vslira's blog

     I use Anki to learn, and for the last few years I've successfully built a habit of doing my daily cards. It's hard at first, sometimes you don't feel like it, but like any habit if you stick to it eventually becomes easier (not always "easy", just "easier").     But I'm not immune to falling behind, and like everyone who does Anki when life gets in the way of the daily sessions I struggle to keep up and start accumulating cards. Then one day you open the app, sees that there are 100 cards to study and you get that strong resistance to get started.     I could simply change the settings to lower the daily review limit, but I feel like I'd be just sweeping the problem under the rug then. I need to face the fact that I have to work through the backlog, which is also a signal to myself to pause adding more stuff until I get it into a manageable state.     So lately I decided that my ...

     One of the books on my reading list is Bryant and O'Hallaron's Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective . As the name implies, it teaches you how computers work. The book uses C since it's a low-level language that "exposes" the machine and it appeals to me because I've been eager to learn both systems-level programming and computer hardware, and this book addresses both areas using C.     Now, the reader might not be aware, but there's currently a low-level language holy war between Rust and C going on (well, more like a two-front war with Rust tackling C and C++ at the same time). Which is fine and all - I've got no dog in this fight - but it got me thinking: Is there some book or piece of content that can teach me the same breadth of hardware knowledge based on Rust? Even though learning is fun, I'd rather learn a language at the same time I learn about hardware.      I don't expect to become a systems programmer any time soon, ...

I didn't finish Statistical Rethinking 2ed yet, but that didn't dissuade me from planning the few books I'll be reading next. I'm trying to mix fundamentals, application and some business/management. Of course, many books will belong to more than one category, but my idea for classification is something like "I need this to understand other things", "things that I can use to build things" and "how to execute on the things I'm building". In random order: - Statistical Rethinking 2ed by Richard McElreath (WIP) [Application] - Measure What Matters by John Doerr (WIP) [Business] - This is Marketing by Seth Godin [Business] - Causal Inference, a Primer by Judea Pearl [Application] - Introduction to Linear Algebra 5ed by Gilbert Strang [Fundamentals] - Calculus, by Michael Spivak [Fundamentals] - Seven Sketches in Compositionality [Fundamentals] I expect to finish them all, ankifying throughout, this year. I just won't call it a New Year ...