⭐⭐ 5 Types of Wealth by Bloom

I read this on the recommendation of Bill Ackman, mostly based on the fact that he also recommended Outlive, which I loved. I don’t necessarily think it’s horrible, it’s just that I am surprised that people would find the stuff that’s discussed here all that insightful. I think I’m simply not in the target audience — this would likely speak to folks that have over-invested in their career, at the detriment of other areas. Still, I feel the recommendations here are limited and don’t cover everything that you’d want to consider when ‘reorienting’ your life. For a more complete treatment, I’d recommend something like Vermeer’s 8760.

March 1, 2025 Book Reviews

R1 1776

A week ago, Perplexity released a version of DeepSeek R1 that is un-censored. The examples in their blog post are pretty compelling. I had previously been using R1 via OpenRouter, but was always uncomfortable with using such a censored model. 1776 likely still has a good amount of censorship in it (after all, they only targeted things known to be censored by CCP), but it’s clearly much better.

It’s good enough to become the third default slot in my Msty “Thinking” split chat, alongside OpenAI’s o1 and Google’s Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking Experimental. (Msty itself is worth mentioning as an excellent UI for both remote and local models!)

How I interact with AI for all but the most basic of questions

February 25, 2025 AI

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Genius Factory by Plotz

I read this on the recommendation of Gwern, who gave the book four stars. I agree with his assessment. As someone who recently went through freezing his own sperm (thank you Legacy, Carrot, and Stripe benefits!), this was an interesting companion piece that not only discusses this specific sperm bank but also goes over a brief history of banks in general. Learning about the history of Robert Graham, as well as a few of the donors to the bank that Plotz was able to uncover (and meet with!) was very cool. And despite it currently being trendy to say the opposite, the book further convinced me that nurture is more important than nature.

The book also does a good job of weaving some narrative elements that focus on specific families and their relationship with the donors they are able to uncover. As a short read, I think I’d recommend it to most.

February 24, 2025 Book Reviews

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Developer Hegemony by Dietrich

I was recommended this book a couple of times over the years but only got around to reading it now. The read was quite an engaging one; I thoroughly enjoy mental models of how we can think of power structures in the modern workplace. In this tome, Dietrich leans heavily on the structures as described in Rao’s Gervais Principle, re-naming them Opportunists, Idealists, and Pragmatists (terminology that I prefer to Rao’s). I thought at first that this would be one of the structures he peruses, but actually, it ends up being the only one discussed in the book. This reliance makes the work primarily derivative and less original.

Dietrich’s insights later in the book, on how to ultimately become an Opportunists from the other two classes, are his primary original contribution. I thought that there were some interesting ideas here, but I didn’t fully buy into his concept of “efficiencer firms” whos primary purpose is automation. Sure, this can be applied to many businesses that one might start after formal employment (especially in the consulting space). However, I don’t think this framing fits businesses that sell a service / product very well. This was tough for me because that’s the direction I am most interested in.

Some of the other concepts would have been groudbreaking to stumble upon in college / early employment, but not so revolutionary for me at this stage of my life (mid-career technologist). I thought of many parallels to Fisker’s Early Retirement Extreme, which I actually did read shortly after graduating college. They have some cool overlaps.

Ultimately I still think this book deserves quite a good rating, and believe that most software engineers (and knowledge workers in adjacent categories) would benefit from reading it.

February 17, 2025 Book Reviews

⭐⭐ How to Engineer Your Layoff by Dogen

I picked this book up during a time that I was evaluating leaving an employer. I had heard of it in the past but balked at the high price tag (nearly $100!). Ultimately, I decided to buy it since the ROI potential was huge. I came away pretty disappointed.

This book probably contains maybe a few bullet points of valuable information. Certainly, the core of what is said could be handled within the context of an essay or blog post. This is a common complaint I have of non-fiction / self-help style books already, but this felt bad even for those standards. Outside of the first few chapters, you’re basically reading a loose collection of thoughts that are related to the concept of leaving a job, some not even by the author himself.

I think the book could also really use a professional editor. There’s a few places I noticed where there were grammatical errors, and formatting can be inconsistent. Many chapters contain tons of filler — for example, the case studies in Chapter 9 were seemingly just copy-pasted emails without modification.

In the end, it did cause me to consider the perspective a bit more, so I offer two stars instead of just one. But you can get that mostly from reading the title.

February 5, 2025 Book Reviews

⭐⭐ Stories of Your Life and Others by Chiang

I had seen this book recommended so many times on HN that I felt like I had to pick it up. Ultimately, I came away quite disappointed — it’s not necessarily that the stories were bad, just that they weren’t particularly good. Ended up stopping after reading about half.

Not recommended.

January 6, 2025 Book Reviews