📚 Finished reading: The Space Trilogy by C. S. Lewis:

• Out of the Silent Planet: A space travel story that is closer in flavor to Jules Vernes than Isaac Asimov. Had to remember that Martian channels were still a thing back in 1938. More nudity than I expected for a book of that time.
• Perelandra: What if you could be there when the serpent persuaded Eve to take a bite of the apple? With even more nudity, and a tedious end sequence that is more fit for an early Disney cartoon.
• That Hideous Strength: A biting satire of bureaucracy and social striving, with body horror, even more nudity, and a delicious R-rated end sequence that is as far away from Disney as you could possibly imagine even if again animals play a crucial role. It is twice the size of the first two books combined and well worth the time spent savoring it.

In design terms, this means that it is wrong for computer systems to tell people what to do and how to do it. In this view, reliance on artificial intelligence is abhorent because it installs a machine in the empty sky and recognizes that machine as the new authority. Instead, the computer should be a repository, a library in which anyone can find what they seek and to which everyone can add their own contribution. Tinderbox follows this path.

This is from Mark Bernstein’s new book Thinking with Tinderbox and I can only nod along.

📚 Finished reading: Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered by Ernst F. Schumacher, so enthralled I was by his guide for the perplexed that I quickly jumped to the more well-known of his works. It was good timing: Abundance is becoming the Sapiens of this generation and Small Is Beautiful is the antidote.

Even if the rich are not “idle rich”, even when they work harder than anyone else, they work differently, apply different standards, and are set apart from common humanity. They corrupt themselves by practicing greed, and they corrupt the rest of society by provoking envy.

This is from E.F. Schumacher’s “Small Is Beautiful”, published in 1973. More than fifty years later, don’t you wish we had more of the idle kind of rich?

📚Finished reading: Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind by Shunryu Suzuki.

📚 Finished reading: How Big Things Get Done by Bent Flyvbjerg, who lists Gerd Gigerenzer, Daniel Kahneman, Benoit Mandelbrodt and Nassim Taleb as his main intellectual influences. It shows. And since Flyvbjerg’s book is lighter than what people on that list tend to publish it can also serve as a gateway for those not initiated in probabilistic thinking.

📚 Finished reading: Wittgenstein’s Poker by David Edmonds. Learned much about Wittgenstein and even more about Popper. Both were wrong, as all philosophers are, but I can’t help thinking Wittgenstein was more wrong than Popper, being so obsessed with language which — turns out — is merely the most superficial layer of human intelligence and one that’s fairly easy to emulate. I do wonder what “little Luki” would have made of LLMs.

Good boy

📚 Finished reading: Feline Philosophy by John Gray promised cats, delivered a brief review of old philosophers. This is a book that could have been a listicle, and a forgettable one at that.

📚 While I wasn’t looking, micro.blog implemented a feature that made sharing what’s in my antilibrary much easier than I thought: bookshelves can now be embedded in a page. So, here is what I am currently reading, and here is the pile for 2025, though at some point I should add the previous years.