June Review
Wiresong July 07, 2024 #ReviewNot too much content this month-went traveling (yay!) and didn't manage to find too many interesting things online.
Books
This month was principally nonfiction. I read Blue Star Enterprises, which is a mildly fun (although still very new) Royalroad book about a 21st century human being transplanted into a robot body in the future; I also reread a few books from the Murderbot series, but that's it.
As far as nonfiction goes: I picked up Ultralearning, which was a nice read-many of the things in there I was doing instinctively already, but it was nice to learn potential new strategies, and it gave me a structured way to think about things which were otherwise mostly intuitive. I read a lot of programming-adjacent things: crafting interpreters, Introduction to the Theory of Computation, the Feynman Lectures on Computation, and a few other things involving Lean and Prolog. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, I find Feynman's book to be the best for me.)
I've also been reading a fair amounnt of mathematical books (along with doing the exercises, something something spectator sport). I read a bit of A Friendly Introduction to Number Theory, though I have to embarrassingly admit that it didn't really hold my interest. recently, I've been doing more category theory: Category Theory for Programmers is excellent, so is Category Theory for the Sciences. (I would mildly recommend starting with the second one, even if you're a programmer, unless you're not really a fan of purely mathematical books-I find the writing style to be somewhat more lucid, somewhat more concise, somewhat closer to the way I like to think.)
Finally, some random self-help-ish books: Designing your Life was recommended to me, and doesn't seem half-bad so far (it makes relatively concrete claims, and has practical things it recommends); and for the sake of finding out what all the fuss was about, I also picked up How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's really well written, in that particular early 20th-century way, but I'm unsure how applicable it actually is in practice.
Music
- American Football - Never Meant
- G.O.A.T, but it's Jazz
- Agam - Thoomani Maadathu
- Epic mountain is a company that produces music for Kurzgesagt videos, and they're awesome. My favorites so far are Smoking and Liquid Asteroid