Industrial Society And Its Future - Ted Kaczynski *

This is certainly one of the most mind-boggling things I've ever read. This bizarre book is a combination of Seeing Like A State, Huxley's Brave New World, Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Bostrom's Superintelligence. Most of his commentary on contemporary society is completely true (especially interesting is his commentary on the insatiable character of left-wing movements), but what is bizarre is the conclusion he draws. Yes, technology is great, it has reduced the burden of man and has drastically increased the quality of life for billions of people. It has also alienated man from their natural state, caused mass societal and environmental problems, and has arguably reduced humans to gears in a system, with that system restricting freedom and turning out lives Kafkaesque with rules imposed on us and our individuality consistently stripped away. However, the solution is to not eradicate 95% of the human race and nuke us back to the Stone Age, as his solution must inevitably cause. Technology is what got us into this hole and technology will be what will get us out. If mankind has shown one specialty, it is out-innovating and having the capabilities to dig itself out of its own holes! Another striking curiosity is how the anti-human Unabomber worldview has become fashionable amongst those exact same over-socialized elites Kaczynski laments about in his work. Hopefully, the future will shine fortune on those who want to take humanity to the stars than those who desire to revert it to the yesteryears wherein for most of man, life is nasty, brutish, and short.

The Founders - Jimmy Soni *

This was a good book that covered the history of PayPal and all the members that eventually became known as the PayPal Mafia, but this got the special orange tag because of the last chapter. That was completely out of left field and pushed this book over the edge. This guy also wrote the Claude Shannon book below, great author in general.

The Cathedral & The Bazaar - Eric S. Raymond *

One thing that I thought was interesting in this book was it's discussion on the origin of traditions and customs for conflict resolution management in a decentralized system where there is no central authority. I've recently been thinking about that topic as a whole when applied to the history of the United States (and societies in general), and how such tradition and customs (deemed legitimate by the host population) were the foundations of order, and how when central authority monopolized dispensing of justice, such traditions and customs completely faded. Such things tend to completely die, with people domesticated, and left completely reliant on the central authority to properly uphold law and order, which for a variety of states across time, tends to be improperly implemented. Overall, I think that the book was very interesting and covered insightful history on the birth of the open source movement.

The Man Who Solved The Market - John Steele Gordon *

This was about Jim Simons and Renaissance Technology. Jim recently passed away a few weeks before me reading the book. Very interesting read. I'm surprised to have heard names like John Nash and Claude Shannon appear throughout the book.

An Empire of Wealth - John Steele Gordon *

This was a good book over the entire history of the United States, from a Marxist perspective of history (through the lens that economic structures fundamentally drives history).

Writing a Compiler In Go - Thorsten Ball *

I skimmed through this book while at my sister's med school graduation. It was interesting to see how a virtual machine compiler worked. I want to make a simple compiler and interpreter over the summer, and this book will be my reference.

Killers of the Flower Moon - David Grann *

This was about the Osage Murders and the birth of the FBI. Interesting to read history books and to put it in perspective with everything else. It's always strange to be reminded of prohibition. Amazing that there was ever enough political will for it to be enacted at all ever.

Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach - John L. Hennessy & David A. Patterson *

Went through a bit of this for Advanced Computer Architecture. The Appendix was a great review of normal comp arch. Good book and good class.

Alexander Hamilton - Ron Chernow *

I just found out that Ron Chernow was the author of the book that the musical was largely inspired from. Decided to give it a read, and it's my favorite of his work. Certainly a book worth reading. I realized that I knew much less about the early founding period than I previously thought.

Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller - Ron Chernow

Napoleon - Andrew Roberts *

I've read dozens of books about entrepreneurs, statesmen, scientists, etc, but this book makes me feel something more than just inspiration for worldly pursuits. Napoleon was one of the last Great individuals. We today have great people everywhere which is great for humanity, but long gone is the time when an era could be named after an individual alone. He is put in the group of great conquerors of history, along side Caesar and Alexander, and he is the last.

A Tour of C++ - Bjarne Stroustrup *

I've never seen a language so great and terrible. I've yet to dive deep in a project with it. My biggest gripe about it is just the lack of decent tooling around it. I'd rather use something like Zig and Rust, where making it deployable seems like a sane task. Having to deal with the lack of coherence (tooling, package management, different versions) just makes it seem like a pain. Things like C++ supporting Modules, but 3 years later GCC doesn't support it is just wild to me.

Efficient Go - Bartiomiej Plotka *

This book was alright. The first half was about Go and the second half was just a review of computer architecture. I half read a handful of books covering Go, but since I only half read them, this is the only one that is included.

Writing an Interpreter In Go - Thorsten Ball *

So much of life is just Abstract Syntax Trees.

The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power - Max Chafkin

Elon Musk - Walter Isaacson

The House of Morgan - Ron Chernow *

This behemoth of a book is about the Morgan banking dynasty, from George Peabody and J.S. Morgan to now. Because the Morgan Dynasty has been around for 200 years, this book also is nearly a history of modern banking as a whole. What I thought was interesting was the evolution of the relation between bank and the state. From king makers to diplomats to tools of the state, their power (and power of bankers in general) has diminished greatly.

The Rust Programming Language - Steve Klabnik & Carol Nichols *

This is not the first time I've read this, nor will it be the last. When I first read this two years ago, I didn't know shit from Shinola. Now, I'm marginally smarter. I've actually taken a computer architecture and OS class, understand memory, etc. I went ahead and made a few small Rust projects (a WASM blog and basic symbolic math library). Perhaps one day I'll actually use Rust for something non-trivial.

The Odyssey - Translated by Emily Wilson *

Surprisingly, I've never read many 'classics'. Emily Wilson did a fantastic translation. I did enjoy the story. These old archetypal stories always reflect aspects of the human condition that we can relate to and cause us to reflect deeper about our lives. We are all the hero in our own lives on our own journey, and we must make the best of it.

Physics for Engineers and Scientists, Vol. 1 - Hans C. Ohanian & John T. Markert *

This is the first textbook I've actually nearly read to from cover to cover. Everything excepct for the sections on heat and thermodynamics. It was a very good textbook. I noticed that there's a really large gap in my understanding of the world. Math and computer science is solid knowledge, but in terms of how the world actually works, I've been fully ignorant until now.

Six Easy Pieces - Richard P. Feynman *

Feels great to actually understand physics (currently also taking a physics sequence at UT). After a couple of books about general relativity and quantum mechanics, I'll tap out of physics. I'll have a reasonable understanding. I can die satisfied.

Rome: An Empire's Story - Greg Woolf *

I loved the end, when it was talking about what causes a culture to create monuments. The late republic and early empire, tons of monuments were built. People that build monuments have enough trust that there will be someone there in the future to remember them. Very few monuments were built after the early life of the empire, which also lines up with the start of its decline. Of course, economic factors play in, but maybe people didn't believe that future generations would be there for them? Or at least future generations that they cared about.

The Man From The Future - Ananyo Bhattacharya *

This book talks about each field that John von Neumann was involved in: quantum mechanics, the manhatten project, computers, and cellular automaton. It's too late for me, but there seems to be a systematic way to raise kids with a touch of genius. Every time I think about it, focusing my entire life on gathering resources and then pivoting all my focus on my future kids seems like it should surely have a higher long term expected value than me trying to reach great heights, as my kids would surely be able to do more. Of course, the future is always full of uncertainties.

American Prometheus - Kai Bird & Martin J. Sherwin *

This is a great biography about J. Robert Oppenheimer. I've read so many books about such great figures. It's strange, going through someone's entire life in just a week. It always leaves an impression on me greatly, reading about their death, and Oppenheimer is of no exception. Wasted away from cancer. Hearing about how people change when faced with their own mortality, it always makes me stop and ponder what I am doing with my life.

Einstein - Walter Isaacson *

This book became so much better and more enriching after I learned about the basics of topology and the history of non-Euclidian geometry and the early Prussian university system with the characters and historic figues that came out of there. I love more about the same things through different lenses. Great biography in general.

Algorithms to Live By - Brian Christian & Tom Griffiths *

This book made me wonder how much knowledge I didn't catch throughout my life. I read a part of this book in the past before. Rereading it again, after taking computer architecture and OS, is a completely different experience. Things that I didn't understand or pick up on are now obvious to me and the amount I take away is greatly different.

Gödel's Proof - Ernest Nagel & James R. Newman *

For the first time in my life, I feel like I actually have a fairly intuitive understanding of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorem (EDIT: forgot it already). I decided to read this because I started Gödel Escher Bach and wanted to truly understand the concept that sparked it all before reading such a Tour De Force.

The Joy of X - Steven Strogatz *

Just another book about math history and trivia. One thing that I thought was super interesting is that it mentioned how to optimal stopping point for any problem where you know the size, the solution is 1/e. In another book, 'Agorithms To Live By', it mentioned this, but it just said .37% (the rounded decimal version of 1/e). I'm just reminded of how amazing math is and how it is unexplanably beautiful and tied together.

The Creature from Jekyll Island - G. Edward Griffin *

This is mandatory reading. This book does what Howard Zinn's 'The People's History Of The United States' wanted to do, while funnily being on the exact opposite of the political spectrum. I'm always reminded how, in response to the criticism of conspiracy theories in general, people remind us that the founding of our country was a massive conspiracy theory. The more I exist, the more I realize that a lot of the largest socio, political, and economic events in human history have all been just strings of conspiracy theories, and we are almost certainly living amongst many at the current moment.

How Google Works - Eric Schmidt & Jonathan Rosenberg *

Bland. This was a mix between 'History of Google' and 'Google's management philosophy'. The history part is nice, the latter was just very generic stuff. Most likely my perspective. When this book came out these ideas could have been novel, but throughout the years, much of this advice propagated to most of the startups out there to the point where a lot of this is common knowledge

A Mind at Play - Rob Goodman & Jimmy Soni *

I love Claude Shannon. Really a human to cause inspires in others. The archetypal tinkerer. Just a terrific man. While I might not ever be able to outshine his genius, I might one day be able to juggle better than him (5 balls instead of 4)!

The Poincaré Conjecture - Donal O'Shea *

A truly fantastic book, one of the best I've ever read. Goes through the history of math, from Euclid to Gauss, Riemann, etc. and covers the origin of geometry, topology, calculus, and other foundations of math and how it all connects. I very much appreciated its intro to topology as I'm very new to a lot of higher math topics. Truly a wonderful book and has helped spark a deeper curiousity and love for math within me.

The Everthing Store - Brad Stone *

This book is about Jeff Bezos and the founding of Amazon. Really surprised me. Who knows how much the lens of this story warps the reality, but from this book, it seems like Jeff Bezos doing something great was inevitable. I recently read half of 'Shoe Dog', the founding story about nike, and it really seems like the guy just got insanely lucky. Jeff Bezos seems to be at the very opposite of the spectrum; it was inevitable he would do something great. Very much holds admirable traits to emulate.

All the Math You Missed - Thomas A. Garrity *

This covers everything from Linear Algebra to Topology, from Differential Equations to Non-Euclidian Geometry. It was really nice to just see everything that one could cover in an undergraduate math degree and introduced me to a bunch of new topics.

Cracking The Coding Interview - Gayle Laakmann Mcdowell *

Just had to go through this quickly to refresh my memory

Chip War - Chris Miller *

This book is about the history of the microchip industry, mentioning the rise of globalism, of Japan, Tiwan, South Korea, the history of Silicon Valley and its relation with the US military, and the national security concerns China and the US has over the lack of control over technologies that make up the majority of their military might. Fantastic book, right down my alley.

Empire of Pain - Patrick Radden Keefe *

This book is about the Sackler family and the opioid pandemic. I realized that, like how a lot of women enjoy true crime stories, I am a sucker for the male equivilant: white-collar crime stories. This is like the 8th book I've read over some corporate story of fraud and greed.

No Longer Human - Osamu Dazai

The Roman Empire - Gregory S. Aldrete *

Hail Caesar!

The Rise of Rome - Gregory S. Aldrete

The Smartest Guys In The Room - Bethany McLean *

It's always interesting to ready more about these interconnected web of major corporations that had a large impact on american society, mainly because we learn about these things as if they happened in a vacuum while in reality thousands of other things were going on and much of it interweaved. After reading books about Bechtel and McKinsey and seeing how those companies had a large impact on Enron and how it all feeds one another, one realizes what a complicated beast humanity is. I also just thought it's interesting seeing how historically, periods of exuberance come again and again and how our window of pattern recognition is far smaller than how often these periods occur. Problems are always ignored when the momentum of things are positive and it is only until the floor from under us begins to shake that we realize our folly. Innate suscpicion is the only cure to exaulted hubris, but it's a fine line between conservatism and letting opportunities pass.

The Firm - Duff McDonald *

This is a history of McKinsey, the famous consulting firm. It's crazy to see that these guys literally created consulting as an industry and how it shaped business across the world. Helped bring the managerial revolution to the world and now currently has the largest alumni network, with ex-McKinsey people running or holding high positions in the majority of the fortune 500 companies.

The United States and the Middle East - Salim Yaqub *

This is a Greats Course lecture series on Audible. I've always had a fairly deep amount of knowledge with western history but lacked historical knowledge of other cultures. The whole rise of pan-Arabism, the origin of anti-US hostility, anti-Zionism and the relation between Israel and the other states, the history of colonial european powers in the area, and the dynamic the cold war played are things I think are necessary to know to understand the last century of conflicts with this part of the world.

A Beautiful Mind - Sylvia Nasar *

This is a biography of the mathematician John Nash. He produced great work in multiple areas of mathematics but you probably have heard of him from Game Theory via the Nash Equilibrium. He suffered from Schizophrenia and lost a large chunk of his productive life due to it. Started off incredibly smart and promising, slowly lost the ability to reason, and then gained it back. Sad in its own way. By then much of his life had passed him by. He still produced work but his golden years had passed. Always reminds me to not take the time I have today for granted.

How Markets Fail - John Cassidy *

This book was excellent and very broad in scope. Talked about the economic theories of Keynes, Friedman, Hayek, Minsky, and others, John Von Neumann and game theory, causes of market failures with natural occurring prisoner dilemmas, market spillovers, information failure, and many others, and dove into the events that led to the 2008 financial crisis.

The Lost Bank - Kristen Grind *

This was a great telling of the story and history of Washington Mutual, the largest bank failure in U.S. History. It goes through the 132-year history of the bank and goes into great detail about option adjustable-rate and sub-prime loans.

Masters of DOOM - David Kushner *

I've always been a massive fan of John Carmack. The paragon of the engineer, of competence itself. This story goes over the entire video game arc of him and John Romero. The ingenious of Carmack for every game engine he developed was otherworldly. Once in a generation mind.

Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich - Norman Ohler *

Wild. Definitely changes the way I look at what I read in The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich.

Flash Boys - Michael Lewis *

This book covers the rise of high-frequency trading firms and the absurd length they went to gain a speed advantage over others and how they were making billions of dollars risk-free by front-running everyone else's trades. Absolutely insane that nothing happened to these guys.

The Machiavellians - James Burnham

Human Nature - Robert Greene

The Lessons Of History - Will & Ariel Durant

Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand *

I did love Ayn Rand's novels. I think I did prefer 'The Fountainhead' for the most part, but this story does a great job at appealing to the ideal side of humanism.

The Road To Serfdom - F. A. Hayek

Zero To One - Peter Thiel

The Fountain Head - Ayn Rand *

Already wrote a bit about Rand for Atlas Shrugged (banger title btw). I think that this is her best work as it just solely inspires the creative side of man through the archetypal story of a hero that will complete his quest no matter what and who stays true to himself and his vision despite the world telling him that his perception of the world is incorrect.

The New Right - Michael Malice

A People's History Of The United States - Howard Zinn *

I think that this is an important book for everyone to read. I disagreed with a lot of things and the book is very heavily biased, but as Zinn points out himself, it is to give the counterview of the majority of mainstream history.

The Sovereign Individual - James Dale Davidson & William Rees-Mogg *

There seems to be a trend in human history where new innovations start under a centralized institution. The internet and dozens of other innovations under the U.S. Military. Literateness used to be solely for the royal and religious sectors of society. Civilization itself, under the Egyptians, Babylonians, etc, started under a centralized power structure. As society progresses, such innovations trickle down from centralized institutions down to individuals. This book talks a lot about this past trend and tries to predict future trends from it, and most of the predictions have held out quite well.

The Origin Of Virtue - Matt Ridley

The Rational Male - Rollo Tomassi *

The original redpill manifesto. I personally don't agree with this life philosophy, but I do think it has a lot of things any young male should be conscious of. One may disagree with the nihilistic hypergamous view of cross-gender relations or disagree with the opinion that men's lives are harder, but at the base of the book is just vouching for good habits and looking inwards for validation instead of from the people around us.

The Infinite Machine - Camila Russo

The Bitcoin Standard - Saifedean Ammous

Beyond Order - Jordan B. Peterson *

I used to be a big Jordan B. Peterson fan when I was younger. I liked his earliest stuff with his Maps of Meaning and Biblical Series. I do enjoy the talks about morality and philosophy. I've listened to the majority of content he had produced up to 2020 and have found much of the new to be a rehash of the old. I saw him give a lecture in Austin, his first public tour in a couple of years. It was all stuff I've already heard him say in the hundreds of hours I've listened to him. I feel like that's how this book felt to me.

Colonel Roosevelt - Edmund Morris

21 Lessons For The 21st Century - Yuval Noah Harari

Homo Deus - Yuval Noah Harari

Life 3.0 - Max Tegmark

The Nuremberg Trials - Paul Roland

Give Me Tomorrow - Patrick K. O'Donnel

In The Shadows Of The American Century - Alfred W. McCoy

How The Internet Happened - Brian McCullough

Up From Slavery - Booker T. Washington

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee - Dee Brown

Super Intelligence - Nick Bostrom

About Face - David H. Hackworth

All Quiet On The Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

Sapiens - Yuval Noah Harari

American Ulysses - Ronald C. White

Theodore Rex - Edmund Morris

Haroun And The Sea Of Stories - Salman Rushdie

The Power Broker - Robert Caro

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage - Alfred Lansing

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman - Richard Feynman

The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald

The Rise Of Theodore Roosevelt - Edmund Morris

Atomic Habits - James Clear *

The most important insight I got from this book was in the first 20 pages. It verbalized something that I've vaguely understood. It was the fact that your habits reinforce your identity and your identity reinforces your habits. If you wake up early, you probably identify as a morning person. Because you identify as a morning person, there's much less cognitive friction in waking up early. It's just *who you are*. It's just *what you do*. Anytime I want to make a positive change in my life, I try to just become someone that does that. I want to get good at math? I'll just dive into it and *become a math guy*. Goes for anything.

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Alice In Wonderland - Lewis Carroll

The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich - William L. Shirer

Memories, Dreams, Reflections - Carl Jung

Ecce Homo - Fridrich Nietsche

Benjamin Franklin - Walter Isaacson

The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

Crime And Punishment - Fyodor Dostoevsky

The Things They Carried - Tim O'Brian *

I really liked this book. I'm always been a big fan of vietnam media like Full Metal Jacket and Apolalypse Now (which is just Conrad's The Heart Of Darkness told in a modern setting). It's fascinating because these stories always delve into the minds of men who were thrown into unthinkable circumstances but who are quite relatable. WW2 and every war before seems as if it is from a distant time, but Vietnam, it is actually comprehensible how we went from there to now.

Notes From The Underground - Fyodor Dostoevsky

A Short History Of Nearly Everything - Bill Bryson

The Compound Effect - Darren Hardy

Beowulf - Ancient Tale

Animal Farm - George Orwell

The Coddling Of The American Mind - Greg Lukianoff & Jonathan Haidt

The Boys In The Boat - Daniel James Brown *

My high school cross country coach, Bob Miller, brought up this boat. A beautiful story of a group of young boys sacrificing for something greater than themselves. Truly one of the most special moments a human can experience. One day I wish to do the same.

Bad Blood - John Carreyrou

The 50th Law - Robert Greene & 50 Cent

AI Superpowers - Kai-Fu Lee

The Autobiography Of Ben Franklin - Ben Franklin

Can't Hurt Me - David Goggins

The Denial Of Death - Ernest Becker

The Tipping Point - Malcom Gladwell

Talking To Strangers - Malcom Gladwell

Elon Musk - Ashlee Vance

Man's Search For Meaning - Viktor E. Frankl

The River Of Doubt - Candice Millard

Rich Dad Poor Dad - Robert Kiyosaki

Be Obsessed Or Be Average - Grant Cardone

The Art Of War - Sun Tzu

Steve Jobs - Walter Isaacson

The Snowball - Alice Schroeder

The Art Of Seduction - Robert Greene

E-Myth Revisited - Michael Gerber

Andrew Carnegie - David Nasaw

The Selfish Gene - Richard Dawkins

Alexander Hamilton's Guide To Life - Jeff Wilser

Managing One's Self - Peter Drucker

The Curious Incident Of The Dog In The Night - Mark Haddon

Mango Street - Sandra Cisneros

Explosive Growth - Cliff Lerner

Smarter, Faster, Better - Charles Duhigg

12 Rules For Life - Jordan B. Peterson

The Richest Man In Babylon - George S. Clason

How To Win Friends And Influence People - Dale Carnegie

Blink - Malcom Gladwell

Drop Out And Get Schooled - Patrick Bet-David

Exactly What To Say - Phil M. Jones

Unlimited Memory - Kevin Horsley

The 1 Page Marketing Plan - Allan Dib

Flowers for Algernon - Daniel Keyes

Sell Or Be Sold - Grant Cardone

The Power Of Habit - Charles Duhigg

To Kill A Mockingbird - Harper Lee

Unbroken - Laura Hillenbrand

1984 - George Orwell

Mastery - Robert Greene

Excellent Sheep - William Deresiewicz

Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck

The Giver - Lois Lowry

The 48 Laws Of Power - Robert Greene