Avogadro Corp
I think this is one of the most realistic and interesting portrayals of the development of artificial intelligence that I have seen. “Avogadro Corp” is a direct analogue to Google and it has an online email application just like Gmail. They are developing a new feature that auto-suggests ways to make your emails more persuasive. [...]
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Nexus
This book is about a futuristic “drug” called Nexus that is actually a liquid containing nanobots that interfaces with the user’s brain. When people take Nexus, they are able to feel the thoughts and emotions of other users around them. The main character of the book hacked the drug to allow him to install software [...]
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Volitional Action Items
When working on self-improvement, I often come across advice that sounds really good, but after reading it, I realize that I don’t have any practical ideas for how to incorporate the advice into my life. For example, if I hear “try to focus more on the present”, I recognize it as good advice and maybe [...]
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The Pragmatic Programmer
This book is full of practical advice for software developers. However, most of the advice is fairly simple and those with even a small amount of real-world experience will already know much of it. Also, the advice is of the kind that is very hard to learn from reading a book. You can read all [...]
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The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect
This is a fascinating story about the development of an omniscient, omnipotent artificial intelligence. Unlike most science fiction about AI, this one takes place not just after the AI has taken over, but also during its development. It is also unique in that the AI is actually designed to serve humans, so it creates a [...]
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Learn You a Haskell for Great Good
This book provides a quirky introduction to a very interesting functional programming language called Haskell. Haskell is one of the more modern functional programming languages. It requires a radical change in the way you think while programming. The tone of this book provides some lightness to an otherwise very heavy subject matter. However, don’t be [...]
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A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy
This book gives an academic’s overview of Stoic philosophy. It is written with an emphasis on practical advice, though there is also quite a bit of historical context added in. The main pieces of advice were negative visualization, internalizing goals, and voluntary discomfort. There were also many other points that weren’t as general, but still [...]
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Kingpin
Kingpin tells the story of an elite hacker who stole tons of credit card numbers online and became the center of the cybercrime community. It exposes some of the wild antics of the fraudsters and the efforts of law enforcement officials to put an end to the crimes. The story is pretty interesting, but I [...]
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Test Driven Development: By Example
Test-driven development is a systematic way of producing robust code. The idea is to write a test before you start writing the code that the test is meant for. This will ensure that almost all of your code has tests and it helps keep you focused on making small increments of progress that you lock [...]
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Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
The interesting aspect of this book is that it attempts to break down the process of refactoring code into a set of refactoring operations that each consist of a sequence of mechanical steps that are guaranteed to preserve the semantics of the program. This is really interesting because it means that you can teach the [...]
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