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Reading Notes

Extracted patterns from books, papers, and technical documentation. Distillations, not summaries.

Designing Data-Intensive Applications

Martin Kleppmann • O'Reilly • 2017

The canonical reference for distributed systems. CAP theorem, consensus, replication, partitioning, and everything that breaks in production.

Key Patterns:

  • → Reliability through redundancy
  • → Scalability via partitioning
  • → Maintainability through simplicity
  • → Trade-offs are unavoidable (CAP, consistency models)

Connections:

→ Distributed Systems module

→ Microservices architecture

→ Event-driven systems

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Douglas Hofstadter • Basic Books • 1979

Strange loops, self-reference, and consciousness emerging from recursive structures. Dense, beautiful, occasionally frustrating.

Key Patterns:

  • → Self-reference creates strange loops
  • → Consciousness emerges from tangled hierarchies
  • → Meaning exists at multiple levels simultaneously
  • → Incompleteness is fundamental (Gödel's theorem)

Connections:

→ The Observer Problem essay

→ Recursive consciousness

→ Neural architecture (attention as self-reference)

Attention Is All You Need

Vaswani et al. • NIPS 2017

The paper that changed everything. Transformers replace recurrence with attention, enabling massive parallelization and scaling.

Key Patterns:

  • → Self-attention allows parallel processing
  • → Positional encoding preserves sequence information
  • → Multi-head attention sees different patterns simultaneously
  • → Scaling works (unexpectedly well)

Connections:

→ Neural Architecture module

→ Hyperconnected cognition (parallel processing)

→ Emergent behavior from simple rules

The Wabi-Sabi Way

Coming soon

Exploring Japanese aesthetics and their application to code, systems, and life.