Readings

I would like to take this space to share important or interesting reading material that I believe worth sharing with others.

The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge (1939) by Abraham Flexner [Read Online] [Download PDF]
An excerpt from the book I Wish I'd Made You Angry Earlier: Essays on Science, Scientists, and Humanity (2002) by Max Perutz. Unfortunately, I haven't read the entire book. I luckily came across this excerpt on Twitter and found it very intriguing. [Download JPG]
Peter Principle is an interesting idea introduced by Laurence J. Peter in his book The Peter Principle (1969). It says, competent employees are promoted to higher levels until they reach an incompetent level, where they remain as an incompetent employee throughout the rest of their career. [Read on Wikipedia]
Human creativity in the age of text generators (2023) by Mark Dingemanse and Gijske de Boo. Quote: "Just as there is value in stammering in a foreign language on the way to greater fluency, so there is value in grappling with complex ideas and struggling to put them into words. Removing that friction doesn’t smoothen the creative process — it makes it slip away. Perhaps the most important lesson from synthetic text generators, then, is that they show us, in photo negative, what it takes to really think together." [Read Original] [Read on archive.org]
How Public Research Institutions Propagate Industrial Niches and Configure New Industrial Structure: The Case of ITRI (Taiwan) for Semiconductor Technologies (2024) by Chan-Yuan Wong and Jui-Jan Chan [Read Online (Paywalled)] [Download PDF]

Enshittification is a term coined by Cory Doctorow that refers to "re-prioritization pattern where online product and service providers experience a decline in quality over time." [Wikipedia article] [Pluralistic blog article] [The Tyee article]

We Need To Rewild The Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon. They point out that the Internet has turned into a dangrous monoculture owned and operated by a few. Ecology teaches us that the strength of a system is in its diversity. [Origial Article] [Read on archive.org]

Complexity Theory's 50-Year Journey to the Limits of Knowledge by Ben Brubaker [Origial Article] [Read on archive.org]

Bremermann's limit sets the speed limit of a computer in a self-contained system; no computer can break this theoretical boundary and compute faster. [Read on Wikipedia]

Degrowth is an idea that critiques the global capitalist system which pursues growth at all costs, causing human exploitation and environmental destruction. The degrowth movement of activists and researchers advocates for societies that prioritize social and ecological well-being instead of corporate profits, over-production and excess consumption. [Read More] [Read on Wikipedia]

Solar Protocol is an experimental web platform hosted across a network of solar-powered servers, installed and maintained by volunteers in different locations around the planet. Solar Protocol uses the distribution of sunshine across the planet as a form of logic that determines where computational work is done. [Read More] [Project on GitHub]

Cognitive Load refers to the amount of mental effort or brainpower you need to use to process information and complete a task. Think of your brain like a computer—it can only handle so many programs at once before it starts to slow down. When you try to juggle too many things at the same time, like remembering a long to-do list while solving a complex problem, your cognitive load increases. This can make you feel overwhelmed, stressed, or even mentally exhausted. Reducing cognitive load often involves breaking tasks into smaller parts, focusing on one thing at a time, or simplifying the information you’re working with. [Read More] [Download PDF]