led by Lord Luton and…
Adaptive Markets by Andrew W. Lo
Rating: 8.2/10. Adaptive Markets: Financial Evolution at the Speed of Thought by Andrew W. Lo Book covering various aspects of the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH), modern hedge funds, and systemic risks leading to financial crashes. The Efficient Market Hypothesis is one of the most controversial theories in economics – it states that any public information…