181–190 of 651 posts
Those who have a computer science background will almost definitely love the book. It connects many dots that are previously seemingly unrelated. My jaw dropped for literally every few pages of most chapters.
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I tried to read Cryptonomicon as a first introduction to Stephenson. Kept waiting for the good parts, and actually just stopped reading halfway through out of sheer boredom. A few years later and I read Seveneves. Absolutely fall in love, and read Anathem right after. Loved it too. To this day I still don’t understand why the first book felt so boring and the others didn’t. To make it worse, when you go looking for a…
Check out Snowcrash! I liked Snowcrash but thought Cryptonomicon was incredibly boring as well.
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Give the Three Body Problem series a try, I think you’ll enjoy it immensely.
I don't think this is in the same league as Snow Crash, or any other Stephenson novel. Learning about parts of 20th century China political history? Cool! The Sci-fi? Makes distractingly little sense. The wire-slicer weapon was pretty cool though!
I haven’t finished this yet (only at the start of chapter 6) but The Scientist and Engineer’s Guide to Digital Signal Processing [0] has been excellent so far. DSP is one of the subjects I’ve wanted to learn for years but could never get my head around, mostly (I think) due to bad instructors and very math-heavy explanations. This book is finally demystifying it for me, with explanations that go for intuition over ma…
I’ve tried to learn electrical engineering and bounce off with more advanced circuit arithmetic. It feels like DSP is a level above that. Does this digest well with someone with a CS degree?
I like that the author takes time to actually explain the concepts with words before getting into the mathy stuff, whereas it seems like a lot of books on topics like this will lead with "The is defined as . Thus, we can and "
Hands down, the most fascinating book I read in 2021 (and I will have read for a long time!) is "The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood" by James Gleick: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400096235 Those who have a computer science background will almost definitely love the book. It connects many dots that are previously seemingly unrelated. My jaw dropped for literally every few pages of most chapters.
#1 Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of America (1943) by John Roy Carlson
Long out of print but relatively easy to find, this book is an incredible history of a populist split off of something called "the old right" (pre-JBS/Hayek/Russell Kirk) and hauntingly describes the modern populist right in a way that you check the copyright date and wonder if he's a time traveler.
I stopped about every page and went over to Wikipedia, Proquest, archive.org or LOC to find out more about the fascinating things the author was talking about. It took me months to work through and I probably read 10 or so books along with it (mostly books by the 1930s equivalent of qanon).
Seeing the through lines to the modern era is really stunning.
If someone is interested in the history of non-highbrow populist right, it's highly recommended.
#2 Weinberg's "The psychology of computer programming" (1971) Also mostly out of print but easy to find. This guy is also a time traveler in his insights
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"you need limitations to be creative", who sold you that? this whole genre of "adversity builds character" type of advice is a backwards rationalisation at its purest. no, adversity does not build character but merely reveals it, just as limitations don't make you creative, rather creativity forces you to find newer ruts. also, you lost me at aristotle ;)
"who sold you that?" Specifically, David Mamet and Aaron Sorkin, who directly tells everyone to read Poetics. But also anyone who engages in poetry and lyrics; the whole idea of poetry is adding limits and seeing what you can do with it. Think of it like chords in music, or moves on a game. If you play tennis and anyone can just kick or throw the ball, that's not very fun.
Aristotle's Poetics. Yes, it was published before 2021. A lot of writers try to set their own rules, but according to the best, you need limitations to be creative. Just like you would play sports with rules. That rulebook is Poetics. It's the kind of book that's so information dense that you have to read it slowly. Summaries are often as long as the book itself. There's some aging in there. Notably the concept of ha…
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I don't think this is in the same league as Snow Crash, or any other Stephenson novel. Learning about parts of 20th century China political history? Cool! The Sci-fi? Makes distractingly little sense. The wire-slicer weapon was pretty cool though!
I found the next two books in the trilogy (The Dark Forest, Death's End) to go much more in depth on the sci-fi aspect; if you're willing to suspend a little disbelief the story is constantly engaging and quite thought-provoking. While the style is different from Stephenson's I think anyone who enjoys Stephenson's books would enjoy the journey and perspective this series offers too!