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).
The original recipe is in Dutch
My twist: add vanilla and orange zest to the dough.
Want to try: touch of cardamon
The story is, appears heavily romanticized, but provides a nice insider perspective on many quirks of Japanese culture.
From the amazing book The handmade loaf
My twist: add anise , cinnamon, and orange zest to the dough for an even richer flavour.
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.
An impressive book that takes tea sufficiently seriously, serving valuable recommendations on teas to try and pairings to explore.
Chris Wickham – Medieval Europe
Rich and fascinating deep-dive into an under-estimated millennium.
Even if multiple views are presented, Elon’s perspective gets most airtime and the final word; which makes the book read like a hagiography.
Reading like a writer – Francine Prose
Lot of examples of great prose, but too few examples of bad writing.
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:
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.
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.
The author set out on a daunting program with impressive results in a fascinating domain.
Mike Pitts – How to build Stonehenge
The book reads as a detective, exploring what we know and what we can reasonably conjecture about the creation of Stonehenge based on the archeological record and examples from indigenous civilizations.
Malcolm Hislop – How to build a cathedral
Fascinating in the thorough treatment of technical details of architecture and construction.
The book continues to drift between wonder about the world and weakly motivated bias towards human scale, which is a pity because it cites some elegant analyses.
Claire Maingon and Hélène Rochette – Le grand guide de la Normandie (in French)
Charming take on a tourist guide, revisiting the favorite spots of impressionist painters to recreate their magic.
Kate Fox – Watching the English
Light read with amusing observation, stretched out over slightly more pages than necessary to convey the message.
Great to see journalists initiating change in their own organization.
As I have noted earlier, data access is a major topic when it comes to achieving a healthy power balance in the information space here and here. Glad to see more and more companies take this seriously.
Personally, I currently see little incentives for companies, organization, or individuals to allow their data to be crawled by for profit.
Theo Mulder – De hersenverzamelaar (The brain collector, read in Dutch)
The book is mostly written from the historical perspective free from contemporary judgements, which allows the writer to tell a nuanced story on a sensitive topic.
A brave attempt to put up a framework for assessing technological innovations, that is rich of ideas, which are in many cases [in 2023] still relevant (e.g. Cognifying in the light of GenAI), but sometimes feel out-dated (e.g. Sharing is a post-truth world).
The author underplays the role of religious power structures in suppressing novel scientific ideas that go against traditionalist dogmas, which makes the book read more like a christian apology than a balanced historical narrative.
