Some of my favourite resources of the month:

• CGP Grey With Rock/Paper/Scissors. Apart for the funness of the project, I admire the intelligence of this guy. He created a graph of multiple videos and each one getting half a million or at least 100K views, all in one day. THis guy is hacking the reccomendation algorithm.
• This reminded me of my other favourite channel, Kurzgesagt. Awesome video on Change Your Life – One Tiny Step at a Time. The wise planner to set routines and triggers smartly and the todler to follow the habits and pursuit happiness. Convince the brain it’s not big of a deal, stack up power/knowledge/expertise through time and then turning them into habits.
• Listening to Naval Ravikant podcast episode on How to get rich without luck. Really interesting thoughts. He talks about the 4 kinds of luck (relevant blog post).
• Dmitry Soshnikov YT channel covers great concepts about programming, with serious and to the point teaching style. I was interested in LLVMs architecture, but he teaches many evergreen high level important concepts.
• Forecasting: Principles and Practice is a great free online book for the fundamentals of time series and analysis for forecasting. Written by Rob J Hyndman and George Athanasopoulos, it’s an amazing online resource that I used during uni and now revisit.
• Ali Abdaal with a book review on “The 12 week year”. Most of the time it’s an execution problem, not a knowledge problem (e.g. getting in shape). Also, the only tradeoff to become successful is not having comfort, pushing a bit outside of the comfort zone everytime. Two questions to keep as journal prompts are “Where am I allowing the lack of consistent execution to hold me back?” and “Where am I allowing the fear of discomfort to hold me back?”. Creating a compelling vision for the future (having something worthwhile to anticipate and strive at the other end) is crucial. It’s okay to change the goal and change/recalibrate over time. But it gives clarity. It’s not motivating to wonder aimlessly, even though the journey is more important than the destination. Lastly, splitting the year in more managable chuncks of 12 weeks is great (Parkinsons law and deadlines). In this frame, every day matters, rather than having annualised thinking. Acceleartion of progress for sure.
• The Blue Dot Effect. Essentially it raises the question “Do we think that a problem persists even when it has become less frequent?”. It seems like it, for example life is much more comfortable in comparison to previous decades, yet people are not feeling much happier (obviously we haven’t experienced previous decades and centuries in order to actually feel the comparison). It’s good to rhave in mind that maybe ‘when the “signal” a person is searching for becomes rare, the person naturally responds by broadening his or her definition of the signal’.
• I am really into MOOCs lately, researching many universities. And the best to find free online courses with world class professors are MIT OpenCourseWare and Stanford Online (many playlists). Initially got inspired by this graduate certificate. You can see so many small clips by lectures even in Instagram (for example, this clip from NVIDIAs CEO Jen-Hsun Huang. The originals are far better, lines need context in order to be understood and small clips cannot offer that.
• That’s AI, fun resource with small articles on AI. And Numerai is a data science game for the stock market that pays money if you come up with smart models!
• Some good resources for LLMs: Hugging Face NLP course, Andrej Katharpy Zero to Hero Course (recreating ChatGPT), Attention is all you need paper, ChatGPT whitepaper, 3blue1brown Neural Nets course, article with simple explanation and major papers links, Stanford course CS224N: Natural Language Processing with Deep Learning, awesome-llm github repo, resources article. There are several open-source LLMs like LLaMA 2, Bloom, Bird, Falcon 180B, Mistral AI.
• Credit cards are important to have, mainly to improve your credit score. The purpose is to recharge every month with money, way before you reach your limits. With a good credit score, you raise you trustworthiness and thus people give you cheaper mortgages, etc. Things become cheaper and people are willing to give you money. This video gives a basic overview of the things you should look at.
  • With a credit card, you use credit, i.e. no money go staight out of your bank account, the bank pays for you, and you are trusted to repay the bank in the near future.
  • Check for the annual fee. It’s just a fee to just keep the credit card open. For beginners it makes no sense, there are plenty of alternatives. The problem is that if you don’t like a credit card with annual fee, you may want to close it, but this will hurt your credit score.
  • The APR (Annual Percentage Rate) is a percentage range (e.g 20%-30%) that tells you how much interest you pay when you “don’t pay off what you owe on time”. Effectively, this should never happen. If you are not sure that you are able to repay, don’t even get a credit card.
  • Check if the card has a foreign transaction fee. If you travel a lot, this is a deal breaker. There are also specific cards that give miles/cashbackes/bonuses when flying a lot.
  • Understand credit card rewards. Cashbacks/Points or Signup bonuses.
  • Watch for the credibility of the bank that issues the card. You should go for a famous/trustworthy bank that does not charge you with hidden fees.
• This video is more specific to UK credit card beginners. It suggests to always look for eligibility criteria (getting denied hurts the credit score actually). I don’t care much about the small benefits (like Tesco, …), there are so many more important habits to get right (like not drinking out in clubs). The money you make at your work plays a huge role as well, the more high paid you are, the more probable you are to be accepted for different cards.
• The prisoner’s dilemma explained by Veritasium. Tit for tat strategy is in general a winning strategy and it shows how a small island of nice strategies can evolve and outperform the nasty ones. That happens when we have infinate rounds, not when we have one round. That’s the beauty of the game, time and repetition makes the cooperation a winning strategy. In general, winning strategies are nice (they don’t defect first), forgiving (they cooperate again with nasty strategies), retaliatory (if the other player defects, you defect back) and clear (not be really opaque/unexpected, because other players don’t consider you trustworthy and don’t cooperate with you). Also, when there is noise (the player maybe wants to cooperate but it comes across as defect) it is helpful to be less retaliatory (meaning that you cooperate even if others deflect, give a second change like tit for two tats strategy). In non zero-sum game cooperation pays, you don’t have to beat others. Players get rewards from the banker/world (they don’t steal each others rewards). Be nice, forgiving but not a pushover (retaliate fast if players deflect).
• Watching these young innovators from 2005 (among them Facebook and Firefox creators) working for their dream is magical. Age is just a number and people that have output will get big, no matter what.
• in programming, hungarian notation exists, in order to name variables effectively with types. it’s not used anymore, but it useful sometimes to have some rules (e.g. data members of class, optionals, pointers, max, adjective after noun, etc). So, this table is kind of useful. Many people judge this, but if the conventions are good, you can be efficient, avoid bugs and spot mistakes as this blog suggests.