Outland by Dennis E Taylor

I loved the Bobiverse books and was not disappointed by the first book of this new series.  Taylor's treatment of "preppers" and the National Guard in an emergency are much better and more optimistic than most prepper stories.  I found the second band of antagonists poorly motivated and difficult to suspend disbelief. But I loved the story otherwise.  4/5 Stars.

Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Fantastic book.  I wish I had access to this information when I had my own startup. There are brilliant insights into the obvious phenomenon of power law dominance in many areas to which business leaders and finance professionals are blind.There are many dense pearls of wisdom. 5/5 Stars.

Mavericks by Craig Alanson

Fun adventures, great space opera. 4/5 Stars.

Ikigai by HectorGarcia & Francesc Miralles

This book is quite horrible, especially the last third.  I skimmed through and put it down. 0/5 Stars.

Children of Time by Adrian Tchaikovsky

Great story, well-crafted. 5/5 Stars

KTF part 1 by Nick ole & Jason Anspach

The long, meandering threads of the Galaxy's Edge books are starting to coalesce as some big reveals and fun adventures play out. 4/5 Stars.

types of people

There are two types of people.  There are people who don't believe in putting others into boxes and prefer to see everyone as unique individuals, and the other type  . . .

xkcd today has a great take on this concept:

"According to my unsupervised K-means clustering algorithm, there are currently about 8 billion types of people in the world."

Finally, chatGPT says: "People categorizers always have a map to make sure they never get lost in their own classifications."

Maelstrom by Peter Watts

I enjoy Peter Watts' books.  The background and world building are thought-provoking, exhilarating, and well-crafted. The characters are well-motivated and richly textured. I wish he did better research into computer science and engineering.  However the "mindless" wildlife net software is eerily prescient of well-trained large language models and chatGPT. The biology is a little simplistic but still fantastic as one would expect from Watts' background. 5/5 Stars.  I look forward to reading the next book.

Voodoo Warfare by Nick Cole

Slow start but fun story, with great one-liners and dialog, 4/5 Stars.

Zero Hour (Expeditionary Force 5) by Craig Alanson

There were way too many near-death experiences in the story line.  I need to put this series down for a little while. The "awe and wonder" space opera mystery stuff is still fun; 3/5 Stars.