Because I need more reminders about how soft and irritable humans have become.
Need to finish off, Liberator, by Patrick Geoghegan
ā¦ Starting to get hands, on the Metro series
Been reading through the locked tomb series by Tamsyn Miur.
Finished the first book Gideon the Ninth onto the second now.
I am doing quite a lot of reading at the moment for the purposes of literature review (in preparation of writing a paper and a Thesis). During this process, I came across the following article: Computer Scientist as Toolsmith II (Brooks, 1996) and was quite moved by (and felt compelled to share) the following extract:
The Gift of Subcreation
Making things has its glories and joys, and they are different from those of the mathematician and those of the scientist. Let us reflect together on these in a fundamental way.
[ā¦]
Here, I want to focus on the last, the gift of work, of the capability and the call to make things. J.R.R. Tolkien, author of the epic Lord of the Rings trilogy, spent his life building a rich fantasy world with its own laws, species, languages, and geography. He calls this creativity the gift of subcreation, and he illuminates it in a poem peculiarly relevant to the graphicistsā craft [5]:
Although now long estranged,
Man is not wholly lost nor wholly changed,
Dis-graced he may be, yet is not de-throned,
and keeps the rags of lordship once he owned:
Man, Sub-creator, the refracted Light
through whom is splintered from a single White
to many hues, and endlessly combined
in living shapes that move from mind to mind.
Though all the crannies of the world we filled
with Elves and Goblins, though we dared to build
Gods and their houses out of dark and light,
and sowed the seed of dragonsāātwas our right
(used or misused). That right has not decayed;
we make still by the law in which weāre made.[ā¦] the ability and the call to create are given to us to enrich our lives and to enable us to enrich each other.
Source: https://www.cs.unc.edu/~brooks/Toolsmith-CACM.pdf
Itās a good read on many levels, really! 
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I just met up with my book club where we discussed The Night Gardner by George Pelecanos (He was a writer for HBOās The Wire). Itās a pretty good book, but a very dark and gritty police/crime story.
Currently Iām reading The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming by Walker Percy for the same book club. The club book is just The Second Coming but I got them in a combined book so I decided to read both. Big mistake. The first book was terrible. I think Iām just going to finish the second one to bitch about it at book club.
In my second book club, Iām reading Hour of the Witch by Chris Bohjalian. So far itās pretty good.
Speeed book club voted to read Project Hail Mary. Foundaryside was my vote last time. I guess Iāll add it and confederacy of duances to my to read list because the descriptions sounded interesting
I used to follow Donut a bit (as a car enthusiast myself) until the controversy and stuff occurred and they split to Speeed, which I was aware of but keep forgetting to check out their content.
I was really surprised to even learn that James reads books, let alone has a book club but thatās pretty cool regardless - watched the video and added some new books to my āto-grabā list. Definitely will start following their content.
As for what I am reading now:
Iāve been lazy about reading books but currently 80% through the book Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams.
Yes - that book about Facebook (now Meta), it isā¦ rather eye-opening albeit not that surprising when you observe Zuckerberg and the entire ābillionaire tech headā community as a whole, but thereās some shit that still grinds your gears knowing what they do behind closed doors.
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Can second Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, Iām only like half way through but yeah, some of their logic is just crazy.
Oh yeah, Jerimiah and Jobe started Bigtime (more of the builds car content) and James with Speeed. I like the variety and how topics are what James finds interesting.
Yeah this month we are reading catās cradle. So far it isnāt holding my attention like the other two books
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im going to read:
on summer holiday. Apparently, the book is very different
i donāt really read fiction.
https://forum.level1techs.com/t/post-what-new-thing-you-acquired-recently/149881/22921?u=bedhedd
Reading The Blacktongue Thief for the Speeed book club
Just finished reading through More Everything Forever by Adam Becker the other day, pretty good book interesting take on the motives behind ai development.
Does anyone use a kindle to read? Considering either the paperwhite or colorsoft so that I can carry more options with me throughout the day
honestly - i tried the kindle, it is disconcerting and disgraphic to read volumes two-three paragraphs at a time . I found a book/messenger bag that can carry my three reads better.
The only time i have book"s" on the go is during holidays.
Otherwise its the lazyboy, side table with scotch or weed, and an over the shoulder lamp.
I have the Boox, as a android tablet, I can sideload apps and epubs.
I am pretty happy with 10 inch screen, if I were to upgrade, Iām waiting for either a colored e-ink screen (for colored pages) or a 12 inch screen (for 2 page manga reading).
If you are reading on the go frequently, Iād probably get a phone sized form factor so that it is more portable otherwise the 10 or 12 inch if you read at home.
Empire of AI by Karen Hao. She defrocks Sam Altman to reveal he is just another human. Like Steve Jobs, he is an adept salesman appealing to the naĆÆve altruistic sentiments of humans while maintaining his singular focus on scale. Not so different from the archetype of Rockefeller in his pursuit of monopoly through scale using any means, sam is no different than google which even forgot its own rallying cry ādont be evilā. Other actors in the story seem to have been infected by the same meme virus, leaving openAI for their own empires- Musk left after he and altman conflicted over who would be CEO.(birth of xAI). Amodei, his sister and others left to start anthropic. Sutskever left to start āsafe something or otherā(smacks of the same misdirection sam used when openAI formed as a nonprofit ) giving the idea of a nonprofit a mantle of evil since OPENAI has pivoted to profit.
The bottom line is that scaling requires money and the only way to get that in the private sector is to lure those with money with the temptation they can multiply their wealth.
Things could have been different in a world before financial engineers bankrupted the US (the crises of enron, salamon bros, 2008 mortgage debacle all added hundreds of billions to us debt as the govt bought the ātoo big to failā kool-aid and bailed out wall street by indenturing main street). Now 1/4 of our budget is simply interest payment on this debt. There is no room for govt spending on a moonshot like AI. This environment in 1960 would have killed Kennedyās inspirational moonshot of going to the moon while it was still an idea in his head in his post coital bliss with Marilyn at his side.
Today our govt needs money just like all the other scrooge-infected players in the tower of debt that capitalism has built.
Ironically it seems china has a better chance now. It seems its release of deep seek and the full set of parameters is giving it a veneer of altruistic benevolence that is slightly more believable than what we see here in the west. China may win simply on thermodynamic grounds. Training and research in DL consumes terawatt hours and hundreds of thousands of chips. Not only are the US models on older architectures (10-100x more energy inefficient) but the ācompetitionā of multiple players in the us multiplies the energy requirements.
Would govt oversight have been a good thing? Imagine if General Motors, westinghouse, bell labs, and ford competed in 1940 each with their own manhattan prohect to develop nuclear weapons ? Would the proliferation of nuclear have resulted in human extinction by now?
Will AIās contribution to global warming be just as toxic global thermonuclear war?
These are the questions that come to mind after Haoās historic summary.
Can second this book, think its much more relevant and engaging then more everything forever which primarily just focuses on the philosophy behind some of the main people in this ai push.
Book is pretty good so far
Just started reading The Wager by David Grann, a nonfiction about a British shipwreck.
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