library

some cool pieces of media.

Books I've Enjoyed

Q3 2026

• The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City, 1986-1990 by Jonathan Mahler
• Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing by Robert A. Caro

Q2 2026

• Pale Fire by Vladimir Nabokov
• American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964 by William Manchester

Q1 2026

• Zhou Enlai: A Life by Chen Jian
• Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI by Karen Hao
• 1929: Inside the Greatest Crash in History – and How It Shattered a Nation by Andrew Ross Sorkin
• The Thinking Machine: Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World's Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt
• Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
• Author in Chief: The Untold Story of Our Presidents and the Books They Wrote by Craig Fehrman

Q4 2025

• Travels with Henry by Richard Gerard Valeriani
• Subprime Attention Crisis by Tim Hwang
• Kissinger: A Biography by Walter Isaacson
• American Gods by Neil Gaiman
• The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories by Ken Liu
• Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China by Ezra F. Vogel
• The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks
• Sparks: China's Underground Historians and their Battle for the Future by Ian Johnson
• There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm
• The Alchemy of Finance by George Soros
• The Soong Dynasty by Sterling Seagrave
• Mao: On Contradiction and On Practice by Mao Zedong
• The Wars for Asia, 1911-1949 by S.C.M. Paine
• Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang
• Consider the Lobster and Other Essays by David Foster Wallace
• The Private Life of Chairman Mao by Li Zhisui

Q3 2025

• The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect by Roger Williams
• Abundance by Ezra Klein
• Unsong by Scott Alexander
• On China by Henry Kissinger
• To Hold Up the Sky by Liu Cixin
• Katabasis by R.F. Kuang
• Kingdom of Characters: The Language Revolution That Made China Modern by Jing Tsu
• The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner

2024

• The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
• Accelerando by Charles Stross
• Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller

2023

• Babel by R.F. Kuang
• Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
• Exhalation by Ted Chiang
• Ball Lightning by Liu Cixin

2022

• This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar
• Death's End by Liu Cixin
• The Dark Forest by Liu Cixin
• The Three-Body Problem by Liu Cixin

Currently Reading

• Against Progress by Slavoj Žižek
• The Rise and Fall of the EAST: How Exams, Autocracy, Stability, and Technology Brought China Success, and Why They Might Lead to Its Decline by Yasheng Huang

Short-form Content

• Fatal Distraction by Gene Weingarten - the stories of those who fit under the margin of error
• math team by benedict - i burnt out of math competitions for a few years, echoing many of these sentiments
• On Grindslop by Will Manidis - achievement is not virtuous
• The Dilbert Afterlife by Scott Alexander - scott adams' life is filled with twists and turns; one step forward, two steps back
• Thinking About Risk: quitting my $600k quant job by Jeffrey Xu - my boy jeff, he made it out
• The Road to the Road to Character by John Warner - fuck-nut! fuck-nut! fuck-nut!
• Cyc by Yuxi Liu - there are many wrong turns on the road to ASI. here is one
• Why Don't We Just Kill the Kid In the Omelas Hole by Isabel J. Kim - how utilitarian are you?
• Infinite America by Sam Kriss - time is a flat circle
• You and Your Research by Richard Hamming - framing (the problem; the process) may be the most important attribute of a researcher
• The Men Who Did Not Build Nigeria by Feyi Fawehinmi - is your leadership more focused on short-term or long-term incentives?
• The Friendship That Made Google Huge by James Somers - me and who (non-traditional methods of working interest me in the age of agents)?
• No Data Centers In My Backyard by Jasmine Sun - the backlash about datacenters is not about datacenters. AI regulation is necessary.
• I Sexually Identify as an Attack Helicopter by Isabel Fall - a reclamation of the transphobic trope
• AI 2040 by Thomas Larsen, Romeo Dean, Brendan Halstead, Eli Lifland, Ryan Greenblatt, and Daniel Kokotajlo - I broadly agree with what is written here; a joint slowdown is necessary to avoid misaligned ASI
• Duane Arnold by Tomás Bjartur - a human living through the end times
• The Survivor by Cal Fussman - we joke about tragedies to deflect their emotional weight
• Manifold Destiny by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber - you cannot avoid politics in a community by shunning it
• No, it's not The Incentives—it's you by Tal Yarkoni - use your free will!!!!
• Ordinary Abundance by Jordan Dworkin - yet utility scales logarithmically
• Choosing to Become Yourself by Chris Peterson - think about the person you'll be afterwards, as a metric for decisions
• Book from the Sky by Kai Van Brunt - the chinese language is strange
• The Leper by Lee Chang-dong, translated by Heinz Insu Fenkl - western lenses of south korea focus only on the techno-consumerist picture it loves to paint of itself
• How to Catch a Lab Leak by Santi Ruiz - seems like these incidences may only become more frequent
• Discovered our parents were Russian spies by Shaun Walker - what happens when your axioms of life fall apart?
• 50 Things I Know by Sasha Chapin - many people often overthink social interactions. remember to remain empathetic and evolve around norms
• Even If You Beat Me by Sally Rooney - competitive spaces reward ego, not virtue. it is hard to maintain the latter
• How the SMU football program came to be killed by hydn - everything's bigger in texas
• Single-Bit Error by Ken Liu - but every emotion can be boiled down to a set of logical processes
• Unexpected poetry in PhD acknowledgements by Tabitha Carvan - a magnum opus requires an expression of self
• Reality has a surprising amount of detail by John Salvatier - thoroughness and attention to detail are the keys to building well
• Alignment by Vincent Huang - my favorite second-person perspective story
• Notes on Managing ADHD by Fernando Borretti - yet I kept this in my bookmarks for months before finally reading it
• 17776 by Jon Bois - internet content was meant to be interactive, meant to be unique. this is what it's meant to be
• The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize by Bobby Broccoli - a youtube documentary whose quality is only matched by his other videos

Music

• Rigamortis by Kendrick Lamar
• Shelter by Porter Robinson
• The King's Affirmation by Iniko
• either on or off the drugs by JPEGMAFIA
• GOLD by BROCKHAMPTON
• thumbs by jigitz
• WHAT IS FOREVER FOR by Frost Children
• Nights by Frank Ocean
• Runaway by Galantis
• Sunset by Kid Ink
• Erase Your Social by Lil Uzi Vert
• 像极了 by Ryan.B
• Big Bootie Mix Vol. 15 by Two Friends
• Grand Escape by RADWIMPS (ft. Toko Miura)
• Whistle (Acoustic) by BLACKPINK
• loving u is harder by seb
• SIGNAL by ISOKNOCK
• Reborn by Kids See Ghosts
• All I Am by Ninajirachi
• Love Is Gone by SLANDER

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