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The Martial Art of the Mind: Reading Rationality: From AI to Zombies
There’s a word Eliezer Yudkowsky uses early in Rationality: From AI to Zombies that I keep coming back to: Oops. “Oops is the sound we make when we improve our beliefs and strategies; so to look back at a time and not see anything you did wrong means that you haven’t learned anything or changed…
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From Prompt to Print: Asking Claude to Design a Robot Chassis
I’ve been working through Learn Robotics with Raspberry Pi by Matt Timmons-Brown — a wonderful hands-on guide that gets you building a wheeled robot step by step. One of the first tasks is sourcing or printing a chassis: at least 6 inches by 5.5 inches, sturdy enough to mount motors, a Raspberry Pi, and a…
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Ensittification – Amazon Example
At dinner last night, I talked to a young author about her book and in particular her sales on Amazon. As was indicated in Enshittification, Amazon takes an enormous percentage of the sales price, in addition to fees to have a store. Amazon sales lose money. But the author feels she must be on Amazon…
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Exit Farming: Survival in an Enshittified World
Cory Doctorow gave us the word Enshittification. Sean Carlton gives us the manual. Exit Farming starts from a blunt recognition: the system is not broken. The exhaustion, the subscriptions, the debt, the fragility—these are successful outcomes. They keep people dependent and predictable. Carlton’s contribution is not rage or reform, but literacy. Learn how systems farm…
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Arduino, Qualcomm, Enshittification
I use Arduinos in many projects, including robotics. Recently, Qualcomm acquired Arduino. It did not take long for Qualcomm to update its Terms of Service to dramatically shift from one of the most open source platforms to a highly restricted one. Here is a link to a reddit post that describes the current situation pretty…
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How Everything Gets Enshittified — and How We Can Fix It
Cory Doctorow’s Enshittification isn’t just a rant about Big Tech. It’s a field guide to how our digital world curdles over time—and how we might reclaim it. I purchased the Kindle version of this book. After I read the book, I started trying to withdraw from Big Tech. In prior book reviews, I put the…
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What Goethe Can Teach Us Today
I had once read that there were three men who were geniuses in three distinct disciplines. Goethe was one, along with Albert Einstein and Albert Schweitzer. Goethe has also been cited in several of my other, recent readings. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was no ordinary writer. As Rüdiger Safranski shows in his masterful biography, Goethe…
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Hype, Hope, and Hard Truths: What Smil Teaches Us About Innovation
I am a fan of Bill Gates. His solutions to some of the world’s greatest problems are thoughtful and interesting and on a grand scale. Not solutions available at a personal level. One of his favorite authors is Vaclav Smil, which prompted me to read this book. In Invention and Innovation, Vaclav Smil slices through…
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Adventures in Computation: Stephen Wolfram’s Vision of the Future
I have always been interested in computation and information, which attracted me to this book. I found Adventures of a Computational Explorer, interesting, though Wolfram’s style and egotism wore thin after a while. Towards the end I found myself skimming more than reading. Though the various software programs he developed seem effective enough, I am…
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DeAngelis Family Tech Interests 