Pimpernel Sandybanks

I liked this better than the first book in the series

Revisado: 09-15-23

I felt like the pacing of the first book was a little slow. This was much better. I also was drawn into the system of technologies used in this book more so than the ones in the prior novel. All of Suarez’s stand on their systems of the near term technologies and characterizations aren’t flat, but they’re pretty low profile. If you’re looking for a book that stands on character interactions, this probably is not your cup of tea.

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Good book, aging like milk

Revisado: 03-08-21

Six months ago this would have been a great book, now it's a good book, in a year it will be very out of date. For the author to keep this book up to date it needs quarterly or every half year updates. This is no insult to the author, he does a great job here, it's the environment that he's writing about. I can understand why he would avoid the Sysifisian task of updating this regularly.

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Maybe good, depends on why you liked RP1

Revisado: 11-30-20

Like: Research into the history of video games and fantasy/scifi fictional works and the integration into the story of that history is compelling.

Don’t like: the Kuzwellian future Cline envisions doesn’t have a viable technology-geography and Cline ignores the power of the largest corporation to alter trajectory, making his Wade Watts character into a cardboard cutout of his RP1 persona.

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As a story this is good, too much fiction

Revisado: 09-21-20

The fact gathering that supports this book seems to be done to support a narrative, rather than investigating genuine curiosity. I would recommend "Jump Starting America" and "The Technology Trap: Capital, Labor, and Power in the Age of Automation" in addition to this book for a more balanced and hard-fact based outlook (the research that went into either of those books was more substantial than the research for this one). This book aligns itself with a few common misconceptions secondary to the primary subject. Insofar as "how innovation works" this is a reasonably good study.

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esto le resultó útil a 10 personas

It's a great story, but too fantastic

Revisado: 04-26-20

There's lots to like here in this hero's quest within the software world. There are also gigantic, gaping, drive a truck through it, oversights. The move in a month from SQL based systems to the no-SQL tooling is completely detached from reality. There are no search systems described (these systems are tied deeply into any ecommerce system and if they were using SQL the company would already be a goner). It's things like this that made this as fictional as The Hobbit. I would really like to see a *real* story of success and unsuccessful digital disruption put into this long form context. The ease with which the hero's circumvent executive control is the most unrealistic thing in the book, and is what made me give this 3 instead of 4 stars. The only old organizations that *might* have any chance of working across organizations like that are ones with "temp" executives. There's a reason so few old organizations are unable to make the change to digital systems, it's about control by people that don't understand technology and their fears around added lack of control, within this book that is entirely fictional.

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Technology deflation through the econ lens

Revisado: 04-15-20

Susskind, along with most economists is trapped by existing economic models, economics has a foundation of scarcity in it's models. What he doesn't say is that technology is both deflationary and exponential, he dodges this as an issue, if you look at the trends for Moore's Law, Swanson's Law, or the Cost of Genome sequencing you see cost curves that are accelerating. Susskind's Conditional Basic Income (CBI) doesn't address the accelerating nature of these factors and his dismissal of UBI doesn't address this either.

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esto le resultó útil a 5 personas

Great perspective of how learning really happens

Revisado: 02-05-20

Great overview of how to level up your learning skills without the fluff present in many other "super learning" books. Scott did a great job showing us what does and doesn't work for Ultralearning. Effort is 100% necessary in learning, there's no way around some level of effortful memorization. At the same time, memorization, drilling for practice, and work towards understanding concepts all require different tools that all must work together, The way you organize or map learning and schedule work can make a gigantic difference to your success.
I think Scott did a credible job reading his work, but may have been moderately better off with a professional reading substantial portions of it.

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insightful look re trends that will effect future

Revisado: 04-06-17

This is a broad, ambitious book. Yuval doesn't attempt to describe any given devices or technology in a Kurzweillian way. Instead he describes where humans are coming from and where we're going. He does this through a systems view. How our systems (social and political and philosophical) have been shaped in the past and uses that as a tensor for predicting future shapes for those systems. I like all of this. Yuval does this from as detached a way as is reasonably possible. My minor gripe is that the predictive surface is uneven, he seems to predict where individuals will head given an increased flow of easily accessible information, but fails to describe a post-liberal society. To me this seems like he's shrugging his shoulders at the forces in play, and I would have liked to see a couple likely directions.

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If this is an optimist's guide we're screwed

Revisado: 02-22-17

The picture painted by Thomas Friedman in this book is that we're moving into an age where security is a historical artifact is frankly terrifying. If you want to be relevant in the future you need to study, work and network all the time, If you're sleeping 8 hours a day then you've already lost. Somebody else is sleeping 4 and . The list of *must do* habits (not things you need to do once, but changes that you need to wrap your life around) are long and complex. I've read other reviews that suggested the message of the book was "you're going to be ok"... I don't think they read or listened to this book. Thomas's intent to be realistic makes this a frightening picture. His common sense list of 18 things the American government should do... did you get that 18 things. None of which is going to happen any time soon. He has similar lists for what individuals need to do. His recollections and revisiting the idealic microcosm of his childhood shouldn't allay any concerns, the area of the country he talks about is all but gone, it's effectively fantasy...you can see this when he talks about neighboring areas that don't share the same strength of community.

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Delivers value

Revisado: 04-13-16

While I tired of Bennett's ongoing mad-lib, fill in the blank style, the substance that he provides is clear and cogent.

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esto le resultó útil a 1 persona