Books & more
“You are what you think about” — Earl Nightingale
TL;DR: Enter the Nerd Cave
Welcome! This space is a collection of the books, movies, and art that I find intriguing. While I haven’t experienced everything out there, I’ve certainly enjoyed my share.
Books
Here are some books I’ve enjoyed. I have some fairly polarizing opinions on a few of them.
Movies
I love movies. Art depicted in visual, creative styles just hits different. Check out my Letterboxd for the full list.
A few favorites: Interstellar, Inception, Tenet, The Dark Knight, V for Vendetta, A Clockwork Orange, The Shawshank Redemption, Oppenheimer, Oldboy, 1984 (my analysis).
Art
It’s a weird feeling, having great respect for old paintings when you know you can generate hundreds of images with Stable Diffusion that are technically more polished.
Paintings
The Great Waves of Kanagawa
Faun by the Moonlight
Destruction
Sculptures
The Gates of Hell — Rodin
Writers & Thinkers
Personal sites are often better than feeds. They keep more of the author attached.
| Who | Why |
|---|---|
| Scott H. Young | Learning, ultralearning, study systems |
| Alexey Guzey | Essays, institutions, media lists |
| Michael Nielsen | Science, tools for thought, pedagogy |
| Amit Patel | Programming and game map design |
| The Scholar’s Stage | History, strategy, geopolitics |
| Andrej Karpathy | AI, software, teaching |
| Naval Ravikant | Startups, money, life philosophy |
| Gwern | Everything, excessively researched |
| Jay Alammar | Visual AI explanations |
| Fabrice Bellard | Systems, compression, emulation, strange feats |
| Chris Olah | Mechanistic and visual ML explanations |
| Jascha Sohl-Dickstein | Weird and interesting research notes |
| Brandon Rohrer | Friendly engineering and ML explanations |
| danah boyd | Technology, society, youth, institutions |
| Julia Galef | Rationality and applied epistemics |
| Sage Jenson | Visual computing, simulation, art |
| Paul Nylander | Mathematical art and visual experiments |
| Robert Munafo | Mathematical and scientific data rabbit holes |
| MathPages | Math and physics essays |
| lcamtuf | Security, systems, electronics, old-web excellence |
Notes
Our Oriental Heritage Quotations: The Madness of Men