This is my two hundred fiftieth review on Goodreads since 2010. You can read them all, fiction, non-fiction, and all sorts of other stuff, at this link:
Rich Magahiz’s reviews on Goodreads
You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane My rating: 4 of 5 stars
This was a solid piece of work on the state of machine learning which is so rapidly changing that one of the main platforms she uses in her examples, GPT-2, has already been replaced by another one with capabilities a hundred or more times that of its predecessor.
I have been attracted to religion from an early age, though I have lots of friends and acquaintances who have no interest in it or have an active dislike of it. Towards them I bear no ill will, though I understand that this blog post is probably not going to be their kind of thing.
For Lent I listened to the audiobook version of Richard Rohr’s book Falling Upward as my assignment and it was an experience of a contrary way of looking and doing things.
Twice a year, during Advent and Lent, I try to do some spiritual reading as a discipline, and this Lent I’m reading St. Teresa of Avila’s The Interior Castle, generally accounted to be a masterpiece of contemplation. The idea is that the human soul is pictured as a transparent castle containing many rooms, sort of a diamond cloister, the most impregnable fortress against the dangers of the outside world. It was natural that this member of a cloistered order would write based upon something she knew, of course, but the interesting thing will be how much I can make of this idea living in the world.
