Topic: Drop a good book, get merits - page 9. (Read 1881 times)

Our character and daily routine is a must factor to determine our future, a bad start cannot give a happy ending. Suggesting an interesting book, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

I’d recommend “Blink: the Power of thinking without thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell.
It’s a MUST READ book. You can check the book out and thank me later.

You should try Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl.
It’s a very interesting book, I read it sometime ago and I’m currently reading “The power of Now” by Eckhart Tolle, this one is more of a spiritual guide to living in the present. It’s also another great book

Read now

Do you like audio books? This book is available for both audio reading and letter reading in Amazon. Its physiological book and i think you will pleased after reading it.

The internet has lots of good books but I can recommend a psychological book written by:

Ben Carson - Think Big

1. What Money Can't Buy - Michael J. Sandel (Author)

2. Against Moral Responsibility - by Bruce N. Waller (Author)

They are both available on Amazon, i added their links too for easy access.

Politics- 48 laws of power by Robert Greene, Too smart by Jathan Sadowski
Psycology- Thinking, fast and slow by Daniel Kahneman, The anatomy of anxiety Ellen Vora

Considering you planning to spend your giftcard on Amazon, this should be a good one for you The Psychology of Money
 

Option2: A book I always avoid to read but always recommend to others, and since  you looking for different try Rich dad , Poor Dad hope this does it for you.

I enjoyed reading this book anything I am not busy.
Title of the book is "The Undocumented Americans" written by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio. You will find the review of the book on the link.

I can't pinpoint the primary factor that explains this phenomenon. But, as clichéd as it might sound here, I'd blame fiat currency. Ultimately, it comes down to people's time preferences, with fiat being the root cause of our tendency to sacrifice future prosperity for present satisfaction. (There's a great podcast that connects the dots on why this happens in here--highly recommended if you have the time.)

It can't just be nostalgia, as I'm much younger than you and still feel the same way. Whether it's old books, movies, documentaries, music, or even webpages, there's something about the old that simply feels like it has more substance, as if the new is flooded with noise but lacking essence. I believe this shift relates to changing time preferences: the more we prioritize the present over the future, the more rushed and superficial everything becomes. Take housing, for example. Modern houses are flimsy and often don't last two decades, while many homes built in the early 20th century are still standing today. It's the same with food--many people prefer fast food over nutritious options, favoring immediate taste over long-term health consequences. Even the desire to have a family has declined. It's no coincidence; having children is one of the most future-focused decisions a person can make, involving sacrifices now to ensure care in old age. The same patterns appear in human relationships.

So, it stands to reason that this applies to engineering and, by extension, to software development as well.

There are definitely more factors to consider now. Since it often makes less economic sense to specialize deeply in just one area, many people aim to gain a little knowledge about everything and see where it can be applied. I'd be lying if I said I've never programmed with some level of uncertainty or doubt about what I'm doing. I've used tools without fully understanding how they work. But wasn't this common in the past as well? The old saying goes, "If it works, don't touch it, don't ask why."

I don't have as much time these days to read as I'd like, but I recently got stuck at an airport for a few hours and ended up spending the time drinking (too many) cappuccinos and reading Michael Strevens' The Knowledge Machine.

I'll admit to not picking it up again since that day at the airport, but I do plan to, and I thoroughly enjoyed the ~8 chapters that I made it through. It's kind of fascinating, if you think about it, that the Universe even has the property that its internal workings can be revealed, layer by layer, by inhabitants of its own construction, until it's understood (I mean, I get that some people feel/believe that it will never be understood, at least not completely, but I think we're still a very long way from maybe eventually having to face that fact).

(One thing I didn't expect to get from the book, and I don't think it was the author's intention, were some uncomfortable thoughts about just how differently people's brains can be wired: I kept bumping, especially at the beginning, into implied and sometimes explicit declarations by the author that some conclusion or another possesses an almost alien quality that defies normal sensibilities, and thinking to myself "But, that's like... the most natural/comfortable/intuitive thought in the world. Do other people really struggle to see that? Why can I see it so clearly? What's different about me? Was I dropped on my head as a baby?", etc.)

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You're a programmer, right? One piece of advice that I can offer you is to not sleep on the wisdom of the old guard. There's a treasure trove of information hiding in plain sight if you can avoid the trap of thinking that the out-of-date stuff is less valuable than the shiny new stuff. In fact, it's almost become something of a coping mechanism with me. When the modern world gets a little too stupid for me to handle, I tend to retreat into old programming books (stuff like Leo Brodie's Thinking Forth). I'm not sure why looking back is so effective at lifting my spirits, but, probably it has something to do with my weird childhood (as in, by the time I was 13 I'd already been "programming" for ~5 years, and had blown past Logo, BASIC, Pascal, and C, and spent my afternoons ignoring my homework and instead figuring out (S)VGA and Sound Blaster programming in x86 assembly and working on little "demos"). Beyond my own nostalgia, there's just something really special about programming-related stuff and computer/gaming magazines from the old days. I don't think I can articulate exactly what it is, but, I just know the people from that era so well, how impressively capable they were, how pure their motivations tended to be, and what made them tick, so digesting their thoughts is always really pleasant for me.

Anyway, that little trip down memory lane probably doesn't help you much, but, yeah, in general I get a lot more from older books than newer ones. There's kind of just this narrow band in time that I keep picking from: ~1970 to ~2000. (Ha! I just realized that's the same time window that I tend to enjoy music from, too; probably it's normal to prefer things from one decade before and one decade after the one you were born in.) While I do enjoy reading programming books/manuals from before 1970 (like the first two volumes of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming, though, that's not exactly light reading), much past that point they start to become a chore because I can't always relate to what they cover. Much after 2000, it starts to become "slim pickings" (for me, anyway), too. There's something about "modern" programmers and their way of thinking/problem-solving that just doesn't sit well with me. It's like... they don't actually know how to program all that well, and they spend their energy on things adjacent to their task, like build systems, and dependency management, and trying to stick to half-understood/unchallenged "best practices" and whatnot. The old-generation vs. new-generation issue reminds me of that kid at school with holes in his sneakers and a hand-me-down tennis racket soundly beating and making a mockery of the kids with all the "latest" equipment but only half the skill.

I'm not sure what's behind this generational skill-reversal, but I think it has something to do with the field having become much less selective over time: the further and further you go back, the harder and harder it was to nurture (and maintain) someone's interest in programming. There was this kind of natural "hump" that very few people could get over without being either exceptionally well-suited to the task, or extremely interested and tenacious enough to pursue that interest largely on their own. So, the concentration of "talent" gets higher and higher as you follow the field towards its inception. Conversely, as you follow the field in the other direction, things get much more onramp-rich and inclusive, which sounds like a good thing, but in practice what that amounts to is a much more dilute mixture of talent making its way into industry and academia and then establishing a correspondingly poorer set of principles/practices/ideas that impair the next wave of programmers further still (I mean, there are still luminaries, as always, except that now, outnumbered practically to the point of irrelevance, instead of establishing the current, they're swimming against it, and typically saying difficult-to-appreciate things that everyone else would rather ignore, especially when those things disagree with the prevailing wisdom).

(Sometimes it feels like we're already near to this outcome, but, if each new wave of programmers is, on the average, less skillful than the last, then software quality will keep declining, and eventually what's going to happen is that, excluding a few artifacts that were mostly built/designed by programmers from another time, our digital infrastructure will get locked into a state of always only ever barely working, with never-ending maintenance on components that keep collapsing under the weight of their own amplified/artificial/mishandled complexity.)

Sorry for the long aside... I'm turning into one rambly, grumpy bastard as I get older.

Long story short: I recommend picking some interest (like programming) and finding out when the "best" material for it was being produced, and then back-reading from that era (if it's an old subject, with no recent paradigm-shifting breakthroughs, then probably its halcyon days are well behind it).

Read something related to social engineering

If you don't go into politics and scold the book for Nazism, then the book is excellent. Becoming a human being from scratch in terrible conditions. I read it at one time, I read a third.

I don't care how much controversy this reply will make; this is actually a great book. It contains much about society, nation, economy, and the story of the man who invented the first currency backed by physical labor and intellectual work, i.e., a currency that is backed by itself.


You can also read "On the Genealogy of Morals" by Nietzsche, it's a very good book that predict so much of our modern time.

For politics --> The Art of War by Sun Tzu

How about you try this book I’ve been on lately. THE HIGHLY SENSITIVE PERSON. Might really be of interest to you. Just maybe

• Think and grow rich by Napoleon hill - (This book is indeed very powerful)
• High performance Habits by Brendon burchard
• The 80-20 principle by Richard Koch
• The compound effect by Darren Hardy
• Men are from Mars and women from Venus by John Gray
• The five love languages by Gary Chapman

These are books that really set my mind towards greatness and good social standing with others, and I believe it would work magic for you.

Please recommend some good books that made you so knowledgeable on bitcoin, I would surely love to up my game.

Paul Vigna, Michael Casey -  "The era of cryptocurrencies."

Designing the Mind



The Giver

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (A Toltec Wisdom Book)

This book contains deep meaning on human virtues. Temperance, justice and to mention a few. Hard quite an interesting time reading it earlier this year. Its worth the time.

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