David Auerbach

David Auerbach has worked for Microsoft and Google, considering himself among their top 10% programmers. He is a smart guy who has some unusual thinking patterns. He is also a student of the humanities and this book combines the fields in interesting and unusual ways. It's subtle and profound, sometimes funny, I've never read anything quite like it. A book of substance that makes you feel smarter about people and computers for having read it, a real find.

I was particularly struck how the core architecture of computers is mirrored socially and it may not be good. That is to say, computers understand boolean logic, is or is not, 1 or 0. This means computers are very good at categorizing things (and people) into discreet chunks, such as "is something true, or not true". But human culture and language is often much more subtle and rich. Big data and systems (Facebook, etc) tend to flatten that out. Another case of the medium is the message.… (mere)