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A late 90s reading of Wired, examining the sexist and racist agenda of the magazine and the larger digital elite for whom Wired became a bible. Despite the book's age, its critique of Wired’s hypermacho, unproblematic technofetishism is still relevant.
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Kurkov’s minimalist style makes him, for me, one of the most interesting and entertaining writers working today. His prose is somehow caustically satirical whilst reading like a fairy tale. This story of time travel and heavy drinking had me hooked from the get go — I read it in one sitting.
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Using Haskell to illustrate ideas from logic is actually really helpful if you have a programmer's brain like I do. I fund the material on sets and relations especially helpful in getting my head round some pretty hardcore ideas. I intend to re-read and do the excercises sometime later in the year.
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I found tis book in the stack of old things in my Dad’s garage that I was sorting through the other day. It is actually really fascinating to learn about stuff like airways, how traffic is co-ordinated and how runways are named — especially given the context of Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 which is missing as I write this and as I read the book. I am sure some readers would find it rather dry, but hey, I had a long train journey.
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Rather old-fashioned and unproblematically sexist cricket cartoons. Also occasionally funny.
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Happened to have a PDF of this kicking around from a while back. It is a guide to healthy living with special reference to the kind of problems that programmers are likely to hit — carpal tunnel, eye-strain, back problems. Pretty solid advice and well written enough. There are no huge revelations, but all the material is based on actual peer-reviewed science, rather than bullshit or intuition, making that advice "worth following".
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The blurb mentions "Cute critters unit[ing] to save the world" — what’s not to love about that, right? But actually this was more a meditation on how we might fight industrial capitalism and actually win for a change. No real conclusions are reached about what might work, which is maybe a little depressing, but at least acknowledges the cale of the problem.