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I recently read “If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies” by Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. One way to summarize the argument is as follows: 1. In a fast take-off scenario, it is virtually certain that humanity will be wiped out. 2. We don’t know if we are a month away, or a year away, or a decade away, from an improvement that would put us into a fast take-off scenario. 3. Given premises 1 and 2,…
I recently read The Thinking Machine, by Stephen Witt. The book captures the various phases of Nvidia, from its launch in 1993, to today: 1. Building the best GPUs for video games (e.g. for Quake) 2. Spotting the opportunity that these GPUs can do arithmetic-heavy tasks 10x-100x faster than CPUs 3. Investing into this opportunity (CUDA) before there was demand in the market. 4. Nvidia was then in…
I recently finished The Conquest of Happiness, by Bertrand Russell. The book consists of Russell’s thoughts on how to live a happy life. The book was written in 1930. Russell’s main advice is that the secret of happiness is to be interested in lots of things, and to be open-minded about what those interests are. He writes: “The secret of happiness is this: let your interests be as wide as…
I recently finished The Lincoln Highway, Amor Towles’ latest novel. It is set in 1954, and the story starts off on a farm in Nebraska. One boy, Emmett, has just returned home from a juvenile detention center, where he had been carrying out an 18 month sentence for punching someone who was bullying him. Emmett returns to his family farm, and to his younger brother Billy. Emmett and Billy’s father…
I recently read The Attention Factory by Matthew Brennan. It is about the founding of TikTok. TikTok was founded by Yiming Zhang. Zhang grew up in Fujian, China, and went to Nankai University, which is a good university in China. Zhang was a strong software engineer, and after leaving university, did 3 startups, as well as a stint at Microsoft. Zhang started ByteDance, the parent company of…
I recently finished The Power Law, by Sebastian Mallaby. The book traces the venture capital industry, from its origins in the 1950s and 1960s, to where it is today. One theme of the book is that venture capital has gone from a state where investors were hands-on, almost co-managing the company, with total fund sizes of $5 million, to being founder-friendly funds with $1 billion+ funds. In the…
I just finished The Proving Ground by G. Bruce Knecht. It is about the 1998 Sydney Hobart race in which there was a large storm. 5 boats sunk, and 6 sailors died. 55 sailors had to be rescued from the ocean by helicopters. The book focuses on 3 boats of the 155 that started: Larry Ellison’s 80 foot all-carbon boat, Sayonara; a 44 foot racing boat, Sword of Orion, and an old wooden boat, called…
A penny dropped for me the other day about how Neuralink proposes to solve the alignment / AI safety problem. Elon Musk often introduces Neuralink by saying that it is designed to address the AI safety problem: the problem that, in the future, superintelligences might emerge whose values are not aligned with the values of humans. The problem that Neuralink is solving is increasing the i/o rate…
I recently finished “Once Is Enough” by Miles Beeton. It is about a couple, Miles and Beryl Smeeton, who set off from Australia and want to go around Cape Horn at the bottom of South America. They have one other passenger on board. Near Cape Horn, the stern of the boat gets lifted up on a massive wave. The bow digs into the water, and the boat does a somersault. Beryl, who is at the helm, gets…
I recently finished “When I Fell From The Sky” by Juliane Koepcke. It is a true story about the author’s experience flying across Peru in a small plane in 1971. The plane flew into a storm, and then the plane fell apart in mid-air. Juliane Koepcke, fell through the air, still buckled into her seat. She fell 10,000 feet, and landed on the jungle floor, and survived. Later on she thought there were…
I recently finished “Four Against The Wilderness” by Elmo Wortman. It is a true story about a man and his three children, who survived for a month in the winter on a deserted island in Alaska after their boat sank. They ate minimal food: mostly seaweed from the beach and a few clams they found. The only shelter they had from the cold and wind was a sail that had washed ashore after their boat…
I recently finished Albatross, by Deborah Scaling Kiley. It is a true story about 5 people who set out in a 50 foot boat from Maine, aiming to sail down the east coast and reach Florida. They got caught in a massive storm on the way. During the storm, the boat was lifted up on a huge wave. As the boat fell off the top of the wave, the boat landed on its side. The portholes of the boat smashed, and…
I just finished The Voyage of the Heretique, by Alain Bombard. It is an extraordinary book. Bombard is a French doctor in the 1950s who decides that he would like to prove that you can survive for a substantial period of time in a life raft. In particular, he wants to show that you can drink sea water and survive, contrary to what conventional wisdom says. And that you can catch fish in areas of…
I recently finished “The Goal” by Eliyahu Goldratt. I have never read a book quite like this book. I would describe the genre as “business fiction”. It is a management textbook turned into novel form. The closest analog would be historical fiction, where you learn something about history in the course of reading a novel. A closer analog would be if a historian had developed a contrarian theory…
Right now the US federal revenue is $4 trillion, and its expenditures are $7 trillion, so it is running a $3 trillion deficit. If the US government was a company, it would be running at a $3 trillion loss. In this case the loss is funded through printing money (the Fed printed about $3 trillion in the last year and a half). The US national debt is $30 trillion. I.e. the US owes $30 trillion to…
The 2004 USS Nimitz incident is considered by some to be the most credible publicly available sighting of a UFO. In this interview with Lex Fridman, David Fravor, a TOPGUN pilot who saw the UFO, tells the story of seeing the UFO in clear blue sky for about 5 minutes, as close up as ½ a mile away. The UFO was a white object in the shape of a “Tic Tac”, the breath mint. It was about 40 feet…
I just finished “The Man Who Solved The Market” by Gregory Zuckerman. It is about the mathematician, Jim Simons, who started Renaissance Technologies. Renaissance pioneered quantitative trading, the idea of using models, instead of intuition, to make trades. Zuckerman estimates that Renaissance is the most successful fund of all time, more successful than Berkshire Hathaway. Zuckerman estimates…
I was thinking it would be good if there was a book called “A Logical Guide To Everyday Conversation” or “How To Have Free-Flowing Conversations and Avoid Conversational Ruts”. Just as chess books model out certain moves and counter moves, it could be helpful to have a book that maps out common moves that people make in conversation, and counter-moves. The goal such a book would be to enable…
I often think there are two kinds of thinking: categorical thinking and spectrum thinking. Categorical thinking is thinking of terms of buckets: things are either in one bucket or the other. Spectrum thinking is thinking in terms of matters of degree. Pretty much every quantity we care about is on a spectrum: cost, speed, weight, height, power, beauty, wealth, health, CO2 emissions, love. As soon…
I recently read Walter Isaacson’s story of the discovery of CRISPR / biography of Jennifer Doudna, called The Code Breaker. The book is structured as a series of “aha” moments, recounting how scientists made a series of discoveries about the CRISPR Cas9 system. The discovery of each piece of the system made scientists think “wow, CRISPR is more exciting than we thought”. James Watson, one of the…