Books on yozy//NET

Sapiens

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Sapiens is a dense and enjoyable book. I read it after Guns Germs and Steel, which it contrasts in interesting ways¹.

Although I read it twice, the book is so dense that I think I’ll need to read it again.

Main takeaway: The whole farming was an inevitable step backwards with regards to nutrition. Civilisations which reproduce quicker and grow to a larger size will eventually win.

The most important event in human evolution was the ‘awakening’ where humans became able to express abstract ideas. This allowed them to speak about the hypothetical, the future and to start constructing shared myths. These in turn enabled us to organise in groups much larger than before.

The notion of the “noble savage” as often portrayed in books and movies is also false. The humans were a bane of the ecosystem even before we discovered the gunpowder.

Contrary to any ecological or biological reasons, Harari states that the reason why it was the Europeans who dominated over the other civilisations is in part the enlightenment movement and their and trust in the future in form of debt. This is somewhat disputed in Debt - The first 5000 years, which shows that usage of debt was not unique to Europeans, and the slavery-coinage-military complex existed since the Roman empire.

Sequels

The sequels are mundane. For one, the first two-thirds of the Homo Deus is rehashing of Sapiens, followed by a glimpse into the future. Ultimately, I found it hollow. Nexus was enjoyable, albeit repetitive at the start. It is a tamer, but realistic², version of Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom.

Both seem to be criticised as not being scientific in any way, but they are a compelling read. ↩︎
As in, it gives real-world examples of usage of AI directly resulting in genocide. ↩︎

So You Have Been Publicly Shamed

Thu, 18 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This book is my answer whenever somebody asks me about a book to read. I don’t think this is the best book that I’ve ever read, but I do believe this is THE book everyone should read—as in—it should be mandatory reading in early school curriculum.

The main learning?

Never boost any mob justice outrage, if the targeted person is not an already established celebrity. Don’t bully strangers.

The book tells several stories about people who did or said something stupid, and their lives got ruined because of it. The transgressions discussed are mundane, in the 90’s or 2000’s nobody would care. But in the age of social media they have become mortal sins.

A young journalist boarded a plane to go to Africa, before boarding she sent a joke tweet in poor taste and put her phone in airplane mode. Before she landed she became briefly the most hated person on Earth, got fired from her job and got shunned by her friends. All of this because some influencer with a million followers quote re-tweeted her.

During a developer conference a woman was presenting her work. One man told his friend a slightly sexual joke. The woman in front of them overheard it, turned around, took their picture and complained about it on Twitter. The two men got fired from their jobs. One of them told his story on Twitter too. The mob has turned against the woman who took the picture. She got fired too. After a year, she still was not able to find another job.

❦

This story repeats over and over. Somebody says something offensive (to some) but ultimately harmless, some influencer gets enraged, shares the story and then their followers just pile on. To be fair, before there was twitter, 4chan was also source of a couple of similar attacks¹.

Celebrities mostly do stupid things as rage-bait and engaging just makes them more money, I’d recommend ignoring them too. Also public shaming rarely works on the most outrageous cases².

A whole industry to combat this has cropped up. You can pay for a service which will do what they can to push the nasty stuff you are known about to the second or third page of Google results. It is costly though.

In this day and age, where we tend to character-assassinate people due to the smallest slight, I think the book is worth a re-reading.

Tay Zonday, Boxxy ↩︎
If that worked people like Logan Paul wouldn’t be able to pull one rug pull after another. ↩︎

Iron Curtain — The Crushing of Eastern Europe

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This book talks about the overall progression of the Soviet incursion into the Eastern European countries starting in the years before the second world war. It focuses mostly on Hungary, Poland and Eastern Germany. Myself being from ex-Czechoslovakia, most of these stories were new.

The history shows that in so many words, there was never any “liberation” effort from the side of the Soviet union. Expelling of German troops from the eastern territories was just an opportune excuse to execute an invasion plan, devised well before the end of the war.

One thing I’d criticize about the book is that, especially in the opening part, it downplays the complicity of the West in this effort. Molotov non aggression pact is talked about, but without the political context in which it was written. Munich pact is not mentioned. It has to be reiterated that the west hoped until the very end that Hitler would first attack the soviet union which would deal with one of their “problems”.

Throughout the book, the “communist ideology” is denigrated but it remains undefined. It is conflated with totalitarianism, which is in turn defined in detail.

Eventually the author does mention western complacency to Soviet control.

Random notes

I chuckled when stories about kids running around yelling “Давай часы”, pretending to be Russian soldiers. I remember these jokes from my childhood.

Chapter 6 shows the shortcomings of fighting “against” rather than “for” something. Fighters back then, as often as they do now, defined themselves by their enemy rather by their end goal. Polish resistance cells described themselves as “anti fascist” and nothing else. This led to internal discord when it was necessary to align themselves to fight the new enemy: the soviets. Ultimately the bickering let to their demise.

The Soviets meticulously eliminated any trace of nationalism in all invaded countries. Unfortunately I think this was also a survival tactic, at the same time the CIA was organizing one coup after another in South America and elsewhere. Notably, all of this was also happening while the west just watched; and all of this was before the soviets had the bomb.

Chapter 8 talks about the importance of control of the radio. Soviets have correctly identified it as the most important medium. Lesson to learn is that we need to protect the free internet. While internet is harder to fully control due to its more decentralized nature, the current attacks try to undermine its value by filling it with garbage.

What is the difference between a renaissance painter, an impressionist and a socialist realist?

Renaissance painter paints what he sees. An impressionist paints what he feels. A socialist realist paints what he’s told to.

Leviathan

Tue, 09 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

I discovered Leviathan through a very catching ad campaign they ran on YouTube. I think it was the first, and the last, book advert I’ve actually seen in video form (other than somebody talking about their book).

It had me intrigued and I’ve waited for the book release with impatience, I think I got it quite close tho the release date. Being a steampunk fan, I got captivated by the cover¹.

The story is a uchronia of the first world war, where the axis’ engineers unlocked the full potential of diesel engines and built massive mech-like war machines. On the other side, Charles Darwin discovered not only evolution, and DNA, but also a way to manipulate it and grow modified “beasties”.

I loved this book, and reread it several times. It is an easy read, and a steampunk-bait. Characters are likeable, and antagonists are introduced later in the series. This gives the series a cooperative vibe of us against them. It definitely cheapens the plot, but sometimes one does not want to be boiling with rage while reading about a villain succeeding almost to the very end.

Clankers are also less developed than Darwinists, the beasties are described in more detail and their inner workings are quite fascinating. There is more to a living ecosystem which is at the same time a beehive, a whale, and a zeppelin than to a big boat with cannons.

❦

This setting would make for a great RTS game, with the two very different factions, but one can only dream. At least we got a passable TV series now (though I found it a little bit lacking, I was expecting more).

Sad that they changed the style for the next two books, and even made an updated version to the first edition’s Leviathan’s cover. ↩︎

Seveneves

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

If I had to compare Sveneves to something I would choose the amazing movie Doom starring The Rock and Karl Urban.

Both start with a very long introduction, drop the title, get into action, and are over in a flash.

I listened to this book in several long sittings, the story and explanation is very catching. However, I find the amount of inventory detail and the amount of characters overwhelming.

I would love to read the same story from the viewpoint of pingers and diggers. Though I did enjoy the fact that Stevenson did not reveal everything and left the reader to fill in their own ideas. A second book would probably ruin it all.

The Trial

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Before reading the book I knew the synopsis, so I went to it “prepared”. Boy was I wrong.

What the summaries don’t tell you are two things:

The protagonist is a genuine asshole.
The civil court is not an institution but an omnipresent entity.

Everybody has a different interpretation but mine was that the book deals with guilty conscience. Josef K knows that what he’s doing is wrong (treating everyone as below himself, treating women as tools, slacking off at work). He is rationalizing things as hard as he can, but “the court” catches up with him.

Some interpret it as criticism of bureaucracy but the way things work in the book are efficient compared to the shit show the real world is.

The Word for World is Forest

Mon, 01 Sep 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Dune 2 is just Avatar with sand. Avatar is just Pocahontas in space. Pocahontas is just Dance with Wolves animated. Dance with Wolves is just Lawrence of Arabia in the United States. Lawrence of Arabia sucks

/u/Kogashinreno

Some time after seeing James Cameron’s Avatar (which I really liked, fight me), I realized how much it had in common with one of my favorite games of all time: Albion. Years later, with the Dos Game Club, I got the opportunity to ask Albion’s developers Jurie Horneman and Erik Simon what they though about it.

Their answer was simple: they drawn inspiration from Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel “The Word for World is Forest”. James Cameron probably read it, and also got inspired.

The book is fairly shot so go read it!

The gist of it is that Earth invades another planet, to start a wood logging operation there, since wood has become a rare commodity on earth. The humans find an extremely peaceful indigenous race, which they promptly beat into submission and enslave. Eventually the locals discover violence for violences sake, and use their numbers to subjugate the human opressors. Part of which they allow to leave, should they wish so.

The economics of the story are highly dubious, invading another planet to log wood just makes no sense with regards to energy expenditure. Just build a self-sustaining habitat for growing trees in space (assuming there is any reason why building a biosphere on Earth is not possible).

Nevertheless, I found the book thoroughly enjoyable. The local people fend for themselves, which Avatar changed by inserting a “good” human soldier. The one good human in the story just get killed, in an aftermath of a revenge attack.

The main takeaway is that once you introduce violence to a culture, it cannot be taken back.

Brave New World

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

During a work lunch we were discussing the current state of AI, AGI, happiness and dystopianism. One thing that come up was Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

So I’ve decided to finally read it.

✏️ As a side note: the audiobook read by Michael York has some really nice voice acting.

Almost a hundred years later, it seems that we are speedrunning the society to the one described in this novel.

A large difference between typical dystopian novels and reality, is that in the dystopias described in fiction, the world governments do something to keep the masses happy.

Be it by free drug Soma distribution in Brave New World, free drug distribution in The Futurological Congress, access to OASIS in Ready Player One, The Matrix¹… you name it.

Dystopian stories revolve around worlds where we remove freedom and replace it by some form of forced happiness or stability. The real world just takes away the former, and gives us Reels and TikTok. Crowd dispersal methods² are also more humane that what we have to deal with—tear gas and stick to the face in Europe, bullets and tazers in the US. Actual voluntary exile for misfits is also surprisingly humane, if the author’s goal was to portray this world as some extreme dystopia.

The writing was refreshing, with more flourish than modern literature. The audiobook version makes the alliterations stand out.

My main takeaway would be: to make a relatable story about destroying a dystopia, one has to find a way for protagonists to not only revert to the old regime, but also provide a solution to the problems the dystopia solved.

Well, one could say that the Matrix is not necessarily keeping people happy, but they do live better inside than in the real world. ↩︎
More drugs, in gas form this time. ↩︎

Jurassic Park

Fri, 22 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Steven Spielberg’s adaptation opening scene shows us that not everything is good with the park, and then switches to a more cheery and positive theme.

Even before introducing us to the park, the novel piles up on failures of the entreprise. We get children getting maimed, and children getting killed. We see the inefficiency of bureaucracy and are treated to a rather cynical depiction of capitalism.

The catchphrase “we spared no expense” is uttered only after they explain all the ways they are going to cut costs (mainly, by minimizing workforce and automating everything). The computer systems are constantly being described as buggy and unreliable. They also reveal that they have a generally accessible key logger as a “security feature”.

Malcolm’s description of the scientific power as inherited wealth, for which the owners have no respect, reminded me of Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. More specifically, the reasons he gives for the compulsory military service before people become citizens and are granted the right to vote. Both Crichton and Heinlein criticize power that is simply given to people, without first having obtained respect for this power by means of self sacrifice.¹

Overall I liked listening to Jurassic Park. One gripe I had was the incessant stream of “he said”, “she said”, there are so many synonyms, at least Crichton could have used “she asked” when there were questions or “he screamed” when people were in panic.

I acknowledge that characters are not their authors, personal opinions from this worldview might be quite different for them in reality. ↩︎

First And Only

Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 +0000

First of the books from the Gaunt’s Ghosts series by Dan Abnett.

First time I’m reading a novel focusing on the Imperial Guard, which is nice. My main take is that it illustrates the scale issues Luetin09 talks about semi-regularly.

Spoilers Ahead

Couple of things struck me here. Naturally the heroes of this series being the guardsmen, we expect them to have some plot armor. Unless you want to read a novel about a Doom slaughtermap from the imp’s perspective that’s fine. However, they are also given plot cannons.

The Ghosts encounter some Chaos Marines that they dispatch quite easily just with lasguns. If it’s also so easy for the other side, then the tens ouf thousands of Space Marines would not do squat against the billions of guardsmen.

Same, at some point they mortally wound an inquisitor. I get that this is realistic, a close encounter with the business end of a shotgun will do its job, but lore-wise this seems improbable.

My favorite part is the description of the corrupted STC.

It also puts a huge doubt on how did the humanity ever struggle to fight against the men of iron, if a small detachment of grunts can dispatch a dozen, just with lasguns.