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I read Jurassic Park last month. Will recommend as well.

It is a deep and profound book. Proper SciFi.

Much emphasis on philosophy, ideas. It is so far from the public opinion about the movie: a monster attack and survival movie.

Really amazing book. So different from all other books, yet so great.

I also started Murakami with 1Q84.

Also make sure to read Sputnik Sweetheart and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.

Hard Boiled Wonderland is such an underrated Murakami novel. I recommend it to Murakami lovers.

Also, does that friend have a list of favourites?

f you just want correct future predictions at a past point, then you are reading Stephenson wrong.

What if it's dated? Anything wrong with that?

You don't like the mythology of a culture being blended into a great story with futuristic tech?

I just loved that.

I see Stephenson as an unapologetic celebration of nerdy, intelligent stuff. It it definitely not the only way.

I have read Quicksilver. The way the novel portrays that time, and my Science heroes, is just fantastic. I don't care at all that it's dated.

My first book from him was Cryptonomicon. I care about History, Math, Computers, and that book blended all that in a coherent setup with proper environmental creation.

I also like the writing style. It's so clean and friendly.

Will highly recommend.

Extremely fluid writing, and you encounter a whole new world.

It is definitely good. You see the world from a very young person's eyes, but the nuances, complexities, etc. of adult life and wider worls still touches you unaltered. That's rare.

I will check out the ones that you mention.

Pick up the Penguin paperback (mine is from the "Modern Classics" series). It's cheap and great to read.

I think I get accustomed to new authors after reading some tens of pages.

I give every author that much.

By the way, the paperbacks have way too small font size, and now I am reading on Kindle.

(I also notice there is a bad typo in GP, but can't edit that now.

'Ecori', is of course, 'Eco'.)

I read multiple books together.

- My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok

Upbringing of a painter and the beginning of his journey in 1950s New York in a Hasidic Jewish family. Existentialism, art, passion.

- The Art of Doing Science and Engineerig, by Hamming

Surprisingly fresh and piercing, even today.

- Miracle of Love, Ram Dass

Stories about Neeb Karori Baba, as mentioned in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.

- The Name of The Rose, Umberto Ecori

Murder mystery in a famous library-monastery in medieval Europe. Amazing portrayal of that time.

I have a books site: https://ritoghosh.com/books

It's a few months outdated.

Planned for the electric officials, unplanned for the consumers.

Nowadays, power cuts are announced via SMS in advanced. Before, this was not the case.

Mind sharing pointers to how to do DL things in AMD?

I don't know anything.

Things like training a Vision/RL/LM, downloading and running LMs, etc.

Neal is one of two living authors whose all books I buy. Happy to have found him during Covid, thanks to HN comments. I found Greg Egan during that time, and I am grateful to HN threads and comments on books.

That's an extremely weird thing to say?

Not everyone uses YT the same way?

I did most psets, assignments, etc.

And at your standard of "learning", 95% of students don't learn anything anywhere. I also align with what you must think of as "true learning", but at that standard, most people are "mostly not learning" at regular schools and unis.

What if it becomes irrelevant?

I have always been taught that greatness is in work (karma), and not in birth (janma), and honestly I have seen it practiced.

A "lower" caste High School teacher gets visibly much more respect in our society than a random priest from "higher" caste.

Why do you assume I am so called higher caste? My caste is under a bucket in India called "Other Backward Classes".

Honestly the caste never comes up. In almost any conversation. And I also grew up far away from megacities.

I only heard a couple of priests blabber about the glory of their caste, but they were piss poor and had nothing else to be proud of. And they were bad as priests as well. That is, you wouldn't call them if you care about pure Sanskrit pronunciation, carefulness and seriousness during rituals, etc.

Caste is mostly irrelevant in India outside of liberal arts department of so-called elite universities.

There are some pockets where this is not true, but they are exceptions.

And those comments aren't defending it.

Upward mobility is available in India, too. But remember that to have "upward mobility", there needs to be place at the top. For a country which has been under hundreds of years of regressive colonial rulers, there is not much place at the top.

Global wealth is much more in the US than in India right now, so it is not wise to compare rags-to-riches of the US with those of India.

India's government jobs, elite engineering and medical seats have a legal 50%+ quota for "lower" castes people. Did you know that? So, I am saying, 50%+ students graduating ALL elite engineering and law and medical and nursing schools, etc. are from these "lower" castes. Did you know that?

> Youtube

Not really. I learned far more from YouTube in subjects and topics that I was deeply interested in. School or college teachers didn't go that deep.

Whether it's pc or not, there are there are bad teachers. I skipped those classes in college and learned from MIT OCW and random tutorials.

So, YT did replace some teachers for me, and it continues to do so for many people.

> Its why sites that are "well designed" but obviously just use a squarespace or wix template feel so cheap.

Same. I honestly am very satisfied with the aesthetics of free Wordpress blogs. Like Terry Tao has. I also have one.

I see Work as the mode where you can generate and edit files without manual intervention.

I tell chat to recommend me some books based on some of my favourites. Chat does it. I read some of them, liked some, disliked few. I give chat that information, it recommends me based on those, now I don't know which of the entries are relevant or not.

I don't want lock-in, so I try my best to tell it to generate copy-able MD syntax that I have to manually paste to an editor.

With Work mode, I tell the model to just maintain an append only markdown file, where it writes "still recommended", "not recommended any more", etc. beside titles. It does this after each turn.

This is just an example. Work - I see it as a mode that can maintain, update, and edit a file.

It's very convenient.

But Amazon does give a seamless experience.

I don't have the urge to fight all my devices.

Well, I won't do it, as although books are mainly for reading, they also are beautiful products that I am not willing to destroy. They also look great on shelves and work as decor.

I have faced the problem of books being too big. What I do is I just get an additional copy on my Kindle. For classics this is free, for newer ones, the price is one-sixth to one-third. This is justified because the need is rare.

I read the physical book during the daytime at my home. I travel with the Kindle and take it to my bed.

Not that much ground covering, but you should listen to Steven Strogatz's podcasts - The Joy of x, and The Joy of Why!

I go through chosen episodes from it regularly, and I can vouch for its quality.

The podcast covers a niche that is not common.

But all the episodes are not equally good, of course, and much depends on the guests.

I really liked the Carlo Rovelli episode (#2), the Tyler Cowen episode (#19), Kip Thorne (#24), Steven Strogatz (#41), etc.

I have always used Jupyter to work in Julia. Beside .jl files, of course.

Same habit with Python.

The Ju in Jupyter does stand for Julia, you know.

Pluto was a meh experience and I didn't keep using it.

Did you study Biology in college or at least had AP Biology in High School?

Or do you read long form content in good magazines/newspapers on vaccines, disease, etc.?

Same for me. When I was High School and uni, there was still copying from Wikipedia, obscure blogs, paying people, etc. but I did all my own work. It was a rewarding experience and breath of fresh air from 'remembering-regurgitating learning'.

Even the topics that I didn't enjoy, I did the essays, presentations, assignments myself, and that led me to learn at least something in those topics.

They are still doing it, and not just in Kenya. The bar has just risen, and that's all. Unis are using Pangram, GPT-0 and a lot of plagiarism detectors, and the cheaters are using ghostwriters to get homeworks, assignments done that pass the AI detectors.

How about developing counters to said bioweapons? That capability should be commoditized too, IMO.

You can access the whole Open Access catalogue here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/open-access-at-mit-press/books/.

This is the best OCaml resource I know, and I have gone through it in full, and highly recommend:

CS3110: OCaml Programming: Correct + Efficient + Beautiful [0]

It is one of the best programming resources that I know of.

[0]: https://cs3110.github.io/textbook/cover.html

Even if I pay for a true large model, I am going to prefer an open model hosted in Europe/my country, not them.

This is a spiritual idea. Encouraged in many traditions all over the world. I saw Zhuangzi mentioned, and also saw people mention the "Perfect Days" movie.

I have delved deep in this matter, and read and plan to read multiple books in this theme:

1. Be As You Are: The Teachings of Ramana Maharshi - David Godman

2. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Robert Pirsig

3. Franny and Zooey - JD Salinger

These come from top of my mind.

If you have the acumen, go read Bhagavad Gita, Gospel of Ramakrishna, Tao Te Ching, etc.

Many people mistake what is conveyed as "NPC" here as being quitters and losers, but it is about owning consequences like no other way.