Litsy

Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI | Yuval Noah Harari

pick

Not exactly “brief” at 17+ hours, I felt like I was taking a college class on AI and the history of communications. YNH shares ideas about how humans network, how information travels and how terrifying our online world currently is and where we go from here. If you have an interest in AI and its future, internet bots, how our online information is taken and used, this book gives you a lot to think about. I enjoyed the ideas I leaned about.

ChaoticMissAdventures What if you have a deep seeded hatred for AI to the point that your firms IT director will not let anyone in the firm mention AI to you any longer? Will this help give me ammunition to fight "progress"? ? Or maybe make me less angry about how much water these programs are using? 8h

Cortg @ChaoticMissAdventures Ha! Where I work we actually have an AI teams page where everyone bitches about it and how we can do our job while minimally using it and it‘s where I came across this title. Unfortunately, AI‘s not going away. My thought is to stay informed and understand it. Keep your friends close and your enemies closer kind of thing. It has so much potential to be dangerous in so many ways. (edited) 8h

Cortg @ChaoticMissAdventures Yes, it‘ll give you ammunition in many of his ideas. 8h

ChaoticMissAdventures @Cortg for sure on enemies closer! I have figured out searching Google by putting -noAI gives you responses with out the AI crap which has helped so much. 7h

21 likes1 stack add4 comments

ManyWordsLater

Why Look at Animals? | John Berger

From the “pay what you wish” cart at the library. Going to give it to my dad.

55 likes

Custo7

Borges oral | Jorge Luis Borges

El desierto es un laberinto sin paredes

GatheringBooks

Jacob's Room: The Shakespeare Head Press Editon of Virgina Woolf (Revised) | Virginia Woolf

#WickedWhispers Day 27: #Grave

Eggs, Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks

Alwaysbeenaloverofbooks 🪦🩶 💀 4w

Eggs 🩶💀🪦 3w

35 likes2 comments

The_Penniless_Author

Unforgivable: And Other Writings | Cristina Campo

pick

This book melted my brain. I can't claim I fully grasped everything Campo laid out in these essays, even after multiple readings. Attention is good, imagination bad. The Gospels, (true) poetry, and fairy tales are good, realist fiction and contemporary are bad. Virtue can only be found in an ascetic, hermetic lifestyle. I'm not sure I can wholeheartedly endorse a worldview that dismisses the Renaissance as a "universal disaster", but I have...?

The_Penniless_Author ...to admit that a lot of what she argues rings true, even when I found myself having an immediate and visceral reaction against it. Whatever else Campo is, she's a genius. I wouldn't say this is an "enjoyable" book (not in a million years), yet I guarantee I'll still be thinking about it long after I put it down. 1mo

The_Penniless_Author I should also mention that Campo writes some incredible sentences. The strength of her opinions lies heavily in the quality of her writing. I'm continually shocked to find myself being persuaded that the correct course in life is to drop out altogether, move to the desert, and become an anchorite Catholic monk. 😂 1mo

The_Penniless_Author I also feel compelled to add that Campo is kind of a whack job and believes that illness has its roots in spiritual decay and asserts - sincerely, by all appearances - that "wild creatures do not usually attack children" because children are "the saint's model". ? You can see her slipping further into religious fundamentalism as the book progresses, and even her excellent writing can't save her from becoming tedious by the end. 1mo

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The_Penniless_Author

Unforgivable: And Other Writings | Cristina Campo

#FirstLineFridays @ShyBookOwl

To accuse the French fabulists of frivolity because they adorned their fairies with a handful of ostrich feathers is to "have sight and not perception."

28 likes

Gleefulreader

Nostalgia for the Absolute | George Steiner

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Another from the Massey Lecture series. Steiner‘s premise is that western civilization continues to look for certainties - in Marxism, in Freud, in astrology and the anthropology of Levi-Strauss - to fill the gap left behind by the decline of the Christian religion. He further posits that the search for ultimate scientific truth (for ex. that one day the earth will cease to exist) is something we cannot grasp which is why we turn elsewhere. Con‘t

Gleefulreader This is a good companion to The Prisons We Choose to Live Inside, and is still relevant today. Important note: it was written in 1974 and therefore there is some language in reference to hippies and their appropriation of Eastern culture that is outdated. 1mo

10 likes1 comment

Gleefulreader

Nostalgia for the Absolute | George Steiner

“The cults of unreason, the organized hysterias, the obscurantism which have become so important a feature of Western sensibility and behaviour during these last decades, are comical and often trivial to a degree; but they represent a failure of maturity, a self-demeaning, which are, in essence, tragic.”

As relevant today as it was in 1974.

5 likes

Angeles

El infinito en un junco: La invenci�n de los libros en el mundo antiguo | Irene Vallejo

so-so

Extremely erudite and well written but it falls awkwardly between history of books, mainly in the ancient world and the author‘s memories about books and family; as well as philosophical musings about reading and life. I dislike this kind of messy book. I expected a history of books and writing in ancient times and I am not interested in the memories of the author or I would have picked a memoir.

8 likes