Five Books Every Human Should Read
I’m sorry. You were looking for a listicle, but instead you are going to have a brief existential crisis. There have been more books published this month then you will ever have the chance to read in your lifetime. This is why this is an extremely curated list that will never grow above 5. It only includes those books that I believe every human should read given their limited time on this earth.
- On Writing Well by William Zinsser
Writing well is one of the most important skills. I think it will become even more important as we enter the age of AI generated garbage. Even if you’re not a professional writer, the lessons in this book will help you throughout life.
- I Will Teach You To Be Rich by Ramit Sethi
Ignore the cheesy title, this is the personal finance education that I wish I got when I was a teenager. This book changed my life.
- Principles by Ray Dalio
A field guide for how to build a life you are proud of.
- How to Live by Derek Sivers
I think if Derek Sivers started a cult, I’d join it. A book of contradicting philosophies, it inspires me, makes me angry, and provokes lingering thoughts every time I read it. Reading this book is how to live.
- [still searching]
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Check out some more stuff to read down below.
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Grow, Like a Tree Not a Cancer from Jim Nielsen’s Blog
- Pluralistic: All the books I reviewed in 2025 (02 Dec 2025) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- DEP-18: A proposal for Git-based collaboration in Debian from Optimized by Otto
- [RIDGELINE] No Phones in The Ten-don Shop from Craig Mod — Writer + Photographer
- My next chapter with Mastodon from Mastodon Blog
- How many pillars of observability can you fit on the head of a pin? from charity.wtf
- The Software Essays that Shaped Me from Refactoring English
- Give Your Spouse the Gift of a Couple's Email Domain from mtlynch.io
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Useful patterns for building HTML tools
I've started using the term HTML tools to refer to HTML applications that I've been building which combine HTML, JavaScript, and CSS in a single file and use them to provide useful functionality. I have built over 150 of these in the past two year…
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Naz Hamid, writing on his personal blog, about forming a small company called Latent Co.: Driven by the creative tooling we’ve cut our teeth on and drawing on our product and imaging experience, we’re making a product for Mac. His partners are Ryan Carver…
via Colin Devroe December 10, 2025Auto-grading decade-old Hacker News discussions with hindsight
A vibe coding thought exercise on what it might look like for LLMs to scour human historical data at scale and in retrospect.
via karpathy December 10, 2025Generated by openring