Category: books

Discipline is Destiny

Very good book, as discipline keeps me in my place and sane. And nobody is perfect, the key is to get back up when failing.

This book is a very good reminder of Jocko Willink: Discipline = Freedom.

Persist and Resist

1) The Exterior (The body)

  • Ruling over the body: Gives the example of Lou Gehrig, I have no clue about baseball but it is very interesting how he kept at the top, no noise, and died so young.
  • Attack the dawn: wake up early (and go early to bed)
  • The strenuous life is the best life: Train your body, take care of your body
  • Quit being a slave: of craving, addiction, vices
  • Avoid the superfluous: – desire -> + rich
  • Clean up your desk
  • Just show up
  • Sweat the small stuff
  • Hustle, Hustle, Hustle: I dont really understand this part.
  • Slow down… to go faster
  • Practice… then practice more.
  • Just work
  • Dress for success: Interesting facts about Angela Merkel.
  • Seek discomfort
  • Manage the load
  • Sleep is an act of character
  • What can you endure?
  • Beyond the body

2) The inner domain (The temperament)

  • Ruling over yourself
  • Look at everything like this
  • Keep the main thing the main thing: Learn to say no.
  • Focus, focus, focus
  • Wait for this sweet fruit
  • Perfectionism is a vice
  • Do the hard things first
  • Can you get back up?
  • The battle against pain
  • The battle against pleasure
  • Fight the provocation
  • Beware this madness
  • Silence is strength: Example from Sparta.
  • Hold, hold your fire
  • Temper your ambition: Example from a young Napoleon noticing the evil of ambition and then later in life he ignored his own advice.
  • Money is a (dangerous) tool
  • Get better every day
  • Share the load
  • Respect time
  • Put up boundaries: Examples of the Queen Elizabeth II
  • Do your best: Example from a young Jimmy Carter, when he recognized not doing his best when he had an interview with a general.
  • Beyond the temperament

3) The Magisterial (The soul)

  • Elevating yourself: Antoninus Pius was the mentor and stepfather of Marcus Aurelius
  • Tolerant with others, strict with yourself
  • Make others better
  • Grace under pressure
  • Carry the load for others
  • Be kind to yourself
  • The power of giving power away
  • Turn the other cheek
  • How to make an exit
  • Endure the unendurable
  • Be best
  • Flexibility is strength
  • Unchanged by success
  • Self-discipline is virtue. Virtue is Self-discipline

TPUv6, Alphafold, OOB design, OpenInterpreter, Walkie-Talkies, Zero Trust SSH, Videos, Finger Strength

Google TPUv6 Analysis: “… cloud infrastructure and which also is being tuned up by Google and Nvidia to run Google’s preferred JAX framework (written in Python) and its XLA cross-platform compiler, which speaks both TPU and GPU fluently.” So I guess this is a cross-compiler for CUDA?

“The A3 Ultra instances will be coming out “later this year,” and they will include Google’s own “Titanium” offload engine paired with Nvidia ConnectX-7 SmartNICs, which will have 3.2 Tb/sec of bandwidth interconnecting GPUs in the cluster using Google’s switching tweaks to RoCE Ethernet.” So again custom ethernet tweaks for RoCE, I hope it makes to the UEC? Not sure I understand having a Titanium offload and a connectx-7, are they not the same?

Alphafold: It is open to be used. Haven’t read properly the license.

OOB Design:

Open Interpreter: The next step in LLMs is to control/interact with your system.

In my laptop fails because I have the free version 🙁 need to try a different one, but looks promising!

open-interpreter main$ interpreter --model gpt-3.5-turbo

●                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                  

Welcome to Open Interpreter.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

▌ OpenAI API key not found                                                                                                                                                                                                                                       

To use gpt-4o (recommended) please provide an OpenAI API key.                                                                                                                                                                                                      

To use another language model, run interpreter --local or consult the documentation at docs.openinterpreter.com.                                                                                                                                                   

───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

OpenAI API key: ********************************************************************************************************************************************************************


Tip: To save this key for later, run one of the following and then restart your terminal.                                                                                                                                                                          
MacOS: echo 'export OPENAI_API_KEY=your_api_key' >> ~/.zshrc                                                                                                                                                                                                       
Linux: echo 'export OPENAI_API_KEY=your_api_key' >> ~/.bashrc                                                                                                                                                                                                      
Windows: setx OPENAI_API_KEY your_api_key                                                                                                                                                                                                                          

───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

▌ Model set to gpt-3.5-turbo                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

Open Interpreter will require approval before running code.                                                                                                                                                                                                        

Use interpreter -y to bypass this.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

Press CTRL-C to exit.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                              

> what is my os?
Traceback (most recent call last):

Walkie-Talkies: Out of James Bond world.

Zero Trust SSH. From Cloudflare. And this video I watched some months ago (and it is already 4y).

Finger Strength: I follow similar protocol, although not everyday, for warm up and I think it works. I am not getting that super results but at least my fingers are stronger…. and I am not getting injuries!!!! \o/

Cisco AI/ML DC Infra Challenges: I am not quiet fan of Cisco products but this is a good overview.

Key points:

  • Create different networks (inter-GPU, front-end, storage, mgmt),
  • Inter-GPU:
    • – non-blocking, rails-optimized (fig.3)
  • Inter-GPU challenges:
  • – Packet loss: Use PFC +ECN (flow aware)
  • – Network delay: “Rich” QoS – proprietary QoS to handle mice flows. Needs good telemetry
  • – Network congestion: Some kind of communication switch-NIC
  • – Non-uniform utilization: Most vendors have something proprietary here, some dynamic LB and static-pinning?
  • – Simultaneous Elephant flows with large bursts: dynamic buffer protection (proprietary)

Videos:

  • Raoul Pal: Crypto Investment. His company. Go long run, invest a bit you can lose
  • Scott Galloway: Interesting his political analysis. Trump won and it seems Latins voted massively for him.
  • Bruce Dickinson: I read Bruce’s books some years ago so I was surprised to see him in a podcast. Need to finish it.
  • Eric Schmidt: I read one of his books some time ago so again, surprised to find him in a podcast. Still think Google has become evil and most of the good things he says are gone.
  • Javier Milei: I am not economist but it “seems” things are improving in Argentina. He is a character nonetheless. Need to finish it.
  • Matthew McConaughey: His book was really refreshing, and seeing him talking is the same. Raw, real.
  • Alex Honnold: You have to try hard if you want to do hard things.

Borges

In my last day in Argentine last year, I bought a small book from Borges as I wanted some memory of my trip. I think it is poetry but I dont understand it. I have never been able to read poetry, even in my mother tongue.

The book contains “Fervor de Buenos Aires”, “Luna de enfrente” and “Cuaderno San Martin”.

Maybe once day i will be able to capture the beauty of this type of literature. As a teenager, I remember one teacher explaining us some poems from Pedro Salina’s “La voz a ti debia” And it was really nice, I still go the book, pending to read it…. nearly 30y in the waiting 🙂

Hyperfocus

I guess I am bit obsessed with personal performance, how to make more and better in the same or less amount of time. And this is another book about the subject. I read it as ebook so didn’t take notes.

Although the main topic is how to focus and make the most of it, the second part is about “scatterfocus” that was unexpected.

Focus produces, scatter invents/solves. They follow different steps to achieve that state.

And I think focus is gold. Difficult to focus with so much distraction everywhere. I like to work in the office… because it is mainly empty and I have few distractions there but looks like everything is about attention. It is the real commodity. Everybody is fighting for it. So you have to look after it.

There is nothing revolutionary for getting focus, and that is a good thing. I like the emphasis in meditation. Be sure you look after your body: good sleep, exercise, proper food, and be sure you have a limited time to be real focus per day so make it count.

For scatterfocus, it is as easy as going for a walk without nothing really in mind, let the mind wander and think in things and problems. These are the moments when most eureka bursts happen.

Need to read it again.

Dead’s End

I completed last week the third part of the Three Body Problem trilogy. It was interesting but in this part things got wild! Every twist caught me out of guard. The physics got me lost most of the time (3D vs 4D, etc). But I like how Trisolarians learnt to lie and play long term. How reaching light speed was the proper solution and the most important thing: humans in a spaceship disconnected from Earth, took them 5 minutes to reach Totalitarianism. And all the theories about the Dark Forest hypothesis (Fermi Paradox), deterrence, and something a bit less sci-fi.

Destroying Earth using a 2D plane that sucks the surrounding 3D… but that would suck the whole universe… but that is a good tactic if you can live in 2D… not sure if that was a superior tactic to defeat your adversaries in the dark forest?

A Man for All Markets

Very interesting book. I learned a lot new things from the origin of card counting, beating the roulette with the first wearable device (with Claude Shannon!!!), beating the markets based on managing risk, etc. The author is truly remarkable.

It is interesting how Edward moved from Chemistry to Maths due to problems with fairness in this Chemistry “career”. And still he didnt find much fairness in Las Vegas, and even worse in the stock market. He was driven to solve problems people didnt think had a solution. And was impressive how he taught himself. And likely he was a pioneer in computer-based trading. He is against the low latency trading. He mentions many times Warren Buffet and his investment style. As well, Citadel, as his continuation about the management of risk. It seems he didnt look for the sort term profit but going long, looking for mis-priced stocks.

I am happy he doesnt believe in the efficient market neither.

The Places in Between

This is the story of crossing by foot Northern Afghanistan after USA invasion. Not the best moment. The author had already travelled by Iran, Nepal, Pakistan but this one was really meaningful. You dont read many travel books about Afghanistan. He is trying to follow the path of the emperor Babur.

The most interesting part of the book is his interaction with the locals, with the good and bad things, and how different “tribes” he finds in his journey. His relationship with the dog “Babur”.

And what a disaster was the invasion. Western culture/democrazy can’t be imposed. EU had to go through several centuries of wars to notice that democracy/union was the less evil. Let’s see if we get back to the old habits…

The Panama Papers

This is a book that makes you to reconsider how you look at the “elite”. For me, paying taxes is one of the most fundamental part of a working democracy, and it is equal to trust and equality. And yes, we all want to pay less taxes. But if you knew everybody paid their part and everything was used properly, and you could live decently (imagine: good education, good health system, good infrastructure, etc) I doubt you wouldn’t do it.

With the Panama Papers, you can see how powerful is Mr Money. Everybody has their hands dirty: politicians (Kirchers-Argentina, Camerons-UK, Iceland, Russia, Ukraine, Spain, China, etc), banks (nearly all German banks), conglomerates (Siemens), artists, sports (FIFA, Messi…) And this is just the tip of the iceberg. Amazon, Apple, M$, etc have billions in tax heavens. This remind me to a similar book regarding off-shore investments where it said there are trillions of $ hidden from us.

I am still surprised this is still “legal” and main player/countries are still allowing it. If USA doesnt crack it down, then, there is still something “worth it” for some people there…. Looks like a lost battle. But still worth it. I hope you dont ever again cry for Messi, CR or any other “star”. Very likely they dont deserve you.

Still, I am happy there are publications like this. Well done for the authors.

Hidden Potential

This is an ebook about personal performance. You dont need the genetics, attend the best school, come from money, etc to be great. In many areas, the most successful individual were not prodigies. Although we have a lot of literature highlighting being a prodigy was the source of everything else. The book gives plenty of examples to contradice that. And this is a great example: Raging Rooks

With the right opportunity and motivation to learn, anyone can build the skills to achieve greater things. Potential is not a matter of where you start, but of how far you travel. The “soft” skill/qualities underrated: proactive, prosocial, disciplined, determined are more important that maths or reading skills.

Character: It is a learned capacity to live by your principles. It is how you show up on a hard day. Being comfortable being uncomfortable.

Character skills predict and produce success in life.

Then you need to the scaffolding to maintain those character skills when things dont go well (it will happen) Those structures will sustain your motivation. He puts the example of the Chilean mining accident in 2010 about the importance of “teaming”. It shows why intelligence agencies failed in early 2000 attacks

Finally, the book talks about building systems to expand opportunity. And the best example is the Finnish education system.

I will have to read it again (in paper)

Waking Up

To be honest, I struggled with this ebook. It is about spirituality without religion, the connection of consciousness and our brain (interesting the cases when people got removed something the brain hemispheres got disconnected), false gurus (you can apply this to many env in life: sport, work, etc), next-death-experiences, enlightenment and the use of psychedelics to open your mind.