Links - February 11th, 2016

“It is not that we have so little time but that we lose so much.” ― Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

As I said in my last post: attention is a zero sum game. I checked how much I have been reading online lately and I’m way below average (Yes, I keep stats on this. Yes, I know its nerdy). According to data from the past 2.5 years, I read about 10 articles per day (avg. 10.02, median 9) but in the last three weeks I’ve been floating between 5-7 per day. I think it will be impossible to keep up the usual 10-12 while maintaining my book reading goal and my new (bad?) habit of scrolling through Twitter a couple of times a day.

However, I’m proud to say that in the past couple of weeks I finished Why Information Grows and moved on to Cool Gray City of Love. Some thoughts on those two are coming.

Links - January 29th, 2016

Random assortment of thoughts:

  • I was sad to hear that Marvin Minsky passed away this week. I was exposed to his work by chance, as I picked up Society of Mind at a used book sale in Chicago during the summer I read GEB, and became obsessed with the seminal ideas of AI and consciousness. His book definitely helped me shape my views on intelligence.

  • A couple of weeks ago I started compiling a list of resources worth reading/watching. They are mostly programming related, but we’ll see how the list grows.

  • My resource list prompted my friend Leon to introduce me to Buster Benson’s Codex Vitae which is an awesome idea. I might do something similar in the future.

  • Attention is a zero sum game. I have started using Twitter which is fun (follow me! @avyfain), but is super time consuming. Its hard to come to terms with the fact that the stream is infinite while time is not. Between that, and my new goal of reading 3 books per month, blogs and news have taken the back seat.

  • Complex systems are awesome. I have been reading about them, and so should you.

Anyway, links for the past few days:

Links - January 20th, 2016

Links - January 18th, 2016

Links - January 14th, 2016

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