Style: Non-fiction
A City on Mars
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Is there any reality to the dreams of billionaires to set up civilizations on planets outside Earth? Nope. Kelly and Zach Weinersmith started out to write a book about how to create a civilization on another planet, and after meticulous research came to the conclusion that any attempt at this within multiple generations is not…
Feel Good Productivity – Ali Abdaal
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Is productivity about grinding and hustle? Is there something else that can help you get your important tasks done? In this book Ali Abdaal looks at the field of Positive Psychology to see how it can help us be more productive. Purchase Feel Good Productivity on Amazon
Knowing What We Know – Simon Winchester
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Simon Winchester examines information transmission through time. From oral traditions, to computers, how do we know what we know? One of the most interesting questions is that of digital amnesia, where information is easy to gather from the internet so it has little value to us and thus we forget it easily. We explored similar…
The Death of Expertise – Tom Nichols
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Are there any experts anymore? If there are experts, do we even listen to them? How many experts take their domain-specific expertise and parlay that into getting to comment on fields that they know nothing about? In this excellent book Tom Nichols explores how we treat experts today. From ignoring them when we don’t like…
The Bill Gates Problem – Tim Schwab
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While we may think that Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation is a benevolent Billionaire philanthropist, it’s not quite so clear. This book shows how Gates has used his many dollars and foundations to avoid taxes and push a Big Tech capitalist mindset on assisting other countries. Yes your tax dollars pay for about 50%…
Basic Income for Canadians – Evelyn L Forget
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This is a long form look at many studies on basic income. Overall, people use the money to improve their lives and continue to work. They don’t get lazy, but employers may complain because it gets harder to find people willing to work for low wages as they now have more financial freedom and don’t…
Personal Knowledge Graphs
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This is a fairly academic look at taking notes and what a personal knowledge graph is. The format of the book is a series of essays, that at times are helpful, but also spend entire chapters on defunct operating systems like Haiku. Yes Haiku runs still, but you’re never going to use it so telling…
Not with a Bug but with a Sticker
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The authors show us just how dumb AI systems are and how overblown the claims of computer vision investors, and LLM producers really are. Don’t believe the AI hype, the systems are brittle and not that smart, everyone invested in them just wants you to think the opposite. Purchase Not with a Bug but with…
The Shock Doctrine – Naomi Klien
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Naomi Klien looks at how natural disasters, war and terrorism are used by government and business to further capitalism and take away benefits to poor people. Most often non-white Americans, or entire other countries, bear the brunt of the capitalist push to use a shock to reset what is normal. Purchase The Shock Doctrine on…
Your Face Belongs to Us – Kashmir Hill
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Kashmir Hill takes us on a look at Clearview AI’s founding and where it currently sits with it’s facial recognition technology. Is it a good thing to give up privacy to catch child abusers, which actually happened during the course of research for this book, or should we combat this so we don’t loose privacy?…
