Rating: 8.5/10. The standard theoretical textbook about bandits, written with a heavy focus on theory over practice, and it’s quite comprehensive, with many proofs as well as notes and literature references. It first covers the vanilla multi-armed bandit case and then covers adversarial bandits, lower bounds, contextual bandits, etc. Some themes that are common throughout…
Category: Topics
Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned by Kenneth O. Stanley and Joel Lehman
Rating: 7.7/10. Book by AI researchers that questions the need for objectives in scientific discovery and inventions – having objectives is reasonable for many things in life but objectives are harmful for highly ambitious goals where the path of getting there is unknown. Many examples of things that were originally trying to be something else,…
A Brief History of Japan by Jonathan Clements
Rating: 8.0/10. Book about the history of Japan from the earliest known history up until the modern day, written in a style that’s not too academic while still having quite detailed information. Japan was settled in multiple waves of migrants from Korea and Siberia. The first group was the Jomon people, who were hunter-gatherers known…
The Anatomy of the Swipe by Ahmed Siddiqui
Rating: 7.9/10. Book about behind the scenes of payment systems, written by a senior employee at Marqeta, a payments startup, and it walks through various things that happen during credit card and debit card transactions. Overall, a high-level overview of many parts of the behind-the-scenes of payments. The book is relatively short and high-level and…
Disrupting the Game by Reggie Fils-Aimé
Rating: 7.5/10. Memoir by Reggie Fils-Aimé, the chief operating officer and a marketing executive of Nintendo in the Americas during the early 2000s and 2010s, and this journey up to the position as well as what he did for the company. He was raised in New York to a Haitian immigrant family in a crime-ridden…
The Travelling Cat Chronicles by Hiro Arikawa
Rating: 8.3/10. Warning: this review contains major spoilers. A heartwarming novel set from the point of view of a cat called Nana. In the introduction, he used to be a stray cat living in the street, and he is hit by a car and then rescued by a man, Satoru, who takes him in. Throughout…
The Gardener and the Carpenter by Alison Gopnik
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…
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…