Of ~200 books I've read, the few that stayed with me over time and I find myself often thinking back to or referring to, in ~random order: All short stories by Ted Chiang, especially Exhalation, Division By Zero, Understand, The Story of Your Life, Liking What You See, The Lifecycle of Software Objects, What's Expected of us, just excellent themes ideas and reading all around. The Selfish Gene (nonfiction) - a classic for understanding evolution and natural selection, especially the realization that the gene is closer to the real unit of selection more than an individual, explaining altruism and colonies and a lot more. The Lord of the Rings (fantasy) - I return to LoTR all the time for comfort. I don't think anyone else has created a high fantasy Universe this complex, with so much mythology, symbolism, new languages, mysterious system of magic, ancient and powerful beings and artifacts, beautiful writing and dialog, themes of courage, friendship and heroism, the list goes on and on... You're thrown into a world with characters and references to so many things that are part of this ancient world and never really introduced. There's always more to find on each reading. The Martian (~scifi) - top tier science porn, competence porn, fast paced and fun. The Vital Question (nonfiction) - First time I intuitively grokked the bridge from geology to biology, the origin of life, and likelihood of life in the Universe at large at various stages of complexity and development. Also all other Nick Lane books. How To Live by Derek Sivers (nonfiction) - 27 conflicting answers to how to live life. Emphasizing the diversity of consistent and possible answers to the meaning and goals of life. 1984 (nonfiction) - Classic. Newspeak, Ministry of Truth, Doublethink, Thoughtcrime, Facecrime, Unperson, the list just keeps on going. Chilling world-building and the realization that weaker equivalents of everything exist. In Defense of Food by Pollan (nonfiction/food) - Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. The book that first taught me to avoid the entire center of every grocery store and only shop on the outer ring. The realization that the food industry is out of control and the things they do with your food, what they put into it, what they are allowed to do, and how they are allowed to market it to you is quite a lot worse than I thought. The Accidental Superpower by Zeihan (nonfiction/geopolitcs) - I've found Zeihan to be a bit of a mixed bag over time but I still remember his books (esp this one) to be elucidating on geopolitics. Countdown to Zero Day (nonfiction/cyberwarfare) - Goes into detail on Stuxnet, imo very important and highly elucidating reading on cybersecurity, the future of warfare, and AGI. A Fire Upon the Deep (scifi) - Chapter one only, incredible portrayal of what superintelligence will be like that has stayed with me since. Guns Germs and Steel (nonfiction/history) - I'd probably recommend a summary of this book more than the book itself. I remember it being very dry, but it was very interesting because it is a comprehensive analysis of the resources grid (food, animals, freshwater, climate, ...) in our real-world game of Civilization, and the implications there of. Flowers of Algernon (scifi) - Just a totally crushing masterpiece on intelligence. Atlas Shrugged (scifi) - No one finishes this I think but the first few chapters and its worldbuilding are enough and, once seen in an exaggerated form in fiction, elements of it cannot be fully unseen in reality. An Immense World (nonfiction/bio, by Yong, among others of his) - Nice book on so many different sensors used by various animals, you repeatedly realize human senses are super inadequate and that we only measure such a tiny sliver of reality. The Master Switch (nonfiction/tech history, by Wu) - history of information technologies telegraph, telephony, radio, television, film, cable television, internet and the pattern of "The Cycle", where each medium starts decentralized, open and idealistic and then progresses towards centralization, control and oligopoly, for the very similar reasons, by very similar means, and usually at the expense of diversity, innovation and technological progress. Quite a few connections to draw on for LLMs, which are after all an information technology too. (I take recommendations for more that are likely to make this list!)

brace for the ensuing enshittification

#WorseThanExpected AMOC news keeps getting worse.

This is how dictators destroy free nations. They threaten those who speak against them with death. We cannot entrust our country and our freedom to a petty, vindictive, cruel, unstable man who wants to be a tyrant. #Womenwillnotbesilenced #VoteKamala

youtu.be/Q10_srZ-pbs?si I guess this is about the simplest and most relevant advanced piece of physics nobody knows about Form high school.

Name the following two fundamental equations in Physics ✍️

A theory of almost everything

🌊🌡️📈 Who benefits from denial?

13. This GIF by Jakub Nowosad demonstrates how the Mercator projection distorts the true sizes of continents and countries on a world map.

What do you think? ✍️

Congrats @geoffreyhinton and @HopfieldJohn !

Why does my phone/android not recognize in which language I'm typing? Why do I have to configure this each time I switch languages?

The answer to the ancient question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable. - Frank Wilczek

Europe split in two. Where Europeans would move if they had to leave their country.

Skandal! Bundesrat Rösti hält einen Bericht zurück, der zeigt, dass 30 % der Arten in der Schweiz bedroht sind. Jetzt erst recht: Stimme Ja zur #Biodiversitätsinitiative am Sonntag! 🌿 bit.ly/3XzlpDb

We didn’t

Economists redo calculation of expected damages from climate change by 2100 and get result that's six times higher than all previous studies. If this was a physics paper I would want to see a very good reason for those 2π. news.harvard.edu/gazette/sto…

Fun Fact 144 and 441 are not just mirror images of each other the same is true of their square roots, 12 and 21.

Bernhard Riemann died in 1866 at the age of 39. Here is a list of things named after him. Riemann bilinear relations Riemann conditions Riemann form Riemann function Riemann–Hurwitz formula Riemann matrix Riemann operator Riemann singularity theorem Riemann surface Compact Riemann surface The tangential Cauchy–Riemann complex Zariski–Riemann space Cauchy–Riemann equations Riemann integral Generalized Riemann integral Riemann multiple integral Riemann invariant Riemann mapping theorem Measurable Riemann mapping theorem Riemann problem Riemann solver Riemann sphere Riemann–Hilbert correspondence Riemann–Hilbert problem Riemann–Lebesgue lemma Riemann–Liouville integral Riemann–Roch theorem Arithmetic Riemann–Roch theorem Riemann–Roch theorem for smooth manifolds Grothendieck–Hirzebruch–Riemann–Roch theorem Hirzebruch–Riemann–Roch theorem Riemann–Stieltjes integral Riemann series theorem Riemann sum Riemann–von Mangoldt formula Riemann hypothesis Generalized Riemann hypothesis Grand Riemann hypothesis Riemann hypothesis for curves over finite fields Riemann theta function Riemann Xi function Riemann zeta function Riemann–Siegel formula Riemann–Siegel theta function Free Riemann gas Riemann invariant Riemann–Cartan geometry Riemann–Silberstein vector Riemann-Lebovitz formulation Riemann curvature tensor Riemann tensor Riemannian graph Riemannian group Riemannian holonomy Riemannian manifold also called Riemannian space Riemannian metric tensor Riemannian Penrose inequality Riemannian polyhedron Riemannian singular value decomposition Riemannian submanifold Riemannian submersion Riemannian volume form Riemannian wavefield extrapolation Sub-Riemannian manifold Riemannian symmetric space Riemann's differential equation Riemann's existence theorem Riemann's explicit formula Riemann's minimal surface Riemann's theorem on removable singularities

In my entire career, I have never seen an experiment fail so many times, at such great cost, as the experiment on the “scaling” hypothesis that you could create AGI simply by adding more data and compute. It doesn’t work! Try something different, already?