A place to keep track of some of the books that I’ve read and found interesting over the years.

• The Rule of Empires by Timothy H. Parsons: An interesting reflection on how previous ruling empires rose to power and have always fallen. I appreciated it for its in depth analysis of how messy societies were, which helped show how complex many of the situations that are glossed over in history classes are. I particularly liked the chapter about the fall of France during the beginning of World War 2 and see many parallels to modern times.

• Zero to One by Peter Thiel: An extremely persuasive book on the startup life, particularly the idea about definite optimism where the “future will be better than the present if he plans and works to make it better”. There are also many valuable lessons and perspectives on the tech world from the 90s to the present day. Definitely one to keep coming back to.

• A History of Civilizations by Fernand Braudel: A book translated from French that provides a quick overview of several civilizations at key points in history. I most appreciated the book’s preface where it described a framework for learning history over the rote memorization I experienced in school. At a high level it advises studying recent history, key points in remote history, and finally analysis of modern day problems. I thought there were a little too many analyses stated without concrete facts backing them up. The language was a little wordy (originally published in 1963 so this makes sense) and I’d be interested to read the original French copy. Another time.

• The Science of Rapid Skill Acquisition by Peter Hollins: I wish I had this book when I was younger, particularly in middle school and high school. A lot of the concepts I’ve learned the hard way. I would recommend this as a book to quickly skim and get an overview of the ideas presented. It “formalizes” a lot of strategies that probably make intuitive sense to most people. The idea that resonated with me the most was the opportunity cost when learning and accepting that in order to get better at a certain skill you will probably have to forgo other things in life.

• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas S. Kuhn: A revolutionary book that I didn’t realize was revolutionary until after skimming it. The book is quite dense both in terms of language and concepts with lots of physics examples but the core idea is simple: scientific progress occurs through the continual process of paradigms being created, gaps appearing in those paradigms until a new paradigm replaces it. This is particularly interesting in the current world of Generative AI. I am definitely on the look out for the current gaps in the existing limits of transformers (e.g. compute limits, data scarcity, correctness) and try to figure out what new paradigm comes in.