Books • Quotes

Sometimes I come across a site, book, article, etc., that is incredibly cool -- but time passes and I forget the details by which to track it down when I want to revisit or recommend it.

Enough! No more! Going forward, I shall save such links on this page.

Building Your Digital Utopia: How to Create Digital Brand Experiences That Systematically Accelerate Growth by Frank Cowell
2024. This book is a rare find. It's amazing how many growth / retention / customer success books fill their pages with information that is worthless or barely relevant. I don't care about your superficial "growth hacks" that are unsustainable in the long run, and I don't care what your responsibilities are as a Customer Success Officer, who you manage, how you align with the sales department, how you report to other executives... just tell me what the heck you do to acquire and retain customers!!! And that's what this book does -- it gets straight to the point. The information value per page is through the roof and yet it's still easy reading, not dense or dry. And, as an added bonus, the author actually ends the book once he has run out of valuable things to say.

Alice's Adventures in a Differentiable Wonderland -- Volume I, A Tour of the Land by Simone Scardapane
2024. Another friendly yet remarkably detailed deep learning textbook.

The Road To Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and Games, edited by K. Anders Ericsson
2024. Reads almost like a book club among researchers who read Bloom's Developing Talent in Young People and Ericsson's numerous papers on deliberate practice. Each chapter is from a different researcher or group, often with different views. I was initially a bit put off by the lack of cohesiveness, but in hindsight, I like the resulting feel of authenticity: things get messy at the edge of human knowledge.

Developing Talent in Young People by Benjamin Bloom
2023. Talent development might sound like a nebulous thing -- everyone seems to have their own opinion about how talented people become talented and what roles working hard, working smart, and getting lucky play in that process. But by studying 120 highly talented individuals across 6 talent domains, Bloom discovered that talent development occurs through a similar general process, no matter what talent domain. In other words, loosely speaking, there is a "formula" for developing talent -- though executing it is a lot harder than simply understanding it.

Understanding Deep Learning by Simon J.D. Prince
2023. A friendly yet remarkably detailed deep learning textbook full of visualizations, quick concrete algebraic/numerical examples and exercises, historical notes/references, and references to current work in the field. An amazing resource for anyone who has decent math chops and has paid attention to deep learning making headlines through the years, but hasn't kept up with all the technical details.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel and Blake Masters
2021. This book closed the loop on my train of thought while reading the book below (Memory Evolutive Systems). If you want to innovate, you have to get hands-on experience at the bottom level of scale of your problem and build your own abstractions upwards from there. That's how you go from 0 to 1. If you jump on the bandwagon of existing abstractions then all you can do is go from 1 to N.

Memory Evolutive Systems; Hierarchy, Emergence, Cognition by A C Ehresmann, J.P. Vanbremeersch
2016. This book marked the end of my interest in pure math. In high school and early college, I was totally obsessed with describing all aspects of the world in terms of math, especially the most complicated things like the brain and macroeconomics. I devoured the entire book in a couple days during the spring break of my second year of college, and it gave me an intense feeling of enlightenment, as though I could finally wrap my head around the most complex systems in the world -- yet when I tried to apply this elightenment in any sort of practical direction, or use it to answer any concrete research questions, I came up emptyhanded. That's when it really hit me that in general, abstractions are features that pop out when you average across many concrete examples, and you can't really think critically about how an abstraction relates to a new example unless you're able to compare the details of that example to the details of the examples underlying the abstraction. In other words, you can't really use abstractions to bypass the hard work of getting hands-on interactive experience with whatever complex system you're trying to understand.

How We Got From There to Here: A Story of Real Analysis by Eugene Boman and Robert Rogers
2015. An engaging real analysis textbook full of memorable quotes such as the following: "In some sense, the nineteenth century was the 'morning after' the mathematical party that went on throughout the eighteenth century."

On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins and Sandra Blakeslee
2014. This was the first book that gave me intuition for how macro-level cognitive abilities can arise from micro-level neural networks in the brain. Jeff Hawkins is an electrical engineer and successful tech founder turned neuroscientist, and Sandra Blakeslee is a science writer, so it's no surprise that the writing style is simultaneously friendly & exciting while also being technically interesting & detailed (though, to be clear, there are legitimate gripes from neuroscientists about ideas lacking proper scientific detail/support or having been discussed previously in the neuroscience literature). In short, I found this book to be very valuable for building intuition about how the brain works, even if it claims to be more revolutionary than it is.

"Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but don't nobody want to lift no heavy-ass weight."
-Ronnie Coleman

"You solve one problem and you solve the next one and then the next. And if you solve enough problems, you get to come home."
-from The Martian

"...[D]eliberate practice requires effort and is not inherently enjoyable. Individuals are motivated to practice because practice improves performance."
-from Anderson, Krampe, & Tesch-Romer (1993) in The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance

"The first guy through the wall always gets bloody."
-from Moneyball

"A man who has made a success desires to see others make a success. A man who has worked wants to see others work. ... A boy having a good time on his father's money has always been offensive to me."
-from Claude C. Hopkins in My Life in Advertising (pp.22)

"I had saved $100, and I worked. The other boy had saved nothing, and he did not like to work. So I was the one who secured the help which changed the current of my life. ... The saver and the worker get the preference of the men who control opportunities. And often that preference proves to be the most important thing in life."
-from Claude C. Hopkins in My Life in Advertising (pp.35)

"I anticipate the terminus of gravity's rainbow. ... I observe the facts without biases of the head or heart, I determine the arc's path, stroll leisurely to its terminus, and the truth falls at my feet. ... Be it cruel or comforting, this machine unerringly arrives at the truth. That's what it does."
-from Knives Out

"That sounds rather pitiful, but it wasn't. It was a great advance ... I slept alone in a bed, instead of on a hay mow with railroad section men. So long as we are going upward, nothing is a hardship. But when we start down, from a marble mansion to a cheaper palace, that is hard."
-from Claude C. Hopkins in My Life in Advertising (pp.39)

All the lyrics of 8-Mile Road
-Eminem

"That Terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with, it can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead."
-from The Terminator