Empire of AI by Karen Hao
While the inside scoop on how events played out at OpenAI was eye-opening, the most interesting insight for me is the chronological run of events related to development of AI through the lens of different companies: OpenAI (non-profit/for-profit), DeepMind/Google, Anthropic, etc. The cast of characters involved from earliest times through 2025 and their role in shaping General Artificial Intelligence.
The author posits that the pursuit of AI may have begun as a sincere stroke of idealism, but it has since become a uniquely potent formula for consolidating resources and constructing an empire-esque power structure. To quote her: "The critiques that I lay out in this book of OpenAI's and Silicon Valley's broader vision are not by any means meant to dismiss AI in its entirety. What I reject is the dangerous notion that broad benefit from AI can only be derived from—indeed, will ever emerge from—a vision for the technology that requires the complete capitulation of our privacy, our agency, and our worth, including the value of our labor and art, toward an ultimately imperial centralization project. Te Hiku shows us another way. It imagines how AI and its development could be exactly the opposite. Models can be small and task specific, their training data contained and knowable, ridding the incentives for widespread exploitative and psychologically harmful labor practices and the all-consuming extractivism of producing and running massive supercomputers. The creation of AI can be community driven, consensual, respectful of local context and history; its application can uplift and strengthen marginalized communities; its governance can be inclusive and democratic."

Don't Believe Everything You Think: Why Your Thinking Is The Beginning & End Of Suffering by Joseph Nguyen
The author lays out the case for thinking as the root cause of our suffering—that without our usual thinking about a particular event, our experience of it completely alters. Here are a couple of excerpts from the book that elaborate this better:
"We survived because of our ability to communicate, work together, form strong social bonds, and pass down knowledge from one generation to the next. It was vital to stay in our social groups, and being thrown out of our tribe meant certain death. And so our minds evolved to fear being judged or doing the wrong thing in order to remain accepted by others and not get kicked out of the tribe. Because of this, we sacrificed our individuality and uniqueness to fit in. We learned to not be too different or weird because it might result in us being ostracized. While this may have helped us survive, it also cost us our peace and happiness."
"If we keep allowing this thinking to direct our lives, we will stay in a state of fight or flight, anxiety, fear, frustration, depression, anger, resentment, and negative emotion because the mind views everything as a threat to our very existence. And it is this tendency of our minds that leads us to the torturous thinking at the root of our suffering. If you want to be free and at peace, then you will need to let go of only listening to your mind's fight-or-flight thinking. You are not just a product of your environment but a co-creator of it. With this understanding, you can begin to shift your experience of reality from merely surviving to truly thriving."
Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel
This is a fascinating book of short stories about what never changes in a changing world. The author has picked 23 short and very captivating stories to highlight uncertainties of the future and consistency of people's behavior. Here are some excerpts:
"The Economist—a magazine I admire (me too and the only magazine I read and subscribe to)—publishes a forecast of the year ahead each January. Its January 2020 issue does not mention a single word about COVID-19. Its January 2022 issue does not mention a single word about Russia invading Ukraine. That's not a criticism—both events were impossible to know when the issues were planned in the months before publication. But that's the point: The biggest news, the biggest risks, the most consequential events are always what you don't see coming. Put another way: There is rarely more or less economic uncertainty; just changes in how ignorant people are to potential risks. Asking what the biggest risks are is like asking what you expect to be surprised about. If you knew what the biggest risk was you would do something about it, and doing something about it would make it less risky. What your imagination can't fathom is the dangerous stuff, and it's why risk can never be mastered."
"Change captures our attention because it's surprising and exciting. But the behaviors that never change are history's most powerful lessons, because they preview what to expect in the future. Your future. Everyone's future. No matter who you are, where you're from, how old you are, or how much money you make, there are timeless lessons from human behavior that are some of the most important things you can ever learn."
"Entrepreneur and investor Naval Ravikant put it this way: 'In 1,000 parallel universes, you want to be wealthy in 999 of them. You don't want to be wealthy in the fifty of them where you got lucky, so we want to factor luck out of it…. I want to live in a way that if my life played out 1,000 times, Naval is successful 999 times.' That's what this book is about: In a thousand parallel universes, what would be true in every single one? Each of the following twenty-three chapters can be read independently, so there is no harm in skipping and choosing as you wish."
"Try to keep two things in mind in a world that's this vulnerable to chance and accident. One is highlighting this book's premise—to base predictions on how people behave rather than on specific events. Predicting what the world will look like fifty years from now is impossible. But predicting that people will still respond to greed, fear, opportunity, exploitation, risk, uncertainty, tribal affiliations, and social persuasion in the same way is a bet I'd take.
The other thing to keep in mind is to have a wider imagination. No matter what the world looks like today, and what seems obvious today, everything can change tomorrow because of some tiny accident no one's thinking about. Events, like money, compound. And the central feature of compounding is that it's never intuitive how big something can grow from a small beginning."

Spoon-Fed: Why Almost Everything We've Been Told About Food Is Wrong by Tim Spector
With fads around diets continuously changing and a growing tendency for the next miracle that will fix all the health issues, this book lists some common sense approaches instead. Here is a summary from the book:
1. Eat diverse foods, mainly plants, without added chemicals
2. Question the science and don't believe quick-fix single solutions
3. Don't be fooled by labels or marketing
4. Understand you are not average when it comes to food
5. Don't get into food ruts: diversify and experiment
6. Experiment with meal timings and skipping meals
7. Use real food, not supplements
8. Avoid ultra-processed foods with over ten ingredients
9. Eat foods to improve gut microbe diversity
10. Reduce regular blood glucose and blood fat spikes
11. Reduce meat and fish consumption and check its sustainability
12. Educate yourself and the next generation in the importance of real food

Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier by Kevin Kelly
This is an interesting collection of simple proverbs that Kelly found most useful for him to convey to the young. Here are some of these from the book:
"Prototype your life. Try stuff instead of making grand plans."
"A great way to understand yourself is to seriously reflect on everything you find irritating in others."
"The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth to flossing."
"Keep showing up. 99% of success is just showing up. In fact, most success is just persistence."
"Life lessons will be presented to you in the order they are needed. Everything you need to master the lesson is within you. Once you have truly learned a lesson you will be presented with the next one. If you are alive that means you still have lessons to learn."
"Very few regrets in life are about what you did. Almost all are about what you didn't do."
"Your goal is to be able to say on the day before you die that you have fully become yourself."

Gut Check: Unleash the Power of Your Microbiome to Reverse Disease and Transform Your Mental, Physical, and Emotional Health (The Plant Paradox Book 7) by Dr. Steven R. Gundry
Some of the theories laid out in the book could be controversial. The first two chapters explain in quite a bit of detail the role gut bacteria play in our overall health. Later chapters establish a detailed protocol for maintaining good gut health.

Hotwire Native for Rails Developers: Build Native Mobile Apps Using Your Server by Joe Masilotti
I have never enjoyed mobile development for several reasons. Currently I am using this book to see how far I can go in reusing my server-side code to serve my frontend for native mobile apps. That is the promise of Hotwire. It is still a journey. I will have a verdict once I have built a complete mobile application using this technique.

Agile Web Development with Rails 8 by Sam Ruby
I started doing full stack web development with the first version of Rails more than 15 years back. And the first edition of this book was what helped me a lot to get up and running. Ever since then, every time I use a newer version of Rails to build a web app, I refer to this book. And so was the case this time with Rails 8 edition. I feel a continuity in the example project chosen to understand new concepts and I can build on top of my previous understandings. I am still surprised, after so many years, there is still no good alternative to Rails when it comes to a full stack, all batteries included web framework that allows a single programmer to build a complete web app—backend as well as frontend—in a very short time. I feel Rails allowed that ability to bootstrap a webapp quickly, by understanding a few key concepts and APIs, and of course Ruby. The power a lot of folks talk about today that comes with using LLMs to build apps, I felt was there in Rails a long time back. Because you don't waste a lot of time on the minutiae of plumbing required to put all the pieces together and reinvent core pieces again and again when you use Rails.

Podcasts I found worth listening and informative :

Weekly Show with Jon Stewart
Geoffrey Hinton : What Could go Wrong
Chris Christie : Cons & Cons of Trump
Jen Psaki : Agreeing & Disagreeing with Jen Psaki
Mehdi Hassan : Debating Reality
Ezra Klein : Why we can't have nice things

TIm Ferris:
Simplify your life - Derek Sivers, Seth Godin, Martha Beck
Derek Sivers
Boyd Varty
Rhonda Patrick
Trevor Noah
Ezra Klein

Joe Rogan:
Jensen Huang
Bernie Sanders
Thomas Kempbell
Douglas Murray & Dave Smith

Making Sense with Sam Harris:
Neall Ferguson : The Geopolitics of Trump 2.0
David Deutsch : Strange Truths
Jonah GOldberg : Political Extremism
Paul Bloom : AI Freinds & Enemies
David Frum : How Bad Is It
Jake Tapper : The Cover Up
Peter Zehan : The Unravelling of American Power

Honestly with Barry Weiss:
Meet Sarah Wynn Williams, Facebook's Highest Ranking Whitleblower
Neil Fergusson
Mark Hymann
Casey Means
How China captured Apple
Giga Yachts, Flo rids and bunkers

Lex Friedman
Dylan Patel : DeepSeek, China, OpenAI, NVIDIA, xAI, TSMC, Stargate, and AI Megaclusters
Volomyer Zelinsky : President of Ukraine
Narendra Modi : Pime Miniister of India
DHH - Future of Programming
Bernie Sanders
Marc Andressen
Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson: Politics, Trump, AOC, Elon & DOGE

Hidden Brain:
What is your life for?

Huberman
Essentials: ADHD & How anyone can improve their focus
Dr David Berson : How your brain works & interprets world

What Now with Trevor Noah
Most Dangerous Part of American Health System.
The problem with mean with Scott Galloway
Join or Die with Robert Putnam

All In
Naval Ravikanth
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick
Sunder Pichai
Sergey Brin
Ron Jonson
Bryan Johnson
Elon Musk