Just finished The Dark Forest. It was pretty good, I enjoyed it more than the first (which I can barely remember).

Started on The Templars but I dont think it will stick with me for long.

I'm also reading The Murderbot Diaries which are fun little scifi stories but nothing earth shattering...

Politics on the Edge was surprisingly good! A Tory (conservative) politician runs for office in a small province and makes his way to the UK cabinet, detailing the madness of UK politics along the way.

I'm about 40% through The Brothers Karamazov audiobook and Im enjoying it but its so long winded I get tired and have to switch to something else for a while. This happens whenever I try Russian novels, and I believe it to be a deep character flaw.

My theory with The Expanse is Abraham and Frank had a really cool story idea around a gumshoe and a rich girl that ends with the discovery of a new alien life form on Venus. And they did so well with it they went "we can do anything" rather than "we wrote a closed-loop story with two interesting characters in it that we just killed off and now we need to make Holden and Naomi interesting for as long as we can, despite the fact that their principle character traits are whininess and petulance." It's like trying to write the Jack Reacher series after you've killed Jack in Book 1.

100%. I read the entire series Miller is the only character who is actually interesting. They tried real hard to add arcs to the others and I think they all fell flat.

American Prometheus - Nothing earthshattering. Gave good context for Oppenheimer I felt. Curious if anyone else has read it.

Read it many years ago, I knew very little about Oppenheimer going into it. The main takeaways was the sheer size of the Manhattan project, the curious nature of Oppenheimer as a person, and then the political intrigue that followed related to his security clearance over the suspected association with the Communist party.

I particularly liked the "competency porn" aspect of it; remarkably talented individuals doing things that require remarkable talent. It scratches that "gee I wish I was a genius" itch you get in fiction like The Martian or whatever. But this was a real genius working with other genius's to do something momentous. I remember reading Bryson's book at the same time as this and it explained much of the explosion in physics around the 20's and 30's and the big players involved.

As a self professed nerd I knew I'd like the science stuff but was surprised to find the political bits pretty interesting. The paranoia of the time period, the creation of a new age, what it means to create something you cannot control, being discarded once you have served your purpose, the beginning of the cold war, and perhaps the social structures in the US at the time, were all fascinating. I ended up reading Caro's LBJ biographies not to long after which though not completely related, have some overlap with the social paranoia and McCarthyism.

The part that stayed with me afterwards was how Oppenheimer was such a difficult person to really get a grip on. He was clearly brilliant, and charming, but also depressive and emotionally complex. Morally ambivalent? Is that a good term for it? He wrung his hands and quoted the bhagavad gita over his role in making the bomb, but then celebrated the anniversary of the day the bomb was dropped in costume dress up for the rest of his life...

Was he too brilliant to comprehend, or just a messed up clever individual? The book was good to not spell out too much its views, although given it took years to write I wonder how much bias it contains.

As for the movie, I've seen it once and was underwhelmed, I'm holding judgement until I watch it again.

Certainly a lot of grifting going, particularly in terms of the valuations and projections. Maybe OpenAI was on track to build AGI, but it almost certainly is not going to get there now. I think its more likely to become a product arm for Microsoft, helping make PPT better at formatting your shitty slides that no one reads.

But that's the company. The technology around LLMs will be useful, are already useful, even if they don't progress much further than where they are today. The reason for this is that there are lots of mediocre people working jobs and churning out very mediocre content. The LLMs can churn out mediocre shit at a higher rate at a fraction of the cost. So our mediocre slide deck needs are met. Ask me how I know...

I worked in a call center years ago doing tech support for broadband issues. I'd say 80% of calls fell into 1 of around 20 problem categories (cannot connect, web pages don't load, reset my password, help me clear my search history before my wife comes home). Lots of repetition with slightly augmented instructions depending on the callers needs/ability (pacing, alternative descriptions, more/less commanding depending on their ability to stay on topic).

Call times mattered, so like a priest in a brothel, you were always searching for the fastest way to finish things up. Sometimes that meant going slower, sometimes it meant being slightly rude and cutting people off mid-rant so that you could get to the part where you flip the switch and the problem is solved. Wrap-time (time 'wasted' between calls) mattered, so if you had a ranty bastard screaming at you on a call for 10 minutes, you (the human, with human behaviors and soft feelings) had to "get over that shit" in seconds and switch to your baseline state for the next ranty bastard in the queue.

On any given day I would converse with something like 100 people for roughly 5 minutes. It's like if speed dating was your job, but instead of flirting, you have to fix their printer while they glare at you. It was a constant stream of human interactions which neither party wanted to have. It made me HATE speaking on the phone with people. It made me great at blocking out peoples current emotional state and get them aligned and working on a goal, or said another way: "Fuck your feelings, we got shit to do and then we never need to speak to each other again!". That isn't normal now is it.

So my guess is that AI will be a shit show at the start but it will eventually end up being BETTER for customers in the end, you get to rant to someone that sounds real, they will respond in the most efficient way to help you vent. They will sound authentic and genuine when they express remorse for your lack of service. And they will forget you instantly when you hang up.

Berserk Volume 1 by Kentaro Miura

Somewhat random pickup for me as apart from Sandman, Maus and a few other graphic novels I don't usually read them. I enjoyed this one and will grab volume 2 at some point. My guess is that it will improve as Volume 1 did have a "pilot" feel to it in places. 4/5.

The Lies of Locke Lamora by Scott Lynch - 1st of the Gentlemen Bastard series.

Lots of recommendations for this one so I tried it out. I find that highly recommended books are very much hit and miss for me, same with movies. I would say this was a pretty good fantasy with a story that moved along very quickly and didn't really let up. Some parts were done really well and were quite clever, parts of the main character were genuinely sophisticated in a kind of Ender's Game fashion, but then towards the end it relied too much on plot armor and big moving pieces. 3/5, good but not rushing to read the next one.

Doom: Game Engine Black Book by Fabien Sanglard - Available online https://fabiensanglard.net/gebbdoom/

So this is essentially a deep dive into the software, hardware, tools, processes, and people who created Doom way back in the 90's. I played the game a lot when I was younger and have an interest in how these games were built. Perhaps too eclectic for a general audience but well worth checking out if you want to dig into some retro game building. 4/5, i'll be checking out his other books.

Crafting Interpreters by Robert Nystrom

Bob works at Google on the DART language and has a deep interest and understanding of computer languages. He wrote this as a guide to those of us interested in building your own computer language interpreter (the thing that takes your code, interprets it, and executes it). He brings you through two different ways to implement one, first using an Abstract Syntax Tree approach that is simpler but slower, and then using a Virtual Machine approach (similar to Java) which is faster. Great book, enjoyed creating my own language from it. 4/5.

The City of Bohane by Kevin Barry

Kevin is an Irish author I've been following for a while, he writes some nice short stories like The Pub with no beer for example. The novel is set in a fictional Irish town in the near future where there is little technology and an assortment of violent and vibrant characters. I just finished it today and the story is good but its really the authors use of a corrupted English language full of vivid descriptions that I enjoyed. I listened to the audiobook and the author reads the book himself. It included the immortal line:

He gave him a side-eyed glance that you wouldn't see on a stoat in a ditch.

4/5.

Its always interesting to hear about life in the exclusion zone and how radiation presents far less of a threat to wildlife than human civilisation. Makes you think about the local area you live in and how very different it would be if we were not here, we are constantly maintaining it in a state that suits us, far more artificial than we realise (this is from someone who lives in the 'countryside').

https://www.google.com/maps/@51.4055498,30.0578371,2a,75y,103.16h,92.19t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sUk_IOuEfhuL_mQCPkvi2Iw!2e0!7i13312!8i6656

Chernobyl street view is quite a trip.

Yea I read Volume 1 of Shelby Foote's "The Civil War" based on how much Ken Burns leaned on him in the documentary (this was years ago, when I first watched it). Like him or not, Foote's anecdotes and insights in the documentary added much to its success, he romanticized the conflict from a mostly Southern perspective, delivered with a whiskey sipping drawl. He had charm. Upon reflection after the fact however, his lingering praise for Nathan Bedford Forrest felt odd. At one point he mentioned that Lincoln and Forrest were the two geniuses to be revealed from the war... hmm.

Ta-Nehisi Coates probably summed it up best:

I'm looking forward to finishing Foote's trilogy. It really is an engaging read. And yet here is the bit of sadness: He gave twenty years of his life, and three volumes of important and significant words to the Civil War, but he he could never see himself in the slave. He could not get that the promise of free bread can not cope with the promise of free hands. Shelby Foote wrote The Civil War, but he never understood it. Understanding the Civil War was a luxury his whiteness could ill-afford.

Its well worth watching, but with clear eyes.

Much appreciated, I just finished rewatching Ken Burns Civil War doc and had started making my way through this playlist so this discussion is timely.

Stepping away from the war itself and looking at some of the societal reasons beyond slavery that drove the conflict is interesting. I hadn't seen the World-Systems theory before, where would a luddite learn more?

The North can't make money if employees are free, the South can't make money if employees are skilled.

Help me parse this a bit more? Why is North restricted by "Free" and the South restricted by Skilled workers?

This guy always has fantastic articles, the animations are amazing.

Right, you can escape after f7+.

I love a good chess puzzle.

Rh8, Kxh8, f7#

There is also f7#, Bxf7, Rh8#

Were you dropping a hint so that they would have additional time to prepare for your exit? You say it was strategic so just wondering what the goal was.

I know that when someone hands in their notice in my current place, and they are good at their job, there is usually some counter-offers or conversations that happen to see if the person will agree to stay. This is good if you want to stay, or were looking for a raise. But if I intend to leave anyway then its better to reduce these discussions and drama to a minimum.

My plan, should i decide to leave is to book 3-4 days vacation time, and then hand in my notice as it begins, by the time I get back I would have avoided much of the drama and it would be old news.

I had booked this week off as vacation time from work, we didn't really have any plans to go anywhere but I've been feeling cooped up in the house and was looking forward to spending some time out and about in the fresh air doing normal stuff. The one thing I did have planned to do was go see DUNE on the big screen.

On Monday we heard that several of my sons classmates had contracted covid, he developed some symptoms and had a positive test on Tuesday, so he had to isolate. I also had a mild sore throat on Tuesday and not wanting to get anyone else sick I also isolated.

The end result is that my intended week away from work ended up with me spending ~4 full days and nights living/eating/sleeping in my home office :D I could have cancelled the time off and just worked, which is probably what I should have done, but I was so pissed off I just spent my days fishing in Read Dead Redemption and reading books.

Getting test result today, hopefully negative, if it is I think ill go dance naked in the streets or something to make up for lost time.

OK, see now that helps. This changes the context from "Unaware youtuber generating low-effort low-value stream-of-conscious nonsense interminably" (of which there are thousands others) to "Fully-aware artist intentionally creating interminable review as expression of their regard for the game being reviewed". Which elevates the entire thing a lot.

So that's cool.

I'm not gonna watch it though, cos its 10 hours and I get the sense that most of the message is "Hey this thing is 10 hours long!!!!", which you can get without having to actually watch it.

I haven't played Cyberpunk 2077 yet, but the fact someone created a 10 hour saga about it is making me want to...

This might be interesting but is completely unbearable to watch (I say this knowing it has ~200K views already). I watched 7 minutes and then started skipping forward a little before just giving up. I abandoned ship when he started naming almost every game he had played during the GTA3 framing bit.

I'm sure a SHITLOAD of time went into editing this, but not everything that a person says is interesting; of the 7 minutes I watched maybe 1.5 should have made the final cut.

Good ones.

I ran into another this morning:

Life: Health, Wealth, Freedom; In general most people only have two at any one time.

- Youth you have Health and Freedom but usually lack wealth to take advantage of the Freedom

- Mid-life you have Health and Wealth but lack Freedom due to responsibilities (job, kids)

- Old age you have Wealth and Freedom but may lack the Health to take advantage of the Freedom

From somewhere in the middle of this article:

One is what I would like to call the communication triangle. Communications can be secure, easy to use or hard to detect. But seldom all three.

In the software world we have oft used anecdote: Cost, Scope, Time: pick the two you want, you can't get all three. You roll it out whenever someone asks you to build Amazon.com when they only have a Wordpress level budget or a two week deadline. I like it for its brevity and conciseness, its understood immediately and retained well. It also gives a nice insight into the difficulties of a particular technical domain, yet avoids having to explain anything technical at all.

Are there other examples of this in other fields beyond Software and Spycraft? I would assume Politics, Medical practice, Law, Criminal investigation has similar trade-off triangles.

I remember reading this David Foster Wallace article when it first came out (2007). His thought experiment was that America should not respond with rage, and instead the right approach was to view the victims of 911 as "democratic martyrs" as Wallace puts it. Over the years his sentiment has returned to me several times, usually when I take my shoes off in an airport.

Of course it is also an impossible response for a country to accept. Were the 88/12% split in the opposite direction, which it would need to be to be accepted; my guess is that the 12% would burn the country down in their grief and anger.

---

One thing that I am constantly amazed by is the "They hate us because of our freedom!" sentiment. I mean do people really think that some dude in Afghanistan hates a country 3K miles away because of their political system? I'd say its far more likely the fact that his grandmother was blown to bits by a drone strike is the root cause don't ya think. Or in other words, they might have good reason to hate.

Amazon absolutely tracks your cookies that tightly. I saved myself $80 on a hard drive a month ago by searching on Amazon, searching on NewEgg, searching on Best Buy and then searching on Amazon again.

Or waiting 2 days for them to email with "Oh hey that thing you wanted has surprisingly dropped in price 10%, click here to buy it..."

Yer blogger seems absolutely gobsmacked that his girlfriend doesn't want to spend her life playing video games and going to museums.

I dunno, man. This guy seems to utterly disrespect anything other than "doing nothing".

Right, which I think is the fatal flaw. He worked to free himself from the need to work, escaping FROM it but not TO something else apart from sitting around the house and taking a few trips.

I suspect that you have no problem filling time with interesting projects that enrich your life. I know I often look at the 40 hours a week spent working as a (mandatory) demand on my time which reduces availability to do other things, learning new skills etc. That is its a job. If retirement was an option, my approach would be "retiring from needing to spend 40 hours doing X every week, freeing me to do more of A-Z in the future", not "retiring to the couch to play Xbox 40 hours a week". In the last week I have spent my evenings and weekends fixing oil boilers, timber floors, water mains, painting, decorating, plastering... And its a blast, I enjoy learning and doing new things.

Did he seem happy? 'cuz some people find their niche. They are to be envied, not pitied.

He was content, which is probably a less fickle state than happiness in the long run. I mentioned him as an example of the opposite extreme and maybe as an example of how people on the extremes can have lots of similarities; where the blogger wanted to leave work and had nothing else, my friend wanted to stay working as he had nothing else. Its one thing to work when you have to, another to continue working when it is no longer a requirement but you enjoy it; but to shut yourself off from all other experiences (which both extremes seemed to do) is best avoided.

In your earlier post you mentioned that people overthink all of this and I would agree. To me it all comes down to the time you have and how you spend it. Should you find yourself financially independent, if you like what you do and have no interesting in other activities then stick with it, in my case I suspect that the desire to learn something new that does not align with my current job (and may not be economically viable) would be too strong to not pursue.

See his follow up from 5 years later: https://livingafi.com/2021/03/17/the-2021-early-retirement-update/

I remember when I was in my early twenties chatting to two guys who were in their late 50's/early 60's and the topic of what they would do if they won the lottery came up. One said he would change nothing and keep working, which was a totally alien concept to me at the time. I couldn't understand how someone who had spent ~40 years doing a job, wouldn't jump at the chance to do something/anything different when given the option. His friend agreed more with me, and said he would do something (I think he mentioned Travel) to change his lifestyle. I left the conversation warning myself to never become like the first guy who seemed utterly devoid of any energy or curiosity of the world beyond his job.

Well.... I mean the Muppet show is arguably artistically more high brow than Shrek, but if someone tried to put on Kermit and Ms. Piggy during a Netflix and Chill session it would also indicate to me that things ain't gonna last... right? My point being that "not going to go well" is exactly the correct assessment to make for lots of movie selections from Shrek to Transformers if you are hoping to impress someone.

A lot of the popular movies now are shit nostalgia fests and all, but Shrek is intended for immature audiences, right? Most mature adults who saw it would have done so with their kids and laughed along at the fart jokes, the whole point is that it entertains the young'uns and is not too god-awful for the rest of us to endure.

For what its worth I tried to introduce my kids to Spirited Away, Nausicaa and a some other films like that about a year ago and they were bored, as the concept of a ghost representing time or whatever was not interesting enough to hold their gaze for long. They are also bored by the Marvel movies once the whizz-bang scenes are over...

Patrick Freyne is a top notch satirist and this article summed up the ridiculousness perfectly. My favourite bit is the commas around "also", its just perfect.

I had an argument with a friend recently, triggered by the Meghan interview (Meghxit? although surely now that Oprah and Beyonce are involved it should be Meghan-gate as the culture-court-case has been moved across the atlantic, clever move by the Sussexs PR team) on whether the Royal family was racist.

To me (whos great grandfather was shot by a clown), the royal family of a kingdom that has generated no less than 65 national independence days transcends the term racist. They are brought up to believe the blood of great kings flows in their veins, are surrounded by staff, and well... treated like royalty. Such a life does not help keep ones feet on the ground. It's a prerequisite for the job to see everyone who isn't family as "lesser", thats the whole fucking point of being royal. But "racist" doesnt cover it, I mean the now beloved (white,english,never divorced) Kate was a commoner who didn't pass muster with most Royalists some years ago.

My friend had a different view, and while they didn't go so far as to defend the Queen as a bastion of equality, they were ruffled by the overwhelming sense that Meghan and Harry are obviously ambitious celebrity types who are playing the situation for monetary gain. And its very hard for my friend to side with people who are dramatizing events (real or not) in their personal life for social/monetary gain; it goes without saying my friend has spent little time in America and thus is uneducated on the enlightened times we find ourselves in.

The following day I had a conversation with a British friend of mine who had taken umbrage with the couples belief that their child should have similar security as Prince Williams son, his point being that one was a "common" child and the other was "heir to the throne of England for gawd sakes!" and how ridiculous it was to compare them. When I (admittedly calculating his response, but feeling I needed to get one back for my poor dead great grandad who they shot in the haybarn) pointed out that both were "just kids" and should be seen as such, and that the real problem in my view was that fools believe one is more important than the other, his harrumphing could be heard in Worcestershire.

Its ALMOST like treating people differently because of who their ancestors were is an all round bad fucking idea.

Let me start out by saying that the pandemic has been useful to me in one regard: it has allowed me to ruthlessly prune my newsletter count. If I listened to you because you knew about markets? And as soon as things shifted in the markets you started talking about masks or remote work or (god help you) politics? Then you were doing nothing but grifting off your 20/20 hindsight. Behind me satan you can't guess at what will be you can only riff on variations of what was.

Would you include John Maudlin in the cull? He has tended to lean into discussing the pandemic but his recent newsletter did include some market direction calls for certain age groups.

You should check out "My Self Reliance" channel, Shaun builds a cabin in the woods single handed in the Canadian wilderness. Been following him for a few years as he has built and added to it.

Interesting, we should track some more under #predictions.

80% confident Biden survives his first term (given there are so many comments on his age/health).

80% confident that Trump is a major participant in a media organization by 2022.

Umm...

It's a weird time.

I have lots to be thankful for, my family and I live in a big comfortable house in a small Irish village, we have a garden and all the conveniences of modern life. I work remotely from a quiet home office, and my wife is a homemaker which is wonderful, but is extra great in lockdown as she can help the kids with schoolwork. It's a nice simple life and we are very lucky, and we acknowledge it regularly.

For the last 12 months my days have pretty much a fixed routine. I get up, make a coffee, go to work, spend the morning answering emails and working on system designs, I eat lunch and chill out for 30 minutes, then back to work for an afternoon of meetings. After work I eat dinner, play with the kids for an hour or two, do some cleaning up, put kids to bed, and then sit on the couch reading, scrolling, or watching something for a while before going to bed.

That's it, wash rinse repeat for 12 months. I used to walk each day but can't really be bothered recently due to bad weather. To some extent life was always this monotonous but it was camouflaged by commutes, by different lunch locations, by different faces in different places. But now there is no colour to wash out the grey, no random variation to make the plain appear interesting.

I don't think I'm depressed, but I am fucking bored.

I have quite a large number of US colleagues and enjoy visiting the states (pre-covid) regularly. Watching from a distance what is happening is really painful, and the distance means that I only get ~1% of the experience so its pretty difficult to get a sense for what its like 'on the ground'. I don't pretend to understand any of it.

I could not comprehend how any country could entertain the idea of electing Trump, let alone elect him AFTER the details that emerged during his campaign. I still cannot comprehend how he got 75M odd votes to come within a hairs breath of a second term given the daily shit show he ran. I have met people in my own country who praise him and even though they have zero skin in the game (he is not our shit-show to deal with). I've had long discussions with them to try and understand what the fuck is wrong with them, what is preventing them from seeing what is so CLEARLY obvious to me and most other people in terms of his shortcomings as a person let alone a world leader.

The QANON shit, its the same thing, I don't get it. People I work with revealing a considerable lack of reasoning ability, following some dogshit conspiracy theory down a rabbit hole, and being so sure about it that they post it on social media.

And its spreading, I've no doubt of that. The rest of the world absorbs quite a bit of American culture by osmosis, much of it good or at least neutral, but you can sense that the Atlantic wont be enough to hold back the crazy virus kicking off here in some shape.

The biggest revelation for me over the last 5+ years is, while most people are good, kind and reasonable if given a chance they can also be led astray very easily, and some significant % of the population were fucking nuts all along.