Hcmc

** Unforgiving Realism ** I didn’t realize The Last Argument of Kings was considered grimdark fantasy until exploring reviews. To me, it’s just realism. The ending, in particular, stood out. Even for characters who achieve their life’s ambitions, success is a transition to another level of the same relentless game. Climbing the ranks only reveals another figure to grovel before. Progress means repeating the same mistakes—only now, the stakes are higher. ...

** Topspin and Emotional Spin ** Even for tennis prodigies, the odds of making it are astronomically low—maybe one in ten thousand. Both Agassi and Sampras beat those odds, and yet, neither grapples with the unknowable question: What if they hadn’t? What if they had just been great athletes who never made it? That alternate life—the life of the 9,999—remains outside their scope, and perhaps understandably so. Agassi’s Open, ghostwritten with J.R. Moehringer, is an emotionally raw, stylistically intense book. At times, it feels over-seasoned—but perhaps that’s fitting. This is a man denied a childhood, trying to find his identity in the rearview mirror. His tennis-obsessed father’s upbringing was essentially child abuse, a relentless regime of pressure and forced training that left little room for self-determination. The emotional flavor is heavy because his life was. Open is less a sports memoir than an exorcism of trauma. It’s as though Agassi is still looking for himself, and hoping the writing process can help. ...

** AI Winter is Coming ** AI is a technological revolution. We take for granted that such revolutions occur. Yet understanding their economic and societal consequences remains elusive. Looking backward is the only reliable compass, and today’s pattern is familiar: a new general-purpose technology appears, spreads unevenly, and begins the long, messy process of reorganizing everything around it. * “When general purpose technologies exist, they are a model that can be followed by all, but [whose] configuration takes time, about a decade or more.” * ...

** Middle Book Syndrome ** It doesn’t feel like that much happens. Characters grow, but I also want some plot! Glokta starts and ends in the capital city. Logen Ninefingers and his crew start and end without the Seed. The Northmen and the Union start and end the book on the front foot. To quote the Navigator, it’s the journey that counts. ** 22nd book of 2025 **

I should be reading in Chinese or about stoic philosophy, but The Blade Itself is… distractingly enjoyable.

** Down, out, and liberal in the 2010s ** I didn’t know it was possible to write a period piece about the last decade, but here we are. I’m still not sure what really compelled me, but I couldn’t put it book down. On this flight I forgot I was even in the air, where I’m coming from or going to, what year I’m in, I was just living inside the story. Maybe it’s because the story gradually felt familiar. Raising kids, even if you’re not climbing the same kind of corporate ladder as the characters, hits familiar notes. It’s grimdark, yet full of both overt and subtle moralizing, and every chapter ends with a life lesson like Grey’s Anatomy in space. ...

Daring to be Different Completed: March 19, 2025 Last edited time: February 9, 2026 1:39 PM Status: OBE Type: Book

This isn’t Robert Caro, but it’s still pretty good. Truman is probably the most relatable president I’ve read about. And as we enter into the twilight of Pax Americana, it’s poignant to read about the person who laid the cornerstones of it.

**Decohere ** * Ubik—the only book that reads you as you read it. Side effects include narrative dissonance and ontological vertigo. * Do books need to make sense? Ubik certainly doesn’t. Supposedly that’s the meta point - a dream, or constructed reality always has seams the reader can pick at, Ubik just makes it more obvious. The core narrative is about surviving in half-life, and different minds collide and cannibalize. Yet, if the narrative is not even an attempt at coherence, what are we left with? Art? A dream? Why do we even read? Maybe Ubik is the diving board from which the reader should jump into more profound thoughts. I just fell into the abyss. ...

** Wired for Thought ** The stamina required to endure the AI winter and emerge into the present era makes me grateful I didn’t choose academia. Worlds I See offers a reasonable introduction to the modern history of artificial intelligence and neural networks, though its publication date means it omits recent advancements. One intriguing idea Li introduces, though without deep defense, is her version of Dunbar’s number: how many concepts is the human brain aware of? She suggests 30,000—what could be called ‘Fei-Fei’s number’—as a probable natural limit to human cognition and labeling, aligning with dictionary entries and her goal for ImageNet. ...