my collection.
a running shelf of things that changed my taste a little.
papers, essays, books, songs, and other tiny internet artifacts i keep coming back to. some are technical. some are emotional. the good stuff usually is both.
papers that rewired something.
papers i keep returning to when i want to understand how modern AI systems actually work.
- Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks the RAG paper everyone should read before hand-waving about RAG.
- Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts a useful antidote to believing bigger context windows solve everything.
- The Faiss Library nearest-neighbor search, but with the engineering gravity it deserves.
- Self-RAG: Learning to Retrieve, Generate, and Critique through Self-Reflection retrieval gets more interesting when the model learns when to doubt itself.
blogs and essays.
essays that make ambition feel less vague and work feel more concrete.
- how to be successful (Sam Altman) ambition, compounding, and being hard to compete with.
- how to do great work (Paul Graham) the kind of essay that makes you want to clear your calendar.
- what i wish someone had told me (Sam Altman) short, direct, annoyingly useful.
- how to work hard (Paul Graham) less hustle poster, more honest operating manual.
books on the shelf.
books i like for leverage, judgment, building, and staying a little more human.
- The Almanack of Naval Ravikant clear thinking, leverage, and calm ambition.
- The Anthology of Balaji for when you want the internet to feel larger again.
- Poor Charlie's Almanack mental models, but with teeth.
- Rework a useful slap against pretending complexity is sophistication.
- Source Code early builder energy from someone who kept pulling threads.
- tuesdays with Morrie a small reminder that being impressive is not the whole game.
songs in rotation.
not a productivity stack. just the current soundtrack.
- All My Life - Lil Durk, J. Cole
- Someday We Will Dream About Today
- Passionfruit - Drake
- Intentions - Justin Bieber
- Move - Adam Port, Stryv, Keinemusik, Orso, Malachiii feat. Camila Cabello
videos worth watching.
reserved for videos that are worth more than background noise.
- The Strange Secret to Success (After Skool) (16:34) Earl Nightingale, animated into something that still hits.
- Large Language Models Explained Briefly (3Blue1Brown) (07:58) clean intuition for the thing everyone is building around.
- Visualizing Transformers and Attention (Grant Sanderson) (57:44) the kind of visual explanation that makes the math feel reachable.
- Discipline Is Power (Value Raw) (05:41) short reminder that intensity compounds when it is pointed somewhere.
- Bahara x Backseat (Ezu) (02:45) for the softer side of the collection.
tweets i want to remember.
short things that punch above their word count will live here.
- build a great product and get users (Sam Altman) the cleanest startup advice is still annoyingly simple.
- quit brainrot, read essays, execute (gaurav) a dense little reset note for attention.
- find your obsession (lichthauch) extreme, but useful when diluted into real life.
- work ethic up close (DogeDesigner) a note on what sustained intensity looks like from nearby.
- a quiet visual note (vas) saved for the feeling more than the caption.
- take 30 seconds before 2026 (shah) a tiny end-of-year reset.
- gm, but make it cinematic (D4rsh) some posts are mostly atmosphere, and that is fine.
- 100 lessons for your 20s (BOSS) compounding, judgment, and reminders you want before they become obvious.