121–130 of 211 posts
A World At Arms - A Global History of World War II by Gerhard L. Weinberg
I found it to be a shot of modern history that gave me surprisingly good context for many of current events. I really started to see world at different perspective . The author tries his best to avoid having a bias.
Sapients was absolutely mind blowing and before it’s time. Many ideas in that book still resonate through the zeitgeist. Still worth reading.
- The Way of The Superior Man. The only "self help" book I give any credit. It really boils down to encouraging people to have a purpose in life and accept ourselves. - The Stupidity Paradox. Ever feel the world works in a "stupid" way? That your organization keeps promoting stupid ideas? Read this book and get into the roots of functional stupidity. It's a bit repetitive, but extremely insightful book. - Structure a…
1. The Body Keeps the Score;
2. CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving;
3. Whole Again.
- The Way of The Superior Man. The only "self help" book I give any credit. It really boils down to encouraging people to have a purpose in life and accept ourselves. - The Stupidity Paradox. Ever feel the world works in a "stupid" way? That your organization keeps promoting stupid ideas? Read this book and get into the roots of functional stupidity. It's a bit repetitive, but extremely insightful book. - Structure a…
SICP is literally computer science 101 in LISP. Personally I found it less englightening than doing medium/hard leetcode problems.
Chapter 4, on interpreters and alternative languages, is where in many readers' estimation the real payoff lies. Scheme itself is constructed in a very elegant way from few primitives. My Programming Languages course did an ML interpreter in Standard ML, but I found SICP's scheme interpreter more satisfying and more enlightening - especially when you see how an impossibly small "toy" implementation easily sustains all the modern conveniences, complexities, and artifice described in the previous three chapters. Then the next two sections were totally new to me: I had heard passing mention of logic programming and nondeterministic programming on HN, but never seen them in college or in practice. It's really impressive how elegant certain solutions can be under those paradigms.
Leetcode is an entirely different track and aesthetic on computer science, obsessed with doing things optimally, efficiently. SICP is the polar opposite of that: it tries to make things nice, organized, clean, elegant, intuitive. Even trivial optimizations are left on the floor, like I'm at the end of chapter 4 and we've been using linked lists in place of maps and vectors the whole time.
Depending on what you're doing, you need some of both. But some programmers are temperamentally more interested in the "ugly but optimal" track, and enjoy SICP less.
* Philosophy Arthur Schopenhauer - The World as Will and Representation. Surprisingly readable and insightful, even if you don't buy his metaphysics. Einstein had Schopenhauer's portrait on his wall and considered him a genius. * Poetry John Milton - Paradise Lost Powerful and beautiful writing. * Fiction Rabelais - Gargantua and Pantagruel. Funny and a real feast of words (the translation is a work of art in itself)…
Actually just ordered this about a week ago. Read a couple articles about him and got the impression that he shares a lot with early Christianity (and also Buddhism)
> Marcel Proust - In Search of Lost Time. Exceptionally rich and a beautiful study of love. Reading it is like living another life.
Haven't read the Proust but I'd say the same for War and Peace
2. CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving (Peter Walker);
3. Whole Again (Jackson McKenzie);
4. The Complete Robot (Isaac Asimov);
5. Outliers: The Science of Success (Malcolm Gladwell);
6. The Compound Effect (Darren Hardy).
Two fiction:
War and Peace: There's just has so much life in this book. The things you read, they age with you over time. I wish I could read it in the original
Ulysses: I don't know why I like this book tbh. There's a lot of "fluff" to it, but the parts that are good are so exceptionally good you will need to come back to them. I started reading the Wake a year ago and took a break bc busy. I still think about it though: he writes about culture like it's this drunken, surreal, fever dream. It's like you read it and wonder if this is how things actually are
The Rules for the Dance by Mary Oliver. I already knew I liked certain kinds of poetry, but never really understood why. This book breaks down metrical poetry and explains how it works.
The Rules for the Direction of the Mind by Descartes, aka the regulae.