non_fiction

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.

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The Idea Factory Book Cover The Idea Factory
Jon Gertner
Business & Economics
Penguin
March 15, 2012
434

The definitive history of America’s greatest incubator of innovation and the birthplace of some of the 20th century’s most influential technologies “Filled with colorful characters and inspiring lessons . . . The Idea Factory explores one of the most critical issues of our time: What causes innovation?” —Walter Isaacson, The New York Times Book Review “Compelling . . . Gertner's book offers fascinating evidence for those seeking to understand how a society should best invest its research resources.” —The Wall Street Journal From its beginnings in the 1920s until its demise in the 1980s, Bell Labs-officially, the research and development wing of AT&T-was the biggest, and arguably the best, laboratory for new ideas in the world. From the transistor to the laser, from digital communications to cellular telephony, it's hard to find an aspect of modern life that hasn't been touched by Bell Labs. In The Idea Factory, Jon Gertner traces the origins of some of the twentieth century's most important inventions and delivers a riveting and heretofore untold chapter of American history. At its heart this is a story about the life and work of a small group of brilliant and eccentric men-Mervin Kelly, Bill Shockley, Claude Shannon, John Pierce, and Bill Baker-who spent their careers at Bell Labs. Today, when the drive to invent has become a mantra, Bell Labs offers us a way to enrich our understanding of the challenges and solutions to technological innovation. Here, after all, was where the foundational ideas on the management of innovation were born.

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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.

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Taming Silicon Valley Book Cover Taming Silicon Valley
Gary F. Marcus
Computers
MIT Press
September 17, 2024
247

How Big Tech is taking advantage of us, how AI is making it worse, and how we can create a thriving, AI-positive world. On balance, will AI help humanity or harm it?

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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.

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AI Snake Oil
Arvind Narayanan, Sayash Kapoor
2024
348

From two of TIME's 100 Most Influential People in AI, what you need to know about AI and how to defend yourself against bogus AI claims and products. Confused about AI and worried about what it means for your future and the future of the world? You're not alone.

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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.

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The Four Tendencies Book Cover The Four Tendencies
Gretchen Rubin
Psychology
Two Roads
May 3, 2018
257

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Lights Out

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This book continues the story of General Electric in the period after that covered by The Man Who Broke Capitalism, thus presenting an opportunity to validate if Jack Welch really was the bad guy while also learning more about where Welchism took General Electric in the longer term. This book is very readable, with nice short chapters -- for example it introduces Welch as a character, but does not dwell on his time at General Electric more than is necessary. Immelt's time as CEO got off to a rocky start, with the 911 attacks occurring on just his second day in the job. GE was financially exposed to these events, both as an insurer of some of the destroyed buildings, but also as a major manufacturer of aerospace equipment whose grounding reduced demand. My second day as chairman, a plane I lease, flying with engines I built, crashed into a building I insure, and it was covered with a network I own" Then of course came Enron. While the book asserts that GE's behaviour lacked Enron's criminality, GE was certainly creative and opaque with its accounting and would have to clean up its act under the new stricter post-Enron accounting…

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The Stranger in the Woods

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At 20, Chris Knight set off into the woods to avoid society. He didn't come out apart from to commit petty theft for supplies for 27 years, when he was finally caught after about 1,000 burglaries. Catherine and I are a bit divided on this story -- I think Chris clearly had something wrong in terms of mental health, whereas Catherine thinks he crossed a line when he committed theft to survive. Either way, I don't think you could claim that Chris was living in luxury in isolation, especially when research has shown that extended isolation is generally very bad for mental health. I came across this book because Digital Minimalism recommended it as a good exploration of solitude, but most of the book really isn't about that. Mostly the book is a description of Knight and his life for those 27 years. That said, it's still an interesting read. I'd avoid the book if talk of suicide is a trigger for you, although Knight does not appear to have carried through on his threat.

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Drive

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This is a book about motivation, specifically about how our assumptions that biological urges and extrinsic motivation are sufficient to model all human behaviours. It turns out that's not true -- intrinsic motivation plays an important part, and in fact badly applied extrinsic motivators can harm the much more powerful intrinsic motivating factors. (It will be interesting to see what corporations currently cutting bonus payouts experience in terms of overall productivity now that they've removed an extrinsic motivator). Intrinsic motivation is more important for heuristic work where the outcomes aren't algorithmic or clear cut the book argues. It's not as simple as just cranking and handle and creativity comes out the other end. However, that's just what traditional management is -- a series of carrots and sticks to crinkle that handle as fast as possible. Its important to note here that the book repeatedly states that intrinsic motivation only works if the person's baseline needs are already met. That is, you need to be earning enough to pay your bills and so forth before you start valuing how interesting work is. Instead, the book encourages companies to consider things like 20% time, self organizing teams, flexible work hours, and so forth.…

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Plays Well With Others

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This book lied to me. It purports to start out with a description of a hostage situation in New York city. However, the twist is it turns out that its a simulation instead of the real deal. The deception is complete! However, this is a  pretty unusually effective way to "hook" people at the beginning of a non-fiction book. Importantly, the book also points out that the techniques that hostage negotiators use to take the heat out of a situation don't work for your marriage: Note to self: something designed for terrorists and emotionally disturbed people isn't perfect for your family. That opening is indicative of the rest of the book -- very readable, and good at keeping your interest. I guess that's good in a psychology book? Every chapter starts with a story, and sometimes the stories are event related to the topic at hand, which is admirable. The whole book is written in a lighthearted style that is fun without coming across as forced, which I think is a pretty impressive thing to have achieved. The book starts out discussing if you can judge a book by its cover -- that is, how good are humans at reading…

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Everything is Obvious, Once You Know The Answer

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This is a book about common sense. Specifically, it's about how when you're told a fact it seems obvious -- common sense -- that it's true. Interestingly, this can be the case even if that fact is in fact untrue. This is at least partially because common sense is mostly practical, that is it's more concerned about "getting to the right answer", preferably quickly, than it is about exactly how it got to that answer. It's also partially because common sense is cultural, we map new situations to things we've seen previously to infer the correct answer. Different cultures have different experiences and so therefore have different common sense. The book spends a chapter discussing the ways that humans make decisions, and how logic isn't really the answer. We instead imagine ourselves in the projected situation and then work through what will happen. This means that we're bad at seeing attempts to anchor our thinking, or other forms of bias. We also tend to think that incentives will work better than they actually do in the real world. That is, we are bad at predicting what factors will be important in someone's decision making process and then apply ineffective incentives.…

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The Kubernetes Book (2024 edition)

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This is yet another accidental purchase of a self-published book, although I think this one makes a lot of sense as a self published work. Writing a technical reference book isn't a particularly lucrative pastime for most authors, and self publishing likely makes it more worthwhile than the traditional publisher route, especially if you can rustle up a good set of technical editors and reviewers yourself. That said, I think one of the risks with self published technical books like this is that they are overly credulous, and I think this book falls into that trap early by describing Kubernetes as the "cloud operating system". Like I get it, you're excited about Kubernetes, but making claims that all of the cloud runs on Kubernetes just undermines your work before you've even really started. I can't find any public data, either academic or anecdotal, which supports the assertion that Kubernetes is even the most popular way to run workloads in clouds. I'm sure that AWS has more VMs not running Kubernetes for example than they do have running it. That said, it is clear at this point that Kubernetes is the dominant player for container clustering. So why not just say…

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