Today I Learned
I read this book a second time without realising. The first time was several years ago, I think it was one of first English books bough in paper. The second time was a cheap deal at 99p for the ebook.
And, I enjoyed it. The thrill, the twists, really engaging. It reminds to “The Pillars of the Earth” It is funny how this reminds me to all the bank crashes we had in 2008/9 and even last year in Silicon Valley. We don’t learn.
This book showed me how screw up we are with the tax system, because it doesn’t apply to all. It is overcomplicated, and it you make a mistake, you pay dearly.
I think it is quite radical but at the beginning, the book gives a very radical example of a the tax system as a way to slow down inflation…. because governments have the printing money machine.
One important question is how you define a “company”. It has all the features as a person, it can buy/sell things, sue/be sued, but it is controlled but different people that are putting the money.
At the end, the author suggest to only tax people, remove all other taxes, you only pay if you get wealthier… but still dont fully understand how that could stop “rich”and companies not paying taxes. At the end of the day, all main governments are keeping all the tax heaven places so we are not going anywhere. Is blockchain a solution?
Different ways to pay less taxes is to borrow on your wealth and set up a trust… high level looks fine but can this be done by a “normal” person?
After reading “After Born To Run”, I decided to buy another of the author’s book. Somehow I had low expectations… I read a bit the intro but somehow it has been beyond what I expected. It mixed history from Ancient Greece, World War II, fitness, nutrition, psychology, philosophy etc. It is a weird cocktel but it worked great!
It is quite brilliant how he tries to mix the fiction of classic Homer‘s Iliad with real facts and personal traits. And how Crete is the origin of all Greece history and heroes, and therefore Western Culture. As well, I never imagined Crete was so important during the WWII as it seems it delayed the invasion of Russia and then doomed the Germans. At the end of the day, the book is about the kidnapping of a Nazi general in Crete. And it is actually an Odyssey. I didnt about Churchill Dirty Tricks and all the characters involved. You dont need to born Rambo to be a war hero. Just check Paddy’s and Xan‘s.
Regarding fitness, he mentions the Fascia Lata and Fat-As-Fuel concepts. Mark Allen is mentioned one of the greatest triathlete that I didnt know and as a curiosity, he had a splash when he discovered the concept of Fat-As-Fuel concept (a.k.a Paleo diet). And the training and fat-as-fuel is mentioned from Phill Maffetone (and it seems he has a very interesting life)
He has a big go against Gym culture (Arnold Schwarzenegger being a target) as it destroyed what humans have done for millennia: natural movement. And the closest to that is parkour . It gives a good history lesson about the origin of Parkour and its figures like Georges Hebert. As well, the author has a go to the Gatorade-link industrie and hydration wasn’t really a problem in long distance running.
Regarding Fascia training he mentions Steve Maxwell (link1, video)
In general, very interesting and entertaining book with a wide range of topics!
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)
2) The inner domain (The temperament)
3) The Magisterial (The soul)
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.
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:
Videos:
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 🙂
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.
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?
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.
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…