Weekly “what are you reading” Thread

The Interior Castle by St. Theresa of Avila.

I'm probably not the intended audience, but I think the imagery and discussion on prayer makes it a worthwhile read.

I've been making an effort to read more this year. So far I've read Industrial Society And Its Future, and The War of The Worlds. Im currently reading The Hagakure. I don't have any interest in samurai, but I heard about the book in a song and it seemed interesting. The translation I'm reading came with a cool introductory chapter to explain the historical context. It's a samurai philosophy book, written in the middle of a 200 year period of peace. My main takeaway so far is that samurai are fricking crazy. The author wanted to self immolate after his lord died, but they made it illegal so he became a monk and abandoned his wife .

I'm enjoying it so far. Bushido/Samurai culture is so alien to me, a lot of what I'm reading seems like nonsense. It's still really interesting.

all of king krazys posts over and over again

I don’t have a book right now, my last two were wind up bird chronicles and do androids dream of electric sheep.

I don’t know what to read next

what are you reading

this post duh

Has anyone here ever finished an Ayn Rand novel . My lolbertarian cousin is currently reading Atlas Shrugged while going, SO TRUE!, when commenting about it. I remember trying “The Fountainhead” once and I put it down after an old man rambling about plastics.

I recently read The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger by Stephen King Loved the atmosphere and worldbuilding but something about the style felt, idk, impersonal? Detached? Maybe that's what he was going for, because the setting is so darn oppressive that I could see it being hard to give a frick about anything if you lived in a world like that Anyone have some non-spoiler thoughts on the next books in the Dark Tower series? I've heard the 2nd book is where crap hits the fan and is the actual litmus test on whether or not you will enjoy the series. The Gunslinger was solid though, and it only being around 200 pages was very much appreciated

Writing a paper on Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning in specific settings, so I need to do a literature survey on the topic.

Previously, I had limited myself to simplistic settings, so this time I thought I'll try something more interesting and started working on a robotic setting similar to that in Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning With Universal Policies for Multistep Robotic Manipulation.

The goal is to teach a robotic gripper to handle Lego-like blocks like a toddler. The approach in the paper mentioned above is to learn a goal-conditioned high-level policy that (implicitly) plans and creates low-level goals, that are then given to a low level policy that actually does the work to achieve these goals. Much like how I do my work, ironically.

I didn't fully get into the details of the algorithm, which is a combination of multiple techniques including DDPG, HER and more, let alone the actual code. But we have verified that the author's official code actually performs as advertised, so that's a start.

I've read Annihilation this week and to be completely honest I don't know how I should feel about it. The premise of an expedition to a remote area (namely Area X) where things aren't as they seem and the world is not quite right after some unexplainable intervention from outside forces sounds intriguing so I thought I'm in for a good time but I ended up with characters that are not only puppets but also deliberately obfuscated and completely and entirely unreliable. I'm not sure if this characterization fits into the dream-like logic of the book where you cannot anchor yourself to any given event or character or basically anything else and at least to me things ended up being frustratingly gray. Given how the book feels like a biologist having an especially savage dream you coast along with all happenings thinking there will be some sort of explanation, but even then you quickly realize there will be absolutely nothing redeemable at the end, and mysteries are either left unexplained or if they are 'explained' (not necessarily in the literal definition of the word) the explanation is intentionally discombobulated and annoyingly opaque. I do realize that there are many different ways of interpreting the novel with the most common stupid one being 'it's a literal dream' but then again dreams are at least fun, and a novel, that makes you feel like you are under a cloud of boring and gray and unremarkable fungal spores during the process of reading, is absolutely not fun and downright a chore. Now, the only real mystery about this book (and its sequels) is the question of why exactly it is so popular and highly praised.

I'm reading a collection of short stories called Dark Neighborhoods, it was praised highly but I'm bit unimpressed. It straddles the line between being purple on purpose, with some very nice literary flow and a try-hard prose. It's a very short book so I'll probably re-read it just to make sure I'm not being an contrarian.

I was trying to read Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, but got bored with it and went back to random podcasts for a while, but thought it was time to read a real book, so this week I started Marcus Arelius's Meditations.

I'm listening to the Amazon Classics version, but there's so many translations and audiobook readers that I was curious on if I might benefit from a newer version instead of this one.

I read Adrian Tchaikovsky novela One Day All This Will be Yours, which is decently fun time travel story. I'm currently reading Margret Atwoods's Cat's Eye which some dramatard recommended to me a while ago

I'm up to scp-2073

“The Last Days of the Dinosaurs” about the K-Pg mass extinction (the asteroid). IT’S SO GOOD

@Cdkong have u read it?

I’m reading rDrama.

Technological Slavery

Last thing I read was The Communist Manifesto. Agreed with almost everything except the abolishment of private property.

It was a slog.

The Demolished Man by Alfred bester was pretty good. A short scifi novel. Decent character writing even if the plot is extremely predictable. Amusing paradigm.

@dipfrick he’s reading Moby peepee

Almost done with spring snow by Mishima

I'm thinking of reading "nausea" by Sartre or "the dwarf" by Pär Lindkvist next

comedy bang bang the podcast: the book

This reminds me, I still need to finish Kitchen Confidential

How are you finding moby peepee?

We had to read it in high school English and found it very tedious at the time. Maybe we were too young

Trans lives matter vaccines work

Metro 2033, I'm enjoying the world and all the lore. It's also a lot spookier than I anticipated.