Boris Smus

Everyone must have two pockets with a note in each pocket… In one: “For my sake was the world created.”

I started hostile.

This book is an odd one.

When a bridge collapses, blaming gravity is a non-answer.

Without moral ambition, argues Bregman, you just end up as a money maximizing consultant.

I’m not actually going to recommend this book, but I figured I might as well post a quick review anyway.

Loren Eiseley's The Immense Journey is a collection of personal naturalist story-essays from the 1940s and 1950s.

Last month, after a long hiatus, I showed invention.cards to a friend in SF and came away unsatisfied.

It’s definitely pulp, but is it fiction?

A recent NYT piece argued we need a mental fitness revolution to combat the cognitive decay caused by algorithmic feeds and generative AI.

Paul Tillich’s The Courage to Be is a dense, philosophical manual for meaning masquerading as theology.

After falling down a rabbit hole on interoception, the vagus nerve, and cortical overrides, reading Breath was the logical next step.

Note: I listened to the audio version of this book in Russian.

As it turns out, Buber is surprisingly accessible.

Ancillary Justice is a well-crafted book with nice, slow reveals.

AI model vendors usually ship their own desktop apps, and aside from coding agents, these tend to be the ways in which I interface with AIs the most.

C.

Oral history in written form.

A compelling first contact story with many twists.

For decades, I've carried a Field Notes notebook and a pen.

Han spends much of The Crisis of Narration mourning a lost world, one where humans were born into compelling, unifying narratives full of wisdom.

Eagleman's book is an easy read given the complexity of the topic.

I recently sat down with B^2 and we decided to watch a Chinese film.

The most fruitful moments for contemplation are often the least conducive to capture.

Finally got around to reading this masterpiece of Soviet science fiction.

I learned about the Old English Poem "Battle of Maldon" from a David Chapman in a recent podcast with Jim Rutt, which I found really insightful.

I enjoyed this book so much that I bought a copy for S.

Humans are remarkably successful as a species.

More a journal than an educational treatise, Math from Three to Seven chronicles the uniquely soviet phenomenon known as Математические Кружки (Math Circles), applied specifically to young kids.

A while ago I began wondering where all the optimistic leftwing voices went.

VALIS stands for Vast Active Living Intelligence System, a critical piece in Horselover Fat's vision of God.

I recently watched a movie called "The Bit Player" bankrolled by IEEE, about Claude Shannon and his contributions.

Authoritarian governments have latched onto open-source LLMs like Llama to craft their own models, complete with censorship rules.

Worth it for the name alone, this is a comprehensive presentation of what happened when the sick man of Europe finally died.

This is the first in a series of vignettes based on observations I captured while creating invention.cards, a visual chronology of science and discovery.

I'm pleased to have completed transforming Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery into a deck of Magic Cards.

I liked this book, although it could use a bit of additional structure.

This book meanders and takes its time building up to a double twist of a conclusion, leaving the reader winded.

What if our pursuit of educational equity is perpetuating inequality?

Labatut's work is a collection of stories strike an unusual balance between fiction and non-fiction.

Imagine if Microsoft's company guidance was that it would make $100 billion this quarter.

This book situates the reader as a fly on the wall during multiple personal discussion between Haruki Murakami and his friend Seiji Ozawa.

This book came to my attention because of S's interest in "The Developing Mind", Daniel J.

Entangled Life is about the world of fungi, especially focused on the symbiosis between mushrooms and plants, called mycorrhiza.

Blindsight was recommended to me by GB, DK, and maybe NA.

I used GPT4's multimodal features to accelerate and improve my recently rebooted Visual Chronology of Science & Discovery project now hosted at https://invention.cards.

This is a Jewish take on parenting from a former psychologist who became disenchanted with her profession and sought wisdom in the tradition of her ancestors.

I recently resumed my Visual Chronology of Science & Discovery project, a Civilization-inspired tech tree but for the real life history of science.

Annihilation was first recommended to me by KO.

Inspired to read more about ecology after enjoying Mystery Teachings from the Living Earth by J.