Sandy
For some reason this book is greatly beloved in programming circles. I can't tell if that's because the people doing the beloving are die-hard Java Enterprise programmers, or if I'm just missing something here. But I think it's the former.
Domain-Driven Design is an excessively dry, boring book whose main thesis seems to be “make sure everybody agrees on what terminology is being used.” What could have been this one sentence is instead 650 pages, chocked full of UML diagrams and insipid discussions about shipping containers. And that's saying something, coming from a guy who reads excessively dry boring math and engineering books on the regular.
If I had to be charitable, I would say that this book is independently groping towards functional programming without knowing it, and trying to shoehorn the ideas into an OOP-mindset. There is a lot of potential here for things to like, but it ultimately falls short. If you've only ever coded in Java, or frequently sketch UML diagrams, this might be the book for you. And if so, may god have mercy on your soul.
I picked up a second hand copy of Keys to the Kingdom after greatly enjoying Ollam's talks at WWHF and DefCon. This book was disappointing, as he's a much better speaker than he is writer. The good: you can get through this book in a few hours, and it covers the same amount of material as maybe four or five of his talks. The bad: you'll be getting a significantly worse experience.
After the first few chapters, I found myself skimming. As an amateur with only a passing interest in lockpicking, most of these attacks are too sophisticated for me to care about. I'm not going to be breaking in to any high-security locations, and attacking a pin tumbler is as fancy as I'm ever going to possibly need be.
That's not to say this book is without its highlights. I learned about the impressioning attack, and that pressing a key against your forearm for 30 seconds will leave an impression for 15 minutes. That's a pretty cool way of exfiltration. I just tried it myself and it seems to work!
This is an excellent book that suffers from what I call 100-Years-of-Solitude syndrome. It spans three generations of the same characters, and the allegories reiterate themselves from generation to generation. It's a good read, but any one of the generations would have been a fine book on its own, and in aggregate they don't do much more than hammer home the same blunt Biblical allusions. Is it neat that the three generations echo and rhyme? Absolutely! But it's a hard thing to keep up steam for over the long haul.
Anyway, that's the bad. The good is the book itself. There are lots of fascinating characters, each of whom exemplifies some aspect of human psychology. Reading through East of Eden feels a lot like casting acquaintances from your life into book form; there are lots of characters, and with the exception of Aron, each of them rings true. My girlfriend suggests that we can learn more about the human condition from fiction than we can from psychology, and books like these make me thing she might be onto something there.
Is this the best book I've ever read? No, but I'm happy I made it through. It could have used an aggressive editor, but the scale of the world, the characters, and the recurrent themes make it a breath of fresh air compared to most modern literature. I doubt this book will stick with me, but I can see why it's considered a classic.
Disclaimer: Chris is a friend of mine.
This is an accessible book that introduces people to optics. It starts slowly and builds up to all sorts of insane pieces of technology which are frankly unbelievably powerful. It's rather inspiring what can be done by optics, though I'm not convinced I could write or read an expression using them on my first try. I learned a lot going through this book, and might reach more for optics the next time I do a big data transformation (though I fear it might be write-only code!)
While I liked this book, a good deal of the prose felt too informal; a good deal of the type errors and signatures are described as “scary,” and the examples reach too often for TV pop culture references that didn't seem relevant. All in all these are minor complaints, and the information content is more than enough to make up for it.
I'm conflicted about this book. There is a lot of good advice around the art of problem solving, but my god is there a lot of shit too. The layout is mostly a big alphabetical glossary of math things — everything from leading questions to notions of symmetry to anecdotes about absentminded professors — and the layout doesn't particularly help. It's not organized by topic or ordered by first things first, it's just plopped down alphabetically. As such, it's hard to get into the flow.
This book however is lacking primarily in that it deals with how to solve “well-posed questions,” which is to say, toy problems. There is very little about conducting your own open-ended research, and about how to turn wisps of ideas into well-posed ones.
I really like Parker's youtube content, and decided I should support him by buying his book! Unfortunately there is no kindle version available, and shipping of physical books doesn't work during CoVID, so I had to pirate it. Sorry Matt, though if you read this, I'd be more than happy to send you (or a charity) the cash!
Writing about math is a terribly difficult job. The vast majority of the population doesn't give a shit, and the people who do probably already know the things you're going to tell them. We're all starved for good math content! Humble Pi's target audience appears to be “people who liked math in high-school, and haven't touched it since. “ It's got enough detail of the math problems to catch your attention, but not enough to actually help you understand what's really happening here. You won't learn any math here, but you'll probably learn about some things to wikipedia later. I liked a lot of the intuitive explanations of some of the described phenomena, but overall felt the book was lacking in substance.
If you follow Parker on youtube, this book doesn't have much to offer you, and his book persona doesn't come off as being as fun as his online one. I'd suggest giving this book a skip, but checking out his videos online instead.
Less lucid than my usual reviews, but here are some thoughts I thought while reading this book. Maybe I'll come back and clean it up. Maybe not. Who knows.
—
succinctly captures the idea of bullshit jobs
shows that having an objective measure of how good is your work is important, and helps separate jobs from bullshit jobs
ikea and buildabear are probably marketed explicitly with the idea that you have to build it yourself. this is the empty calories of doing things with our hands. designing a home by shopping at ikea is merely choice, and not craft or skill. everything has been pre-vetted for being good enough. what differentiates real things? where do we draw the line at actually learning?
^ the process seems to be explicitly one of giving it your all and coming up short, and learning how to do better for next time. the iterated fixed point is where you become a master.
things you build yourself, even if they aren't perfect, are much more important to us. it's easy to see how you might keep a coffee table you built for decades. we take pride in them.
the mechanic has a fiduciary resp. to the customer, but a moral resp to the bike he's fixing. these responsibilities are in tension
the world is being more and more infantilized, as we remove choices, and the responsibility (or even the capability) of understanding from people. sears catalogues used to include schematics of everything they sold — assuming you'd want to know. this is no longer the case. on one hand that's good; it allows us to focus on the things we care about. but the majority of things being built today are intentionally tamper-proof; assuming that you are not smart enough, or allowed to be fucking with your own stuff. do we even own our own stuff anymore?
relatedly, the relationship of democracy and absentee capitalism implies problems are not any one person's responsibility. our global institutions require so many moving pieces that it's impossible to find someone to blame when something goes wrong. cf how terrible customer service is; because everything is so specialized, the people you are talking to have no understanding, no power, and no responsibility. management he says is mostly spent dealing this ambiguity to cover your ass.
misunderstanding of culture; presumably it's what makes a place successful, which is an important detail to capture when you are globalizing
complete misunderstanding of abstraction, and its value. he dismisses his dad as being a man who “traffics in abstractions,” saying ohms law is useless because it doesn't help you fix motorcycles. no, but it does help you BUILD motorcycles. and electronics. abstractions let us deal with the world and understand bigger things than human minds can comfortably contain.
very good description of the experience of mechanics/engineering. the minute to minute frustrations, and sorts of problems you need to deal with. despite having never touched(?) a motorcycle, this chapter resonated the FUCK out of me with dealing with computer systems.
I am giving this book 5 stars not because I liked it, but because it has significantly improved my scholarship — at least, in the last few days since I started reading it. We'll see if it continues!
The crux of the book is “write down insights you have, as you're having them, and then regularly reconcile these into a single place, and track insights you have while writing THOSE down. Rinse and repeat.” It's been a very helpful framework for thinking about big thoughts; rather than trying to keep it all jumbled up in your head, or rather than trying to serialize it into a coherent piece of prose, just write down the idea. You can shape it later. It's an excellent tool for decomposing hard problems that require lots of moving machinery to get your mind around. When you're actively searching for, and reveling in insights, learning becomes fun, and spending time doing scholarship becomes the norm. Life pro tip.
The only other good thing I'll say about this book is that it's short. I got through it in two sittings. Really and truly, the only content here is that thing I said above. Have ideas and write them down. The rest of this book is a bunch of bad pop-sci that is sorta tangentially related. I get the impression that Ahrens was Taking Smart Notes on all of the bad pop-sci books he read, and couldn't help but write about them here as filler. The useful part of this book could be a blog post, but you can't sell a blog post!
Unrelatedly, I feel like I've read all the same bad pop-sci books as Ahrens. I'm not sure if this a failure on his part, or on mine :(
I'll begrudgingly recommend this as an excellent book I've read this year, if just for its information content, and not for the book itself. Feel free to skip any paragraph whose first sentence doesn't mention a slip-box; you won't miss much.
This is a frustrating book, because I simultaneously agree with the conclusion and an entirely unimpressed with its argument. There is some great stuff here about the meaning of “reality” (things that are real are those things that are involved in our best explanation for a phenomena), and it gives a good heuristic metric for the quality of arguments (good arguments are ones in which there are few-to-none variables which can be changed without affecting the outcome.) Also that people are relevant in the grand scheme of the universe, due to their engineering and scientific prowess to effect change. I liked all that stuff.
What I didn't like was Deutsch's bad logic. He plays fast-and-loose with shaky metaphors, and generalizes their arguments back to the real world. For example, he takes issue with Haldane's quote that “the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.” I've always interpreted this as either “the universe is infinite, and we are not, therefore we simply can't enumerate all thoughts about its queerness,” or as “something about our neural architecture makes us fundamentally blind to some of the universe's mysteries.” Analogously to the first case, it's uncomputable to choose an arbitrary real number — there's simply too many of them to ever possibly find most of them.
But this is all stupid, says Deutsch! He dismisses it metacircularly, saying that if the universe did have physically-possible but technically-impossible aspects, then “this fact would itself be a testable regularly in nature. But all regularities in nature have explanations, so the explanation of that regularity would itself be a law of nature, or a consequence of one. And so, again, everything that is not forbidden by nature is achievable, given the right knowledge.” As is so often the case with physicists, philosophers, and traditional mathematicians, Deutsch is missing the capital-C Complexity issue of this problem. Just because something must have an answer doesn't mean it must be computable, which is to say, doesn't mean it is necessarily instantiable inside the universe. As an illustration, there is an answer to “what is the quantum state of the universe,” but the answer to that is too big to fit into the universe, other than as the universe qua itself. More generally, if a problem space grows too quickly, you simply can't expect to find an answer.
Most of the book is Deutsch having interesting ideas with extremely weak justifications. It gives off the impression that he wants to talk about his (in my opinion, not-so) crazy beliefs, but feels that he ought to justify them first. But either he couldn't be fucked to give good justifications, or his entire thought process is needlessly muddy and if he's gotten to the right answers, its purely by coincidence. As someone who already agreed with his conclusion, I found myself put off by his arguments; they simply would not compel a disbeliever to start believing, nor do I think they hold much water even stripped of the rhetoric.
All in all, I wanted to like this book, but put it down around 30% because Deutsch didn't seem to have a point, and his arguments were frustrating enough that I wasn't convinced I could trust him of anything novel he might have to show me tangentially.
Good thesis, that engineering mistakes are more often systems mistakes. If you defund all of the safety mechanisms, of course things are going to be disastrous when they do go wrong. I've seen this time and time again during my engineering career, where the business people and project managers care only about safety in reactionary circumstances.
I abandoned this book about a quarter of the way through though, because my god is it long.
I picked this up mostly as a joke after learning that iced coffee and walking quickly are queer symbols. While researching whether or not I was queer for liking iced coffee (and wondering if this is what my San Francisco friends meant when they said they were queer,) I came across this book, and was surprised to learn that there is a THEORY behind being queer! Fascinating!
After a quick wikipedia-job on queer theory that didn't prove to be helpful in the least, I thought I should probably read a book on the topic. Either it would be informative, or it would be further evidence that the humanities are full of crazy people spouting off on “theories” that are completely impenetrable – win/win, really.
So I dove in during a long bus ride. And I was pleasantly surprised! Wilchins makes a good argument that it's stupid to draw strong dichotomies based on sexuality. Does it make a man a homosexual if he thinks about kissing another man? Not only is this not right, argues Wilchins, it's not even wrong. These categories are useful insofar as they help us predict the future, but they are not helpful as identifiers.
I don't remember much else about the book. I ran out of steam on it. I never intended to abandon it, but I did, and I have no desire to read more. Queer Theory was significantly less shit than I was expecting it to be! I remember being impressed with a few of the arguments while reading it, but damned if I can remember what they are now.
EDIT: 2022 I revisited this book because it was on my list of unfinished books on my kindle. The second time around it was worse.
I read this on the recommendation of a friend who suggested it might help clear things up for me. She winked when she said it. And so, as a man, I realize I am not the target audience, which makes this a difficult thing to review.
The good: several of my female friends have told me that this book changed their lives. Evidently there is good advice here, and it definitely cleared up some misconceptions I had around women's sexuality. To that extent, if you can suspend your disbelief, this is probably a great read.
The bad: I mentioned suspension of disbelief. Nagoski often refers to “the science,” claiming that whatever study proves her point. However, my overwhelming feeling throughout the book was that Nagoski had ideas that empirically seemed to work out, and was trying to justify them through the literature. While there are quite a few citations (none of which I followed up on), the studies she describes simply /reek/ of bad science. They are either studies about rats that she's extrapolated to human behavior, or they are unreplicated studies of n<50. This is a classic failure mode in the search for truth; mining the literature for claims that support an a priori belief, rather than synthesizing the literature into a coherent worldview.
While the facade of science probably lends an air of legitimacy to what otherwise would be a book of just-so stories, it completely falls flat to a scientifically-minded audience. And so I'm stymied here. Nagoski's methods are clearly bunk, but due to how many people I know personally whom have been helped by this book, I feel that I need to credit where it's due.
Should you get points for accidentally being right, even if your methods are completely wrong?
Another gripe: the prose here is rather egregious. It comes off a lot like having a chat-room conversation back in the early 2000s. For example, Nagoski doesn't seem to know the word “feelings,” and instead, exclusively refers to “getting the Feels.” There are a lot of strained analogies to popular culture, almost none of which I was familiar with — and the ones I was, the metaphor didn't really connect. For example, she spent a few pages describing the plot of Groundhog Day, and then when she got around to her point, it really didn't seem to be related to Groundhog Day at all! I think it was about “why do vaginal and clitoral orgasms feel different from one another if they are REALLY AND TRULY JUST THE SAME THING?” but I can't remember.
Relatedly, the book espouses particularly bad ontology. As alluded to above, Nagoski decides by fiat that ALL ORGASMS ARE THE SAME. She adopts a non-standard definition of orgasm, and justifies this claim based on her new definition. She says, if you notice a distinction between vaginal and clitoral orgasms, that you are wrong. Because they are the same thing. “And besides, every orgasm is different from one another, so why differentiate?”
Nagoski makes this misstep many times throughout the book. Maybe it's just me splitting hairs, but she willingly and oftentimes redefines a word. Clearly she is attempting to remove stigma or get past some cultural blocks, or whatever, but make no mistake — this is the work of a marketer, not a researcher. Nagoski evidently has something to sell here, which she admits, but it's unclear whether she's aware she's doing this, or whether her thinking really is this sloppy. Like it or not, words mean something, and we use them because they usefully carve distinctions that we'd like to make. It's fine to show us that these distinctions are mistaking the forest for the trees, but a better approach than saying “you're wrong, orgasm doesn't REALLY mean that” is “here's a better word that better carves reality at its joints.”
The ugly: the major takeaway of this book seems to be “no matter what your sexuality is, it's normal.” There's a lot of dark-arts psychology in the prose of this book, in an attempt to reassure the reader that they are “not broken.” My initial, uncharitable response to this was “what sort of sad, weak person needs to seek reassurance from this?” But then I remembered the women who have praised this book to me, and quite a number of them are remarkably strong, wildly inspiring humans.
As such, I have reconsidered my view, and instead interpret the book's reaffirming attitude as evidence of just how fucked up women's sexuality must be in our culture. As a man, this is never going to be a thing I will experience first-hand, so any evidence is helpful to gain an honest understanding here. Maybe it's not weak people who feel that they're broken; maybe it's just everyone. If so, I guess I can get onboard with the book's approach, but it still feels a bit dishonest.
Overall, if you are like me, this book probably isn't a great investment of your time. There are definitely things to be learned here, but the vast majority of it is an owner's guide to contextualizing women's sexuality. My primary takeaways are that the expectation of sex leads to sexual excitement, regardless of whether or not the brain is into it — and that getting rid of the expectation of sex from intimate touching can help alleviate stress and, paradoxically, lead to significantly better sex.
Picked this book up on a raving review from a friend, without knowing anything about it. Put it down again after slogging through the first 15%. DIM falls into the same problem as every philosophical treatise, namely that it argues by authority. “Plato thought this, but Aristotle thought that!” The argument is mainly one of linguistic games: “the OED says $x means this, and therefore we can deduce $y.” Although it was pretty funny watching a philosopher trying REALLY HARD to grapple with the everyday ideas of mathematical composition and abstraction.
I didn't really understand the point that Peikoff was trying to make — but I think it might have been “building models of systems is good.” He makes the claim that Aristotle should be our role model in this endeavor, because he wanted to build, and... uhh.. believed in science? The argument is definitely that Plato believed too much and Kant too little, so I suppose it's that Aristotle believed just right.
Unfortunately, there is no predictive power here. Plato is wrong because he believed in some form of idealistic naturalism. Kant is wrong because he argued that arguments don't hold water (why does society take this guy seriously?). Aristotle is right because he built systems in exactly the right way, but right because he liked that we can reason from our subjective experiences and because he liked science (as best I can tell — I was skimming at this point!). Some examples and counter examples would have really helped sell the idea he was hustling here.
I came away from this book with the feeling that Peikoff doesn't know what he's talking about, and furthermore that he's so tangled up that he has no idea that he doesn't know what he's talking about. The book comes off as intentionally dense; as in, if you don't understand it, you must be stupid. This is my best explanation for why everyone seems to rave about this book. Of course, I might just be missing something, but Peikoff really didn't try very hard to help me understand.
I gave up on this book after 10%, which given that it's a massive fucking book, is actually quite the trial run. While it's a good read, it's not great, and its extreme length makes that a particularly bad tradeoff. This thing could do with an editor; I'll tolerate reading through the obligatory story of Moses' childhood, but hearing in great detail about his friends' childhoods too is just too much. Maybe it gets better, but maybe it doesn't, and I wasn't invested enough to find out.
This is my favorite book I've read in a long time. I've always been a fan of Atlas Shrugged, but upon subsequent rereadings, I find myself bogged down by its length, pacing and atmosphere. The Fountainhead is a better book in every way, but is similar enough to Atlas Shrugged in order to communicate the same ideas.
The Fountainhead is an unconventional book, telling the story of four characters as they revolve around Howard Roark: the personification of incorrigible merit and confidence. Each character falls short of the ideal in a different way, and each suffers for it. This is not so much a book as a philosophical treatise told in literary form, but it's a healthy dose of inspiration for those of us who need its message. For those of us who need to know that excellence is life's greatest joy, that it's admirable to disagree with the majority, that there are higher ideals than charity, and that sympathy can be weaponized by the incompetent.
At its heart, The Fountainhead is an ode to human excellence, superiority, and accomplishment. Its message is distasteful in the contemporary political climate, and liking Rand can immediately get you branded as an enemy of the blue tribe. Many of these ideas are likely to be unpalatable to a modern audience, but I'd argue that's even more of a reason to read The Fountainhead.
Strongly recommended.
I didn't realize this was a collection of short stories until about three short stories in! Before that I was very confused. But it turns out that short stories are the right length for Dortmunder; he's sorta fun, but quickly loses his welcome — so lots of short little scenarios are the perfect medium.
Some of these are quite good, others are not. All in all it's not an amazing read, but if you're in it this deep, you might as well.
We are so fucked. I'm a professional software engineer who cares a great deal about correctness and about security. I've worked on the security team at Google. And I didn't know half of the exploits listed in this book. The underlying technology is sufficiently complicated that I would be very surprised to learn that a nontrivial piece of software is adequately defended against all of them. Even if you aren't interested in breaking systems, this is a fantastic, eye-opening book on things to pay attention to when writing robust software.
Terrible. I was expecting a fun book full of cool spy stuff, and instead got a boring treatise on how to set up Microsoft Word documents for your customers, and how to deal with customer relations while doing pen testing. The actual spy stuff consists of “use a carpet to get over barbed wire fence”, “use a big mylar sheet stretched over a canvas to defeat motion sensors”, and “wear pieces of carpet over your shoes.”
So what do we get? Unhelpful and tortured acronyms like REDTEAMOPSEC, where, for example, the E stands for “Engage in Reconnaissance.” Yeah, that's memorable.
I was getting a bit bored by Dortmunder from the last few books; they're a too samey, with one-dimensional characters (the bartender who refers to people by what they drink; the driver whose only discussion topic is what route he took to the meeting — even though most of the stings don't require a driver!; etc). This book is a nice shake up to the formula, in which Dortmunder accidentally steals the macguffin and can't wait (or manage) to get rid of it.