image-title-here Source: Catalin Avram - photo taken in La Prairie, Montreal, Canada, Dec, 2021

Intro

I consume a lot of content. I try to be more and more selective with the content itself and in my quest for filtering the information flow, I have decided to look back and see which pieces of media I found really interesting in the last while. I intend to do this every year - however this first post will also include things from before 2021.


Beginning of Infinity - Book by David Deutsch

I read this book in 2016 while checking out Mark Zukerberg’s reading list. It’s one of my all time favourite books now. The book discusses a wide range of complex topics including humanity, intelligence, politics, philosophy, climate change, computing and so on. It is focused primarily on the scientific revolution created during the Enlightenment period. The author argues that advances in technology are based on knowledge and that knowledge itself is acquired by having a society which encourages education itself and questions the status quo. One of my favourite parts of the book is presented in the idea of an “Earth Ship”. The author explains how sending a spaceship to colonise outer space is no different than how we currently live on earth. A ship that needs to support life across a few generation might seem like a crazy place from where there’s no escape and that the survival of the people is dependant of how well they manage their internal resources, including how they govern themselves. Although we look look at planet Earth as “home” and as a ‘safe’ place to be, it’s really not. It’s the advancement in technology that helps us a lot more than anything else. Imagine how long you could survive naked, outside, in the middle of the winter. So our own planet is not sheltering us from anything – if anything it’s trying to kills us, therefore our own survival and success depends on our knowledge of how the world works, which in turn helps us develop technologies to better ourselves. (link to the book)


Jordan Peterson’s Biblical Series Youtube Lectures

I have watched Jordan Peterson’s lectures on Biblical series. Religion is not something I am necessarily deeply familiar with, and I am not claiming that these lectures are comprehensive, however, I found them to have a very psychological take on the Bible (new and old Testament). I don’t agree with all the statements made during the lectures, but I find some interesting points in regards to thinking about the Bible as a psychological introspection, rather than a “how to live your life” book. (link to the lectures)


How to Avoid a Climate disaster - Book by Bill Gates

I read this book in 2021 during a short vacation to the Canary islands. I started feeling guilty about flying there and started doing some calculations on my carbon’s footprint regarding my flight there. Not so bad, since I was flying one of newer Airbus A320Neo which apparently has better fuel economy than a Golf TDI. But back to the book, I found it scary. Not because of the scary potential threat to our planet, but scary because I have been having some similar thoughts on the topic. The main idea goes as follows: climate change and environmental issues are everyone’s problem. Actually, they are Western’s world problem, even if newly industrialised countries pollute more. The problem is that regular people don’t care enough about the environment if it affects their bottom line - and it makes sense. If you need a car to go to a job and don’t have that much money, you will get the best car your budget will get you, regardless of how much it pollutes. It’s not that people don’t care, it’s more like personal and family well-being is more important. This becomes a paradox, because poorer (by GDP) countries will not have the research money and the means to create new technology, at scale, to make a dent in our pollution. Even more so, they will put all their focus on bringing their population out of (GDP) poverty and build infrastructure. This will lead to even more pollution. It’s up to us, engineers and scientists from the highly industrialised countries that HAVE to come up with most of the tech solutions in combating this problem. And we have to do this. Because if we don’t do this, nobody else will do it. It is also an unbelievable good business opportunity. Governments and industries will buy the new green tech at once as long as it’s economically feasible to do so. (link to the book)


A Thousand Brains - Book by Jeff Hawkins

It is only natural to read about the brain when doing AI research. I have read many books and papers on the topic and it’s hard to pick a “best” one. However, the Thousand brains theory - I find the most complete on this subject. Very approachable to the non-academic reader, but comprehensive enough to really understand the topic. The book itself is about a relatively new theory about how the brain works (spoiler alert, we still don’t know much about how the brain REALLY works) but this book and the main ideas in it are very intriguing. (link to the book)


A new kind of science - Book by Stephen Wolfram

I have only read this book recently for the first time, even though it’s been published in 2003. It contains most of the work related to cellular automata and the main idea is about complex systems emerging from very basic, simple rules. Another thesis is most intriguing: computational irreducibility. That means that in some systems, you cannot find what will happen in the future by simply analysing the starting conditions. You can only find the future by playing out the rules. Recently, in 2021, Stephen Wolfram published another book called A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics which tackles a possible theory of everything. Wolfram’s idea is that the universe, at the quantum level is more or less a discrete, finite state machine and in each time step a small, incremental change happens. I will post more about this theory once I get a chance to fully read the new book. (link to the book)


Conversation with Travis Oliphant - Lex Fridman Podcast

I am sure that by now Lex Fridman became a household name in the nerd comunity, especially in the AI-nerd comunity. I have been listening to his podcast from the beginning and found many of the conversations to be fascinating, but the one in particular that I like is the one with Travis Oliphan. He is the creator of Numpy - a free, open source, python library for scientificy computing. If you are a scientist, Data Scientist, Engineer or Computer Scientist, you must have used the Numpy library at least once. He speaks beautifully about the topic of Open Source and in particular about Open Source and making money - which sometimes are two things that don’t really go hand in hand. The discussion is pretty technical for non-computer science people, but still accessible to almost everyone. (link to the podcast)


Ghost Love Score - Live performance by Nightwish

I love music. It would be impossible for me to pick a good song or a good video. It’s art and art is very personal - everyone sees and savours it in different ways. But this particular band, with this particular live performance of this particular song just blows away everything I have ever seen. Fun fact: as of this writing, it has the most “reaction” videos on Youtube. Lame metric, I know, but it must mean something. If you really want to have a good experience, check it out end to end, without skipping ahead, in a quiet room, with headphones. You will not regret this. (link to the video)


Notes from the Underground - Book by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Reading classic Russian literature for the first time is a unique experience. You might wonder why reading about the mundane life of 18th and 19th century Russians have anything to do with current day events, but boy, oh boy will you be in for a surprise. It’s unfair to choose only one book, but for the purpose of this writing I will chose Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevksy. It’s fairly short and extremly deep - even funny sometimes. It captures the human nature in all its nasty glory and shines a light onto the hardships of the transition into the industrial revolution. Fun fact: Dostoyevsky was part of somewhat secrete intellectual group that was speaking against the regime - the Tzar. He got busted and sentenced to death by firing squad. Him and his buddies were arrested, and come the day of execution they were taken, slowly, through the streets, to the execution place. They were blind-folded and ready to be killed. Only in the last moments, the executioners stopped and told them that everything was made just to scare them, to show them that the Tzar is merciful and that the whole execution was staged from the beginning. They were then exiled to Siberia. (link to the book)


Cloud Atlas - Book by David Mitchell

One of my favourite ficiton books of all time. I have also seen the movie. It’s ok, but only if you read the book first. The book is fantastic. It’s so well written. I do not want to write a book report on it. Just pick it up and read it if you haven’t done so already. Then see the movie. (link to the book)


Mindstorms - Book by Jean Piaget

In my research into AI I sometimes turn to child psychology. I think that looking into how a child’s brain works is a key to understanding how the brain really works. That lead me to reading Mindstorms. The book is about the idea of introducing kids to computer science and other abstract ideas at a very early age. As early as 5. The idea is to use a very simple programming language (called Logo) in the book, that will help them understand abstract concepts. The way it works is that you help the kid program a simple routine that draws a circle on the screen, using simple commands such ash LEFT, DRAW, ANGLE 45 degrees, etc. The child will soon learn the correlation between angles and drawing shapes. At the same time, the programming language Logo also comes with a physically toy (a turtle toy) that draws on the floor. The idea is that you can use the same program that draws lines and shapes on the screen to get the turtle to do the same, but on the ground. This will make the child understand that the exact same code produces the exact same result, but in different mediums (one on the screen and one on the ground). (link to the book)


Understanding Media - Book by Marshall McLuhan

I follow Alan Kay, who is somewhat a bit of a hero for the Computer Science community. For those of you who don’t know him, he was part of the core team at XEROX Parc where the following were invented: the Graphical User Interface (GUI), The mouse, the laser printer, the internet, etc. After seeing a few of his talks, I ended up on his publicly available reading list and picked up a few books. One of them is “Understanding Media”. It’s a great book which describes how media changes and shapes people’s behaviour. The book is known for coining the term “the Medium is the message”. The book was written in the 80s, before the internet, but I think all of the ideas are more than relevant today, especially after the rise of the social media platforms. (link to the book)


Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World - Book by David Epstein

A book that argues generalists thrive in a world of specialism. The example explored in the book is Roger Federer. When you hear Roger Federer’s name, you hardly think of him as a generalist - after all he’s one of the best Tennis players of all time. However, it turns out that Federer played a lot of different sports when he was younger and that gave him an edge over the competition from the start. I think the argument is valid, and there are numerous other books exploring what is sometimes “T” shaped skills or management. Basically you are really good at 1 or 2 things, but you also have a wide working knowledge of many other things, sometimes unrelated. In my Computer Science work sometimes I believe it’s good know how to write things from complete scratch - like create your own instruction set and write your own assembly language for it type of scratch. Not to use these in a production environment, but just because it will widen your knowledge so much.(link to the book)


Open - Book by Andre Agassi

I read Andre Agassi’s biography during a time when I was myself very confused about my career choices. I was just ending things (bitterly) with some former parters in a startup where I was co-found and spent about 8 years of my life. Reading Agassi’s story - of how he hated playing tennis when he was small and only really enjoyed playing it when in his 30s gave me a new perspective on my career. Just like Agassi saying that he loves the sport but hates the entire business of it, I have also found myself many times in this conundrum: I love Computer Science, but I am not big fan of the business around it - at lest not from what I have seen so far (and I have been working professionally for almost 20 years now) (link to the book)


The Great Conversation - Book by Norman Melchert

One of the truly inspiring books is The Great Conversation. It is the first book of what is known as “Western Canon” or “Best books of the Western World”. It is written to give a proper introduction to the reader who is about to embark in the journey of reading the great literature of the West. There is an ongoing philosophical conversation between people that live in different time periods. Starting with Homer, continouing with ancient greeks, romans and all the way to the enlightnment french philosphoers, each great mind built upon the ideas of a previous one. I find it a great priviledge to be able to be part of this great conversation myself, even though only one way for now. I do hope that one day I can also contribute to this conversation, even if it’s only with a humble thought. (link to the book)


The Matrix - Movie

I saw this movie in theatres when it first came out. Twice! Then, I have seen it at least another dozen times. This movie and the ideas portraid in it mean a lot to me, mostly because I have watched at the right time during the right period of my life. There are a lot of articles and books these days about living in a simulation and such, but the real original idea came to the masses in this movie. And boy was the delivery great! (link to wiki)


Microserfs - Book by Douglas Coupland

I grew up in Romania, in the 90s. I was lucky enough to have a Commoder 64 which I used to learn Basic. However, I was still far away from really understanding what it takes to build software in those days. Even after my parents immigrated to Canada, in the late 90s, it was almost impossible for someone like me to really KNOW how it is to work at IBM or Microsoft or Intel, etc. This particular book is amazing in the sense that it gives the reader an amazing insight into how it was to work at Microsoft in the early days. It’s funny and believable and extremlly insightful. I highly recommend this book to anyone working on an IT startup.(link to the book)


Swan Lake - Performance by The Kirov Ballet

I like watching sports. I like seeing how amazing the human body can be and what it can do. I have never really paid attention to ballet though. I watched this performance during the first pandemic Christmas and I was completely blown away. I cannot really describe it words, I think it’s fair if you just set some time and watch it yourself. (link to the video)


The mother of all demos - Tech Presentation from the 60s

The mother of all demos is a demo showcasing the internet, real time video conferencing, live document editing by 2 different individuals, etc. What year was it made? 1965. Yes you read it right. Nothing that we use today (in 2022) is new. It’s only an iteration of what already existed in 1960s. Perhaps we have a few more pixels on the screen and perhaps we have a computer in our pocket which we use to buy bus ticket instead of buying a physical one. I like watching this once in a while because it puts things in perspective. Technological progress is not as accelerated as you might think. However, there is a big difference between inventing something - making. a demo - and scaling it to billions of people. (link to the video)