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https://opensea.io/collection/books-39
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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A mega-thread of all the books I read in 2024. The setup: one cast per book (from oldest to most recent)—title, author(s), an impression and a link. Comments, questions and further recommendations welcome.
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
@msms
Here's the thread from 2023. My personal site also has my active reading tracks, quake books and top reads from 2022 and 2021. 2024's will go up once I've done the year's annual review. https://warpcast.com/msms/0x71239ef2 https://www.msweet.net/
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
@msms
Now, let's kick off my 2024 reading mega-thread. First up, the texts begun late in 2023 and finished in early January 2024...
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
@msms
Being-Time: A Practitioner's Guide to Dogen's Shobogenzo by Shinshu Roberts. A fun text which highlights (amongst other things) one of the central tenets of Dōgen's Sōtō school of Zen: that the duality between enlightened and unenlightened is BS. I'm kinda convinced—it helped nudge me away from "happy" and "unhappy" as dominant "inner game" labels, at least. https://wisdomexperience.org/product/being-time/
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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How to Grow a Robot by Mark H. Lee. This one's about developmental robotics and how we may facilitate the growth of machines, rather than merely building them. With the increasing pace of developments in AI, I suspect we're going to have to begin thinking in these sorts of paradigms by default, especially at the end user level. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262043731/how-to-grow-a-robot/
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Illustrated) by J.K. Rowling. I didn't realise I had this on the shelf—it turned out to be a fun, lightweight holiday season read. https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/harry-potter-and-the-order-of-the-phoenix-9781408845684/
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Adaptive Oncogenesis by James DeGregori. I really enjoyed this. The proliferation of cancerous cells is more than just the accumulation of cellular biological trials. Evolutionary dynamics—such as occupying reproductive lifecycle phases or being at the upper end of human lifespan—and the enveloping tissue macro-environment are big factors. The biggest factors, perhaps? https://www.hup.harvard.edu/books/9780674545397
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Every Man for Himself and God Against All by Werner Herzog. Herzog is the epitome of an unreliable narrator. All the same, this was interesting and contained some harrowing autobiographia—like knife fights with a sibling. I enjoyed the earlier set of interviews produced in collab with Paul Cronin more. https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/447206/every-man-for-himself-and-god-against-all-by-herzog-werner/9781529923865 https://www.faber.co.uk/product/9780571259779-werner-herzog-a-guide-for-the-perplexed/
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Memories of Ice (Malazan Book of the Fallen III) by Steven Erikson. I mean, it's Malazan. I've read it multiple times and I will shill it to anyone who 1) likes epic fantasy and 2) can stomach long reads. Just read it, goddammit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memories_of_Ice
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
@msms
Leftovers from 2023—done. Moving onto the proper 2024 texts...
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
@msms
From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. My second foray into the work of Alan Moore. It's easy to see why he's cited as a seminal artist. From Hell was a real blast, blending thriller vibes was Masonic ritual and London history and geography. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_Hell
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Meeting the Universe Halfway by Karen Barad. I'm no physicist, nor a philosopher, but this text resonated—it argues for viewing phenomena as entangled and actions as embodied. It seems to present a different path forward for meta science. https://www.dukeupress.edu/meeting-the-universe-halfway https://newmaterialism.eu
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Once and Future Vols. One to Five by Kieron Gillen, Dan Mora, and Tamra Bonvillain. My final sequential art read before I switched back to regular texts. A dark, Arthurian romp that places the power of narrative at the core of the story. Gorgeous visuals, too. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_%26_Future
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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The Emperor of All Maladies by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Cancer affects practically every person in some way or form and it was fascinating to see how it evolved from an almost unacknowledged phenomena of sufficiently advanced biological systems into an organising force for much of modern medicine. https://siddharthamukherjee.com/the-emperor-of-all-maladies/
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
@msms
Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris. Reality is not history is not lore—this applies to Silicon Valley, too. Harris is by no means a neutral observer, but his recounting of the region's arc from gold rushes through railroads, defence, personal computers and contemporary Big Tech provides a good start for sensemaking SV's position today. https://www.hachette.co.uk/titles/malcolm-harris-2/palo-alto/9781529430875/ https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/on-lore
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick is a simple approach for doing product discovery and understanding end users. TL;DR: their life is more important than your idea, past specifics are more valuable than generics / opinions about the future, and one should talk less and listen more to what they have to say. It's definitely impacted my thoughts and actions concerning a lot of things. https://www.momtestbook.com
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Talking to Humans by Giff Constable is similar to the Mom Test in some respects. It offers a bunch of tactics and tools for the latter half of the pre-PMF discovery arc; "build s*** and talk to people". https://www.talkingtohumans.com
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Microhabitable by Fernando Garcia Dory, Lucia Pietroiusti and others. It's a reader focused on the micro—scopic, political, economic. My favourite essay was by Marisol de la Cadena and concerned the irreconcilable conflicts concerning the Amazon—what exactly a territory is and what relations make it is the ground truth that none of the parties can gain consensus on. https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/microhabitable/ https://www.marisoldelacadena.com
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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House of Chains (Malazan Book of the Fallen IV) by Steven Erikson. I'll say it again. Malazan; epic; read it. And this is one of my favourite in the original ten book series—so much happens, and the array of characters is just divine. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Chains
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Effectuation: Elements of Entrepreneurial Expertise (2nd Ed.) by Saras S. Sarasvathy. To some degree, the mythologising of entrepreneurs (a practice that should have a wider scope than tech founders) is correct. There's disproportionate risk assumed in a lot of cases, which I think is the main myth-making requirement. But, as this text helped me realise, what's really valuable about such endeavours is the audacity. The knowhow required to do it? That can be learned. Effectuation is one approach for doing that. https://effectuation.org/effectuation-books-and-chapters
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Galileo Unbound by David D. Nolte. If you want to speedrun the history of the science of motion, this is the way to do it. https://galileo-unbound.blog
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Scattered Minds by Gabor Mate. I came to this text looking for ways to help me focus more easily on the most important thing, and to learn how to unattach from things that get stuck in my attention. That kinda happened? At the least, I picked up a new frame of reference for some of my long-held tendencies and dispositions. https://drgabormate.com/book/scattered-minds/
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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The Infinite Machine by Camila Russo. I didn't know much about the world of Ethereum—either technically or historically. I still don't, really, but I'm in a better state than before. https://www.harpercollins.com/products/the-infinite-machine-camila-russo?variant=32123333836834
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain by David Gerard. I picked this up as a counterweight to the Russo text. It was meh. Gerard is a well-known cryptocurrency cynic but most of the criticisms didn't land with me as much as I expected them to. https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee. Lesser in scope than The Emperor of All Maladies, its equal in narrative quality and rigour, and with a greater sense of pathos, this history of the gene is a solid telling of the past and present of genetics. As for the future of genetics—and of humanity? That's what the text gets one thinking about. https://siddharthamukherjee.com/the-gene-an-intimate-history/
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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The Protocol Kit by the /sop 2023 team. This came in five instalments over the course of the year. It really altered my perspective on a lot of issues, from sociality and culture to organism decay and technology development. So much so that I've elevated it to "quake book" status (a text that radically perturbs how one thinks about and acts within the world). https://summerofprotocols.com/kit
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Matter and Motion by Thomas Nail. Nothing especially new for me here because I've read all of Nail's kinetic case studies (Being and Motion was a revelation). Enjoyed coming back to some of the motion-centric ideas, though. https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-matter-and-motion.html https://academic.oup.com/book/43685
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Daughter of the Moon Goddess (The Celestial Kingdom Duology I) by Sue Lynn Tan. My wife thought I'd enjoy this, and she wasn't wrong. It's a touching story and a fun read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughter_of_the_Moon_Goddess
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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The Murderbot Diaries (#1-#6 Bundle) and System Collapse (Murderbot Diaries #7) by Martha Wells. I ended up at this series because 1) I caught Martha Wells on the Embedded FM podcast, and 2) because I'd heard @jenna mention it multiple times. It's really, really good. Great characters, strong world, compelling events and awesome narration. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murderbot_Diaries
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Midnight Tides (Malazan V) by Steven Erikson. The fifth Malazan book. The Edur-Lether collision is perfectly executed. The anguish experienced is almost too much, at times. Just exquisite stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midnight_Tides
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Anti-Oedipus (Capitalism and Schizophrenia P1) by Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. I persevered with this for a bit but then quit. It's a text that needs an almost devotional level of attention to contextualise and unpack—I wasn't willing to give it that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Oedipus
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Biosemiotics by Jesper Hoffmeyer. I kind of connected this to some of Barad's ideas about observers, entanglement and intra-action and to some of the concepts coming out of new materialism. It argues that intermediation, signs, signalling, boundaries are more central to the emergence of consciousness than given credit for. https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/B/bo5932926.html
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (4th Ed., Global) by Stuart Russel and Peter Norvig. Picked this up to get a good overview of the basics of modern AI—it's ideal for that. Also makes it very apparent how frictionless the slope is from reasoning about logic and computation through to agents, decisions and systems. If one's not careful, you can end up trying to remake / revolutionise the world. https://aima.cs.berkeley.edu/global-index.html
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Ways of Seeing by John Berger. The first of two arbitrary art book pickups. Easy to see why this hit hard in the 1970s. I also suspect that it's more impactful in documentary format (no, I haven't watched it). https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/56465/ways-of-seeing-by-berger-john/9780141035796
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Viewing Velocities by Marcus Verhagen. The second of the opportunistic art book purchases. It's about speed in contemporary art. Revealed some interesting recent projects and theorists (e.g. Harmut Rosa, Jacques Rancierre), and made me think about the slow and fast in my own life. https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/2951-viewing-velocities
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Doomsday Book (Oxford TIme Travel I) by Connie Willis. This looked promising but I found to be a bit too dry to get into. I quit it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doomsday_Book_%28novel%29
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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The Sevenwaters Trilogy by Juliet Marillier. Another recommendation from my wife, and another good one. I read the original first three novels (there's six total). Very much enjoyed the Gaelic mythology and the druidic elements of the story. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sevenwaters_Trilogy
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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The Soul of the Octopus by Sy Montgomery. I'm struck by melancholy for the most part when thinking of this text. Cephalods are SO fascinating (esp. when juxtaposed when brain-dominant dialogues around intelligence) but we know SO little about them. And the minor ways we can know things require these animals to be in captivity. https://symontgomery.com/soul-of-an-octopus/
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Lapidarium by Hettie Judah. Total opportune purchase and a book I really loved. I have not spent any time, really, thinking about minerals, and it turns out they're intricately intertwined with our histories. https://www.hettiejudah.co.uk/lapidarium-the-secret-lives-of-stones
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Testing Business Ideas by David J. Bland and Alex Osterwalder. I'm familiar with other texts in the Strategyser series. This one had the same high production values as the others, although it didn't have the personal resonance of the OG texts on business model design and value proposition design. Still, really handy to have around. https://www.strategyzer.com/library/testing-business-ideas-book
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann. Seems like a GOATed text in many corners of the web. And definitely worthy of the praise. It provides a lot of guidance for thinking about and unpacking the consequence of decisions when designing systems. Insightful and kinda timeless. https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/designing-data-intensive-applications/9781491903063/
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil. A pretty dense book; a lot of insight in little space. Not particularly applicable for me or any of my projects at the time, but definitely handy for eyeing up potential futures and thinking about the elements that need to exist for them to manifest. https://press.stripe.com/high-growth-handbook
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Systems Medicine by Uri Alon. A really neat text. Reasoning about physiological systems as circuits that can be modelled AND connecting those circuits to a periodic table of diseases just seems, to an outsider like me, a paradigmatically different approach to traditional cause-and-effect medicine. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.1201/9781003356929/systems-medicine-uri-alon
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Cybernetics for the 21st Century by Yuk Hui et al. "...dedicated to the epistemological reconstruction of cybernetics, consisting of a series of historical and critical reflections on the subject". It seems to do that quite well. It manages to avoid drinking the cybernetics kool-aid, and also highlights some lesser known cybernetic thinking outcomes (e.g. China and Latin America). I still prefer Michael C. Jackson's Critical Systems thinking for situating cybernetics historically, though. https://hanart.press/cybernetics-for-the-21st-century-vol-1/ https://www.wiley.com/en-gb/Critical+Systems+Thinking+and+the+Management+of+Complexity-p-9781119118398
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Imperial Radch Trilogy by Ann Leckie. Loved this. It read like a mashup of the Murderbot Diaries and Iain M. Banks' Culture series. A little more gritty than the former and not as monumental in scope or as deft philosophically as the latter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_Justice
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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The Bonehunters (Malazan VI) by Steven Erikson. The sixth Malazan book. Things are getting weighty, and the christening of the Bonehunters is easily one of my favourite sequences in the ten-book saga. These books just get better with each re-read. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Bonehunters
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Energy and Civilisation: A History by Vaclav Smil. I was expecting this to be dry AF. But it wasn't too bad. Smil's writing does have a very subtle character and he's a solid guide to the intricacies of energy utilisation and some of its downstream effects. Smil-like depth feels like table stakes for reasoning about Kardashev scales and accelerating civs. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262536165/energy-and-civilization/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Venture Deals (4th Ed.) by Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson. Useful to understand what the eff VC is all about and where it sits in the greater landscape of capital allocation and movement. Also helped me realise how dangerous a game it can be if one doesn't understand the incentives, the norms and the risks. https://www.venturedeals.com
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Onchain Capital Allocation Handbook by @owocki. As a counterweight to Venture Deals, I really enjoyed this. One of the main reasons I think cryptocurrencies are important is they allow us to ask really basic questions, like, "With these new mechanisms, how can we distribute capital?" The text is a nice survey of some proven and emerging methods. https://allobook.gitcoin.co
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The Edge of Sentience: Risk and Precaution in Humans, Other Animals, and AI by Jonathan Birch. Attempts to wrangle with definitions of sentience. Not just conceptually, or philosophically, but in a way that can be actualised within and inform literal policy decisions. It's excellent and I expect it would sap the heat from a lot of the discourse concerning non-human (machines AND animals) sentience if more widely known. https://www.edgeofsentience.com
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Cryptography Engineering: Design Principles and Practical Applications (1st Ed.) by Niels Ferguson. I had this lying around (digitally) as a PDF from a while back. It was interesting to see the sorts of questions the design of a cryptographic protocol raises. It also got me into thinking about maximum extractable value. https://www.schneier.com/books/cryptography-engineering/
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Radical Acceptance by Tara Brach. I've read some of Brach's other texts, as well as a bunch of other texts that make the contemplative arts palatable for more secular audiences. Not mind blowing for me at this stage, but a handy reminder of some really important approaches for handling one's self. https://www.tarabrach.com/books/radical-acceptance/
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Matthew McDowell-Sweet
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Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. Came to this text after hearing her on the Tim Ferriss pod. (which was itself strongly recommended by a friend). A good book for management wonks and for people heading up rapidly scaling teams / departments / orgs. I don't really fit in either category so I noped out of this one early. https://press.stripe.com/scaling-people https://tim.blog/2024/02/27/claire-hughes-johnson/
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