What I’m Crunching — June 9, 2024


Book I’m Reading

I finished this one this week. Road trips are great for making progress on audiobooks.

Hanes has accomplished much in the world of bow-hunting. His achievements are remarkable and he has advanced the sport. His intense training (he regularly runs marathons and ultramarathons) means he outworks most others by a mile. He’s devoted to being the best bow hunter he can be.

As a piece of writing, the book is quite repetitive. I found myself asking, “How many different ways can he say the same thing?” The answer is, surprisingly many! Maybe a series of blog posts would have been adequate to get the message across. But, the book is likely allowing his message to be distributed to a wider audience.


Podcast I’m Listening To

Palmer Luckey is an interesting character. Sporting a goatee and a mullet, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and cruising around on his personal warship, Luckey is revolutionizing the modern defense industry.

In this podcast episode, he lays out his philosophy on leading large companies and his learnings from developing emerging technologies like VR and AI.

Differentiated thinking is key to abnormal impact. You cannot think and act like everyone else and expect to have an outsized impact.


Video I’m Watching


Articles I’m Reading

2023 Stone Ridge Investor Letter (Ross Stevens)

Evaluation of the Great Commission Resurgence (from 2009) from the Southern Baptist Convention

From GPT-4 to AGI: Counting the OOMs (Leopold Aschenbrenner)

^ This last essay is the first of a series of eight by Aschenbrenner. I was blown away by his thorough and thoughtful analysis. There are some fundamental assumptions I question, but there is tremendous value in reading these essays and considering his points.

The first essay in the series estimates the possible orders of magnitude gain in FLOPs of effective computing.

“Effective” here includes three categories: 1) straight compute, 2) algorithmic efficiencies, and 3) unhobbling gains. 


Tweets I’m Reading






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