March / Aril / May 2025 Reading

Books

• Foundation and Empire, Isaac Asimov (1952)
• Second Foundation, Isaac Asimov (1953)
• Deng Xiaoping and the Transformation of China, Ezra Vogel (2011)
• The Star Thrower, Loren Eiseley (1978)

Papers

• Perception Encoder: The best visual embeddings are not at the output of the network, FAIR 2025

Blogs / Essays

• How I've Run Major Projects, Ben Kuhn
• Softmax Attention is a Fluke, Ethan Smith
• Does AI Progress Have a Speed Limit?, Ajeya Cotra and Arvind Narayanan
• Slop, Will Manidis
• Impact, Ben Kuhn
• Research Taste Exercises, Chris Olah
• The Urgency of Interpretability, Dario Amodei
• Recent AI Model Progress Feels Mostly Like Bullshit, lc
• What I Worked On, Paul Graham
• Feedback Loops, Will Crichton
• Why Does RL Work? An Inquiry, LLM Promptu
• Toward a working definition of paperclip-punk, Elena Burger