Currently reading.

Us moderns are good at sniffing out persecution and exclaiming the innocence of the victim in real-world historical settings. We fall short when the same mechanism is presented in myth. We fail to see the collective violence done upon the victim by the community. This book teaches you to see through the lies told by myths and find the innocence in all victims.

Lewis is writing in Britain during WWII. In a moment of chaos, he is trying to distill the essence of Christianity and hold up what is common across denominations. He is really good with analogies that make you think about things in a different light.

A fun memoir to read. Reminds you that you can just do things.

An incomplete novel by Dostoevsky. It's a bummer because it really starts to pull you in right as the story drops off the map. Sadly, we can only guess at where young Netochka's story goes.

A really good primer on systems thinking. It equips you with concepts like stocks, flows, feedback loops, and leverage points. There are also interesting discussions about non-linearities in systems that are worth the read.

McLuhan is a genius. He examines a technology (or a medium if you will) and asks, 'how does this change the way we interact with the world both as individuals and as a society?'. Take the lightbulb for example. We don't really think about the lightbulb as a medium but it is. It transforms how we interact with the world. It detached our productive hours from the cycle of the sun. You can read at night now. Friday night football is possible because you aren't strictly limited to the daytime hours. Another good example is the transition from the bicycle to the car to the airplane. When you travel on a bike, you are in your direct environment. You're much more integrated. In a car, you are an observer, further removed. In a plane, you don't even start traveling until you touch down at your destination. You have teleported to your location and bypassed the whole 'traveling' part of the journey.

McLuhan's take on the history of the written word. He talks about fundamental differences between oral and written cultures. We are the literate and with that come extraordinary benefits but also a narrowing of experience. There is richness and depth in the audile-tactile world that cannot be captured by a string of characters on a page. The written word brings repetition, linearity, and uniformity. It is the assembly line of Western culture.

A beast of a book. Girard hypothesizes that all human culture and institutions are founded on an original sin, the collective murder of a victim by the community. He believes human desire is mimetic; we chose our desires by copying the desires of those around us. This inevitably draws us into conflict. The enlightenment view of the world is that when everyone is at each other's throats, they will sit down and draft a peaceful resolution to the conflict. This is fantasy. What actually happens and has always happened is that there is one amongst the group who is more 'other' than the rest. This individual is singled out as the cause of the conflict. The community collectively murders or exiles the victim. The truth, and the thing hidden since the foundation of the world, is that the victim is innocent. They are not solely responsible for the disharmony in the community. Myth conceals this truth. Often it takes the shape of 1) a crisis of undifferentiation plunges the community into a crisis, 2) the community realizes that a newcomer/outsider is responsible for the chaos, 3) the outsider is expelled or killed and peace is restored, 4) the outsider (now victim) is sacralyzed as they were the cause and cure of the crisis. This is the scapegoat mechanism and it is the foundation of all human culture. Girard believes that the Gospels alone reveal the truth that the victim is innocent by telling the story from the perspective of the victim.

A weird book for us moderns because we do not spend any time thinking about things like ritual sacrificial violence. The existential threat for early human communities was reciprocal violence. Your neighbor kills your brother, you kill his, the cycle repeats, the community is destroyed. Ritualization of the violence is a containment policy. It short circuits the cycle of violence. And because it is effective at preventing the destruction of the community, it is sacralized. The ritual becomes a religious act. Our modern justice system serves a similar function. Its most essential purpose is to stop the cycle of reciprocal violence. It is good but not perfect.

To see Satan is to see Satan fall. This is revelation. To understand the scapegoat mechanism is to render it powerless. It is a one-way door. You can no longer lie to yourself and pretend that human violence can buy temporary peace. History actually has a direction.

A comprehensive guide to the AWS DynamoDB service. There is an interesting piece of background where Alex talks about how it used to be the case that storage was in really short supply and compute was marginal. This is part of why SQL databases are structured the way they are. They are normalized to save space. Running a JOIN is expensive in terms of compute but cheap in terms of storage. DynamoDB flips this on its head. Storage is relatively cheap and compute is relatively expensive. This is why you often denormalize your data in DynamoDB. You want to minimize the number of operations you need to perform to get the data you want. This book is a great resource for learning how to structure your data in DynamoDB.

A history of the American war machine during WWII. This book gave me new heros like William Knudsen and Henry Kaiser. We overwhelmed our enemies with materiel. We have to get back to this level of industrial capacity.

Burnham predicted the rise of the professional managerial class. He was writing during WWII and trying to see through to the world that would exist after the war. Companies had grown in size and complexity and it was no longer the world of the apple cart vendor. You need managers to run your enterprise. So in that sense, it is not 'founder capitalism'. It is also not 'worker socialism'. The means of production are in the hands of the managers. It is 'managerial capitalism'. Today, with the Internet and AI you can massively leverage yourself. I think Instagram had like 13 employees when it was acquired by Facebook for $1 Billion. We will probably see the one-person, billion dollar company before too long. I think that will mark the end of the managerial era.

Idk man he might be wrong. It seems like things are happening again. History is back on, baby. Also, if he is right, how boring? A thousand flowers must bloom.

This man built modern Singapore. Really good book. Being a founder is cool but have you tried building a country?

The idea is really simple. Everyday low prices, satisfaction guaranteed. Sam executed ruthlessly on this basic idea and built a behemoth. Don't get distracted; cut everything that is not in the service of your mission.

Gruesome. Quickly dispells any romantic notions of war. Obviously, it would be devastating to die at any point during a war but to die in the last hours before the armistice is particularly cruel.

A banger. What else can I say. The way he writes Paul as his powers develop is so good. I love that he gets you to care about things like the ecology of Arrakis. The spice must flow.

Schemers are scheming.

I hope these kiddos turn out alright.

Worm.

We are doing something new now.

How do we resurrect Frank Herbert?

Aligns really well with how I think about complex systems. Trying to reduce food to its constituent parts and then reassemble it is a fool's errand. And it's not even that effective. Your body runs on food, you can just eat food. You should have extreme humility in the face of complex systems. There is way too much going on for you to be able to figure out this specific nutrient input will produce this specific health output. Just eat food man.

Heinlein kind of nails the experience of talking to an LLM six decades prior to their invention. You could say this is a story about agency with the assistance of a superintelligent AI. Also, gravity accelerated rock catapults are a cool idea.

I believe this is what we call a flow state.

I read this in college and I think I neglected my schoolwork for like a week because I couldn't put it down. This is a time-ranging sci-fi book written in 1930. It's a history of the human species from the present day to the end of the universe. You follow humanity through 18 different evolutions and all the associated weirdness. The last paragraph is delivered by the last man facing the end of the universe and it is so so good.

Similar to McLuhan in the way that it examines how technology shapes society.

This book made me sad. Regret is a major theme.

We have always had stories about moral inversion. This is a solid one.

I'm not sure what this was and I probably will not double dip to find out.

Not for me. Existentialists need to find something worth living for.

We are in search of good explanations. All of our explanations are flawed and temporary useful at best. There is no such thing as settled science; we will keep trying to get closer to the truth. And thus we are always at the beginning of infinity.

A good primer on probablistic thinking and decision making under uncertainty.

Know when to rely on your snap judgments and when not to.

The first time I read this book I was rushing through it and I didn't get it. The second time, I read it in a slow meandering way like a motorcyle ride across the country and it clicked. I love this book.

These are not your grandpa's drugs. It might have been relatively safe to experiement with whatever in the 60s but it is a very different world now.

This is another 'have extreme humility in the face of complex systems' type of book. It is a skeptical critique of putting our irregularities into buckets. The number of buckets is increasing. But names are not explanations. And so we need some compassion and understanding. Additionally, if a system no longer serves us, we should think about changing it.

Asks 'what if we are thinking about disease all wrong?' Maybe infection has more of a role in chronic diseases than we think. Could totally be wrong but it is worth exploring anyways. Ewald encourages us to reexamine our assumptions.

I love the irreverence of Feyerabend. Just try stuff man. Sample from all over the place and remix everything.

The Steve Wozniak story is my favorite. Making a very limited chip do something it was never intended to do in a garage with your other buddy named Steve is so sick.

The story of the PayPal mafia. PayPal was the first act for a lot of the big names in tech today.

Doug was a cool guy. This book was a bit of a slog to get through but it is fun to put yourself into the headspace of the early computer pioneers. Everything was (still is) possible.

An OG in the computing field. She seems like one of those people that if you could bring them forward in time to the present day, they would be overflowing with ideas and possibilities in light of todays technologies.

The world is not a normal distribution. Repeat after me. The world is not a normal distribution. This book goes into the venture capital world and demonstrates how the power law distribution is the norm. I would rather be wrong about 99 things and right about 1 thing that really matters than be right about 100 inconsequential things.

How do you get the flywheel spinning? If I ever start a marketplace company, I will be revisiting this book like 7 times.

My most re-read book, and not by a small margin. It is much bigger than just a business book. Thiel is the thread that lead me to Girard. He boils down big ideas into digestible taglines like 'competition is for losers' and 'you are not a lottery ticket'. There is no playbook and there cannot be. Each success is singular and unique. You have to think for yourself.

This is one of my all-time favorites and you should read it.

We somehow understate the horrors of the Soviet Union. This book is a good reminder.

A nihilistic survior of the cultural revolution sold out humanity and now the world must come together to face this foe. This series begins with an optimistic rebound from a mistake made in a moment of pessimistic weakness.

We are back to pessimism. I would like not to believe that the universe is a dark forest, with all the civilizations hiding from each other in fear. Interesting take though.

I actually cannot remember what happened in this book.

An approachable introduction to Girard.

Follows AGM's journey through Silicon Valley in the ad-tech space.

This book has no business being so good. It lands sort of in the world of systems thinking and optimizations. The cool part is that it is salient for more than just the manufacturing world. I like to think about it in opposition to Antifragile. An efficient system can eliminate slack and waste but at the cost of increased fragility. There has to be a balance.

Love you JavaScript.

I know this book gets a lot of flack and maybe deservedly so. It is at least a good starting point for thinking about the history of human civilization. We must bring back the megafauna.

An enjoyable read. I personally would like to catch a marlin.

The story of the shipping container. Totally unsexy but it is an essential technology that has reshaped the world and its history is fascinating.

We went from decentralized local grids towards greater centralization. We might be swinging back the other way.

This one is really fun. I love the idea of an antimeme. Something that suppresses itself, makes you forget about it. The opposite of virality. Conceivably such a thing could exist but by its very definition, it would be impossible to know.

We are the fish that swims in the fish bowl and asks 'what is water?'

If nothing else, you get a masterclass in conviction. This is the celebration of rugged individualism. That may not be all you need for a functional civilization but it is an important part. This book gets more hate than it deserves.

Aphorisms by your favorite grumpy uncle. Good though.

I don't like treadmills anymore because of this book. Complex systems like your body need stressors to grow. Hiking a rough trail will provide you with a new angle of contact, a new pressure, a new shift at each step. A treadmill is the same step over and over. Uniform repitition is fragilizing.

The story of the turkey lives in my head forever. The turkey is fed every day and thinks the farmer is his friend. Then comes Thanksgiving. The trend is your friend til a bend at the end. Are you vulnerable to a black swan event or have you positioned yourself to benefit from one?

Don't tell me what you think, show me your portfolio. If you yap and yap but don't have anything at stake, I'm not interested.

We often misattribute our good fortune to skill and others' to luck.