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…
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.
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.
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.
This is an ebook about how to deal with life. Every person has its rules for living and I have read several book about rules so it is always interesting to see/read the different points of view from very different people.
This case is from a USA Seal and Admiral. Actually, I watched this video before buying the book. And hits your.
1- Start your day with a task completed: Make your bed to perfection. If you can’t make the little things right, you will never be able to do the big things right.
2- You can’t go it alone: You can’t paddle the boat (life) alone. Find someone to share your life with (struggling with this), make as many friends as possible (idem) and never forget that your success depends on others.
3- It’s not the size of your flippers that count, just the size of your heart matters: There is more in life that physical attributes.
4- Life is not fair, deal with it: The common people and the great men and women are all defined by how they deal with the life’s unfairness.
5- Failure can make you stronger: True leaders must learn from their failures, use the lessons to motivate themselves and not be afraid to try again or make the next tough decision (You will always make it to the Circus at some point)
6- You must date greatly: Without pushing your limits, without occasionally sliding down the rope headfirst, without daring greatly, you will never know what you are truly capable for.
7- Stand up to the bullies: Courage is within all of us. Dig deep.
8- Rise to the occasion: If you want to change the world, be your very best in the darkest moments.
9- Give people hope: If you want to change the world, start singing when you are up to your neck in mud. Like this. Lift up those around you and give them hope that tomorrow will be a better day.
10- Never, ever quit: This is the summary for all the above. If you refuse to give up on your dreams, stand tall and strong against the odds, then life will be what you make of it.
I have read this ebook recently. As it is in electronic format, I didn’t take many notes but it looks quite complete touching many subjects. The site is quite good and you can get a list of all recommended books.
The general idea is you dont have to spend a fortune in knowledge that you can get just reading several key books (buying or borrowing from a library).
I agree (high/good) education is becoming a luxury and knowing that there are alternatives is a safe-line.
I would read it again but in paper so you can have a physical reference in your desk.
Good sleep, dedicated time, focus, meditations to improve focus, similar time of day, teach it, test it frequently, create engagement. Reduce knowledge decay a.k.a = learning
Testa TCP replacement: Instead of buying and spending a lot of money, built what you need. I assume very smart people around and real network engineering taking place.It is like a re-write of TCP but doesnt break it so your switches can still play with it. It seems videos are not available in the hotchips webpage yet. And this link looks even better, even mentions Arista as the switching vendor. (video from hotchips24)
Cerebras Inference: From hotchips 2024. I am still blow away for the waferscale solution. Obviously, the presentation says its product is the best but I wonder, can you install a “standard” linux and run your LLM/Inference that easily?
Leopold AIG race: Via linkedin, then the source. I read the chapter 3 regarding the race to the Trillion-Dollar cluster. It all looks Sci-Fi, but I think it may be not that far from reallity.
Cursor + Sonet: Replacement for copilot? original I haven’t used Copilot but at some point I would like to get into the wagon and try things and decide for myself.
AI AWS Engineering Infra: low-latency and large-scale networking (\o/), energy efficiency, security, AI chips.
NVLink HGX B200: To be honest, I always forger the concept of NVLink and I told my self it is an “in-server” switch to connect all GPUs in a rack. Still this can help:
At a high level, the consortium’s goal (UltraEthernet/ UA) is to develop an open standard alternative to Nvidia’s NVLInk that can be used for intra-server or inter-server high-speed connectivity between GPU/Accelerators to build scale-up AI/HPC systems. The plan is to use AMD’s interconnect (Infinity Fabric) as the baseline for this standard.
Netflix encoding challenges: From encoding per quality of connection, to per-title, to per-shot. Still there are challenges for live streaming. Amazon does already live streaming for sports, have they “solved” the problem? I dont use Netflix or similar but still, the challenges and engineering behind is quite interesting.
Some career advice from AWS: I “get” the point but still you want to be up to speed (at certain level) with new technologies, you dont want to become a dinosaur (ATM, frame-relay, pascal, etc).
Again, it’s not about how much you technically know but how you put into use what you know to generate amazing results for a value chain.
Get the data – be a data-driven nerd if you will – define a problem statement, demonstrate how your solution translates to real value, and fix it.
“Not taking things personally is a superpower.” –James Clear
Because “no” is normal.
Before John Paul DeJoria built his billion-dollar empire with Patrón and hair products, he hustled door-to-door selling encyclopedias. His wisdom shared at Stanford Business School on embracing rejection is pure gold (start clip at 5:06).
You see, life is a numbers game. Today’s winners often got rejected the most (but persevered). They kept taking smart shots on goal and, eventually, broke through.
Cloudflare backbone 2024: Everything very high level. 500% backbone capacity increase since 2021. Use of MPLS + SR-TE. Would be interesting to see how the operate/automate those many PoPs.
Cisco AI: “three of the top four hyperscalers deploying our Ethernet AI fabric” I assume it is Google, Microsoft and Meta? AWS is the forth and biggest.
xAI 100k GPU cluster: 100k liquid-cooled H100s on single RDMA fabric. Looks like Supermicro involved for servers and Juniper only front-end network. NVIDIA provides all ethernet switches with Spectrum-4. Very interesting. Confirmation from NVIDIA (Spectrum used = Ethernet). More details with a video.
