mahoneko

Unique, bite-sized insights into Japanese Language

Revisado: 02-01-23

This guy produces short lessons on various aspects of Japanese, many of them unique. He posts new lessons almost daily and I'm starting to feel like he's a friend I meet regularly. Try it out. Maybe start with the most recent episodes and work backwards. I follow him, so I get the daily updates.

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The greatest games designer and dev in history.

Revisado: 01-31-22

An absolute must read for anyone who has played, never mind developed computer games. I had not idea that Sid had made so many of the seminal games in history. Many great fundamental insights into game deign. The industry has come full circle so that indie designers can now again replicate what Sid was doing at the dawn of the industry.

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Very good but slightly tainted

Revisado: 12-23-21

It's a great expose (like the last one) of the video industry but there's an unacknowledged selection bias that the people he spoke to largely had bad experiences which left them outside companies, often without severance, people well treated might not be free to talk. Also the writer finds it hard to entirely keep his politics out of the book, silliest though is his naivete around business, and the corporate world. For example he calls out Curt Shilling for saying he took nothing out of his company when he was on the company healthcare plan and was repaid (a mere) 40k in expenses from the company he put 50m (USD) of his own money into. Seemed clear this was because Shilling later supporter the Republican presidential campaign. Later the write dismisses 'The Culture Wars' as just whinny young men who didn't want diversity, which is also a very biased and uniformed viewpoint. Such silliness made me question how well the writer understood what he was writing about and how honest his accounts were. Still once you take into account the extreme bias, there's a lot of information there.

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esto le resultó útil a 3 personas

Outstanding performance and writing.

Revisado: 12-13-21

Aside from protecting his children's' privacy, the book is an almost no holds barred account of Smith's life. This is the real Smith as opposed to the media persona. Incredibly well written and the audiobook performance (which has extras and performances/clips not found the book) is exceptional. Smith manages to sensitively address genuine social justice issues in passing where relevant, but avoids getting drawn into critical social justice/wokeism nonsense (which is impressive given the times we live in and prevalence of such views in Hollywood especially). A must listen for anyone who grew up over the 80s, 90s and into the 21st century. Surely one of the greatest lives of recent times from the author himself.

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Fantastic end to the arc series.

Revisado: 08-06-20

A few unnecessary preachy lines about pronouns in a novel which is otherwise almost entirely free from postmodernist (woke) nonsense was a bit jarring, but otherwise the novel is solid, ties up the previous books in a very satisfying manner. I recommend the whole series so long as you can, at least in part, get over your instinctive squeamishness about the whole idea of 'gleaning'.

Perfectly read by the narrator.

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Fractionally better than the last few installments

Revisado: 07-30-19

Although this series starters strong and lives off the characters created in the first two books it really feels very repetitive. You still might get a positive feeling from hanging around the characters a bit longer and there are some good lines and ideas in here, but really it's too thinly spread. Scott needs to slow down and really come up with something deeper if there are to be any more volumes.

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Great, great story, great writing, good ending.

Revisado: 06-20-19

The story was good, well researched, largely plausible given the primary suspension of disbelief. The writing was also excellent, intelligent and insightful, also athesticly beautiful. I sometimes thought the main protagonist was a bit melodramatic, but that was nicely offset by other characters around her who were very much the opposite, I really liked and appreciated that.

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Extremely good.

Revisado: 02-20-19

This is a great novel, at least as good as the first series, but smoother and without the glitches of the first book, none of the self consciousness around issues of prejudice, those issues are still tackled, but naturally without throwing you out if the story. The book seems to finish the series, but I can't help wishing for a third. Performance is also perfect this time.

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A great book, if slightly flawed in parts.

Revisado: 02-07-19

I enjoyed this book, and it has many truly great moments and will read the next book. It was slightly flawed in parts though.

I enjoyed the diversity in the cast of characters and I like that it addressed the prejudices of the 50s and 60s including terrible prejudices towards women, but I thought it was a bit too self conscious of the fact it was doing so, especially in the first half, not only did prejudice happen in the story and the characters dealt with it is best they could, but the author felt the need to sign post that it was being addressed as well and unnecessarily explain the discrimination to us, this kind of smacked of over-the-top virtue signalling by the author and just wasn't necessary, in fact at points it undermined what the author was trying to accomplish, even sometimes highlighted that perhaps she herself had some holes in her understanding of the cultures she was including. (For example did the astronaut from a Muslim background have to be a devout Muslim? For that matter did the Jewish couple at the the forefront have to have become so observant? Isn't it far more likely that someone with a Muslim or Jewish background who becomes an astronaut would either be a non-believer or at least take their faith fairly lightly?). The husband character was a little one dimensional too (it could have been a lot worse though), he is to some extent a male version of the one dimensional female characters that so plagued the SciFi of the era the books is set in (though at least he is not presented as a 'typical man' of the era, he is squarely a modern man of the best kind). Though the main antagonist is not one dimensional at all, he constantly crosses the line between nasty and redeemable, which left me impressed at the writing. As for the protagonist, it seemed rather implausible that a woman pilot of the era who and flown combat aircraft in WWII and is demonstrably cool in air incidents would be so prone to panic and so weak willed in many other circumstances, sure a bit of uncertainty, but panic attacks of the absolute worst kind seemed too much. Certainly while I was cheering on the efforts to get women onto the astronaut program, I was also thinking that the protagonist should absolutely never be allowed to pilot a space craft for everyone's sake, the implausibility of this did keep throwing me out of the story, and I had to be very tolerant of the implausibility to will myself back into the story, however that was doable because the bulk of the novel is very well thought out, and seemingly meticulously researched and though through and there are plenty of great pieces of writing, some of the writing around the wonder of space, space flight and flying generally was just fantastic, as was the protagonists reactions to those experiences (she never seems to suffer panic attacks in these situations thankfully).

The author reads the novel herself as she is an accomplished narrator, unfortunately this exacerbates the whininess of the protagonist in the first half of the book, but we get paid back for our persistence as the book goes on.

In summary the book gets off to a slightly shaky start, its self consciousness on issues of race and the greater focus on the main characters insecurity, grief and anxiety in the first half distracting from the story and the writing, however, this is more than made up for in the second half

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A great book, but solutions not fully thought out.

Revisado: 02-01-19

The first part (first 90%) of the book is priceless in its examination of AI and the rise of tech and AI entrepreneurship in China, this alone makes the book well worth reading.

Kai Fu is an extremely talented person who has the arrogance to match, though he has mostly recognized this character flaw (though it taints his solutions somewhat in the suggestions at the end).

The book is a disorganised at the end, the near term solutions for job losses are weak sauce, though his heart is clearly in the right place and later addressing long term solutions he ends up both rejecting Universal Basic income for being not enough of a solution (fair point) and for leaving too much up to the recipients (though he later appears to backtrack in this pointing out that diversity of human activity is a vital strength), he wants stipends only for those doing tasks that are considered to be doing worthy tasks by the government. It seems like he didn't research the UBI movement enough as in the end he essentially makes the case for UBI while renaming it, he wants a stipend that depends on people doing something socially productive, then he points out how people with unconditional income (pensions etc) tend to do socially productive things anyway and points out the difficulty of policing his conditional payment (I bet he's never had to go through the misery of applying for and maintaining right to unemployment benefit in his life). Finally he forgets he's living well within the bubble if the top 0.001% and that most families in the world could never afford his compassionate jobs etc... Not without a very hefty basic income which he rejects. It would be a nice idea if it could be made to work, but a very risky solution to rely on, no VC would back it that's for sure.

Still the whole book is well worth reading, even if the solutions are low on detail and a bit confused.

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