Ayush Ranjan
Notes on machines that learn and systems that don’t.
The reading log
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14 books, 38 papers, ongoing
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Updated 21 May 2026
§ What I’m reading
A modest log, kept honestly, so I’ll remember.
I read a lot more than I finish. The log is here partly to embarrass me into finishing, and partly because the best book recommendations I’ve ever gotten were one-liners from people I trusted. So: one-liners, kept honestly.
§ I
On the desk — right now
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/01A Philosophy of Software Design — John Ousterhout (2nd ed.)Rereading. The middle chapters, on layered design and the cost of shallow modules, are doing more work in my head than they did the first time.rereading
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/02Sea of Tranquility — Emily St. John MandelBedside book. A small, structured novel that keeps doubling back on itself in a way I find restful.in progress
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/03Compiler Construction — Niklaus WirthSlowly. A tiny, opinionated book; the kind that doesn’t explain itself twice. I’m on chapter 6 and pretending I’m not lost.slow
§ II
Books, finished — 2026
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b5.Designing Data-Intensive Applications — Martin KleppmannStill the reference. I keep the chapter on consistency models taped to the inside of my brain.great
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b4.The Practice of Programming — Kernighan & PikeOld, short, perfect. A book to hand to a smart intern on day one.classic
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b3.Why We Sleep — Matthew WalkerUseful but oversold. Read the criticisms alongside it.mixed
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b2.The Soul of a New Machine — Tracy KidderA book about engineering that’s really a book about people. I find it gets sharper every time I reread it.great
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b1.Klara and the Sun — Kazuo IshiguroGentle, sad, very precise. Not the book about AI I expected.good
§ III
Papers worth your afternoon
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p7.Mixtral of Experts — Mistral AI, 2024The cleanest description of routing-by-expert in any paper I’ve read.great
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p6.FlashAttention-3 — Dao et al., 2024The hardware model in section 4 is worth the whole paper on its own.great
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p5.The Bitter Lesson — Rich Sutton, 2019Short, mostly right, occasionally weaponized in ways I don’t think Sutton intended.important
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p4.On the Spherical Geometry of Word Embeddings — Mu & Viswanath, 2018Lovely small result. Embeddings have a surprising amount of structure if you take their norms seriously.elegant
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p3.Chinchilla’s Wild Implications — nostalgebraistA blog post that aged into a prediction. Long. Worth it.essential
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p2.A Note on Distributed Computing — Waldo et al., 1994Every five years I read this and feel slightly worse about my last design.classic
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p1.No Silver Bullet — Fred Brooks, 1986An essay, technically. I reread it once a year.canon
§ IV
Writers I follow closely
· gwern.net
· simonwillison.net
· danluu.com
· brandur.org
· eatonphil.com
· mattklein123.dev
· lethain.com
· fly.io/blog
· nostalgebraist.tumblr.com
· bdickason.com