Florian Hartmann

What I read in 2025

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 10:21:01 +0000

In 2025, I ended up reading 43 books. Just like every year, it is time to summarize and reflect on all the books.

My six favorite (☆) books of the year were:

Lord of the Flies (2.)
Life 3.0 (8.)
Guns, Germs, and Steel (13.)
The Methods of Rationality (14.)
Normal People (23.)
The Emperor of All Maladies (36.)

Compared to the previous years, I ended up reading significantly more fiction this year, resulting in a somewhat equal ratio to non-fiction books. That was not something I expected when 2025 started, but I ended up really re-discovering fiction for me, particularly books that describe interesting relationships one can learn from.

1. Wild Chocolate

Even though cocoa beans originate from the rainforest in South and Central America, most of today’s cocoa production comes from West Africa, in particular from Ivory Coast and Ghana. Most of the chocolate we eat is produced from these cocoa beans, which are usually fairly uniform in kind since people ended up cultivating the ones that are easiest to grow and harvest. Using such uniformly grown cocoa beans unfortunately leads to less complex flavors in the final chocolate.

In Wild Chocolate, Rowan Jacobsen goes on a journey to find the last remains of wild chocolate in the rainforest. Some specialty chocolate makers have made it their mission to seek out these wild cocoa trees with the goal of producing more rich and complex tasting chocolate. However, finding such cocoa trees and harvesting the beans is not exactly easy, and can in all fairness be called an adventure.

I found the book to be super interesting. I enjoyed learning more about how chocolate is actually produced and it was fun to follow along on the search for wild chocolate. In particular since I started eating lots of dark chocolate, up to 100%, over the last year, it was cool to learn more about chocolate, and the book really made me want to try out some chocolate made from wild cocoa beans.

2. Lord of the Flies ☆

Lord of the Flies tells the fictional story of a group of kids and teenagers that survive a plane crash and end up stranded on a deserted island. The kids realize that they need to organize themselves until eventual help, hopefully, arrives. However, how exactly to do that is not entirely clear and different potential leaders and ways of running their mini society emerge.

I found the book to be absolutely brilliant. On one hand, it is just genuinely interesting to read about what the kids do and what they will find on the island. On the other hand, it was also really intriguing to see how the kids are trying to organize themselves and what the dynamics are like.

Besides just being interesting to read, I would also consider Lord of the Flies to be a really important book for people to read. I can totally see why many schools in English-speaking countries cover the book in class, and why the author eventually ended up winning a Nobel Prize in Literature.

3. How Will You Measure Your Life?

Clayton Christensen was a professor at the Harvard Business School and is particularly well known for first describing the innovator’s dilemma. In How Will You Measure Your Life?, Christensen talks about how to live a happy life that is filled with purpose. To achieve that, he transfers over many business concepts and explains how to apply them in a personal context.

I really enjoyed the book. It was super interesting to see how such seemingly business-focused concepts can also be applied to one’s personal life, and I also found Christensen’s life and his approach to things quite inspiring.

One idea that in particular stayed in my mind is carefully considering outsourcing. In the business world, there are of course well-known cases where outsourcing ended up badly, e.g. Western companies increasingly outsourcing manufacturing to Asian countries, and in the process forgetting, or not further developing, essential skills. However, the same concept can be applied to personal knowledge. For example, if a kid outsources various skills to you, that might be more efficient in the short term but has bad long-term consequences. Generally, you want to be mindful about outsourcing, and only do it for skills you definitely will not need in the long run.

4. Altered Traits

It is well known that meditation is a good practice for one’s mind. But how long do the positive effects of meditation last? Just during the meditation itself or does meditation lead to changes that last a long time? That’s exactly the question that Altered Traits discusses.

The book’s authors, Daniel Goleman and Richard Davidson, have spent many decades scientifically studying meditation. Their results show that meditation can indeed lead to altered traits, i.e. long-lasting effects, not just short-lived, altered states. However, this is only the case when practicing regularly in certain ways.

I really enjoyed the book. It was cool to learn about the positive effects of meditation and to see how they are actually being studied. I also really liked that the authors were quite honest about shortcomings of their own, initial studies. Meditation is indeed not easy to study scientifically, since it is non-trivial to guard against the placebo effect, but the authors found some good practices to deal with these issues.

5. The Story of the Human Body

Daniel Lieberman is a professor of evolutionary biology at Harvard. In 2022, I had read his book Exercised, which I really enjoyed. The Story of the Human Body is another book from Lieberman, covering how the human body evolved over time, and what consequences this has when it comes to health and diseases.

In the book, Lieberman postulates the concept of mismatch diseases, i.e. illnesses that occur because of a mismatch between what people’s bodies are evolved for in contrast to how people actually live today. Type 2 diabetes is a typical example of such a mismatch disease. The human body evolved to crave sugar because it was incredibly hard to get for most of our evolution. However, today, sugar is abundant, and just listening to what we crave leads to a mismatch. This concept not only applies to type 2 diabetes but to many other modern health issues as well.

I really liked the book. Lieberman is a great writer and has lots of interesting things to share. However, it is worth noting that the book really spends most pages on how the human body evolved, and only a small part on what that implies for health and mismatch diseases today. Those topics are only covered in the last third of the book. That was a bit disappointing for me considering those topics were the reason I started reading the book.

6. Fortitude

In the modern day and age, you can often read that it is important to develop resilience, i.e. the ability to bounce back from difficult events and to grow with them. In Fortitude, Bruce Daisley takes a closer look at what it actually means to be resilient and what the science says about resilience and experiencing difficult things.

Of course, it turns out that there are a lot of myths surrounding the topic. Not everyone that experiences traumatic events does develop resilience from them. And even the ones that do seem to exhibit resilience often struggle internally.

A set of studies that I found particularly noteworthy covered professional athletes. An astonishing number of elite athletes experienced traumatic childhood events and used sports as an outlet. Of course for every such athlete that succeeded in their sport, there are many traumatized kids that did not manage to find such an escape. And even for the elite athletes that did manage, a serious number of them still suffer from mental health issues today. So things are not all like they seem from the outside.

Besides these investigations, the author also shares some practical advice on what works, focusing on three particularly important aspects: having control and agency, being part of a community, and having a purpose. I found the advice to be sound, and all three dimensions really spoke to me. However, I also came away from the book a bit unsure; there is so much advice on resilience out there, as well as so much debunking of that advice.

7. Meditations

Marcus Aurelius was a Roman emperor about 2,000 years ago. Meditations is his personal journal, consisting of life lessons and guidance that he learned during his life. The book title should be read as “reflections” or “contemplation”, not as meditation as we understand it today. It is also worth noting that the book was not meant to be published. Rather, it was written in the form of a personal journal.

I found it incredible how timeless some of the advice in the book was. You can tell that Marcus Aurelius was an incredibly smart person and focused a lot on intellectual growth during his life. However, some of the advice does not quite transfer to today’s world, and some is really difficult to interpret in a meaningful way.

Lastly, it is worth noting that there are many translations into English available. I opted for one into modern English, which significantly simplified reading the book.

8. Life 3.0 ☆

Max Tegmark is a professor of physics at MIT. In Life 3.0, he talks about artificial intelligence; how it might happen and what the consequences for people are. Nowadays, everyone is talking about AI, and it can be difficult to find actually novel thoughts on the topic, particularly for someone active in the field. Life 3.0 managed to really positively surprise me in that regard. I got exposed to so many new ideas.

The book is incredibly well-written, with many intriguing ideas on how AI might develop, how to think about AI safety, and how we will actually want to live with AI in the future. In particular, it was great how much the book made me reflect on things and what my preferred way of living with AI would actually be – it really is not that obvious.

I also thought it was super impressive that the book was written in 2017, just before the Transformer revolution started, at a time where models were still many orders of magnitude smaller, and web-scaling training was not yet commonly done. Despite this, most of the book still reads incredibly well now in 2025. In fact, if I would have had to guess the publishing date, I would’ve guessed late 2022, and the only reason I wouldn’t pick a later date is that there are no ChatGPT references and the term large language model is not used. The book really does transfer incredibly well to the AI space in 2025.

In my opinion, this book should be required reading for everyone working on AI.

9. The Art of Fermentation

Around 1.5 years ago, I got really into fermented food, and started regularly consuming kimchi. Later on, I added kefir and other fermented food. Besides having a ton of health benefits, as explained in The Good Gut, fermented food is also just super tasty and can make dishes a lot more interesting.

To learn more about how to make fermented food myself, I read The Art of Fermentation. The book starts by explaining the fundamental concepts, and then provides detailed explanations and recipes for pretty much every fermented dish on this planet. Along the way, the author shares stories and letters that he received from readers. These were really fun to follow along.

When wanting to really learn well how to ferment food, this is the ideal book. It is incredibly detailed and covers an enormous amount of different fermented foods. It is also well written and fun to read – though I would caution that it is a fairly long and detailed book, and thus takes quite a while to really go through.

Now, after having read the book, I regularly make my own kimchi, kefir and yoghurt, and really enjoy doing so.

10. How to Not Die Alone

Logan Ury, the book’s author, is the head of relationship science at the dating app Hinge. Prior to that, she worked as a behavioral economist at Google and then as a dating coach. In How to Not Die Alone, she explains how to date right, how to deal with break-ups, how to find lasting love and what makes relationships grow over time. All of this is a mix of her own advice with what science, mostly psychology, has to say about these questions.

The book definitely has some great advice and I’m glad that I have read it. However, I really dislike the title of the book. It sounds too hyperbolic and dramatic, whereas the book itself has a much calmer, positive vibe.

11. Elements of Fiction Writing: Characters & Viewpoint

In Characters & Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card explains how to design characters. This covers questions such as what makes for a good character, how much background to give on them, and figuring out how you want them to impact your story.

Across the book, Card provides many examples of characters and stories, which are just a joy to read. It really helps that Card himself is a great author that is able to write rather elegantly. I also found it really enjoyable to think through how to design characters and found the book to be very creatively stimulating.

12. What the CEO Wants You to Know

What the CEO Wants You to Know is a book that aims to describe how businesses work. To explain this, the author both discusses some fundamentals of economics, as well as many stories of actual companies.

I did not find it an overly enjoyable read. The economic fundamentals discussed are really that: absolute fundamentals. Besides that, I also did not get much value out of reading the stories of the author.

13. Guns, Germs, and Steel ☆

Guns, Germs, and Steel discusses why Eurasian and North African societies in particular were the ones that emerged as more powerful and were able to colonize and dominate other parts of the world for so long. To explain this, the author comes up with various theories of why the geographical features of Eurasia made many things easier for societies there. As such, it argues against the idea that Eurasian societies did well because of inherent or supposed intellectual advantages, and instead considers much lower-level features, such as the geographical shape of continents.

While the book title gives a small spoiler on what kind of things the book discussed, it is far from exhaustive. An argument that I found particularly interesting was that it is a huge advantage of Eurasia that it mostly stretches from West to East, whereas the Americas mostly stretch from North to South. The major axis being West to East means that climates are more similar, which makes trade and exchanging plants, seeds, and animals much easier.

I would absolutely recommend the book to anyone that is curious to get a better sense of how the world developed the way it did. Another great reason for reading the book is that it makes it very clear that sometimes huge advantages can be rather hidden and appear subtle before taking a closer look.

14. – 19. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality

14. The Methods of Rationality – HPMOR 1/6 ☆

Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality (HPMOR) is a Harry Potter fan fiction, written by Eliezer Yudkowsky, a decision theorist and artificial intelligence safety researcher. In the books, Yudkowsky makes use of the Harry Potter universe to explain many ideas of how one ought to make rational decisions and how to follow the scientific method.

While much of the universe resembles the actual Harry Potter universe, in HPMOR, Harry Potter’s aunt ended up marrying a different person, an Oxford professor. In contrast to the actual HP books, Harry Potter in HPMOR grows up in a loving home with parents that are obsessed with science. Harry Potter thus reads a lot and becomes a child prodigy.

When he receives his invitation to Hogwarts, Harry Potter then uses the scientific method to try to understand magic. Instead of accepting “it is just magic” as a reason for why spells work, like the rest of the magic world, he tries to perform experiments and uses scientific reasoning to get to the bottom of things.

The HPMOR series spans 6 books, making up a similar number of pages to the actual Harry Potter series. I absolutely loved all of them. Not only can one learn a huge amount of things from the book, I also found the plot to be genuinely interesting and engaging.

I ended up writing reading notes for all the books.

15. The Legion of Chaos – HPMOR 2/6

It is difficult to summarize books 2 to 6 of a series without giving away spoilers to someone that has not read the first book of the series. Thus, I will keep the summaries for these books rather short, just describing a few cool scientific concepts discussed in each book.

In Legion of Chaos, Harry Potter pursues more extracurricular activities, in particular a series of mock battles to learn the art of fighting with magic. The author uses this plot to discuss many concepts around group coordination, e.g. the Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis, zero-sum games, mutual modeling and some classic game-theoretical problems.

16. The Shadows of Death – HPMOR 3/6

In The Shadows of Death, Harry Potter pursues a rescue mission which requires him to do a particularly good job at decision making. In this context, constrained optimization, consistent utility values and some popular psychology experiments, such as the Stanford prison experiment and Milgram experiment, are discussed.

17. The Phoenix’s Call – HPMOR 4/6

In The Phoenix’s Call, more concepts around rational decision making are discussed, e.g. Pavlovian association, replacement values and many concepts of Bayesian reasoning.

Besides these concepts discussed, something I really enjoyed in the HPMOR books is Harry Potter as a character. He is not only smart and driven, but is a character with very high agency: when something does not go well, he actively tries to look for solutions in a “go-getter” manner that makes me as a reader rather motivated to tackle things in the same manner.

18. The Last Enemy – HPMOR 5/6

In The Last Enemy, the stakes of the story are raised. Harry Potter needs to deal with this by carefully considering Bayesian evidence. He also discusses some fun concepts, such as egocentric bias and the law of the excluded middle.

19. The Mirror’s Stone – HPMOR 6/6

The Mirror’s Stone wraps up the HPMOR series, after an astounding 2,100 pages. The book again discusses many interesting concepts, such as Vinge’s Principle.

I’m super happy that I read the whole HPMOR series. I learned a huge amount of things from it. Besides that, it was also a particularly fun read, with an interesting plot and a main character that I found genuinely inspiring.

20. – 21. Rationality: From AI to Zombies

20. Map and Territory – Rationality 1/6

Besides HPMOR, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote another series of books on rational decision making, Rationality: From AI to Zombies. The work covers six books, each consisting of many individual essays, which discuss various biases and rules for good decision making.

Map and Territory discusses topics such as what is truth, how to align your map with the actual territory, and how to use Bayesian reasoning.

21. How To Actually Change Your Mind – Rationality 2/6

The second volume, How To Actually Change Your Mind, on the other hand discusses topics around how we can get our brains to deal with new information. Whereas we should be seeking to figure out the truth, we are often overcome by our desire to be right and our own, personal biases. The book discusses why this is the case and how to deal with these biases.

I found both books on rationality to be really interesting, with lots of sensible ideas. Reading Yudkowsky’s thoughts sharpens one’s own thinking process and is a great way to become more introspective.

However, after these two books, I decided that I had read enough about rationality and decision making for this year. Six HPMOR and two Rationality books are a huge amount, with often overlapping ideas. While the other four Rationality books were on my reading list for 2025, I ended up dropping them, and focused on other genres afterwards.

22. The Telomere Effect

Telomeres are protective caps at the end of chromosomes. They protect chromosomes from unraveling, a bit like how shoelaces have protective pieces of plastic at the end to make them keep their shape. As such, telomeres ensure that cell division works without damaging DNA, and are thus an important facet of health.

Elizabeth Blackburn is a biologist that is one of the pioneers of telomere research. In this book, she provides a biological explanation of what telomeres are about and why they are important. Then, she also gives practical advice on how to protect one’s telomeres, covering diet, exercise, managing stress, and related topics.

I found the book to be an interesting read. Though a lot of the advice overlaps with other health advice, it is interesting to read how it impacts telomeres particularly.

23. – 26. Sally Rooney’s novels

23. Normal People – Sally Rooney 1/4 ☆

Normal People tells the story of Connell and Marianne, two teenagers that lead rather different lives, but that have a lot of chemistry with each other. They fall in love and become a couple, but of course not everything is as easy as it would be in a perfect world. Initially, one of the two characters treats the other fairly badly in some ways. Despite them being in love and having a special relationship, it kills things between them. However, the two characters keep appearing in each other’s lives, and the book follows them over many years.

Connell and Marianne’s connection and chemistry is undeniable, but the communication between them can be equally bad. Often, both characters want the same thing, but do not manage to properly communicate their feelings, for example because of pride or a fear to be hurt. As a reader, that can be really frustrating, but there are also many lessons to be learned from following their story, both in terms of how to communicate but also in terms of how to set boundaries and what behavior to accept from other people.

What made the book one of my absolute favorite reads of the year is that Sally Rooney, the author, is just incredibly good at describing relationships and interpersonal aspects. It’s just so intriguing to follow the story along and to see the dynamic described, though it can often also be heartbreaking. After reading Normal People, I decided to also read Sally Rooney’s other books this year.

On a more personal note, I think there are a few different things one can take away from Normal People. Personally, though I’m not proud to admit, I saw some parts of myself in Marianne’s character, in terms of accepting a lot of toxic behavior for what looks like a special connection, and needing to learn that one needs to set boundaries of what behavior is okay. That’s a valuable and important thing to learn, though it can be a painful process.

24. Conversations with Friends – Sally Rooney 2/4

After having liked Normal People so much, I decided to read all of Sally Rooney’s book, in chronological order. Conversations with Friends is her first book. Just like Normal People, the book goes deep into personal relationships, and Sally Rooney is just absolutely brilliant at describing the dynamics in them.

More concretely, Conversations with Friends tells the story of two best friends, two literature students in Dublin, who end up meeting an elder couple. Somehow both friends develop deeper relationships with wife and husband of the couple respectively, resulting in a bit of a love rectangle.

The book was super interesting to read, and I really enjoyed following along to see how the relationships untangle. However, I found it much harder to relate to the characters in the book as it describes a much more complicated setup than Normal People does.

25. Beautiful World, Where Are You – Sally Rooney 3/4

Beautiful World, Where Are You forms a clear pattern with Normal People and Conversations with Friends: the main characters again studied literature in Dublin and Sally Rooney does a superb job at setting up characters and describing the relationships between them.

Setting aside the main plot, something I really liked in the book was how the two main characters keep writing each other letters, telling each other about what happened in their life. I enjoyed this for multiple reasons. First all of, interleaving the letters with the third-person narrator, is super intriguing to follow along as one gets to see the divergence of how the people involved understand the same things very differently.

However, I also found it a really sweet practice to write letters in today’s day and age. This inspired me, and I’m also now exchanging letters with a couple of good friends that live far away from me.

26. Intermezzo – Sally Rooney 4/4

Intermezzo is Sally Rooney’s fourth book and again covers interesting relationships, of which Rooney does a super job describing. However, besides this, the book is probably the one that stands out the most from the four books, as the main characters are brothers with a large age difference, very different personalities, and a troublesome relationship.

Ivan, the younger brother, is autistic and a brilliant chess player. He ends up meeting, and falling in love, with a significantly older woman. Peter, the older brother, on the other hand is dating a much younger woman, with a dynamic where it is not really clear if they genuinely like each other or simply exchange love for money. At the same time, Peter is incredibly dismissive of Ivan’s relationship. To make things more complicated, Peter is still in love with his ex-girlfriend, that ended their relationship because she was in an accident and does not want to be a burden to Peter.

All of this makes for plenty of relationship trouble, which is amplified by broken communication. For me, Intermezzo was Sally Rooney’s best book, besides Normal People. It’s interesting to follow along how the relationships unfold, and there’s a lot to learn about good communication in the process.

27. Slow Productivity

Cal Newport is a computer science professor and productivity expert. A few years ago, I read Deep Work from Newport, and really enjoyed it.

In Slow Productivity, Newport argues that doing fewer things and working at a natural, sustainable pace while relentlessly focusing on quality leads to much better results than overexerting oneself in the short term and burning out on too many projects and short deadlines.

A piece of advice I liked in particular was the suggestion to introduce seasonality into one’s work: rather than working at the exact same intensity all the time, we should aim to do targeted sprints interleaved by periods of rest and more free-flowing exploration. This is inspired by how people before civilization also did not do the exact same thing all year around, but had a variety of flows based on seasons.

I have to admit that I was a bit skeptical before reading the book, in the sense that there are so many productivity books out there and they get somewhat repetitive after a while. However, I was pleasantly surprised by the book in the end and took some valuable pieces of advice from it.

28. The Optimist: Sam Altman, OpenAI, and the Race to Invent the Future

Earlier in the year I had read a WSJ article about what happened inside of OpenAI when Sam Altman got fired. It turned out that the article was an excerpt of the author’s upcoming book, The Optimist, which was released later in 2025.

The book is a biography of Sam Altman, though large parts of it also cover OpenAI as an emerging organization. I found the book to be super interesting to read. Sam Altman is an interesting personality, with many impressive achievements, and a set of interesting careers. I also really enjoy books where you learn about how things actually happened, and this book was great for learning more about how YCombinator and OpenAI came to be successful.

29. The Parable of the Sower

The Parable of the Sower is a science-fiction novel that tells the story of Lauren Olamina, a 15-year old girl that lives in a gated community in a dystopian world in which society is starting to collapse. In this world, Lauren ends up creating a new religion, which postulates that “God is Change”. As the only constant in this dystopian world is change, it is important to embrace and shape it, rather than to be afraid and ignorant of the changes that are about to come.

Initially, I was not sure how much I would enjoy the book. The first few chapters are rather depressing, as all you read about is how society keeps collapsing further, and how horrible things are happening all around. However, I really liked the main character. She has a very proactive attitude at addressing problems rather than ignoring them, and it was really intriguing to read about how a religion can be organized around the concept of change.

Nick Hornby’s novels

30. High Fidelity – Nick Hornby 1/3

High Fidelity tells the story of Rob, a record store owner, whose relationship just ended because his girlfriend left him for their neighbour. As a result of this, Rob is both miserable and is trying to re-evaluate his life. He also meets some new people along the way and tries to fix his previous relationship. Though the plot sounds like a rather sad one, the book is actually really funny.

This is the second time I read the book. The first time was in English class, many years ago. I remember that this was one of the few books I had to read in school that I actually enjoyed. This time I enjoyed it even more.

31. About A Boy – Nick Hornby 2/3

After enjoying High Fidelity, I decided to read another book from the same author, About A Boy, which was also turned into a popular movie.

The plot of the book is hard to describe because it sounds absolutely horrible. Will Freeman, the main character of the book, somewhat incidentally figures out that single women might be easier to date. He does not actually have a kid himself though. Hence, he decides to make up a son, just to have an easier time at dates, something which of course can only work for a few dates, unless you hire someone else’s kid.

While the plot and behavior are despicable, there is a lot of character development happening across the book and the relationships are interesting to analyze. Furthermore, the book is really funny and written in a light-hearted way. I must admit though that at times I had some trouble enjoying the humor given that it is pretty messed up to invent (and then hire) a kid because you think it makes it easier to get some initial dates.

32. State of the Union – Nick Hornby 3/3

After High Fidelity and About A Boy, State of the Union was the third book of Nick Horny that I read this year. The book follows Tom and Louise, a married couple whose marriage is falling apart and that decides to go to couple therapy. Each chapter of the book describes how Tom and Louise meet in a pub just before their weekly therapy session starts.

I really enjoyed the setup of the book. It is fun to see week after week how the story and relationship develops. The book is a quick and easy read, but one that I enjoyed a lot.

Also, if one ever gets to the point where one does not live together anymore but goes to couple therapy to fix things, it does seem like a rather good idea to meet for a drink before every therapy session.

33. Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

In 2023, I had already read Breath. It had a large impact on my life, making me change to nasal breathing, which in turn led to a lot of ways I feel better from a health perspective than some years ago.

Since the book had such an impact on me, I decided to re-read it, pretty much exactly two years after I first read it. It is still a really great book! Some of the advice I had already forgotten about since I first read the book, so it was good to re-read. Other advice I’ve been following for the last two years, and it was really motivating to see what an impact it has made.

34. Table for Two

A few years ago, I read, and really enjoyed, A Gentleman in Moscow, another book from Amor Towles. So when I saw his new book Table for Two appear in bookstores, I had to read it.

The book consists of short stories, all playing in New York City, and a novella, playing in Los Angeles. The short stories span different settings and are all incredibly well written. A couple of them also made a lasting impression on me as I occasionally recall them.

The novella continues the story of Rules of Civility, which I had not read before. While it was not necessary to have read it before, the novella is quite different to the short stories. I found it enjoyable to read but I probably would not have bundled it with the short stories that are somewhat different in nature.

35. Lifespan

David Sinclair is a Harvard professor that researches aging: why we age and how to prevent aging. Lifespan is his pop-scientific book describing the aim and results of his research.

At the core of this is the idea that aging is not some inherent process that we cannot control but that it is a disease that should be measured and treated just like any other disease. However, Sinclair considers it to be the most serious disease in that it affects absolutely everyone and leads to many other diseases down the road.

I found the book to be an intriguing read. The take on aging was novel to me and it was interesting to read about his, and other, theories of why the human body ages, and what we can do about it.

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s books on biology

36. The Emperor of All Maladies ☆ – Siddhartha Mukherjee 1/3

Cancer is the deadliest disease of our time, jointly with heart diseases. The Emperor of All Maladies is a biography of cancer, covering chronologically how it was first discovered, how people started to develop an understanding of it, and then engineered treatment methods, initially crude ones but then increasingly more sophisticated ones, against it. As such, the book spans many centuries of discoveries.

The author of the book, Siddhartha Mukherjee, is a doctor, specializing in cancer. As such, the book also contains detailed biological explanations of how cancer, and its treatment methods, work. However, Mukherjee is also an absolutely incredible writer, turning the book into an intriguing read. I’m not surprised that he won the Pulitzer Prize for the book.

Something I in particular gained an appreciation for while reading the book is how long cancer a history cancer actually has, and how significantly the treatment methods of it have improved, even in recent years. Before reading the book, my take would have been that it is a really new disease (or set of diseases) and that we do not yet really know how to treat it. However, there has been absolutely astonishing progress in cancer medicine in recent years. It’s not perfect of course and there are many cancers we cannot treat, or prevent, well yet, but there are equally many success stories, and so while treatments are clearly not sufficient yet, there is a lot of hope for even more advancements in the future.

37. The Song of the Cell – Siddhartha Mukherjee 2/3

After reading The Emperor of All Maladies, I decided to read all of Mukherjee’s books this year. They all follow a similar setup: they describe some biological phenomenon (cancer, cells, genes) in a historical form, describing mostly chronologically what, and how, people figured out certain things. This is super interesting to follow along, in particular as you get to learn about how science developed. However, one also learns a huge amount of biology along the way.

The Song of the Cell, in particular, tells the history of cellular biology: how people figured out that there is a thing like cells, how the biology theory of them developed, and how that gave rise to new ways of approaching medicine. It’s a super interesting read that one can learn a lot from. Also, the title of the book is just absolutely beautiful.

38. The Gene – Siddhartha Mukherjee 3/3

The Gene is Mukherjee’s third book, covering the history of genes: how people first assumed there might be some underlying mechanism to heredity, how the idea of genes was devised, how some interpretations of heredity lead to some incredibly dark periods for humanity, and how gene research drives science today.

The book also tells a rather personal story of Mukherjee’s family, in which several members suffer from psychological problems, something which the family assumes might be a matter of heredity. To investigate this further, the author decides to learn more about genes, and their history. While this of course a rather sad reason to learn about this, I found it moving to read about and an inspiring reason to write the book.

All in all, the book was a great read and I really enjoyed it. Though after having read these three, rather thick, books on biology and the history of biology, I was really in the need of reading something else again.

39. Rules of Civility

Rules of Civility is the third book of Amor Towles that I read. Set in New York City in 1937, and the years following, it covers the two stories of two young women and their life in the city, in terms of their emerging careers, dating, and other relationships that develop over time.

I read the book while I was spending a few weeks in New York City at the end of Fall 2025. That was a really great time to read the book, as I was able to feel its vibe a lot better and kept reading about places in the city that I already visited, or wanted to visit afterwards.

The book is written in an incredibly elegant fashion, and I really enjoyed the description of the relationships. There’s also a particular quote from the book I keep having to think of:

By the Summer that Val and I had begun seeing each other, we were still in our thirties and had missed little more than a decade of each other’s adult lives; but that was time enough. It was time enough for whole lives to have been led and misled.

I turned 30 not too long ago before reading the book, and the quote is one that hits hard when I reflect on life.

40. Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop

Welcome to the Hyunam-Dong Bookshop is a book that I kept seeing in book stores, and eventually decided to read. It tells the story of Yeongju, a woman that burns out at a corporate work and decides to open a book store. While running a book store is not likely to be a financially savvy decision, it makes her happy, and she thus decides to do it. The book then tells the story of her and the other people that visit the book store or work their part time.

Besides this being an interesting story to follow along, the book also discusses deeper questions: what should the meaning of work in our life be and how does society value work vs. how should it do so ideally. However, it also covers some literary aspects of what should a book store stock and what does good writing look like. Both were cool to read about.

All in all, I found the book to be an enjoyable mix of different topics. I also really appreciated the general vibe of the book: do in life what makes you happy and do not be obessed with just earning a lot and working hard for the sake of working hard.

41. Seize the Day

Seize the Day tells the story of Tommy Wilhelm, who after a failed career in Hollywood tries to navigate his life in New York City, which is genuinely quite messy: he is in the process of being divorced, does not see his kids often, has financial problems, and a rocky relationship with his father. The book starts off with Wilhelm deciding to invest his last life savings in a questionable manner by accepting an offer from his psychologist. That of course does not make things any less messy.

The book then follows Wilhelm as he tries to fix things. It is an easy and straightforward read, and I found the story engaging, though at times it was also rather frustrating to see Wilhelm’s poor decisions without being able to intervene myself.

Books in German

42. Das Kind in dir muss Heimat finden

Stefanie Stahl, the book’s author, is a psychologist. In Das Kind in dir muss Heimat finden, she discusses how our childhood impacts our personality and beliefs. These in turn impact how we behave as adults today and how we deal with relationships and conflicts.

The book provides lots of practical guidance on how to analyze the effects of our experiences, as well as some exercises for the reader. I thought it was a really neat book with some great advice.

43. Starke Füsse

Our feet are core to many of our activities, from walking to running and many other forms of exercise. However, the muscles of our feet (as opposed to the muscles of the legs) and proper form of using them are often underlooked. This book covers the anatomy of feet and their muscles, and how to systematically strengthen and take care of them.

It might sound like a really specialized book, but it is both an easy and worthwhile read, and I took some good habits away from it.

Reflecting on the year, I ended up reading a lot more in the first half of the year. Particularly the last couple of months of the year were too stressful, and I did not get to read too much unfortunately. For 2026, I’d like to read more consistently again. It doesn’t have to be exactly a book a week, but it would be nice to keep the routine going at a somewhat even pace, even if slower.

On a side note, this was the first year where LLM-driven editors (via Cursor) significantly helped me with the writing of the blog post, from finding and inserting all the book links, to making sure the book images are in the right formats and resized correctly. Pretty neat!

Gemma 3n

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 20:21:01 +0000

Google DeepMind just released the new Gemma 3n family of models. They are open-weight models, support multimodality natively, and come in sizes of 4B, 12B and 27B parameters. The developer guide has some more details on that.

Something cool to look for in the announcement video (at 0:47) is the computer control demo that I both worked on and recorded:

The demo also shows some fun pictures that I took on hikes here in Switzerland to fill up the screen besides the recipe photo that is used in the demo.

The video at 0:47

Who would have thought that my hiking photos from Lugano, Pilates and Uri would ever make it into a Google announcement.

What I read in 2024

Tue, 31 Dec 2024 10:21:01 +0000

2024 is coming to an end, so it is again time for me to reflect on what I have read this year. I ended up reading 39 books this year, of which most were non-fiction, and many were health-related. Just like every year, I will summarize all the books I have read.

My five favorite (☆) books of the year were:

The Idea Factory (9.)
I’m Off Then (11.)
Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead (14.)
Good Energy (26.)
Winter Swimming (28.)

However, it is always difficult to pick the top five books since I genuinely liked most of the books I read this year.

1. Elon Musk

Walter Isaacson has written several popular biographies, for example of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein. In late 2023, he published his newest book, a detailed biography of Elon Musk’s life. While Elon Musk is definitely a super interesting, albeit controversial, person, I was initially unsure whether I should read the book. It is over 600 pages long, and one reads so much about Elon Musk all the time anyways that I was not sure this would be exciting enough to read 600 pages.

In the end, I did read the book, and I was really happy that I decided to do so. 600 pages may sound like a lot, but it really is not for describing Elon Musk’s life. There is so much to cover, from an unusual childhood in South Africa, his university years, Zip2, PayPal, SpaceX, Tesla, AI explorations, a tumultuous personal life, and of course the Twitter takeover. Because of this, I ended up finding each chapter genuinely interesting. There is so much to cover that there is just no space for adding fluff.

The book also does a really good job at covering Musk’s style of leading companies. It describes how the impressive achievements happened, without glorifying potential flaws. Isaacson did a great job at covering super interesting things, while providing a nuanced view on them. I thought it was a really great book.

However, in hindsight, I wonder whether the biography was written too early. 2024 would have been an interesting year to include in the biography.

2. Immune

Philipp Dettmer is the creator of Kurzgesagt, a pop-scientific YouTube channel with amazing story telling and visualizations. In Immune, he explains the human immune system in a bottom-up manner. Step by step, he introduces increasingly complex mechanisms of the immune system to fight off diseases.

The entirety of the book consists of amazing story telling. It feels as much as reading a pop-scientific book as it feels like reading an interesting history book about an ancient battle, just that it is the immune system and a disease battling it out. I had a blast reading the book and learned so much from it, so I can only recommend it.

3. The Missing Cryptoqueen

The Missing Cryptoqueen was originally a BBC podcast about Dr Ruja Ignatova, a Bulgarian-German scam artist that founded a fraudulent crypto currency. The book re-tells the story of the podcast, which is an investigation from BBC journalists into how the crypto scam worked and what happened to Ruja Ignatova.

The book was interesting to read. However, there are more mysteries than resolutions, so at times it did not feel quite satisfactory to read the book. The endless crypto scams also get a bit repetitive over time. Nevertheless, it felt like an important book to educate people about such scams.

4. Feel-Good Productivity

Ali Abdaal is a popular YouTuber who makes videos about productivity. Feel-Good Productivity is his new book about achieving productivity in a way that makes you happy and feel good.

Initially, I was a bit skeptical about reading yet another productivity book. However, I ended up really liking the book. It is very well structured, has great examples and some really sensible advice that I had not seen before. I am pretty sure that I will eventually re-read the book to fully absorb the advice.

5. Too Close to the Wind

In 2023, Credit Suisse, Switzerland’s then second largest bank, was about to collapse and ended up being acquired by UBS, Switzerland’s largest bank. Too Close to the Wind is the story of what really happened to Credit Suisse in the years before and during the UBS takeover.

Living in Zurich, the Credit Suisse collapse was a huge topic here in the last couple of years, which made the book even more interesting to read. The book ended up consisting of a mix of finance topics and a lot of inter-personal drama that happened behind the scenes. I found it a well-research book, albeit with a writing style that sometimes felt over the top.

6. Think Again

Think Again is a pop-scientific book about re-thinking, i.e. re-evaluating one’s beliefs in the face of new evidence. While we often think of intelligence as being able to learn quickly, unlearning and re-learning can be even more difficult. On top of that, these are skills that we often do not get taught in school.

The book was exactly the type of book I’m really into: pop-scientific about psychology and one gets to learn about how to avoid common flaws in thinking. And fortunately, the book did not disappoint. It is well-written and contains lots of really interesting observations and theories.

7. Building a Second Brain

While we have access to more information than ever before, it is hard to remember everything we would like to remember. The book Building a Second Brain proposes that we do not need to focus on remembering, but instead on properly building up our own, digital knowledge base, i.e. a second brain. The author discusses techniques for how exactly to do that.

While I was quite on board with the initial idea, I found the book to be incredibly repetitive. I’m pretty sure one could easily compress the book into a 40 page essay without losing too much content.

8. What is Life?

What is Life is the first volume of What is Intelligence, a series about the nature of intelligence and how it evolved. The series is written by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an artificial intelligence researcher and VP at Google. I find Blaise an incredibly inspiring person, with ideas that very few other people out there have as early as him.

This first volume, What is Life, discusses the computational nature of life, the role of self-replication and emerging complexity. It masterfully combines many different disciplines, from computer science and machine learning to biology and philosophy. I found it to be an amazing read and can only recommend it.

9. The Idea Factory ☆

The original Bell Labs used to be the world’s greatest industrial research lab. Some of the things pioneered at Bell Labs were the first transistors, lasers, information theory, Unix, the C programming language and communication satellites. The list of inventions is so incredible that I have a hard time finding a modern equivalent to it; probably Google Research and DeepMind come closest to it.

The Idea Factory tells the story of this amazing research lab – how it came to be, what made it so successful and what it was like working there. I found the book to be an amazing read. Bell Labs seems like a magical place, and it was so interesting to learn more about it.

10. Who Are We Now?

After reading, What is Life?, I decided that I would also like to read one of Blaise’s other books, Who Are We Now?. At the heart of the book are surveys that Blaise, the author, performed over the course of many years. In these surveys, he asks Americans about behavior and identity, for example about gender and sexuality. The book then analyzes the results of these surveys and discusses how to think about them.

I found it to be an amazing book. In particular, the book made me realize that many, seemingly simple, questions can be much more complex than one would think at first. For example, I still have in mind the author’s survey about handedness, where one might naively assume that there are just two possible answers (left and right handedness). However, it turns out that there are many more complex yet reasonable answers, just as there are with many other questions.

11. I’m Off Then ☆

Hape Kerkeling is a German comedian that in 2001 decided to march the 500 mile Camino de Santiago pilgrim route. Being rather unprepared, Kerkeling is not the type of person you would expect to do this on a whim. However, Kerkeling is also really determined not to give up.

I’m Off Then is his diary of how he manages to do the pilgrimage. Every day, he reflects back on his day, covering both his adventures as well as his mental state. I found it to be a superb book. Kerkeling is both eloquent and well-reflected, making it a joy to follow along. Though I am not a religious person, the book made me think that I might want to do something similar at some point in my life.

12. Designing Your Life

Designing your Life was originally a class at Stanford, and then turned into a book. Its fundamental thesis is that life should be purposefully lived, i.e. one should design it based on what one wants from life. To do a good job at this, one can use design principles.

All of the advice in the book is sound, and I also found some part of it to be thought-provoking. However, I think that I read the book at the wrong time of my life. The book has a lot of exercises to figure out how one should design their life, and, at the time of reading, I just did not have enough headspace to do them properly. That’s on me though, and maybe I’ll eventually re-read the book.

13. Influence Empire: The Story of Tencent

Tencent is one of the major Chinese tech companies. Among other things, it is the maker of WeChat, the popular Chinese messaging app. The Story of Tencent is a biography of Tencent, telling its story all the way from its creation to its impressive growth and contemporary challenges It also talks about the relationship and competition with other Chinese tech companies, in particular with Alibaba.

I found the book to be super interesting. It gave me a good overview of the Chinese tech industry, and it was genuinely interesting to read about how the Chinese tech ecosystem works, what the culture is like, and how different products and tech companies emerged. I particularly liked that the book felt very fair in terms of criticism, addressing both problems with the Chinese system as well as with Western mentality and an often improper sense of superiority.

14. Situational Awareness: The Decade Ahead ☆

Initially I was not sure whether I should count Situational Awareness as a book to be listed in this summary. However, it is such a highly relevant, intriguing and captivating read that it would be a mistake not to do so.

The author, Leopold Aschenbrenner, used to work on alignment problems at OpenAI, and eventually got fired for raising security concerns and allegedly leaking things. In Situational Awareness, he paints a picture of how AI development is likely to continue, what that means for AI security and the geopolitical impacts of that.

I found the book to be absolutely incredible. Aschenbrenner is highly eloquent and has interesting theses to state. He provides good evidence for his predictions and makes important policy suggestions. For people that are interested in AI or geopolitics, this should be a required read. However, it is worth noting that Aschenbrenner is also highly opinionated, in particular when it comes to political issues.

15. Hooked

Hooked is, or at least was at some point, an infamous book in tech companies. It is a pop-scientific psychology book that talks about how to build products that let users form long-lasting and healthy habits. Unfortunately, many tech companies ended up focusing on the long-lasting part of habit creation and less so on the healthy aspects, even though the author emphatically tries to cover both dimensions.

I found the book to be an interesting read. It is cool to learn about the principles behind products that make you stick to them. More generally, I would also say it is a great read for anyone interested in applied psychology.

16. Indistractable

Nir Eyal is the author of both Hooked and Indistractable. A few years after writing Hooked, he became increasingly unhappy that his suggestions were being used to build addictive social media products. At the same time, the companies were ignoring his suggestions of how to build products that lead to healthy habits.

In Indistractable, he takes the user’s point of view, and gives advice on how to control one’s attention to develop healthy ways of interacting with such products. I thought that the book was great, and that Eyal is the perfect person to write it considering that he also wrote the book that social media companies used to make products too addictive.

17. This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends tells the history of cyber attacks. It starts all the way from the very first attacks that were performed on typewriters, way before the internet and common, general-purpose computers. The book then also covers how exploits on the internet came to be, and how bug bounty programs became a thing. Furthermore, the book talks about the geopolitical aspects of it, covering the US as well as other countries like Israel, Iran, Russia and China.

I found the book to be super interesting. I learned a lot of things, and most of the time it felt like reading a real-life thriller.

18. Glucose Revolution

Glucose is the primary source of energy for cells in the body. After digesting food, the body distributes glucose via the blood stream. However, when eating food with lots of sugar or carbs, and with too little fiber, too much glucose can enter the blood stream all at once. In such situations, the body releases more insulin to deal with the large amounts of glucose.

However, when this commonly happens, the body gets more resistant to insulin and has a harder time dealing with glucose in the blood stream. Furthermore, processing large amounts of glucose all at once is generally taxing for the body. As such, regularly eating large amounts of sugary and carb-heavy food can lead to insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, and a large array of other diseases.

In Glucose Revolution, Jessie Inchauspé, who also happens to be running the Glucose Goddess social media account, explains all of this in detail as well as strategies for better nutrition and health habits. I learned a ton of things from the book, and it really made me change a bunch of habits for the better. I also ended up using a glucose monitor for a couple of weeks after reading the book.

19. Grain Brain

After liking Glucose Revolution so much, I decided to also read Grain Brain. It covers a similar range of topics, but is much more focused on grains and the many health consequences of regularly eating highly-processed grains.

The book also made me change many habits, and I now consume way less grains and pretty much no highly processed ones. So all in all, I think it was worth reading the book. However, I have to say that some parts of the book seemed a bit unscientific and hyperbolic, so it felt like a book where one has to carefully consider the advice given.

20. Hygge

Hygge is the Danish concept of happiness. It has no verbatim translation to English, but loosely corresponds to the feeling when you’re warm and cozy inside with candles around you while it is raining or cold outside. It also happens to be that the Danish are among the happiest nations in the world, as measured by various surveys.

In the book Hygge, Meik Wiking, the founder of the Happiness Research Institute in Copenhagen, talks about the Danish approach to life. It was really a feel-good book to read and I learned lots of things. The book also really makes me want to visit Copenhagen.

21. Brain Energy

We often treat diseases of the brain, e.g. among many others, depression, ADHD, schizophrenia, and autism, as completely separate diseases, each neatly classified into its own thing. However, in the brain and body, all of these diseases follow common patterns. In particular, they are all heavily impacted by the body’s metabolism, i.e. how well our cells can function, including turning nutrients into energy and repairing the body.

Brain Energy takes such a holistic point of view on the connection of metabolism to mental health. It explains the science behind this, and then exhaustively discusses how various diseases of the brain are in particular impacted by metabolism. Furthermore, the author also provides practical advice for how to fix one’s metabolism to better deal with such diseases.

I found the book to be a great read. The book really made me see things more holistically and appreciate the role of metabolism, and having a healthy lifestyle. However, at times, I found the book too repetitive since it really goes through many individual diseases where things look fairly similarly from a metabolic perspective.

Furthermore, there was a good amount of overlap with Good Energy. If one is only willing to read a single book on the role of metabolism, I would recommend Good Energy since it covers not only mental health but also other diseases that are impacted by metabolism.

22. On the Edge

Nate Silver is a statistician and author that became famous for his incredibly accurate election predictions in 2008 and 2012. In 2017, I read his first book, The Signal and the Noise. I learned a ton of things from that book, in particular on getting a better intuition on statistics and predictions. So when I saw that Silver’s new book, On the Edge, would be released in 2024, I immediately put it on my reading list.

Unfortunately, I found the book to be somewhat disappointing. Silver talks about what he calls The River, a group of people, common in the worlds of Silicon Valley, Hedge Funds and poker, that are particularly adept at thinking about risk in quantitative and systematic ways. He then covers what exactly he understands by such decision making and how that applies to different things in the world. While I would like to consider myself part of this “River”, I found the naming and the grouping of people a bit silly.

Furthermore, a large chunk of the book covers Silver’s experience of playing poker at a professional level. I had already read a lot about poker and blackjack, and so these stories just were not that interesting to me anymore. Looking back at the book, I don’t think it made the impact on me that his first book did, and I’m a bit sad about that given my high expectations.

23. A Poison Like No Other

Plastics are all around us, from packaging for food to cosmetics and cookware. This has also led to a crazy amount of plastic in the environment, particularly the oceans. Sometimes this plastic breaks down into microplastics, e.g. when heat or acidity are applied to it. Microplastics harm both the environment and our health, and are increasing at alarming levels.

A Poison Like No Other tells the story of how this came to be and how bad the situation really is. Even in the most remote places, we can now measure significant amounts of microplastics in the environment. The book consists of interviews with scientists as well as the author’s journey to learning more about this. I thought the book was a good read, and it really made me much more conscious about trying to avoid the use of plastic as much as possible.

Originally, this tweet from Andrej Karpathy made me want to read the book. I still think that he summarizes a great takeaway from the book.

24. The Good Gut

The gut microbiome is the set of bacteria that live in one’s digestive system, in particular in the gut. They not only help us to break down and absorb nutrients but also play a key role in the immune system. Furthermore, it turns out that the gut also has a strong connection to the brain, and that a healthy and diverse gut microbiome has a strong impact on mental health as well. How exactly your gut microbiome looks like depends on what you eat, how you grew up and in what environment you live now.

The Good Gut is a book written by Justin and Erica Sonnenburg, a husband-wife team that jointly runs an academic lab at Stanford, focusing on the gut microbiome. In the book, they explain the science behind the gut microbiome affects our immune system and mental health. They also provide practical advice and make a strong case for regularly eating fermented food to nourish the gut microbiome.

I really liked the book. The gut microbiome is just super fascinating and so cool to learn about. I’ve been eating fermented food regularly for about a year now, but the book also convinced me that I want to make my own kimchi and kefir.

Lastly, I have to say that the dynamics of how the gut microbiome comes to be and interacts with the rest of the brain also remind me of what I’m interested in in the field of artificial intelligence: how different intelligent models interact and jointly influence each other. In the gut microbiome, it’s bacteria instead of models, but the dynamics are just as interesting.

25. The Interior Design Handbook

At some point this year, I decided that I want to make my apartment feel more homely. Maybe that was caused by reading Hygge which made me really desire this warm, cozy feeling of a home.

In the process of this, I decided that I would like to learn more about interior design. The Interior Design Handbook is the book that I ended up reading to that end.

The book has lots of great advice, visualizations and gives a really good, systematic overview of things. I can only recommend it. The three main things I took away from the book is that I would like to have more plants in my flat, more photos and that paying attention to the right kind of light is really important.

26. Good Energy ☆

Metabolism has many connections to different aspects of health. This not only includes mental health, as discussed in Brain Energy, but also various other diseases. In Good Energy, Casey and Calley Means, the authors, discuss why this is the case and provide practical health advice.

I really enjoyed the book. It has lots of great advice and really made me see some things through a different lens. The book also convinced me that I should be trying heat and cold exposure, in the form of sauna and ice bathing.

Another new practice I took away from the book was mindful eating and practicing gratefulness for one’s food. Now I try to do this for at least one meal, but ideally most meals, a day, by considering the food consciously and thinking about what I am thankful for.

27. How Emotions Are Made

Lisa Feldman Barrett is a psychologist that studies emotions – what they are and how they are expressed in different cultures. When she started her research, it was the common assumption that a default set of emotions are hardwired into us and expressed the same way across cultures. However, Feldman Barrett discovered that this is not true; there are no universal emotions and things can really differ across cultures.

Instead, Feldman Barrett put forward the new theory of constructed emotions. In this theory, emotions are learned and reactions are predictive. We model our environment and react to what we think will happen. How exactly this happens differs across cultures, and can also vary significantly across different individuals.

All in all, the book was a really great read and I learned lots of things from it.

28. Winter Swimming ☆

After Good Energy convinced me that ice bathing is a good thing to do for one’s health, I wanted to read more about the topic. I came across the Winter Swimming book through Huberman’s podcast, where Susanna Søberg was the guest for an episode on cold and heat exposure. Søberg did her PhD on the topic, and hence this seemed like a great book to read.

I ended up absolutely loving the book. It gives a great overview of the science on the topic, with many interesting studies – for example, did you know that regularly taking cold showers significantly reduces one’s risk of catching a cold?

Furthermore, the vibe of the book is just great. Most of the book plays at a winter swimming club in Copenhagen and it’s just a joy to read. The book not only made me integrate ice bathing and sauna into my weekly routine, but it also changed my view of Winter – now there’s really something to look forward to in Winter, and that makes all the difference in a season without as much sunlight.

29. The Comfort Crisis

The Comfort Crisis tells the story of Michael Easter, who decides to spend a month on a back-country hunting expedition in Alaska. This story line is intertwined with how he prepares for this trip, as well as with many interviews on the topic, covering both the spiritual and the scientific parts of living fairly isolated in the wilderness.

I did not at all identify with the author’s desire to go hunting. However, I think that he brings up some really good points on meat consumption and hunting. It now seems like an odd ethical stance to me to be willing to buy meat in the supermarket, from animals that were raised in terrible conditions, while condemning hunting for meat of animals that lived long and healthy lives. Particularly, since the author only kills elderly animals, tries to do so in a sustainable way with respect to the herd, and also in a manner that leads to as little pain as possible for the animal.

Similarly, the author makes good points about us being too used to many comforts of daily life, and thus being often out of touch. All in all, I’m still not the kind of person that would go on a hunting trip, but the book did make me reconsider some things in a good way.

30. Revenge of the Tipping Point

Malcom Gladwell is one of my favorite authors. Among the books that I read from his last year was The Tipping Point. The book talks about how trends happen: at first very slowly, and then suddenly, when a tipping point is reached, seemingly all at once. In the process, there are people that are particularly good at seeing trends happen before it reaches the tipping point.

Revenge of the Tipping Point can be considered an addendum to the original book, though it can certainly also be read as a standalone book. Gladwell covers various new phenomena about tipping points that he became aware of, sprinkled with interesting stories around them, e.g. on why the Ivy League cares so much about sports, and why some neighborhoods in the US went so quickly from being all-white to being all-black neighborhoods.

I found the book to be an incredible read. As always, Gladwell finds the most interesting stories and tells them incredibly eloquently. At the same time, he notices fascinating patterns in things and suggests intriguing models for them.

31. Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain

After reading How Emotions Are Made from Lisa Feldman Barrett, and really liking it, I decided to read her other book, Seven and a Half Lessons about the Brain. The book consists, as the title aptly states, of seven chapters, each discussing an insight about the brain in more detail. There is also a half lesson, which is that the brain is not just for thinking but also for keeping our body running and regulating lots of things.

I thought the book was really great. It’s an easy read, covering lessons about the brain at a high level. At the same time, it was super intriguing, with lots of ideas I hadn’t really thought about before. Since reading the book, I can’t get the idea of the predictive brain out of my head; the concept that we not only process the world as it is now but also based on what we think will happen. Clearly that’s useful behavior evolutionary, and there is lots of evidence that this is also what people do.

32. Waking Up

Sam Harris is a neuroscientist that I mostly heard about before through his advocacy for meditation. In Waking Up, he talks about spirituality without religion. One part of the book is autobiographic, while the other is exploring spirituality from a scientific lens.

I found the book to be super interesting to read. I got some new view points on various things, and became more curious about the concept of ‘spirituality without religion’. However, I found the last part of the book to be less inspiring. It is mostly warning of false gurus, which makes sense, but also felt more obvious and dull to read about.

33. Ikigai

Reading Hygge inspired me to also read about the Japanese way of life, Ikigai. Similarly to Hygge, there is no direct translation to English, but Ikigai loosely maps to the concept of finding one’s purpose in life, the reason to get up in the morning.

The book was an interesting and fun read. However, it was not as specific to the Japanese way of life as I was hoping for. Instead it also covered longevity on a high, but crude, level that felt like too much of a diversion from what the cover advertised. Longevity is an interesting topic, and one I’ve been reading a lot about, but I think this just did not do its justice.

34. The Wim Hof Method

Wim Hof is probably the person most well known for popularizing ice bathing. He holds many world records and is an outspoken proponent of ice bathing. After Winter Swimming was such a great read, I took an ice bathing class that involved some Wim Hof breathing exercises. To learn more about this element of breath in cold exposure, I decided to read Wim Hof’s book.

However, that was a mistake. This was quite easily the worst book I’ve read all year. Most of the book consists of Hof boasting about his accomplishments, while explaining little what to do, let alone why those techniques actually work. It reads more of an autobiography, and less like a book that is supposed to help people with something.

I’m glad that my first exposure to ice bathing wasn’t through this book. Otherwise, I probably would’ve stayed far away from the practice.

35. The Vegetarian

In 2024, Han Kang was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. The Vegetarian is one of her acclaimed works. It tells the story of Yeong-hye, a Korean woman who, after a particularly bad nightmare, decides to turn vegetarian. Her family’s initial reaction is disbelief, though over time that morphs into much more adverse reactions.

All in all, I’m still not quite sure what to think about the book. It was interesting to read about Korea’s culture with respect to meat and being Vegetarian. However, the story of the book gets increasingly more bizarre and hard to follow, and eventually is about much more than just being Vegetarian. It’s definitely a novel that one needs to actively interpret, and I found that progressively harder and harder to do.

36. I Don’t Want To Talk About It

Depression is a hidden epidemic among men. While of course all genders can suffer from depression, men are particularly likely to hide it. This leads to the impressive statistic that, in the US, women are twice as likely to be diagnosed, while men have four times higher suicide rates, with depression being one of the main factors.

In I Don’t Want To Talk About it, Terrence Real, the author and a practicing therapist, talks about why this is and what to do about it. A lot of his advice comes down to culture and how boys are raised. It is common to tell boys to “toughen up” or to “take it like a man”, instead of openly discussing one’s feelings. Similarly, it is still common that men are expected to hide any pain and weaknesses.

Besides talking about these issues, the book is intertwined with the stories of many patients of the author, as well as his own personal story with his dad. I found the book to be an incredible, deeply touching read. A good chunk of the book applies not only to men but to everyone more broadly. However, given how men are especially unlikely to talk about their issues, it is probably also good that such a dedicated book exists.

Books in German

While I mostly read in English, I did end up reading the following three books in German. As far as I’m aware, there are no English translations of those books.

37. Gebt mir etwas Zeit

After liking I’m Off Then so much, I decided to read Kerkeling’s newest book, Gebt Mir Etwas Zeit. The book is currently only available in German and the title translates to “give me some time”.

Kerkeling has spent several years trying to reconstruct his family history, as far back as multiple centuries. In the book, he talks about how he did this as well as selected stories of particularly noteworthy lives of relatives.

The book has some interesting stories, as well as his own, personal and deeply heart-breaking love story. It was an interesting read, but a lot of the other side stories in the book felt too repetitive.

38. Ein starker Körper kennt keinen Schmerz

Werner Kieser was a Swiss athlete and entrepreneur that founded a gym chain, named after him, that is popular in German-speaking countries and that is known for its scientific approach to weight training.

In this book, Kieser shares lots of advice on weight training and on different exercises. I thought it was a great read and much more scientifically rigorous than a lot of related material out there. For me it was particularly interesting since I go to one of his gyms and I can really tell that they implemented a lot of the advice given in the book.

39. Norwegen: Reisen im Land der Fjorde

This book provides travel advice for Norway, as well as lots of amazing pictures. I thought the book was beautifully done. I can’t wait to go to Norway some time – maybe in 2025.

Looking back at the year, I am really happy with the breadth of books, and think I learned a lot from reading this year. However, I ended up a little bit behind my goal of the 52 books a year that I read in 2023 and 2022. I think this was mostly because I have been reading a lot more papers this year, and thus did not get as much to reading books.

Next year, I hope to get back to 52 books a year again.

Social Learning

Thu, 07 Mar 2024 23:23:10 +0000

This post describes my work at Google: https://blog.research.google/2024/03/social-learning-collaborative-learning.html

LLMs Understand Base64

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 16:00:01 +0000

A fun thing I recently learned about Large Language Models (LLMs) is that they understand base64, a simple encoding of text. Here’s a demonstration: the base64 encoding of What is 2 + 3? is V2hhdCBpcyAyICsgMz8=. Passing that to an LLM, say ChatGPT or Gemini, answers the question perfectly:

Both ChatGPT and Gemini understand base64 questions

And that isn’t just a one-off. It works remarkably well. Here’s another example: taking the string What is the capital of Finland? and converting it to base64 yields V2hhdCBpcyB0aGUgY2FwaXRhbCBvZiBGaW5sYW5kPw==. Again, prompting the LLM with that works just as well as prompting it with the original string:

Many types of prompts work in base64

Like anything with LLMs, the behavior isn’t 100% consistent. Sometimes the models also reply in base64. Sometimes they just decode from base64 and don’t actually answer the question encoded in the message. And sometimes they flat out refuse to respond at all.

Still, LLMs understand base64 surprisingly well. But why is that? Let’s investigate.

How base64 works

Base64 is a simple encoding of strings. The 64 characters [a-zA-Z0-9+/] form the base of the encoding. A base64 string of length 10 can thus represent 64^10 different messages.

Base64 mappings per Wikipedia

To encode a UTF-8 string in base64, you take its binary representation and use the above table to encode it as base64. The = character is used at the end of the base64 representation if there is a need to pad to a certain length. That is why many strings encoded in base64 will end with an equals sign. To decode, you simply take the binary representation and convert from that to your target encoding.

But why do LLMs understand base64? Admittedly, the transformation is rather simple, and the fact that many base64 strings will end with a = makes them easy to detect. However, there is a transformation needed that would not happen naturally during the LLM’s tokenization or embedding steps. Converting three UTF8-encoded characters produces four completely different characters in base64. To convert, there is some work needed that would not happen anyways just because of the way the model is set up.

base64 on the internet

The solution in the puzzle probably lies in the fact that there is plenty of base64 on the internet. Base64 is commonly used in web development to encode things, e.g. images. Hence, there are also a lot of tutorials on the internet on how base64 actually works.

During pre-training, LLMs are commonly trained on massive amounts of data scraped from the internet. The typical task they are trained on is masked token prediction. Of course, if you have to predict masked tokens on a website containing base64, it is rather beneficial to understand how base64 works.

To illustrate this, let’s take the second sentence of this blog post:

The base64 encoding of What is 2 + 3? is V2hhdCBpcyAyICsgMz8=.

Let’s say we mask it like this:

The base64 encoding of What is 2 + [MASK]? is V2hhdCBpcyAyICsgMz8=

The LLM is now asked to predict the missing token and trained on whether it got it right or wrong. How can it figure out the missing token? Either it memorizes all instances of base64 on the internet, or it learns how to encode and decode base64. The latter is of course much simpler and more feasible, so that’s what training the model will guide it to.

More concretely, during training, the model will make predictions for masked tokens, such as the one above. If it does not get it right, its weights will be updated to move in a direction where it will be more likely to get the masked token right, hence taking a step towards understanding base64.

Training on the above example of masking thus enforces an understanding of how to decode from base64. Conversely, you could also mask it this way to induce an understanding of how to encode to base64:

The base64 encoding of What is 2 + 3? is [MASK].

To get the masked token right, the model needs to be able to convert to base64.

Learning and compression

Effectively, learning to encode and decode base64 is a form of compression. It is more economical to learn the rule than to memorize all instances of the rule being applied.

It’s been a longstanding saying that compression is learning, and vice versa. That idea always made some intuitive sense to me – if you want to compress things, you need to understand patterns in the data you are trying to compress. With LLMs, I find it much easier to illustrate that idea though.

Here’s a hypothetical example to this end: let’s say you have a corpus of all 100M+ books written in the entire history of our world. How can you compress that? Many of the books are translated to several other languages. Hence, one way to compress would be to just keep the original copies and then learn how to translate them well into the other languages. It’s a lossy form of compression because you wouldn’t always verbatim reconstruct the phrases actually used in the books. But it’s a form of compression nevertheless. The more books and the more languages you want to compress, the better it works.

LLMs understanding base64 is a bit like that. Instead of memorizing both the decoded and encoded strings, it is much cheaper to learn how base64 works. However, this time, it is not even lossy compression. It is a perfect reconstruction of the original.

But why does the LLM follow instructions?

One question remains though: why do LLMs follow the base64 instruction? A lot of times, they not only decode the message but actively try to answer the question included in the message.

The reason for that behavior is not as obvious to me. My best guess is that LLMs are so tuned to be helpful that it’s just more natural for them to follow the instruction than to just translate it.

Going back to the language translation example: when prompted with an instruction in a different language, LLMs also do their best to follow the instruction. I can e.g. prompt LLMs in French or German, and they will try to answer my questions. They will only translate to English if that’s explicitly what I asked for. Maybe it’s similar with base64; the default behavior taught during instruction tuning is to follow the instruction, not to just convert it to a different encoding.

Conclusion

Concluding the post, LLMs likely understand base64 because it helps them to predict masked tokens on websites that contain base64, of which they are plenty on the internet. This really shows the power of training models to predict masked tokens.

However, the grander thought I have while thinking about this is that it is pretty cool that we’re now at a point in machine learning where models have gotten so good that they surprise us with their abilities. It hasn’t been that long since we’ve had shallow models that were not too difficult to interpret. Over time, models got harder to interpret, but now we’re at a point where models actively surprise us with emergent behavior.

What I read in 2023

Sun, 31 Dec 2023 10:21:01 +0000

As the year is coming to an end, it is time for me to reflect back on what I read this year. Just like last year, I ended up reading about a book a week. That’s a pretty good pace for me, and one that I plan on keeping next year as well.

My five favorite (☆) books of the year were:

Nonviolent Communication (3.)
Sophie’s World (11.)
The Cuckoo’s Egg (14.)
The Undoing Project (30.)
Outlive (45.)

For the first half of the year, I read my usual mix of tech, nonfiction, pop-scientific and applied psychology books. During the past few months, I pivoted to reading a lot more about health and biology, which has been really interesting.

1. Journey to the Edge of Reason

Kurt Gödel was a mathematician who made significant contributions to the field of logic. He grew up in what back then was Austria-Hungary and lived there through a tumultuous period of history, including World War 1 and parts of World War 2. Eventually he fled to the US where he spent his remaining life in Princeton.

The book Journey to the Edge of Reason tells the story of Gödel’s life. It gives detailed context on the environment that Gödel grew up in, explaining the preceding two hundred years of Austrian-Hungarian history. Initially I thought the book gave too much historical background information instead of focusing on Gödel himself. However, I ended up finding the context to be really helpful to get a better sense of the world back then. Gödel lived a fascinating life, and it was really interesting to read about it.

2. Things A Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About

Donald Knuth is one of the founding fathers of the field of analyzing algorithms. He also happens to be religious. In Things A Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About, Knuth discusses his view on faith and how it relates to his work in computer science. He discusses topics like randomness, aesthetics and language translation.

Knuth has a brilliant mind and I really enjoyed reading his views on things. However, it is worth mentioning that the book is derived from a set of lectures, which often feel more like a loose conversation than a well-structured book.

3. Nonviolent Communication ☆

Nonviolent Communication is an approach to communication for discussing difficult topics. It is based on structuring such a conversation into four well-defined parts: an observation, the effect on one’s feeling, how that relates to one’s need, and finally a request to the other person. By strictly separating observations, feelings, needs, and requests, conversations are supposed to become more grounded and it should be easier to focus on how to resolve conflicts.

I had seen this approach recommended in a lot of places, some referring to the book and others referencing a popular video of the author explaining the concept. Initially, I was not too interested in the content since the video seemed quite unstructured and not necessarily that scientific. However, in the end, the recommendations of a couple of friends convinced me. Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s CEO, for example also wanted all of his direct reports to read the book when he became CEO, in order to move to a better style of communication in the company.

I ended up really liking the book. It is very clearly structured and explains the concepts in a nice bottom-up manner. Many chapters end with exercises that are also really helpful. I cannot believe that it took me this long to read the book, and wish I had done so sooner. In hindsight, it would have made some relationships a lot easier if I had been able to communicate in the manner that the book advocates for.

4. After Steve

After Steve tells the story of Apple in the decade after Steve Jobs passed away. It mostly focuses on Tim Cook and Jony Ive, describing their background stories, their personal visions for the company, and how they led Apple through that decade. The reader then learns how various products happened and how different people influenced these products.

I found the book to be incredibly interesting. I really enjoyed hearing about how Apple developed their products and how they overcame various difficulties. To me the title “How Apple Became a Trillion-Dollar Company and Lost Its Soul” also seems like a misnomer after reading the book. A more apt title to me would be “How Apple Became A Trillion-Dollar Company and Handled Various Challenges Fairly Well”, based on how things are characterized in the book.

5. Good Arguments

Beo Seo is a world champion in debating, having won both the high school and university debating world championships. Good Arguments is written in the style of an autobiography, telling Seo’s story of how he got into debating and excelled at it. Along the way, he provides lots of advice on how to have better arguments and on how to be more convincing.

While it was generally fascinating to get a glimpse into the world of debating, I do not think that I was able to learn that much from the book. After having read Nonviolent Communication this year, the world of debating seems somewhat toxic to me. While I understand that this is due to debating being a competition, I disliked that everything is about winning the argument and finding more convincing rhetorics, instead of the real goal of better understanding each position and maybe arriving at some compromise. It looks like I side more with Socrates than Gorgias on the topic of rhetorics.

6. Dataclysm

Dataclysm is a book written by Christian Rudder, the co-founder of a dating application, OkCupid. In the book, Rudder analyzes aggregated online data to show various patterns. Some of these are taken from OkCupid and revolve around dating. Others are from more generic social networks or websites.

I enjoyed learning about the statistics, and liked how neatly they got presented. One can learn really interesting things by looking at large aggregates of social behavior. The book does however not have a very high information density, as it only shows a few such analyses, which I found a bit frustrating.

7. Attached

Attachment theory is a general psychological theory around how people interact with each other. It classifies people into having an anxious, avoidant or secure communication style. One can apply the theory to interactions of children, but also to the dating world. The book Attached, covers the latter topic, and has become somewhat of a cult book.

I really liked reading the book, and think I learned some valuable things from it. In particular, I think the book helps with forming a mental model of what structure relationship styles can have, what these styles might be caused by, and how one best deals with them.

8. The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Ben Horowitz has a long Silicon Valley career, from being an early employee of Netscape to eventually co-running the Venture Capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. In The Hard Thing About Hard Things, Horowitz writes about running startups. The book follows along his career, with Horowitz giving lots of advice along the way.

In some sense, the book is similar to Zero to One from Peter Thiel, which I had read last year. The main difference is that Horowitz’ book is more focused on the specifics of being the CEO of a startup, while Thiel’s book talks more about the macro aspects of how startups find their place in the world.

9. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems

Two years ago, I read the Google software engineering book (SWE book), an amazing book about good software engineering principles. As a follow-up, I decided to read Google’s site reliability engineering (SRE) book, the SRE equivalent to the SWE book. Site reliability engineering is the field of ensuring the software systems run reliably and are scalable. While my work is not related to site reliability engineering at all, I thought it would be an interesting thing to learn about.

The book is well organized. It allows one – even someone like me that has no prior exposure to the field – to get a good glimpse at what site reliability engineering is all about. However, I did not end up enjoying the book as much as the SWE book. While the SWE book is more focused on general principles, the SRE book often delves quite deep into specific tools and implementations, which are not that important for learning about the general field.

I ended up writing detailed reading notes for each chapter.

10. Talking to My Daughter About the Economy

Yanis Varoufakis was Greek’s finance minister during the parts of the Greek financial crisis. In Talking to My Daughter About the Economy, he explains the fundamentals of economics and his view on things. The book is a fairly easy read and well written.

I enjoyed the book to read about fundamentals in a well-explained way. However, it really is written for an audience that has the amount of economics knowledge you would expect an average teenager to have. So in the end, I did not end up taking too many things away from the book.

11. Sophie’s World ☆

Sophie’s World is a fiction book, in which Sophie, a Norwegian teenager, receives letters with philosophic questions. Curious about the letters, she ends up learning more about philosophy. Over the course of the book, she studies all major philosophers, all while attending high school and dealing with other things going on in her life.

However, there are some mysteries in the book, like who is the person sending the letters? And what is up with some seemingly magical things happening in her life? Sophie ends up investigating these mysteries.

It is hard to describe how brilliant the book is, without spoiling anything. I rarely read fiction books, but Sophie’s World is one of these books that’s better described as art in a written form, and that you just have to read. It really is that good.

12. Nudge

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein are professors in behavioral economics. Thaler won the Noble Prize for Economics a few years ago for his contributions to the field. In Nudge, they discuss heir theory of nudging, which describes how designing a decision process impacts how people decide. For example, based on how retirement savings options are presented and how the default is configured, people end up saving very different amounts for retirement. Similarly, people end up picking very different food depending on how supermarkets are organizing.

The book was super interesting to read. I generally really like these pop-scientific psychology books, and this one in particular had a lot of intriguing experiments to read about. I ended up sharing these with lots of people around me.

13. Factfulness

If you read the news regularly, you can be forgiven for thinking that the world is trending in a bad direction and has been for a while. While there are certainly a lot of terrible things happening in the world, that the trend is negative is not true in many, many important areas, like the number of people living in poverty or getting good education.

In Factfulness, Hans Rosling analyzes what progress across the world is really like, and ends up showing that things have in fact dramatically improved in the last decades, and continue to improve. He does this by both analyzing concrete questions and metrics, but also by explaining common instincts people have which make things look much worse than they are.

The book is a brilliant read and really makes one optimistic about the world. I would recommend this book to anyone, but especially to people that consume a lot of news and tend to be depressed by them.

I ended up writing compact reading notes for the chapters.

14. The Cuckoo’s Egg ☆

The Cuckoo’s Egg describes the story of the first documented computer hack, in 1989. Clifford Stoll is the author of the book, and the person first discovering the hack. He is an astronomer by training but ends up getting hired by an academic lab in Berkeley to manage their computers.

In their system, each researcher gets a certain compute budget. The system keeps track of who spend how much. Stoll gets asked to investigate a bug where these accounting numbers do not add up. He ends up discovering that there is an unknown user in the system, who used up compute worth a few cents. It turns out that this is a hacker, and this marks the beginning of a game where Stoll tries to track down the hacker over the computer’s network connections.

The book is written like a thriller. I found it impossible to put the book down. In particular, it is intriguing that this was really the first documented hack, thus many people that Stoll asks for help along the way (e.g. security agencies) have no idea what he is talking about, and are not of much help. However, Stoll is incredibly determined and ends up spending a huge amount of energy on trying to track down the hacker.

15. Genius Makers

Genius Makers is an account of how the machine learning revolution happened. In particular, it tells the stories of the people that made it happen – Hinton, LeCun, Bengio, et al. For someone working on machine learning, this was an intriguing read, with many super interesting stories.

However, in the end, this is a book about people and how things happen, and much less so about how their ideas work. That’s why I think that this book is probably mostly interesting to people already involved with machine learning, and who know the people that the book is about.

16. Talking to Strangers (Malcolm Gladwell 1/7)

In Talking to Strangers, Malcom Gladwell discusses why we so often have a hard time reading strangers. He does this by investigating famous stories of people not correctly gauging the true intentions of strangers. For example, why did Neville Chamberlain trust Hitler not to invade more countries after invading parts of Czechoslovakia? And how was Bernie Madoff able to trick so many people for their money for so many years?

Malcom Gladwell once described his books as “biographies of ideas”. Talking to Strangers fits that description really well. It is incredibly well written and so intriguing to read. After having read the book, I decided to read all seven of Gladwell’s books this year.

17. The Tipping Point (Malcolm Gladwell 2/7)

All trends have this moment where they turn from something only early adopters follow to something that suddenly everybody hears about. Malcolm calls this moment the Tipping Point. In the book, he discusses how this happens to a trend. In his typical style, he does this by following several stories and analyzing the actions of the people that take part in it.

The Tipping Point is an incredible read. It feels like the academic discussion of how marketing in its highest form ought to work. But at the same time, it is deeply entertaining because you keep reading about interesting stories.

18. Blink (Malcolm Gladwell 3/7)

We make many decisions in the blink of an eye. However, some people are incredibly good at these decisions, and are often not even able to explain how they came to the decision. For example, there are cases of art experts recognizing a fake painting at a first glance, without being able to explain why they believe it to be one.

In Blink, Gladwell investigates these stories, and discusses why some people are so good at quickly gauging some things. If Gladwell’s books are biographies of ideas, then this one is about the positive parts of thinking in system 1.

19. Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell 4/7)

We are often quick to equate outsized success with luck, or, in the other extreme, with pure skill. In Outliers, Gladwell looks at the stories of extraordinarily successful people and distills down what really made them so successful. His answer is that outsized success is based on at a young age being in the right place at the right time, and then working incredibly hard to use one’s advantage.

Like in his other books, he discusses his ideas based on many interesting stories. The fundamental ideas that the book describes are fairly simple and could as well be expressed in a simple essay. However, the stories make the book so fun to read, that it is worth reading the whole book.

20. What the Dog Saw (Malcolm Gladwell 5/7)

What the Dog Saw is a collection of Gladwell’s writings as a journalist for The New Yorker. There is a wide range of topics discovered. For example, why are there so many kinds of mustard, but only one kind of ketchup? What is the difference between mysteries and puzzles, and why does that matter?

The stories are incredibly well written and I loved reading them. Gladwell has an amazing gift for finding good stories where others do not see them, and then writing down these stories in elegant ways.

21. David and Goliath (Malcolm Gladwell 6/7)

The book is based on David and Goliath, the biblical story where a young David defeats the giant Goliath in direct combat. Besides this story, the book tells similar ones, where an underdog surprisingly defeats a seemingly much more powerful opponent. However, these stories might not really be what they seem like: Are the Davids really the underdogs, or are we just sometimes bad at correctly gauging one’s chances?

Gladwell discusses this question and others. Like his other books, it really fits the description of “the biography of an idea” very well. I really enjoyed reading the book.

22. The Bomber Mafia (Malcolm Gladwell 7/7)

Warfare has changed a lot over the past centuries, from infantry to cavalry to tanks. In The Bomber Mafia, Gladwell tells the story of how a group of people in the US military tried to make the case for smarter air-based warfare. Their fundamental idea was that instead of fighting long, deathly wars, it would be much smarter to use planes to take out a small number of strategic targets to quickly end a war. It was not obvious at all whether this could be done, e.g. because of the precision this would require from bombing.

I’m not that interested in military history, so I probably would not have read this book if it were not written by Gladwell. However, the book is really less a story about the military than a story about how a small group of innovators changed the strategy of their larger groups. As such, it was really interesting to read about.

23. Why We Sleep

Why We Sleep is a book that argues for why good sleep is really important. It is written by UC Berkeley professor Matthew Walker, who has done a lot of research in the area. Broadly speaking, the book has two kinds of content: descriptions of scientific studies about sleep, and practical advice about how to improve one’s sleep.

While the book has been repeatedly criticized for not accurately representing many studies, it is very effective at convincing one that sleep is crucially important. Even if only half of the studies in the book hold, sleep really matters. So while it is unfortunate that the book was not as rigorously written as it should be, I am still glad that I read it. I managed to really prioritize sleep after reading the book.

24. Sleep

Since I was not entirely content after hearing about the criticism of Why We Sleep, I decided to read another book on the topic. Sleep was that book. It is a more compact book, and much more focused on practical advice than scientific studies.

I ended up taking lots of things away from the book. It is also a really entertaining read. The author advises sports teams on how to optimize their sleep, and has a lot of intriguing stories about that.

25. Empire of Pain

OxyContin was an opium-based pain killer, commonly used in the United States against various things, such as back pain. It turns out that it made a lot of people addicted to it, and that the company developing it was aware of that. Empire of Pain tells this story. However, it is not simply a story of just OxyContin but one of three generations of the family owning the corresponding company, and doing various questionable things in the pharma industry.

The book is written like a thriller. I found it really hard to put the book down. While it is in its core a deeply sad story, the book is also an exemplary case of investigative journalism.

26. Algorithms to Live By

Each chapter of Algorithms to Live By, discusses a concept of computer science and how it can be applied to real life. A typical example of this is the explore-exploit trade-off, which can be applied to many things in daily life, such as picking restaurants.

The book is well written and covers interesting algorithms. However, most of it is also fairly obvious to someone that studied computer science. I would only recommend the book to people coming from other fields.

27. The Monk of Mokha

The Monk of Mokha is the true story of Mokhtar Alkhanshali, who is part of a family of Yemeni descent. He grows up in a troubled part of San Francisco and does not get much of an education. Eventually, he learns that coffee originated from Yemen, a fact that surprises him, given that, nowadays, Yemen exports nearly no coffee beans anymore. He decides to start a coffee business that grows coffee in Yemen and exports it to the world.

The book is absolutely amazing. I had a hard time believing that this really is a nonfiction book. It reads like an incredible adventure.

I also ended up learning a lot of things about coffee while reading the book. For example, I was quite surprised how recent a thing coffee really is, and that a lot of essential techniques for processing it were developed in the US.

28. The Code Breaker

Walter Isaacson has written popular biographies about Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Leonardo da Vinci. The Code Breaker is his book about the biochemist and Noble Prize winner Jennifer Doudna. Doudna works on gene editing technology, which became famous under the name CRISPR. The book is as much a biography about Doudna as it is about the technologies she works on and the scientists around her.

I started reading the book because I was curious about how gene editing technology works. However, in the end, the story of how these technologies were developed was even more interesting. The Code Breaker is a scientific thriller and shows really well how academia at the highest level works. It was one of my favorite books this year.

29. The First Minute

The First Minute is a book describing techniques for better communicating at work. It is a quick read and the ideas described are generally sensible. However, it is also a rather shallow discussion of the ideas, and I do not think that I took enough away from the book to recommend it to others.

30. The Undoing Project ☆

Michael Lewis is one of my favorite authors. I absolutely loved his books Flash Boys, Liar’s Poker, and The Big Short. The Undoing Project is his book about Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, two influential psychologists. I’m also a big fan of their work, as described in Thinking, Slow and Fast. As such, The Undoing Project did not disappoint.

While I was expecting that I would like the book, I did not imagine that I would be as enthusiastic about it as I am now. Kahneman and Tversky have lived amazing lives, full of adventures and unforeseen twists. Furthermore, their relationship is incredibly interesting. They both have very different strengths that combine well. However, since they created their great works jointly, the academic community found it very hard to correctly assign credit between the two. That led to many tensions between them.

It is hard to describe how brilliant the book is. Descriptions I read of it do not really do it justice, so I would recommend to just read the book.

31. Lessons in Chemistry

Lessons in Chemistry tells the story of Elizabeth Zott, who is a chemist but works at a cooking show at the beginning of the book. Elizabeth is smart but lives in a patriarchic world that does not take her seriously as a chemist. The book follows her as she tries to find her place in the world, against all odds.

I had seen Lessons in Chemistry several times in book stores before deciding to read it. The story seemed intriguing but the fact that it is fiction – which I rarely read – put me off for a long time. In the end, I am really happy that I read the book.

Elizabeth is a great main character. It is hard to put the book down as one follows her life, and sees her succeed. However, I disliked that all of the characters are extreme versions of what I think people would really be like: characters are either extremely smart or not at all, discriminating or not, supportive in everything or nothing. There is little subtlety in the character traits.

32. How The World Really Works

Vaclav Smil is a professor doing research around energy and the environment. In How The World Really Works, he explains how the world works in regards to things like energy usage, food production and epidemics. While the title of the book is fairly generic, the book really is quite focused on energy in particular.

Smil knows what he is talking about and makes a convincing case for his arguments. One of the things I took away from the book is that human progress in the past one hundred years has been astonishing: the amount of energy we have available is absolutely crazy compared to what people used to be able to use.

33. Longitude

Knowing your current position in terms of latitude and longitude is important for many things, like navigating ships. Quite early, people figured out how to find out one’s latitude position by observing the stars. How to determine longitude was a lot harder to solve, and this remained an open question for a long time, despite many people looking into it and there being considerable economic interest.

Longitude tells the story of John Harrison, who realized that one might be able to compute longitude based on clocks. The scientific community at the time did not take him seriously at all and provided little support to him. Despite this, Harrison managed to build prototypes and in the end convinced the world that his idea worked.

However, the book is much more than a biography of Harrison. It also provides a window into the time that he lived in, where people had not yet figured out good processes for how to do science.

34. Chip War

Computer chips power many things these days. Chip War tells the story of how the computer chip industry started in Silicon Valley, and how the place where the chips are fabricated has repeatedly changed. As computer chips have become more important, this has become a geopolitical issue. As such, the book combines a technological story with a geopolitical one.

The book is really well written, and I ended up learning lots of things from it. It is also really entertaining to read about. However, the book contains a lot of hyperbole – it repeatedly states that this is the world’s most important technology. While it is arguably important, one can probably call quite a few things “the world’s most important technology”.

35. You’re Not Listening

Kate Murphy, the author of You’re Not Listening, is a journalist. As a journalist, it is crucial to be able to ask good questions and to listen well. In You’re Not Listening, she describes how most people are not able to listen well, why it is important, and what to do about it.

The book consists of many essays around this topic. It is an important topic, and I tried hard to apply some of the ideas to my life afterwards. The individual essays are somewhat repetitive however. It is one of those books that could just as well be one long essay.

36. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman

Richard Feynman was a theoretical physicist, who received a Nobel Prize for his work, but who at the same time lived an adventurous and quite entertaining life. Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman is his book, written in the style of an autobiography. Each chapter tells a different story of his life, in mostly chronological order.

About 90% of the stories are really entertaining, funny and a joy to read. In particular, I found really inspiring one of his annecdotes on losing motivation to work on physics, then deciding to just play around with things, and in turn doing his most impactful work, which led to his Noble Prize.

The problem with the book are the remaining 10% of the stories. As has been repeatedly criticized, those are somewhere between creepy and outright sexist. I was quite shocked when the first of those stories appeared in the book. Even though this kind of stuff only makes up a small part of the book, it ended up ruining the book for me.

37. The Manager’s Path

The Manager’s Path is a book about career advice for software engineers that turn managers. It follows the path of a successful engineering manager: from individual contributor to tech lead, manager, director, VP, and finally CTO. Each of these stages gets a chapter in the book.

The book has a lot of great advice and I found it worth reading it out of curiosity. I especially liked the structure of the book – it has an apt title.

38. Back Mechanic

Stuart McGill was a professor at Waterloo, where he investigated back pain. Back Mechanic is his book which describes his research, findings and advice. The book is much more scientific than previous material I had read on back pain.

I am really happy that I found the book and read it. I ended up taking lots of things away from it, including some things I had previously done incorrectly. The book is now my top 1 recommendation to anyone struggling with back pain.

39. Thinking in Bets

Annie Duke worked as a professional poker player, achieving lots of impressive things during her career. In Thinking in Bets, she describes the lessons she learned about decision making, and how those relate to both poker and the real world.

Poker has some interesting properties when it comes to evaluating decisions. There is a lot of random noise in the outcome of your decisions. So even if you make good moves, based on the information you have and the expected values of the possible outcomes, it could be that you end up with a loss. When evaluating your play to learn from it, it is important to be aware of this. Instead of simply looking at what you did and how it turned out, you should consider whether you played the best possible move you could have played with the information you had at the time.

While that sounds obvious, most people do not follow this idea. The book was really influential in changing the way that I think about decisions. After reading it, there were a couple of instances where I told someone that something turned out badly, but that I still made the right decision. That was something people did not find intuitive at all.

40. Klara and the Sun

Klara and the Sun takes place in a future where technological progress has continued and robots are common in daily life. Klara is a robot designed to be a kid’s best friend. She is purchased by a mother and daughter, and Klara thus moves into the child’s bedroom.

However, not everything is at it seems. The girl’s sister recently died in unexplained circumstances and she herself has some illness as well. The book is written in Klara’s perspective, who tries to navigate social life in her new family, while trying to figure out what is really going on.

I found the book to be superbly written. I have also been wanting to read a book from Kazuo Ishiguro for a long time, and this was a great first choice.

41. Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art

Breath is an exploration into how we breath: why the way we breathe matters and how it impacts the body. It discusses mouth vs nasal breathing and similar topics. Many cultures have at some point figured out that nasal breathing has various advantages but nowadays people are not as aware of it anymore (lost art). However, there is an increasing amounts of studies on the topic (new science).

While the description might not sound very interesting, I found the book to be brilliant. As someone that has always breathed through my mouth and had trouble with nasal breathing, I was probably also the target audience for the book. It was super intriguing to read about how humans evolved to have multiple modes of breathing and what kind of things it impacts.

42. Plunder: Private Equity’s Plan to Pillage America

Private equity has always been somewhat mysterious to me. You hear the term more often these days, but I was not really clear on what it actually means. Thus, I decided to read Plunder, which discusses the topic of private equity.

The explanations in the book are great and the book definitely saturated my curiosity. It is worth noting that the author has a really negative view on private equity, so it is not necessarily an unbiased discussion on the topic. While a lot of his criticism seems apt, I think the book would have profited from a clearer distinction between what private equity is and why the author thinks it is bad for the US.

43. Eat Pray Love

Eat Pray Love is the true story of Elizabeth Gilbert, who after two failed relationships decides to take a year off in order to find herself. She spends the year in equal parts in Italy, India and Indonesia. The book follows her along her journey.

Initially, I thought that I would find the book to be too corny. However, I ended up really liking the book. Her story was quite meaningful to me. I also really liked the witty style that the book is written in.

44. Unwired

We spend more and more of our time in front of screens. Much of that is spend on social media in particular, which is often designed to make people addicted to it. Unwired is a book that discusses this issue and what to do about it. The author compares social media nowadays to how tobacco and fast food companies used to operate.

While I found the author to be quite dogmatic about the topic, most parts of the book still resonated with me. After reading the book, I drastically reduced the time that I spend on my phone. I am also now way more aware of how commonly people take out their phones while talking with others, without really realizing what it does to the flow of the conversation.

45. Outlive ☆

In Outlive, Peter Attia discusses the art and science of living a long and healthy life. His fundamental theory is that medicine has evolved in different stages. Medicine 1.0 was the crude medicine that people started out with, which was not a very structured approach to helping people. The discovery of antibiotics started Medicine 2.0, which fundamentally worked by waiting for an illness and then treating it with the right kind of medication. Attia suggests that we should now start with Medicine 3.0, which is not reactive but instead proactively tries to avoid most illnesses.

The book is split into two parts. In the first part, Attia discusses the four most common killers: heart problems, cancer, diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases. Medicine 2.0 cannot deal well with any of these, thus motivating the more proactive approach of Medicine 3.0. In the second part of the book, Attia discusses various things one can optimize to do stay healthy, e.g. sports and nutrition.

I found the book to be amazing. His description that medicine nowadays is too reactive resonates a lot with me. The book is well written and has a ton of great, practical advice.

46. Dopamine Nation

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter that regulates pleasure and motivation. In Dopamine Nation, Anna Lembke, a psychiatrist and Stanford professor, discusses addictions of all sorts, some serious and some not so serious. She explains what causes addictions and how to deal with them. During all of this, she recounts interesting stories from her time as a psychiatrist.

I found the book to be super interesting and well worth reading. I also saw a lot of connections to Unwired.

47. trauma: the invisible epidemic

Paul Conti is a psychiatrist focused on traumas. In trauma, he recounts different forms of traumas and how they impact people. Just like Dopamine Notation, the advice is intertwined with stories from his time as a psychiatrist. The book is interesting and written with a lot of empathy.

48. Build to Move

Humans are build to move. People are becoming more and more sedentary though, leading to all sorts of aches. Build to Move describes principles for an active and healthy life to counter this trend.

Each chapter starts with a test of what a healthy life should look like. Then, the rest of the chapter discusses why this is important and how to improve. Many different topics are covered, from flexibility and stability, to walking often and eating well, breathing correctly, and more. I really enjoyed the book and adapted my behavior in various ways because of the book.

49. Atomic Habits

Habits make a large difference. If we consistently do something over a long time, even small habits can really add up. Atomic Habits is a book that discusses how to form good habits and what one can do to keep habits going.

The book is well written and provides a lot of good advice. I was a bit skeptical initially because a lot of productivity books really reduce down to one simple idea, but Atomic Habits kept discussing interesting things throughout the book.

50. Ready to Run

From the Build to Move author, this is another book around healthy living, this time focused on running. The structure of Ready to Run is the same as of Build to Move, with each chapter discussing a test and how to improve.

As I started running again regularly this year, I appreciated the advice a lot. I was able to take a lot of things away from the book and have since recommended it to some friends who also run.

51. Oxygen Advantage

After having read Breath and being quite enthusiastic about it, I decided to read another book on the topic, but one that is more focused on concrete advice. Oxygen Advantage end up being that book. The central idea behind the book is that good breathing is (1) nasal, (2) utilizes the diaphragm well, and (3) occurs at the right frequency, which is much less often than most people would think.

While that was useful to learn – and in line with what I heard before – the rest of the book was incredibly disappointing. The author connects all kinds of diseases to incorrect breathing and goes quite deep into pseudo science. I would not recommend the book.

52. When the Body Says No

In When the Body Says No, Gabor Maté discusses the influence of stress on the body. While we often think of stress as something mainly mental, it can impact all sorts of things, from digestion to your heart rate. The book discusses this with the intent to show why it is so important to manage one’s stress.

While the stories in the book get very repetitive, I found it to be an important book to read. I became much more aware of my own stress afterwards.

53. Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ

While one’s gut might not seem that interesting, it is a crucial part of the body. Gut: The Inside Story of Our Body’s Most Underrated Organ discusses how it works and why it is important.

The book is really well written. It is incredibly funny and entertaining, much more than I expected a book about the gut to be. I was also really surprised by how much is going on in the gut. For example by the fact that the gut has its own neurons, and by how fascinating microbiomes are.

54. Going Infinite

In Going Infinite, Michael Lewis tells the story of Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of Alameda Research and FTX. When I heard about the book, I got really excited because the mix of finance and interesting characters seemed like the perfect story for Michael Lewis, since that is pretty much the essence of some of his other books like Flash Boys.

The book has around 250 pages. The first 200 of those I found to be amazing. The story is really intriguing, the characters are interesting and you keep wondering what is going to happen. I really enjoyed those parts and read them very quickly.

My problem with the book were the last 50 pages. Alameda Capital and FTX ended up being a fraud, which I expected the book to discuss much more. While the last 50 pages do discuss this, everything happens so abruptly and so fast that it was hard to follow along. I am still a bit unsure about what actually happened. Unfortunately, the book helped little to clarify that.

Looking back at the year, I am really happy with the breadth of books that I read. I am especially happy that I discovered biology and health books for me. I plan on reading more of that genre next year.

When the year began, I had about 25 books on my reading list. I was wondering whether I would find enough interesting books to keep my habit of one book a week. That ended up not being a problem at all.

Now, as 2024 starts, I again have about 25 books on my reading list. It is pretty remarkable that we live in an age with so many interesting books that are easily available.

Distributed Differential Privacy for Federated Learning

Thu, 02 Mar 2023 23:23:10 +0000

This post describes my work at Google: https://ai.googleblog.com/2023/03/distributed-differential-privacy-for.html

What I read in 2022

Sat, 31 Dec 2022 10:21:01 +0000

A habit that I have had for a few years is that I try to focus each year on some particular goal. In the past years these have been things such as learning to cook well or deeply understanding how to invest. For 2022, I decided to focus the year on reading. Concretely, I decided to read a book a week.

Following the tradition of the past years, this blog post summarizes all books I have read this year. This thus amounts to 52 books for the 52 weeks of the year.

In case this post is too long for you, and you would rather just look at my favorite books of the year, I marked them with a ☆:

The Soul of a New Machine (2.)
Thinking in Systems (10.)
Crafting Interpreters (20.)
A Gentleman in Moscow (24.)
The Design of Everyday Things (29.)
CODE (43.)

Feel free to directly skip to these.

1. The Brain: The Story of You

The Brain is a pop-scientific book about neuroscience. The author is a neuroscience professor at Stanford, and it shows: He is able to explain the ideas really well and can very well explain why certain research areas are important. The book is a fairly easy read but nevertheless gives a good overview of what neuroscience is about.

2. The Soul of a New Machine ☆

The Soul of a New Machine was not just one of my favorite books of the year but also of all time, and I really did not see it coming. The descriptions generally attached to it sound fairly boring. I mostly started to read the book because I kept seeing it as a recommendation and because it won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction.

The book tells the story of a group of engineers in a company building a new computer in the 1980s. Initially I found it hard to get into the book. I had never heard of the company (Data General) nor the computer it was building (Eclipse MV/8000), so I did not feel invested in the story. However, what the book really is about is the culture of a special workplace and about how people get motivated.

While reading the book, my initial sentiment about the book changed. It was fascinating to see how the project came to be, how different people felt like it was “their” project, and how people got incredibly motivated about it without any extrinsic rewards being given to them. I often had to think back about how projects happen at my work place and how certain environments can either really spur your intrinsic motivation or completely kill it.

Additionally to the contents of the book being fascinating, the author’s writing style is also superb. I am not surprised that it won a Pulitzer Prize. Since I have read the book, I have recommended it to lots of people, though always with a big disclaimer similar to my book description here.

3. Modern Dating

Aziz Ansari is a well-known Hollywood actor that teamed up with a social scientist to write a book about dating. The book is both super interesting and written in a funny way. Ansari discusses how dating changed over time and how it differs across cultures, backing up things with data along the way.

4. The Cafe on the Edge of the World

The Cafe on the Edge of the World is a book about the meaning of life. It wants to go deep on that topic, but to me the dialogues were too unnatural and scripted. Every sentence is foreseeable and feels too crude. Just the desire to discuss important questions at depth is just not enough to actually produce deep insights.

5. The Pragmatic Programmer

The Pragmatic Programmer is a collection of software engineering advice. It is a popular book and over the years I have seen it recommended in lots of places. While it is not a bad book, it does cover fairly basic material. I now feel like this is something that people in university might want to read, but for people that worked as a software engineer for a few years most stuff should be pretty obvious. If one wants a really good overview of the craft of software engineering, I would instead recommend the Software Engineering at Google book.

Finally I found myself disagreeing with some of the book’s contents. For example, one of the authors claimed they stopped writing tests for their code because after 30 years of writing code they now write it in a testable way by default, and thus don’t feel the need to write tests. That’s something that might work when writing code solely for yourself but that would be a terrible idea if you really want to create software at scale.

6. The Goal

The Goal is a book about management, written in the form of a story. The main character, Alex Rogo, is managing a failing manufacturing plant. At the same time, his marriage is in deep trouble. Somehow he has to fix things before they spiral out of control.

The book aims to teach concepts based on this story. The fundamental idea is that it is important to keep the overall goal you are pursuing in mind. Activities that do not contribute to that overall goal, like robots in a factory that are fancy but do not actually increase output, are not productive. This leads to the Theory of Constraints.

While the concepts taught are not too complex, they are still really powerful and I ended up thinking about the “fancy robots” analogy quite a lot at work. I also really enjoyed the way the concepts were taught through an entertaining story. I would absolutely recommend this book to people wanting to tackle problems in more systematic ways.

7. How to Stop Worrying and Start Living

Dale Carnegie is primarily known for How to Find Friends and Influence People, but he also wrote a second popular book: How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. The book consists of loosely connected essays about why one should stop worrying about things and how to do that.

While reducing stress is an important topic and the advice is generally sensible, I did not find it particularly helpful. Maybe reading about the topic does just not make a huge difference since it is often fairly clear what to but the hard part is actually following that advice.

8. The Rules of Love

The Rules of Love is a collection of rules for happy relationships. These include not just relationships to your partner but also to friends, parents, kids and more. Most of the rules are common sense, some are good to read about in order to call them out more explicitly, and a few I found debatable.

All in all it was a good read. It was not a book that completely changed the way I think about things but I am still glad I read it .

9. The Blue Zones

This was a book I had been wanting to read for a really long time. There are a few areas on Earth where people have a significantly higher life expectancy. These are called the blue zones, and have an especially high number of people living to the age of 100 and more. This observation has always been fascinating to me.

The book explores those regions. It covers questions, such as what habits people have, what kind of food do they eat, or how do their daily lives look like. It is certainly an interesting read but I still ended up being disappointed by the book. A lot of the content is anecdotal and in the form of a travel journey, and less about actual scientific evidence about why certain things help.

10. Thinking in Systems ☆

Thinking in Systems is a book that got recommended to me a few times, and that has a bit of a cult following in tech. Whenever I tried to read descriptions of it, I could never really figure out what it is about. I still ended up reading it and it became one of my favorite reads of the year. I will try to describe what it is about, but in case it seems too abstract, I recommend that you just go ahead and read it.

A lot of times when we feel people do not act the right way, we blame it on personal traits like incompetence or greed. However, people might act these ways because they are part of a larger system with certain incentives and properties. A system is a collection of elements that interact with each other with respect to a goal. Thinking in Systems describes bottom-up how to analyze such systems rigorously.

By thinking in systems, we move away from “person X acted in a bad way” towards “person X is part of a system with undesirable traits Y and Z, and here’s what we could do about those”. That’s a much more constructive and systematic way of tackling issues.

All in all, I absolutely recommend the book and have to say that it really changed the way I think about a lot of things.

11. Liar’s Poker

Michael Lewis is one of my favorite authors, with Flash Boys and The Big Short being some of my favorite books. Before Lewis became a writer, he used to work on Wall Street. Liar’s Poker is an autobiographical book about this time.

It is a deeply fascinating book. Lewis’ life story is super interesting. To give just one example: He ended up getting his first Wall Street job because he attended a banquet by the British Queen where he got to meet the wife of a managing director of Salomon Brothers. What makes the book so great are not just his stories, but also how sharply he analyzes the environment he is in, and how he keeps rising in it even though he evidently does not enjoy being there.

12. The Vaccine: Inside the Race to Conquer the COVID-19 Pandemic

Ugur Sahin and Özlem Türeci are two German scientists of Turkish descent whose company, BioNTech, created the first COVID-19 vaccine. The book tells the story of their lives and how the vaccine came to be.

Sahin and Türeci have been researching in the field of RNA for many years. They are both professors and sold their first company for 400 million euros, after which they founded their next company, BioNTech. When the first news of COVID-19 came out, they re-centered the company around racing towards a vaccine. Eventually, they partnered with Pfizer to globally distributed the vaccine. Today, many know the vaccine as the “Pfizer vaccine”, even though it was created by BioNTech. However, the vaccine can really be attributed to Sahin’s and Türeci’s intellect and their attentiveness, which turned them into billionaires in 2021.

I really enjoyed the book. I generally like books that explain how something came to be, and this one gives great insights into how the vaccine works, into the lives of superb scientists and into how they organized a great research team. After reading the book, Sahin and Türeci seem like superheroes to me. It is crazy how efficient they are and what a great team they make. This 2020 article from the New York Times also gives a good overview of the story.

13. Zero to One

In Zero to One, Peter Thiel provides advice on how to create and run a startup. The book is an easy read but yet provides really valuable advice. I think a lot of the advice is not just helpful for creating actual startups but also for people that work on more uncertain projects in large, established companies.

14. High Output Management

High Output Management is a book from Andy Grove, one of the Intel co-founders, on managing people. It is a classic book in the tech industry that is recommended in lots of places. The book discusses topics like how to evaluate managers, how to run meetings efficiently and how to compensate people. It gives a very thorough overview of such management topics.

I quite liked the book. What made it an especially good read is that it is written by Andy Grove. The fact that he co-founded Intel and turned it into a huge company gives a lot of credit to the advice he provides in the book.

15. Exercised

Daniel Liebermann is a Harvard professor in biology. In Exercised, he writes about the science of why humans exercise and discusses what we know about how to exercise well. If one thinks about it, it is quite fascinating that humans exercise at all. There are no other animals that do this as systematically as humans. Liebermann discusses how this came to be.

The book is incredibly well written and gave me a new perspective on lots of things. To give just one example, I never thought of as humans being especially gifted physically. Other animals seemed stronger or faster, and I always thought that humans purely established themselves as dominant on Earth because of their intellect. However, it turns out that this is not really true, as there are no other animals other size that have as much physical endurance as we do. This is actually an enormous physical advantage, as it was really helpful for humans when hunting.

16. #noprojects

#noprojects is a book about how to plan work. Instead of thinking in projects with a clear beginning and end, the book proposes to think about work in a more continuous form. The general idea makes sense to me and is well explained. However, I think that the book could be significantly compressed to be a long essay. A lot of the pages just seem like filler content.

17. How to Lead Smart People

How to Lead Smart People is a book that talks about how to lead projects and interact with people at work. Each topic is discussed on just a few pages, in a rather short and information-dense way.

The advice is sensible and I took some things away from this book. However, I feel like with this brief presentation of topics, it is just too easy for me to forget too much of the content after a while.

18. Queen’s Gambit

You probably heard about the Netflix show Queen’s Gambit. The show is based on this book, which tells the story of an orphan who is a chess prodigy. In the course of the book she rises in the world of chess, against all odds.

The book is entertaining. Most of it is fairly foreseeable, but it is still a really enjoyable read. I also quite liked the writing style.

19. The Mythical Man Month

The Mythical Man Month is a classical software engineering book. Adding people to projects does not decrease the time to project completion proportionally. Instead, adding people adds communication overhead, and there is a point where it can actually slow down projects.

The book discusses this and other phenomena. It was a good read, and I found it really worthwhile to understand that having more people does not always equate to more progress.

20. Crafting Interpreters ☆

I had been wanting to learn about writing compilers for a long time. There is something magical about how a computer is able to translate and execute commands in a language defined by humans. Somehow I never got to learn about how compilers really work deep down, and I figured this year it was time to make up on that.

Crafting Interpreters is a book that explains how to build interpreters and compilers. Two interpreters are actually written in the book and the full code is produced step by step over the chapters. Reading the book gets you to a state where you fully understand how these interpreters work.

The book feels like a piece of art to me. Everything is incredibly well explained and the code produced is beautiful. Additionally, the author created lots of illustrations that are really artfully done.

21. Radical Candor

When giving feedback you want to do it with candor while still saying something meaningful. Radical Candor is a book that provides a framework for this. Advice is broken up in two dimensions: how to the point it is (radical) and with how much empathy it is presented (candor). This is illustrated with many examples from the author’s long career.

I found the book to be a good read and I feel like I learned valuable things from it.

22. Turn the Ship Around!

Turn the Ship Around’s author David Marquet spent his career in the Navy, which is an environment in which people generally follow rules but do not act by initiative that much. This works in some situations, but can actually be pretty problematic in others, so Marquet tried to teach people more independent leadership skills.

The book gives advice in that regard. It is a fairly easy read, but I feel like it could have been a long essay instead of a book.

23. Beyond Collaboration Overload

We generally consider collaborations to be a good thing. However, they come at a cost, as they add complexity in terms of communication and mental capacity, and take time. This is especially the case in an ever increasingly connected world.

The author offers a new framework on how to think about collaborations and how to design to be effective. I think I took some valuable lessons away from the book, as it made me completely rethink collaborations.

24. A Gentleman in Moscow ☆

A Gentleman in Moscow is a beautifully written novel about Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution. The main character, called The Count, is a Russian nobleman. After the Russian revolution, he loses all his property and has to spend his remaining life inside a hotel building, without being allowed to leave it at all. As the years pass, the reader gets to see how life for The Count goes on and how Moscow changes over the years.

The book is superbly written and a real joy to read. The Count has to be one of my favorite novel characters ever – it is fun to follow his eloquent musings and inspiring to see someone so at ease in a difficult situation.

25. Freakonomics

Steven Levitt is an economist that likes to ask interesting questions that can be answered with data and economics. These include questions such as: Why do drug dealers usually live with their parents? How much does it matter where we grow up? Together with Stephen Dubner, a New York Times journalist, Levitt tries to answer such questions in the book.

I loved how creative the questions and analyses were. Picking good questions should be more valued in our world. I would absolutely recommend the book to anyone that finds it fun to follow analyses of such topics.

26. A Three Dog Problem

A Three Dog Problem is a light-hearted, obviously fictitious, crime novel. A murder happens at Buckingham Palace. The Queen ends up investigating the case, just aided by her corgis. It was a fun and easy read.

27. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams

In Peopleware, the people aspects of software engineering are discussed. The authors claim that people are often incorrectly seen like exchangeable software modules, ignoring that people have different strengths and needs. The book gives a lot of advice in this area, but also discusses more general topics, such as how to design good work environments.

I think it was worth reading the book for a thorough discussion of some of these topics. Others felt fairly obvious to me – I think it is well-known by now that having a good work place is important for productivity and well-being.

28. The Art of War

The Art of War is an ancient Chinese book on military strategies. It is several thousand years old, but has become a cult book because a lot of the advice is more generally applicable when strategic thinking is required.

It was fascinating to read. However, I did not find it that easy to take things away from the book. Since you always have to translate from the military setting to more general ideas, it takes a lot of re-reading to understand the content well.

29. The Design of Everyday Things ☆

In The Design of Everyday Things, author discusses how every day items, like door handles, are designed. A lot of thought goes into these things and it is fascinating to read about it. One of the central ideas the author advocates for is that users should not blame themselves when they cannot figure out how to use every day items. Instead, this means that the design is flawed, and that it is too hard for the user to build a mental model of how things work.

The book made me reconsider how a lot of every day things are designed, for example heating controls for cooking or showering. It gave me a completely new perspective of what good design actually means.

30. Beat the Dealer: A Winning Strategy for the Game of Twenty-One

Twenty One is a game that can be played in casinos. By counting cards it is possible to significantly increase one’s odds of winning the game. The author Edward Thorp was one of the first to design a really efficient strategy for how to count cards.

This makes Thorp a good person to explain how these strategies work. He also has many interesting stories to tell about how he got to use the strategy, before casinos were prepared to deal with it. These stories inspired the movie 21.

It was an interesting read and I enjoyed learning to count cards. However, much of the book consists of the author boasting with his personal stories. I did not enjoy that part as much.

31. Fluent Forever

On vacation in Southern France this year, I started to (re-)learn French, and really got into it. Instead of just learning French, I also got curious about how one really learns a language well. Fluent Forever’s author is a polyglot who put a lot of effort into figuring out how to learn languages well, so this seemed like a good book to read.

His advice in the book really helped me to get a better mental model of how language learning works and how it can be designed to be more effective. Some of his suggestions are quite opinionated though, even though it felt to me like they might only work for certain types of learners.

32. How Languages Are Learned

Since Fluent Forever was largely based on one person’s personal experience, I also wanted to read a more scientific book about language learning. I picked How Languages Are Learned, a textbook about teaching languages in the classroom. The book discusses a lot of scientific studies and goes through different kinds of classroom learning.

I found it to be super interesting. However, in hindsight I went deeper into the topic than was really useful for my personal language learning journey.

33. What If?

Randall Munroe, known from xkcd, wrote this book, which presents scientific answers to humorous questions. These include questions such as: What would actually happen if you swam in a nuclear fuel pool? What would it mean if everybody had exactly one soulmate somewhere in the world that they have to find by themselves?

The explanations are fun to read and the illustrations are great. It is the typical xkcd feeling of humor mixed with serious explanations. However, I think that people more into physics than me would enjoy the book even more. The questions are generally physics-related, a space that I have a limited understanding of.

34. Humble Pi

Matt Parker is a standup comedian that talks a lot about math-related topics. In Humble Pi, he analyzes mathematical errors, either common ones or historically significant ones, in a humorous way. I kept seeing the book in book stores, and, each time I saw it, I thought that I have to read the book at some point.

It was a fun read, and I am happy I did pick up the book. The writing style is great and one can really tell that Matt Parker is a standup comedian.

35. Fooled by Randomness (Incerto 1/5)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a statistician and essayist that used to work as an option trader. The Incerto series is his work on how humans deal with randomness and uncertainty. The series consists of five books. I had wanted to read them for a long time, and finally managed to go through all of them this year.

Fooled by Randomness discusses how bad humans are at dealing with randomness. We like to give explanations to purely random events, and have a hard time distinguishing correlation from causation.

The book is similar to Thinking, Fast and Slow, but has a more philosophical than psychological view on things. It is also more applied in the sense that it discusses the impact on real world cases rather than on psychological experiments.

36. The Black Swan (Incerto 2/5)

The Black Swan discusses how humans have trouble at dealing with rare events. Taleb calls these events black swans, since people for a long time thought there is no such thing as a black swan but eventually discovered this to not be true.

If something has a low probability of happening, people generally consider it as something that surely will not happen. This is particularly evident in financial cases where people’s bets work well for years only to have all their gains whipped out at once by the rare event they were betting against.

More generally speaking, people do a bad job at picking and describing distributions. In particular, people often abuse the normal distribution by modeling tons of things as normally-distributed that really are not.

I generally found the book interesting to read, and it gave me a better intuition about how statistics should be applied. However, Taleb keeps unnecessarily insulting people in the book, which makes it much harder to focus on the actual content, a general problem with his books.

37. The Bed of Procrustes (Incerto 3/5)

The story of Procrustes is a Greek myth in which Procrustes offers a bed to guests. He decides, however, to either stretch the guests or to cut their legs offs, just so that they perfectly fit the bed. It serves as a metaphor for the mental flaw of artificially trying to fit things into certain patterns, even when they do not really match.

In The Bed of Procrustes, Taleb discusses this and other phenomena. It is by far the shortest book of the Incerto, and written in a very different style. For me it was the hardest book to follow in this series.

38. Skin in the Game (Incerto 4/5)

If people’s actions have no impact on them, then they have a much weaker incentive to act in good ways. Instead, we want people to have skin in the game. Good decisions should help decision makers while bad ones hurt them. This is often not the case, e.g. thinking of how politicians sometimes act, or how the incentives in various financial crises looked like.

Taleb thinks this idea through and considers all sorts of implications of it. He then analyses, in quite some detail, the places that would benefit from an incentive structure where people have skin in the game.

The fundamental idea is quite simple. However, I quite liked how far Taleb can see implications of it, and how he really analyzes the idea in detail.

39. Antifragile (Incerto 5/5)

Fragile systems break if they are attacked. Perfectly robust ones are not influenced at all. Taleb proposes a third category, antifragile, as a word for systems that get better when they are attacked. This is a property you want systems to have. Taleb then analyzes this idea in detail, and, again, can explain all sorts of implications of making things antifragile.

I am quite happy that I read the Incerto books. I took away lots of things related to randomness and psychology. However, I did not enjoy the way that Taleb aggressively attacks everything and unnecessarily insults people. After having read nearly 2,000 pages of Taleb this year, I think that I have also consumed enough of such content for now.

40. 101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think

101 Essays That Will Change The Way You Think is a book consisting of self-help essays. Many of these are in listicle form.

Some of the essays were great and I took a lot away from them. With others I really struggled since they felt too crude. There is also a lot of duplicated content, which is probably because there are so many essays. I got less and less excited while reading the book, and really had to force myself to finish reading it.

41. Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making

Tony Fadell invented the iPod and started Nest. In Build, he provides a guide on how to create great products and gives career advice. The book follows his personal career, and he provides advice based on each stage of his life.

Build was a great read for me, and I learned a lot of things. The book also gave me super interesting insights into how Apple and Google cultures differ, as Fadell worked at both places, and talks about both of them in the book.

42. The Power of Moments

We remember some moments much better than others. The Power of Moments is pop-scientific psychology book that discusses why this is the case. Better understanding what makes such moments special makes it easier to create them. It is also just really interesting to learn about the psychology behind all of this.

I quite liked the book and it made me rethink why I still remember certain moments so well. I also love the idea that there are people researching such topics, and that we live in an age where we have easy access to detailed books about their findings.

43. CODE ☆

How do computers actually work? If you think about it, it seems like a miracle that computers can be programmed without any changes in hardware. CODE is a bottom-up explanation of how all of that works. The book starts with first fundamentals, discussing how currents flow and how they can be manipulated with switches. It then continues to build up the ideas step by step until there’s a programmable computer.

By reading the book, it feels like I got to understand a whole new world, and one that I have just taken for granted for a long time. Additionally it is worth saying that the book is just beautifully done. Everything from the prose and the print design to the visualizations is artfully created.

I should also note that I have an embarrassingly bad understanding of physics and electrical engineering. So the fact that I got to understand how all of this works, and immensely enjoyed the read, really tells you quite a lot about how great the book is.

44. Game Programming Patterns

After enjoying Crafting Interpreters so much, I also wanted to read the author’s other book, Game Programming Patterns. The book discusses various design patterns in the context of developing games. Each pattern is generally described and shown in the context of games.

I do not have that much knowledge of game development so this gave me some interesting insights into that world. Additionally, the discussion of the patterns was really well done. I liked this book much more than any previous design pattern content I had read, which was usually too dry and detached from the real world.

Just like Crafting Interpreters, the book is incredibly well put together. The illustrations are beautiful and the explanations flow incredibly well.

45. The Forever Dog

There is lots to know about how a healthy life looks like for dogs, ranging from knowledge about nutrition and exercise to more medical information. The Forever Dog is a comprehensive guide on the topic. The aim of the book is to teach people how dogs can live long and healthy lives.

This is a book I would absolutely recommend to all people that own dogs or regularly look after them. It was a great read, and I learned lots of new things. It was also a bit shocking to read about how little regulation there actually is for food that is meant to be consumed by animals. I view a lot of things differently now after learning about all of this.

46. Getting More

Getting More is a book about negotiation strategies. It is similar to Never Split the Difference, which I read in 2020. Getting More, however, has a stronger focus on every day situations. The book discusses how to do better in every day life, and is not as focused on formal negotiation settings like hostage or salary negotiations. Its author is a business school professor and not an ex-FBI hostage negotiator, like with Never Split the Difference.

The book is well written and a nice read. The author not only discusses the theory of negotiations but also has a huge number of entertaining stories from his life. I would summarize my takeaway from the book as: empathy is important in everything we do.

47. Androids: The Team that Built the Android Operating System

Android began as a startup that was acquired by Google in an early stage. The team then grew and the Android project expanded. Eventually, Android launched, got adopted by phone makers around the world, and turned into the world’s most used operating system.

The book Androids tells the story of how all of this came to be. It is a remarkable story since there are not many projects like Android out there — an open source system used by billions, initially funded by a single company, but yet created with a strong bottom-up culture.

For me it was super entertaining to read the book. I might be a bit biased though since I work at Google and know the names of quite a few people that appear in the book. Having read Androids just a few weeks after Build, the book also showed fascinating cultural differences between how projects happen at Google compared to Apple.

Books in German

I generally read nearly everything in English. However, there were a few books I have read in German this year. Since these books were not translated into English, I put their summaries at the end of this post.

48. Allmen und der Koi

This is a light-hearted crime novel from a popular Swiss author. A Koi gets stolen on the island of Ibiza and the main character, Allmen, is tasked with finding it. The book is not so much about unforeseeable plots and the thrill of figuring out what happened. Instead it’s a fun read in a cool setting.

49. Künstliche Intelligenz und der Sinn des Lebens

Richard David Precht is a philosopher whose book Who Am I? And If So, How Many? I enjoyed a lot last year. In this new book, he discusses the pursuit of artificial intelligence from a philosopher’s perspective — and does a remarkably bad job at that. He has little clue what he is talking about and only covers the topic superficially. However, worst of all, the ideas are just badly put together and I found it hard to follow his arguments.

50. Freedom: A Plea

This book is a plea from Joachim Gauck, Germany’s former president. Based on the counter example of the authoritarian former state of East Germany, he discusses fundamental values he believes in: freedom, democracy and tolerance. The book is really well written and an easy read.

51. Ich und der Präsident

This book tells the story of a Frenchman who writes letters to various French presidents over many decades. It is written in a funny and light-hearted way. There is no major takeaway from the book, but it is amusing to read.

52. Atlas der Globalisierung

The French newspaper Le Monde published this book, which consists of various maps of the world. Each map visualizes and discusses a different topic, ranging from wealth distribution and historical conflicts to health politics across the world. The book is super interesting. However, I felt like I forgot rather quickly about the details of many issues since they are only briefly discussed.

Looking back, I am really happy that I managed to read a book a week. It took a lot of focus, and I really noticed how I e.g. barely watched any TV shows this year. In 2023, I will focus on something else, but I am really glad that I got to read so many interesting things this year.

Now that 2022 is over, I also have to say that it really took an enormous amount of work to put together this post – summarizing 52 books takes quite a while.

Working on Federated Learning

Sun, 29 May 2022 02:21:01 +0000

Much has been written about how federated learning (FL) can enable training much better models and help build more intelligent systems. This essay instead discusses a more personal aspect: Why working on FL as an individual is interesting, meaningful and fun.

You can either take this as an advertisement for why one should work one FL, or as a personal reflection on why I am still passionate about it after working in the space for a few years.

Fast and strong feedback loops

One thing that initially drew me to coding was the tight feedback loop: After coding something up, you can immediately try it out and see whether it behaves as you wanted. If it does not compile or work as expected, you get back to the code and iterate on it. At least that is how it works for the kind of stuff people code after getting started with programming.

Compared to other fields where it is fairly difficult or time-consuming to check whether you are on the right path – think of math proofs or physical experiments – this made coding a ton more fun to me. Fast iteration makes it easier to get into a state of flow, and allows you to try things out much more quickly.

Machine learning in the traditional way has no such feedback loop. It is not uncommon for people to spend many weeks or months on a model before it ever gets tested out on real users. Possibly much of that work was not fruitful after all, and, considering the quality of offline evaluation sets, you often have no good way of knowing beforehand.

FL enables fast iteration in a very natural way: Training happens on-device, so it is trivial to also evaluate on-device at the same time. During all of that, training also matches the inference distribution much more closely.

All of this means that you can directly understand much better whether the thing you are training is useful. Instead of doing work for months and hoping that the model does not break in a later live experiment, you can see live during training how well the model is really doing on actual users.

The only caveat here is that FL has a larger upfront cost. One has to build up the federated learning system before training can begin. But in my opinion this is well worth the later advantage of having a powerful feedback loop.

Interesting technical challenges

FL has a ton of interesting technical challenges: You are trying to train something intelligent in a distributed system of millions of devices, where much of the code is run on end devices that you exercise little control over.

This leads to all sorts of interesting challenges and a huge variety of work one can do. From pure machine learning work to distributed systems aspects, cryptography to writing on-device code (e.g. Android), there are a ton of interesting challenges to tackle. The breadth of FL papers being published also shows this.

Understanding user behavior, not tweaking data

People sometimes mock that machine learning work mostly comes down to playing with data. That is certainly the case for much of traditional machine learning. For example, for server-side training of models that eventually run on-device, one often only has access to unrepresentative proxy data. Tweaking this proxy data to make it more similar to inference data is incredibly common. This is necessary to make sure the model will work well during inference.

This often happens without a fast feedback loop, making it slow to check whether the tweaks one performed really helped. This is thus not only rather frustrating work, but also hard to get right.

In FL, this is not really the case. You are already training on user interactions that closely align with inference, so there is no need to do manual data tweaking work.

That does not mean that there is no work related to the data at all. There is work in accessing the right kind of signals, removing noisy data and inferring the right kind of labels. However, all of this is a much more natural way of approaching the problem. It all comes down to understanding what happens on-device, not to tweaking data based on some high-level intuition.

Privacy

Privacy is a major motivation for FL and why many people are drawn to it. The whole concept of FL is geared towards data minimization and keeping users’ data private. It feels good to work on such a thing, in a world where privacy has been an afterthought for way too long.

Looking at the work that people are currently doing in FL, there is also a ton of interesting privacy-related work. This ranges from advances in differential privacy to cryptographic aggregation algorithms or model auditing techniques. All of these are super interesting to learn about, while really advancing privacy.

Furthermore, any work that makes it easier to use FL further advances the state of privacy, even if it is not directly privacy-related. This is purely because it gets us closer to a world where FL can be a default option over traditional data collection.

It is futuristic

One of my initial reactions after hearing about FL was that it sounds futuristic. A network of millions of devices is jointly training something intelligent. This also opens up the potential of training large and distributed models.

Nearly 5 years later, I still feel the same way. It is incredible that something like this exists, already works so well, and is something I get to play with.

It is the right time

There is a quote I really like to consider when picking what to work on:

“The thing that differentiates scientists is purely an artistic ability to discern what is a good idea, what is a beautiful idea, what is worth spending time on, and most importantly, what is a problem that is sufficiently interesting, yet sufficiently difficult, that it hasn’t yet been solved, but the time for solving it has come now.”

– Savas Dimopoulos

FL as a field seems to fit this perfectly. Its time has only come recently, because of advances in machine learning and distributed systems, because phones have become powerful enough, and because internet connections have massively improved in many parts of the world. All of these together have allowed FL to become possible.

In the past few years, FL as a field has now become established and many aspects of it have been explored, leading to it working better and better. However, there are still a ton of challenges left to solve and many places where people are just starting to make use of FL.

This makes me incredibly excited about FL and its future.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Karan Singhal, Sean Augenstein and Kuba Weimann for reading drafts of this post and providing lots of great feedback.

What I read in 2021

Fri, 31 Dec 2021 10:21:01 +0000

For the past four years, I have been doing yearly reading summaries now. Initially, I started because I really enjoyed reading such lists from other people. Now, I mainly write them because it is a great way to reflect back on the year. This year is no different in that regard.

Software Engineering at Google

In 2016, Google published a book about Site Reliability Engineering, the SRE book. Last year, the SWE book followed: A very detailed account of how software engineering works at Google. As such, it covers everything from working in teams over code reviews and testing to Google’s monorepo.

All in all, the book is amazing and I would recommend it to every software engineer. It felt like what software engineering classes at university should teach but usually do not. I frequently think back to concepts I learned from the book.

However, there was a large variance in how interesting I found the chapters: The content of some chapters felt completely obvious, e.g. the code review chapter. Some chapters were incredibly insightful, even though I did not expect it, e.g. the ones on build systems or dependency managment. Finally, some chapters give great insights to Google-specific tooling, e.g. large-scale changes, and are interesting in order to read to learn more about Google-scale engineering.

I ended up writing detailed reading notes for the entire book.

The Man Who Solved The Market

Jim Simons was a math professor who ended up starting the world’s most successful hedge fund, RenTec. The book tells the entire story of RenTec, from the early beginnings to the eventual political involvement of its executives. Its especially interesting because Simons was the first person to really apply quantitative techniques, early forms of machine learning methods, to investing.

The book reads like a thriller and I had trouble putting it out of my hands. There’s multiple aspects that make it so fascinating: First, Simons is a deeply interesting person, and I enjoyed his interviews long before reading the book. Furthermore, there’s so much mystery around RenTec that much of its story was not widely known before the book came out.

This was one of my favorite reads of the year. I would recommend it to anyone at least loosely interested in finance or machine learning history. I also ended up writing down some more detailed takeaways on the book in my reading notes.

Flour Water Salt Yeast

2020 was the year I learned how to cook well – and read Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat. For 2021, I decided to learn how to bake well – and thus decided to read Flour Water Salt Yeast to learn more about baking bread. I had been baking my own bread every couple of days for more than the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, so this felt like the right book to read.

The book was a good choice for that: It gives a good overview of how to bake bread and inspires one to try different techniques. Again, I ended up writing detailed reading notes.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Thinking, Fast and Slow is a classic, pop-scientific psychology book. I have probably read a dozen books the past couple of years that cite it, and plenty of people have mentioned it to me. This year, I decided it was finally time to read it myself.

The author, Daniel Kahnemann, won the Nobel Prize for economics for his discoveries in psychology. The most well-known among them is probably prospect theory, which describes how people find losses much more painful than they enjoy equivalent gains, leading to a bunch of irrational investing choices.

The book describes this bias and many others. Each chapter discusses a different bias or psychological phenomenon. Read individually, they are all really interesting and often surprising.

However, when reading the entire book front to back, it becomes a hard read: 400 pages in, I was not able to recall many of the biases I had read about. The lack of structure in the book made it difficult for me to take away as much from the book as I was hoping I would. In the end, it took me many months to complete the book, and I can completely understand why many people never finish it at all.

Dune

Dune is one of the most popular science fiction series of all time. Since it was made into a film this year, I heard about it again, and decided to finally read it. It is worth noting that the movie only covers roughly the first half of the book.

I found the book to be a decent read. The story involves political games and a few twists that made it enjoyable to read. However, it was a bit difficult for me to initially get into the book, mostly because of the style of writing.

Who Am I? And If So, How Many?

Who Am I? And If So, How Many? is an introduction to philosophy’s biggest topics. Each chapter of the book discusses a different question, ranging from the meaning of life to ethical questions.

The author does not only discuss the philosophical questions very well but also narrates the historical aspects of how they came to be. What I found particularly interesting is that many questions started out as philosophical ones but are now core topics of hard sciences, such as neuroscience. This for example includes the questions of how our brain works or what language is.

I deeply enjoyed the book and will probably go through it again in a few years.

Homo Deus

Last year, I read Sapiens. It is the first book in Harari’s trilogy about human life, and discusses humanity’s past. Homo Deus is the second book, describing the present and, partly, the future.

I am a huge fan of Sapiens, and thus had high expectations for Homo Deus. I especially liked the beginning of the book, since it is similar to Sapiens. As I continued with the book, I had more and more trouble with it though.

The parts of the book discussing the future are quite opinionated. The problem with this is that the author keeps stating things as if they were not opinions but facts, making it a frustrating read. According to book reviews, the third book of the trilogy is even more like this, and I thus decided not to read it.

The Lean Startup

The Lean Startup describes principles for managing startups. The main idea of the book is that founders initially do not really know what customers want. So instead of completely focusing on a well-defined product and then building it in a waterfall-like manner, one needs to figure out what to build. This should be done by quickly iterating based on customer feedback and potentially pivoting to completely new products.

The author defines startup as any human institution that operates in an area of extreme uncertainty. This does not only involve typical startups but can also include individual teams inside of non-profits or big companies.

The book is an easy read and it feels like anybody working in areas of extreme uncertainty should read it.

The Big Short

In 2019, I read Flash Boys, a book about high-frequency trading, and enjoyed it a lot. This year, I decided I would read another book from the author, Michael Lewis, and settled on The Big Short. It describes the events leading up to the US housing crisis, focusing on a few people who saw it coming and then shorted bonds related to the housing market.

The reason I found the book to be interesting is not the explanation of how the US housing crisis came to me – that has been discussed in many places before and was not new to me. However, there were not that many people that saw it coming early, and their stories are really interesting.

In the end, I found the book to be quite good, but also did not like it as much as Flash Boys. The book was also turned into a film, which is a bit dramatized but still quite decent.

Invent and Wander

Invent and Wander is a book about Jeff Bezos and his writings – shareholder letters and texts derived from various speeches. It was an odd read: I mainly read it as part of the free Kindle Unlimited trial, in which I only found a few interesting books. Bezos is a great writer and a lot happened in the history of Amazon, but as a book this is not well structured, so it was just an okay read. I would not read it again.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was originally a radio comedy and eventually turned into a, series of, books. It is widely known in pop culture as the origin of 42 as the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything. I listened to this as an audiobook, narrated by Stephen Fry.

I found the book to be incredibly funny. Fry does a great job at narrating it in many different voices. The events in the book are often rather random, but to be fair this only adds to the funniness.

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

There are different kinds of motivation: biological, extrinsic, intrinsic. The last of these is the most powerful but also the most fragile: It can only grow in certain environments. Drive describes this in detail, citing many scientific studies along the way.

While I was roughly familiar with these kinds of motivation, I learned a great amount about the intricacies of intrinsic motivation. All of this was not only an interesting discussion of motivation but also a great guide towards happiness: The book not only describes that intrinsic motivation is more effective but also that it leads to a more full-filled life. I especially liked that the author then applied these ideas to areas outside of work, e.g. to improving education systems or personal fitness.

I also ended up writing a more detailed summary in my reading notes.

Passenger 23

Sebastian Fitzek is one of Germany’s most popular author of thriller books. This was the first book that I read from him: People go missing on a cruise ship and a troubled police officer goes on the ship to investigate.

I did not enjoy the book much, and will probably not read anything else from Fitzek. All characters are the most extreme version possible. There is no subtleness in anything and no good character arcs. I still ended up reading the entire book, mostly because I wanted to know how it ends.

The Midnight Library

The Midnight Library tells the story of Nora, who attempts suicide and subsequently lands in the midnight library: A place that allows her to live every possible life she could have lived had she made different choices. Nora uses this place to change the decisions she regrets, such as not following her best friend to Australia or not becoming a professional swimmer.

The book is deeply emotional and written in a way that makes it easy to follow Nora’s feelings. I always found it frustrating that we can only live through a finite number of choices, e.g. we are only able to live in a few places for multiple years. The main message of the book is somewhat obviously but nevertheless told well: All our choices inevitably lead to some regrets. Not being able to live through all possible lives makes life no less livable than not being able to listen to all possible songs makes music unenjoyable.

Looking back, I am quite happy about how diverse the set of books was. What additionally got more diverse this year compared to last year is the medium through which I have consumed books: I read some in paper form, some on Kindle, and then I also started listening to audiobooks.

Initially I was quite skeptical of audiobooks, but now I am a huge fan. Given how much time we sometimes spend in gyms or on walks, audiobooks are a great way to consume more books. They only work well for certain kinds of books though: The kind that you can follow along easily in a linear fashion (i.e. you do not have to skip back a few paragraphs occasionally) and there are no important visualizations.

Reflecting back on the year, I also noticed that I read quite irregularly, going from fighting my way through a couple of more difficult books, to not reading at all, and then reading a ton during the last two months. Given that I roughly averaged one book per five days at the end of the year, I would love to attempt reading one book per week in 2022. I am not yet sure if that is feasible though, so I will not make it a New Year’s resolution. We will see how much I will actually end up reading.