Sandy

Classic Feynman. Not as good as The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, but a worthwhile read regardless.

I probably would have learned something if I read this when I was 14.

Pretty OK! It's half manual for structuring one's life as an intellectual, half love poem to Thomas Aquinas. I did a lot of skimming if I saw the word “God” on the page more than three times. There's lots of good, actionable advice in here (as well as lots of bad, vague advice – thankfully it seems easy enough to separate the wheat from the chaff).

It was fine, I guess.

Original 2019 Review: Hamming invented a lot of cool stuff, but he is best known for sitting down and asking people why they weren't working on the most important problems in their domain. Presumably he didn't make a lot of friends with this strategy, but his is the name we remember, not theirs.

This book is excellent excellent excellent. The thesis is that a life lived without producing excellent work isn't one worth living. Hamming describes the book as a manual of style; while university is good at teaching technical skills, it's not very good at teaching the important stuff that falls /between/ the discrete subjects. Like how to choose important problems to work on, or where insight comes from, or how to stay ahead of the trend and not become obsolete.

To this extent, Hamming talks about his own successes and failures (though mostly his successes — he says it's more important to study success than failure, since you'd like to replicate only the former.) He's obviously proud of his accomplishments, which is a refreshing note from most technical autobiographies, in which the authors present a cool, modest description of their work. Hamming provides commentary behind each of his wins, describing the circumstances that lead to it, and how having a “prepared mind” helped him jump on it before others did. He further notes how he could have done better, and gives explicit advice to the reader for how to do a better job than he did.

This is a wonderfully insightful book, and is chocked full inspiration and interesting technical topics. If you're in a technical field and you'd like to do great work, this is mandatory reading.

What a great book! The author must be really smart.

Good, inspiring read about kicking your life into gear. The advice didn't really resonate with me, but the attitudes towards life certainly did. Nate is an extremely motivating sort of dude.

It's mostly a rehash of his blog on the same topic, but the information is good, the topic is interesting, and as far as I can tell, nobody's ever managed to do gui-based property testing before. It's worth the read!

Psychology is based on grad students. Who CARES. I don't. We already know it's a failed science with no replicability.

Potato fingers! Impudent strumpet!

I was hoping this would be about a bunch of cool infrastructure but instead it's a series of crappy ted talks in book form.

It's a short book with good advice in it that's half filler and full of analysis of woke and meme communities.

My dad recommended this to me, and it's delightful. There are parallel stories about a penal colony one billion years in the past, and — more contemporarily — the set of events that led the main character to end up there. It's an extremely interesting character study in homeostasis and the stories we humans tell ourselves in order to survive.

I don't read much literature with female protagonists where being female is central to the character. This is one of those books, and it was fascinating, even if I never really felt like I “got it.” For example, the protagonist's menstrual cycle is a big plot point. It's weird to think about how rare that is, versus JUST HOW MANY MENSTRUAL CYCLES are happening EVERY DAY.

Anyway.

Despite the interesting theme, this book wasn't for me. The protagonist doesn't do much protagonizing; it seems like things — both problems and their solutions — just happen to her. For example, nothing happens in the book for 20 years (unfortunately this is not hyperbole), and then she loses her house. And then her friend gives her a new place to live. And that's the end of that.

There is some stuff about the protaganist's love life as a middle-age woman, and I really liked that bit. Maybe it's because I'm getting uncomfortably close to middle-age. But it's a great, stark contrast to her earlier love affair which comes off unbelievable and stupid. All the stuff with the mastercraftsmen was great, maybe again, because that's a character I know how to relate to.

Biggest takeaway: if a man's price for marrying his daughter is not only that you need to cut the tip off of your penis, but also that EVERY MAN IN YOUR KINGDOM MUST ALSO CUT THE TIP OFF OF HIS PENIS, that price is too high and you would do well to meet someone else.

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.

This is an excellent book full of well-designed mechanisms for finding good Nash equilibria in society. From taxing possessions based on how valuable their owners consider them (and being required to sell them at that price if someone asks,) to a quadratic voting scheme for balancing the weight of the many against the passion of the few, this book nails lots of weird ideas for what life could be like. But of course people are too risk-adverse to try anything of the nature, and so we'll be stuck with the status quo until the collapse of society.

Decided to finish this book, since I had a flight and will soon have income once again. It's fantastic, and I'd heartily recommend it to all of my twentysomething friends. While most of the tactics are very Amerocentric, the strategies for budget layout and portfolio diversity should work in any country. In particular, this book taught me a lot about what my credit card could be doing for me, but isn't because I was ignorant. Officially fixed.

Highly recommended.

Here are the quotes I took away from the book:
http://sandymaguire.me/books/sethi-ramit-i-will-teach-you-to-be-rich.html

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.

Read this on the suggestion of lots of friends; I'd been avoiding it for a few years because I'd assumed I wouldn't like it. Turns out I was right. It's an exceptionally slow in terms of narrative, and very soft in terms of science fiction. The book has obvious parallels to Stephenson's Anathem, which is a much better way to spend your reading budget. It's worth saying that Oryx and Crake isn't egregiously bad; it's just not worth the effort.

Couldn't get into it. While I'm exactly the target audience, I found the writing sloppy and unconvincing—an especially bad thing if you can't convince the people who already agree with you.

Everyone seems to love this book. I don't.

It's ok. There's a nice section where the prince makes friends with a fox. I liked that part! But I didn't understand what message the book was trying to tell me. “Don't become an adult” maybe? Possibly “adults are boring and care about stupid things?” There's definitely an anti-adult sentiment, but that's not particularly actionable.

The book argues these points through a bunch of caricatures — there's a king who “rules” nobody, and a banker who “owns” the universe. I guess the point is that believing something doesn't make it so? Or it's a bad allegory for “you also need other people?” Or something. In short, the storytelling is muddled, and the rest of it isn't charming enough to make up for it.

I'm not sure it's the book's fault, but my copy had some egregious english grammar. Maybe it was a bad translation, or a garbled ebook or something, but it was enough to frequently break my suspension of disbelief.

There is lots of good advice in this book, but the writing is absolutely atrocious. The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari would would be significantly improved by getting rid of the Mary Sue dialogue and instead just being a no-nonsense nonfiction book in the vein of The 7 Habits of Highly Successful People.

I can't give it 1 star in good conscience, but I wish I could.

This is a comprehensive book that would have been fantastic had I not learned half of it in university, and the other half from functional programming. Most of the problems in the book feel like they're desperately grasping for a type-system, and needing to be very clever in order to get around their lack of such. It's not a bad read by any means, but I didn't get nearly as much out of it as people promised I would.

I was reading this with Erin, but it's kinda crap and uncomfortably sexist. I know it's the product of another time, but, damn.

DNF around chapter 2. As someone in the memeplex, it didn't feel like there was much for me here.