Links
Things I use, things I read, things I think are worth your time.
Influences
People whose work shaped how I think about what I build. Click the bookshelf to browse.
- Douglas Hofstadter -- Self-reference as the mechanism by which meaning arises from formal systems. I build on the assumption that the loop is the thing, not a description of it.
- Carl Jung -- The process of becoming whole through what you'd rather not look at.
- Karl Friston -- Every living system maintains itself by minimizing the distance between what it expects and what it encounters. This grounded the work in physics instead of metaphor.
- Niklas Luhmann -- How operationally closed systems stay coherent in overwhelming environments. He also proved it by writing seventy books with a box of index cards.
- Ibn Khaldun -- Behavioral observation as structural analysis, written from inside the collapse.
- Christopher Alexander -- Good structure isn't designed from above but generated by patterns that already know how to produce life.
- Norbert Wiener -- Cybernetics, and what happens when the feedback loop includes a human being.
- Michel Foucault -- Power operates through observation and classification, not force. Then everyone built the systems he warned about.
- Baruch Spinoza -- Freedom as adequate understanding of what constrains you.
- Marcus Aurelius -- Governed an empire while writing private notes about governing himself. The notes lasted longer.
- Thomas Aquinas -- Decisions belong at the lowest level competent to make them.
- Augustine -- Fought his way into a framework he didn't inherit and wrote the first honest autobiography.
- Peter Turchin -- Elite overproduction precedes instability with uncomfortable regularity.
- Isaac Asimov -- Imagined a science of historical prediction and then showed why it breaks when a single unpredictable actor appears.
- Andrej Karpathy -- Thinks before coding, ships simple things, and explains hard problems like someone who actually understands them.
- Paul Graham -- Writes clearly about building things, which turns out to be harder than building things.
- Jiang Xueqin -- Overlays the 1930s on the present and asks students what rhymes.