My Review of "Stay True" by Hua Hsu on Goodreads

Stay True by Hua Hsu
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This book is a memoir about a friendship. The author met Ken in college in the late 90's, less than 3 years into the friendship his friend was killed in a random car-jacking gone wrong. This is a less a story and more like the author writing therapeutic monologue processing what happened.

I liked that the book is honest and insightful. The author makes astute observations about American culture then (the 90's), about life as the son of immigrants from Taiwan, about race, being Asian and life in general.

I struggled to figure out what this book was about, like, I'd say it's a vibe, but I don't think that's what the author was going for. I think this is maybe a little more than an homage to a beautiful life lost in a absurd way in an uncaring universe and how the author dealt with it.

I enjoyed this book, there's nothing wrong with it per se, but it's not a "must-read" it's more like, "huh, ok" type of book.

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My review of "Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow" by Gabrielle Zevin on GoodReads

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a story about two friends who make video games. The narrative spans their life-long friendship. It's a story about creative work, love, art, tech and video games.

I really enjoyed reading this book. I can tell that the author knows what goes into building software.
She walks the reader through the creative process, not just the design up front, but the debugging, the release schedule, all that, which may seem like boring details but made the story feel real to me.

I love the references to classic literature and Japanese culture. I stopped and looked up "The Great Wave off Kanagawa" and remembered the fact that this work of art was my laptop wallpaper when I was in college.

At times it feels like the characters are stereotypes, I had to take breaks from this book, there were some sad parts, some triggering parts, don't be like me and read this at a busy bus station downtown, you might start crying in public.

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Computer Scientist Explains Machine Learning in 5 Levels of Difficulty

 In Wired magazine's 5 Level Series experts are challenged to explain a concept at different levels. Like Albert Einstein said:   "If you can't explain it to a six-year- old, you don't understand it yourself"    In this episode, Computer Scientist Hilary Mason explains Machine Learning to a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student and an expert.     This was too good not to share