December / January / February 2025/2026 Reading

Books

• The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Alvaro Mutis (2002)
• The Three Body Problem, Cixin Liu (2008)
• The Dark Forest, Cixin Liu (2008)
• The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector (1964)
• Breakneck, Dan Wang (2024)
• Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson (2011)

Papers

• T5Gemma 2: Seeing, Reading, and Understanding Longer, Biao Zhang et al. (2025)
• KL Divergence of Max-of-n, Jacob Hilton (2023)
• Scalable Optimization in the Modular Norm, Tim Large et al. (2024)
• WSM: Decay-Free Learning Rate Schedule via Checkpoint Merging for LLM Pre-training, Changxin Tian et al. (2025)
• Understanding Optimization in Deep Learning with Central Flows, Jeremy M. Cohen et al. (2024)

Blogs / Essays

• Fun with Linear Transformations and Symbolic Maps, John Hewitt
• Contra DSPy and GEPA, Benjamin Anderson
• Code Review as Human Alignment, in the Era of LLMs, Edward Z. Yang
• FastAPI for TypeScript Developers, Loren Stewart
• Inside NVIDIA GPUs: Anatomy of High Performance Matmul Kernels, Aleksa Gordić
• A Pragmatic Vision for Interpretability, Neel Nanda
• Now What?, John J. Hopfield
• Reflections on 2025, Samuel Albanie
• Capital in the 22nd Century, Philip Trammell and Dwarkesh Patel
• 2025 Letter, Dan Wang
• 2025 Letter, Zhengdong Wang
• Is The Truth Out There?, Maia Mindel
• a16z: The Power Brokers, Packy McCormick
• What (and How Far Off) Is Self-Replicating Capital?
• The AI Revolution Is Here. Will the Economy Survive the Transition?, The Substack Post
• The Cyborg Era: What AI Means for Jobs, Séb Krier
• Zhipu CEO Zhang Peng on Taking China's First LLM Company Public, Jiang Jiang
• The AI Patchwork Emerges, Dean W. Ball
• The Adolescence of Technology, Dario Amodei
• Attention Sinks from the Graph Perspective, The Tensor Throne
• Beyond Attention as a Graph, The Tensor Throne
• Modular Manifolds, Thinking Machines
• LoRA Without Regret, John Schulman and Thinking Machines
• On-Policy Distillation, Kevin Lu and Thinking Machines
• Recursive Language Models, Alex L. Zhang
• Anthropic Economic Index Report: Economic Primitives, Anthropic
• Rented Virtue, Will Manidis and Nabeel S. Qureshi
• My Week with the AI Populists, Jasmine Sun
• The Left Is Missing Out on AI, Dan Kagan-Kans
• Centrist Imaginations, rayne fisher-quann
• As Rocks May Think, Eric Jang
• How to Build a Distributed Queue in a Single JSON File on Object Storage, Dan Harrison
• Mathematics in the Library of Babel, Daniel Litt
• The First Fully General Computer Action Model, Standard Intelligence Team