Max McKinnon > Recent Status Updates

Whoa. This one looks to be headed into the bad first impression great second impression category.

I assumed it was going to be too simple and/or things I already knew, but I got called out pretty directly on a poor mentality I didn’t even know I had. Very interesting relatable discussion on the flaws that come with goal setting with a convincing proposal to do better. Summary: Focus on the system, not the goal

After a shakey intro and jumping around a bit, now enjoying the book quite a bit. (The intro was still pretty garb)

Pretty interesting in between story and pacing given the ending is known. Loving it so far. Was a bit scared of this book because Paul has one of the most epic character arcs in the original, and I didn’t want to ruin that, but so far I’m enjoying it.

Safe to say I will be reading all the Dune books after this. I was expecting this to be the worst of the bunch and sort of reluctantly started it when Butlerian Jihad wasn’t available.

There’s many moments in here I’m sure Brian and KJA would have made FH proud.

Wow was not expecting this to be much, what an epic offshoot between the events of Dune and Messiah.

Also this one has very strong anti-war philosophy as well as war hierarchy commentary that was only hinted at in the original.

There’s this scene with Gurney and the Jihadists that’s incredibly good writing.

We have our own goals and ambitions for good or ill, but our true destiny is decided by forces over which we have no control
- The Atreides Manifesto first draft, section deleted by Bene Gesserit committee

Can’t seem to put it down!

Good, reads more like a cleanly crafted Michael Crichton novel than the original Dune. I really slept on this and believed the “not as good as the original” popular claims. This book is better than books 4-6, and like those books it builds on the epic Dune universe in a consistent way.

So far meh. High on optics, short on reality. Many of the small silver bullet philosophies “taken from Google” are more story than reality.

I was a bit disappointed at bringing in the Milgram shock experiment into the discussion only to repeat the popularized false conclusion. (See Humankind for a better experiment and the flaws with Milgram’s)

I just can’t seem to get into this. It feels like the short story equivalent of jazz music to me. Lots of words, lots of complexity, not a lot of emotion or engagement.

I heard from about 5 people I really trust with book recommendations that this was awesome, but it doesn’t seem to be my jam. Maybe the audiobook narration is hurting it slightly too.

I loved Arrival, so I was expecting something different from this book. The time traveling rings story was a great intro, 4/5. The software lifecycle story really drags, 2/5. I’m really not into morality philosophy contrived into a sci fi story.

I can definitely relate to the cultural stigma around “a jack of all trades is a master of none”. I have many times not included things on my resume or in conversations with hiring managers because more than once I’ve gotten stopped early due to being interested in too many things.

I learned the full phrase was originally a complement “… but oftentimes better than a master of one”

He describes a scenario involving a choice to race and a failing engine. Worse case was described as losing the sponsorship. Then when you make the decision to race, it turns into an “aha! You were given NASA data and just killed 7 people on the Challenger!”, an entirely different set of risks vs reward. Terrible analogy.

Overall he was trying to say challenge the data but did so poorly.

The comic book section was interesting. But one super glaring issue, he kept describing “so many benefited from breadth of working on multiple genres” without giving any data. How significant was it? Probably not much if be failed to mention it in numbers. I hate it when authors are more interested in the narrative than the actual data

Nintendo’s history is fascinating: food to video games led by an engineer that couldn’t get a job at big firms.

Great story in there
“Oh no our competitor just released a handheld gaming platform that looks pretty good!”
“Does it have color?”
“Yes!!”
“Then we’re fine.”

In context of the original green gameboy

The notes around Michael Crichton, Patrick Rothfuss, and other “late to arrive” authors were insightful. I could add one more to that list: Andy Weir.

I like his commentary on Duckworth’s Grit, which had both rebuttals and praise.

I found myself overpraising that book. A lot of the things he’s saying about pivot vs persevere I can relate to, especially since I just switched teams at work. The first team wasn’t traumatically bad, and I could have easily gritted it out, but I’m so glad I made a transfer.

The music and math examples are pretty good however. Both music and math have a fairly easy way to understand both the memorization approach and the understanding approach and the superiority of the understanding approach. I would disagree that that generalizes to all fields though. Many fields are more about memorization, and even math and music can benefit from some amount of memorization.

3/5 so far. You’d have to be living under a rock to not understand some of these problem solving principles, and I completely disagree with the narrative of building breadth before depth. Almost all my breadth and analogy knowledge I can trace back to going super deep in one thing, then relating lessons there back to other things. “Fundamentals first” is completely wrong and totally neglects the role of passion

Pretty good. Not as consistent and driving as the first two, and the pacing is not as good, but the continuation is great. A little more religion commentary in this one, which was overall good but slightly forced compared to the “it’s there if you want to see it” in the previous two books.

The author discerned that chess is 99% tactics and 1% strategy. Doesn’t matter how good your strategy is if you’re more than a few pieces down (rare short term exceptions come up, like the beautiful stockfish queen in the corner game).

The conclusion of humans adding to a computer’s ability was a bit forced and only true during the deep blue era. Humans aren’t infinitely better at generalizing everything.

So far lots of things don’t really make sense. I hate it when there are tech/science elements used as plot devices but the author clearly doesn’t understand them. In comparison highlights how good the martian and hail mary were. Sort of boring intro and 3/5 so far. Might drop it by the next chapter.

Interesting to hear the author himself read some of the scenes. I didn’t know what i was getting with this, but it’s all right. Nice to relive key moments, and his own touch on reading a few things was great.

Spoiler —-

“Sorry Grandpa, but you’ve found the Atreides’ Gom Jabbar”

6th or so time reading this book. I recently learned Frank Herbert didn’t accept his son’s homosexuality. I never noticed it before, but with this understanding some of the book is a bit different / worse. Add another one to “don’t meet your heroes”. Overall still an incredible book.

Waiting for Children of Dune to be available, so I figured I’d start this one again for roughly the 5th time.

Loving it. It has more hand waving and less actual engineering and science than The Martian, but overall I like it more. The story telling style is noticeably more cliffhanger after cliffhanger as well.

The pacing is phenomenal. Every now and then some piece of pseudoscience rattled off that’s very important to the plot has a hand wavy explanation and doesn’t hold up to scrutiny as well as it did in The Martian but what the hell, most of it is still epic and great.