About

You can see an irregularly updated Goodreads list here, but my all time favorite books are included below. The metric for choosing this list is an idea (or multiple ideas) from the book that resonated to my core.

(NB: I get a bit of kickback if you buy a copy. Thanks!)

1. Siddhartha (affl. link) by Herman Hesse “Siddhartha looked into the river and saw many pictures in the flowing water. He saw his father, lonely, mourning for his son; he saw himself, lonely, also with the bonds of longing for his faraway son; he saw his son, also lonely, the boy eagerly advancing along the burning path of life’s desires; each one concentrating on his goal, each one obsessed by his goal, each one suffering.”
2. The Beginning of Infinity (affl. link) by David Deutsch “That is what makes good explanations essential to science: it is only when a theory is a good explanation – hard to vary – that it even matters whether it is testable. Bad explanations are equally useless whether they are testable or not.”
3. The Denial of Death (affl. link) by Ernest Becker “The urge to immortality is not a simple reflex of the death-anxiety but a reaching out by one's whole being toward life. Perhaps this natural expansion of the creature alone can explain why transference is such a universal passion….We are gods with anuses.”
4. Developer Hegemony (affl. link) by Erik Dietrich “Pragmatists contribute as little as possible to preserve stability, getting a bad economic deal and recognizing it. Idealists, believing in the company, work even harder and make their economic deal even worse. Don’t be fooled by a slightly higher salary and meaningless perks like offices and parking spaces. Working 50 percent more your entire career to eventually get paid fifteen thousand more per year is an abysmal deal, compared not only with opportunists’ deals but also with minimum effort, lower-wage pragmatists’ deals. And the opportunists feeding the grist to the mill certainly overpromote idealists because of strategic necessity rather than any kind of merit.”
5. Gardens: An Essay on the Human condition (affl. link) by Robert Pogue Harrison “The emphasis on cultivation is essential. It is because we are thrown into history that we must cultivate our garden. In an immortal Eden there is no need to cultivate, since all is pregiven there spontaneously. Our human gardens may appear to us like little openings onto paradise in the midst of the fallen world, yet the fact that we must create, maintain, and care for them is the mark of their postlapsarian provenance. History without gardens would be a wasteland. A garden severed from history would be superfluous.”
6. Sun and Steel (affl. link) by Yukio Mishima “Specifically, I cherished a romantic impulse towards death, yet at the same time I required a strictly classical body as its vehicle; a peculiar sense of destiny made me believe that the reason why my romantic impulse towards death remained unfulfilled in reality was the immensely simple fact that I lacked the necessary physical qualifications. A powerful, tragic frame and sculpturesque muscles were indispensable in a romantically noble death. Any confrontation between weak, flabby flesh and death seemed to me absurdly inappropriate. Longing at eighteen for an early demise, I felt myself unfitted for it. I lacked, in short, the muscles suitable for a dramatic death. And it deeply offended my romantic pride that it should be this unsuitability that had permitted me to survive the war.”
7. So Good They Can't Ignore You (affl. link) by Cal Newport “The Law of Remarkability: For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.”
8. Black Rednecks and White Liberals by Thomas Sowell “Before the modern era, by and large Europeans enslaved other Europeans, Asians enslaved other Asians, Africans enslaved other Africans, and the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere enslaved other indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere. Slavery was not based on race, much less on theories about race.…During the Middle Ages, Slavs were so widely used as slaves in both Europe and the Islamic world that the very word “slave” derived from the word for Slav—not only in English, but also in other European languages, as well as in Arabic.”
9. The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander “The more living patterns there are in a place - a room, a building, or a town - the more it comes to life as an entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.”
10. Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse “Infinite players cannot say when their game began, nor do they care. They do not care for the reason that their game is not bounded by time. Indeed, the only purpose of the game is to prevent it from coming to an end, to keep everyone in play. There are no spatial or numerical boundaries to an infinite game. No world is marked with the barriers of infinite play, and there is no question of eligibility since anyone who wishes may play an infinite game. While finite games are externally defined, infinite games are internally defined...What one wins in a finite game is a title. A title is the acknowledgment of others that one has been the winner of a particular game. Titles are public. They are for others to notice. I expect others to address me according to my titles, but I do not address myself with them—unless, of course, I address myself as an other. The effectiveness of a title depends on its visibility, its noticeability to others.”
11. Lost In Thought by Zena Hitz “In the activities here described, the intellect reaches past whatever is given in immediate experience. That is why mere experiences sought for their own sake (video games, channel surfing, pornography) do not count. But if this is right, the intellect does not provide an escape from “the world” so much as it involves an escape from oneself, one’s immediate experiences and the desires and impulses they provoke. Social conformity taps into our desire to fit in; social competition, to be superior to others; physical suffering, to let pain overwhelm us. Poverty and deprivation instill a fierce desire to be satisfied, comfortable, suffused with pleasures. They drive us, as we saw in the examples of Martin Eden or the worker at the Amazon warehouse, to drink and distraction…As described by the interlocutors of the Republic, intellectual life relies on wealth and luxury. It does not develop in environments where work is overwhelming, but appears only in economies where leisure has become possible. Yet it is not an immediate outgrowth of wealth and luxury. It emerges from a wealthy society that has been disciplined, that fears the pull of wealth and ambition, that trains its young for what really matters. Intellectual development requires a chosen asceticism, a conscious rejection of available luxury. It marks out a way between rustic simplicity and the decadence of wealth. In this way, Plato’s Socrates holds out a hope that Aristophanes does not—hope of an authentic way of being human that does service both to simple human necessities and to the heights of human excellence.”

Thinking in Systems by Donella Meadows "A stock is the foundation of any system. Stocks are the elements of the system that you can see, feel, count, or measure at any given time. A system stock is just what it sounds like: a store, a quantity, an accumulation of material or information that has built up over time. It may be the water in a bathtub, a population, the books in a bookstore, the wood in a tree, the money in a bank, your own self-confidence. A stock does not have to be physical...Stocks change over time through the actions of a flow. Flows are filling and draining, births and deaths, purchases and sales, growth and decay, deposits and withdrawals, successes and failures. A stock, then, is the present memory of the history of changing flows within the system." ... "You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling of scales from the eyes, a new way of seeing. Whole societies are another matter—they resist challenges to their paradigms harder than they resist anything else. So how do you change paradigms? Thomas Kuhn, who wrote the seminal book about the great paradigm shifts of science, has a lot to say about that.8 You keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm. You keep speaking and acting, loudly and with assurance, from the new one. You insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don’t waste time with reactionaries; rather, you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded."

Hunter x Hunter (affl. link) by Yoshihiro Togashi is my favorite piece of art, period. “…It was a minor change. Something…somewhere…shifted. If I had been this way since the beginning…While I am no god, what I could do, with this world…No. Perhaps only now could I see it this way.”

I'm broadly focused on:

1. Your Commonbase
2. This website
3. Taking learning seriously: stone sculpture, drawing, singing

• Public Domain Image Archive
• The Met Collection

Such a thing is difficult to convey in words, but here are a few quotes and ideas that get close.

(Italics are ideas I got from somewhere else, non-italicized are my ideas)

1. Hunters must always be hunting something.
2. Enjoy the little detours, something more important than what you're hunting for could be right by the side of the road./Ask anyone you admire: Their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal. So embrace detours. Life is not a straight line for anyone.
3. ...I want what I've always wanted. Something I don't see in front of me.
4. Toma lo que quieras y págalo.
5. Ars longa, vita brevis.
6. A zettelkasten/commonplace book is a noble task to work on unto itself. It is a garden, and gardens have no beginnings or ends, they merely change with intention and by season.
7. Solvidar ambulado.
8. The Law of Remarkability: For a mission-driven project to succeed, it should be remarkable in two different ways. First, it must compel people who encounter it to remark about it to others. Second, it must be launched in a venue that supports such remarking.
9. If what you are working on is not important and not likely to lead to important things, then why are you working on it?
10. Do less, better.
11. If you want to get to know someone, find out what makes them angry. / When someone tells you what ticks them off they are telling you what makes them tick.
12. Choose a philosophy, or one will be chosen for you. The same can be said for your attention.
13. Most code has yet to be written. Code is still in its early alphabetic literature phase, and LLMs have sped us up drastically. Expect a Cambrian explosion of programs.
14. Enthusiasm, freshness, beauty. All the things that make life worth living. That's why I plan in the suite of a superior five-star hotel. Not in a hangar or some apartment in the suburbs like those crooks who hide away like rats and dress in dark colors. If we're riddled with bullets at the doors of that auction house, we'll leave five beautiful corpses behind...and Damian's.
15. To be remarkable, read books.
16. Luck is a skill like everything else.
17. I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing, not associating with all the people around me. I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers. As long as I got my day-to-day life set so that each work was an improvement over the last, then many of my readers would welcome whatever life I chose for myself. Shouldn’t this be my duty as a novelist, and my top priority? My opinion hasn’t changed over the years. I can’t see my readers’ faces, so in a sense it’s a conceptual type of human relationship, but I’ve consistently considered this invisible, conceptual relationship to be the most important thing in my life. In other words, you can’t please everybody.
18. Siddhartha looked into the river and saw many pictures in the flowing water. He saw his father, lonely, mourning for his son; he saw himself, lonely, also with the bonds of longing for his faraway son; he saw his son, also lonely, the boy eagerly advancing along the burning path of life’s desires; each one concentrating on his goal, each one obsessed by his goal, each one suffering.
19. To understand how Epicurus's garden reflects and even embodies the core of his philosophy, we must keep in mind first of all that it was an actual kitchen garden tended by his disciples, who ate the fruits and vegetables they grew there. Yet it was not for the sake of fruits and vegetables alone that they assiduously cultivated the soil. Their gardening activity was also a form of education in the ways of nature: its cycles of growth and decay, its general equanimity, its balanced interplay play of earth, water, air, and sunlight. Here, in the convergence of vital forces in the garden's microcosm, the cosmos manifested its greater harmonies; here the human soul rediscovered its essential connection to matter; here living things showed how fruitfully they respond to a gardener's solicitous care and supervision. Yet the most important pedagogical lesson that the Epicurean garden imparted to those who tended it was that life-in all its forms-is intrinsically mortal and that the human soul shares the fate of whatever grows and perishes on and in the earth. Thus the garden reinforced the fundamental Epicurean belief that the human soul is as amenable to moral, spiritual, and intellectual cultivation as the garden is to organic cultivation.
20. Risking your life and throwing away your life seem alike, but are two totally different things. People who live at the brink of death never think of throwing their lives away. Only those who can take perfect care of their bodies, and then drink poison thats barely under the lethal dose at any time without hesitation can survive.
21. A person is an end-in-themself: their inherent value doesn't depend on anything else - it doesn't depend on whether the person is enjoying their life, or making other people's lives better. We exist, so we have value.
22. An engineer while I'm here, an artist after I'm gone.

1. Why don’t programmers treat themselves like book authors? (example)
2. Does all creative coding need to fall into the local maxima of generative art or video games?
3. Is it possible to build a zero stress search/store/share societal legacy built on the Commonbases of individual legacies?
4. What does it mean to be a Hunter in the real world?
5. Can the average developer build a sustainable lifestyle on their own, or will they always be yoked to a nameless large organization?
6. If most code hasn’t been written yet, what should (and shouldn’t) we expect to see? When will we cross the threshold where most code has been written?
7. What do I value above all else?
8. What am I hoping to find in all these books I read?
9. Is knowledge power? How many kinds of power exist?

Good question! Find out here.

Find out here. Or here (my runway modeling days (in the past!!)).

I really struggle with this myself. Broadly speaking, I think I "qualify" to title anything I have been officially paid to do in the past/present, and " aspirational" anything I'd like to be paid for/rewarded for in the future.

Official:

1. Software Developer
2. Developer Advocate
3. AI Consultant
4. Owner-operator (Stenography)
5. Writer
6. Creative Technologist

Aspirational:

1. Artist
2. Book Author
3. Actor
4. Musician

The current-near future AI will be as impactful to humanity's future as the impact of true alphabetical language (the ones we use today) combined with the impact of infinite computation devices (Turing machines). In other words, the foundation of a true self sustaining intelligence.

The current, null hypothesis impact of AI is massive for those who are willing to explore the space and make it work for their needs.

for bramadams.dev:

• Ghost (Pro)

for life/work management:

• Time Block Planner
• Trello
• Your Commonbase

software:

• Arc (browser)
• Cursor (code editor)
• OpenAI API (for pretty much anything AI)

hardware:

• Supernote Nomad
• iPhone 15 Pro Max
• Macbook Pro M1
• Kindle Oasis

for food:

• Whole Foods

for style:

• Uniqlo (for basics)
• Zara (for flashy pieces)
• Adidas (for shoes - namely Ultraboosts)
• Miansai (for jewelry)

You can find my contact information here.

You can schedule office hours with me about:

• personal library science
• commonbases and commonplace ides
• gpts
• writing
• books
• programming
• creative coding

loose structure suggestion:

• 5 mins you tell me about your question
• 20 mins topic from above list
• 5 mins next actions

hard stop at 30 mins!

Calendly

No.

I oscillate favorite artists, but broadly stick within 3-4 core genres:

1. Metalcore
2. Rap
3. J-Pop/Rock
4. EDM

My favorite artists currently are (by odds of me consuming their entire discography over and over):

In no particular order:

1. Sleep Token
2. Braden Ross
3. Oliver Francis
4. Childish Gambino
5. Porter Robinson
6. Post Malone
7. System of a Down
8. Brakence
9. Maggie Lindemann
10. MCR
11. Kai Wachi
12. YOASOBI
13. Bad Valentine
14. RevengeInKyoto

Yes!

• GoTime Podcast Episode 279
• New School Interview
• Experimenting with Codex - Sandra Kublik
• A Conversation with Andrew Mayne

Bram Adams (@bramses) is a creative technologist and AI Consultant based out of NYC.

Bram publishes a weekly newsletter, is a community developer ambassador for OpenAI, and does contracts (for hire!) related to AI/web dev/AR+VR.

today

As of Summer 2024, Bram is actively working on two intertwined missions: the foundation and formalizations of the core philosophies of personal library science, and writing the initial software that powers it: your Commonbase (Commonplace Book + LLM Augmented Database). Commonplace Bot and its sibling projects: Quoordinates and Quo-Host, are the world's first look into what he future of reading books and retention will look like with the influence of LLMs. You can test Commonplace Bot out live in the Bram Adams' Discord server.

The prototypes for a near-future general Commonbase build can be found in the prototype libraries Commonbase Editor Prototype and Commonbase Prototype.

Check out all the projects by starring the topic: #future-of-reading.

other projects and experiences include

Bram is the creator of Stenography, an API and VSC Extension that automatically documents code on save, which went #1 on Product Hunt. He also created MapGPT, a GPT that creates a personalized tour guide from anywhere in the world and has been a featured GPT on the GPT Store and used in more than one hundred thousand conversations. He also is the author of Bramses' Highly Opinionated Vault, an extremely detailed philosophy + vault template used by thousands of Obsidian users (new and old!), and ChatGPT MD, a (nearly) seemless integration of Chat GPT into Obsidian which has been downloaded by over thirty thousand Obsidian users. He also taught the GPT-3 in Production Course for O'Reilly Media, teaching students how to leverage LLMs in the real world of production.

Previously Developer Advocate @ Algolia, Software Engineer @ HBO, Computer Science B.S. @ University of Rochester

Summary:

Currently Community Developer Ambassador @ OpenAI, Freelance @ Bram Adams

Previously Developer Advocate @ Algolia, Software Engineer @ HBO, Computer Science B.S. @ University of Rochester

Contact

Newsletters - Every Sunday. Curated by me (members only). See an example of the format here.

Essays - Long form thought pieces.

Short Stories - A collection of parables and stories I've written. Fictional essays basically.

Quoordinates - A 3D exploration space of quotes I've highlighted from books over the years. You are what you read! (Best experienced on desktop)

Creative Coding - Generative Art (p5.js + canvas-sketch + midjourney are my tools of choice generally)

Books - Books I've Read. I try to knock out five per month. Reviews, Quotes. (Here is my Goodreads!)

Livestreams - Sometimes I go live on Twitch!

Instabrams - Audio, video, text and code artifacts, a look into the daily process of a programmer and writer.

Chats with GPT - Improv conversations with GPT-4, testing the boundaries of what LLMs can do, how to utilize them to the fullest – including the concept of modality switching (members only full text versions).

Creative Coding Archive (links out to Notion) - An archive of my creative coding works over the years.

Standups - Daily progress on books, the newsletter, tech thoughts