Nice Reads
Some nice reads and initiatives.
High Relevance
- Highly recommended:
- The School of Life - on the skills everyone should be taught, but no school actually does (on Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube)
- About how to use your working life in a purposeful way and many general life advices: 80,000 hours carrier guide
- GiveWell - Highly recommended on effective donations
- If in Austria: can donate to effektiv-spenden.org s.t. the donation is automatically deducted from tax
- Recommended:
- Amazing data source: Our World in Data
- Dollar Street: How do people live across different levels of income
- For a factful view: Gapminder
- Book: "Factfulness" by Hans Rosling - book
- Presentation of Hans Rosling on Factfulnes - YouTube
- Book: "Not the End of the World" by Hannah Richtie - book
- The School for Moral Ambition - Interesting initiative on making moral ambition part of your work life
- Impact pathways (also beyond quitting your job) - article
- Using law as a proven and powerful lever to fight bad industries - article
- "HUMAN" movie series by Yann Arthus-Bertrand: portraits of people around the world about life - YouTube movies
Collection of nice general reads and initiatives
2025
- “Its tactics remain consistent: delay inconvenient science, deflect responsibility onto individuals, and distract with misinformation.”; “The core strategy can be summed up simply: change minds first, policy second.” - essay: "Beyond Growth, towards Alignment"
- More on philanthropy
- Giving What We Can - Giving pledge for individuals
- Founders Pledge - Giving pledge for companies
- Animal Welfare Fund
- Effective Altruism Community
- Introduction to effective altruism
- Why renewables became so cheap so fast - article
- "The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better." - blog post
- On using the law for climate action - clientearth.org
- Rutger Bregman's strong opinion on moral ambition: article
- CrashCourse Philosophy YouTube Series
- exurb1a: Nice philosophical mind games on YouTube
Collection of nice AI reads
2025
- basic assistant/agentic patterns (blog post of philschmid, 16min)
- "The key to success with any LLM application, especially complex agentic systems, is empirical evaluation. Define metrics, measure performance, identify bottlenecks or failure points, and iterate on your design. Resist to over-engineer."
- "In this new programming paradigm then, the new most predictive feature to look at is verifiability."; "The more a task/job is verifiable, the more amenable it is to automation in the new programming paradigm" - blog post of Kaparthy
- "Agent Engineering is **Probabilistic**. \[...] Trust, but Verify." - great blog post on agentic software development (philschmid, 6min)
- Google paper on the importance of data before model work
- "The oldest monetization engine on the internet is coming to save the newest. From VHS to broadband to streaming, and now to LLMs. When in doubt, sell dopamine 🤷♂️. [...] Because every tech revolution starts with ideals, then ends with monetization." LinkedIn opinion
- Highly recommended: "AI Should Challenge, Not Obey": preprint opening the door for an new view on human-centered AI-based content generation. With AI as a provocateur encouraging critical thinking of humans instead of simply creating a final response/output based on a prompt. paper
- When models fail to reason beyond known benchmarks paper
- Interesting benchmark on real business tasks: OpenAI GDPval
- Benchmark on tough expert questions: Humanities Last Exam (website)
- "State of AI in Business 2025" -> the famous 95% of AI projects fail MIT report
- DeepSeek OCR release paper and high-level explanation
- OpenAI: Why models hallucinate. On how gpt-5 has a huge reduction in false positive answers (hallucinations) - blog post
- "Emergent misalignment": Fine-tuning gpt-4o on writing insecure code lead to major misalignment of the model in many other fields (creating deceptive, harmful content unrelated to code generation) - paper
- Open Models of OpenAI
- Rinat Abdullin on **Schema Guided Reasoning** utilizing structured outputs (constrained decoding of LLMs)
- How the TIMETOACT Enterprise RAG Challenge was won: Lots of insights on building a working RAG solution for extracting KPIs from annual company reports - blog post
- Subliminal learning: "During distillation on model-generated outputs, students exhibit subliminal learning, acquiring their teachers’ traits even when the training data is unrelated to those traits." and "Subliminal learning occurs for different traits (including misalignment), data modalities (number sequences, code, chain of thought), and for closed- and open-weight models." - paper
- On which tasks and jobs have high AI applicability (i.e. likely of being strongly affected by AI) - paper
- Google Agent2Agent Protocol (here)
- First large scale transformer-Mamba fusion LLM: Hunyuan T1
- Facts & Data about AI trends: https://epoch.ai/
- Tracing the thoughts of a large language model - Anthropic blog post
- Anthropic Model Context Protocol (MCP) - blog post
- FunSearch by Google - evolutionary agent to come up with new (code) solutions for complex problems (blog)
- DeepSeek R1 release - challenging OpenAIs o1 model
- State Space Models: A Modern Approach
Before 2025
- research based AI search: https://typeset.io/en/
- Visual Guide to Mamba and State Space Models - blog
- A recipe for Training Neural Networks (!) - Karpathy blog
- great intro to ML/DL - Elements of AI website
- Building effective agents blog
- Anthropic: Mapping the Mind of an LLM blog
- LLMs scheming capabilities blog
- MAD (AI) Landscape 2024 - super comprehensive blog on trends
- Thoughts: Compute will be one of the most precious resources in the future (after oil and data)
- Keeping up with Joe Reagan - LLM project on analysing a podcast (blog post)