Book

The Idea Factory

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This book is a history of the Bell Labs run by AT&T for much of the 20th century. These are the labs which produced many of the things I use day to day -- Unix and the C programming language for example, although this book focuses on other people present at the lab, and a bit earlier than the Unix people. Unix, a history and a memoir for example is set in the same location but later in time. One interesting point the book makes early is that the America of the early 20th century wasn't super into scientists, it was much more about engineers. So for example Edison was an engineer whose super power was systematically grinding through a problem space looking for solutions to a problem, but not necessarily actually understanding the mechanism that caused the solution to work. A really good example, although not one of Edison's, is adding lead to fuel to stop engine knocking and wear -- they literally walked the periodic table until they found an element that worked. I am left wondering how much of this failure to understand the underlying mechanism was a contributor to the longer term environmental and health implications…

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Fugitive Telemetry

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This is the fifth murderbot book and it's a fun read just like the rest. Unfortunately, it's also really short just like most of the others and I find that the story is therefore just a bit simple and two dimensional. It is nice that the story isn't just a repeat of previous entries in the series, although I would say that this one is relatively free standing in that it doesn't progress the overall story arc. That said, no regrets reading this one.

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Children of Memory

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This is the third book in this series, coming after Children of Time and Children of Ruin. While I really liked the first of the books in the series, the second felt weaker. While this one doesn't review as well as the second I think it's actually a stronger book. Whilst sometimes a bit repetitive I think the ideas presented here are novel, and the book does a good job of finding a new way of discussing the tensions that refugees and mass immigration create for societies. This book is also an interesting combination of science fiction and fantasy -- the familiar territory of a failing colonization ship sent out on a hope and a prayer, and then a fantasy story about a little girl trying to save her family and a group of strangers come to town. Overall, I enjoyed this book.

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Taming Silicon Valley

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The similarities and contrast between this book and AI Snake Oil are striking. For example, AI Snake Oil describes generative AI as something which largely works but is sometimes wrong, whereas this book is very concerned about how they've been rushed out the door in the wake of the unexpected popularity of ChatGPT despite clear issues with hallucinations and unacceptable content generation. Yet the books agree on many things too -- the widespread use of creators' content without permission, weaponization of generative AI political misinformation, the dangers of deep fakes, and the lack of any form of factual verification (or understanding of the world at all) in the statistical approaches used to generate the content. Big tech has no answer for these "negative externalities" that they are enabling and would really rather we all pretend they're not a thing. This book pushes much harder on the issue of how unregulated big tech is, and how it is repeatedly allowed to cause harm to society in returns for profits. It will be interesting to see if any regulation with teeth is created in this space. I find the assertion made in this book that large language models should not be open…

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Network Effect

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I'm not really sure why, but I found it harder to get going on this book than the others in the series. It might have been that I was also reading a particularly good non-fiction book at the same time, or it might have been that the premise for these books is starting to wear a bit thin. I'm unsure. That said, while the start of the book covers familiar territory, the overall story rapid diverges into new things and I found it quite readable once I build up some momentum. In the end, I enjoyed this book and would definitely read it again sometime.

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AI Snake Oil

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Nick recommended I read this book, so here it is. The book starts by providing an analogy for how we talk about AI -- imagine that all transport vehicles were grouped by one generic term instead of a variety like "car", "bus'', "rocket", and "boat". Imagine the confusion a conversation would experience if I was talking about boats and you were talking about rockets. This is one of the issues right now with discussions of "AI" -- there are several kinds of AI, but the commentary is all grouped together and conflating the various types. I think this is probably a specific example of what Ben Goldacre talks about in Bad Science -- science reporting by non-scientists is often overly credulous, and misses the subtleties. Next we need to decide what is in fact AI versus being something else which might be like AI, but not really AI. The book poses three questions to help here: Would a human performing this role require training? If so this might be AI. Image generation is a good example where. Is the behaviour of the system specified directly in code, or is it learnt from examples or a database search? The later is…

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The Four Tendencies

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I tend to be a bit concerned by psychology books from people without psychology qualifications, but Cat was keen for me to read this book based on her encounters of the author in podcast form. Luckily, Psychology Today seems to have relatively positive things to say about the book so I decided to give it a go. Regardless, attempts to pigeonhole people into psychological buckets have always made me uncomfortable -- be they Myers Briggs, Strengths Finder, or now the Four Tendencies. Ironically under the Four Tendencies framework I think that would make me a Questioner, but the (very short) analysis quiz declared me to be an Obliger. I am very sure my management chain at work would agree that if I am an Obliger I'm definitely hiding it pretty well. I'm not really sure what that means to be honest. I think on the other hand, if I think about the Four Tendencies as being simply a description of the permutations of weighting between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, that works better for me. I don't know what that means for the quiz thing though. For example, I've always felt more intrinsically motivated than extrinsically -- I'll do things because I…

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Leaders Eat Last

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This is the first Simon Sinek book I've read. His stuff has been on my mental to do list for a long time, but never seemed to get to the top until now. This is about a book about how employee happiness and trust in their management directly results in better outcomes for employers, and how the best way to create happy employees is via mutual trust and empathy. In fact the book goes further and outright states that staying in a job that makes you unhappy, even if it also makes you feel safe, is bad for your health and eventually your life expectancy. I haven't seen this stayed quite this clearly before and the book wastes no time in making this point. Leaders Eat Last also has a section on the various chemicals in our brains and how they guide our behaviour. I felt specifically called out by this quote on the addictive nature of social media and how it interacts with our dopamine levels: ...if you wake up in the morning and the first thing you crave is a drink, you might be an alcoholic. If you wake up in the morning and the first thing you…

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Children Of Ruin

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This book did not go where I expected it to. Sure, it has a species uplift plot which is similar to Children of Time, but that's not all that's happening here. If the previous book was about refugees and redemption, this book is about alternative ways of structuring societies (I don't want to ruin the surprise by being too specific). Let's just say some of these societies are small and some are big, but they both cooperate to achieve their goals better than perhaps our society does. There's definitely a pattern forming about how books in this series resolve their conflicts. I'm not normally into horror as a genre, and there are definitely horror elements to this story. I probably wouldn't have bought this book if I'd known how it was going to be different from the previous one. That said, the horror element decreases after a mid-book peak and overall I enjoyed the story although not as much as that of the first book in the series.

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Solving the bottom turtle (the SPIFFE / SPIRE ebook)

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I'm reading about SPIFFE / SPIRE at the moment in the form of the official project ebook. I'm going to list it here because if I read 194 pages I am going to write it up, regardless of if the book has been formally published or not. This book is probably the best introduction to SPIFFE / SPIRE I've seen. There are a lot of videos covering the basics in a relatively superficial way, and many blog posts along the same lines too, but I felt this was the best way I've found to really "get" what SPIFFE is trying to do. However, I did think it was a bit weird for this ebook to admonish me to ensure I have good runbooks for my environment in case something goes wrong, but of course the SPIFFE / SPIRE projects do not provide reasonable default runbooks as a starting point. Is asking software projects to include operational runbooks in their documentation unreasonable? I get that they'd have to be customized depending on deployment choices, but why is it that we expect end-users to produce runbooks from scratch instead of giving them a starting point to work from?

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