Library

The paper that introduced the transformer — the architecture underneath essentially every modern LLM. Dense, but worth reading once precisely because so much is downstream of it.

Artificial Intelligence

Two pages, and it reframes seventy years of AI research: methods that scale with compute keep beating methods that encode human cleverness. The single highest insight-per-word text on this list.

Artificial Intelligence

Builds a working LLM from an empty file, one line at a time. The rare course that leaves you with no black boxes — if you only do one thing to genuinely understand LLMs, do this.

Artificial Intelligence

The visual intuition to pair with Karpathy's code. Watch this first if the maths is what's blocking you — gradient descent stops being an equation and becomes a picture.

Artificial Intelligence

The founding text of mechanistic interpretability — the argument that you can actually open a neural network and read what it learned, rather than treating it as unknowable.

Artificial Intelligence

The standard graduate reference, free to read online. Not a first book — but the one to reach for when you need the rigorous version of something you half-understand.

Artificial Intelligence

The map of the field that studies how trading actually happens — order books, spreads, price formation. Start here to find the vocabulary, then go read Harris properly.

Capital Markets

The most readable entry point into high-frequency trading and market structure. Contested by practitioners on the details — read it for the intuition, not as a verdict.

Capital Markets

The LTCM collapse: Nobel laureates, flawless models, and near-systemic failure. The definitive case study in what leverage does to a model that was right on average.

Capital Markets

The regulator's own plain-English explainer. Worth knowing as a primary source — this is the baseline the rules are actually written against.

Capital Markets

The actual regulation, navigable article by article. Most MiFID commentary is someone's summary of a summary — bookmark this and read the source when it matters.

Capital Markets

The central banks' central bank on what's actually moving in global markets. Denser than financial press, and correspondingly less wrong.

Capital Markets

The profession's formal body of knowledge. Bureaucratic to read cover-to-cover, but it's the shared vocabulary — and knowing the official framing helps you argue with it.

Business Analysis

Sixty-eight words that reshaped how software gets specified. Read the original — almost everything sold as 'Agile' today is an elaboration nobody there signed off on.

Business Analysis

The most practical, least dogmatic delivery guidance published anywhere — written by a government that had to actually ship. Better than most paid consultancy material.

Business Analysis

For the BA who wants to stop nodding along in architecture discussions. Fowler explains engineering tradeoffs in a way non-engineers can genuinely follow.

Business Analysis

The foundational text on how judgment actually works. Note: several priming studies in it failed to replicate — the core work on heuristics and biases holds, but read it knowing that.

Decision Making

The empirical answer to who predicts well and why. Its real lesson is procedural: forecasting is a trainable skill, and confident pundits are reliably worse at it than careful amateurs.

Decision Making

A professional poker player on separating decision quality from outcome quality — the single most useful distinction for anyone judged on results they don't fully control.

Decision Making

Why most predictions fail, across weather, elections, and markets. The best popular introduction to thinking in probabilities rather than certainties.

Decision Making

The rigorous foundation under the popular books — expected utility, risk versus uncertainty, where the axioms break. Free, and far more careful than anything on a bestseller list.

Decision Making

The clearest argument ever made for what prices actually are: not values, but compressed signals carrying knowledge no single planner could hold. Short, and it rewires how you see markets.

Economics

The best introduction to systems thinking there is — stocks, flows, feedback loops, and why well-intentioned interventions so often make things worse. The closest thing to this site's own thesis.

Economics

How choice architecture quietly shapes behaviour without removing options. Read it alongside the critiques — the replication record here is mixed, and that argument is instructive in itself.

Economics

The story of how behavioural economics fought its way into a discipline built on the assumption that people are rational. Half memoir, half demolition of that assumption.

Economics

On mistaking luck for skill — especially in markets, where survivors write the history. Abrasive by design, and more useful for it.

Economics

Nobel-winning work on testing development policy with actual experiments rather than ideology. A masterclass in demanding evidence for claims everyone assumes are obvious.

Economics