I was expecting another fairly journalistic-distant nonfiction experience here, but instead what I got was a gloriously opinionated fireball. The author is working in the music journalism rather than tech journalism tradition and the result is an excoriation of nobody’s favorite streaming service and the major labels (‘the majors’) who payola it.
The author is clearly passionate about independent music but takes pains to explore the culture of other genres and point out that there’s something there beyond just noises to put in the background. Muzak is a brutal accusation of any form of music, but it’s backed up with ample evidence here.
The history of personal computers is something you can find covered in all manner of media. It’s beyond a cult following and well into mythmaking. What’s often lost is that there’s a history of computing that reaches much further into the past; most histories treat anything before minicomputers (and, increasingly minicomputers themselves) as a given and tell the story of the PC. But the minicomputer era relied on prior art, and this is what we hear about in IBM.
If you ever wanted to know how hard disc drives or magnetic tape were invented or how early architecture was worked out this textbook is actually a treasure trove.
From my perspective the most interesting section is of course the chapter on Programming featuring early assembly (etymology: related to the fact that they were writing programs for the so called “Test Assembly?”) and ‘speed code’, stuff that predates the history of programming languages as such.
The AI Era (or, as I like to say, AI Crisis) can really be attributed to a single company: OpenAI. As such, it’s an important enough subject that I’m glad someone wrote a book about it before they vanish into a puff of debt.
The folly of OpenAI, thinking they could build a private nonprofit to create aligned AGI when they couldn’t even successfully align and control an Oligarch is an operatic tragedy and the meat of Empire Of AI tells that story. Hao manages to thread the needle between people-zooing the crazies as and the Hagiography of an Isaacson. Genuine appreciation for technological innovation is tempered with empathy for the people the process of its creation is harming. Its perpetrators are painted as human, not cackling villains, though you get the distinct impression of who gave interviews and who didn’t.
Empire also seems to set out to answer a nagging question I’ve had since the beginning of the AI Crisis: how serious are the folks at OpenAI about thinking they’re creating Skynet, and if so why are they doing it? What’s the backstory to the board coup? We get the inside story on both and the answer turns out to be that there were multiple factions within OpenAI (mirroring the opposing factions of accelerationists/safetyists) while still making it clear that both belong to a tiny subculture far out of step with the mainstream which suddenly has massive outsized influence on all of our lives.
A fine sequel to Weapons Of Math Destruction, incidentally.
This novel would appear to be a fixup of two short stories previously published. The sections covering those short stories are the best parts, but the beginning drags a bit in actually getting us there.
The pacing is weird (I suspect it’s due to the fixup) with long sections which are flashbacks or quotes and most of the action happening in the second half.
Also, the summary blurb would be a massive spoiler if it wasn’t completely incorrect. Don’t read the back cover summary. It says something that really isn’t true. The real hook is: our hero Alex Benedict wants to know what his uncle (father figure?) was trying to find out when his space liner randomly misjumped out of existence. It’s National Treasure but instead of American history it’s the detailed fictional history of a far future human space civilization organized around common defense against aliens. I wanted a space opera and I suppose I got one in a slightly roundabout way.
I will note that I read this because I started Polaris and realized that it was actually book two in a series several chapters in. I’m going to restart Polaris and see if anything makes more sense, but it felt pretty self contained (and I think the author improved a lot in the intervening decade and a half anyway.)
The setting has some interesting space opera set pieces, but my favorite is that the center of the character’s universe is a planet called Rimway, Earth is an afterthought.
Where Hartford County intrudes into Litchfield County, that’s where I’m from. Just into the intrusion actually. Like, if we gave it to New Hartford as part of a grand rectification to repatriate the Southwick Jog, it’s difficult to say if we’d be part of the deal or not without squinting.
We lived high on a hill in the region of Connecticut’s Western Uplands, our yard rising to an outcrop of the Rowe Schist bedrock of Ratlum Mountain.1 Rocks there sparkle with mica, which is hard to capture on a camera but produces a dazzling effect in person.
That bedrock was a jungle gym for us kids. Though it looks rough, I mastered running straight across it, front to back. From there, especially in winter when the foliage thinned, there was a clear view out of the mountains, across to the mighty Traprock Ridges that split the central valley.
It was there, but also digging through rocky topsoil (“rock farming”), driving through winding hill roads and up the mighty Avon Mountain that set me up to appreciate that someone went out and wrote the perfect guide for a Connecticut-specific (lay) geology enthusiast.
Bell’s Book
The Face Of Connecticut is divided into two parts: a the first is a region-by-region description of the terrain with a history of land use. Of interest to uplanders like myself is the knowledge that the forests are in fact quite young. Local lore points out that in New England the oldest trees are the ones growing into stone walls, but I don’t think I really took that to heart, no matter how many stone walls I saw running abandoned through forests, or huge trees I saw along them.
The second section starts off slow with Connecticut’s ties to the history of geological science, used as a way to explain the history of the field. Having already read Annals Of the Former World–constituent volume Basin And Range is name-checked here–this wasn’t terribly new to me. What’s exciting, however, is the focus on New England specifically, especially of the creation of the mountain ranges and, perhaps most engaging, the story of the Central Valley (also called the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts.) The filling in of a rift that almost became the Atlantic Ocean, impingement by lava flows, and the tilting of those layers to form the awe-inspiring traprock (basalt) formation visible from miles away is an adventure on a geological timescale.
The Internet Mystery
The book was published in 1985 by State geological and natural survey of Connecticut as “Bulletin 110.” An exhaustive list of Bulletins wasn’t forthcoming. When I went to look for some maps I could use to try and locate my old stomping ground in the bedrock, I found something curious: the entire book, online, in immaculate HTML. There’s no about page explaining it and the archive barely knows about it. In fact I was so worried it would disappear that I immediately downloaded the whole thing and hosted it on Orbital Fortress and also on the the Internet Archive.
The mystery of who was hosting it, at least, was easily solved: the index page on the IP address told us that it was the Talcott Mountain Science Center And Academy’s “project and secondary server,” copyright 1998-present. That’s probably why the images are disappointingly small, I wonder if they’ve been hosting this site since then!
It was no small undertaking, I imagine, circa 1998 (let’s say) to create such web book. It’s got a fully working index with links! It’s broken up by page! Who created this relic and why? It’s presented (presumably) exactly as the 1997 printing of the book. The archive goes back to 2016, but how far back do links to it go?
It has since disappeared, Talcott’s server presumably receiving a new IP or going offline. Just goes to show: if you see a cool old website, save it!
1: Not, one might note, Ratlum Mountain Schist, which is on the western side of its namesake, not the summit.
Dot Con was good but I felt it was lacking a lot of color, what it was like to experience the the bubble from the inside. Burn Rate has it in spades. This is the story of a single CEO in the midst of the dot com boom running around and trying to secure enough capital to keep his money-burning company afloat. The dialogue is worthy of a Max Barry or Ian M Banks novel. Especially his conversations with his wife/counsel.
Wolff is a bastard. He sells a grandmom-and-pop magazine company his lemon of a database, runs out of money, sells air like a conman and ultimately tries to screw his investors. He shows little or no concern for anyone but himself–not his wife, not his employees, and last of all his customers. His concern is singular: he wants a big payout.
What’s truly insane is that this book was out in 1998. This wasn’t some expose of the bubble nor did the account of numerous dotcoms being dead companies walking or outright ponzis serve to deflate it. It kept rolling for years.
The first chapter contains some factual errors which, while superficial, hurt the credibility of the text. Later, we see Paul Allen’s name mangled. The author was a New Yorker writer, but the New Yorker’s famous fact checkers didn’t get their hands on this one. This didn’t diminish my enjoyment too much however; I was looking for broad strokes anyway.
Each chapter can more or less stand on its own as an article; we follow many different characters (and companies) that only occasionally reappear, like Amazon and Alan Greenspan so there is some continuity. And don’t worry, as you’re probably wondering with the mention of Greenspan, you will hear all about “Irrational Exuberance.” But he’s also taken to task for practicing the non-interventionism you’d expect from a personal associate of Ayn Rand. The author seems to take a rather dim view of Amazon, using it as a proxy for other companies with absurd P&E ratios and seemed to be under the impression that B&N was going to eat their lunch. But for every Amazon or WebMD you see mentioned you will see a dozen companies you’ve never heard of, long defunct.
There’s some wonderful archaic language, like when users ‘call up’ a Web page. But that’s mostly what we get for flavor. The perspective is that of someone watching the stock market for the most part, we don’t get a close view of what it was like for people to actually use these services, what it was like to work at one of these companies, or what it was like when it all came crashing down. I would have liked more of that. The Great Beanie Baby Bubble (Bissonnette, 2014) sort of sets the standard in this regard. That said, I can’t blame the author too much for this, because it’s from 2002 when it was still fresh in the minds of his audience, who had lived it.
Two things that resonate with our present moment are as follows:
The “Productivity Paradox” is something I haven’t seen named before but makes some kind of sense. The introduction of the internet to business was supposed to make everyone so productive per-capita that we’d be swimming in goods and services. That theory was part of how they justified insane P&E ratios, the idea that some time in the future the products would start showing huge profitability because of this. We’re operating under a very similar theory now, complete with the lack of productivity gains.
The other thing is the complicity of the media in creating the bubble. How Day Trading became almost a national sport is discussed at length. There are echoes of that too now; breathless coverage of AI Doom, access journalism, and until recently failing to point out the absurdity of these companies claims. I suppose it doesn’t help that this time around, some major outlets are owned by the same folks who run tech giants. I don’t expect 60 minutes to, for example, run an Ed Zitron style article on Oracle.
I’d like to add that the book pointed to a site which catalogued dead dot-coms and, now only really available in the archive, serves as a window into what the web looked like in 2001. The screenshots preserve many sites that the archive either didn’t save or didn’t fully save. You can find them here (and I’ve used a few to illustrate this review.) I think the interaction of web and print in this way is interesting because diving for sites deep in the archive can be a challenge and having links that act as entry points really helps.
I can’t tell you what the future holds, but I do think it’s instructive to look back on this particular time period right now. I’d recommend this read for anyone who currently feels like they’re being Truman Show’d by the tech industry right now.
This book seems largely constructed out of interviews rather than following people doing field work around. This is understandable to some extent, we can’t expect the author to fly to mars.
I really like the summary of Mars geology here, a lot more color than Wikipedia and also a better sense of what’s settled and what isn’t. Ditto for the Moon and Venus.
A lot of pop culture references, not the elevated reading experience of a McPhee or a Winchester. But the Rhode Island style sizing at least sticks in your head. Yellowstone has an upper magma chamber the size of Manhattan and a lower magma chamber the size of New York City. I think it’s best understood as a work of Science Communication rather than Journalism (or even Science Literature.) It takes pains to make sure you get good understandings of the conceptual stuff but also just as often loses itself in figures.
The color is nice though. By color I mean what you don’t get by reading Wikipedia-you get the candid takes of scientists saying what they think but can’t prove yet. Volcano hot takes, if you will.
Like the story of a plane crash or bridge collapse you know what’s going to happen. Gravity is going to win in the end, and so it is with Enron. A company that tried to defy the laws of thermodynamics and conjure money from thin air with a sort of accounting perpetual motion machine. It’s an old story, over twenty five years now, but the details of the collapse still hold fascination. And there’s a bit more catharsis involved when you’re rooting for failure then when you are rooting for the pilots to land the plane against all odds in an episode of Mayday.
There’s another compelling reason to read this story in the spring of 2026 though. The inescapable drumbeat of AI calls to mind the story of Enron, so I thought it made sense to go over the history. I’m not going to write my own version of an Ed Zitron article, because he’s already done it, better than I could have. I planned on going through everything in the book and linking it to specific articles, but I don’t think that’s really needed or particularly original. So I’ll leave you with the impression of reading it: it’s well paced, well written, and contains a great amount of flavor-of-the-time, something I always look for when I chase nostalgia. They make the financial shenanigans underpinning Enron’s rampant fraud in a way comprehensible to non-accountants. They have a keen sense for when a sentence is going to land with an audible thud for the reader and structure their prose to deliver maximum impact. I have seen a lot of business literature and it rarely reaches this level of craft.
Apparently I am the coffee table book review guy now. I hesitated to pick this one up because I’d long ago scrutinized old catalogs and bricklink pages to learn about these old sets (and built a few of them even) so just seeing pictures wasn’t going to be revelatory, but I wanted to see what it had to offer.
Is the title appropriate?
My main complaint about this book is that it’s not quite what it says on the cover. It’s really three things:
Light biography of Jens Nygaard Knudson including behind the scenes information about Lego’s process.
An illustrated tour through the Space sets designed during his era with discussions especially about the elements and how they’re used.
A fanfic illustrating the type of things one might imagine while playing with lego sets.
The last item isn’t very engaging and I skipped most of it. It’s the type of thing that’s extremely fun to write and not necessarily what I want to read. Maybe there’s some larger story that emerges but the ones I did read were just vignettes. I don’t want to throw too much shade on a project clearly made with love.
The second item has some gems about pieces and is an interesting lens to look through but gets repetitive as the sets themselves get, well, repetitive. At times it felt like an exercise in trying to use as much aircraft jargon as possible or squeeze some sort of interest out of the third little seat with wings scooter vehicle we’ve seen. Reading that the rover is blue next to a photograph of a blue rover isn’t a great use of time. But don’t get me wrong, ‘this element was originally made for pirate ships’ is the type of interesting Lego lore I love. I really would have appreciated if the stat blocks listed the set’s designer though.
The the first, then, is the meat for the readers. It includes interviews with Lego employees from the era and other background color. What era you might ask? Knudsen’s era. What are they asked about? About the process yes, but also about Knudsen. I think a more appropriate title would have been “Lego Space: the Knudsen years.”
The Text
I’m going to focus on that piece. The Juice of this book, so to speak, is information about the creative work behind Space. But it’s also where I have the biggest bone to pick.
There’s interesting information on offer! Niels Milan Pederson says that he originally pushed for a Jules Verne 20000 leagues inspired Steampunk theme and that some of it was recycled into Aquazone (p28). Apparently Aquazone was designed in ’91 and ready to go before launching in ’95 without changes (p194) It should be noted that he sort of got his wish with the Stingrays which, despite the use of neon, have a fair bit of steampunk DNA with their browns and brassy prints.
The information that the famous light grid was an in-camera practical effect using converging wires to achieve the perspective look is really interesting and there’s definitely a magic to seeing how it was done.
Some of the the concepts are already well known having been printed in a highly recommended Brick Journal article a decade ago. Lots of M tron concepts on p155 and some amazing never before seen concepts on p156 and 157. And the fact that half of the concept shots are already known is a symptom: the era this book focuses on has been covered extensively in the past.
Is this enough juice to carry a whole book? I’m skeptical.
I still haven’t found my Lego Book
For me personally, I’m once again left unsatisfied because they only covered the first half of Lego Space and neglected the more vibrant and colorful second half. None of the themes in that picture get treatment. Because it’s really about Knudson it for the most part misses the era of Space I find most interesting, 1990-2002. We get a (much appreciated) interview with Jørn Thomsen, but I want a full book devoted to his designs!
