Trying to look at the machine coldly: stack, energy, culture, policy, and time.
Thinking about AI through the full stack: research, chips, energy, manufacturing, universities, patents, culture, geopolitics, and industrial execution.
If intelligence and labor become abundant, markets may start pricing very different things.
AI may not make investing obsolete. It may make markets faster while shifting scarcity toward attention, trust, energy, compute, and allocation.
With what I know now, I see the ambition, the rough edges, and the system thinking that helped make aMUZE work.
Development diagrams from the aMUZE build, and what they reveal about system thinking, authentication, frontend/backend structure, and hindsight.
From Next.js to SvelteKit with Codex, then from Azure to Hetzner.
In 2026 I moved my personal website from Next.js to SvelteKit with OpenAI Codex, then moved the infrastructure from Azure to Hetzner when the practical answer became obvious.
A product can only understand what its model is able to name, connect, and preserve.
The data model decides what a product can become, and its own UI matters for the people building it.
AI makes it practical for interfaces to learn from real behavior and improve beyond the first guess.
AI changes UI work from a one-time prediction into a system that can observe, adapt, and improve around real user paths.
Stock screens, Greek property-listing screens, watchlists, and the recurring need to make judgment visible.
By 2026 the investing work had become a broader private system: stock screens, valuation notes, Greek property-listing extraction, and clearer ways to challenge my own thinking.
The same weather data can be a table or a dashboard. The difference is how quickly it becomes usable.
A small weather example made the point brutally clear: UI changes how quickly structure becomes meaning.
Remembering a good cloud experience while choosing the economics that fit the product.
By the time the product came back in 2026, the cloud question had changed: Azure still felt serious, but the schedule and cost profile pushed me toward Hetzner.
Regulation, inevitability, and the train that already left.
AI is already extraordinary. The question is whether humans can meaningfully regulate a force that may soon sit above us in the hierarchy.
Not better targeting. Not smarter persuasion. Just the content I asked for, stripped of everything trying to hijack me.
AI should give me the internet without ads, clickbait, sponsored steering, dark patterns, and all the machinery trying to handle my mind.
Prompting made design, coding, architecture, and communication feel much closer than expected.
The AI chapters made something obvious: design direction, communication, coding, and architecture are starting to overlap hard.
by Dan Bergh Johnsson, Daniel Deogun, and Daniel Sawano
A useful security architecture book about putting protection into the shape of the system instead of hoping to bolt it on later.
Sketching, prototyping, testing, and letting the interface expose weak thinking early.
Wireframes are useful because they make product decisions visible before code makes them expensive.
Research, empathy, and the discipline of designing beyond your own assumptions.
The first useful shift in the Google UX course was simple: design from evidence and real user paths.
Why I keep coming back to markets as an intellectual challenge.
Investing attracts me because it is philosophy with consequences: judgment, incentives, psychology, courage, patience, and money keeping score.
by Don Norman
Norman frames good design as communication under constraints and gives useful names to everyday confusion.
by Henry A. Kissinger, Craig Mundie, and Eric Schmidt
A serious book on AI and civilization that I respected more than I enjoyed. The frame is useful; the conviction did not always land for me.
A year later, the tables were useful, but the assumptions were the real work.
After a year of working with investing screens, the interesting work moved toward assumptions, owner earnings, watchlists, and making different investing lenses argue.
by Edwin Lefevre
An interesting trading classic, but also a warning label. The game is seductive, the discipline is real, and the life around it can still collapse.
by Nir Eyal
Nir Eyal gives product behavior a simple loop: trigger, action, variable reward, investment.
by Steven Johnson
Steven Johnson made innovation feel ecological to me: coral reefs, dense cities, pressure, accidents, networks, and slow hunches that finally find oxygen.
by Vadim Zeland
I came across Zeland while looking for something good on attention, intention, psychology, and the stranger edges of self-direction.
by Chris Miller
Chip War made semiconductors feel like the anti-sexy investing case study: boring-looking bottlenecks, industrial depth, and power hiding in supply chains.
by Gregory Zuckerman
The Jim Simons story is fascinating because the edge looks almost alien: mathematics, data, secrecy, patience, and a machine built to see patterns humans could not hold.
Successfully closed pre-seed
A fair-auction exchange concept for bringing structure to fast-moving markets.
by Tren Griffin
Reading Munger was an absolute pleasure. I felt I had discovered a mentor: sharp, unsentimental, broad, and allergic to beautiful stupidity.
When Greenblatt, Lynch, and a pile of investing books started turning into code.
The investing books became much more useful once their questions started turning into Python screens I could run, inspect, and argue with.
A retrospective through 2024 on rhythm, melody, experimentation, performance, and eventually AI-assisted composition.
by Peter Lynch and John Rothchild
Lynch made business literacy feel practical: own the vocabulary, look at the world, then let screens and formulas start helping.
by Christopher Mayer
100 Baggers is about the uncomfortable math of patience: rare businesses, long holding periods, reinvestment, and the discipline to let compounding breathe.
by Peter Lynch and John Rothchild
Lynch opening the notebook: examples, ordinary clues, business questions, and the discipline of staying close to the actual company.
A small electronics experiment built around a very practical family problem.
The technology is too powerful to dismiss and too important to handle carelessly.
AI music should not be discussed only with excitement. That would be lazy. It should also not be discussed only with panic. That would be equally lazy, just with better posture.
The reactions were mixed in exactly the ways that made the idea feel real.
When an idea is too clean in your head, the market has a helpful habit of walking in with muddy shoes. That is useful. Reality should be allowed to ruin the first version of a pitch.
Azure, startup support, and the rare feeling that a platform was actually helping.
During aMUZE, Microsoft Founders Hub and Azure felt professional, useful, and genuinely helpful after a much colder experience with AWS startup support.
Startup romance has terrible upholstery.
A small memory from the aMUZE fundraising period: ambition, runway, pressure, and sleeping in a car while trying to keep the story alive.
A production music-generation platform built from the award-winning prototype.
The product should start with a human idea, not with a control panel.
The original aMUZE mission was simple: give people freedom of musical expression regardless of skill, education, or access to resources.
by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool
Ericsson makes expertise feel less mystical: small differences, repeated over time, become huge visible outcomes.
A personal practice rooted in simplicity, patience, mindfulness, and the search for balance beyond the noise of daily life.
by Jeevan Vasagar
I read Lion City after travelling to Singapore, trying to understand the precision, ambition, pressure, and strangeness I felt there.
The music industry has a transparency problem hiding inside its paperwork.
The music industry has always had a strange relationship with transparency. Everyone agrees artists should be paid fairly. Everyone agrees rights should be tracked. Everyone agrees ownership should be clear. Then the actual system appears and begins speaking in contracts, territories, platforms, percentages, intermediaries, and reports that feel like they were formatted by a haunted printer.
by Peter Lynch and John Rothchild
Lynch gave me permission to look at real life first, then verify brutally before an observation turns into a thesis.
A song can be culture, memory, expression, and also an object with rights attached.
Every song has a financial dimension, even when we prefer to talk about art in a pure voice while quietly checking streaming numbers. A song can carry emotion, memory, identity, and status, but it also has rights, ownership, usage, licensing, royalties, and value.
by Og Mandino
Og Mandino wraps discipline in a parable so simple that I almost distrusted it at first. Then the book keeps tapping you on the shoulder, annoyingly calm and annoyingly right.
The distance between artist and audience is a design problem.
Most fans are passive consumers. They listen, react, share, attend, buy, comment, and occasionally write alarming things online in capital letters. But they rarely participate in the creation of the music they love.
by Ethem Alpaydin
Alpaydin's Machine Learning gave me a clean way into models, data, training, testing, and generalization without turning the entrance into a ritual sacrifice to notation.
by Chris Guillebeau
A fun-to-read book that takes you on a journey around the world with inspiring stories of ingenious entrepreneurs.
by David Gerard
Blockchain technology is often hailed as the cure-all solution to many serious problems. I'm delighted to have stumbled upon a book that reveals a layer beyond the glittering surface, and in a way that is informative and entertaining :)
A playlist is already a confession. AI may let the song itself adapt.
Personal playlists are quietly revealing. They are not just collections of songs. They are emotional maps. People build them for running, heartbreak, focus, ego repair, late-night overthinking, gym delusion, and the occasional heroic walk to buy groceries.
by Eric Ries
Central to Ries's Lean Startup methodology is the Build-Measure-Learn loop, a continuous process of creating an MVP, measuring its success, and using that information to make informed decisions about what to build next. The goal is to quickly test ideas and receive feedback which provides with valuable insight when focusing on the correct metrics.
by Pema Chodron
I've had my fair share of exploring mindfulness and meditation, but meditation has always felt intangible and elusive. This book gives structure and concrete approaches to meditation, making it easier to understand.
by Al Ries
It got me thinking about the difference between a fad and a trend in the marketing world.
Technology tends to disappear into smaller, friendlier surfaces.
One of the clearest product trends is less clutter. Technologies that used to live as separate objects slowly merge into one surface. Calculators, cameras, music players, maps, flashlights, notebooks, credit cards, voice recorders, and half of modern human attention have all been swallowed by the smartphone.
by Peter Thiel
Thiel offers a good overview of the startup industry and its history. He touches on the dot-com and the green bubble, discussing how the hype and speculation around internet companies and renewable energy led to market crashes.
by Corey Taylor
Corey Taylor doing what Corey Taylor does best: loud honesty, sharp edges, and an almost uncomfortable appetite for calling bullshit.
by Jackie Chan
A few days ago, I was looking for a good movie to watch and remembered my childhood admiration of Jackie Chan. I looked for any new releases and stumbled upon his autobiography, "I Am Jackie Chan". Once I cracked it open I couldn't put it down.
by Ozzy Osbourne
Just finished reading Ozzy Osbourne's autobiography. A great window into the tortuous life of a rock star. Ozzy grew up in very poor conditions. He couldn't find his place as a student and was a social misfit. But he went on to define the sound of heavy metal and become the Prince of Darkness and eventually a comical but very successful TV personality. A very honest and revealing memoir that doesn't stick to drug abuse and bragging.
by Dave Grohl
He sets an example of how being a rockstar doesn't have to come with excess and substance abuse - considering that his only known vice is drinking too much coffee.
by James Allen
A tiny book with a heavy claim: guard the inner machinery, because sooner or later it leaks into everything else.
by Brandon Turner
Practical real-estate machinery: numbers, leverage, risk, and the unglamorous operational side people usually skip when they fantasize about wealth.
by Russell Conwell
An old-school reminder that opportunity is often less exotic than we imagine. Look harder at the ground under your feet before chasing treasure elsewhere.
The fear is real. The conclusion does not have to be lazy.
When we discussed AI music with musicians, the reactions were not uniform. That was useful. Uniform reactions are usually a sign that nobody is paying attention or everyone is being polite, which is worse.
by Mohnish Pabrai
Pabrai was another investing mentor discovery for me: calm, concentrated, asymmetric, and refreshingly allergic to unnecessary complexity.
Some lessons land harder when the teacher has decades of scars and still loves the craft.
Robert C. Martin made software design feel like a serious craft: names, boundaries, discipline, tests, and responsibility toward the next human reading the code.
by Susan Jeffers
A direct book about moving with fear instead of waiting for it to disappear. Useful precisely because it refuses the fantasy of perfect confidence.
by George Orwell
I had been putting off reading this book for quite some time.
Access, education, and active experimentation decide who gets to turn sound into form.
I keep coming back to three ingredients in music composition: access to instruments, some form of musical education, and active experimentation.
Award: $150,000
Award-winning iOS prototype that turns a whistle or hum into original music.
by Yuval Noah Harari
Harari is useful when he slows down the panic and gives the century a table of contents. The problems are still enormous, but at least they stop arriving as one shapeless cloud.
by Robert Pirsig
As an AI and music enthusiast, I've been wondering if generative AI will help us understand what quality is when it comes to music composition, and whether it will help improve it or lead to an increase in the musical equivalent of junk food.
The curve does not ask whether everyone studied music. It asks what tool finally closes the distance.
The number of people able to compose music has been increasing for a very long time. Not smoothly, not politely, and not because history enjoys clean diagrams. It increases in waves whenever a new technology reduces a serious barrier.
by Joel Greenblatt
Greenblatt gave me a useful machine, but also made me wary of machines that sound too deterministic for something as messy as investing.
A pocket device can now behave like a studio, a notebook, and a strange little orchestra.
People still talk about musical instruments as if the category is fixed. Piano. Guitar. Violin. Drums. The respectable objects. The ones that look good in black-and-white photographs next to someone with cheekbones and problems.
The microphone did not create the magic. It amplified it.
Electricity did something strange to music. It did not invent the emotional force of sound. That force was already there, sitting in the human nervous system like an ancient button waiting to be pressed. Electricity simply made the button scalable.
by John C. Bogle
Bogle is probably right in many ways, but emotionally I found indexing too unadventurous. I would rather investigate than surrender curiosity completely.
Writing changed music because it changed memory.
Music history can be read as a history of information. That sounds cold at first, because music feels like the opposite of a spreadsheet. But the more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes: every major leap in music followed a major leap in how humans store, copy, transmit, or manipulate information.
Before music was entertainment, it was communication.
Music did not begin with a piano, a guitar, a studio, or a person dramatically staring out of a rainy window because they have "a lot to say". It began much earlier, inside the human body, with breath, rhythm, pitch, and the strange ability to turn sound into meaning.
by Robert C. Martin
Clean Code made programming feel like a craft of names, boundaries, and small decisions that either help the next human or quietly punish them.
by James Altucher
Many believe that being a "yes" person is the way to go, but this is becoming increasingly impossible in today's fast-paced world.
A physics degree is not a personality, but it changes how abstraction feels.
Looking back at physics, mathematics, and the quiet confidence that comes from staying with abstract problems for long enough.
by Viktor Frankl
A brutal and necessary meditation on suffering, dignity, and the human capacity to choose an inner posture when almost everything else is taken.
A focused terminal workflow shaped into a fast, personal development environment.
by Paulo Coelho
A fable about following signs without becoming allergic to reality. Dreamy, simple, and somehow still hard to dismiss.
by Mark Twain
Mark Twain being dangerous in a small format: funny, surgical, and annoyingly correct about the social machinery of truth.
by Joshua Foer
A strange and practical tour through memory, attention, and deliberate practice. It makes remembering feel less mystical and more like engineering.
by Plato
A dense confrontation with justice, order, education, and power. The kind of book that argues with you long after you close it.
by Plato
A philosophical farewell staged around death, the soul, and what it means to live as if your ideas matter until the end.
by George Church
This book changed how I see the world! It is full of incredible inventions and breakthroughs in bioengineering.
by Richard Dawkins
Evolution explained with ruthless elegance. It changes the scale of the conversation from individual intention to machinery much older than us.
by Richard Feynman
Feynman was an exceptional physicist. He made significant contributions to the field of Quantum Electrodynamics - a theory that explores the behavior of light and matter at the subatomic scale.
A story about patience, learning, companionship, and the discipline of helping a very smart dog grow with care.
by Don Miguel Ruiz
The Four Agreements is built from simple rules, but not easy ones. It feels lightweight until you notice how much everyday noise they would remove if actually practiced.
by Anthony Robbins
Big Tony Robbins energy: intense, repetitive, theatrical, and still useful when you need to stop negotiating with your own inertia.
by Marilyn Manson
A messy rock memoir with spectacle, damage, and myth-making everywhere. Not exactly clean living; definitely not boring.
by George Clason
Personal finance dressed as ancient parable. The advice is simple because the hard part was never the arithmetic.
by Anthony Kiedis
Last book for 2022 - Scar Tissue by RHCP frontman Anthony Kiedis.
by Marvin Minsky
It was very insightful to see his divide and conquer approach. He breaks down mental processes into a hierarchy of k-lines, nemes, polynemes, isonomes, and other agents that, as a whole, make up human intelligence.
by Thomas J. Stanley
A useful antidote to fake-rich theater. Quiet accumulation, boring discipline, and the uncomfortable truth that wealth often does not look wealthy.
by T. Harv Eker
A blunt mindset book about money scripts, ambition, and the strange psychological ceiling people carry around without noticing.
by Robert Kiyosaki
A provocative gateway book on assets, cashflow, and financial independence. Not gospel, but a useful shock to the default script.
A dated, uncomfortable, and revealing self-development detour.
A look back at a controversial reading detour: confidence, insecurity, social courage, manipulation, and the strange industry built around desire.
by Mark Manson
A sharp, vulgar reminder that attention is finite. The trick is not caring less; it is choosing more honestly what deserves your care.
by Jules Verne
During a recent business coaching program, we were challenged to compete with pitch decks on solutions for a city ravaged by a hurricane. The event was intense. People came up with cutting-edge ideas involving robots, IoT smart infrastructures, drones etc.
by J.K. Rowling
The one where the world gets darker, stranger, and more emotionally interesting. Time, fear, loyalty, and childhood magic starting to grow teeth.
by J.K. Rowling
A mystery inside a school year, with danger hiding in walls and rumors. Still childish in rhythm, but the shadows are already arriving.
by J.K. Rowling
The doorway book: wonder, friendship, secret corridors, and the first addictive feeling that a whole hidden world might be waiting nearby.
by J.K. Rowling
The series opens up violently here: spectacle, competition, politics, and the first real sense that childhood is no longer protecting anyone.
by Mark Twain
Adventure, mischief, and the American boyhood myth machine in full motion. Funny, alive, and more complicated than its nostalgic surface.
by Pinelopi Delta
A Greek childhood fable-world entry from Pinelopi Delta: simple surface, old emotional weather, and the kind of story that carries memory more than plot.