Category: Tech / Science

Best Books I Read in 2025 that Weren’t Published in 2025

Selections mine. Comments via Amazon. In order of publication date.

The Night of the Gun
David Carr
Publication Date: August 5, 2008

Amazon Best of the Month, August 2008: In his fabulously entertaining The Kid Stays in the Picture, legendary Hollywood producer Robert Evans wrote: “There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth.” David Carr’s riveting debut memoir, The Night of the Gun, takes this theory to the extreme, as the New York Times reporter embarks on a three-year fact-finding mission to revisit his harrowing past as a drug addict and discovers that the search for answers can reveal many versions of the truth. Carr acknowledges that you can’t write a my-life-as-an-addict story without the recent memoir scandals of James Frey and others weighing you down, but he regains the reader’s trust by relying on his reporting skills to conduct dozens of often uncomfortable interviews with old party buddies, cops, and ex-girlfriends and follow an endless paper trail of legal and medical records, mug shots, and rejection letters. The kaleidoscopic narrative follows Carr through failed relationships and botched jobs, in and out of rehab and all manner of unsavory places in between, with cameos from the likes of Tom Arnold, Jayson Blair, and Barbara Bush. Admittedly, it’s hard to love David Carr–sometimes you barely like the guy. How can you feel sympathy for a man who was smoking crack with his pregnant girlfriend when her water broke? But plenty of dark humor rushes through the book, and knowing that this troubled man will make it–will survive addiction, fight cancer, raise his twin girls–makes you want to stick around for the full 400-page journey. –Brad Thomas Parsons

Planet Funny
Ken Jennings
Publication Date: May 29, 2018

In his “smartly structured, soundly argued, and yes—pretty darn funny” (Booklist, starred review) Planet Funny, Ken Jennings explores this brave new comedic world and what it means—or doesn’t—to be funny in it now. Tracing the evolution of humor from the caveman days to the bawdy middle-class antics of Chaucer to Monty Python’s game-changing silliness to the fast-paced meta-humor of The Simpsons, Jennings explains how we built our humor-saturated modern age, where lots of us get our news from comedy shows and a comic figure can even be elected President of the United States purely on showmanship. “Fascinating, entertaining and—I’m being dead serious here—important” (A.J. Jacobs, author of The Year of Living Biblically), Planet Funny is a full taxonomy of what spawned and defines the modern sense of humor.

The Art of Logic in an Illogical World
Eugenia Cheng
Publication Date: September 11, 2018

In a world where fake news stories change election outcomes, has rationality become futile? In The Art of Logic in an Illogical World, Eugenia Cheng throws a lifeline to readers drowning in the illogic of contemporary life. Cheng is a mathematician, so she knows how to make an airtight argument. But even for her, logic sometimes falls prey to emotion, which is why she still fears flying and eats more cookies than she should. If a mathematician can’t be logical, what are we to do? In this book, Cheng reveals the inner workings and limitations of logic, and explains why alogic — for example, emotion — is vital to how we think and communicate. Cheng shows us how to use logic and alogic together to navigate a world awash in bigotry, mansplaining, and manipulative memes. Insightful, useful, and funny, this essential book is for anyone who wants to think more clearly.

The History of Bones
John Lurie
Publication Date: August 17, 2021

In the tornado that was downtown New York in the 1980s, John Lurie stood at the vortex. After founding the band The Lounge Lizards with his brother, Evan, in 1979, Lurie quickly became a centrifugal figure in the world of outsider artists, cutting-edge filmmakers, and cultural rebels. Now Lurie vibrantly brings to life the whole wash of 1980s New York as he developed his artistic soul over the course of the decade and came into orbit with all the prominent artists of that time and place, including Andy Warhol, Debbie Harry, Boris Policeband, and, especially, Jean-Michel Basquiat, the enigmatic prodigy who spent a year sleeping on the floor of Lurie’s East Third Street apartment.

The AI Bubble – Price to Earnings Ratio, History

Kai Ryssdal
A huge chunk of the S&P gains of late have come because of the hundreds of billions that are being invested in Artificial Intelligence. So, bearing in mind that the average p/e ratio on the S&P right now is 25, price to earnings ratio, what does that tell us?

Michelle Lowry
People have very optimistic expectations of how fast these AI companies are going to grow, into the future.

John Steinsson
There are kind of two episodes in the past where the price to earnings ration has shot up to really high levels. One was right before the great depression. One was in the late 1990’s, during the internet bubble.

What’s a price-earnings ratio anyway?
Kai explains the P/E ratio of the S&P 500, which is higher that it’s been since the early 2000s.
Marketplace – Nov 12, 2025

Note – transcription approximate, done by hand, not ai.

Wearable Recording Technology – With Artificial Intelligence

Both Ikeda and Comans are software engineers in suburban Sacramento and are just generally really into AI. When Ikeda first broached the idea of buying an AI wearable, partly to record and summarize their conversations about tech, Comans was reluctant.

“I said ‘absolutely not,’” said Comans. “This is a horrible idea. Like, why would I invite this in my life? And why would I put the most intimate moments of my life onto a server on the internet where I don’t know what’s going to happen with it?”

But Ikeda eventually convinced him. They were already sharing so much information online anyway. And at the very least, the Limitless transcripts were supposed to be only accessible to them.

While the technology isn’t perfect — it often mistakes Comans and Ikeda for one another, and doesn’t really understand sarcasm — the couple says, for the most part, it’s been helpful to have their conversations recorded.

Even the fights.

“The fact that it records the like, deeply unflattering things that you say right in a moment of weakness, or when you know you’re being really defensive, is kind of the stuff you really, actually need to see,” said Ikeda.

The Limitless Pendant is just one of a new generation of always-on AI wearables that have recently hit the market. There’s the similar Amazon-backed Bee, a bracelet that records and transcribes everything you say. And there’s the yet-to-be-seen device OpenAI and iPhone designer Jonny Ive are reportedly collaborating on.

The covert recorder wasn’t one of the newest generations of AI wearables. But Miller sees the possibility of a near future where everyone needs to assume they’re being recorded at all times.

It’s made her less trusting and more careful about what she says.

“It’s a strange thing that part of being a human is a weak memory,” said Miller. “We did not evolve to have every single thing we’re saying or doing to be remembered.”

From her perspective, even if AI never forgets, maybe humans still should.

What it’s like to have an AI wearable record everything you say
A new generation of wearable AI gadgets can record, transcribe and analyze your every interaction. Here’s how early adopters say it’s changing their relationships.

Zen of Python

The Zen of Python is a collection of 19 “guiding principles” for writing computer programs that influence the design of the Python programming language.[1] Python code that aligns with these principles is often referred to as “Pythonic”…

  • Beautiful is better than ugly.
  • Explicit is better than implicit.
  • Simple is better than complex.
  • Complex is better than complicated.
  • Flat is better than nested.
  • Sparse is better than dense.
  • Readability counts.
  • Special cases aren’t special enough to break the rules.
  • Although practicality beats purity.
  • Errors should never pass silently.
  • Unless explicitly silenced.
  • In the face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.
  • There should be one– and preferably only one –obvious way to do it.[c]
  • Although that way may not be obvious at first unless you’re Dutch.
  • Now is better than never.
  • Although never is often better than right now.[d]
  • If the implementation is hard to explain, it’s a bad idea.
  • If the implementation is easy to explain, it may be a good idea.
  • Namespaces are one honking great idea – let’s do more of those!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zen_of_Python

Constantly Wrong and Out of Your Depth – Psychology of Programming

“The thing that gets lost, and which I think is important to know, is that programming is never easy,” he says. “You’re never doing the same thing twice, because code is infinitely reproducible, so if you’ve already solved a problem and you encounter it again, you just use your old solution. This means that by definition you’re kind of always on this frontier where you’re out of your depth. And one of the things you have to learn is to accept that feeling—of being constantly wrong and not knowing.”

Which sounds like it could be a Buddhist precept. I’m thunderstruck.

“Well, constantly being wrong and out of your depth is not something people are used to accepting. But programmers have to,” he concludes.

Devil in the Stack: Searching for the Soul of the New Machine
Andrew Smith

AI vs Persian Etiquette

Why AI Chatbots Can’t Process Persian Social Etiquette

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica:

If an Iranian taxi driver waves away your payment, saying, “Be my guest this time,” accepting their offer would be a cultural disaster. They expect you to insist on paying — probably three times — before they’ll take your money. This dance of refusal and counter-refusal, called taarof, governs countless daily interactions in Persian culture. And AI models are terrible at it.

New research released earlier this month titled “We Politely Insist: Your LLM Must Learn the Persian Art of Taarof” shows that mainstream AI language models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta fail to absorb these Persian social rituals, correctly navigating taarof situations only 34 to 42 percent of the time. Native Persian speakers, by contrast, get it right 82 percent of the time. This performance gap persists across large language models such as GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Haiku, Llama 3, DeepSeek V3, and Dorna, a Persian-tuned variant of Llama 3.

A study led by Nikta Gohari Sadr of Brock University, along with researchers from Emory University and other institutions, introduces “TAAROFBENCH,” the first benchmark for measuring how well AI systems reproduce this intricate cultural practice. The researchers’ findings show how recent AI models default to Western-style directness, completely missing the cultural cues that govern everyday interactions for millions of Persian speakers worldwide.
“Cultural missteps in high-consequence settings can derail negotiations, damage relationships, and reinforce stereotypes,” the researchers write.

“Taarof, a core element of Persian etiquette, is a system of ritual politeness where what is said often differs from what is meant,” the researchers write. “It takes the form of ritualized exchanges: offering repeatedly despite initial refusals, declining gifts while the giver insists, and deflecting compliments while the other party reaffirms them. This ‘polite verbal wrestling’ (Rafiee, 1991) involves a delicate dance of offer and refusal, insistence and resistance, which shapes everyday interactions in Iranian culture, creating implicit rules for how generosity, gratitude, and requests are expressed.”

No One Is Really Average

Even though I was born in Perth, Western Australia, I have lived in the UK for so long, my accent is now 60 to 80 percent British. While I enjoy sports, I’m not a super-fan of any of them, and it has been a very long time since I’ve applied a prawn to a barbecue. I’m not a typical Australian. But then again, no one is.

After the 2011 census, the Australian Bureau of Statistics published who the average Australian was: a thirty-seven-year-old woman who, among other things, “lives with her husband and two children (a boy and a girl aged nine and six) in a house with three bedrooms and two cars in a suburb of one of Australia’s capital cities.” And then they discovered that she does not exist. They scoured all the records and no one person matched all the criteria to be truly average. As they rightly pointed out:

While the description of the average Australian may sound quite typical, the fact that no one meets all these criteria shows that the notion of the “average” masks considerable (and growing) diversity in Australia. – Australian Bureau of Statistics

…
Having unmasked one Mr. Average, I was prepared to make amends and find a replacement. I contacted the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) to see if it was possible to find someone with the reduced criteria the newspaper used, instead of the full average Australian range of statistics. The fine people at ABS found my request interesting enough to dig through the data for me. Expanding the population considered from West Australia to the whole country subtly changed the averages: Mr. Average is now a woman with one fewer bedrooms in her house. They estimated that, for the loosest definition of average (using only a few main statistics), there would only be “roughly four hundred” matching people out of Australia’s then population of 23,401,892. So there you have it: 99.9983 percent of the Australian population is not average. I’m in pretty good company after all.

Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World
Matt Parker

Recommended book

Not Everything You Like is Bad for You – Coffee and Visceral Fat

Body fat serves all sorts of valuable functions in your body, from storing certain vitamins to keeping you warm. But there’s one type of body fat that’s not-so-friendly for your health: visceral fat. Inside your abdominal cavity, this form of adipose tissue (fat tissue) surrounds critical organs, such as your stomach, liver and intestines. Fortunately, there’s one drink that can help you reduce visceral fat. Java lovers, rejoice! It’s coffee.

Research has linked drinking coffee to reductions in body fat. For instance, a 2025 study of over 45,000 people found that those who drank coffee (an average of 1.7 cups per day) had significantly lower visceral fat than non-coffee drinkers.

https://www.eatingwell.com/best-drink-to-lose-visceral-fat-11721048

The Sound of the Void – Quantum Randomness

If you’re being random on a budget, the Australian National University has you covered. They have set up their own quantum random-number generator by listening to the sound of nothing. Even in a vacuum of nothingness, there is something going on. Thanks to the quirks of quantum mechanics, it is possible for a particle and its antiparticle mate to spontaneously appear from literally nowhere and then annihilate each other faster than the universe can notice that they shouldn’t be there. This means empty space is actually a writhing foam of particles popping in and out of reality.

In the Department of Quantum Sciences at ANU, they have a detector listening to a vacuum, converting the quantum foam into random numbers, and then streaming them live at https://qrng.anu.edu.au, around the clock. For tech people, they have a great range of secure delivery systems (never use the built-in random.random() function in the Python programming language again!). And if you are a background-noise hipster, they have an audio version so you can listen in to the sounds of random.

Humble Pi: When Math Goes Wrong in the Real World
Matt Parker

This website offers true random numbers to anyone on the internet. The random numbers are generated in real-time in our lab by measuring the quantum fluctuations of the vacuum. The vacuum is described very differently in the quantum physics and classical physics. In classical physics, a vacuum is considered as a space that is empty of matter or photons. Quantum physics however says that that same space resembles a sea of virtual particles appearing and disappearing all the time. This is because the vacuum still possesses a zero-point energy. Consequently, the electromagnetic field of the vacuum exhibits random fluctuations in phase and amplitude at all frequencies. By carefully measuring these fluctuations, we are able to generate ultra-high bandwidth random numbers.

https://qrng.anu.edu.au/
https://qrng.anu.edu.au/random-bernoulli-noise/

DotCom Bubble – 25 Years Since Peak

The dotcom era was a wild ride. When the NASDAQ peaked on March 10, 2000, it was double its value of a year before. Historically, it takes seven years for a market to double in value on average. So to say the dotcom era was overheated is an understatement.

And it’s a misnomer to call it a boom. In a boom, someone’s actually making money. Amazon didn’t have a profitable quarter until Q4 of 2001, and it was a modest profit of $5 million. It didn’t have a profitable year until 2003. Google was more promising, as it was turning profits before its IPO.

But Google was the exception. A company didn’t have to be profitable for its stock to boom. Netscape was the poster child for this. It created a necessary product, but Marc Andreessen and Jim Clark couldn’t figure out how to make it profitable. Andreessen is only rich today because he and Clark managed to convince AOL to pay $10 billion for the company before they could finish running it into the ground. Transmeta was another example of a company with interesting technology but no profits. Competing with Intel wasn’t any easier during the dotcom bubble than it was in the years right before it.

The stereotypical dotcom business model went something like this: Find something nobody’s selling on the Internet. Register a domain name. Start selling that product on the Internet. Then wait for profits to happen like magic. And without a solid business plan that included things like logistics, those profits rarely happened and typically weren’t sustainable when they did. Just like in any other business. But since this was the Internet, it was going to be different this time, somehow.

When the dotcom bubble burst
Dave Farquhar

Diet and Healthy Aging

Participants were asked to provide regular surveys of their diet, assessing whether they adhered to eight healthy dietary patterns as well as their intake of ultra-processed foods that are high in sodium and saturated fats.

The study found that 9.3% of participants aged healthily, being able to avoid chronic diseases by the time they reached their 70s.

The study used the Alternative Healthy Eating Index score to determine a person’s diet quality. The score graded people based on their high intake of fruits, vegetables, whole grains, nuts, legumes, and healthy fats, and low consumption of red and processed meats, sugar-sweetened beverages, sodium, and refined grains.

Those who scored in the top 20% were 86% more likely to avoid chronic diseases than the rest of the population.

Healthy eating habits in midlife may prevent chronic illness in later years, research finds

Bit Rot – Defined and Examples of

I installed a wireless network at home. It worked for two years – and then suddenly it failed. For the whole world, I could not find out how to re-configure it. Embarrassingly enough, I couldn’t even remember how to get into the damn thing.

And I had a very helpful plug-in for my web browser. But after the browser had updated itself, it announced that the plug-in wasn’t compatible anymore. I searched for a replacement, but the list of plug-ins had 5000 items and the search function couldn’t find anything of the same kind…

And I used to access the voicemail on my mobile phone by just pressing a button on the keypad. But unexpectedly it stopped working. Perhaps it happened when I switched operators … but I could not figure out how to get it back. Nor even whether the problem was on my phone, or with the new operator.

You might think I’m just hopeless with new technology. I’m not. Rather the opposite: I’ve been working with computers for more than 30 years. I really belong to the “early adopters”; I’ve often been one of the first users of new technologies.

But every so often, I wind up a “somewhat-later abandoner”.

Digital technology may contain no moving parts but it still, somehow, gets worn, splintered and corroded. It rots. It decays. The rot, though, is mostly invisible (and un-smellable). Still, one day, the thing is broken.

Onceability: The consequence of technology rot
Jonas Söderström

Code often suffers from what people call “bit rot” when it isn’t actively maintained. Data can suffer from the same type of problem; that is, people forget the precise meaning of specialized fields, or data problems from the past may have faded from memory. For example, maybe there was a short-lived data bug that set every customer id to null. Or there was a huge fraudulent transaction that made it look like Q3 2017 was a lot better than it actually was. Often business logic to pull out data from a historical time period can get more and more complicated. For example, there might be a rule like, “ if the date is older than 2019 use the revenue field, between 2019 and 2021 use the revenue_usd field, and after 2022 use the revenue_usd_audited field.” The longer you keep data around, the harder it is to keep track of these special cases. And not all of them can be easily worked around, especially if there is missing data.

Big Data is Dead
Jordan Tigani

AI Software Development – Slashdot on

Replit CEO on AI Breakthroughs: ‘We Don’t Care About Professional Coders Anymore’

Replit, an AI coding startup platform, has made a dramatic pivot away from professional programmers in a fundamental shift in how software may be created in the future. “We don’t care about professional coders anymore,” CEO Amjad Masad told Semafor, as the company refocuses on helping non-developers build software using AI.

The strategic shift follows the September launch of Replit’s “Agent” tool, which can create working applications from simple text commands. The tool, powered by Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet AI model, has driven a five-fold revenue increase in six months. The move marks a significant departure for Replit, which built its business providing online coding tools for software developers. The company is now betting that AI will make traditional programming skills less crucial, allowing non-technical users to create software through natural language instructions.

Black Parrot
In my experience, business “analysts” don’t know what the hell they want, let alone how to specify it.

I’ve been asked to create reports that add pounds + gallons, and it’s almost impossible to get them to understand why that’s nonsense.

caseih
Maybe AI would be able to tell them what they want makes no sense, whereas a human programmer has to worry about tact and of course not getting fired.

AleRunner
My main experience with AI in programming is that it regularly produces things that don’t exist. References to libraries that have never been made. Function calls that should exist but don’t and so on. There are things that it’s useful for and can do much more quickly and accurately than a human but immediately the smallest amount of thought is needed, it does what you tell it to whether or not that’s possible. I expect that we’ll get a bunch of cars soon where the code is set up to use the “eco brake” for emergency breaking because there ought to be an eco brake so it makes sense to use it, even if nobody has invented such a thing yet.

Given their own hallucinations, I doubt the AI is going to save us from product management that has no idea what could and couldn’t work. Rather just allow them to get lots further before they find out that what they are trying to do is impossible.

Bad Habit of Overthinking

But looking at it from another angle, if we’re able to control our mind, maybe we’ll be able to stop the continuous thinking that goes on in our head, dictating how we behave. The problem here is that the mind has a habit of looking for stronger stimulation and can get out of control if we let it. Because negative thoughts have a much stronger impact on our brain than a mild, gentle sense of happiness, it’s hard to prevent that from happening.

The Practice of Not Thinking: A Guide to Mindful Living
Ryunosuke Koike

Does a humidifier make your house feel warmer? Asking Google AI

AI Overview
Learn more

Yes, a humidifier can make your house feel warmer, even though it doesn’t actually raise the air temperature, because increased humidity slows down the evaporation of sweat from your skin, making you perceive the temperature as higher; essentially, you feel warmer due to the moisture in the air, not because the room is physically warmer. 

Key points about humidifiers and temperature perception:
    • Sweat evaporation:
      When the air is humid, sweat evaporates more slowly from your skin, causing you to feel warmer.
       
    • Body temperature regulation:
      Your body uses sweat evaporation to cool itself, so less evaporation in humid air means you feel warmer. 
    • Comfort factor:
      Proper humidity levels can significantly improve your comfort level, making a room feel warmer even if the actual temperature remains the same.