Gordon Corera – Russians among us
The connection between ‘illegals’ and digital information warfare seems mostly motivated by the author’s (or publisher’s) desire to give the book more relevance, rather than the coherence of the narrative.
To disagree with Kara Swisher is not for the faint hearted
Entertaining rather than enriching, with strong emphasis on the ways in which Kara lets other people know that she is right
If power is all you want, just follow these 48 simple steps
Robert Greene – The 48 laws of power
A pile of cynical, often conflicting, recommendations presented with Machiavellian panache.
Understanding behavioral economics is quite helpful when you want to understand what works in marketing.
A smart repackaging of Khanemean for marketeers that is indeed worth a second edition nine years after initial publication
The populist far-right has been able to gain ground due to the failure of progressives to address underlying concerns across broad strands of the population
Rhetorically strong, with well chosen observations spun into a seductive narrative that is designed to give hope.
Brain variances present differently in women and dispels widely-held misconceptions, leading to many living undiagnosed and untreated
Janara Nerenberg – Divergent mind
Does a great job explaining the negative impact.
A bunch of geeks figured out a better way to run a company and are now taking over the economy
The case that “data trumps opinions, provided your corporate culture doesn’t get in the way” contains little original thinking, but that – to be fair – is not the author’s objective
Most crypto currencies are Ponzi schemes funded and operated by hardened criminals and effective altruists lacking a moral compass
The author’s hard-felt frustration that the crypto market could (and in a sense still can) stay irrational as long as it did makes the story even more juicy.
Writing your tests first saves a shitload of time in debugging
Harry Percival – Test Driven Development with Python
It take quite some wasted hours of coding to appreciate the full power of the TDD approach
If you are quirky enough; people may just trust you because you seem harmless even if you have a history at a Wall Street trading firm
Michael Lewis – Going infinite
Amazing story, told with a consistent yet not so surprising perspective
To optimally solve for the UN Social Development Goals, optimize on simple metrics with good pay-off
Bjorn Lomborg – Best things first
Nice exercise that provides some nice contrarian thinking, as long as one is aware that the methodology of cost-benefit analysis (as applied here) seems to ignore systemic risks (e.g. climate change) and under-plays the difficulty of getting from theory to policy (let alone realization).
Sourdough oliebollen
Ingredients
- 600 gr starter
- 700 gr wholewheat flour
- 500 gr sparkling water
- 30 gr sugar
- 2 eggs
- 15 gr salt
- 1 teaspoon of cinnamon
- vanilla from 1 stick
- Zest of 1 orange
- 50 gr melted butter
- 500 gr currants
Method
- Start expanding your starter 2 days in advance of baking to ensure you have enough; use white flour for that
- Soak the currants for15-30 minutes
- Mix starter, flour, water, eggs; using the paddle attachment of your kitchen machine, c. 3 mins at speed 1
- Add salt, cinnamon, butter, vanilla, and orange zest. Continue mixing for another c. 2 mins at speed 2
- Spoon in the currants
- Let rise for c. 4 hours (or overnight in a cool place)
- Stir through and let rise for another 2-3 hours
- Fry in frying pan with sunflower oil at 180 degree Celsius. Flip after c. 3 mins, boil for 6 mins in total.
The original recipe is in Dutch
My twist: add vanilla and orange zest to the dough.
Want to try: touch of cardamon
It requires a risky mix of naive optimism, grotesque bluff, and boneheaded persistence to get a scoop on a yakuza boss
The story is, appears heavily romanticized, but provides a nice insider perspective on many quirks of Japanese culture.
100% rye bread
Ingredients
The gelatined rye mix
- 480 gr Water at 90 degrees C
- 120 gr Rye flour
The dough
- 400 gr rye leaven
- 100 gr cold water
- 600 gr gelatined rye mix
- 600 gr rye flour
- 12 gr salt
Method
The gelatinated rye mix
- Quickly whisk rye flour in the hot water
- Leave for 1 hr to 1 day
The loaf
- Set apart 4 tablespoons of the gelatinated rye mix to brush over the loafs later
- Mix the leaven in the cold water
- Add the gelatinated rye mixture
- Add the flour and the salt
- Stir until you have a sticky paste
- Knead gently into two balls
- Shape each ball into a baton
- Let the loafs rise on floured cloth in a basket for 5 hours / until doubled in size
- Just before baking, brush with the remaining gelatinated rye mixture and spray with water
- Bake for 50 minutes at 210 degrees C
- Leave to cool fully
- Wrap in kitchen baking parchment tied with a string and leave for 24 nrs before slicing
From the amazing book The handmade loaf
My twist: add anise , cinnamon, and orange zest to the dough for an even richer flavour.
The ruthless pursuit of profit optimization has killed the soul of the American supermarket
Benjamin Lorr – The secret life of groceries
Narrated with bravado, the book conjures the nostalgic image of a 1950s store and skillfully contrasts it with the current state of the industry.
Don´t settle for industrially produced teabags, but choose high-quality tea leafs and take care to optimize water temperature and infusion time
An impressive book that takes tea sufficiently seriously, serving valuable recommendations on teas to try and pairings to explore.
A solid system of taxation is one of the major indicators for the success of power structures
Chris Wickham – Medieval Europe
Rich and fascinating deep-dive into an under-estimated millennium.
It is easy to fall under the spell of a charismatic and brilliant maniac who is convinced he has mankind’s best interests in mind
Even if multiple views are presented, Elon’s perspective gets most airtime and the final word; which makes the book read like a hagiography.
For every writing-fiction-rule you can come up with, there is a brilliant Chekhov story that disproves it
Reading like a writer – Francine Prose
Lot of examples of great prose, but too few examples of bad writing.
Trust is context dependent
It’s always tricky… claiming to be comprehensive. In particular where it concerns LLMs.
And that;s where the paper Decoding Trust [..] stumbles. Right in the title is claims “A Comprehensive Assessment of Trustworthiness in GPT.” Nonetheless, when reading about this research on one of my favorite blogs, I decided to have a closer look.
The authors propose a framework with eight perspectives on trustworthiness:
- Toxicity
- Stereotype bias
- Adversarial robustness
- Out-of-distribution robustness
- Robustness to adversarial demonstrations
- Privacy
- Machine ethics
- Fairness
They then continue to develop that into a benchmark for GPT models and present the empirical results on GPT-3.5 and GPT-4.
Although the results are interesting, there are some concerns with this type of benchmark approach.
- The framework in nowhere near “comprehensive”. For example: it does not include factual correctness (which I would posit as a a prerequisite for trust); nor does is test for being politically opinionated (which I would say is highly relevant).
- The choice of benchmark prompts is in nature never neutral, and should be made dependent on the context in which the LLM is applied.
- As with any public benchmark, its value will diminish over time as the prompts and desired responses will become part of the training of next generation LLMs.
On the positive side, the paper brings a lot of inspiration for organizations for how they can shape their own testing approach for trustworthy GenAI. Even if not comprehensive, a framework like this as a starting point is massively useful and important.