bookshelf | mason wang

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (book, nonfiction)
2025 letter | Dan Wang — **US (especially SF) vs. China, (especially regarding AI).** Silicon Valley, like the CCP, is powerful and humorless: impressive in its capacity to build, yet prone to narrow, herdlike thinking, espec (essay, nonfiction)
95%-ile isn't that good | Dan Luu — Becoming 95%-ile isn't that hard because most people don't actually practice or deliberately improve. No, seriously! Have you ever recorded yourself coding and studied it to improve? What about actual (essay, advice)
against narrative | Internet Princess — “a love story, or an essay about love stories, or the opposite of both.” Starts with a beautifully painful snippet of her last relationship, then discusses why we try to storytell, why we need stories (essay, nonfiction)
Against Universal Basic Income - Alexey Guzey — Inequality often means the hierarchy of social status. UBI doesn't solve this central problem. Also, means-tested programs are better than UBI. (essay, nonfiction)
AI neurostimulation for attention — In a double-blind study, home-based study (not within lab setting), transcranial random noise stimulation (**tRNS**) personalized by Bayesian optimization improved attention for a attention-sustained (research paper, science)
AI vs. the Pentagon | Jasmine Sun — Pete Hegseth threatened to designate Anthropic a “supply chain risk” after they refused to remove contractual limits on mass surveillance and autonomous weapons use and Sam Altman swooped in to take t (essay, nonfiction)
Introduction of Marina Keegan (by Anne Fadiman) — Introduction the “The Opposite of Loneliness,” telling the story of Marina Keegan. (book, fiction)
Staring into the abyss as a core life skill | Ben Kuhn — Reason hard about the uncomfortable questions, and get used to doing that. (essay, advice)
Be impatient | Ben Kuhn — Moving fast has the obvious goal of getting more work done, but the more important thiing is you process information more quickly and get more opportunities overall (to work on different things, to im (essay, advice)
Be Skeptical | Nick Cammarata — Assigning probabilities to your statements to show your confidence allows us to be productively skeptical when discussing both inkling and polished ideas. (essay, nonfiction)
Becoming a magician — Describe the version of you that seems impossible—truly magical—to you right now, aim at that, and repeat. Your progress in life flattens out to linear, often without you noticing. (essay, advice)
On becoming competitive when joining a new company — Also could be titled “How to gain influence in a company.” Have incredibly high agency through 1) grinding and 2) being intentional with who you talk to / what you invest time into. (blog post, advice)
Why and how to write things on the Internet | Ben Kuhn — Instead of focusing on counterarguments for why not to start a blog, he shares the **positive reasons** for why you *should* start writing on the Internet. Then he dives into how with practical writin (essay, advice)
The Best Essay | Paul Graham — What surprising thing do you have to say? Writing is the process through which you get more ideas (actually write something bad down, because you at least turn vague → bad). The initial question that (essay, advice)
Burdens | Scott Alexander — Humans don’t owe society anything; we were here first. Actively suicidal people always say they feel like a burden. Sometimes the signal here is that you can't trust your brain. But the premise of thi (essay, nonfiction)
No one can teach you to have conviction | Ben Kuhn — Learning from others can get you a model that makes 95% of the easy decisions, but the 5% that adds the most value yourself has to come from your own mistakes. Conviction matters particularly when the (essay, advice)
Why we care about whales | Marina Keegan (essay, nonfiction)
Chaos Theory | Tina Mai — Getting lucky is about increasing your surface area of luck; luck being unpredictable does not make luck uncontrollable. Make yourself findable by saying yes more often and by sharing your work. Be re (essay, nonfiction)
Choosing to Walk | Internet Princess — “I think of writing a lot like walking. It’s rarely the most popular, the most effective, or the most efficient way of getting to your destination. … Walking invests in the potentiality of your experi (essay, nonfiction)
Cognitive Hygiene: Why You Need to Make Thinking Hard Again | Westenberg — In changing work, AI changes thought: instead of just offloading thoughts we offload cognition. This results in more efficiency but simulated intelligence, where we think we know things we never did. (video, nonfiction)
Cold Pastoral | Marina Keegan (short story, fiction)
College advice for people who are exactly like me | Ben Kuhn — 1) Get + stay grounded in what's important (basically all the points fall under this category) 2) Get good advice from the few people who can actually help you because it saves you a lot of wasted mot (essay, advice)
Here's how to live: Create. | Derek Sivers — Spend your life creating: constantly ship projects and turn ideas into something real, without waiting for inspiration and without holding judgment to what you produce. (essay, advice)
Setting up GPIO on the r/pi | CS 140E — “This note describes how to configure and use the r/pi GPIO pins.” (other, science)
Observation, code equivalance, and bugs | CS 140E — If an observer cannot tell the difference between two things (e.g., snippets of code) then they are effectively equivalent and can be substituted for one another. This causes many problems because of (other, science)
The wonderful world of the VideoCore IV (Raspberry Pi GPU) | CS 240LX — This lab introduces the VideoCore IV (Raspberry Pi GPU) through “hello-world”, 2D indexing, parallel addition, and Mandelbrot examples. (other, science)
The days are long but the decades are short | Sam Altman (essay, advice)
Making Deep Learning go Brrrr From First Principles | Horace He (blog post, science)
What are Diffusion Models? | Lilian Weng — From Lil'Log: technical overview of diffusion models, conditioned generation, and speedup/architecture methods. (blog post, science)
Proof You Can Do Hard Things | Nate Eliason — **Do hard things to prove to yourself that you can** because it will turn “your default stance on challenges from ‘that seems hard’ to ‘I can figure it out.’” (essay, advice)
The Double Ratchet Algorithm | Signal — How the Signal chat client provides end-to-end encrypted communications. The goal is to provide **forward secrecy** (securing of past messages in event of current keys being compromised) and **break-i (blog post, science)
Everything you've been told about burnout is wrong | Bscholl — “Burnout is caused by the lack of believable motivation—not working too hard.” We all have gratification windows, and we need make sure to keep a tangible, believable, and concrete milestone within th (essay, advice)
Everything is Fertile | Nick Cammarata — We may bucket habits/places/people into sterile (bland) / fertile (interesting), but whenever we classify something as the former, we fail to appreciate the fertility of everything. There's wonder and (essay, nonfiction)
Exhalation (short story) | Ted Chiang — “In the epistolary ‘Exhalation’, an alien scientist makes a shocking discovery with ramifications not just for his own people, but for all of reality.” (Goodreads) (short story, fiction)
FAST: Efficient Robot Action Tokenization (research paper, science)
a brief refresher on how to write easily-forwardable emails — Very useful guide/reminders for intros (tweet, advice)
The Average Fourth Grader Is a Better Poet Than You (and Me Too) — “By middle/high school, the average student has learned how normal people talk. The resulting language is underwhelming and predictable - the safe regurgitations of a thoroughly socialized consciousne (essay, nonfiction)
Generalizing From One Example | Scott Alexander — “Typical mind fallacy”: tendency to believe that our own mental structure can be applied to everyone else. Starts with an old survey that found wide range of people's ability to form mental images, an (essay, nonfiction)
Stellar Moments of Humankind | Stefan Zweig — 12 decisive moments in human history. (book, history)
The Gun to Your Head | Nick Cammarata — Frames our self-sabotage, our inner critic and fears, as a gun pointed at us from *inside our head*. You face it to get it see your perspective, and you end up seeing its perspective to. (essay, nonfiction)
Why You Should Start a Blog Right Now | Alexey Guzey (essay, advice)
Half of World’s Population Will Experience a Mental Health Disorder — Half of us will face a diagnosable mental disorder by age 75, most starting in our teens or 20s. Women more vulnerable to depression/anxiety, men more vulnerable to alcohol/drug problems. (research paper, science)
You and Your Research | Richard Hamming — Why do so few scientists make exceptional impact on their field and so many others are forgotten? More broadly, what separates those who do great work and those who don't? (essay, advice)
Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog | Henrik Karlsson — Write about what makes you odd: your contradictions, your obsessions. Write like you text a friend. In your blog, you set the norms, so be unapologetically yourself. That's what others will want to re (essay, advice)
home for the holidays | Internet Princess — “an essay (sort of) about grief (sort of)”: “I tried to write an essay about grief, but because writing about grief is sort of like staring at the sun, I mostly ended up writing about everything that’ (essay, nonfiction)
A Brain-Inspired Algorithm For Memory (Hopfield Networks) | Artem Kirsanov — Easy visual introduction of Hopfield networks, a foundational model of associative memory. (video, science)
How I Read Books (essay, advice)
How to Do Philosophy | Paul Graham (essay, nonfiction)
Understanding & Conquering Depression | Huberman Lab — (1) What major depression is at the biological and psychological level. (2) The three major chemical systems altered in depression: norepinephrine, serotonin, and dopamine. (3) Treatments. (podcast, science)
Hunyuan3D 2.0: Scaling Diffusion Models for High Resolution Textured 3D Assets Generation — Very impressive 2D image -> 3D mesh (and texturing). At its core, it is a diffusion transformer operating in the latent space of the Hunyuan3D-ShapeVAE which encodes and decodes 3D meshes. So it start (research paper, science)
Nabeel's comments on Karpathy/Dwarkesh interview — Useful reminder that we need to actively fight against collapsing mentally by 1) reading and writing a lot (to make your updates clearer) and 2) having conversations with people, especially those who (tweet, advice)
On Keeping a Notebook | Joan Didion — A personal notebook is not for facts but rather for us to preserve and remember ourselves. Even when we write about others, the primary subject is ourselves. Even when our memories lie, they tell the (essay, nonfiction)
Life is Short | Paul Graham — Life really is short, so you really shouldn't waste time on bullshit. Bullshit is either forced upon you or tricks you, and in both cases you can do something about it. The one lures you into wasting (essay, advice)
What to do with your life | Julian Shapiro — “We fundamentally change over time, but it's not obvious that we have unless we pause to self-assess. If we're lazy and just ride life's momentum, we're likely to regret how we spend our years.” Here' (essay, advice)
The Lifecycle of Software Objects | Ted Chiang — “It's a story of two people and the artificial intelligences they helped create, following them for more than a decade as they deal with the upgrades and obsolescence that are inevitable in the world (short story, fiction)
Mao Zedong: A Life (Jonathan Spence) — A 188-page, brief and straight-forward biography on Mao. (book, nonfiction)
math team (and other horrible things you do to get into stanford) | Benexdict — Mourning the pointlessness of competitive math and, more broadly, what the college application process had done to him psychologically. (essay, nonfiction)
Look Ma, No Bubbles! Designing a Low-Latency Megakernel for Llama-1B (blog post, science)
The Merchant and the Alchemist's Gate | Ted Chiang — “In medieval Baghdad, a penniless man is brought before the most powerful man in the world, the caliph himself, to tell his story. It begins with a walk in the bazaar, but soon grows into a tale unlik (short story, fiction)
More people should write | James Somers — Writing changes the way you live. You become more curious and it acts as this filter which all the things you experience pass through, and it catches just a bit more of the richness of life for you. (essay, advice)
The Munich Olympics Hostage Crisis - Animated Documentary | The Operations Room — “5th September 1972, the eyes of the world turn to the Olympic Village in Munich as members of Black September take Israeli athletes hostage at the Summer Games.” (video, history)
The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Doug… — Dr. Douglas Kelley is given the opportunity of a lifetime when he is assigned to evaluate the Nazi leaders before the Nuremberg trials. His access to the prisoners is not only unlimited but uniquely i (book, history)
Neuralink Overview, Fall 2025 | Neuralink — Really nice presentation explaining Neuralink's Telepathy, how they own their whole stack, and some of the engineering challenge areas. (video, science)
Neurode landing page (other, science)
A quantitative comparison of NIRS and fMRI across multiple cognitive tasks (research paper, science)
There's no speed limit | Derek Sivers — There is no rule in terms of how fast you can learn something or do something. The standard/norm can be astoundingly bad. (essay, advice)
Notes on Puzzles | Nabeel Qureshi — "Scientist-brain" (falsifying ideas) vs. "founder-brain." Problem-solving crucially involves both (1) conviction that a solution even exists and (2) a hunger to actually find that solution. Conviction (essay, nonfiction)
Nudge: Our Mission, Technology, and Approach | Nudge — Nudge is building non-invasive ultrasound-based devices for stimulating the brain to combat brain disorders like addiction, chronic pain, and anxiety (and in the future, help everyone with wide-rangin (blog post, science)
Nudge (Quintin Frerichs) (essay, science)
On impact | Alexey Guzey — Looking back on history, we have no clue what kind of impact anything or anyone really had in the long term, nor will we know our own impact. So “what should we do with our lives? ... **(1) Do what yo (essay, advice)
The Opposite of Loneliness: Essays and Stories — Marina Keegan was a gifted Yale graduate, playwright, and essayist who delivered the amazing commencement speech *The Opposite of Loneliness*, calling her classmates to “make something happen to this (book, fiction)
How to optimize Raspberry Pi code using its GPU | Pete Warden — To get data from DRAM onto the Pi’s QPUs, using the TMU (Texture and Memory Units) for data transfer is faster than using the VPM (Vertex Pipeline Memory). Various notes about VPM usage for GEMM (matr (blog post, science)
The Parable of the Talents | Scott Alexander — Intelligence is an innate ability, but this isn't a bad thing. Figure out what energizes you, and pursue that. It doesn't matter what talents you were born with, only that you do what you can with the (essay, nonfiction)
21 observations from people watching (essay, nonfiction)
Perceived Age | Surya Dan — Half our life is over by 21, at least in the way we perceive time. Maintain a dynamic life, establish better habits, and introduce novelty. These can “add layers of childlike richness to life.” (essay, nonfiction)
Poor Charlie's Almanack (book, nonfiction)
Preemptive threads, checked with single step equivalence | CS 140E — Implementing preemptive context switching by saving and restoring all 17 registers (r0–r15 + CPSR) to forcibly switch between threads. Verifying the restore works using a debug hardware mismatch fault (other, science)
Principles of Neural Design (book, science)
Principles | Nabeel Qureshi — A concise, well-communicated, and thoughtful list of hard-won life lessons. (By design, very dense). (essay, advice)
PyTorch is dead. Long live JAX. — Consider rewriting your PyTorch codebases in JAX, which is better in important ways: autoparallelization, reproducibility, a clean functional API, etc. (essay, science)
How We're Fooled By Statistics | Veritasium — Regression to the mean: extreme results (good or bad) tend to be followed by results closer to the average. So very poor performing baselines tend toward improving the next time you measure. (video, science)
The Relativity of Wrong by Isaac Asimov — “Right” and “wrong” are not binary absolute (some wrongs are wronger than others). Each century, what scientists believe to be right turn out to be wrong, but through smaller and smaller refinements e (essay, nonfiction)
Resident Evil | Internet Princess — “on the various pursuits of weightlessness” which I think is a really fitting subtitle, or it's a “weird compulsive diary entry.” Truthfully, I use quotes because I don't know how to even describe thi (essay, nonfiction)
Rest in motion | Nate Soares — The ground state is in motion, not a relaxed resting state. Treat the things you need to do in life not as a bucket you have to empty (you never will) but rather a never-ending stream you move through (essay, advice)
What I Wish Someone Had Told Me | Sam Altman (essay, advice)
How To Be Successful | Sam Altman — 13 tips on how to achieve outlier success. e.g., believe in yourself to the point of delusion, be willful, choose intentionally what you focus on, self-compound. (essay, advice)
The Search for Modern China — 400-year narrative history of China from the late Ming (~1600) through the present, tracing how internal decay, foreign pressure, revolution, and reinvention produced the China that exists today. To m (book, history)
Searching for outliers | Ben Kuhn — **Most important things in life are outlier-driven (jobs, relationships).** But because heavy-tailed distributions are unintuitive, we make serious mistakes (e.g., undersampling, underestimating the t (essay, advice)
The Secret of the Weekplan | Calv — Send a group of peers or team members a weekly email with your plan for this week, what you did or didn't do last week, and something fun. (essay, advice)
Book Review: The Secret Of Our Success | Scott Alexander — Debunking the popular view that humans succeeded because of their intelligence. Instead, it's our "culture," or our ability to pass down abilities and learnings. (essay, nonfiction)
Shadow of the Dragon - The History of Taiwan & China | ColdFusion — The long and turbulent history between Taiwan and China, from civil war and Cold War alliances to today’s escalating tensions in the Taiwan Strait. Started as retreat by Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists (video, history)
Shitty First Drafts | Anne Lamott — Your first draft is going to be seriously very shitty, but really your job is just to get something—anything—down on paper. (essay, advice)
I’m sorry, but the simulation can’t include deceased individuals you knew personally. It’s in the handbook. — A woman tries to talk to her mother, one last time. (short story, fiction)
Sporks of AGI | Sergey Levine (essay, science)
The stable marriage problem | Aella — If you ask for what you want, you get the best of what you could've gotten, and if you wait for things to come to you, you get the worst you could've gotten. (blog post, advice)
Fourteen more months in the greatest square mile on earth (essay, nonfiction)
Take Aim, Even Badly | Jordan Peterson — “A brief video on the utility of taking aim–even badly. At least it's a start. Most of the positive emotion that will characterize your life (at least of the sustaining kind) will be a consequence of (video, advice)
tDCS/tRNS Stimulation for ADHD Treatment — In 19 unmedicated children doing cognitive training, **tRNS beats tDCS** on **parent-rated ADHD symptoms** (statistically significant) and on **backward digit span** (a working-memory test) (NOT stats (research paper, science)
thalassophilia: on escaping the cornfields, my freshman year at Stanford, and the liminality of 19 — Hannah's reflection of her first year at Stanford. (essay, advice)
What's Expected of Us | Ted Chiang — Warning letter from the future. (short story, fiction)
If you don't tinker, you don't have taste — Tinkering = doing things just because. (Fiddling with, breaking apart, building things out of pure interest; side projects don't count). Tinkering builds taste because you get to iterate, discard, and (essay, advice)
Cognitive Training with tRNS in ADHD Treatment — tRNS vs sham during executive function (EF) training. 10 sessions, one follow-up 3 weeks later, formal blinding check, short EEG monitor session and parent-reported sleep data. Found larger parent-rat (research paper, science)
Reflections on Trusting Trust (Turing Award Lecture) — Any system used to build/verify/interpret itself (e.g., a self-hosting compiler) can be used to silently add a hidden behavior that persists even when future source codes are clean. More generally, it (essay, science)
🌻 tryhard | Jasmine Sun — A beautiful and personal piece on trying hard. Keep trying hard: it pays off, and it's about the journey anyway. (essay, nonfiction)
How to use your wife/husband/gf/bf correctly | Alexey Guzey (essay, advice)
My weekly review habit | Ben Kuhn — Each week, set aside a few hours to think about how your week went and how you can make it better next week. (essay, advice)
Sarah Paine — Why Japan lost WWII (lecture & interview) — Japan lost WWII because it consistently confused **operational excellence with strategic success**: winning nearly every battle in China while losing the war, executing a flawless Pearl Harbor while c (video, nonfiction)
Are wireheads happy? | Scott Alexander — Wanting ≠ liking, as shown in rats: rats can want food and not experience satisfaction (knock out "liking"), or can enjoy the food just as much when they get it but not seek it out (knock out "wanting (essay, nonfiction)
Life Philosophy — Wojciech Zaremba — A few principles with good links. (other, science)
Advice for a young investigator in the first and last days of the Anthropocene | Jascha Sohl-Dickstein — The inventor of diffusion models discusses the implications of AI becoming better than humans at all intellectual tasks within the next few years. “This is a good time (the last time?) to go all in” o (tweet, advice)
Attention is your scarcest resource | Ben Kuhn — Focus is by far your most powerful weapon (allows you to achieve exponentionally better results). Here are some strategies that help. (essay, advice)
Zugunruhe | Nathan's Notes — **Ideology beyond agency.** Knowing a lot of things deeply across domains is what produces insight and great work. Most people are “philosopher's coat racks,” hoarding mental models they never wear, a (essay, nonfiction)