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A good solid book that starts with "synthetic people" -- sentient robots that look and think like people, and can reproduce by hacking their self-repair functions -- and doesn't go down the rathole of "if only I were a real human."

Instead, vN is about what it means to be a real robot. Are you created for purpose? Is it right to seek revenge on people who created you and your children to be slaves? When you feel programmed love for humans who don't deserve it, how can you trust your own feelings and drives?

vN talks about all this and more. There are places where it's not realistic (in a world with working nanobots and some terrifyingly advanced technology, it's a little odd to think that human bounty hunters and police are still the primary means of law enforcement) but it's always emotionally true, down to the fraught relationship that Amy has with her grandmother, Portia.

Meh. Nothing really new in it. If you read Bruce Sterling's Holy Fire, you'd see the introduction to the world of the new, with improbable child geniuses -- and done much better against a European backdrop. The caper is a well known trope. The analysts behind the protagonists and the JITT are swiped from A Deepness in the Sky. And the wacky University hi-jinks was done by Stephenson way back in The Big U.

Which is a pity, because Robert Gu could have been a great character. Here's a man who was a complete bastard by all accounts, with a gift. Now he's dealing with future shock, and a world that no longer cares... and he can't make it care. And yet he's flat and off, thinking about "how to dominate" a 13 year old girl. No-one, not even the complete bastards, thinks like that.

So yeah. Not one of his better works.

This book is the literary equivalent of the movie "Sucker Punch" -- the blurb promises you ninjas, friendship, monsters, and betrayal. But by the time it happens, you feel stupider for having watched up to that point, and you can't wait for it to be over.

There are so many things wrong with this book. It doesn't read like a first novel, it reads like a first draft. It starts off with the Pipe exploding, and the protagonist and his friends suiting up and heading out. Then the story stops for five chapters to tell you about his life history.

The first two or three of those chapters, I couldn't figure out what had happened. Where was the story? Why on earth would someone write a child like a bad David Foster Wallace impression? And as I kept reading, I was overcome by a distaste for the protagonist that I hadn't felt in quite some time. There's a German word that I couldn't get out of my head -- backpfeifengesicht, which means "a face badly in need of a fist."

Thankfully, the precious bullshit and overwrought sentences calms down onces he gets into a military academy and things start to go wrong. Once there's an actual plot, then the other characters get a chance to breath as well and they stop quite so much like carbon cutouts... and then they get past the point where we came in (the pipe has blown, they're off to save the day) and it starts getting interesting.

...And then it starts going off the rails again.

The problem is ninjas. In a world which has armies, geopolitical conflicts, mass starvation and a soldier running around in the middle of it, bringing in Wacky Movie Ninjas is like watching The Walking Dead and then having pirates invade. It makes absolutely no goddamn sense, unless they're secretly Fantasy Gone Away Ninjas, which I seriously considered at some point. This is why I think it's close to Sucker Punch -- for all that there are ninjas and hijinks and derring-do, it makes no sense.

It gets worse from that point on.

At one point the protagonist is caught by the ankles, while falling off a building, by someone who's literally just decided to hang out underneath the balcony. No explanation.

There are mimes, all with the same name. I hated them.

The antagonist's rationale makes so little sense that at one point the protagonist even stops to wonder why someone would construct such a mindblowingly wasteful and over-complicated plan for so little result. Never explained.

The resolution is so incredibly stupid that I expected the next page to be a "ha ha, you didn't really it to go down like that" type fakeout. Nope.

I feel cheated out of the time that I spent reading this book, and I think slightly less of everyone who reviewed this book and said it was worthwhile. Still, having read it, I have decided what to do with it now: rather than donating it to the library, I'm going to recycle it so there will be one less copy of this book in the world. You're welcome.

As much as I like reading about technical stuff, this book was unsatisfying.

Admittedly, this book is a bit out of date now. And everyone is very earnest, and clearly thinking hard in this book. But this is roughly how each essay felt:

Person talks about how data science is important in [CHOSEN TOPIC]. Then, how [OBVIOUS PROBLEM A] is surprisingly related to [OBVIOUS PROBLEM B] and so after some thought, is something that deserved more attention and [NEW STARTUP] is specializing in [MONETIZING THE EMERGENT SYNERGY BETWEEN PROBLEMS A AND B]. This is clearly the beginning of a bright new future for [CHOSEN TOPIC].

[LINK TO NEW STARTUP, BIO ABOUT NEW JOB, BTW TOTS HIRING, CALL US!!!]

Okay, Audrey Watter's piece is really good.

"Beyond infrastructure issues, as engineers, the web app programming we’ve been doing over the past 15 years has taught us to build applications in a highly synchronous transactional manner. Because each HTTP transaction generally only lasts a second or so at most, it’s easy to digest and process many discrete chunks of data. However, the bastard stepchild of every HTTP lib’s “get()” routine that returns the complete result, is the “read()” routine that only gives you a poorly bounded chunk. You would be shocked at the ratio of engineers who can’t build event-driven, asynchronous data processing applications, to those who can, yet this is a big part of this space. Lack of ecosystem knowledge around these kinds of programming primitives is a big problem. Many higher level abstractions exist for streaming HTTP apps, but they’re not industrial strength, and therefore you have to really know what’s going on to build your own."

Whelp, I feel like an asshole for quoting science studies now. Turns out (who knew) that POP NEUROSCIENCE REALLY SUCKS.

This is actually not an easy book to read. Every few paragraphs, I felt like bashing my head into the wall, either because the science was so horribly flawed, or because the early Victorian quotes are so well meant and concerned and so enlightened... and 100 years later, obviously meretricious bullshit. Even the author comments that she had a hard time writing the book because of having such rich and fertile source material.

I have discovered the joys of kindle.amazon.com, so some good highlights:

"One study even found that the more men there are taking a math test in the same room as a solo woman, the lower women’s performance becomes. And, surrounded by men, she herself may come to grudgingly believe that women are indeed naturally inferior in math—and women who endorse gender stereotypes about math seem to be especially vulnerable to stereotype threat."

"In addition to clogging up working memory, stereotype threat can also handicap the mind with a failure-prevention mindset. The mind turns from a focus on seeking success (being bold and creative) to a focus on avoiding failure, which involves being cautious, careful, and conservative (referred to as promotion focus and prevention focus, respectively). Also, the more difficult and nonroutine the work, the more vulnerable its performance will be to the sapping of working memory, and possibly the switch to a more cautious problem-solving strategy."

"In line with this, it’s been found that the presence—real or symbolic—of a woman who excels in math somehow serves to alleviate stereotype threat."

"in the absence of the luxury of a male breadwinner, the occupational decision making of lesbians looks very similar to that of heterosexual men."

"Allan and Barbara Pease, for example, purport to demonstrate in their book Why Men Don’t Listen and Women Can’t Read Maps the striking sex differences in the sheer volume of brain devoted to emotion processing. [...] “emotionally-charged images that were shown first to the right hemisphere via the left eye and ear and then to the left hemisphere via the right eye and ear.” Should readers have both the time and the resources to check out the [...] references, it was a postmortem study. Possibly Sandra Witelson really did present her samples of dead brain tissue with emotionally charged images — but if she did, it’s not mentioned in the published report." BURN.

"when I survey the popular literature, I suspect that this will not be where the people of the future will find their biggest laughs. Frankly, I think they will be too busy giggling in astonished outrage at the claims of early twenty-first-century commentators who, like their nineteenth-century predecessors, reinforced gender stereotypes with crude comparisons of male or female brains; or who, like Brizendine with her talk of “overloaded brain circuits,” attempted to locate social pressures in the brain."

"Non-Hispanic white girls born in North America are sorely underrepresented: there are about twenty times fewer of them on IMO teams than you’d expect based on their numbers in the population, and they virtually never attend the highly selective MOSP. But this isn’t the case for non-Hispanic white girls who were born in Europe, immigrants from countries like Romania, Russia, and the Ukraine, who manage on the whole to keep their end up when it comes to participating in these prestigious competitions and programs. The success of this group of women continues into their careers. These women are a hundred times more likely to make it into the math faculty of Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, or University of California–Berkeley than their native-born white counterparts. They do every bit as well as white males, relative to their numbers in the population."

"Stanford University’s psychologist Carol Dweck and her colleagues have discovered that what you believe about intellectual ability—whether you think it’s a fixed gift, or an earned quality that can be developed—makes a difference to your behavior, persistence, and performance."