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Books I loved reading this year

gatesnotes.com

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Re: Books I loved reading this year

#41

Post by onedognight »

greedo wrote: post #37
azinman2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather Gates just takes his billions and spend it on private planes and yachts, retreated away from the world? I’m glad he’s taking his acumen and treasure to things that are intended to positively benefit the entire world, personally. There’s a lot of great things he can still achieve in this lifetime regardless of his past. Computing has largely moved on from his Microsoft days and it’s control of the wor…

Wait, MS no longer controls computing in the business world? Show me a Fortune 1000 company that doesn't use MS extensively.

Apple? :)

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#42

Post by fernandotakai »

adamgordonbell wrote: post #30
rememberlenny wrote: post #25

- List for the lazy - A Thousand Brains: A New Theory of Intelligence, by Jeff Hawkins. The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, by Walter Isaacson. Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro. Hamnet, by Maggie O’Farrell. Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir.

Project Hail Mary was so good. I loved The Martian but Artemis not as much. By that measure Project Hail Mary was a return to form. It was just a fun, breezy read that hit the problem solving part of my brain in just the right way, but with a different angle on things than "The Martian".

project hail mary's audiobook is the best audiobook i've ever listened to. it's.... incredible. they adapted parts of the book that were kind of hard to "get" perfectly (and for people that read it, i think you know what i mean).

i totally recommend it.

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#43

Post by CrazyStat »

chestertn wrote: post #24

> The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, by Walter Isaacson. The Nobel prize should have gone to Francis Mojica. Of course, he does not have all the PR machine that Doudna has, the futuristic TED talks and all.

Why?

Mojica did important work on CRISPR, yes, but Doudna and Charpentier were the ones who showed how to use it as a DNA editing tool, without which very few people would care about it.

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#44

Post by mdturnerphys »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #33

> Project Hail Mary, by Andy Weir No. Just no. It is hard science fiction, but there is no character development. I had no empathy for the main character and did not care about him or his fate. Also he is unusually prude, which he blames on being a school teacher, but even his inner dialogue consists of “HOLY COW!” when surprised. I mean, really??

With The Martian, a later "classroom edition" was published with the profanity removed. Maybe he just wanted to avoid making a second edition this time.

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#45

Post by Arainach »

zwieback wrote: post #36
adamgordonbell wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Project Hail Mary was so good. I loved The Martian but Artemis not as much. By that measure Project Hail Mary was a return to form. It was just a fun, breezy read that hit the problem solving part of my brain in just the right way, but with a different angle on things than "The Martian".

We're reading this one for my at-work bookclub, looking forward to it. We did the Martian back when and people enjoyed it. Although easy reading it has enough depth to spark a good discussion.

It's an interesting choice for a book club. Due to the way the narrative progresses (you start with an amnesiac protagonist and gradually reveal backstory via memories) discussions could get tricky/problematic if anyone is reading ahead faster than the rest. Obviously all books have some risk of that but PHM is more challenging than most in my opinion.

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#46

Post by itisit »

greedo wrote: post #37
azinman2 wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would you rather Gates just takes his billions and spend it on private planes and yachts, retreated away from the world? I’m glad he’s taking his acumen and treasure to things that are intended to positively benefit the entire world, personally. There’s a lot of great things he can still achieve in this lifetime regardless of his past. Computing has largely moved on from his Microsoft days and it’s control of the wor…

Wait, MS no longer controls computing in the business world? Show me a Fortune 1000 company that doesn't use MS extensively.

AWS?

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#48

Post by nnoitra »

azinman2 wrote: post #22
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #20

I've mislaid my copy of Bill's "How I put a computer on every desk while totally fucking up everyone's idea of what software is, how it could be developed and how it might be used". To be honest, it was a riveting read but I don't really want to get into the sequel "How I became a nice guy and everyone forgot about the terrible things I did in business".

Would you rather Gates just takes his billions and spend it on private planes and yachts, retreated away from the world? I’m glad he’s taking his acumen and treasure to things that are intended to positively benefit the entire world, personally. There’s a lot of great things he can still achieve in this lifetime regardless of his past. Computing has largely moved on from his Microsoft days and it’s control of the wor…

Right as if "helping the world" is not self-serving

Re: Books I loved reading this year

#50

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

cinntaile wrote: post #38
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, he's a great guy now (mostly). I fully applaud 99% of everything he's tried do with the Gates Foundation. But what he did to the future of computing lingers on, and will do so for another decade or threee.

What did he do to the future of computing?

He created the public understanding that "software" means ready-to-run executables. He created the public understanding that "software" is non-repairable, non-modifiable and created (only) by wizards in corporations. He created the public understanding that software had to cost money, and specifically per-copy, per-platform, per-user licensing terms.

None of these things were accepted before Gates et al. create Microsoft. Sure, there were versions of them floating around, but they were still competing with alternative visions of how computing was going to work, and there was at least an equal chance that the more anarchic vision of things that ultimately gave rise to GNU and libre software would have won out.

Gates' letter to "hobbyists" stands out as a turning point in the history of software, and because its author ended up with an enormously powerful corporation behind him, his views of how this stuff should work became the dominant one.

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