Ryan L

Booms are good, actually

Revisado: 11-25-24

This is a fundamentally optimistic book about the future. It argues that many great things are in-the-moment and at-the-margin irrational for individual steps and individual actors, and the solution is some external force, hype, "boom", etc. which makes it happen anyway -- being rational at the larger scale. Essentially, why do A, B, and C if each only make sense if the others are also successful, but betting everything that B and C will be done, going all-in on A (even if it has to be tried in multiple parallel ways, so only one method works) can make everything work. They give some great examples from technology and history (Manhattan project, Apollo, and fracking), show how these were enabled by being built during "booms", and the positive results. It's interesting that the naive response to the boom/bust cycle of markets is that it's bad and one should sit them out, but many of the greatest investors (Warren Buffett) jump in as early as possible, and the cycle seems to be responsible for much of the progress in the world.

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Bitcoin isn't as private as some think it is

Revisado: 11-21-22

This is a great book from an amazing technology journalist -- specifically covering the tools and procedures used to trace cryptocurrency transactions (e.g. Bitcoin) for law enforcement purposes.

Despite the public protestations of law enforcement (and some Bitcoin advocates) Bitcoin isn't even as private as regular banking systems -- it's a global public transparent ledger of pseudonyms, fully linkable through connections to external systems, patterns, and "metadata" analysis. We're currently living in a privacy dark age valley of "too late for physical bearer assets, too soon for Zero Knowledge online assets". Cryptocurrency has an edge in being permissionless and censorship resistant in many cases, but it's far from private as deployed today.

This book shows through tracing dark net markets participants (Silk Road, AlphaBay, and others), exchanges, and other bitcoin and cryptocurrency transactions what the true state of privacy on the blockchain is. A major element is the founding and history of Chainalysis, one of the first dedicated tracing firms, from the tracing of loss Mt Gox exchange assets, but there's also extensive coverage of various law enforcement agencies and how they use traditional forensic accounting techniques, as well as chain analysis tools and subpoena and other investigatory powers, to find undesirable activity.

It was a little disappointing that de-anonymizing Monero transactions and other more privacy focused transactions wasn't more of a focus, but this is probably not covered as much in open forums.

The book and writing style focuses on personalities and events, rather than technology, so it's approachable and interesting for a general audience, but as an expert in the field (I work for a cryptoasset insurance company and have been involved in anonymous electronic cash since the mid 1990s), it's technically accurate as well.

Strongly recommend.

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You should host a party, here's how

Revisado: 09-11-22

An incredibly practical and easy to follow guide to the otherwise-daunting task of hosting a cocktail party. Probably the main value of this book is providing motivation and a clear path to hosting your first party or two; it is something which gets much easier after you've done it a few times, but which has a high barrier to getting started. A few pieces of very practical advice which I found useful (even after hosting many parties) -- some great advice on how to pick a date/establish a critical mass of attendees before inviting harder-to-invite people; he makes a strong case for name tags, in a specific way; and provides some solutions to the "people who show up early" "people show up late" "people stay too long" problems.

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An important story told poorly

Revisado: 07-05-21

This was a really badly written book, and while the audio version wasn’t any worse than the book, it couldn’t rescue it.

Badly researched, lacking in content, and basically not worth the time or a credit.

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The best evidence for a great diet that I've ever

Revisado: 01-12-20

This is a great book on the science behind longevity diets, although it is a bit overcomplicated for simple dietary advice (there's a chapter at the end which is sufficient if you accept what the author says and develops with support, but that chapter should be even more explicitly how-to).

Essentially, based on research about people who have lived past 105 years, blue zones of extreme longevity globally, and laboratory research, it seems that the ideal diet is low-GI plants, with relatively small amounts of high-omega3 fats, and relatively low amounts of protein, with very low carbohydrates generally, particularly high-GI refined carbohydrates. So, essentially the opposite of the mainstream modern diet, but largely in-line with current best dietary advice from most sources.

The somewhat novel part here is having distinct anabolic and catabolic diets throughout the year (roughly 4:8 ratio), and a focus on encouraging autophagy through diet during 8 months of the year to reduce risk of cancer, especially from middle age onward.

The actual advice isn't particularly novel, but the justification and evidence for the advice is better than I've seen before.

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Great (if incomplete) account

Revisado: 09-22-19

I don't agree with everything Snowden did, and I don't know how complete this book is about his motivations and actions, but even with those caveats, it's an excellent book.

The most interesting aspect for me was not the factual description of what he did (although there are some never-before-read details), but his mindset and motivation to choose to betray the NDAs and chain of command while (possibly) honoring the oath of service. The technical details about his archiving system (it basically crawled a bunch of the published-within-IC sources and then indexed them, republishing for internal use, which allowed him perfect cover for exfiltration...) were still interesting, of course. That NSA had incredibly lax internal security and compartmentalization in the 1993-2013 period (due to losing all the cold war people and replacing them with...a specific demographic profile), CIA and State's technical incompetence, etc. are all pretty well supported by evidence. (Incidentally, the technical jack of all trades at CIA job sounds pretty amazing.)

Least expected angle was just how impressive his wife is. NSA's initial angle was "stripper", which brings a whole set of assumptions. However, this was pretty clearly inaccurate -- she's an intelligent and thoughtful person (although not involved in Snowden's exfiltration of data or escape), and based on actions since the incident (moving to Russia, marrying Snowden a year later, ...), seems

His descriptions of contracting culture and the gov/contractor split, hypertrophy and metastasis of the IC and contractors, etc all are strongly supported by evidence (and my personal experience as a contractor with the government for several years).

What is missing, and calls into question the veracity of the whole account, is the exact process of deciding to do all of this. In the book, it was that he accidentally saw a STLW (Stellar Wind) document, related to one of the most morally and legally questionable programs post-Church conducted by the USG (and for which individuals should be prosecuted and likely hanged), then just started searching for and consuming information for his own education (to see if these programs really existed), and only then decided to leak. That's possible, but it's not strongly supported. The mysterious occurrence of epilepsy around this time which motivated him to spend time on self-reflection and switching to a role with less of everything except access to this data, etc. seems a bit too convenient. This is the one area where I'm still a bit suspicious of the whole affair (either that an external power was involved, or that other NSA insiders supported him), but the story as told could also be the truth -- it's just difficult or impossible to validate.

Overall, one of the best books about the complex and evolving interplay between young, relatively powerless individuals who have technical competence and thus effective technical control over large institutions like government vs. the official power structures, the failures of USG/IC, and one of the biggest news stories in civil liberties since the 1970s.

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Great ideas to use markets to improve the world

Revisado: 06-02-18

Overall, one of the best books I've ever read. Basically describes ways markets could be used to increase economic inefficiency, decrease inequality (and in particular, increase the proportion of rewards going to productive labor vs. accumulated capital), and fix various systems (political and social). Largely an extension of the ideas of William S. Vickrey.

Things I particularly liked about the book: a credible argument against "conventional" Georgist land-value tax (difficulties in valuation), and an interesting alternative. A superior form of voting (accumulated/bankable votes). "Quadratic" increases in cost for certain policy preferences (such as reducing pollution, or regulations. An interesting immigration scheme where individuals could sponsor foreign workers, gaining a portion of their income, to more broadly distribute the benefits of immigration along with costs.

The chapter on data (data sovereignty, data markets, etc.) seemed pretty weak in comparison to the rest of the book (ironic given the background of the authors), and detracted from the whole.

One interesting element was prefacing each chapter with a fictional story of what life would be like under their proposed rules -- more abstract policy arguments should include these.

There were a lot of flaws with the specific proposals they make, and overall I think for most private property, taxation is theft, and their taxing schemes were in some ways even more immoral than the status quo (personal/portable property being taxed in such a way that third parties could forcibly purchase it for the declared value at any time seems rife for malicious exploitation by trolls, or effective censorship of unpopular people), but they propose testing in much less challenging environments (such as as an alternative way to distribute public assets like radio spectrum or resource exploitation on public property), which I'd support.

I strongly recommend this book.

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Four horrible "not really sci-fi" genre stories

Revisado: 04-29-17

This is probably the worst collection I've found on Audible -- which is quite an achievement, given how bad a lot of the discount sci fi magazine audiobook collections have been.

Four stories, completely lacking in any interesting speculative fiction or hard-SF content, but with essentially one dimensional characters and no meaningful plot or other value! The interesting thing about this collection is all 4 stories are essentially equally bad, so it wasn't by chance.

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A few high points

Revisado: 03-30-17

As with all of the periodicals turned into audiobooks, hit or miss. A few of these stories were good (Dragon Gate, Repository) and a few were surreal (Clem Crowder's Catch, and Spawning). Overall pretty decent for an audio anthology.

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A good speaker's guide, not limited to TED

Revisado: 09-09-16

This was a good set of guidelines and advice for public speaking and presentations. A lot of standard things, but well presented, and some information I hadn't heard before (discussion of the uncanny valley in scripted vs extemporaneous talks).

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