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GenericMoniker

GenericMoniker@bookwyrm.social

Joined 1 year, 2 months ago

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Ethan Mollick: Co-Intelligence (english language, 2024, Random House N.Y.)

Ethan Mollick, professeur à Wharton et auteur de la populaire newsletter One Useful Thing Substack, …

Co-Intelligence

A generally optimistic take on what could be: Generative AI won't destroy education, it will be how everyone will have their own personal tutor. Smart executives won't lay off all of their human workers seeking cost savings but will use the productivity gains of AI to allow their workforce to do so much more than they could have previously.

Mollick covers some history of AI, current capabilities and limitations, and guidelines for working with it. But even a future rushing at us so quickly is difficult to predict, as the author acknowledges.

Brandon Sanderson: Wind and Truth (2024, Doherty Associates, LLC, Tom)

Dalinar Kholin challenged the evil god Odium to a contest of champions with the future …

Favorite moments

Content warning Things that happen... not so much plot

Stephen King: The Long Walk (Hardcover, 2016, Turtleback)

In the near future, where America has become a police state, one hundred boys are …

A boy goes for a walk

Content warning Maybe spoilers?

reviewed Witch King by Martha Wells (The Rising World, #1)

Martha Wells: Witch King (EBook, 2023, Tom Doherty Associates, LLC)

Kai-Enna is the Witch King, though he hasn’t always been, and he hasn’t even always …

Complex

Kai is a demon, which means he inhabits the bodies of humans after their death, and has various other powers. He and friends spend the book looking for another friend, which sounds pretty simple, but the world in which this happens has a complex backdrop of peoples, organizations and politics that is gradually revealed during a past and present timeline.

I'd recommend dedicating serious sequential reading blocks vs. the way I did it, which was in shorter snatches, occasionally with a few days in between. It made it hard to keep some minor characters straight and to understand some of the political situations. Do I not know what is going on because it hasn't been revealed yet, or because I forgot? Hard to tell sometimes.

Fredrik Backman: A Man Called Ove (Paperback, 2015, Sceptre)

A grumpy yet loveable man finds his solitary world turned on its head when a …

A Man Called Ove

Ove is a 59-year-old widower who is ready to end life so he can just be with his wife again, but keeps getting interrupted in his attempts by mostly incompetent people who need his help.

I think the author and I got off on the wrong foot because he made his grumpy old man protagonist just a couple of years older than I am (and I'm not old dammit!). So time felt all off for me through the book. When Ove is dating his wife, it sounds like they're in the 1950s, but his current neighbor is an IT consultant.

For me, there were just a lot of unlikeable characters -- but maybe that's just the grumpy old man's view of the world (mine or Ove's, take your pick).