Autobibliography: December 2025

6 Dec 2025

A lightly-annotated list of recommendations. Previously: Nov 2025 May 2025 Feb 2025

Read

Bertolt Brecht’s poem A Worker Reads History

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?

The books are filled with names of kings.

Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?

It’s short, read the whole thing. (h/t DK)
Emily Bressler’s essay I Work For an Evil Company, but Outside Work, I’m Actually a Really Good Person

Last quarter, I led a team of engineers on an initiative to grow my company’s artificial intelligence data centers, which use millions of gallons of water per day. My work with AI is exponentially accelerating the destruction of the planet, but once a month, I go camping to reconnect with my own humanity through nature. I also bike to and from the office, which definitely offsets all the other environmental destruction I work tirelessly to enact from sunup to sundown for an exorbitant salary. Check out this social media post of me biking up a mountain. See? This is who I really am.

(h/t JK)

A primer on Hexagonal Grids

The primer I wish I’d read a while ago, before an frustrating hexagon CAD tiling exercise. (h/t QK)
Matt Keveney’s animations of Five Hundred and Seven Mechanical Movements by Henry T. Brown

The colored illustrations are animated—click them to see the movement: