Books

The Essence of Value Investing:

Routines and Orgies

Peter Cundill turned $7M into $20B.

The best biography you'll never read in public. https://x.com/TheIcahnist/status/2017793929526009879/photo/1

Good book on Game Theory. Under the radar. Highly Recommend. https://x.com/PEoperator/status/1987147104901357809/photo/1

red in the context of zettelkasten

Albert Jay Nock

• Patterns, Predictions, and Actions by Moritz Hardt and Benjamin Recht; PDF, problem sets.
• Learning Theory from First Principles by Francis Bach.
• Foundations of Machine Learning by Mehryar Mohri.
• Understanding Machine Learning: From Theory to Algorithms by  Shai Shalev-Shwartz and Shai Ben-David

Via Four years of running a SaaS in a competitive market - Max Rozen

• The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick
• Deploy Empathy by Michele Hansen
• Badass: Making Users Awesome by Kathy Sierra
• The SaaS Playbook by Rob Walling

Via Merri Cronk of Frannet

• The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber (on kindle)
• Built to Sell by John Warrillow

By Michael E. Gerber (1985) ★★★★★

Good book to think about how to build a small business (typically one-person operation) to a self-sustaining business with "systems" in place, that allows the business to scale, with a goal to exit.

Book outline:

• The components of a RAG system
• How to create a RAG knowledge base
• The indexing and generation pipeline
• Evaluating a RAG system
• Advanced RAG strategies
• RAG tools, technologies, and frameworks

Bought this book from manning today. However, instead of paying $25.99 for this book alone, I decided to purchase a monthly subscription at $24.99 that would allow me to read all their books online. I also get to keep the PDF and epub of this book. I think this is a good deal.

To more writing and technical blogging!

Textbook, second edition

Electromagnetic Field Theory: A Problem Solving Approach | Electrical Engineering and Computer Science | MIT OpenCourseWare recommended by X/karatalaamalaka

Linear Algebra by Shilov (PDF) via X/akbirthko

Applied Mathematical Programming; This book is a reference book for 15.053, Optimization Methods in  Business Analytics, taught at MIT. This is from 1977. I suppose it's ok for fundamentals but you can probably do better going with a modern text like "Model Building in Mathematical Programming by H. Paul Williams ". MIP formulations and linearizations ( PDF ). Convex Optimization – Boyd and Vandenberghe

The episode of "How I Write" podcast is here - Sam Parr: Copywriting... What You Need to Know

I heard this episode while biking 10.7 miles on my bike.

People mentioned:

• Dharmesh Shah
• Scott Galloway
• Robert Caro
• Felix Dennis
• Gregory David Roberts
• Ben Franklin
• Hunter S. Thompson
• Neil Gaiman
• Neil Armstrong
• James Madison
• Thomas Jefferson
• Harry Dry -- Learn Great Copywriting in 76 minutes
  • Kaplan's law of words -- any words that aren't working for you, are working against you.

Books mentioned:

• American Kingpin
• How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis
• The Elements of Eloquence by
• Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts
• The Great Gatsby

Websites and Products mentioned:

• The Hustle

Concepts and Ideas:

• AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action)
• Copy work
• Merism
• Antithesis

Key takeaways:

1. The headline is VERY important. It should be attention grabbing, and the hook should be the beginning of a slope that keeps the attention of the user going down the length of the piece - advert, article, book, ... If you nail the headline, you will nail the rest of it.

The following summary was generated by Clade from the text transcript of the video

Key topics discussed:

• Writing viral articles and effective copy
• Building email newsletters and media businesses
• Reading habits and favorite books
• Techniques for memorable writing and phrasing
• Company vision and branding
• The importance of speed and boldness in business

Key insights:

• Focus on email subscribers as a core metric for media businesses
• Use "forgotten text" like thank you pages to enhance branding
• Study early versions of successful company websites for inspiration
• Employ techniques like antithesis and merism for memorable phrasing
• Read history books for entertainment and business books for enrichment
• Define what your company stands for and against in your vision
• Move fast and create stakes to build momentum in new projects
• Written words have power to shape institutions and societies

Textbook by Dan Jurafsky and James H. Martin of Stanford

recommended as a companion to Eloquent Javascript

version 4 of the book. A narrative way of learning the language over just learning syntax. Might be useful in understanding how javascript differs.

@Askeladam You should read Journal of a Cruise. It's real historical memoir of Master and Commander David Porter.
And as a side note the fictional Master and Commander is based on the British side of this story.

https://www.amazon.com/Journal-Cruise-CLASSICS-NAVAL-LITERATURE/dp/0870213318

Trotsky's bodyguard until a year before the murder was Jean van Heijenoort, who had a subsequent career as a mathematical logician. He was also one of Frida's lovers. Anita Burdman Feferman's biography, which covers all this (including the math), is fascinating. #BookReview https://t.co/PsqQJUqo01

@Partisan_O You would like James Belich's "Replenishing the Earth."

https://t.co/ll7GPO9uGd

Nothing has increased my programming productivity more than being able to restate hard problems as simple ones. Nobody taught me more about how to do that than the late, great Gerald M. Weinberg. https://t.co/PWXm0MItUv

Source: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/75665931-the-maniac

Goodreads Review

John von Neumann was a titan of science. A Hungarian wunderkind who revolutionised every field he touched, his mathematical powers were so exceptional that Hans Bethe - a Nobel Prize-winning physicist - thought he might represent the next step in human evolution.

After seeking the foundations of mathematics during his youth in Germany, von Neumann emigrated to the United States, where he became entangled in the power games of the Cold War; he designed the world's first programmable computer, invented game theory, pioneered AI and digital life, and helped create the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was the darling of the military industrial complex, but when illness unmoored his mind, his work pushed further into areas beyond human comprehension and control.

The Maniac places von Neumann at the centre of a literary triptych about the dark foundations of our modern world and the nascent era of AI. It begins with Paul Ehrenfest, an Austrian physicist and close friend of Einstein, who fell into despair when he saw science and technology become tyrannical forces; it ends a hundred years later, in the showdown between the South Korean Go Master, Lee Sedol, and the AI program AlphaGo.

Braiding fact with fiction, Benjamín Labatut takes us on a journey to the frontiers of rational thought, where invention outpaces human understanding and offers godlike power, but takes us to the brink of Armageddon.

If you ever feel like dabbling in real math stuff but not getting waterboarded by Wikipedia, you might want to check out the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. It’s really fun to just flip through randomly. Very hard to describe this strange book though.

https://t.co/bkmNPhGtE7

@zenpundit btw, this is an absolutely phenomenal book and provided a better answer to the common hagiographies of why the USSR fell apart and was based upon 30 years of interviews: https://www.amazon.com/Collapse-Soviet-Vladislav-M-Zubok/dp/0300257309

Phone formatted PDFs are a great option to provide reading material and courses in.

The Little Book of Deep Learning is where I first encountered "Phone formatted book". The LaTeX layout is in this git repository.

k2pdfopt  optimizes PDF/DJVU files for mobile e-readers (e.g. the Kindle) and smartphones via 🐥svat

Some links from Archive.org

• Panchatantra in Karnataka Sculptures by Channabasappa Patil S.
• Lilavati's daughers, the women scientists of India.
• The Kautilya Arthashastra - part I by R P Kangle in sanskrit.
• Kautilya arthashasra - part II by R P Kangle (PDF)
• Lord Siva And His Worship : Sri Swami Sivananda : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
• ದುರ್ಗಸಿಂಹ ಕವಿಯ ಕರ್ನಾಟಕ ಪಂಚತಂತ್ರಂ : Gundmi Chandrashekara Aithal : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive
• Gramadevatas A Study Of The Feminine Divine In Bangalore Rural District 16th To 19th A D : Gomathi, Manohar (2012) from the Internet Archive.

#books

Completion of DVG collection, Lokmanya Tilak speeches, SLB collection continues

Thank you @subbubooks @sahityaprkshna for super fast shipping https://t.co/0nCJgq9F2y

and finally, in the last chapter:

"I regret selling Trader Joe's"

https://t.co/oBmOM99tOA

Drop whatever you are doing, and watch this superb discussion between @sanjeevsanyal and Arnab Goswami!

The Real Story of the Freedom Struggle https://t.co/jbD89vMmzM

Pre-order the book Revolutionaries : The Other Story of How India Won Its Freedom: https://t.co/zTuRu18vSH

I end this year with Victor Serge Diaries 1936-47. They were not written for publication, were found by accident in the 1960s, published in French and then recently translated into English. Will write more when I finish the book.
https://t.co/tS1CXqQgSk

@varunram Yes, he created something out of nothing, but that is the exception, not the rule. You should read The Big Score on the origins of California as the tech capital and SV is what is is
https://t.co/L7z3438CdK

@ajliveRIP DDD has a some good ideas but I keep the book around as reference. Given your exp you could get by on https://t.co/We4NZrEuVb