Vijay's Reading Log

Currently (Re-)reading

• The Great Game by Peter Hopkirk: Hopkirk mixes expert historical research with entertaining (and factually accurate) storytelling. This makes the book very fun and rewarding to read.
• Poor Charlie’s Almanack
• Exhalation by Ted Chiang

Past Reads

• Essays by Michel de Montaigne: Montaigne (1533-1592) invented the essay, but not as we know it today. Modern essays are punitive. They are usually written as part of a school assignment and focus on just one topic. Montaigne’s essays, meanwhile, are very idiosyncratic and unstructured, often jumping from topic to topic multiple times in the same page. There is an emphasis on witty writing and funny anecdotes.

• What is ChatGPT Doing… and Why Does It Work? by Stephen Wolfram: A really interesting summary of how ChatGPT works. The author, Stephen Wolfram, has put the whole book online on his website. One interesting takeaway is that a lot of stuff about LLMs was discovered through tinkering and experimentation. For example, when writing about why a temperature value of 0.8 (in his opinion) works best for language models, he admits, “There’s no “theory” being used here; it’s just a matter of what’s been found to work in practice.” Likewise for why attention blocks “split up” the embedding vector – “we don’t know any particular reason why [this is] a good idea.”

  There are plenty of other examples throughout history of inventions being discovered before people fully understood why they worked. For example, the Wright Brothers invented simple airplanes before flight mechanics was as well-understood as it is today.¹ Many researchers today are tinkering with LLMs in a way not unlike how the Wright Brothers tinkered with airplanes. That’s why we have things like prompt engineering and tweaking (hyper-)parameters to see how the model’s performance changes.

• The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch: I went through the book about a year ago, but looking back, I’ve barely scratched the surface of what Deutsch was trying to get across. If you like discrete math, complexity theory, or physics, you will definitely enjoy this book.
• Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card: Passes itself off as a kids’ novel, but has a lot of philosophical depth. Kept my interest from start to finish with the deeper philosophical questions. Is it ethical to preemptively strike against aliens?
• Ender’s Shadow by Orson Scott Card: This is a great example of a successful sci-fi sequel. It doesn’t outdo the original book, it complements it. Orson Scott Card sheds new light onto the characters’ motivations and fleshes out subtle details that went unexplained in Ender’s Game.
• The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu: The premise is that there are a finite amount of resources in the universe, so it is only logical that alien civilizations will pre-emptively attack each other. This is known as the “Dark Forest Theory”, and it has been debunked many times. Aliens would visit for knowledge, not resources.
• Antifragile by Nassim Taleb: This book is hard to summarize. If you ask 10 different people to summarize Antifragile, you will get 10 completely different summaries.
• The Bed of Procrustes by Nassim Taleb: A very short, fun, and witty read. You could finish it in one afternoon, because it consists entirely of concise, one to two sentence philosophical statements (aphorisms). You could also read the aphorisms one at a time, following the author’s recommendation finishing the book in a few months.
• The Black Swan by Nassim Taleb: Philosophy, epistemology, funny anecdotes from the author’s career as a Wall Street trader: Taleb’s writing style is highly idiosyncratic and polarizing. Some people strongly dislike his books while others swear by his ideas.
• Only the Paranoid Survive by Andrew Grove: Written by a former CEO of Intel, the book talks about “critical inflection points,” times when a business encounters crisis and must radically pivot its product or go bust. Critical inflection points aren’t bad. If handled properly, they can take a business to new heights. The idea of a “critical inflection point” is very reminiscent of Taleb’s The Black Swan.
• Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond: I was really convinced by the author’s thesis until I read David Deutsch’s The Beginning of Infinity. Diamond’s explanations, while very persuasive the first time you read them, are subtly reductive. They suggest that human decisions play only a marginal role in the world and that biogeography is the main driver of history.
• Striking Thoughts by Bruce Lee: Bruce Lee is known for his martial arts movies, but he was also a philosopher. The book talks about all kinds of philosophy, and parts of it get very technical, discussing stuff like the difference between a priori and a posteriori knowledge.
• The Almanack of Naval Ravikant by Eric Jorgenson: After multiple rereads, I realized this book is less about business advice and entrepreneurship and more about philosophy.
• Schott’s Original Miscellany: I found this in a used bookshop in London. It reads like a Commonplace book from a few decades ago.
• Surviving the College Admissions Madness by Kevin Robert Martin: The book disguises itself as a college admissions advice book, but it’s really a set of memoirs + investigative journalism. A thoughtful, convincing book on why College Applications are not just a waste of time, but also hurtful to society.
• The Discovery of France by Graham Robb: A really well-written, fun history book. One interesting takeaway from this book is that as late as the 1800s, most of France’s population didn’t know French. What we think of as “French” today was actually the dialect of Paris, which was only exported to the rest of the country in recent times.
• Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell: Orwell wrote a lot of stuff besides 1984 and Animal Farm. Did you know that he was fluent in Burmese?
• The Story of English by Robert McCrum: Books about the history of the English language are really fun to read.
• The Great Seige by Ernle Bradford: This book is a very thoroughly-researched history of the Ottoman Empire’s seige of the island of Malta in 1565, complete with detailed breakdowns of the motivations and strategies of both sides.
• The Wisdom of Adam Smith: A neat condensed form of Adam Smith’s economics and philosophy writings.
• The Story of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang: My favorite story in this collection is “Story of Your Life: it’s linguistics, sci-fi, and physics all rolled into one novella. The story was written in the late 90s, but it still feels relevant today, which is a testament to Ted Chiang’s skill as a thinker and sci-fi writer.
• Cultural Amnesia by Clive James
• Don’t Sleep, There are Snakes by Daniel Everett
• Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
• Good Calories, Bad Calories by Gary Taubes
• On Writing by Stephen King
• How to Read a Book by Mortimer Adler
• Fashionable Nonsense by Alan Sokal
• The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch
• Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari: No.

Non-books, dense blog posts, websites

• Nassim Taleb’s Philosophical Notebook: Stumbled across this a long time ago, and it’s a ton of fun to read. There are ~90 pgs about everything from human nutrition to epistemology. My favorite entries: #66, “Real Books vs Digital Words” and #71, “Low Carb Philology”
• Reflections on Hyderabad - 2022: A cool, detailed, and very thoughtful travelogue about the city of Hyderabad, which is one of India’s major information technology cities.
• Japanese Level Up (JALUP) My main takeaway from this website is that language learning is way, way easier now than it was just a few decades ago. If you wanted to learn Japanese in the 1980s, your options were limited. Maybe you’d find some old, unsubtitled VHS movies or a battered dictionary at a yard sale, but without tech like Zoom, Anki (a flashcard app), or YouTube, your options were severely limited. It’s no wonder that that generation considered learning a language like Japanese to be nearly impossible.
• Text is the Universal Interface: Reflections on ChatGPT, the Unix philosophy, and the history of software development.

The design of my reading log was inspired by this page.