I'm plowing through the Dungeon Crawler Carl series, which is not particularly challenging as sci-fi/LitRPG goes, but entertaining enough. I'm also wrapping up Doctorow's _Enshittification_, and I'm looking for…
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My 17 year old son bought it for me for my birthday. I've been enjoying it a lot. I do in fact like thinking in systems and learning more about it, and reading it in a more generalized fashion than I tend to in the computer science world has provided a refreshing perspective. It's all very approachable, nothing very complex, but gives names and discreet patterns to things I intuitively understood but previously wouldn't articulate easily. Definitely one of my favourite gifts in a long time.
Stories of Your Life and Others by Ted Chiang
I read bits of this to my wife at night occasionally. One of the first trips we went on together was camping on a little island, and I had Kafka on the Shore (Haruki Murakami) with me which I suggested I read to her in the evening. She really liked it and I've done it since. I wish I did it more often. Anyway, Stories of Your Life and Others is a wonderful collection. I've read it a few times, not always completely, and I enjoy it. Story of your life is the standout. It's what the movie Arrival is based on, which I consider one of the best scifi movies of all time. It's a beautiful story.
Silo series by Hugh Howey
I've been watching the show and decided the books deserve a shot. If the show is as good as it is, the books must be great, right?
I liked the observations like:
'long-term behavior provides clues to the underlying system structure. And structure is the key to understanding not just what is happening, but why'*
'Purposes are deduced from behavior, not from rhetoric or stated goals.'
'Large organizations of all kinds, from corporations to governments, lose their resilience simply because the feedback mechanisms by which they sense and respond to their environment have to travel through too many layers of delay and distortion.'
* 'Structure generates behavior' as stated in the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-Yp8A7BPE8
A light rewrite of the slogan "the purpose of a system is what it does".
I hate that slogan. It's supposed to be profound, but it's actually really, really dumb.
The whole point of the word purpose - its purpose if you will - is to be able to talk about the difference between what a system does and what it ought to do. To say the purpose of a thing is what it does, is to render the word completely redundant.
If the stated goals of a system don't match what it does, then either you have a dysfunctional system that needs to be fixed, or those stated goals are lies.
In these days of AI, it's all the more important to think clearly about purpose. Just because a system does a thing, there's not necessarily anyone who wants that thing. And there's definitively not any "spirit of the corporation" or "spirit of the nation" or "spirit of the language model" which wants it. Only persons want things.
Systems thinking changes the way people think about solutions, often for the better (but not always). There's a tendency to think: "uh... it's the system, nothing's gonna change unless we change the _system_ per se". And that's correct. But individual actions also change systemic outputs. So. Case in point: climate change and all that...
[fun fact, I took a class with Sterman at MIT. He's fantastic, very engaging!]
[1] https://mitsloan.mit.edu/faculty/directory/john-d-sterman
I was inspired, and I did a variation of it with a partner at one point. It was really nice. Feels kinda like a synthetic version of an engaging conversation with someone you care about, but perhaps with words you can't muster yourselves at that time of the day. If you've chosen the book together, it's guaranteed to be the right thing between you. It's nice to feel like you're hearing or learning something interesting from the person you care about, even when one of you perhaps don't have the conversation or the story in you. (I have a high appetite for connecting over ideas, but sometimes people I care about can run out of capacity before me, so it feels like a hack for my relationships.)
I imagine swapping reader-listener roles is another variation.
They have a special place in my heart. Vinge didn't write much, but what he did write I think is very special indeed.
I've also taken to buying hardbacks of my favourite books from ebay.
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/77711.A_Fire_Upon_the...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/226004.A_Deepness_in_the...
The Cradle series by Will Wight, starting with Unsouled. Kind of hard to describe, but it’s an sci-fi/Asian fantasy martial arts cultivation epic. If you liked Dungeon Crawler Carl, it may be of interest.
Now reading: "null: $cat /dev/null_", by Dienw Neb[0]. I don't know what it's about yet. I heard about it in an ad in the back of "2600 Magazine" and it caught my attention. Initial impressions are that 1) Neb is really good at dialog, and 2) their recreations of IRC chats is so perfect that I know they had to've spend many hours online in the middle of the night. Basically, the author knows how to write things I want to read. I do so hope they stick the landing and that the story turns out as wonderful as the writing.
People who haven’t read it: Lonesome Dove won a Pulitzer for a reason. It’s very good.
One of the best books and simply the best imho in its genre.
Roald Dahl: "True Grit is the best novel to come my way for a very long time. What book has given me greater pleasure in the last five years? Or in the last twenty? What a writer."
Donna Tartt: "I cannot think of another novel—any novel—which is so delightful to so many disparate age groups and literary tastes [as True Grit]."
The more recent film is more faithful to the novel than the 60s/70s one.
"Butcher's Crossing" is another one that springs to mind.
The next one was Lonesome Dove, this was my first time reading a western and I didn't think I'd enjoy it as much as I did. The book is also absolutely hilarious and has one of my favorite characters in a book(shoutout to Gus).
I'm currently reading The Count of Monte Cresto and, boy, it's turning out to be quite the epic tale of revenge(no spoilers please!).
At the beginning of the summer I read All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy. I'm not into westerns, but I really liked that one. A modern classic.
Just finished The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry. Such a gorgeously written book.
Once you get done, try The Three Musketeers. It's both romantic (like Monte Christo) and also really funny, not dark at all. Dumas was an amazing writer, backed by August Maquet, who wrote the first drafts on both novels.
I was lead to Rebecca after I found and read a discarded copy of Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History”. I wanted more and Googled “books like Rebecca”. Sadly, I thought Tartt’s “The Goldfinch”, which lots of people raved about, was not very good.
I first read _Rebecca_ as a teen, years ago. Still recall the thrill of the book. Few writers wrote so engagingly as Du Maurier. Hitchcock's movie was fine, but the book is the real deal.
If you're unconvinced, try comparing a few random passages to see which one you prefer, or just check the beginning of Chapter 1. You could also show a few translations of a passage to an LLM and ask it which one best conveys the nuance of the original French.
I'm on Book Two of the Dungeon Crawler Carl series.
Non-Fiction:
More than I can count, as far as "I've read at least some, put a bookmark in it, and intend to finish it eventually." But in terms of the books I'm really actively engaging with right now, the top one is:
Neuroscience: Exploring The Brain[1] by Mark F. Bear, Barry W. Connors, and Michael A. Paradiso
And sort of in parallel with that, is
Analog Computing: Development, Programming, Applications, and Future Directions[2] by Bernd Ulmann
[1]: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0781760038/
[2]: https://www.amazon.com/Analog-Computing-Development-Programm...
Rethinking Consciousness: A Scientific Theory of Subjective Experience by Michael S. A. Graziano (https://link.amazon/B0fbKBxEU)
The World Behind the World: Consciousness, Free Will, and the Limits of Science by Erik Hoel (https://link.amazon/B05TPjEY6)
Greatly enjoyed both. Made me think about the thinking-machines future and our ever-increasing understanding of the human brain.
There was a particular "Prepotente" moment that made laugh so loud i was honestly embarrassed of the sound I made in the caffe, I'm really not easily embarrassed.
I think of it as an analog computer primer.
In fact, I sent one to Dr. Bernd Ulmann. He enjoyed it. :-)
[1] https://www.tindie.com/products/jcalhoun/anna-analog-compute...
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