WHAT IS THIS⌗

I have not blogged here in a while. It’s been close to two years essentially. Since then, most of my writing has been over at the Sitebolts blog, covering things closer to that side of the business (you can find those bits linked below):

  1. The WordPress Saga - Exploring the implications of the ongoing WordPress conflict
  2. What is RAG? - A practical guide to Retrieval Augmented Generation
  3. Sitebolts Link Roundup - Tools and work highlights
  4. DeepSeek AI: A Deep Dive - The true impact of DeepSeek’s release
  5. Conway’s Law in Practice - How org structure shapes products
  6. The Visible Hand - When digital supply chains meet geopolitical reality
  7. The Visible Hand Part II - The sequel
  8. WTF is still going on with WordPress - Revisiting the conflict
  9. EuroStack - Europe’s digital sovereignty initiative
  10. The Great Refactor - Securing critical open-source code
  11. 2025 Predictions - Predictions for next year

ANYWAY. I have a bit more time on my hands this week so I decided to revive my old bit and cover some of the books I’ve read since my last contribution to this blog.

ANYWAYS HERE’S THE STUFF⌗

Okay so (for the first time in a while), here goes my list of things I’ve read // researched // found interesting (in reverse chronological order):

  • House of Huawei: The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company (2025)

This is the book I’ve finished most recently. It’s incredibly well researched and sourced and outside of the general insder baseball of the business, it was another reminder of just how different (but no less impressive) the different parts of the world are. Huwaei’s story is extremelly interesting as it’s one of the firms whose trajectory matches the wider nation’s development and rise. The founder, Ren, is a fascinating figure as well. Incredibly reserved from the outside world (except in moments of strategic value), Ren evolved into modern tech CEO as Huawei became a global powerhouse, but he strikes me as a figure from a different era (for better or for worse)

  • Be Slightly Evil (2025)

Compact and to the point (which makes sense given its origin as long form blog posts), Be Slightly Evil is a compilation of a series from Venkatesh Rao’s Ribbon Farm blog. It covers different dynamics in modern society and how to come out ahead, mostly framed through professional interactions. Like most of Ribbon Farm content, there was some stuff I disagreed with, some stuff I agreed with, but it made me pause and reflect several times as I went through it. It’s sort of like an in-on-the-joke corpo Machivallian self help book.

  • Gilded Rage (2025)

This is Jacob Silverman’s latest work and was released relatively recently, focused on the post COVID evolution of political change in the US, framed through the platforms that accelerated these changes and the individuals who run them. I’ve read a lot of Jacob’s work through the years, especially his crypto cvoerage, and this is him at his very best. Sharp, incisive, and actually immersed in the (digital) conversations driving today’s political discouse and scene. It might be helpful to consider what Jacob’s work isn’t, in the sense that while he contributes to certain MSM outlets, his work stands outside of their usual constraints and ivory tower takes. Gilded Rage traces the change in the tech ecosystem, through the individual journeys of our very own oligarchs like Thiel, Anderssen, and as always, a certain Musk, and how their neuroses have created the society we live in today.

  • Other People’s Money: The real business of finance (2025)

John Kay’s book on the financail industry was a bit dense but incredibly informative. Kay makes a sector that purposefully makes itself oblique and over main street’s head feel clear and comprehensible. It has to be dense to this, so it isn’t a knock really more of an observation. Kay gives enough insider baseball to connect the academic principles to the real world expression of the industry and the people who work in it.

  • Empire of AI (2025)

I read this book pretty early when it first came out while I was on a fairly long flight and really enjoyed the depth of coverage and the journalistic rigour backing it. It took a winding approach across contemporary AI organizations, products, models, nations, and individuals, all rotating around the central gravity of the story birth and life of OpenAI, the organization. The author, Karen Hao, was a journalist at MIT Technology Review who got access to OpenAI a couple years before the release of ChatGPT so she got access to a lot of the key players that would take over the industry shortly after. She also balanced it out with the perspectives of the different people affected by these tectonic shifts, from South American battles over hyperscaler server farm development to droughts in Arizona.

It’s a tough balance to hit coverage across all these perspectives, but I felt like it managed to pull it off, so overall, I rated it quite highly.

And then…discourse happened.

Basically, a couple weeks ago (it is December now. so fairly late in the year), a blogger (and Head of Effective Altruism DC, make of that what you will) named Andy Masley wrote some long form deep dives into the environmental claims and threads in the book (original linked here: https://andymasley.substack.com/p/empire-of-ai-is-wildly-misleading) and pointed out some pretty substantial issues with the numbers behind data center water use in the book. I encourage anyone curious about this exchange to read both the book and the piece and then make up their mind on their position on the whole thread of discourse.

TLDR:

  • Empire of AI

  • “Claim that a data center is using 1000x as much water as a city of 88,000 people, where it’s actually using about 0.22x as much water as the city, and only 3% of the municipal water system the city relies on. She’s off by a factor of 4500”

  • Hayek’s Bastards (2025)

Quinn Slobodan’s work this year was fantastic. I mean, it really cut right to the truth of the modern era’s economic and political spaces & systems of power (and the names we all know who live in these spaces). Historical in perspective, but completely clear eyed about the contemporary expressions of this history, I cannot recommend it enough. The main thread that Quinn puts forward is that the authoritarian right-wing populism that we see rising across the globe is a “mutation” borne from the neo-liberalism and market fundamentalism of figures like Hayek and gov’ts like Thatcher’s and Reagan’s. He traces the different idelogical strains and the topology of groups like paleo-libertarians and race IQ fusionists while connecting their shared communications, the points of agreement, and of course, the points of disagreement.

  • Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (2025)

Somewhat niche, this was an inside look at one of the most fascinating experiments in socio-technical systems (aka the things we are stuck in these days). Bridging the perspectives of figures like Stafford Beer and the Chilean politicians that (alongside Allende’s general leadership) worked to build intelligent technical systems to provide (as close to) real time information about Chile, its economy, and industries in a project called “Cybersin”. Combining historical and narrative moments, it has a rather foreboading shadow hanging over the end because the end of the Cybersin project was the end of Allende, his government, and peace in Chile (spoiler alert: uh the fella that ended all the aforementioned items was named Augusto Pinochet)

  • Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology by Chris Miller (2025)

One of the most topical and accessible wonky books in the past couple years, Chip War does an extremely good job at covering the different players, companies, nations, and specific technologies in the chip industry. As a historian and professor, Miller brings a really keen and in-depth approach to the world of semi conductors. His particular expertise is international history, which sets him up well to cover all the geopolitical threads that make up the chip industry.Dense, but digestible for non-specialists, it deserves the wide recognition it got. Really well done.

  • The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future (2024)

Sebastian Mallaby is a really great writer. He is particularly good at covering the corners of the (financial) world that capture cultural imagination, from hedge funds….to venture capital. The Power Law is both a historical perspective with narrative components and an analytical outline of the political economy that created and fueled our modern economy. Extremely well written, with accessible prose and clever explainers.

  • The Fund: Ray Dalio (2024)

What can I say about this one? In short, it was another installment to the collection of “no one knows what they’re doing, including the most “elite” or “prestigious” orgs out there. Corporate disfunction, battles between egos, and occasionally some people sort of put their money where their mouth is. It was quick and entertaining and confirmed my previous biases, so it was fun but also made me more cynical. I guess that’s a fair trade.

  • The Rebel Allocator (2024)

On paper, it’s a bit of a tough sell. It’s a narrative story that seeks to explain the philosophies of capital allocation from the Buffet and Munger school of value and their intellectual ancestors, while also creating enough story to keep a reader engaged and enteratained. It somehow pulls it off. Jake Taylor does an immense job of marrying the strains that these different objectives create while also creating moments of real, pure humanity. A book about capital allocation that brought tears to my eyes in certain moments. This is one of those pieces of writing that I will come back to for the rest of my life. What else can I say.

  • Poor Charlie’s Almanac (2024)

One of the all time classics for MBAs and value investor heads out there, the Alamanac is a collection of Charlie Munger’s greatest hits. Everything from his commencement speech for the University of Southern California law school to lovely pieces of writing like his 2000 memo “The Great Financial Scandal of 2003 (An Account by Charles T. Munger)”. It was a very pleasant read and one that gave words to the things that I thought only existed in my head. Another one to keep coming back to.

  • The Counting House (2024)

A fictional story depicting the very real psychology of long term investors and their world, this was an eye opener for me in regards to the endowndments and large, pools of long term capital. Written from the perspective of the endowndment manager himself, it was a roller coaster of emotions and a first hand account on the figures that show up to the doors of capital allocators, all angling to get a piece of the pie. Entertaining and relatively light (complementary.)

  • Number Go Up (audio book, 2024)

The past two years I have broadened my horizons and given audio books a chance. The first experiment in this little expansion was Zeke Faux’s incredibly detailed and well structured coverage of the past half decade of crypto nonsense. From SBF to Razzlekhan, you either laugh at the nonsense or cry at the sheer scale of grifts. As far as audio vs text goes, I think there is something visceral about reading text that I missed while listening. So, the audio book experiment is still a bit of a wash.

  • Pathless Path (2024)

Bit of an outlier compareed to the rest of the books on this list, I read it in one sitting as a sort of mental reset and enjoyed the general vibes of it. It’s not a heavy read (complimentary) and you can imagine it as a series of long blog posts instead of a book. If you’re very cynical (as I tend to be), it can read as a bit of uh…an airport woowoo book, but sometimes great things lie on the other side of cringe. I think the parts that really stuck with me are the ones that align with my priors around taking some heterodox risks in your career (shocker), but seriously, sometimes people need the cringey words to push them to do something they wouldn’t have done other wise.

  • Supremacy: AI, ChatGPT and the Race That Will Change the World (2024)

Written by Bloomberg journalist, Parmy Olson, this is a really balanced and well researched journey through the most recent AI boom (and some of the previous winters), framed through the parallel journeys of OpenAI and DeepMind. I specifically enjoyed the coverage of DeepMind, since OpenAI has dominated news and general attention and I had some gaps in my knowledge of DeepMind and their team. It has enough inside baseball to keep you enjoyed, and again, has strong evidence and support from insiders and analysts. Recommend it for anyone trying to understand more of the humans involved in this era of tech.

  • The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (2024)

Margaret O’Mara covers more than three generations of technologists, engineers, and the suits that have made up the technology industry and the spirit of Silicon Valley in a historical analysis with insider narratives and connections between tech and gov’t. Given that 2025 was a year where that combo and the relationship between the Beltway and the Valley affected every citizen’s lives, reading this book when I did provided a richer understanding of the relationships and history of those relationships that drive these dynamics.

  • The Twilight Before the Storm: From the Fractured 1930s to Today’s Crisis Culture (2024)

I read Viktor Shvetz latest book around this time last year and it’s stayed in the back of my mind since. His wide perspective across the different complex systems that have intertwined to become our modern society gives him the exact latitude needed to trace how history and society have changed. Eerily prescient, his specific prognostications regarding international affairs and geopolitics started to come to pass in 2025 and uh unfortunately makes me realize that the calm maybe shorter lived than I originally thought.