Et cetera

Books §

Math & Computer Science §

• Pattern Recognition and Machine Learning (Bishop)
• Deep Learning (Goodfellow et al.)
• Outlier Analysis (Aggarwal)
• Linear Algebra and Optimization for Machine Learning (Aggarwal)
• Mathematics for Machine Learning (Deisenroth)

Popular Science §

• The Egoistic Gene (Dawkins)
• A Brief History of Time (Hawkins)
• 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)
• The Singularity is Near (Kurzweil)
• 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)

Philosophy of Science §

• 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)

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)
• The Scout Mindset (Galef)

History §

• Sapiens (Harari)
• Homo Deus (Harari)
• Life 3.0 (Tegmark)
• Nexus (Harari)

Self Help §

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

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

• 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

Self-hosted §

I like self-hosting web services. 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
• GitLab: A very feature-rich git. Requires a lot of RAM, but for me, it was worth it.