2025 #

April #

• Blurry Sentences - Ben Garfinkel - Deepities, Motte and Bailey Generalization. Nice read on mental models to be incisive about what you hear.
• Being Glue - Tanya Reilly - Doing the important thankless work, but also how to recognise when you’re stuck doing it
• Trusting Trust - Ken Thompson - Quines and hiding trojans in compilers

May #

• Machines of Loving Grace - Dario Amodei - Beautifully written. Wide and easy to read.
• Everything I Know About Good System Design - Sean Goedecke - Good mental models of what to aim for and what not to aim for when making a system

June #

• A Theory of Jerks - Erin Schwitzgebel
• Are We Accidentally Building A Planetary Brain? - Thomas Moynihan
• Why don’t birds drive Bentleys? - Antone Martinho-Truswell
• Warbreaker by Brandon Sanderson

August #

• In Search of AI Psychosis - Scott Alexander - A good article on how many seem to be affected, and what usually predisposes them.
• A Deep Dive into Reverse Proxy - Start with a Why - An amazing series about practical aspects of what a loaded load balancer has to care about.

September #

• The World in Which We Live Now - Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Very nice points. I used to find Taleb very opaque before reading this. I think I understand him much better than when I tried Black Swan 5-6 years ago.
• Real Life is Risk Taking - Nassim Nicholas Taleb - Vindication for me personally as I start taking more and more obvious risks.