Here are links to people and things that I think are worth knowing about.
Projects & Curiosities
- Low Tech Magazine is a solar powererd website that occasionally goes down when there is not enough sun.
- Long Bets is a list of publicly accountable bets (predictions) of the future of the world.
- Long Now Foundation is a foundation created by Stewart Brand to encourage humany to think in longer time horizons (>10,000 years).
- Handmade Web is an essay about the qualities of handmade and why the web ought to remain handmade.
- Basics of the Unix Philosophy is an overview of the Unix philosophy which states that the value of a computer system is proportional to its simplicity, that programs should do one thing (and do it well!) and that programs should work with other programs using well-defined interfaces.
People
- Bret Victor is a programmer with profound writing about human-computer interfaces.
- Bartosz Ciechanowski is a writer who creates incredible interactive visualizations of mechanical systems.
- Stewart Brand is a writer and creator of the Whole Earth Catalog.
- Tehching Hsieh is a performance artist known for his "One Year Projects" that mix life and art and require incredible dedication and sacrifice. Watch this video of his work to understand why I have included him in this list.
- Ted Chiang is a brilliant sci-fi writer who writes short stories that take my mind places I didn't think were possible.
- Ken Thompson is a pionoeer of computer software and the inventor of the Unix operating system (and philosophy) which my Mac is still based on.
- Yuki Kawauchi is a Japanese elite runner who won gold at the 2018 Boston Marathon. He is completely self-trained, has no sponsorships and holds down a 40 hour per week job working night shifts for his government. He trains 130-140km per week and is known as elite distance running's "oddball".
- Carl Sagan is my favourite science educator of all time (second place goes to Richard Feynman). His research into extraterestrial life, his contributions to Voyager, and the genuine zeal for space he brought to Cosmos make him worthy of anyone's time.
- Ilya Sutskever is a brilliant AI researcher. He is a co-founder of OpenAI, co-creator of AlexNet and ChatGPT and has a knack for explaining complex ideas in simple terms and in a calm way. I highly recommend this fireside talk with him and Nvidia founder Jensen Huang. His Lex Fridman interview is also worth a listen and especially interesting given it was recorded before the release of ChatGPT.
- Paul Graham for his essays on startups and the life of a founder.