Bookshelf
Inspired by the likes of Collison, below are notes on books and internet writing I’ve enjoyed (or not enjoyed). I read way too many Substacks, and these short notes are as much for my organisation/mnemonic purposes as anything else.
Aside - I’ve noticed these online book trackers are often wall-to-wall Classics and vast works of non-fiction, but I’ll attempt to stay honest (I’ve read every discworld book again this year, in order, and I read a ton of bad scifi).
November 2024
Elena Ferranta, My Brilliant Friend, contd: - currently reading.
October 2024
Elena Ferrante, My Brilliant Friend: (see above)
Links:
- https://quantian.substack.com/p/market-prices-are-not-probabilities
- https://darioamodei.com/machines-of-loving-grace
- https://www.todayontrail.com/p/meetings-partings
- https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-real-north-korea-by-andrei
- https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-math-from-three-to-seven-by
September 2024
qntm, Ra: - You can see the writing style that became Antimemetics, it’s a book with a strange lack of connective tissue. It’s interesting scene -> new interesting scene -> third scene suggesting scene 1 was a dream -> fourth scene suggesting the narrator in scene 3 is unreliable, etc. It also does the thing the Bourne movies do where you feel like you’re being hurried along so that you don’t notice the plot holes. But it’s got great ideas, the central two characters are really well portrayed, and if you survive to the end, the resolution is worthwhile. It’s also clearly a book written by a British physicist-turned-software-engineer, which is precisely what I am, so I’m probably the ideal target audience.
qntm, There Is No Antimemetics Division (again): - Re-read in one go during a bad night with the newborn - still superb, and I’m looking forward to the new version now qntm has a publishing deal.
Links:
- https://www.neelnanda.io/blog/become-a-person-who-actually-does-things
- https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/llm-applications-i-want-to-see
- https://cerebralab.com/My_lukewarm_take_on_GLP-1_agonists
August 2024
Anne Leckie, The Raven Tower: - I don’t think I’ve ever read a second-person novel done successfully before. Conceit interesting, character-building great. Probably read Ancillary Justice first and if you like that, you’ll like this.
Links:
- https://asteriskmag.com/issues/07/sins-of-the-children
- https://ozybrennan.substack.com/p/mea-maxima-culpa
- https://notes.billmill.org/blog/2024/06/Serving_a_billion_web_requests_with_boring_code.html (and the associated https://mcfunley.com/choose-boring-technology)
July 2024
John Le Carré, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Honourable Schoolboy: - At some point midway through the Smiley novels I realised I wasn’t having a good time anymore, I can’t recommend reading them back-to-back. The pacing and the plot remain great, and the premise of ’exceptionally competent and deeply sad civil servants’ remains compelling, but it all gets a bit predictable, and Le Carré’s dated worldview gets harder and harder to ignore.
Links:
- https://www.benkuhn.net/trust/
- https://qntm.org/mmacevedo (again)
- https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/search-query (again)
- https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/writing-to-think
- https://www.troynikov.io/essays/telescoping_ambition/
- https://www.avabear.xyz/p/a-blog-is-a-space-for-dreaming
- https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean
June 2024
John Le Carré, The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (also Call for the Dead, A Murder of Quality, and The Looking-Glass War): - TSWCIFTC is an incredibly immersive spy thriller, and deserves its laurels. Paints an extremely credible picture of poor decisionmaking. Also every scene description and piece of dialogue is a glimpse into a kind of UK society of which the barest traces remained when I was growing up, so it reminds me of my grandparents. TLGW, the sequel, is somehow incredibly similar but with a very different emotional effect - it’s much more brutal in its description of its characters’ cowardices and failings, and tragic.
Links:
- https://visakanv.substack.com/p/are-you-serious
- https://qntm.org/godmode
- https://blog.brunk.io/posts/similarity-search-with-duckdb
- https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/reflecting-on-years-of-runescape/
- also https://ludic.mataroa.blog/blog/i-will-fucking-piledrive-you-if-you-mention-ai-again/
- https://applied-llms.org/
- https://nadia.xyz/jhanas
- https://jc.gatspress.com/pdf/otherness_full.pdf
- https://imbue.com/research/70b-infrastructure/
- https://research.character.ai/optimizing-inference/
- https://v2thegreat.com/2024/06/19/lessons-learned-from-scaling-to-multi-terabyte-datasets/
May 2024
Patricia Lockwood, No One is Talking About This: - Almost incomprehensible and transcendently beautiful tale that is mostly about twitter. For a specific person who’s too online (me) it’s incredibly powerful and moving, for someone with a normal relationship to the internet it may be a struggle to get through the start.
Prev. 2024
Gene Wolfe, Book of the New Sun:
Cormac McCarthy, Passenger/Stella Maris
Ned Beauman, Venomous Lumpsucker
China Mieville, Perdido Street Station & The Scar & Iron Council
Arkady Martine, A Memory Called Empire
Katherine Addison, The Goblin Emperor
Emily St John Mandel, The Glass Hotel
Oedipus Trilogy (new translation by Bryan Doerries)
Blogs of note
- Simon Willison
- Byrne Hobart
- Simon Sarris
- Ozy Brennan
- Zvi Mowshowitz
- Bounded Regret
- Lilian Weng
- Nate Silver
- Sasha Chapin
- Ludic
- Craig Mod (his pop-up newsletters specifically)
- Sarah Constantin
- Hamilton Nolan
- Eugene Yan
- Ava
- Henrik Karlsson
- Dan Luu
- Vicki Boykis
- MR
- Defector
- Speedwell Research