Library, curriculum, interests
Reading
What is on the desk, what I am studying, and what I keep returning to.
Currently reading
On the desk
The Scaling Era · Dwarkesh Patel
A first-hand chronicle of the people, decisions, and capital flowing into frontier AI. Reading slowly because the bibliography is half the value.
2026
Curriculum
7 active subjects
- 01
Agentic AI
Orchestration patterns, tool use, evaluation, failure modes.
- 02
AI Use Cases
A working catalogue of where this is actually deployed and what it took.
- 03
CS Fundamentals
Data structures, algorithms, complexity, the parts of theory that compound.
- 04
Data Engineering
Ingestion, warehousing, lineage, quality.
- 05
Production ML & MLOps
Serving, monitoring, drift, retraining, the full lifecycle.
- 06
Quantitative Finance
Signal construction, factor research, backtesting, risk.
- 07
System Design
Large-scale architecture and the FAANG-shaped interview surface.
Reviewed
4 entries
Book review
Designing Machine Learning Systems
Chip Huyen · 2022
★★★★★
The closest thing the field has to a standard text on production ML. Returns are diminishing on the second pass; gains are non-zero on the third.
Book review
The Hard Thing About Hard Things
Ben Horowitz · 2014
★★★★☆
A practical companion for the parts of building things nobody wants to talk about: layoffs, founder-CEO transitions, the wartime mindset. Periodically dated, mostly not.
Book review
Working in Public
Nadia Eghbal · 2020
★★★★☆
The economics and social dynamics of open-source maintainership, written with unusual care. Has aged remarkably well.
Book review
Why Machines Learn
Anil Ananthaswamy · 2024
★★★★☆
A historical-mathematical tour of the ideas behind modern machine learning, traced through the people who developed them. Read and enjoyed in 2025; a longer take to follow.
Lectures francophones
En français · pour entretenir
-
Capital et Idéologie
Thomas Piketty · 2019
Sur la liste de lecture en cours sur les inégalités de richesse. Lecture lente, en français pour entretenir la langue et parce que la traduction perd quelque chose.
-
L'Élégance du hérisson
Muriel Barbery · 2006
Roman. Relu pour le plaisir et pour le vocabulaire.
Subjects of standing interest
Long-running
- → Wealth inequality and social mobility
- → Education and how people actually learn
- → AI safety and the deployment gap
- → Geopolitics and geography
- → Macroeconomics and monetary policy
- → Sport (football, cricket, long-distance running)
- → British comedy: panel shows, stand-up, the long-form podcast era