Random thoughts from a book-loving Puerto Rican astronomical data scientist in Baltimore.
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TL/DR: Blog moving to https://strakul.com/blog For the past 14 years, I've been maintaining this blog, Strakul's Thoughts , hosted at blogger.com . As of today, I'm porting the content to a new instance. As I've become more familiar with development tools, I wanted to move away from the limited (but easy-to-use) offerings at Blogger and host my own custom site. This blog is now running Jekyll with…
Children of Strife is the 4th book in the Children of Time series. It continues the trend of terraforming planets, alien creatures, and forays into the nature of consciousness. Here is the Goodreads blurb: From the award-winning master of sci-fi Adrian Tchaikovsky, Children of Strife is the unmissable follow-up space opera to the highly acclaimed Children of Time, Children of Ruin and Children of…
Graph representation of notes in the LLM Wiki. Green are labels, red correspond to the character Zinjaro, and blue correspond to the character Soren Over the past few weeks, the AI community has been all abuzz about a post from Andrej Karpathy about LLM wikis. I've seen a handful of videos about it and decided to give it a try with my DnD session notes. This is an alternative to a traditional RAG…
Queen Demon is the sequel to Witch King by Martha Wells, part of the The Rising World series. I picked it up on discount to check it out, even though it wasn't my favorite series. Here is the blurb from Goodreads: Dahin believes he has clues to the location of the Hierarchs' Well, and the Witch King Kai, along with his companions Ziede and Tahren, knowing there's something he isn't telling them,…
While I haven't read Andy Weir's work before, I was familiar with The Martian thanks to the movie and hearing that Project Hail Mary was going to be turned to one I figured I'd read the book before watching it. Here's the Goodreads blurb: RYLAND GRACE is the sole survivor on a desperate, last-chance mission—and if he fails, humanity and Earth itself will perish. Except that right now, he doesn’t…
This is the 2nd book in the original Mistborn series by Brandon Sanderson. It's been a long time since I read these, but I'm making my way slowly through them again. Here is the blurb from the Kindle version: Vin, the street urchin who has grown into the most powerful Mistborn in the land, and Elend Venture, the idealistic young nobleman who loves her, must build a healthy new society in the ashes…
This is the 4th book in The Expanse series. Just continuing my read of the books and comparing them to the TV series. Here is the Goodreads blurb: The gates have opened the way to thousands of habitable planets, and the land rush has begun. Settlers stream out from humanity's home planets in a vast, poorly controlled flood, landing on a new world. Among them, the Rocinante, haunted by the vast,…
This is the 3rd book in The Expanse series. I watched the TV series first but have been meaning to get through all the books at some point. Here is the Goodreads blurb: For generations, the solar system - Mars, the Moon, the Asteroid Belt - was humanity's great frontier. Until now. The alien artefact working through its program under the clouds of Venus has emerged to build a massive structure…
La Belle Sauvage is the first of The Book of Dust, a separate trilogy set in Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials universe. I enjoyed the first series so I figured I'd give this one a try. Here is the Goodreads blurb: Malcolm Polstead is the kind of boy who notices everything but is not much noticed himself. And so perhaps it was inevitable that he would become a spy... Malcolm's father runs an inn…
It's been a while since I read a book by Ann Leckie and I remember enjoying Ancillary Justice very much. I probably should reread it since it's been a decade since I first read it. This book isn't a sequel, but it is set in the universe and we get to see some of the ramifications of the original trilogy at least indirectly. Here's the Goodreads blurb: The mystery of a missing translator sets three…
