Content here is by Michael Still, mikal@stillhq.com.
Another really good if a bit short book. My only real criticism of the first four books in this series is they really should have been one book. Title: Exit Strategy Author: Martha Wells Genre: Fiction Publisher: Tordotcom Release Date: October 2, 2018 Pages: 143 Murderbot wasn’t programmed to care. So, its decision to help…
The third installment in the murderbot series. Another fun if a bit short read. Honestly these books should all have been a single volume. That’s the only way I don’t enjoy these books — they’re super expensive for their length. Title: Rogue Protocol Author: Martha Wells Genre: Fiction Publisher: Tordotcom Release Date: August 7, 2018…
This is the textbook for a course I am doing at the moment. To be honest the book is kind of old and nothing special, but I read it so it gets at least a brief mention here. Overall the book is too dated to be particularly useful, and I find it hard to believe…
This is an interesting read about the history of the EBS subsystem in Amazon EC2. This quote particularly stands out to me: What I didn’t realize until I joined Amazon, and seems obvious in hindsight, is that you can design an organization much the same way you can design a software system. Different algorithms have…
Another short and fun sci-fi read. Our favorite anxious and depressed murderbot is off trying to solve the mystery of why in fact he murdered all those nice people. Along the way he meets a mildly annoying but actually kind of friendly AI transport ship with a lot of unexplained capabilities. Definitely worth a couple…
While being a fairly transparent metaphor for refugees, this book is also an excellent read with a relatively believable premise. I especially like the ending, which I thought was quite unexpected. I don’t want to ruin any of this for anyone, but I really really enjoyed this book. Title: Children of Time Author: Adrian Tchaikovsky…
This is a book about common sense. Specifically, it’s about how when you’re told a fact it seems obvious — common sense — that it’s true. Interestingly, this can be the case even if that fact is in fact untrue. This is at least partially because common sense is mostly practical, that is it’s more…
This is yet another accidental purchase of a self-published book, although I think this one makes a lot of sense as a self published work. Writing a technical reference book isn’t a particularly lucrative pastime for most authors, and self publishing likely makes it more worthwhile than the traditional publisher route, especially if you can…
This book was a short but fun read. Sufficiently short in fact that perhaps it was a little over priced, but not outrageously so. It follows an adventure of a slightly rogue but generally nice cyborg SecUnit which has charmingly named itself MurderBot. That’s confusing, because said cyborg is too busy being depressed and anxious…
This book argues that technology, especially social media, has been deliberately engineered by Silicon Valley to be addictive, and that often there are detrimental impacts to the products we all use every day. That argument makes sense in that these products are measured by the amount of time they are used per user (and thus…