After reading The Wicked of the Earth, I wanted to understand some of the history behind the stories. Why were women⁰ accused of being witches? What really happened in those trials? What are the modern consequences of those events?

This is the story of the Scottish Witch Trials - with brief forays into England and abroad. It examines the central tension of whether witchcraft was real to the accusers, or just a convenient means to oppress troublesome women. The descriptions of the imprisonment, torture, and state-sanctioned murder is visceral and horrific.

It's also rather stark in its modern assessment of the historic context:

Nonetheless, it’s important to remember it was a proper legal trial, with evidence being put forward and the judge assessing it and carrying out legal tests. Some people think that witchcraft trials were carried out by angry peasants waving pitchforks. Perhaps this is a more acceptable way for a modern person to think about it. No one wants to think that a judicial system can get it so wrong. But it did, with catastrophic consequences for those accused.

The book is mostly good, it's a spin off from the Witches Of Scotland podcast and that's reflected in the writing. As with any parasocial¹ entertainment, it attempts to centre the authors and bring the audience along for the ride - so there's lots of descriptions of the libraries the authors visit, how things make them feel, how enamoured they are with their podcast guests. I found it a little distracting, but it's obviously right for their main audience.

Similarly, there's an attempt to bring the past to life by imagining a little monologue from various historic figures. I found that a little unconvincing; I dislike putting words in peoples' mouths. But with sparse primary documentation, that may be the best way to bring these characters to life. It's also well illustrated. Too many books eschew pictures - but this has a nice collection of woodcuts and portraits to contextualise what we're reading about.

One little nitpick, the book makes the claims:

Life was hard and life expectancy was around 35

and

Lilias was an old woman, at least 60 years old and possibly as old as 80. At a time when life expectancy was much lower than it is now, even the lower estimate was still a considerable age.

That's not quite right. Although the average life expectancy was low, that's the average at birth - with a large number of infant mortalities dragging down the average. When you look at the full data, you'll see people used to live long lives even in the distant past.

In a way, it reminds me of Invisible Women. A national tragedy hidden from view.

It builds to a rousing end. There are parts of the world where witchcraft is still taken seriously - with devastating consequences. The febrile atmosphere which led to unfounded accusations against women is still prevalent even in modern societies.

Much like the film "Lola RenntRun Lola Run" there's a briefcase full of cash, a cast of morally ambiguous characters, and a meandering philosophical discussion about the nature of economic salvation.

It slams together the naïve and the cynical into a bunch of uneasy conversations.

I loved the slow-burn of the first story - the way it gradually revealed more and more about the characters. But throughout I was left wondering "where is this going?" The answer, disappointingly, was nowhere.

That's the heart of my problem with the book - it was compelling and frustrating in equal measure. The author herself states it best:

The reader needs something to hold on to. A glimmer of hope

It was stylish, there's no doubt about that. The texture of each story was gorgeous. The plotting was inventive and the morality interesting. I also enjoyed the bluntness of the social politics of economics. I just felt the whole was much less than the sum of its parts.

I read this as part of a new book club I'm attending. Thankfully, everyone else seemed to agree that it was a bit of a let down.

When I finally invent time-travel, the first thing I'll do is go back in time and give everyone a copy of this book. Published in 2014, it clearly sets out the likely problems with true Artificial Intelligence (not the LLM crap we have now) and what measures need to be put in place before it is created.

It opens with The Unfinished Fable of the Sparrows:

Which, frankly, should be the end of the discussion. Oh Scronkfinkle, why didn't they listen to you?

This book attempts to set out they why and the how of protecting humanity from the (inevitable?) arrival of machines which we would describe as "superintelligent". That is, capable of human-level reasoning and understanding, but unlimited in terms of speed, working memory, and accuracy.

For example, automated trading algorithms caused a "Flash Crash" of the stock market in 2010. Unchecked machines very nearly destabilised the financial work. As Bostrom writes:

[…] while automation contributed to the incident, it also contributed to its resolution. The pre-preprogrammed stop order logic, which suspended trading when prices moved too far out of whack, was set to execute automatically because it had been correctly anticipated that the triggering events could happen on a timescale too swift for humans to respond. The need for pre-installed and automatically executing safety functionality—as opposed to reliance on runtime human supervision—again foreshadows a theme that will be important in our discussion of machine superintelligence.

So where are those safety functions now? Are any of the AI providers building in guardrails to prevent atrocities? We know that some LLMs are restricted from sharing details about devastating weapons of mass destruction - but there seems little else put in place.

The book is mostly accessible but veers wildly between casual language, deep philosophical tracts, pointed snark, and the occasional dive into maths and physics. For anyone with even a passing interest in the progression of any technology, it is a worthwhile read.

Many of the predictions are spot on:

As of 2012, the Zen series of go-playing programs has reached rank 6 dan in fast games (the level of a very strong amateur player), using Monte Carlo tree search and machine learning techniques. Go-playing programs have been improving at a rate of about 1 dan/year in recent years. If this rate of improvement continues, they might beat the human world champion in about a decade.

In fact, AlphaGo achieved mastery at the end of 2016.

In the slightly longer term, the cost of acquiring additional hardware may be driven up as a growing portion of the world’s installed capacity is being used to run digital minds […] as investors bid up the price for existing computing infrastructure to match the return they expect from their investment

As I wrote about in "AI is a NAND Maximiser" this too has come to pass.

While LLMs weren't yet invented when this was written, there's an excellent prediction about how an AI could become a pernicious psychological adversary:

Caution and restraint would be required, however, for us not to ask too many such questions—and not to allow ourselves to partake of too many details of the answers given to the questions we do ask—lest we give the untrustworthy oracle opportunities to work on our psychology (by means of plausible-seeming but subtly manipulative messages). It might not take many bits of communication for an AI with the social manipulation superpower to bend us to its will.

Indeed, I think it is clear that this is already happening. While I don't ascribe malice (or any other motivation) to the AIs, it is clear that their makers have a bias towards obsequiousness.

Other predictions are perhaps a little wide of the mark:

if somebody were to succeed in creating an AI that could understand natural language as well as a human adult, they would in all likelihood also either already have succeeded in creating an AI that could do everything else that human intelligence can do, or they would be but a very short step from such a general capability.

We're a few years in to the LLM revolution and, while we can quibble about what "understand" means, it's clear that natural language can now mostly be interpreted by computers. But that doesn't seem to have made the leap to general intelligence, nor the acceleration of art and science.

Others are hopeful but possibly a bit naïve:

A future superintelligence occupies an epistemically superior vantage point: its beliefs are (probably, on most topics) more likely than ours to be true. We should therefore defer to the superintelligence’s opinion whenever feasible.

Yes, there probably are modern concepts which have more in common with "phlogiston" than reality. But if a scientist were to time-travel back to the early 1700s, how easy would it be for them to disprove the theory? Perhaps AI ought to exist in the "trust but verify" space?

It is slightly over-footnoted, with no distinction between citation and diverting passage. There's also a tendency to go off in fanciful directions - the stuff on genetically enhancing humans goes on a bit too long for my tastes. Similarly, the philosophy of maximising happiness by emulating brains and virtually doping them seemed unconvincing.

That said, some of the thought experiments are both fun and profound - the seminal "Paperclip Maximiser" was introduced in this book.

There are some downsides. An over-reliance on specific individuals like Eliezer Yudkowsky crowds out some of the other important thinkers.

One of the suggestions made has already fallen:

One valuable asset would be a donor network comprising individuals devoted to rational philanthropy, informed about existential risk, and discerning about the means of mitigation. It is especially desirable that the early-day funders be astute and altruistic, because they may have opportunities to shape the field’s culture before the usual venal interests take up position and entrench.

The "Effective Altruism" movement is now hopelessly compromised and seemingly in tatters. Similarly, the cult of rationalism has taken an unfortunate turn to the bizarre and dangerous.

Nevertheless, it's hard to argue with the philosophy. Whether or not "superintelligence" is ever achieved, we should have systems in place now to protect us. It's the same as any other technology - the time to set up nuclear non-proliferation agreements and the systems to monitor them was before we invented them.

Short stories offer you the chance to dip briefly into a world and then skip out so there's not much time for development; just straight in to the plot and off we go. But this is all exposition and very little action. Rather than let the plots develop naturally, there are just vast passages of infodumping. I'm sad to say this is a rather dreary and insipid collection of stories.

Some of the stories start out with an interesting premise but then just fizzle out. There's a reasonably good idea in "The Materiality of Emotions" which describes people buying little trinkets which induce emotions in them. Again, emotions as drugs is well-worn stuff, but this builds up momentum nicely before suddenly ending.

The highlight is "Spectrum" which has some delightful world-building but, like the others, it's rather derivative of older stories. A woman's space ship crashes on a strange planet and she tries to befriend the local hominids. You've almost certainly read it before.

Overall I found it underwhelming.

Many thanks to NetGalley for the review copy.

And there is a lot of politics.

One of the weakest areas is the political analysis behind the stories. For example, a Soviet Lunar rover is described as being "daubed with the sickle and hammer" - but there's no derogatory mention of the stars, stipes, and eagles on American craft. Similarly we hear about "the Soviet plans to invade Mars proceeded unabated" - there's no deriding description of the American plans to colonise various planets. The efforts of the European Space Agency described as "[m]ore than fifty industrial contractors from fifteen nations were involved in construction. Safe to say, it was a logistical nightmare." - while ignoring the various back-room deals that led to the American space programme being distributed around their country and their resultant logistical problems.

It isn't relentlessly pro-American (there's lots of descriptions of their failures) but it feels a bit one-sided.

There are some gorgeous photos spread throughout the book. Sadly, the ebook relegates most of them to the end rather than interspersing them with the text. At least one of the images is incorrect although, thankfully, the attribution hyperlinks to the correct photo on NASA's site.

I'm being a bit down on the book. It is a decent enough look at all the problems faced by space agencies as they tried to send machines into the void. For those of us in the computer industry, it is depressing to continually read about how we're often the weakest link:

On 2 September, a computer command was sent to Phobos 1 to turn on the gamma ray spectrometer. A single hyphen had been left out of the code, transforming it into an order for Phobos 1 to shut down. There was no way to turn it back on.

Yikes! The book is full of titbits like that - minor errors which led to major catastrophes.

It's a good starting point for anyone with an interest in space exploration and how technical and political challenges can be overcome.

Apparently I reviewed the previous version of this book four years ago but have no real memory of it. Did you ever have a dream which was vividly realistic yet somehow slightly askew from reality? Obviously there is no antimemetics division, nor could anyone write a book about it. If they did, their mind would instantly be liquefied and their mere existence would be purged.

So, why is there a new version of the book out and is it worth reading again?

As the copyright page says:

Earlier versions of this material were previously published in serial form on the scp wiki under Creative Commons 3.0, and subsequently self-published by the author in ebook and paperback format. The work has been substantively revised and updated since.

As the FAQ makes clear, getting a "proper" publisher to put money into a CC project is unlikely. So many of the original elements have been rewritten and reworked. The writing, plotting, and characters have all been substantially improved. The ending, in particular, has become something quite special.

The story itself is still recursively memetic and a metacommentary on itself. The bug-eyed-monsters are mindbending and the good guys are all morally compromised. The concepts are gorgeously impossible and the pacing is exciting.

There's simply nothing like it.

The eBook is mostly well formatted. Excellent use of monospace fonts for reports, there are accessible redactions where suitable, and the images all have alt text. Weirdly, one "monster" is named వ - a character which failed to render correctly on my eBook. That gave it a rather sinister appearance! The ghosting of eInk made it look like there were faint words behind the various redactions which was delightfully spooky. An excellent book and a satisfying update.

However, it is worth noting that ███████ this book will ██████████ ██████████ ██████████████ and could lead to ████ █████████████ ██████████████. Although the retailer won't accept refunds on any book stained with █████████ █████████████████ ████ or ████ ██████████, it is possible to summon ██████ ████████████████████ ████████████ ███ ████ ███████████ in an emergency.

What can a fifty-year-old book teach us about cybersecurity? Written just as computing was beginning to enter the mainstream, The Electronic Criminals takes us into a terrifying new world of crime!

Fraud over Telex! Ransomware of physical tapes! Stealing passwords and hacking into mainframes!

The books has a strong start, but gently runs out of steam because there simply weren't many electronic criminals in the mid-1970s! Instead, the book is over-stuffed with "Catch Me If You Can" tales of chequebook fraud, stolen aeroplane tickets, and regular blackmail and bribery. It isn't quite a how-to guide for the budding fraudster, but it isn't too far off.

Nevertheless, there are some amazing and mind-boggling computer crimes described:

Computer print-outs concealed the massive fraud and fakery. Tapes were programmed so that computers would reject incriminating data and accept and produce only what would support the conspiracy. Computers were also used in playing hide-and-seek with investigators by switching data damaging to the swindlers from one code to another, just a step ahead of the authorities.

One common refrain is that the law of 1975 hadn't caught up with the reality of modern crime. In the above case, the…

… investors decided to sue IBM for $4 billion, claiming that the company’s inability to manufacture a swindle-proof computer had contributed to their loss. Despite the fact that IBM had claimed their computers are virtually tamper proof, the case was thrown out of court. Obviously no one can be expected to be perfect, not even an IBM computer.

And in another:

In a recent case in France the accused was charged with sabotage. He had intentionally erased valuable information recorded on a magnetic tape by passing it through a strong magnetic field. However, since the tape itself was undamaged the court ruled that no offense had been committed. The jury was directed to issue a verdict of “not guilty.”

Many of the "electronic" crimes are able to be facilitated by poor physical processes:

Computer center near London, England: Unguarded side door hooked open to allow employees to step out for fresh air. Top secret military and industrial information was stored in the center’s files.

Anyone who has done an ISO 27001 audit knows that pain!

It isn't just computers and data-tapes that are discussed. There's rather a large section on phone-tapping and eavesdropping bugs. Rather terrifyingly, there's also a section on what we might now call "Deep Fakes":

On tape recordings, words can be rearranged and new words can be built up from an assortment of syllables. The process is somewhat like fitting together bits of a jigsaw puzzle. Simply by inserting or deleting “nots” in a taped voice recording, affirmatives can be changed to negatives and negatives to affirmatives. Words can be borrowed from one part of a tape and fitted into another so the entire meaning is changed. By the same techniques, inflections of words can be altered.

Oh, and drone warfare!

Today there are infrared cameras that can indeed see you in the dark, even portable TV cameras that can record pictures by moonlight, and radio-controlled miniature aircraft (some that can hover like helicopters) to carry these cameras to subjects that someone wants to photograph.

As with any good book on the subject, it spends plenty of time talking about how to defend oneself from these attacks and the downside of protection:

Another scheme, called “hand-shaking,” requires the inquirer seeking information from the computer to correctly answer a personal question, something known only to him, before he can find out what he wants to know. This slows down the running of a business. I remember sitting in the office of a man who has a computer terminal on his desk. In the middle of our conversation a question came up and he said: “Wait a minute. I'll get the answer from our computer.” He put the question in by typing on the keyboard. The terminal’s screen lit up and displayed another question: “In what month was your mother-in-law born?”

It also predicts the rise of music and film piracy; albeit by analogue means.

Rather pleasingly, it doesn't just limit itself to crimes committed in the USA. It acknowledges the pervasive nature of criminality and goes into some detail about cases in the UK, France, Germany, and Italy.

It is always fascinating to look back on our industry's history. Much like 1999's Information Warfare and Security by Dorothy E. Denning, we have to constantly go back to see what assumptions we have baked in to our processes.

I'll leave you with this rather chilling excerpt from the prologue:

Our world is still a fine place in which to live—a better one perhaps than any previous generation has enjoyed. But some of the people in it are causing serious problems. In 1974 many people experienced diminishing respect for persons in high places who acted as if they were above the law, and this led to a loss of respect for the concept of leadership itself. We should not confuse diminishing respect for a president with respect for the presidency, for example. Our society needs people in high places. It cannot function without leadership at every level, from the head of a household to the manager of a business to a chief of state.

What is missing in our society today is the necessary preparation and training for the responsibilities of authority in high places. If parents in the home and people in business and government never learned the lessons of fair play when they were growing up, we cannot expect them to know how to play fair when they reach high places. Consequently we all suffer every time “the boss” makes expedient judgments rather than proper moral decisions.

If coming generations are to be spared the tragic consequences of even more widespread corruption, the teaching of morality in the family and in the school ought to be as important to us as curbing inflation and other socioeconomic problems. Our children should be taught how to deal with everyday actions fairly and ethically. They should be exposed to those philosophical and ethical concepts, with practical examples that illustrate the alternatives of right and wrong so that they are better able to cope.

I'm a fan of R.F. Kuang's books - but this is the first which I've found laugh-out-loud funny. What if your University advisor died and the only way to graduate was to descend into hell and bring him back?

In a terrible sort of way, I'm glad that Kuang had such a miserable time at University. Being able to mine that psychotrauma has led to the brilliant Babel and now the excellent Katabasis. This is almost a love affair to the idea of being the perfect student.

It's also deliciously catty:

She had never gotten round to trying Proust, but Cambridge had made her the kind of person who wanted to have read Proust, and she figured Hell was a good place to start.

The plot is, almost literally, Alice in Wonderlabyrinth. A metaphysical excursion through logic and fallacy, pausing lightly at revenge, with a quick diversion through intersectional feminism and its limits. Much like the play Copenhagen, the characters often exist as a way to explore the nature of reality and how it conflicts with academia.

Perhaps it is a smidgen too long, and there are some weird Americanisms which perhaps should have been caught in the edit. A few of the observations about Hell being a writers market or modelled on an essay crisis are a little too on the nose - but, you know what, it is tremendous fun.

Everyone knows that Black people didn't exist in the UK until recently, right? Despite mountains of evidence of everything from Black Tudors and Victorian actors, some myths perniciously persist.

What was the experience for Black Britons during the second world war?

I find it fascinating how the US cultural hegemony rewrites history. I've heard people in the UK talk about "Jim Crow laws" as though that was a thing that happened in the UK. It wasn't. While there were barriers and racism (as the book makes clear) the experience of Black people in the UK was vastly different than it was for African Americans. To the point that white American GIs were routinely castigated for trying to impose their vile racism onto our country.

What makes this book special is the contemporary reports and modern interviews. There are some amazing stories to be told and it is fascinating to hear first-hand accounts. The book also contains a list of prominent Black people living in the UK (including their addresses) which feels a little like padding - but then this is fleshed out with mini-biographies of most of them. What is astounding is, given the range of people living in Britain, you occasionally get little revelations like this:

Only one black evacuee has ever been interviewed for a television documentary.

Some people profiled are, for want of a better word, ordinary. People who had normal lives, kept the home fires burning, and took part in ordinary civic life. And then there are guys like Ras Prince Monolulu who were bona-fide celebrities.

It is fair to say that modern Britain's relationship with the notion of "Empire" is complicated. When the call to arms came, people from the farthest colonies rushed to aide the "motherland". In many cases, they were initially rejected due to formal or informal colour-bars. The social acceptability of and legal ramifications of these practices is evidenced in Constantine v Imperial Hotels Ltd.

But for every story of casual and institutional racism towards people who came to help, there are stories of love and acceptance.

The English people opened their homes to us, we were invited out for dinners, teas, no problems at all. There were problems with the American forces, but it didn’t hinder us.

As with any history book, some of the language used can feel a little shocking or distasteful. History is never easy to engage with, but this book presents an even handed look at a turbulent period. It ends a little abruptly, but it is an excellent overview of the literature. Recommended for anyone who wants to understand our history.

Remember back in the early 2010s when any moderately popular Twitter account could become a book (or even a TV series)?

This is a collection of Tweet-sized "overheard in" stories. All set in book shops.

Isn't it funny that some people don't know how books work! ROFL!

Aren't the general public strange? LOLOL!

That's a bit harsh of me. It only rarely becomes mean-spirited. But in a book this short, it rather contaminates the joy.

That said, this one will live rent-free in my head for a while:

Did Beatrix Potter ever write a book about dinosaurs?

It's the sort of stocking-filler book which is reasonable for perusing on the loo. Light-hearted but ultimately disposable.

Still, at least Neil Gaiman found it funny enough to leave a blurb…

This is fun, silly, charming, and much better than The Murderbot Diaries despite being superficially similar.

Imagine you are an interstellar ship and, of course, your AI is conscious. What would you do if your passengers were killed - not by a terrifying alien, but by Count Dracula???

What if, on the return journey, another set of your passengers were similarly slaughtered. Except, this time, by a Werewolf? How would that make you feel? Would it drive you mad? Could you cope with the bullying from other starships? Or would you feel the need… the need for REVENGE!

As I said, silly and campy fun. It is episodic adventure with just the right amount of Hammer-style horror and not too much technobabble. All the classic monsters are here - depression, intrusive thoughts, envy, fear.

Oh, and Frankenstein’s spider.

As an ebook, it makes great use of fonts - which give it a delightfully retrofuturistic feel. There are some fun binary Easter-Eggs as well.

This book doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it a sociology textbook, travel guide, history book, or guide to the mysteries of the world? Subtitled "the temporal misadventures of a social psychologist" it veers between hard data and well-worn anecdotes until it becomes a sort of self-help book for the time-poor 1990s American executive.

Despite being well-caveated against the "dangers in making generalization about the characteristics of places" and the dangers of stereotyping, it does do a lot of both! There's an unhealthy obsession with then en-vogue Type A Personality Type and a little bit of over-reliance on anecdotes and just-so stories. Yet, at the same time, the data kind of bears that out. Certain countries and communities do have different concepts of time and this leads to markedly different behaviour.

It doesn't quite go down the Sapir–Whorf path - but there's certainly something about the way cultures refer to chronological concepts which shapes how prompt they are to appointments!

The data are fairly brief and presented only in tabular form. I assume, much like Hawking, they were told data and graphs turn away casual readers. The book is extensively referenced, although there's not much about reproducibility of either their or others' data. It is stuffed with great quotes about the nature of time and how technological developments have wreaked havoc on otherwise idyllic communities. Some of the history stuff is revelatory.

While it does span the world, the book orbits the twin loci of American and its then-archrival Japan. The Japanese economic miracle was in full swing when this book was written and there's some hand-wringing about whether Japanese concepts of time are incommensurate with Western (read American) notions of productivity.

The end section contains eight lessons which can be applied by anyone who is changing country and culture - they're designed to help you mesh with your new community as you adapt to their rhythm of life.

If you're happy with a meandering philosophical Smörgåsbord of ideas, this has plenty to keep you interested. I'm sure it is rather dated now, but it is fascinating to see exactly what value people around the world place on time.

This is a curious and mostly charming book about therapy. It is presented as a (somewhat contrived) Socratic dialogue between Skynner the teacher and Cleese the pupil. Skynner lectures on while Cleese interjects with "that's too clever to be convincing" and other witty remarks. It is fun to have a somewhat sceptical interlocutor but it does get a little wearisome after a while.

The basic of the premise is much the same as Larkin's "This Be The Verse". We all have various neuroses and blockers that wall off parts of our personalities. These prevent us from living our best lives and are often (inadvertently) reinforced by our families and spouses. The solution? Go to therapy and take your family with you!

Some of the notions within the book are a little outdated. The stuff about homosexuality and "trans-sexuals" probably doesn't stand up to modern scrutiny. They're neither cruel nor callous when discussing it, and seem to agree that so-called conversion will do more harm than good. Similarly, while not excruciatingly sexist, it is a bit painfully blokey. The constant whinging about "women’s libbers" doesn't help - nor the stuff about Cleese hitting his daughter - and the book would have been better if anyone other than a PSM had been involved.

Still, for a book written in 1983 there are some terrifyingly modern predictions within its pages:

John:  You mean a politician who’s been a rebel all his life might find it difficult to be sufficiently firm if he ever got put in a position of power?

Robin:  Either that, or else he’d become very authoritarian but pretend that all his decisions were really being made democratically, on behalf of the silent majority perhaps, or the proletariat.

I can't think of anyone like that. Can you?

Similarly, the book is rather good at turning its ire onto groups of people:

John:  So if we look at mainstream British politics, it’s perfectly healthy that the parties should get worked up and angry with each other during a debate or an election, because they can let those feelings go later and talk to each other on a friendly basis.

Robin:  Yes. After all, politics is the art of the possible, isn’t it? No one’s going to have exactly the same views, so you need to respect each other’s differences and try to reach a reasonable compromise if you can.

John:  But the real extremists have difficulty with this, don’t they? They don’t seem to be able to see their political opponents as people who happen to hold different opinions. They really seem to view them as bad people.

Robin:  Well, you see, people like this need to use their opponents as dustbins, somewhere they can dump all the bits of themselves that they can’t accept. Just like the scapegoat in a sick family. So they need to hate their opponents to keep themselves sane.

Do you feel seen?

Like lots of books, it is very keen on diagnosing the problem but slightly hazy about providing the solution. There aren't any exercises to do or worksheets to fill in. I think it is assumed that anyone reading the book will recognise themselves in the pages and immediately pick up the Yellow Pages to find a therapist.

On a technical level, it is disappointing that the cartoon illustrations are extremely low resolution and blurry. There's also no alt text. That said, they're a bit naff; so you aren't missing out on much.

An interesting enough curio, but there are probably more rigorous and useful books out there.

Everyone raves about this series, so I thought I'd grab the first book. It's basically fine, I guess.

It is moderately amusing having the Muderbot be an awkward teenage boy who just wants to watch videos and cringes when people stare at him. But it is a bit one-note. Similarly, evil corporations hiding details from exo-planet surveyors is a trope which has been a thousand times before.

This is a novella, serving to introduce the protagonist and fill us with a little too much exposition. The trouble is that nothing much happens. There's a bit of world building and a light smattering of action - although I found it rather plodding.

Essentially, a lot of telling and not much showing. Rather underwhelming given the hype. I might give one of the many (many!) sequels a go once I reach the end of my reading list.

This cybersecurity book is badly written, contains multiple offensive stereotypes, is technically inaccurate, and spends more time focussing on the author's love affair with the New York Times than almost anything else. Seriously, if you take a drink every time the book mentions the NYT, you'll spend most of the chapters drunk. Which, to be fair, is probably the best way to experience it.

The epilogue pre-emptively complains that "the technical community will argue I have over-generalized and over-simplicifed". I don't have a problem with that; it is essential to write about cybersecurity for the lay audience. But this book just gets things wrong. As a quick sample:

Some pushed to have his cybersecurity license stripped.

Does anyone know where I can get one of these fabled licenses?

Jobert would send discs flying out of Michiel’s hard drive from two hundred yards away.

If you can make a disc fly out of an HDD, something has gone very wrong!

It does become moderately interesting when the author stops gushing about the NYT and describes some of the implications behind the hacks which changed our world. The descriptions of Stuxnet, EternalBlue, and other cyberweapons are well done. But it quickly lapses back into lazy clichés.

For example, hackers are variously described thusly:

Every bar, at every conference, was reminiscent of the Mos Eisley cantina in Star Wars. Ponytailed hackers mingled with lawyers,

Their diet subsisted of sandwiches and Red Bull.

These young men, with their sunken, glowing eyes, lived through their screens.

hackers—pimply thirteen-year-olds in their parents’ basements, ponytailed coders from the web’s underbelly

Germans don’t do small talk, and they don’t do bullshit.

Then there's this:

To any woman who has ever complained about the ratio of females to males in tech, I say: try going to a hacking conference. With few exceptions, most hackers I met were men who showed very little interest in anything beyond code. And jiujitsu. Hackers love jiujitsu.

I don't even know where to start! Sure, the gender ratios are skewed, but every hacker I know has multiple interests and I don't think any of them include jiujitsu!

It's also sloppily edited. There are multiple odd typos and weird inconsistencies. For example:

Leonardo famously labeled himself with the Latin phrase senza lettere—without letters—because, unlike his Renaissance counterparts, he couldn’t read Latin.

He used the phrase "sanza lettere" - not "senza" - see Codex Atlanticus.

not the testosterone-fueled “boo-rah” soldier Hollywood had conditioned us to.

I can't find any reference to boo-rah outside of Hallowe'en articles.

Panetta told an audience on the USS Intrepid in New York. “They could derail passenger trains, or even more dangerous, derail passenger trains loaded with lethal chemicals..

That's not what he said. The author has cribbed a incorrect transcription from - of course! - the New York Times.

Do passenger trains tend to carry lethal chemicals? No, obviously not. It took me less than 5 minutes to find the original video. At 1h 8m 22s, Panetta clearly says "derail trains loaded with". No "passenger".

Littered throughout attackers’ code were references to the 1965 science fiction epic Dune, a Frank Herbert science fiction novel set in a not-too-distant future

I'm not a big enough nerd to have read Dune. But most scholars agree it is set in the far future.

A century and a half earlier, in 1949, he reminded the crowd, a dozen countries had come together to agree on basic rules of warfare.

This book was written in 2020. While 1949 is a long time ago, it isn't a century ago. Perhaps this is a reference to the original 1864 convention?

I'll begrudgingly admit that the book does a good job of explaining some of the problems facing the world as cyber-warfare takes hold of industries and nations. But it is hidden behind so much American hegemony and basic mistakes that I found it borderline unreadable. On the rare occasions that the author stops unnecessarily inserting themself (and the New York Bloody Times) into the story, it can be rather interesting.

This is too important a story to be written up this badly.

This is an excellent "dipping" book. There are nearly 200 articles ranging from short anecdotes, multi-page synopses of complex topics, and quirky little asides. Rather than a linear history of computing, each short chapter ends with a multiple-choice "GOTO".

From there, you take a meandering wander throughout retro-computing lore.

Some paths lead to dead-ends (a delightful little Game-Over experience) while others will send you round in loops (much like any text adventure). I've no idea if I actually read everything - although I did stumble onto some Easter Eggs!

Some of the knowledge in here is of the geeky arcane trivia which is of no use to man nor beast - yet strangely compelling to anyone who remembers POKE, CHAIN, and all the other esoteric commands. Some of the stories you'll undoubtedly heard before. Others are deliciously obscure.

Sadly, the book is caught up in the continuing Unbound drama so is rather hard to buy. There are signed copies available from The Centre for Computing History.

I'm grateful to the kind friend who lent me their copy.

I had the most intense time reading this book. Do you ever see the date of a famous event and notice that it is also the date of your birthday? When I do, my brain gets a fun jolt of recognition. This book is set perennially on the 18th of November - my birthday. My poor little brain was exhausted and satiated from the repeated mentions. A most curious experience.

It would be easy to dismiss this as "Groundhog Day" but French. Like the movie Palm Springs, it revitalises the "time loop" concept. Told through the diary of a woman trapped, we get an intimate sense of her claustrophobia and resentment.

The novel is quiet and contemplative. Much like "In Search of Lost Time", it revels in describing the mundane. Although the prose is much more captivating than Proust! It meanders in lovely an unhurried way as our protagonist attempts to first understand and then make peace with her predicament.

You could read it as a meditation on dementia - as her partner forgets every previous day. Or on divorce - as she attempts to hide in her own house. Perhaps it is an allegory for environmentalism as she tries to leave no mark on the world?

I got to the end stunned by the journey - and I completely understand why it has attracted such a passionate following. That said, it was so intense that I'm not sure I can handle reading the next six(!) in the series.

Why am I reading so much about death lately? This is a wryly funny and cosily charming book about council funerals.

Evie King conducts Section 46 funerals under the Public Health Act. If you die and there's no one else around who is able to arrange your funeral, the local council steps in. This could be a coldly bureaucratic process with no wiggle room for anything other than perfunctory sympathy. But humans are going to human. Why wouldn't you put some effort in to making people feel cherished in death?

In many ways, this is what Cameron's "Big Society" should have been about. Giving empathetic and passionate people a chance to serve their community and enrich all our lives. And, I guess, deaths. But austerity makes it hard to stay motivated when you're doing multiple people's jobs for a fraction of the pay.

This isn't to say King is a whinger - quite the opposite - but she is clearly frustrated that she cannot do more. People who interact with the state are rarely in a good emotional or financial place. Those interacting with Section 46 deserve more support than is available to them. What King does is marvellous - but necessarily limited. In effect, it is a series of short stories each taking a look at a different death and how she tried as hard as possible to make the funeral process as painless and uplifting as it can be.

The book is, naturally, a little upsetting in places. It isn't so much that people die; it is how society reacts which causes such emotional turmoil. Why are people sometimes abandoned? Why do reconciliations never happen until it is too late? How do we deal with trauma?

It is an excellent book but it is rather annoying that the publisher, Mirror Books only makes the eBook available via Amazon. There's no other way to read it - not even via a library! I resorted to borrowing the audiobook. This was the first audiobook I've ever listened to - and it was a rather curious experience. The author's voice was slightly hesitant at first, but gradually became more passionate and evocative. It was wonderful to hear her tell her story directly.

I bought this book for the title alone and I'm glad I did! I don't think I've seen any of Hayley Morris's comedy sketches. To be honest, you don't need to be a fan of her work to appreciate the humour and courage in this book. It could quite easily have been a cash-in celebrity autobiography - light on the details and full of charming anecdotes - and I'm sure her fans would have snapped it up.

Instead it is a darkly funny meditation on intrusive thoughts, panic, and acceptance.

Her prose is exceptionally good - I loved the way she described doing the washing up as "giving a dinner plate a little bubble bath" - it's also extremely relatable. Everyone occasionally thinks "what if I just ran away?" or "what would happen if I dropped this glass?" For most people it is just a passing moment; but for Hayley it is something more intense.

All of this is smuggled to the reader hidden within poop jokes, tales of teenage awkwardness, and millennial angst. It is consistently funny which makes the sudden switch to pathos all the more effective. It morphs into a tender tale of loss, loneliness, and something else beginning with L which will make me sound erudite.

I wouldn't describe it quite as a "self-help" book, but I think that's clearly part of the intention. Lots of people need to know that their (parasocial) friends find therapy useful. Having someone influential describe the journey to better mental health in such a relatable way will undoubtedly help others.

It is refreshing to read a political polemic which contains useful actions the reader can take. Too many books about the social problems with technology end up being a diagnosis with no cure.

Paloma Oliveira's new book (with technical review by my friend Dawn Foster) is a deep dive into how we can all make Open Source more inclusive and equitable.

Unlike most tech books, it doesn't follow the usual pattern of restricting itself to the US hegemony. It is very focussed on the EU and the needs of people around the world. It is clear in identifying many of the problems which arise when people say they just want to focus on tech, not politics:

When projects focus purely on technical excellence without considering accessibility, they create implicit barriers. Documentation written only in English, community discussions held during North American business hours, or development environments that require high-end hardware all reflect choices that determine who can participate—though these choices often remain unexamined.

This is profoundly important. The book isn't afraid to be challenging. It links the way companies extract value from the commons to the way colonisers extracted value from the lands they "discovered".

There are a few missteps which I didn't care for. While it starts as very casually written, it quickly finds itself getting into the weeds of political philosophy. I think that's a necessary evil. But I don't know how easily people will be convinced by passages like:

Bratton notes secessionist withdrawal in traditional territories and consolidation domains in stacked hemispheric, the continuing expansions of nebular sovereignties, and the reform of conventional States into regional platforms.

Similarly, there are a few "just-so" stories which are fictional parables. I think they would have been more convincing as actual case-studies.

I did find myself skipping some of the background in order to get to the parts I found more interesting. The chapter on "Political Rhetoric and Institution Validation" felt a bit out of place and I didn't get much from it.

But, after all that theory, there is a lot of practical advice. From how to structure your README to how to communicate change to your community. Even better, all the templates and resources are on GitHub.

It is thoroughly referenced and gave me lots of new rabbit-holes to follow Rather pleasingly, it cites my 2020 blog post "Please Stop Inventing New Software Licences" as an example of the ways in which corporates often try to stifle open source.

If you want to help Open Source succeed, you owe it to yourself to grab a copy of this book.