Reviews and Comments

I feel bad that I think there's interesting bits of this book but a lot of it is just is just a miss for me, it feels very unedited and repetitive where I keep finding myself reading a sentence and thinking "wait, I already read this part...no it's just almost the identical text"

Still enjoying it! Fun breezy read, nice change of pace from what I've been reading lately

Yeah I'm having some complicated feelings about the argument of this book so far

Like yes I agree that technological progress is often done by private entities in an undemocratic way

Yes I agree that regulatory agencies often take too narrow a view of risk and harm

But, I don't know, it feels like she's kind of arguing that to even develop technology we need a kind of consensus first that has looked at all possible potential harms and

I don't know

that doesn't really sit right with me. Maybe this is because of how trans I am but like I very easily see how this argument can, and in some ways has, been used to try and take away our healthcare as "harmful experiments"

and it doesn't help that she already has characterized nuclear plants as unequivocally dangerous

so I don't know, I'm going to see where she's going with these points

Interesting so far but I'm not sure I agree with some of the framing

Some of the stories in this were honestly fantastic. The Tower of the Elephant was awesome.

Then there were pieces like The Vale of Lost Women which is, just, incredibly racist in ways you can't ignore.

It's still worth reading for seeing how much of an influence Howard was on fantasy

It already feels a little dated but Ethan is legitimately thoughtful when drawing out the good and bad uses of modern LLMs for knowledge work.

It'll only take a couple of hours to read through, very breezy, but not dumbed down or inaccurate