Rating: 7.3/10. Voice user interfaces like Siri and Alexa have improved in some ways, but in many other ways are similar to IVR phone systems from the 1970s. This book goes through various things to look out for while designing them. For example: Be as brief as possible and use visual mode to display lots…
Category: Textbooks
Fifty Challenging Problems in Probability by Frederick Mosteller
Rating: 6.6/10. A classic book with a bunch of random problems in elementary probability (but not statistics). They are not very difficult, ranging from easy to moderate in difficulty. Some of them touch on significant ideas (like random walks, coupon collector problem, German tank problem), but the majority are quite arbitrary (maybe suitable for a…
Understanding Thermodynamics by H. C. Van Ness
Rating: 9.0/10. Pretty short, 100 page book that gives an intuitive introduction to various topics in thermodynamics and statistical mechanics. It’s meant to be a supplementary text, not a main text, so some really important things were omitted, which was confusing to me, but that’s understandable. Some ideas I learned: Energy can’t really be defined…
The Fundamentals of Ethics by Russ Shafer-Landau
Rating: 9.5/10. Intro book on ethics — it’s not an easy read (took me about 6 months to finish it) but it contains a lot of deep ideas in 300 pages. The book is divided into three parts: what is the goal in life, how to do the right thing, and what is the status…