For Buffett I recommend Essays of Warren Buffett. Regarding Munger’s Almanack, I wrote a nice summary just before his death:
”A real estate investment of $24 by the Dutch to buy the island of Manhattan would today be roughly equivalent to $3 trillion. Across 378 years, that’s about a seven percent annual compound rate of return…”
Ok, haha. Well this question I ask myself too much already incl. reading books etc. on the topic. What is self, what is life, what is the "fear of death". Here I wrote down some highlights from Becker's Denial of Death if you're interested. These are deep topics, not sure if it makes sense talking about such fundamentally human issues with LLMs no matter how good they are right now: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/notes/the-denial-of-death-by...
I applied to AWS and Microsoft last summer and I directly got invited to interviews for jobs here in Finland. However, I decided not to proceed and took a break from working and studying (I've returned to the country from Germany for doing my Master's degree). This year, since graduating just now and after many applications I've had a couple of interviews – one with a large consultancy and another one with a smaller boutique firm.
Generally, the AWS listings for the country are suddenly zero – nil. Microsoft's are close to zero and I haven't heard back from them at all. I saw one Google job ad in a smaller hometown of mine where this region's GCP servers are located which I applied to and came across later on LinkedIn, but it showed that the job had over a hundred applicants in under a week.
The salary ranges mentioned to me during my interviews I did have, e.g. for the larger consultancy role taking place at the country HQ in the capital city were abysmally low (like ridiculously low), so I guess they went with someone more eager to work for what they were willing to pay. That is, earning half of what the local junior factory welder does here in northern Europe (they do night shifts though etc.). The title for the role was: Data & AI Consultant, and it's one of the Big4 accounting / audit / consultancy firms. Anywho, they were telling I'd be working at 100% capacity without a lot of time for self-development or anything else for that matter, which is fine, but in essence, and to summarize, I've personally seen a huge shift downward in the last year in the job market and frankly, it looks rather terrible right now.
I have no visibility into the layoffs happening in the industry, but looking from the outside it does indeed seem grim. By now I'm actually thinking I should've seriously considered taking anything they were willing to offer me at all, or even working half-free to get myself back to working again! Well, I guess I'll just continue looking, but my expectations have been calibrated in a major way, that's for sure... So I guess we're all sailing in the same boat right now job-market-wise.
I’m working on a simple Fuzzy Pay-off Method (FPOM) real options calculator and a Datar-Mathews (DM) one based on Monte Carlo simulation: https://sdss.lostbookofsales.com
Yep, just like I wrote about my experience in my age of distractions post back during the COVID-times… It stayed on the front page for quite a while here on HN: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/
I also mentioned the greyscale screen trick people bring up here, haha. Phones are huge contributor to this whole problem.
In Finland this is commonplace with ”open university” courses which are just the typical unis offering single ECTS credit courses for a small fee or for free. They are fully fledged courses though. See for example: https://fitech.io/en/ or https://www.mooc.fi/en/
It’s no MIT, but they can count towards an eventual completion of a degree, and if completed with good grades, after 20-40 credits or so you can get admitted directly into a full-time program without any entrance exams or such.
This is one of his greatest. I wrote a nice summary of Poor Charlie’s Almanack back in 2021 which I’ve occasionally kept coming back to. I think today I‘ll revisit it with a sense of emptiness inside me. I’m sharing it here for others to enjoy: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/notes/poor-charlies-almanack...
Indeed, it's a thin line and I as the OP am surprised it generated so much (also productive) discussion. I saw this post was hidden from the front page at some point and I guess it's for the better. It's a "so-so".
Alliance model contracting is the future of large-scale infrastructure projects to make them stay on time and under budget. Some very good and positive indications gained in Australia and lately also here in Finland. It can be a bit rough when not executed properly, but in the best case I see so much potential in getting the industry "back on track".
Adding to this, I also did a summary of a book from Ernest Becker way back in the day, and the section on neuroticism, or how psychology is taking over from religion, and such broader societal topics you can read about here: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/notes/the-denial-of-death-by...
It's quite some brutal and heavy reading, but then again, if it helps you understand the condition better then it's for the best I guess...
I recently started writing a lot about depression trying to channel all this neurotic energy I have into some nice descriptive writing. Here's one where I describe the nice sauna experience I have every now and then in the town we're currently studying in: "One with Nature" -> https://sentience.lostbookofsales.com/one-with-nature/
It's some kind of a meditative process and I do it only when I truly feel like it. With a cup of tea and some nice background music. Definitely recommended!
It's not only comprehension decline, it's a combination of decreasing attention spans and the substitution of your memory by an electronic device (calendar, notes, etc.). I've been writing about what's happened to me during the COVID lockdowns, and I think quite a few of HN people share the feeling that one can barely even read a normal book at length these days... Here's my actual writeup from back in early 2021: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/
It’s nice to hear about the positive side of internet and all these stories people share here. Usually it’s much more about the negative aspects like one of my own personal posts I wrote from the middle of lockdowns about a year ago, touching upon the distractions of the internet and how it’s been slowly re-wiring my brain: https://www.lostbookofsales.com/age-of-distractions/
Since I moved to a smaller town here in northern Finland from the heart of Germany, thanks to the internet I feel no less connected to communities, teachers (MIT, Harvard, etc. as I’m doing my masters degree) and friends than before.
You have to balance the negative and positive sides and control yourself. I think it’s a huge net positive though as becomes obvious from this thread.