2019: Books Read

Non-Fiction

Media and Technology

  1. Kai Fu Lee - AI Superpowers
  2. Meredith Broussard - Artificial Unintelligence
  3. Susan Crawford - Fiber
  4. Harold Ebelson, Gerald Jay Sussman and Julie Sussman - Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs*
  5. Ken Kocienda - Creative Selection: Inside Apple's Design Process During the Golden Age of Steve Jobs
  6. Jonathan Taplin - Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy
  7. Pratik Sinha, Dr. Sumaiya Shaikh, Arjun Sidharth - India Misinformed: The True Story
  8. Nick Diakopoulos - Automating the News

Autobiographies, Biographies, and Memoirs

  1. Michelle Obama - Becoming (audio book)
  2. Nadia Murad - The Last Girl
  3. Leander Kahney - Tim Cook: The Genius Who Took Apple to the Next Level

Geopolitical | History and Current Affairs

  1. Ronan Farrow - War On Peace*
  2. Astra Taylor - Democracy May Not Exist, but We'll Miss It When It's Gone
  3. Ronan Farrow - Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies, and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators (audio)
  4. Anand Gopal - No Good Men Among the Living

General Non-Fiction

  1. Johann Hari - Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression—and the Unexpected Solutions
  2. Melinda Gates - The Moment of Life: How Empowering Women Changes the World
  3. David Spiegelhalter - The Art of Statistics: Learning from Data

Fiction

  1. Gail Honeyman - Eleanor Oliphant is Perfectly Fine
  2. Lisa Halliday - Asymmetry
  3. Donna Tartt - The Secret History
  4. Elizabeth Strout - Olive Kitteridge
  5. Sally Rooney - Normal People
  6. Sally Rooney - Conversations with Friends
  7. Daphne Du Maurier - Rule Britannia
  8. Yaa Gyasi - Homegoing

Children's Books, Sci-Fi, and Fantasy

  1. Philip Pullman - La Belle Sauvage (Book of Dust 1)
  2. Cixin Liu - The Three-Body Problem (audio book)
  3. Cixin Liu - The Dark Forest
  4. Cixin Liu - Death's End
  5. Cressida Cowell - The Wizards of Once
  6. Cressida Cowell - The Wizards of Once: Twice Magic
  7. J.K. Rowling - The Tales of Beedle the Bard
  8. Patrick Ness - The Knife of Never Letting Go
  9. Patrick Ness - The Ask and the Answer
  10. Patrick Ness - Monsters of Men
  11. Philip Pullman - The Secret Commonwealth (Book of Dust 2) (audio book)
  12. Philip Pullman - Northern Lights (His Dark Materials 1) (audio book) (re-read)

Essays, Short Stories, and Novellas

  1. Neil Gaiman & Chris Riddell - Art Matters
  2. Stefan Zweig - Chess
  3. Edith Wharton - Roman Fever & Other Stories

*currently reading

Ken Kocienda - Creative Selection

Ken Kocienda writing about designing and developing the keyboard for the original iPhone:

As everyone on the Purple hallway used the software day in and day out, we made surprising discoveries about what the autocorrection dictionary should contain. We found we had to add a complete collection of hate speech to the dictionary and explicitly mark those words to prevent the software drom ever offering them as autocorrection—imagine trying to type "nugget" but narrowly mistyping the first vowel or the last consonant. We didn't want to offer racial epithets as a "helpful" aid, and we resolved that we would never provide software assistance for attempts to slur or demean.

Like everyone else, I never want to say "ducking" (once we've typed the expletive a couple of times, can the iPhone please remember it?), but it's worth noting that this was a concern before the first iPhone was even announced, let alone shipped.

Imagine if the folks over at YouTube or Facebook were that prescient, or spent focused on their threat model while designing their algorithms as opposed to scale at any cost.