Et cetera

Books §

Math & Computer Science §

• Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Bishop): a good intro to ML that was written before Deep Learning became big.
• Deep Learning (Goodfellow et al.)
• Outlier Analysis (Aggarwal)
• Linear Algebra and Optimization for Machine Learning (Aggarwal)
• Mathematics for Machine Learning (Deisenroth): a good introduction to linear algebra, multivariate calculus, probability theory and continuous optimization

Popular Science §

• The Egoistic Gene (Dawkins)
• A Brief History of Time (Hawking)
• Calling Bullshit: The Art of Skepticism in a Data-Driven World (Bergstrom)
• Human Compatible (Russel)
• Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction (Gardner)
• Superintelligence (Bostrom)
• The Book of Why (Pearl): on causal inference
• The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Taleb)
• Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder (Taleb)
• The Alignment Problem (Christian)
• Algorithms to Live By (Christian)

Philosophy §

• Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Nietzsche)
• On the Genealogy of Morality: A Polemic (Nietzsche)
• Beyond Good and Evil (Nietzsche)
• The Republic (Plato)
• Our Mathematical Universe (Tegmark)
• Bhagavad Gita (German Reclam Version)
• Siddhartha (Hesse)
• Parerga and Paralipomena (Schopenhauer)
• The Art of Being Right (Schopenhauer)

Epistemeology §

• Against Method (Feierabend)
• The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Kuhn)
• Conjectures and Refutation (Popper)
• Lost in Math (Hossenfelder)
• Existential Physics (Hossenfelder)

Politics §

• The Prince (Machiavelli)
• Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness (Thaler)
• The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. 1 (Popper)
• Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Lanier)
• 21 Lessons for the 21st Century (Harari)
• Chip War (Miller): a history of computing substrate

Economy §

• A Random Walk Down Wall Street (Malkiel)
• Bullshit Jobs (Graeber)
• The Big Short (Lewis): a description of the events leading to the 2008 financial crisis
• Inadequate Equilibria: Where and how Civilizations get Stuck (Yudkowsky)

Psychology §

• Thinking Fast and Slow (Kahneman)
• The Elephant in the Brain (Simler): Why we really do thing, from the perspective of evolutionary psychology.
• Influence - The Psychology of Persuation (Cialdini)
• The Scout Mindset (Galef)

History §

• Sapiens (Harari)
• Homo Deus (Harari)
• Nexus (Harari)

Futurism §

• Life 3.0 (Tegmark)
• The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil)

Self Improvement §

• Atomic Habits (Clear)
• Getting Things Done (Allen)
• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Covey)
• The Power of Habit (Duhigg)

Biographies §

• Permanent Record (Snowden)
• Steve Jobs (Isaacson)
• Elon Musk (Vance)

Fiction §

• Crime and Punishment (Dostojewski)

• Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (Yudkowsky): A 2000 pages Harry Potter fan fiction.

  • There is also a very good audiobook.

• Animal Farm (Orwell)

• 1984 (Orwell)

• Fahrenheit 451 (Bradburry)

• Brave New World (Huxley)

• Blindsight (Watts): A hard scifi-novel with aliens and “vampires”. This might sound strange, but it works. From my understanding, the core topic is the difference between intelligence and consciousness.

• Echopraxia (Watts): The successor of Blindsight, which in addition to the “vampires” and aliens features zombies. While the core topic is free will, it also speculates about which paradigm might supersede contemporary empirical science.
  

• Requiem for a Dream (Selby): I also really enjoyed the movie.

• The Swarm (Schaetzig)

• Atlas Shrugged (Rand): a contentious book that argues in favor of individualism and radical free market capitalism. It could have been 600 pages shorter.

• The Grand Grimoire (?)

Essays, Blogs, etc §

Some of the blogs that I read frequently:

• Slatestar Codex, Astral Codex Ten (ACX): The author, Scott Alexander, is a psychiatrist and writes pretty amazing posts about various topics. Some accuse him of leaving his area of expertise too often. Judge for yourself.
  • Meditations on Moloch: Why we can’t have nice things
  • The Toxoplasma of Rage: Why controversial memes spread further
• Gwern: An American freelance writer & researcher
  • The Algernon Argument: Why increasing human intelligence is difficult
• Fefes Blog: German blog from a security guy about all kinds of things
• Meltingasphalt: A blog about evolutionary psychology. Even though I am somewhat skeptical about the validity of evolutionary psychology, probably due to my exposure to Taleb, I think it is an interesting perspective. The author also wrote The Elephant in the Brain which covers much of the blogs content.
  • Ecological Thinking: systems have niches, and it is more helpful to think about behavior in terms of properties of a system instead of behavior of actors
• Less Wrong: A website that aims to improve decision making, where anyone can submit posts
  • The Goddess of Everything Else: A post by Scott Alexander that I personally enjoyed, there is also a pretty good youtube animation available here
• near.blog
  • Personality Basins: a mathematical model of personality

Software §

Command Line §

You can find my dotfiles in this repo.

• Shell: zsh, a nice shell with lots of available plugins
• Text editor: NeoVim

Desktop §

• OS: Arch Linux¹, a highly configurable Linux distribution
• Desktop Environment:
  • XFCE, a fast and lightweight desktop environment
  • i3 gaps, a tiling window manager. I mainly use this on notebooks, as tiling window managers make good use of the limited space
• Terminal: Alacritty, a terminal emulator with GPU acceleration
• Browser: Firefox
• IDE: IntelliJ/PyCharm, VSCode
• Password Manager: KeePassXC with a YubiKey
• Video Editing: Kdenlive
• Image Editing: GIMP
• Anki: Flashcards for learning facts
• Obsidian: Note taking (day to day, short-term notes)

Self-hosted §

I like self-hosting web services. You can find an in depth description of my infrastructure in this post. The following is a collection of the software which I found most useful over the last few years:

• Proxmox: A hypervisor that allows you to easily deploy virtual machines and LXC containers
• Wallabag: Saving articles for later reading
• FreshRSS: A web-based RSS reader
• Home Assistant: A framework for home-automation
• OpenWebUI: A frontend for LLMs which I use in combination with ollama to run local LLMs. Ollama can also be integrated with Home Assistant to answer queries and execute commands on your smart home.
• MediaWiki: I use MediaWiki extensively for note taking (for long-term notes)
• GitLab: A very feature-rich git. Requires a lot of RAM, but for me, it was worth it.