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@skarra@infosec.exchange The author actually addresses that in the Introduction! He sort of apologizes for it, but he's a physicist and doesn't want to cover chemistry he's not familiar with and get it wrong. (I'm still pretty early in the book so I don't know how much chemistry it will or won't have)

The premise of this book is wonderful: translations between languages are always imperfect, and those slight mismatches give them power. In the world of this book, actual magical power. This is used to cause effects large and small in the industrial-revolution alternative-history setting of the book. The author, who herself was born in one country and grew up in another, and is a scholar of Chinese literature and language, brings that perspective to the book with force and with nuance.

I have mixed feelings about the world that the author creates; in many ways, it's very much like our world at the same point in our history. The same colonial empires, the same power structures, etc., just for slightly different reasons. I feel like this is not really fully taking advantage of the premise. On the other hand, key elements of the plot very much hinge on interactions with real historical figures and events - I suppose that only really works if the world has a history similar to our own. It also sets up a point of possible divergence from our history.

The story she tells is powerful, wide-ranging, and provocative. It touches on issues of race, class, and imperialism, and makes some of the power structures implicit in them explicit by giving them literal powers. It's a strong tale of struggle and empowerment, and certainly worth a read.

This is one of the books that I consider part of the "speedrunning modernity" set of discworld books; it's about the press. I enjoyed this book, but I think there are better ones in the series.

This book starts with the idea of accountability sinks: parts of a system that no one is responsible for, so there is no accountability for their actions. These are processes, algorithms, etc. that by design are not the responsibility of any one person, and which cannot be overridden so that no one can be held accountable for the outcomes that they produce. Davies makes the case that to some degree these are necessary in large systems, because we cannot really cope with systems in which there is personal responsibility for every decision. However, large systems can build so many accountability sinks that eventually no one is accountable for anything, and the system constantly produces outcomes that everyone involved claims not to want, and eventually break down.

From there, he goes into cybernetics, and the ways in which cybernetic theory describes the functioning and non-functioning of systems. One of the ways that accountability sinks make systems dysfunctional and unstable is that they break the flow of information: when you're unhappy with an outcome, there is, by design, no one you can express that unhappiness to that can do anything about it. At a small scale, this is tolerable and maybe even helpful to the health of the system. But when the accountability sinks are too numerous or in the wrong spots, the system becomes incapable of absorbing new information, eventually ceasing to respond to changing conditions, new needs, signs that it is failing, or growing dissatisfaction.

Eventually, all that is left is for those who are dissatisfied with the system's functioning is to pull the fire alarm (emergency brakes in Davies' examples). Davies' core thesis is that one of the problems with our modern large systems is that they are too full of accountability sinks, there are no nuanced ways of communicating what's going wrong, how it could be done better, what we actually want, etc. All we are left with is these single-bit messages where people signal 'something is going wrong' using the emergency stop mechanisms because that's all they can do.

And yes, this connects to AI, and so much more that's going wrong, but at this point you should probably just stop reading my review and read the book!