# nicholas taleb (blogs) — RSS Amplifier Recent posts from the 2 feeds in the RSS Amplifier directory that cover nicholas taleb. Page: Feed: --- ## [Michael Mania](https://blog.valentin.sh/michael) _2026-08-09 · Valentin · Valentin's musings_ Last April I went to see the movie Michael about Michael Jackson, which I liked very much. Before the movie, my knowledge of Michael Jackson was restricted to knowing a few hits from him ( Beat It and Black or White had rocked a number of my listening sessions when I was a teenager with a short music rotation on my small MP3 player), knowing he was the guy who did the moonwalk, and having a vague… ## [Arsenal, Nostalgia and the Bittersweet Champions League Final](https://homeworkinghenry.com/arsenal-nostalgia-and-the-bittersweet-champions-league-final/) _2026-06-02 · homeworkinghenry · Home Working Henry_ Every time Arsenal win a trophy, whether it is the FA Cup or the Premier League title, it brings with it a bittersweet mixture of joy and nostalgia. Watching the Champions League final brought that Bittersweetness all together. There have been FA Cup victories, memorable moments, and days when everything felt possible. The last three years felt like a title was near. And yet during that period… ## [My Journey With Bearblog: What I Discovered Moving To Bearblog](https://homeworkinghenry.com/home-working-henry-on-bearblog/) _2026-05-04 · homeworkinghenry · Home Working Henry_ How I migrated my blogs to Bearblog, why minimalism matters, and what the numbers reveal about this simple blogging platform. ## [Everything I know about Mushrooms](https://homeworkinghenry.com/everything-i-know-about-mushrooms/) _2026-04-21 · homeworkinghenry · Home Working Henry_ It is a slightly cold and damp autumnal day and I am in a park in Scotland, following my toddler discovering the wonders of trees, bushes and grass. Suddenly he points at a small cluster of mushrooms and looks at me curiously. I tell him, “do not touch,” and, for some reason, I take a photo. Snap. He laughs. We find more mushrooms. Snap. He laughs. That was how my journey with mushrooms began.… ## [The English Cottage, The Chainsaw and Work That Matters](https://homeworkinghenry.com/the-cottage-the-chainsaw-and-work-that-matters/) _2026-04-14 · homeworkinghenry · Home Working Henry_ Before we made the move up to Scotland, I lived in a place called “the Cottage” in rural Hampshire, at the edge of a village. It had a very Midsomer Murders vibe, nestled between a railway line, a village hall, allotments, and a village that, although in the countryside, was certainly not cut off from it. Many people still commuted into larger towns for work. We spent a good number of years there,… ## [A Brit’s Personal Reflections on America’s Decline](https://homeworkinghenry.com/a-brits-personal-reflections-on-americas-decline/) _2026-04-07 · homeworkinghenry · Home Working Henry_ As I write this, an American president is threatening to end a civilisation and chatting to toddlers about Autopens. America has throughout my life been a constant: the world’s superpower. An unabashed place that leads the world in science, art, creativity and raw military power. Today it feels like a superpower that has become a shadow of its former self. Childhood and Teenage Years As a child… ## [From Duvet to Desk: How To Get Out of Bed as a Home Worker](https://homeworkinghenry.com/from-duvet-to-desk-how-to-get-out-of-bed-as-a-home-worker/) _2026-03-30 · homeworkinghenry · Home Working Henry_ You can sense the grey skies through the light poking through the curtains and can hear the rain pitter-patting on the window. You can hear the dog snoring in the corner of the room. The slow rhythm of gentle sleep. The bed is warm. It’s snug. It feels wonderful. So why not stay in bed a little longer? Why not snuggle down and avoid getting up altogether? After all, the bed feels precious. This… ## [Why does everything feel so 'flat' in Britain today?](https://homeworkinghenry.com/why-does-everything-feel-so-flat-in-britain-today/) _2026-03-23 · homeworkinghenry · Home Working Henry_ Britain feels remarkably flat at the moment. Is it just me? The other weekend, we travelled over the border into England. It just felt more miserable, flat and depressing. Anecdotally at least, this is one data point among many observations. Britain feels like it is in the middle of a deep crisis of confidence. As a nation it feels like something is going wrong. In England it feels even worse. As… ## [Cheap Drones, Expensive Missiles and The Missile Accounting Fallacy](https://homeworkinghenry.com/cheap-drones-expensive-missiles-and-the-missile-accounting-fallacy/) _2026-03-16 · homeworkinghenry · Home Working Henry_ The fourth Gulf War (the ongoing US-Iran conflict, 2025-) has primarily been fought so far with drones, missile defence and unrivalled US air power. Wars in the gulf region have a habit of happening every 10 years or so, starting with the Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s, Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the invasion of Iraq in 2003 (and ensuing conflict) and this present iteration. The conflict has… ## [Quick Book Review: Anti-Fragile: Things that gain from Disorder by Nassim Nicholas Taleb](https://homeworkinghenry.com/quick-book-review-anti-fragile-by-nassim-nicholas-taleb/) _2026-02-26 · homeworkinghenry · Home Working Henry_ Nassim Nicholas Taleb has written an excellent, insightful and interesting book that could have easily been a quarter of the length. The central premise of the book is that there are things that are fragile, robust and antifragile. Our society is increasingly built on fragility and complexity. This complexity is going to bite us in the ass, though Black Swans or as we called it recently Covid 19)… ## [CLI-first decentralized GPU compute (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/PiB3Rca6glfx) _2026-02-26 · **Sponsored**_ Pay workers or run your GPU for FFmpeg transcode and AI inference. ## [Quick Book Review: Moscow December 25th 1991 by Conor O'Clery](https://homeworkinghenry.com/quick-book-review-moscow-december-25th-1991-by-conor-oclery/) _2026-02-19 · homeworkinghenry · Home Working Henry_ This is the best book on the Soviet Union I have ever read. And I have read a lot about the Soviet Union. Too much in fact. Conor O'Cleary lived in Moscow towards the end of the Soviet Union, and he genuinely brings a superb perspective on the tradegy that the collapse of the Soviet Union. The book is insightful, full of facts, and paints a bleak yet real picture of Moscow during the collapse. The… ## [Notes on agentic programming](https://blog.valentin.sh/llm-coding) _2025-12-26 · Valentin · Valentin's musings_ 2025 apparently was the 'year of agents'. After spending a fair share of the year programming with LLMs both for my personal side-projects and at work, I wanted to reflect on my impressions. Those impressions are based on using Cursor with various models (at work), Gemini CLI (personal projects), and Codex CLI (personal projects). Observation 1: Agents are doing waterfall The latest agents are… ## [Monty Hall Illustrated](https://blog.valentin.sh/monty-hall) _2025-06-07 · Valentin · Valentin's musings_ The Monty Hall problem was keeping me awake last night. Here is an infographic of how I eventually made sense of the solution. (Drawings courtesy of ChatGPT.) Below the doors is indicated the probability of the door(s) concealing the car. ## [Vibe coding is metaprogramming](https://blog.valentin.sh/vibe-metacoding) _2025-05-17 · Valentin · Valentin's musings_ I originally wanted to write 2 distinct articles, but realized that they shared the same underlying idea: 'Vibe coding', the act of talking to an LLM / LLM-based AI agent to code a full project without writing a line of code manually, is no more than a metaprogramming technique, where a program (the AI agent), produces another program (the code that gets committed). As such, it shares some common… ## [Everybody can learn to walk](https://blog.valentin.sh/learning-to-walk) _2025-05-14 · Valentin · Valentin's musings_ When we are learning something new, and we struggle with failures, some of us can easily get unmotivated and convince ourselves that we are simply unskilled at what we are trying to learn, and therefore that there is no point in learning it. 'It's useless, I'm not good at it.' Then, there is also the case when you are on the other side of the mirror: When you are (relatively) skilled at something,… ## [Excerpts from The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (William L. Shirer, 1960)](https://blog.valentin.sh/rise-and-fall-of-the-third-reich) _2025-04-23 · Valentin · Valentin's musings_ I gave up this book about 1/4 through (the 'rise part', basically). It was just way too long and detailed. Such details lost me and prevented me to understand the most significant events among all the twists and turns. On the other hand, it definitely contains some very interesting annecdotes, some of which contains very symptomatic and important insights about this time period. I have highlighted… ## [The Rise and Fall of Idols](https://blog.valentin.sh/idols) _2025-02-28 · Valentin · Valentin's musings_ I remember how much, about 10-15 years ago, Elon Musk was praised on social media and, to some degree, by journalists. He was becoming a myth adorned with God-like virtues, because people like to believe such stories and idolize such heroes: a genius engineer, a genius man with a vision for mankind. Someone able to understand everything and to create anything. The real-life Tony Stark! The 'CTO'… ## [AGI is the new AI](https://blog.valentin.sh/agi) _2025-01-08 · Valentin · Valentin's musings_ People struggling to find a good definition for 'AGI' (Artificial General Intelligence) seem to forget that we never had a good definition for 'AI' (Artificial Intelligence) to begin with. Historically, the practical usage of AI has been 'anything that we thought we couldn't do with a computer', such as, for example, natural language translation. But now that AI is being integrated into every… ## [Stuff I did in 2024](https://blog.valentin.sh/2024) _2024-12-30 · Valentin · Valentin's musings_ Released todo 5.0.0 Made my first YouTube video Built ratesmovies.net Passed all S licenses with Gold in Gran Turismo 7 Built auto-redactle Wrote 5 articles for this blog Read the Rust book and wrote my first lines of Rust Watched 107 movies Read 7 books: L'autre Fille (Annie Ernaux), Spielberg: The First Ten Years (Laurent Bouzereau), Skin in the Game (Nassim Nicholas Taleb), What Do You Care… ## [The case for 100% code coverage](https://blog.valentin.sh/100-percent-coverage) _2024-10-29 · Valentin · Valentin's musings_ When it comes to testing, I'm a proponent of aiming at 100% code coverage, and I've encountered numerous opinions claiming that such a goal is useless, worthless, idiotic, or merely amusing (and other variations of the 'bad idea' part of the spectrum). I have found out that many critics seem to confuse necessary with sufficient , as if my point was that the '100%' stamp ensures that the code is… ## [Crypto Payments, No Custody (Sponsored)](https://crawlproof.com/a/QYVSWDqYdjCw) _2024-10-28 · **Sponsored**_ Send crypto to merchant wallets via API with real-time updates and automatic fees. ## [Turn the Ship Around! (L. David Marquet, 2013)](https://blog.valentin.sh/turn-the-ship-around) _2024-10-03 · Valentin · Valentin's musings_ This is a book written by a Navy captain that took command of the USS Santa Fe in the late 90s. He explains that the default model for leading in US submarines is the leader-follower model, where the captain is basically an all-knowing God who is the most expert in everything, and is therefore the one most qualified to give orders down to the minutiae. The model obviously has limits, most notably… ## [Solving Redactle with Decision Trees](https://blog.valentin.sh/redactle) _2024-08-30 · Valentin · Valentin's musings_ Redactle is a game in which you are presented with a Wikipedia page in which most words are redacted, and you need to find the article's title. You can submit as many words as you want, and if the word you submitted is anywhere in the article, it 'unredacts' all the occurrences of it, so you can progressively comprehend what the article is about by trial and error. I usually start by submitting…