This book gives a very detailed, very well-written, history of OpenAI. But much of the author's complaints seem like generic complaints that the company is not adequately contributing to a progressive society. And, if it weren't for the spectre of AGI looming menacingly on the horizon, the misbehavior of OpenAI executives would seem pretty mundane.

I'm about two-thirds through, and I've ground to a halt. The Bono who sings "You've got to leave it behind" and "I will begin again", and who tells concert-goers that there is no end to grief and that's how we know there's no end to love--he makes scant appearance in this book. Or at least his lyrical gifts seem to be buried under other stuff that makes reading the book a depressing experience for me.

I can't think of another book that I've read cover-to-cover and gotten so little out of. I was hoping to gain some insight into how AI will affect our future, but I really didn't.

Your mileage may vary, of course. If Adorno, Lacan, Zizek, Derrida, and Deleuze are among your favorite authors, this might be your cup of tea.

Very smart, powerful novel. There are episodes that are meant to feel like a punch in the gut, and they do. It's not clear whether Horowitz intended for there to be three distinct authorial voices, but it felt to me like they were there, and this feeling added to the sense of authenticity.

At the start of this book, Horowitz warns that it will reveal the outcome of "Magpie Murders". I would supplement his warning with the advice that you will probably get more out of "Marble Hall Murders" if you read (or watch) "Magpie Murders" first.

I didn't enjoy the ending. I didn't feel like the narrator played fair with me, the reader. I didn't enjoy the book enough to go back and see if I could collect specific instances of when the narrator didn't play fair. And, finally, I don't enjoy Horowitz's pastiche as much as when he's writing in his own voice.

Not as good as "The Word is Murder", but then "The Word is Murder" was very, very good.

I give "The Sentence is Death" the same one point demerit for "mature" content that I gave "The Word is Murder". If that stuff doesn't bug you the way it bugs me, you can add that point back on!

I think I would have had no difficulty sensing that this book wasn't written by Arthur Conan Doyle if I hadn't already known. Horowitz's Sherlock seems to talk quite differently from Doyle's Sherlock to me.

Through the main part of the book, it felt to me like Horowitz was hamstrung by his attempt at Sherlockian pastiche. The conclusion, however, is quite powerful, and earns House of Silk an overall 4-star rating, in my opinion.

It is so much different reading a smartly-written mystery than one that drags. And Horowitz is very smart. And to think that I didn't even know he existed until last year when I watched Magpie Murders on PBS and then decided to read some relevant Wikipedia articles as background.

Being smart didn't prevent The Word is Murder from being incredibly intense in spots. I think I will have to read some uneventful science text, say Physiography of Western United States, to calm me down before moving on in the Hawthorne & Horowitz series.

Some have objected to the way that the novels in this series have been framed, but if Bronte could present Wuthering Heights the way she did, The Word is Murder can't be considered beyond the pale, can it?

One point was subtracted because I'm a prude and this book would have been just fine with 5 or 10 fewer F-words.

I found the wooing towards the end to be almost unendurable, but it accounts for less than 5% of the book, with the rest being smart Victorian literature. There are violent antagonists, but the real creeps are some of the local clergy and gentry(?). If you're like me, they'll make your blood boil.

I was disappointed in this book for the following reasons:

(1) Despite the author being a research mathematician, there is no math in the book, in particular no attempt to explain anything about how AI works.
(2) Much of the book seems devoted to the general Christian story, with at most a tenuous connection to AI.
(3) Some of the content of the book is dated, and in fact was so even by its publication date of 2020.
(4) The author devotes a lot of space to quoting the opinions of others instead of crafting a convincing argument on his own.

On the positive side, the author does remind us of the reassurances provided by the Gospel (if such a reminder were necessary).

Blurry Blu-Ray. Dance of the Cygnets not nearly as good as the 2018 performance of Hinkis, Gasparini, Pajdak, and Harrod.

I am teaching out of this book this semester, having taught out of Klenke, Cinlar, Williams, and Bauer in previous semesters. Each book has its plusses and minuses. My impression is that Durrett is harder to understand than the others. For example, I recently taught the section on establishing existence of Brownian motion using Kolmogorov's Extension Theorem, which Durrett does in Theorem 7.1.2, Theorem 7.1.3, and Lemma 7.1.4, but it's a little hard to tell where the proof of one result ends and the proof of another result begins. If I were exceedingly knowledgeable about probability, this wouldn't be much of a problem, but as an instructor I need the assistance of a very clearly written textbook!

The epilogue reaches conventional progressive conclusions, but the information-rich text that precedes it undercuts those conclusions. This seems to be not only my opinion but also the opinion of the "indigenous academics" whose criticism of the book Wikipedia discusses.

The book has very wide outside margins containing marginal comments with very little information content. In order to accommodate these wide outside margins, the inside margins are narrow enough that the text extends into the shadow of the binding, and the font is small enough that some symbols can't be read (by me) without a magnifying glass.

This is a shame, because the content of the book seems to be top-notch. Fortunately, the author has made a pdf of the textbook available on his webpage.

Often sarcastic, but sweet at the right times.

Parts remind me of C.S. Lewis's Pilgrim's Regress (of all things), and they were published just a year apart.

If you're wondering about the television phones and all the private air travel, don't overlook the fact that it was supposed to have taken place in the near future, from the perspective of 1932.

This book is recommended on the Internet for those seeking good, clean fiction. It does qualify as clean, but I wish the recommenders had made clear that it is a romance novel. I adore all of Jane Austen's novels (for their style and wit and morality), but I don't care for the romance genre per se. I forced myself to finish the book, but I didn't enjoy reading it.

Your mileage may vary.

I think the editors warned us up front that there would be repetition, and they weren't kidding. If I never again read about buttes, buttresses, walls, precipices, etc., that are red, yellow, white, vermillion, etc., it will be too soon. And Lund, Utah, may have gotten more references in this one book than in all other books combined. (Not really, but come on!)

It just feels to me like there was plenty left unsaid about Zion that would have been better than repeating other things.

I had just finished reading Dünkirchen and was looking for an antidote for exposure to all that gore. I thought I could use some light-hearted G-rated fiction, so I plucked this book off the shelf where it had been languishing for two decades. I mean, the title did sound funny and the cover was bright and colorful.

Wow, what a bad choice. Derbyshire shares with us the vulgar expressions in common use in Hong Kong, explicit details of how he thinks it feels to participate in a gang rape, etc. Don't make the mistake I did and confuse paleoconservatism with social conservatism.

Having found cause to object a bit to the tone of a couple of Farmer's later books, I was pleasantly surprised by this one. It's hard to imagine how it could have been written more charitably and generously than it was. And it clearly manifests Farmer's skill as a writer (which few people who have sampled his wares have had cause to doubt).

I appreciated the book's candor about the long-term history of the Glen Canyon area. I had learned about the Navajos' relatively late migration from Canada to the American Southwest in general from various books in Yale University Press's Lamar Series in Western History, but I was surprised to learn from Glen Canyon Dammed (and to confirm from other sources) that it was not really until the 1800s that the Navajos settled in Utah. It sheds some light on Steven Simms' efforts in First Peoples of Great Salt Lake to deny clear distinctions between one tribe/nation and another.

I think I acquired this book on the recommendation of Tim Spalding, founder of LibraryThing. Because of my profession, I should probably have a better understanding of the mathematics of AI. There's essentially no mathematics in the book. The endorsement on the front cover says that the book is "nuanced and captivating". Nuanced? I guess so. Captivating? I didn't really feel captivated. I'm guessing I have a pretty typical interest in AI and a pretty typical anxiety about its societal effects. Having read the book, I don't think my interest has increased or my anxiety lessened.

I think the book will appeal to those interested in psychology; it feels like there was a lot of that. While there was definitely talk of ethics, I don't leave the book feeling very enlightened about practical ethics as it pertains to AI. And it feels like maybe another book on AI might deal with other branches of philosophy in ways that this book doesn't.

So this book may be for you. It wasn't for me.

A random passage: "Place is conditioned by landscape and conceptualized in terms of experience and circumstance." To my taste, there was a little too much of that sort of writing and not enough of the type of writing you find in, say, Barry Cunliffe's works.

Also, it feels to me like Simms is trying to understate the level of animosity that existed between different tribes/nations.

Monday I will finish up teaching this book cover-to-cover to 19 advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students. It has been a good experience, and if I were to teach this class again I would very likely use the same book.

It is a thin book, but I was looking for a book that stayed focused. I was actually surprised how much meat there was in a mere 170 pages. By and large, the arguments are self-contained, demanding only facility with delta-epsilon arguments and an understanding of vector spaces, with very infrequent appeals to the basics of complex analysis.

Because the class I'm teaching doesn't have Lebesgue integration as a prerequisite, I deliberately chose a book that only makes passing reference to (big) L^p spaces. Instead it uses sequence spaces and spaces of continuous functions for most of its examples.

The book has typos, a list of which I'll be sending to the author, so perhaps they'll be fixed in later revisions. As it is, I consider them a small price to pay for as good a book as this one is. I think my own understanding of functional analysis has improved from reading it.

Think of the low rating I've given this book as a reflection of my own taste (or lack thereof) rather than an objective criticism of the author's achievement. I have not managed to tolerate well what I consider to be the book's repetitiveness. This is the second book I've read by Perry, and I guess her stories are just not for me.

This book has nearly 2000 ratings on Amazon, with an average of 4.4 out of 5, so clearly her writing connects with many readers.

Front-line soldiers of the North and the South in the Civil War apparently often acted with friendship rather than hatred towards those on the opposing side when their encampments were close together. This book describes many accounts of this, mostly taken from contemporaneous diaries and letters. I find this heartwarming.

The author occasionally inserts comments about racism and about the "Lost Cause" theory. The former make sense because the camaraderie apparently did not extend to Black Union soldiers. The latter seem at most tangentially relevant. Both give the feeling that they were inserted upon the request of the author's thesis supervisor or a reviewer.

The editor of the “History of the American West” series predicts that this book “will capture readers and win major prizes.” I thought that was rather presumptuous when I read it in the Introduction, but now that I have completed reading the book, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the prediction of winning major prizes comes true. It is an extremely well-written history, almost poetic in its rhetoric. And even though I’ve read a fair amount of Western history lately, I still learned a lot from this book.

My one major criticism is that the summing-up section “Creating the West” at the very end is tediously repetitious. If you have the strength to skip the final section of a book, you might want to skip the final section of this one.

Some minor criticisms:

1) On page 11, it says that Panama City (Panama) is “9 degrees north of the equator, 21 degrees closer than Boston and 16 closer than even New Orleans”. Actually, it is 33 degrees closer than Boston and 21 degrees closer than New Orleans.
2) On page 11, it says: “In 1849 about five thousand persons followed the Gila River route to Santa Fe and then across the southwestern deserts to Southern California”. But for westward travelers, the Gila River was a way out of Santa Fe, not a way in.
3) On page 43, there is an unnecessarily lengthy argument that 2-dimensional growth is more powerful than 1-dimensional growth, that is then followed by the statement that a certain quantity grows “by more than nine show more and a half times, from 640 to 2276 acres.” (It should be three and a half.)
4) As important of a book as this one deserved better proofreading. As an example, a sentence on page 72 ends with the clause “but even before the Civil War it clear that the disposal of much of for farming.”
5) On page 198, we read: “Even correcting for lively exaggeration, there seems something like a compulsive inflation of mayhem and dissipation that would be repeated over and again by visitors to the new country.” This seems to be saying that even correcting for lively exaggeration, there was lively exaggeration! show less

This history of the Utes is warts-and-all but (to this Anglo-American layman) seems eminently fair. And don't be misled by the fact that many of the other histories written by the author might be called "micro-local": The Ute Indians is very professionally done.

I feel that reading this book has corrected a lot of my misimpressions, both the naive ones I had before really reading any histories of the West, and the new ones I developed in the process of that reading.

Sarah Leonard singing John Harle's arrangement of "The Three Ravens" may not (in isolation) be that appealing to the common ear (such as my own), but the way it is used by Simon Schama in A History of Britain is breathtakingly heartwrenching. After seeing that show, it is worth the price of this CD to have access to that piece alone, and the memories that accompany it.

I read this book, because I quite enjoyed the Vera TV show. But I'm pretty sure I won't be reading any more of Cleeves' books.

I'm not a fan of modern fiction. I've read much worse than The Crow Trap, but it was more like an R-rated movie than I had hoped it would be. YMMV.

This is the last of 17 Wodehouse novels that I read this fall. He's a good comic writer, but there seems to be an awful lot of redundancy from one book to the next. The same general plot appears over and over. The illustrations by Cox in the Folio Society editions magnify this repetition in that all of the young women look the same, as do most of Wooster's old school chums.

This book, like the others, was a pleasant read, and I very possibly might buy more Wodehouse novels in the future, but I'm not expecting any surprises!

If I had paid closer attention, I would have known before buying it that this book is not just a description of the roadless areas of Utah but was a brief in favor of giving most if not all of these wilderness study areas official Wilderness status. Still, the authors seem very nice and don't abuse their privileges. They clearly love the Utah backcountry and seem willing to tolerate those who would recreate in these areas differently than they would. (If they must!)