Lilith Wittmann asked on Twitter:

Why do we have so much dangerous software in Germany?

Because we don’t have the competency anywhere (administration, enterprise or science) to understand the complexity of software.

My take was :

Computer science is easy. It is the science of Zeroes and Ones, and it does not get any more complicated anywhere.

Computer science piles abstractions on top of each other, though, 30 layers deep and with non-linear interactions. That creates a different kind of complexity that is also harder to handle.

This 2018 book in some aspects is already outdated: Silicon Valley Techbro Kai-Fu Lee describes what AI is and what he thinks it will do to our future, the nature of work and the job market. But since then, the worlds view on what AI can and cannot do, what the problems to solve really are and a lot of other things have changed.

AI Superpowers:China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order , Kai-Fu Lee

“Old Man’s War ” is the first “large” works by John Scalzi,

Old Man’s War , John Scalzi

The plot premise is weird, but simple: Humanity has taken to the stars, but with private enterprise. Basically all advanced space technology is controlled by the Colonial Union. Life on earth on the other hand goes on almost as before.

John Perry enlists to serve in the Colonial Defense Force at the age of 75, to protect humanity, but mostly to have the CU fight the effects of him aging with some unspecified Scifi tech. He leaves earth and during his induction to the CDF learns that he will be indeed rejuvenated, by transferring his consciousness into a new, young, genetically engineered body tailored for planetary combat.

Ram V is a writer, sometimes for comics. Together with artist Sumit Kumar he wrote a simple story: English Vampires vs. Indian Rakshasa.

These Savage Shores , Ram V & Sumit Kumar

The 1760’ies. An english vampire puts his peers at risk by not having his desires under control, and is exiled to Calicut, India. He soon finds out that even older and fiercer beings rule the night: Rakshasa, the Vampire equivalent of Indian Myth.

Max Gladstone and Amal El-Mohtar co-authored This Is How You Lose The Time-War , not exactly a Science Fiction novel.

This Is How You Lose The Time War , Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone

Red and Blue are representatives, spies and saboteurs of two nearly all-powerful, warring factions. They travel through time to manipulate events at critical points in history in favor of their respective factions. They are leaving each other messages, they taunt each other, and gradually earn mutual respect. Eventually they grow close to each other, and love develops.

Dave Addey ran a Tumblr once, titled “Typeset in the Future”, in which he dissected the typography of Science Fiction films. This has been turned into the eponymous book.

Typeset in the Future , Dave Addey

In 2013, Addey nerded out over the fonts in a Science Fiction movie and discovered it was an Eurostile variant (“Eurostile Extended Bold”). He started a Tumblr about this, and in great detail went through a number of movies, and about every sign, letter and font used in there. The Tumblr became quite successful, and he turned the most important posts into a book, adding a lot of images with examples and a number of interviews and essays to it.

The memoir of Brian Kernighan, and the story of how UNIX came to be and what working at Bell Labs was like at that time: UNIX: A History and a Memoir is required reading for anyone who wants to know where Unix concepts came from and what ideas were behind its inception.

"UNIX: A History and a Memoir ", Brian Kernighan

Kernighan takes us through the history and the setting of Bell Labs, why it existed and what it did. He explains the hardware of the time, in terms of size, power and capabilities, and why Bell did get involved into writing an Operating System, and the failure of Multics. Unix inception and its co-evolution with the C language was a kind of response to the Multics project, at the same time pioneering novel ideas and taking tested salvageable concepts from Multics, making something new and much more useful.

I had reason to look into the UNIX Eschaton, the time when the signed 32 bit counter of seconds since Midnight, 1970-01-01 UTC overflows. Going to Wikipedia , I learned we will die two years earlier, because in 2036-02-07, 06:28:16 UTC NTP will kill us all:

At 06:28:16 UTC on Thursday, 7 February 2036, Network Time Protocol will loop over to the next epoch, as the 32-bit time stamp value used in NTP (unsigned, but based on 1 January 1900) will overflow. This date is close to the following date because the 136-year range of a 32-bit integer number of seconds is close to twice the 70-year offset between the two epochs.

It began with a tweet by Sebastian Bergmann , which made me buy “88 names ” by Matt Ruff. The book is a tour of massive multiplayer online role playing games for people who do not play, and also a discussion of identity on the Internet.

John Chu has a small sherpa company, an outfit that helps causal players who have the coin to experience hard content in MMORPGs in an easy and successful way without investing too much time into the game. Chu is coming out of a relationship with a borderline gamer, Darla, and is being asked by an obviously powerful and demanding anonymous client to be shown several well known MMOs to better understand their genres.

Paul Fischer writes “A Kim Jong-Il Production ”, a documentary the 1978 abduction of the famous South Korean actress Madam Choi, and her ex-husband, the filmmaker Shin Sang-Ok.

Before becoming the leader of North Korea, Kim Jong-Il headed the Ministry for Propaganda. Dissatisfied with the talent available, he had the famous actress Choi Eun-Hee kidnammed. When her ex-husband started to investigate, he had him kidnapped in Hong Kong and transported to North Korea by ship.