Reviews and Comments

Will Sargent

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Joined 9 months, 4 weeks ago

I like books.

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Andreas Zeller: Why programs fail (2009, Elsevier/Morgan Kaufmann) 3 stars

Review of 'Why programs fail' on 'Storygraph'

3 stars

Good but oriented towards desktop software and severely out of date when it comes to tooling.  There are lots of inquiring looks into research techniques like delta debugging but very little on how programmers actually debug in practice and how tooling can support their processes and constraints.

Cadwell Turnbull: The Lesson (Hardcover, Blackstone Publishing) 2 stars

Review of 'The Lesson' on 'Storygraph'

2 stars

its not really science fiction.  It's a character novel with aliens, the Ynaa, who are not believable as a race.  They are stand-ins for rich white people.

reviewed Machine by Elizabeth Bear (White Space, #2)

Elizabeth Bear: Machine (EBook, 2020, Gallery / Saga Press) 4 stars

Meet Doctor Jens.

She hasn’t had a decent cup of coffee in fifteen years. Her …

Review of 'Machine' on 'Storygraph'

No rating

Crisis makes some people—like me—feel alive, and it turns out that’s really bad for everybody, because when you don’t have a crisis in front of you, you might go out of your way to construct one.


and

It turns out, with further research, that human thought is, by its nature, not logical. We can lessen our susceptibility to confirmation bias, egocentrism, and denial. But it turns out that nearly everything about our decision-making process is emotional, and that this is actually a good thing. Because our conscious minds are slow and ineffectual, and if we actually had to sort all the information our subconscious minds process in order to present us with hunches, gitchy feelings, and the occasional epiphany, we’d never fit through the birth canal.