Sunday was a reading day for me. A few days before I had torrented quite a few books. More books than I could read, just to have a good library to pick from locally. So now that I had nothing to do on Sunday it was time to put my nose in them and figure out what is worth reading.

Here is what suprised me. The amount of AI in apparently popular and respected books is pretty crazy.

Though some of these books are still worth reading dispite that. The Ruby book I linked to I suspect has some. The main reason is the chapter 1 organization, and really all of the organization. But even if some of the ordering of things makes you ask "who would have made that choice," it's still easy to read if you look past that and still learning something useful. Actually I appreciate the peppering of "advanced topics" inside of "basic sections." While odd organizationally it's kind of nice getting hints on how to do things better early on. So many programming books can teach you enough in a few chapters that you are basically ready to go, but not ready to go well. I guess you'll have to read it to see what I mean. The author makes no attempt to explain the odd ordering. But the odd ordering is actually based from a practical perspecitve. But the repeated material in chapter 1 and 2 makes it more obvious. I still made it the book of the month because if you can look past that it's actually pretty good. The topic alone makes it one of the best things anyone could be reading.

The worst offender though was a book on Stable Diffusion. This one is so good you have to look at it. I'll let you peek before I point it out. Just scroll past any table of contents and get to the text. The first text past the table of contents is where the fun really begins.

https://files.catbox.moe/ycsxsi.pdf

It's among the more popular of the books I downloaded. Maybe just because of the topic. But out of the gate with no reason at all it just starts talking about how the java virtual machine works. The best part is the multiple AI related section headers, and then the java text just continues. Once the java ends it never brings up java again. It continues on with the next section like nothing happen. It continues talking about the general history of AI like any other AI book does. All the code of the rest of the chapter is in Python (makes sense). So why a random chapter on Java internals? Clearly not a single person looked at this before publishing it. It feels odd seeing the foreward dedicated to the mans family knowing there is no family.

The next very cool book I poked my nose into was on Formal Verification.

https://pomf2.lain.la/f/ee6fpw9.pdf

That's going to be cool as hell to read if I'm able to keep up with it. But that one is a challenge to take in parts. But I'm going to take what I can per reading session and then go to something easier when I hit my limit.

The last book was mostly lame sauce. It was unplug-Sunday where I'm looking to waste time so why not.

https://pomf2.lain.la/f/95qlii4b.epub

It's a guidebook on taking roadtrips through Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Sounds pretty cool. But the content (writing) is top levels of cheesiness. If anyone were to use that book they should just pick one of the trip plans at random or one that touches a top sight they want to see and just do it. Actually reading the thing is just goofy. Copy out the list of destinations to paper and trash the book.

One cool incidental thing I picked up from it is Zurich has got to have one of the stepest gradents in temperate zones in all of Europe that's actually populated. I suppose anywhere with mountains can. It's in the Alps but is right next to the warm Rhine valley. I guess anywhere in the US with mountains could be like that, but usuall not populated to that extent. In most of Colorado you drive West toward the mountains and civilization kind of just stops at a certain point. On some parts of route 81 that's just the width of one farm.

But that's really squeezing the extraction effort to get something out of that book.