Erabiltzailearen profila

Generally, as a geek and a tech worker, I enjoyed this novel. I thought the Douglas Adams references were on-brand for a tech entrepreneur, and they frequently made me laugh. Peter fits comfortably into this world, and gets to display his strong problem solving skills.

Peter’s relationship with Bev is developing and I enjoy their domestic time. They are funny together even when things are serious.

I felt like Peter and Nightingale collaborated more in this novel than the last two. Their relationship appears to be maturing, less student/master, more collegial.

I think the introduction of The Librarians and the Mary Engine creates innumerable opportunities for future novels, but this story was very simple compared to the other novels, and honestly as quick as a read as it was, it didn’t grab me. I’d like to have seen more of Skinner plotting and Ms. Chin’s history. I’d really like to know more about what was happening in the battle between Ms. Chin and Nightingale.

I’m fine with Peter going undercover, and it served the plot well, but I didn’t like the way Aaronovitch structured that reveal in the first section of the book. The time skipping was specifically meant to tease the reader; it was contrived. I was very pleased when it ended.

Aaronovitch continually expands the Rivers universe. I wonder if he’d bring in other authors to add some depth to some items that we know little about so far.

I’m really not sure why, but I took a ridiculous amount of notes while I listened to this book. Usually, I take notes to help me remember. I consume enough information generally that things have a tendency to go in one ear and out the other if I’m not focused on remembering them.

While I learned quite a bit while reading this, I didn’t find any of the information revolutionary or surprising. It’s clear that the two companies have widely different cultures, and Walmart has struggled and essentially failed to adapt the stereotypical tech-business culture into its own in an effort to be competitive in the online market.

It took quite a long time for Walmart to begin leveraging its major advantage over Amazon in the online space: physical stores. The pandemic made grocery pick-up a popular option, and it is a service Walmart is much better placed to offer than Amazon. While Amazon provides superior delivery options, it struggles to make traction with grocery, which lead to its purchase of Whole Foods.

It’s interesting to observe these two companies work so hard to make progress into each other's area of advantage, but to date and hundreds of millions of dollars later there has been no significant change.

The one area both companies have tried unsuccessfully to crack is medical service. However, between the two of them, they have the power to create serious disruption in the pursuit of improving medical customer service and more importantly profit.

Coincidentally, I listened to the chapter titled “Amazon and Antitrust” the day after the FTC filed an antitrust claim against Amazon, and Lena Khan is the chair of the FTC.

For casual readers, this book is interesting but moves a bit slow. I’d definitely recommend it for anyone interested in business and technology.

Wow! This book reads super fast and is difficult to put down. It’s also not the place for a person to start this series as a few of the running plot lines come to a head.

Peter’s magic dampening holding cell is an interesting new development and makes me wonder if Molly can create something similar at the folly. Would they have been able to hold Chorley? Hmmm…

I like that we now know Leslie’s motivation for teaming up with The Faceless Man. It was never as simple as getting her face back, and now I’m interested to see where that anger will carry her in future books. I’d be surprised if Aaronovitch just abandoned a complex character like Leslie. She’s a bit of an antihero.

I’m not sure if I missed it, but I really would like to know what Chorley expected to happen if his plan had succeeded? What would killing a god and releasing that power actually do?

And finally, that last reveal! Whoa! That’s definitely going to complicate Peter’s life, probably for the better. I’m guessing it will give us a few laughs in future books as well.

Again, Riordan improved on his previous novel. This book is the best in the series, and they were all good.

Like the previous one, this one moves at a blinding pace. It’s one battle after another with short bits of character development in between. I was surprised at the length of the falling action. The book didn’t end with the abrupt post-battle, “Go celebrate! That’s all folks” short chapter. The book actually has three chapters after the battle, and Riordan does a nice job of tying up the various dangling threads.

The love triangle is finally resolved; although, it seemed pretty obvious where that was going early in the novel. Nonetheless, the tension was fun. I can’t really discuss what I liked about the ending without significant spoilers, so I will have to be satisfied by saying I really liked that everyone had a place in the final battle and after.

Also, as with The Halfblood Prince, I think this is my favorite of the series because it gives us a large dose of bad-guy backstory. I’ve heard the next series, The Heroes of Olympus, is actually better than this one, so I’m looking forward to starting it soon. I also can’t wait for the new Disney+ series. I hope they do it well.

This book is fantastic, a model of combining personal stories, clinical narratives, science, and behavioral analysis. Just as I might be getting distracted during a bit of science or analysis, Lebke includes an anecdote from her personal life or one of her patient’s. (All stories are included with the explicit consent of the owner. Lembke even includes a bit of information about how she collected the consent at the end of the book.)

The book begins with some clinical definitions, one being that the measure of dopamine generated in neural pathways is how scientists measure the addictiveness of a substance or behavior. From there, she takes the reader into an unusual story of a patient addicted to sexual edging. The stories of this patient and others are revisited frequently throughout the book as their stories apply to the information in each chapter.

As the book moves into the balance of pleasure and pain, self-binding, and pressing on the lever, I found I learned a great deal. The story of the teenager who was being forced into therapy by her parents for her near constant use of marijuana to deal with her anxiety was particularly enlightening. Sometimes the cure becomes the problem.

The chapter on shame reveals a lot about our “post-shame politics,” despite this not being the intention of the chapter. She begins this chapter by explaining the difference between guilt and shame: guilt being connected to an action, shame being the same emotion but applied to our self-concept, of who we are.

Shame comes in two forms: destructive and pro-social. Pro-social shame is exemplified in the structure and tenets of Alcoholics Anonymous and is a positive force. It can also be used as a parenting tool. However, some groups use pro-social shame to encourage bad behavior, as in the disinformation business model.

The conclusion of the book reviews the ten most important take-aways from the book, and offers a nice summary of all of the previous information.

In the end, I wish the book contained a relevant story related to internet and social media addiction, addiction to electronics. It is mentioned a few times, but Lembke doesn’t delve into it much. That said, her own personal story of addiction makes it clear that any behavior can be addictive if abused to negative effect.

Spoiler Alert: The identity of The Faceless Man is revealed in this chapter, and it’s awesome!

It’s interesting to me that where these books begin and where they end are such different places. Peter starts this adventure with the investigation of a drug overdose; his investigation spurred by Lady Ty, whose daughter was witness to and possibly involved in the overdose.

We end with the reveal of The Faceless Man’s identity and a couple of epic battles, one mostly “off-camera” between Nightingale and said Faceless Man, the other involving Peter, Leslie, and the Faceless Man.

I love the introduction of the new magical factions, the witches and the Virginia Gentlemen, and I look forward to their involvement in future novels. And, I’m very interested to know why we have the return of the ghost?, Mr. Punch.

This is clearly a turning point in the story of The Faceless Man and Leslie May. I’m glad I don’t have to wait to read the next book.

I learned a lot from this book. The history of the cDc engenders a great deal of respect for the early members as they skirt the line with legality while maintaining pretty fierce ethical and moral standards.

My single biggest struggle with the book is the way it is organized. Menn wants to keep the stories of individuals coherent, so he focuses on one or two member stories at a time, saving one big reveal for the last chapter. This makes a lot of sense to me, but it obscures the timeline, making it difficult to keep the events in chronological order, which in turn makes it difficult to connect various events and people to each other.

With that complaint out of the way, I can safely say I loved this book. I’m frustrated with my younger self because I was ankle deep in technology through the 80s and 90s but thought I was up to my chest and living on the cutting edge. I never viewed myself as a hacker, but I should have at least known something about this world while I was living through it. I should hire the “shame nun” from Game of Thrones to follow me around for a few days. -sigh-

Somewhere about chapter six, I became a bit overwhelmed with the names, and I really wanted a chart or a family tree to keep it all straight. I felt like too much of the history was getting jumbled in my head, so I started taking notes. (No small feat because I listen to books while walking in the mornings.)

The cDc and its subsidiaries are singly responsible for forcing capitalism to take computer security seriously, and with the EFF, arguably the most important players in protecting encryption. When the cDc presented Microsoft with vulnerabilities, they were ignored and then actively derided by the company, so with no other options, they released tools to allow any scriptkiddie to take advantage of the exploit. The first time they were forced to do this in the mid-nineties, it gave the cDc (l0pht) the leverage needed to create an ethical reporting system template: vulnerabilities would first be reported to a vendor with a timeline for repair. Negotiations on the timeline could then take place, but if ignored, the vulnerabilities would be exploited to force the hand of the vendor. While not made clear in the book, this appears to be the beginning of the various bug bounty programs most technology companies run now.

It’s difficult to encapsulate the influence of the cDc covered in this book, and I can’t really do better than the first couple of paragraphs of the epilogue:

“IN ITS EARLIEST days, the chief moral issues for the teens in the Cult of the Dead Cow were how badly to abuse long-distance calling cards and how offensive their online posts should be. But as they matured, the hackers quickly became critical thinkers in an era when that skill was in short supply. In an evolution that mirrored and then led the development of internet security, cDc went on to forge rough consensus on the complex but vital issue of vulnerability disclosure, to show that enabling strong security could be a viable business, and to merge the hacking spirit with activism on behalf of human rights. It also kept a remarkably big tent, roomy enough to include support for acts of civil disobedience as well as work for the military, as long as both were principled. They all helped push a realistic understanding of security challenges and ethical considerations into mainstream conversations in Silicon Valley and Washington. As the big picture in security grows darker, those conversations are the best hope we have.
One lesson from the Cult of the Dead Cow’s remarkable story is that those who develop a personal ethical code and stick to it in unfamiliar places can accomplish amazing things. Another is that small groups with shared values can do even more, especially when they are otherwise diverse in their occupations, backgrounds, and perspectives. In the early days of a major change, cross sections of pioneers can have an outsize impact on its trajectory. After that, great work can be done within governments and big companies. Other tasks critical for human progress need to be done elsewhere, including small and mission-driven companies, universities, and nonprofits. It gets harder to keep the band together over time, but cDc’s impact lives on in those whom members hired, taught, and inspired. That said, a movement cannot control its children. The Citizen Lab and Tor are one thing, while Lulz Security and Gamma Group are another. Trolling and fake news also owe something to cDc, and neither is anything to be proud of."

Anyone interested in the history of technology and/or technology security should read this book. Also, hackers. This is a book for anyone considering themselves a hacker because it contains great lessons: the good, the bad, and the ugly.

This might be my favorite Sandford novel for several years. I enjoy the Prey and the Letty novels, but this one felt different. It had the charm of the historic characters and successfully added Cartright, who works for the Agency-that-must-not-be-names, as well as a few others. I think the introduction of the Ladies Gun Club is brilliant. It brings a lot of possibilities to future novels.

The biggest question I have about the plot is the unknown reasoning for keeping the actual reason behind the hacker hunt a secret. When it came out, it wasn’t a giant revelation, more like, “Oh, of course, let’s do that.” The suspense built up around this just fell flat at the reveal.

Revolving the events around the beginning of the Ukraine invasion really sets this novel in time. I wonder how it will read in a few years. I guess it makes it easy to pinpoint these novels in time, and it’s not like Sandford hasn’t referenced current events in his novels before.

Finally, I have to mention my satisfaction with the final confrontation. It’s atypical for crime novel because while it has its share of heroic acts, it isn’t the all-guns blazing shootout we often see when the bad guys and the good guys finally meet.

This book is a fast read, and it’s hard to put down. If you like Sandford, you’ll like Dark Angel.

This is my favorite of this series so far. Now that any romantic possibilities with Leslie are out of the way, I fully support Peter’s romantic explorations with Beverly Brook, and in the end, she’s my favorite character in this story.

I like some of the terminology introduced in this book. No one wants to appear insane or really believe magic drives real events, so a major part of Peter’s job requires him to create two narratives around events, a “real” official report and a true one for the Folly. to that end, he is asked to complete “A Falcon Assessment” of the events surrounding this case in rural England. People are left to interpret “Falcon Assessment” any way they deem appropriate, but no one actually asks him what it means. Some know, and some don’t want to know.

I like that the supernatural element of this story takes a while to develop. Peter stays on the case to stay out of London after determining no Falcon involvement. He’s still reeling from the betrayal at the end of the last case. Then a couple of cell phones change his conclusion, and Nightingale sends Beverley as backup.

Peter’s use of technology to trace the appearance of magic is brilliant, and his sacrifice at the end show the depths of his character. As another reviewer mentioned, the Fae in the Rivers Universe aren’t like Tinkerbell, but they definitely like to play with humans.

Finally, I love the portrayal of unicorns. While I’m certain it isn’t the first time in fiction, it is the first time I’ve seen unicorns as the malevolent enforcers of the Fae.

This book is informative and mostly interesting. Three out of five because I wanted more of the interview material with the moderators. And, maybe I wanted more detail of the horrors they face in their work. I’m not sure I actually want that though.

The portions of the book focused on the business structures around moderation are slow to read. I do appreciate being able to compare those that worked directly on “Megatech’s” campus as contractors to those in remote locations like call centers. Despite both sets of workers being undervalued contractors and their work being similar, they have different perspectives. I can’t imagine those moderating U.S. posts from another culture can be as effective as those who live in the U.S. That said, moderating centers have flourished in the Philippines because they are steeped in U.S. pop culture.

The interviews with the workers, taking risks because of NDAs, are the most interesting parts of the book, including Roberts’s analysis of their discussions. The work seems horrible, and I think “sin eater” is an outstanding description. I imagine PTSD is a pretty common result of this work, which says a lot about humanity. I was surprised to learn that the moderators often feel helpless. They follow their protocols and report to law enforcement as necessary, but they usually don’t learn the result of their reporting, and if they don’t hear anything, it’s easy to assume nothing happened.

The fact that “Megatech” limited their contractors to one year stints with a mandatory break in between makes it clear that the horror of the work is acknowledged, and yet mental health is a secondary thought. I agree with the moderator who suggested required sessions with a therapist for all moderators.

Finally, the book’s conclusion is outstanding. Content moderation is finally acknowledged as a reality of the web, and as one moderator said, without the work, the internet would be a cesspool. Now that moderation is acknowledged, we need to appreciate their necessary, dangerous, and invisible work by providing them the physical health care, mental health care, pay, and recognition they deserve. Companies are making billions from the work of free content creators; the least we can do is move some of that money to those making it as safe as possible.

This story felt disjointed as I read it, like incomplete short stories. I struggled enough to keep all of the plot points in my head that I reviewed this summary at about the 75% mark. (summary link didn't transfer: allreaders.com/book-review-summary/broken-homes-40217)

However, I liked quite a bit of it. The characters are really the reason I love this series. Peter is a great narrator with a good balance of humor integrated into tense situations and clear explanations of some police procedures. The explanations are helpful as an American reading about policing in London.

Most story threads came together at the end. Aaronovitch did a nice job of leading the reader to understand the importance of the architecture of Skygarden and its connection to the farm and the Faceless Man. And, that end, WOW! I’m a bit upset about it.

These are the plot points that seem to be hanging a bit for me. I’m sure if I took more time, I’d make stronger connections. Maybe I just read the story too slowly to make the connections as I read: What is the importance of the German grimoires? Why did the trees need to be killed? What is the importance of the suicide/murder of the man with the train? I know he was connected with Skygarden, but why did he need to die?

Zach develops as a character with this book, and I’m looking forward to his role in future books. I love the introduction of the Night Witches, and I hope to see Sidororovna again. The River Gods don’t seem to have an important part in this novel, but I always enjoy any scene with Beverly Brook. She just brings such wonderful sexual tension.

We finally have a scene that shows Nightingale’s power instead of hearing about it through exposition of his history. And then we get a new complication with Leslie. I hope this ends up being a positive development. I love her, and she’s a great partner for Peter.