Charity 1 by Wolfgang Hohlbein

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

There’s a wonderful feature by the local reading site Chitanka that offers you random books. I would click 10-15-20 times and find something new I’ve never seen before. A few days ago, it offered me the apocalyptic sci-fi Charity.

Charity is an astronaut and a military captain during an active invasion. An alien ecosystem enters Earth through some kind of portals, brought here by a spaceship, and obliterates everything. The invading army is so powerful that humans do not stand a chance. However, there would be no book if there was no hope, right?

It’s not yet clear what Charity’s superpower is or how she’s going to push back to the invading force. She seems to be good at surviving and also very lucky.

I’d say, almost 5*/5, not a wow book, but definitely one that makes you want to read the continuation. It is also short, which is an advantage.

Why aren’t intelligent people happier

~ Veselin ~ 2 Comments

I found this nice article today that digs into the subject. Check it out.

The article suggests that we’ve been measuring intelligence the wrong way, which leads to poor correlation with life success metrics. Most of our intelligence metrics (like IQ) focus on how well someone can solve clearly defined problems. Real life rarely works that way. Living well, building relationships, raising children, and so on, depend more on the ability to navigate poorly defined problems. As a result, you can have a chess champion who is also a miserable human.

The article goes further and states that AIs can’t become AGIs because they’re only operating with human definitions (training data), and well-defined problems coming from prompts. AGIs would have to master poorly defined problems first.

The Nebula Collection by Artline

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

Publishing books with covers that are all part of the same image is still a relatively uncommon practice in Bulgaria. There have been some nicely designed series over the years, but not many that build a consistent visual identity across multiple titles.

This is the Nebula sci-fi series, featuring titles like Murderbot, Silo, and others. I’m curious to see how long this publisher plans to keep the style going. Something with the perspective feels limiting, as if it should end within 2-3 books.

And here is my success with the books, green are those I already read, red are those I did not start or did not finish. Overall, very solid books so far, mostly 5/5 with a rare 4/5 here and there.