Posted by dan-bailey 12 hours ago
Ask HN: What are you reading?
Austin worked for British Intelligence during World War II, running the Martians section and helping assess possible invasion sites for D-Day. After the war, as a philosopher of language, he helped bring ideas such as performative utterances and speech acts into the discussion.
A fascinating overlap between intelligence work and philosophy of language.
And because the Brewers are in the playoffs, "Catcher in the Wry" by Bob Uecker. Despite being a Cleveland fan, I have to admit the book is amazingly fun. Uecker was Uecker long before he became everybody's favorite baseball storyteller, and he was the Cleveland announcer in Major League.
- Google News and the occasional full article
- Slack
- ChatGPT/ Codex responses
- Road signs
- Various things in various mobile apps I use
- Websites
- Movie/Show subtitles
Off the top of my head, that accounts for most of the things I read on a weekly basis.
No time for books.
Done: QED, Richard Feynman. Lectures on explaining quantum electrodynamics but with no more math than geometry.
Currently: One Good Turn: A natural history of the screwdriver and the screw, Witold Rybczynski. The discourse goes into his references in depth. It has yielded an excellent list of museums to visit.
On deck: Impossibility: The limits science and the science of limits, John Barrow. A re-read for me. Barrow discusses what we can never know in a way that’s like P vs NP but for the physical world.*
I'm reading Deadly Quicksilver Lies, right now.
Goodreads is commercial, but it does a good job of describing books and series of books.
[UPDATE] Ah. Figured it out. It's the trailing period. I think HN removes it from the link.
- End Times Fascism, And the Fight for the Living World (Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor)
- The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity (Tim Wu)