AI · Research Paper
Attention Is All You Need
VASWANI ET AL. · GOOGLE BRAIN · 2017
The paper that made everything possible. Eight pages that restructured the entire field. Re-reading it now the mechanism feels obvious — that's the mark of a truly foundational idea.
AI · Research Paper
Scaling Monosemanticity
ANTHROPIC · 2024
The most important AI paper of the year. Sparse autoencoders extract millions of interpretable features from Claude Sonnet. The feature for "Assistant" activating concepts of imprisonment is haunting and important.
AI · Book
The Alignment Problem
BRIAN CHRISTIAN · 2020
The most readable account of why building AI that does what we want is harder than it sounds. Every chapter reframes a technical problem as a philosophical one.
AI · Book
Superintelligence
NICK BOSTROM · 2014
Dense, demanding, essential. Whether or not you agree with the conclusions, this book asks the questions that the field still hasn't answered. The orthogonality thesis alone is worth the read.
AI · Research Paper
ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting
YAO ET AL. · PRINCETON / GOOGLE · 2022
The paper that formalized the think-act-observe loop underpinning modern agentic systems. Reading this clarified why tool use isn't a feature — it's a reasoning architecture.
AI · Book
Human Compatible
STUART RUSSELL · 2019
Russell's "assistance game" framing — AI that is uncertain about human preferences rather than optimizing a fixed objective — is the cleanest solution to alignment I've encountered.
Cosmos · Book
A Brief History of Time
STEPHEN HAWKING · 1988
The book that made me feel small and infinite simultaneously. Hawking's gift was making the incomprehensible feel personally relevant. Still the best entry point into cosmology ever written.
Cosmos · Book
The Order of Time
CARLO ROVELLI · 2018
Physics as poetry. Rovelli dismantles every assumption about time — no present, no direction, no flow — and leaves you more comfortable with uncertainty than most philosophy books manage.
Cosmos · Book
The Fabric of the Cosmos
BRIAN GREENE · 2004
String theory made almost tactile. Greene's spatial imagination is extraordinary — by the end you'll visualize extra dimensions not as abstractions but as structural necessities.
Cosmos · Book
Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON · 2017
A masterpiece of compression. Tyson fits the entire universe into 200 pages without losing the wonder. I reread the dark matter chapter every year — it gets better.
Cosmos · Book
Until the End of Time
BRIAN GREENE · 2020
Greene's most personal book — tracing the arc from Big Bang to heat death, asking what meaning looks like against a backdrop of inevitable entropy. Unexpectedly moving.
Software · Book
Designing Data-Intensive Applications
MARTIN KLEPPMANN · 2017
The book I recommend to every engineer on my team. Kleppmann turns distributed systems from a fear-inducing black box into a comprehensible design space. Dog-eared and annotated.
Software · Book
A Philosophy of Software Design
JOHN OUSTERHOUT · 2018
"Complexity is anything that makes a system hard to understand or modify." Ousterhout's framing is simple enough to tattoo and deep enough to spend a career unpacking.
Software · Book
The Pragmatic Programmer
HUNT & THOMAS · 1999 / 2019
Still the most practical book in software. "Your Knowledge Portfolio" and "Tracer Bullets" are mental models I use every week. The 20th anniversary edition earns its existence.
Philosophy · Book
Gödel, Escher, Bach
DOUGLAS HOFSTADTER · 1979
The book that convinced me self-reference is the key to consciousness, creativity, and meaning. Dense, strange, joyful. I understood maybe 60% of it and it changed how I think entirely.
Philosophy · Book
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
THOMAS KUHN · 1962
Why paradigm shifts happen slowly, then all at once. Kuhn's model maps exactly onto AI right now — we are deep in a paradigm shift that most practitioners haven't fully recognized yet.
Science · Book
The Gene: An Intimate History
SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE · 2016
The best science narrative I've read. Mukherjee traces genetics from Mendel to CRISPR as a human story — obsession, error, ethical catastrophe, redemption. Blueprint for how to write about complex science.
Science · Book
The Emperor's New Mind
ROGER PENROSE · 1989
Penrose's argument that consciousness requires quantum mechanics is probably wrong — but the detour through Gödel, Turing, and quantum gravity is worth the journey regardless of the destination.