She, Lover of Death by Boris Akunin (2020)

This eighth Erast Fandorin mystery returns to turn-of-the-century Moscow, a setting Akunin continues to relate with his immersive command of historical detail, character, dialogue, and storytelling. I continue to enjoy the series as much for its historical slice of life as for its mysteries. The dense prose, interwoven poetry, and brisk pacing sustain the reader's interest as the mystery progresses. Yet another nihilistic suicide club and its serial killer provide familiar material, but Fandorin is less infallible than usual, making mistakes before he finally solves the mystery and saves the day. I recognized many of the clues early and anticipated several revelations, which diminished the detective work’s surprises.

In Moscow, Fandorin operates undercover, unable to enlist the police or state agencies because of the events of the preceding novel. As young people die in a nihilistic suicide club, he must investigate its members, motives, and connections without exposing his identity or relying on his usual institutional resources. His inquiries gradually uncover the truth behind the deaths, testing both his deductive abilities and his capacity to recover from mistakes.

The familiar premise and predictable revelations kept this book from ranking among my favorites in the series, but its pace and period detail compensate. I look forward to the second half of the story in the next installment.

4/5 Stars

Shadows upon Time (Sun Eater book 7) by Christopher Ruccio (2025)

This 1,000-page volume brings a fun series to an unsatisfying conclusion. The sprawling narrative contains enough material for two or three books, and its spectacular events resolve some character arcs, but the length comes at the expense of closure. The shadowy force behind the galaxy’s woes remains in power, numerous loose ends are left unresolved, and Hardrian's fate remains unclear. Rather than a satisfying culmination, the ending reads like a cliffhanger.

Hadrian Marlowe prepares humanity for the Cielcin’s long-awaited return, assembling fleets and wielding the ancient war machine Demiurge against an enemy allied with the Watcher gods. Major fleet engagements devastate both sides, while the revelation that the Watchers can transport Cielcin forces without warning overturns conventional military strategy. The climactic assault on Gododdin delivers a shocking reversal: rather than merely attacking the human fleet, a Cielcin worldship deliberately collides with the planet, destroying it. Hadrian must then confront the Cielcin Prophet-King and the cosmic powers behind the war, as military catastrophe, political betrayal, and personal sacrifice converge.

I enjoyed the spectacle, the escalating stakes, and the resolution of several character arcs, but I wanted a conclusion worthy of the series. Too many conflicts remain unresolved, and Hadrian’s ultimate fate is left hanging. After seven books and nearly a thousand pages, I expected a more satisfying farewell.

3/5 Stars

Dark Horse by Gregg Hurwitz (2022)

I continue to enjoy the Orphan X series, and this seventh installment is as well crafted and entertaining as the earlier books. Hurwitz immerses the reader in communities suffering under cartel domination, where criminal organizations function as parallel governments, controlling commerce, infrastructure, and local populations. Although the realities of contemporary cartel power differ substantially from the novel's setting, Hurwitz creates a convincing environment for a close-combat thriller. Reading the story, I was willing to suspend disbelief and enjoy the action, even with a better-informed understanding of the criminal network.

Orphan X confronts another dangerous adversary in a story that explores the human costs of cartel power. The series continues to introduce engaging plots while developing its central characters and their relationships, leaving unresolved threads that promise further adventures.

I find Dark Horse another satisfying entry in a series that has sustained its appeal through inventive plots, evolving characters, and relentless action. 5/5 Stars

Side Bar (Reality of Cartels):

• Cartels function as parallel governments in Mexico, extracting taxes from all local businesses and controlling transport infrastructure, while influencing national leaders
• In Venezuela, the Tren de Aragua gang operated as a mercenary force for the Maduro administration while controlling illegal mining territories and still has enormous power
• Ecuador hosts the transit hub for 70% of global cocaine supply, where cartels heavily infiltrate national commerce and mining areas
• The Northern Triangle (Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador) serves as the primary cocaine transit bottleneck connecting South American production to North America under Cartel international leadership
• Colombia forms the upstream economic source of the entire continental cartel and cocoa network
• Cartels have many, strong transnational crime, supply chains, and foreign influence 

Quel avenir pour la République?

The French Republic faces violent unrest. Rioters waving Palestinian flags:

• Ransacked, & occupied Marseille's city hall,

• Burned Limoges's town hall,

• Ransacked Bordeaux's prefect residence,

• Burned down historic Tourist Office in Lyon,

• Ransacked town hall, looted dozens of stores, attacked police in Lille,

• Looted over 100 stores, "devastated neighborhoods" in Paris,

• Ransacked city hall, looted 40 stores, banks, churches, hijacked train in Grenoble,

• Looted, ransacked, burned > 1,500 businesses in Nice, Nantes, Toulouse, Strasbourg, Avignon Pau, Montpellier, Valence, Bordeaux

In all cases the protesters waived Palestinian flags. - Over 2,400 arrests, 600 injured police officers, widespread shop damage across France.

• Over 300 School burnings all contained Palestinian flags, escalated to widespread violent riots  - Radical-left leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon and France Un-bowed drive "conflictualization," casting the French Republic as an adversary to unite widely disparate grievances.  Mélenchon's strategy unifies anti-establishment anger and intransigent nihilist Arab causes ahead of the upcoming presidential election to secure political positioning.

• Party figures have defended school riots, targeted school principals

• Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu criticized opposition leaders for fueling violence

• Intersectionality on the radical left conflates unrelated Arab seething and domestic causes, "Palestinian" (anti-semetic)  and local municipal disputes.

• Islamist networks exploit institutional distrust by framing national belonging as inherently hostile to Muslims

• Public servants, including mayors and teachers, face severe death threats from Islamists without state protection, exemplified by violent attacks on municipal homes.

• President Emmanuel Macron condemned the ongoing violence with empty rhetoric and no action.

• The unrest empowers Marine Le Pen's National Rally

Sources:

• https://www.i24news.tv/fr/actu/france/artc-manifestations-du-17-octobre-violences-a-marseille-et-lyon-des-drapeaux-palestiniens-dans-les-corteges

• https://www.fdd.org/analysis/the-french-republic-is-under-attack/

• https://www.franceinfo.fr/economie/greve/une-antenne-de-l-office-de-tourisme-de-lyon-a-ete-saccagee-et-incendiee-en-marge-de-la-mobilisation-du-17-octobre_8241787.html

• https://www.bfmtv.com/police-justice/on-a-eu-super-peur-paris-lyon-marseille-nice-les-commerces-des-grandes-villes-pilles-lors-des-manifestations-du-17-octobre_AN-202610170306.html

• https://www.leparisien.fr/societe/mobilisation-du-17-octobre-black-blocs-affrontements-a-paris-lyon-ou-marseille-le-point-sur-les-fortes-tensions-en-marge-des-rassemblements-17-10-2026-MEE27WC2R5EJVHHLWNJHSJ34NM.php

The Coronation by Boris Akunin (2000)

This seventh book in the Fandorin series combines historical immersion, a compelling mystery, and thriller pacing against the backdrop of Tsar Nicholas II’s 1896 coronation and the Khodynka Tragedy, where 1,400 people died in a stampede. Akunin’s increasingly powerful and resourceful adversaries are an effective escalation across the series. Hidden treachery, unexpected allies, and a motley cast of characters sustain the suspense. The first-person account of a royal majordomo was not to my taste, and reminds me why I did not enjoy Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. The technique does help with historical immersion, however.

During the imperial coronation festivities, Fandorin confronts a dangerous conspiracy involving powerful adversaries, hidden loyalties, and threats to the royal household. The plot twists, &  turns in many, unexpected ways as the mystery unfolds.

Despite my reservations about the narrator, I find the mystery, characterization, and historical setting outstanding. Akunin makes the imperial world feel inhabited rather than merely reconstructed, while the escalating contest between Fandorin and his formidable opponents gives the plot the momentum of a genuine thriller. The narrative perspective occasionally impedes my enjoyment, but the novel’s other strengths more than compensate.

4/5 Stars

Chasing Happiness

 

“Don’t pursue happiness in the way today’s culture advises. Pursue virtue, generosity, piety, integrity, and kindness. Your happiness will come from the love you give.”

Arthur Brooks closes with this advice in his essay on happiness. It echoes an argument Aristotle made more than 2,300 years ago.

In Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapters 4–5, Aristotle distinguishes eudaimonia—human flourishing through virtuous activity from lesser goods people mistake for happiness: pleasure (hēdonē), honor and esteem (timē), and wealth. Pleasure fades; honor depends on others; wealth is a means, not an end.

For Aristotle, happiness is not merely a feeling to acquire. It is a way of living: exercising our capacities well and acting virtuously over a complete life.

Charity Majors revisits this distinction in “If your team is happy, are you doing a good job?”. Her argument challenges the idea that management succeeds by keeping everyone happy. Psychological safety matters because it enables learning and high performance, not because nobody should feel uncomfortable. Growth requires accountability, difficult feedback, and the willingness to confront problems.

The parallel is instructive. A pleasant workplace is not necessarily a flourishing one, just as momentary pleasure is not a flourishing life. The goal is not to eliminate discomfort, but to build an environment where people can do meaningful work, develop their abilities, and achieve something worthwhile together.

(AI reconstruction of Aristotle)

Aristotle gives us the framework; Brooks gives us the reminder. Pursue the good, not merely the feeling.

“Don’t pursue happiness in the way today’s culture advises. Pursue virtue, generosity, piety, integrity, and kindness. Your happiness will come from the love you give.”

Further reading: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I · Arthur Brooks, on happiness · Charity Majors, on happy teams

Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry (1985)

This book is a sprawling, gruesome, and stirring novel that defined most tropes of the Old West drama, a genre that has outlived by many generations the historical period it portrays. McMurtry’s Pulitzer Prize-winning prose immerses the reader in frontier squalor, relentless violence, disease, hardships, and the harsh demands of survival, while exploring unrequited love and the frontier spirit in a depressing story. The main characters are complex, compelling, and realistically human; their psychological contradictions and tangled relationships give the novel its enduring power.

Two aging Texas Rangers lead a cattle drive north from Texas to Montana, encountering danger, hardship, and the varied inhabitants of the frontier in a depressing story.

The journey supplies the structure, but the novel’s real achievement is the people: their longings, loyalties, disappointments, and stubborn persistence in lives that offer no comfort or certainty. The characters transcend the Western archetypes they embody, lending emotional heft to a world where violence is commonplace and happiness remains elusive. The length and brutality can make the book demanding but McMurtry’s command of character and human psychology makes the experience worthwhile.

4/5 Stars

Has France lost its charm, its cars, and now its schools?

During my misspent youth I had a full-blown Francophile stage. I watched French films, read French newspapers, followed French politics, and tracked every development of the May 1968 student uprising. At the time, it genuinely felt like it might turn into another French Revolution.

Then I read Barbara Tuchman’s The March of Folly. Her long section on the American (and earlier French) disaster in Indochina/Vietnam cured me of the romance. The French had already demonstrated the same combination of arrogance, denial, and eventual collapse that the Americans later repeated. Interest evaporated.

In 2022 I picked up Alistair Horne’s A Savage War of Peace (the classic account of the Algerian War of 1954–1962). That book filled in the missing piece. Suddenly the post-colonial migration from North Africa into France, and the broader pattern of Muslim demographic and cultural pressure on Europe, made a lot more sense. One of the clearest lessons from that war is the sheer effectiveness of a death-cult’s intransigence: refuse every compromise, raise the body count, outlast the democratic will, and the other side eventually folds.

Because we are all bombarded by news, France is impossible to ignore. The “disaffected youth” (mostly of Algerian and other North African origin) were already torching cars sporadically in the banlieues in the 1980s. The real annual “Carbeque” tradition, hundreds to thousands of cars set alight every New Year’s Eve and Bastille Day solidified in the 1990s and 2000s and has never stopped. The numbers fluctuate, but the ritual is now well-entrenchenched and decades old. The 2023 riots simply scaled it up: several thousand vehicles burned in a single week of mayhem.

And the newest generation of “disaffected youth” has updated the repertoire. They have started burning down their own schools. The French protest tradition evolves, but the underlying energy remains the same. Examples here, here, here or here.

Prodigal Son by Gregg Hurwitz (2021)

I continue to enjoy the Orphan X series for its combination of kinetic prose, close-quarters combat, relentless suspense, melodrama, and super-spy-versus-super-villain entertainment, but by book six, Hurwitz is pushing the underlying mythology toward implausibility. Evan's sudden discovery of a globe-trotting, immensely powerful mother, the newly revealed blood relationships, and the autonomous-AI plotline collectively stretch my willingness to suspend disbelief. Hurwitz is not a science-fiction writer, and I preferred the earlier approach of keeping his characters' extraordinary hacking abilities in the background rather than introducing an AI antagonist whose capabilities require increasingly conspicuous technological hand-waving. Still, the thriller mechanics remain tight, and the teenager and pre-teen drama works surprisingly well when Hurwitz restrains the melodrama. By now, I am invested in Evan and the network of people surrounding him, which makes every new mystery and improbable coincidence entertaining to unravel.

Plot: Evan becomes entangled in revelations about his family while confronting a new threat that combines personal history, international intrigue, and artificial intelligence. The investigation pulls him and his allies through escalating dangers as they attempt to determine whom they can trust.

I enjoyed Prodigal Son despite the increasingly elaborate mythology and the moments when the story made me think, "That is too ridiculous." Hurwitz remains skilled at constructing tightly sequenced action and keeping the narrative moving, while Evan's relationships provide enough emotional grounding to offset the increasingly extravagant threats. I found the book less convincing than earlier installments, but still sufficiently entertaining to make the series' continuing mysteries worth pursuing.

3/5 Stars

A drop of corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett (2025)

This second Ana and Din fantasy detective novel is a 2026 Hugo Award nominee and improves on its predecessor. I particularly enjoyed the uncomfortable collaboration between our talented, neurodivergent protagonists and the bureaucratic machinery of their society. Against them stands a supervillain with superpowers.  The antagonist's patience, intelligence, and meticulous preparation gives our plucky heroes what seems like an insurmountable task. Bennett also uses the case to explore institutional power, social hierarchy, and the ways bureaucracies can either preserve or endanger a society.

I remain frustrated, however, by the magic system. The biological systems underlying its fantasy world violate physics. I am equally bothered that generations of supposedly brilliant natural philosophers have apparently discovered none of the basic insights that transformed our own understanding of biology and the physical world, leaving the society trapped in pre-Enlightenment ignorance, suffering, and squalor. Still, Bennett’s characters, dialogue, plotting, and prose are so compelling that I am willing to suspend disbelief. I particularly enjoyed the social dynamics and the tension between individual intelligence and institutional capability.

Ana and Din investigate a seemingly inexplicable biological threat, gradually uncovering an elaborate scheme whose scope and consequences extend far beyond the initial mystery. Their investigation brings them into conflict with an adversary whose preparation and intelligence repeatedly outmaneuver their expectations.

Bennett compensates with compelling characters, intelligent dialogue, inventive plotting, and writing that makes the world’s social and political tensions wonderful literature.

4/5 Stars

Memoirs of a thinking radish by Peter Medawar (1986)

Peter Medawar won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 1960, but I know him almost as much for his popular science essays, where wit, intellectual clarity, and unfiltered criticism make even difficult subjects entertaining. Memoirs of a Thinking Radish collects his recollections of childhood and youth, his studies at Oxford, and the research career that eventually brought him international recognition. I particularly enjoyed the contrast between the magnitude of his scientific accomplishments and the deliberately ridiculous title, which reflects the humility running throughout the book.

Medawar gives considerable credit to the collaborators, mentors, colleagues, technicians, and other members of the support network who contributed to his success. His willingness to puncture his own reputation keeps the autobiography from becoming an exercise in self-congratulation, while his sharp observations provide much of its entertainment. I found his account especially interesting because it reveals the human infrastructure behind scientific achievement rather than presenting discovery as the product of solitary genius.

I did not find Memoirs of a Thinking Radish quite as entertaining as Richard Feynman's autobiographical books, whose exuberance and eccentricity make them difficult to match. Nevertheless, I found Medawar's combination of scientific accomplishment, humility, humor, and candid criticism thoroughly enjoyable.

4/5 Stars

Buy a Bullet by Gregg Hurwitz (2016)

I have always been interested in the possibility that a series novella or short story began as a writer's private character exercise: a vignette written to discover how a character's past shaped the motivations, reactions, and inner dialogue required by a larger work. During my own amateur writing years, from 1979 to 1986, my small writers' mutual-support group occasionally assigned such exercises for our longer projects. Successful writers sometimes discover that one of those discarded pieces can stand on its own, whether as a prequel, a deleted scene, or simply an opportunity to monetize material already written. I cannot tell whether Buy a Bullet originated that way, although its function within the Orphan X series makes the possibility intriguing.

The story is a prequel to Evan Smoak's transformation into the "Nowhere Man," the protector of people who have nowhere else to turn. The story supplies the decisive experience that moves Evan toward the moral purpose he embraces in The Nowhere Man, showing the psychological hinge between the government-trained assassin and the self-appointed protector. The premise interests me more than the execution: the story is too short to develop much tension, and Hurwitz pushes the emotional turning point toward melodrama. Even so, I enjoyed seeing the particular experience that helps explain why Evan eventually chooses to spend his considerable skills helping strangers rather than simply disappearing into a private life.

The story is more useful as an Orphan X character history than compelling as an independent thriller. It fills an important gap in Evan's trajectory, but the compressed format leaves little room for the suspense, tactical ingenuity, and character interplay that make the novels entertaining.

4/5 Stars

The State Counselor by Boris Akunin (2017)

In this sixth Fandorin mystery, we experience the collision of Fandorin’s humanistic, enlightened ethics with the labyrinthine bureaucracy and Czarist power politics of 1891 Moscow. Fandorin is now a State Counselor, placing him inside the very apparatus whose corruption and institutional self-interest test his commitment to justice. I continue to value the series most for its vivid historically accurate slice-of-life: Akunin makes Muscovite society, political factions, manners, and official machinery come alive. The revolutionary Nihilists again provide the adversarial force, led by an autistic mastermind with fun eccentricities and powers. I found the thriller mechanics enjoyable, although the Christie-like reversals sometimes become melodramatic and over-done. The passionate, sexually liberated women are less convincing as characters; their opacity serves the mystery but leaves them underdeveloped. Fandorin himself is also less dominant than in earlier installments, with his deductions and actions constrained by his position.

A political assassination draws Fandorin into a conflict among revolutionary conspirators, government officials, and competing factions within Moscow’s ruling apparatus. He must investigate while navigating institutional rivalries, concealed loyalties, and a conspiracy whose real architect is hidden.

I enjoyed The State Counselor as much for its historical atmosphere as for its mystery. Fandorin’s diminished freedom is an interesting evolution of the character, even if it reduces some of the earlier books’ intellectual fireworks. The plot twists are entertaining  despite their excesses, while the depiction of 1891 Moscow is, again, the best part of the series. The original Russian novel was so popular in 1999 that it became the most-expensive film in Russian history in 2005, for which Akunin wrote the screenplay.

4/5 Stars

Second-mover advantage in the age of AI

The internet bubble of 1995–2001 produced a classic mismatch between investor returns and eventual economic impact. Early backers of Amazon watched the stock collapse and then languish; the net present value of those investments looked terrible for decades. Eventually, the company’s extraordinary effects on retail, cloud computing, and logistics become fully visible. Capital destroyed on the way up created the conditions for patient capital to buy undervalued assets on the way down. The second movers won.

Eerily similar events are unfolding in AI. Trillions of dollars are flooding frontier model companies and the surrounding ecosystem. Hype cycles are reliable: AI will reach the plateau of productivity only after the bubble deflates and the trough of disappointment has been crossed. When those events occur, valuations will reset. Clever investors will again find underpriced assets whose economic viability is clearer than their current market prices suggest.

The geography of those assets will matter. SemiAnalysis’s recent mapping of Chinese AI infrastructure shows a market already larger than EMEA and the rest of Asia combined, with more than 24 GW of capacity across a thousand facilities, with ByteDance alone occupying roughly a fifth of delivered space. Build-out is rapid: 100 MW facilities routinely appear in under twelve months. Policy (“Eastern Data, Western Compute”), state carriers, and hyperscalers are driving wholesale AI demand while legacy retail racks sit underutilized. Chip constraints and high vacancy rates exist, yet the physical capacity keeps expanding.

Dan Wang’s Breakneck supplies the cultural contrast. China is an engineering state whose elite, trained in civil and chemical engineering, prefers to build first and manage consequences later. The United States has become a lawyerly society whose elite, steeped in process and compliance, excels at obstruction. The difference shows up in high-speed rail timelines, power permitting, and the speed of modular data center construction. After the AI bubble pops, government influence will shape which second movers capture durable economic value. In China, engineering-oriented leadership is already directing capital toward infrastructure that can be filled once model economics stabilize. In the United States, the same leadership style that slows housing and transmission lines may also slow the reallocation of capital toward the firms that survive the trough.

The frontier labs may still produce the most advanced models. The second-mover advantage, however, is likely to accrue to those who own the undervalued capacity, the power contracts, and the policy alignment that turn models into sustained economic activity. History suggests the largest returns will go not to those who paid peak prices for the most hyped names, but to those who bought the right assets after the bubble popped.

Into the Fire by Gregg Hurwitz (2020)

In this fifth Orphan X novel, we find our hero attempting something almost as difficult as his previous missions: retirement. After years of pursuing personal redemption by rescuing one random victim at a time from powerful, evil criminals, Evan wants to become something resembling a normal person, with fewer secrets, fewer layers of tradecraft, and perhaps enough emotional openness to sustain actual relationships. Fate (plot contrivance), naturally, has other plans. What begins as a final, relatively simple mission expands in complexity and layers into a multi-book war against a large, distributed criminal empire, transforming Evan's hoped-for exit into another reluctant journey into the high-stakes world he is trying to escape.

I particularly enjoyed the novel's structure: early in the story, Evan is severely injured and progressively deprived of the advantages that normally make him so formidable. Rather than simply overpowering his enemies, Hurwitz makes those progressively higher-level close-combat encounters compelling because Evan's expertise remains intact even as his resources collapse; each successful up-leveling victory therefore feels constructed rather than inevitable. At the "boss level" of the book, Evan must improvise increasingly ingenious MacGyver-style solutions while operating under near-deadly physical constraints. I also enjoyed the emerging side stories and deliberately unresolved mysteries that foreshadow a larger architecture still developing across future books.

For me, the greatest pleasure remains Hurwitz's ability to sustain relentless action without reducing Evan to a formula. The characters remain sharply differentiated, the dialogue is consistently entertaining, and the escalating complications feel like genuine extensions of Evan's increasingly tangled life rather than arbitrary obstacles. Hurwitz keeps finding new ways to put Orphan X in situations for which even Orphan X is insufficiently prepared.

5/5 Stars

Disquiet godds, Sun eater book 6 by Christopher Ruocchio (2024)

I continue to enjoy the Sun Eater series because Ruocchio combines elegant prose, literary and historical allusions, expansive world-building, and long-form revelations with an engrossing story. I am increasingly disappointed, however, by the series’ movement away from science fiction toward high fantasy: Watchers, Titans, lesser gods, and greater gods now occupy an expanding role, while the underlying metaphysics increasingly resembles an arbitrary magic system. Ruocchio is no longer using fun frontier cosmology and physics, such as ten-dimensional reality with multiple time dimensions.  He has replaced them  with fantasy conventions. This shift away from science and my love of Golden Age science fiction are eroding the fun as the series progresses.

Nearly two centuries after Ashes of Man, Hadrian lives in exile on Jadd with his daughter Cassandra when the Emperor recalls him to service. HAPSIS, the emperor's secret ancient god "Watcher" investigation department, has located a Watcher, a being worshipped as a god by the evil Cielcin, and Hadrian receives an almost impossible assignment: kill the watcher.

I am still invested in Hadrian’s story. I enjoy watching his character evolve as centuries of experience, accumulated power, guilt, and loss reshape him, while Cassandra introduces a new dimension to a protagonist who has spent most of the series isolated by circumstance. The revelations continue to reframe earlier events, and the stakes now extend beyond interstellar war into the nature of reality itself. Hadrian increasingly resembles a fantasy hero leveling up, acquiring powers sufficient to confront progressively more consequential enemies and quests. I would prefer more scientific constraint and less arbitrary metaphysics, but Ruocchio’s prose, character arcs, historical texture, foreshadowing, and world-building keep me engrossed. I continue to enjoy the Sun Eater series, even as its increasingly fantastic direction moves it further from the science fiction I love most.

4/5 Stars

The Simplicity Advantage: Crafting Software That Lasts

Personally, I always strive for simplicity and elegance in software. AI makes that preference more important because both humans and models have a well-understood cognitive bias toward adding rather than subtracting.

• People systematically overlook subtractive solutions 

• Models have an identical bias and sycophancy makes it worse.

• The models know it:  Claude Opus will always overengineer with extra files, unnecessary abstractions and unrequested flexibility

The danger is not necessarily one bad generation. It is an accumulation.

• 623 million changes found cross-file reuse down 35% and refactoring down 70% from 2022.

• Copy / paste (copy-pasta) rose 41%, duplication 81%, and two-week churn 15%.

• AI adoption is associated with a 7.2% decline in delivery stability

• "AI slop is a tragedy of the commons" -  generation is cheap; review and maintenance are expensive.

• “AI-Generated Code Smells” increase bloat and coupling; not even detailed prompting could prevent it!

• There may be hope!  These new LLM chatterbots are amplifiers.  Some LLM-generated code is simpler than human reference code in every tested language except Python.  a generation can be simple while a thousand additions make it complex.

Everyone should add subtraction into the development loop.

The technical co-founder of OpenAI and co-creator of chatgpt says that:

• unchecked assumptions, 

• sycophancy, 

• overcomplicated APIs, bloated abstractions, and 

• dead code

. . . are the most-offensive recurring problems in AI-generated code. He goes on to say:

Coding agents also really like to overcomplicate code and APIs, they bloat abstractions, they don't clean up dead code after themselves, etc. They will implement an inefficient, bloated, brittle construction over 1000 lines of code and it's up to you to be like "umm couldn't you just do this instead?" and they will be like "of course!" and immediately cut it down to 100 lines.

And Kaparthy is not the only one who recognizes this problem. And newer, simpler approaches are not better because human judges add their own "always add complexity" bias when the models are trained.

Therefore before asking AI what to add, we must always ask the model what to delete! Do you remember your college curriculum on Software Design?

• Software Design - Complexity is the central design problem!
• No Silver Bullet - Accidental vs Essential complexity
• Simple made easy - Simplicity is deceptively difficult!

And finally, as I keep repeating in these posts, when you are trying to defend your code from vulnerabilities, exploits, etc:

There is no attack surface as good as no attack surface.

Less code means fewer vulnerabilities.

Death of the Author by Nnedi Okorafor (2026)

I enjoyed Nnedi Okorafor’s imaginative, multifaceted story despite the terrible science. The strongest elements are the slice-of-life immersion in a Nigerian immigrant family in Chicago. I enjoyed the unapologetic, self-absorbed autobiographical detail, family tensions, and passionate, emotional candor. Okorafor portrays the corruption, misogyny, terror, and violent crime in Nigeria without sugar coating the reality and  human consequences; I found the cultural specificity and family drama far more compelling than the terrible science in its science fiction.

The story follows a disabled Nigerian American woman whose sudden success as an author transforms her life, with unexpected fame, money, and complications.  The story also tries to break the literary wall, where the story she writes interacts with reality, but those parts are quite terrible.

For me, the plot and science remain secondary to the emotional and autobiographical core. I was most engaged by the family relationships, competing loyalties, and passionate reactions of characters navigating cultures and circumstances that resist easy resolution.

3/5 Stars

Furious Gulf by Gregory Benford (1994)

I found the fifth volume of the Galactic Center series less depressing than its predecessors, although Benford continues to subject his characters to extraordinary suffering and helplessness. Physics is the real spectacle: regions surrounding a black hole contain stable, separate space-time realities insulated from the tidal forces of our comparatively flat universe. Benford piles on so many PhD-thesis-level revelations that I sometimes lost sight of the characters beneath the cosmology. The book recalls Stephen Baxter at his most ambitious, particularly in its fascination with exotic physics and civilizations operating across incomprehensible scales.

The story follows the surviving humans as they struggle to navigate the increasingly bizarre environments and political conflicts of the Galactic Center while confronting powers vastly beyond their understanding. Their immediate goal is survival; their larger problem is discovering what the galaxy's mysterious powers are doing and how humanity fits into events operating on a cosmic scale.

I found the human conflicts less interesting than the increasingly strange galactic phenomena. Petty political struggles among the various human factions continue, but I have become somewhat numb to the suffering inflicted by the powerful antagonists; survival against overwhelming forces now feels more plausible because of the larger pattern of events gradually emerging. Benford reveals more about the mysterious galactic powers without dissolving their fundamental mystery, preserving the series' sense of cosmic awe. The contrived reappearance of Benford's favorite character near the conclusion disappointed me, however; the device felt less organic than the increasingly elaborate cosmological discoveries surrounding it.

4/5 Stars

Perry Rhodan 12–13, Das Geheimnis der Zeitgruft / Die Festung der sechs Monde (1961)

 
Ich habe weiterhin großen Spaß an diesen Space Operas aus dem Goldenen Zeitalter, in denen die noch junge Terranische Raumflotte auf ausgewachsene Zivilisationen trifft, die das Leben auf der Erde bedrohen. Die Größe und der Umfang der Geschichten sind einfach herrlich: interstellare Politik, fremde Imperien, wackelige Allianzen und vor allem Flottenmanöver und Raumschlachten bieten genau die Art von Abenteuer, die ich schon als Teenager an Science Fiction geliebt habe. Besonders viel Spaß macht mir, wie Rhodans kleine Flotte gegen technisch überlegene Gegner durch Manöver, Täuschung und Kühnheit bestehen muss, statt einfach mit mehr Feuerkraft zu gewinnen.

In Das Geheimnis der Zeitgruft gerät Rhodan in ein Rätsel um eine uralte Anlage und die verschiedenen Kräfte, die sich darum streiten, während Die Festung der sechs Monde den Konflikt zu einer größeren militärischen Auseinandersetzung mit fremden Mächten und einer gewaltigen Festung ausweitet. Mir gefällt, wie die beiden Bücher zwischen Ermittlung, politischen Ränkespielen und Flottengefechten wechseln; immer wieder geraten die Terraner in Situationen, in denen sie mit ihren normalen Mitteln nicht weiterkommen und Rhodan improvisieren muss.

Die Fähigkeiten des Mutantenkorps finde ich nach wie vor etwas gewöhnungsbedürftig, besonders wenn außergewöhnliche Kräfte plötzlich die Lösung für ein ansonsten ziemlich schwieriges Problem liefern. Rhodan selbst gefällt mir dagegen immer besser: seine rücksichtslose Entschlossenheit, seine Bereitschaft zur Täuschung und sein Wille, zum Schutz der Erde praktisch alles Nötige zu tun, machen ihn für mich zu einer zunehmend interessanten Figur. Gerade die dreisten Täuschungsmanöver und taktischen Tricks sind genau die Sorte Space-Opera-Übertreibung, die mir Spaß macht; die Bücher bringen mir wieder dieses gemütliche Teenager-Gefühl zurück, das ich mit der Science Fiction des Goldenen Zeitalters verbinde.

5/5 Sterne