>0 grizzly @ 2022/03/20 01:09
What book (or books) changed your life? I'm looking for inspiration and would love to hear what and how you were impacted.
>1 jacksonbenete @ 2022/03/20 02:26
A lot of books had a great impact on me, though "change life" might be a bit too much. I'm still broke and single, not quite a change. haha But if you're looking for inspiration, books that have inspired me before: - Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse. - The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. - Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand. Siddhartha was a gift from a friend, some years ago when I was feeling lost. He said that he read it when he was feeling lost and thought it would help me. It did. After that I decided to move abroad. The book is about someone that's quite lost as well, and looking for his own way. The Alchemist is another book that I keep reading again everytime I lost meaning and need inspiration. The story shows you that you can't just expect to understand "destiny", you just have to focus on something, and things eventually just happen if you're working hard for it. Atlas Shrugged is a very famous book on the political spectrum. It did teached me some lessons, but it was inspiring because it's really a good novel, with good characters, and seeing so many bright people working hard for something made me take the decision to study and enter College back then. I have read many books in my life, but most of them were technical books like mathematics, chemistry, software engineering... There are some good philosophy books as well, I would recommend Enchiridion, it have a lot of very nice lessons and things to think about. There is a book called The Intellectual Life. It's from a priest, but if you handwave the religion, that's a book that can makes you wonder about studying, hardwork and if you're really using your time wisely. Being a "Intellectual" is no easy task, someone have to devote it's life on something like this. I think it's interesting because you don't quite find someone devoting their lives into something anymore, at least not like this. We don't question too much how we use our time and sometimes we don't even have a focus. If you want some inspiration, try this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQMbvJNRpLE
>2 jacksonbenete @ 2022/03/20 02:45
I just thought a bit more about it. There is a book that shaped a lot my critical thinking, thus, kind of changed my life. "Economic Policy: Thoughts for Today and Tomorrow" by Ludwig von Mises. It's a smallish 100 pages book divided into "6 lessons", that is, 6 chapters. Each chapter is an exercise on praxiology, and invites you to think about the consequences of naive actions and decisions. I would recommend it considering it's such a small book, you can read one chapter or two and see if it's something that would interest you, pdf is free I think in their institute. The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin was surprisingly good and quite inspiring as well. There are too many good books, I guess that at this point I'm flooding.
>3 grizzly @ 2022/03/20 04:50
>>1 >>2 Thank you for your reply! Thank you so much for so many interesting suggestions! Probably your suggestions can be useful to anyone reading this post. Thanks again!
>4 x88 @ 2022/10/08 02:17
One book that changed my life absolutely was a DK programming book, something like "Teach your kids computer coding". That absolutely turned everything I knew about making simple apps in a scratch-like blocky enviroment upside down. And yeah, without it I'd still be around, trying to make GTA V in a 2D block-based game making enviroment lol.
>5 anthk @ 2022/10/29 10:44
>>OP "In the beginning there was the command line". Even if today it's outdated, and Neal Stephenson switched to Mac OS X, it's still a good source of inspiration.
>6 anthk @ 2022/10/29 10:51
>>1 MMhm, I don't like "El Alquimista", it's full of snake oil nonsensery. The Spanish translations are very close to the Portuguese one, so I know Coelho pretty well. In the Hispanic world (Iberoamerican, actually, I'm from Spain), Coelho it's viewed as a charlatan. On "Atlas", I consider that and The Capital good fairy tales, utopias. In th end, Ayn Rand headed fast to a public healthcare based hospital. Ironic, true? And the Soviet Union began progressive in the pre-Stalin era, but later the differences on conservativism between an American and a Soviet (on social issues, not the economical ones) were neal nil. Homophobia, sexism (and yes, in theory women had to be full rights) but in real life they ended putting "the women belongs to the kitchen" stereotype the same way as the Western world. At least in the Stalin era. Thus, today I prefer an European centrist-left ideology, with heavy critical thinking. Science and data first, ideologies for the later. I'm really skeptical on "prophets", be left or right.
>7 jacksonbenete @ 2022/11/01 00:42
>>6 Paulo Coelho is a charlatan indeed, everyone knows that, or at least question that. (I hope) This by no means makes the story being told and the content being shared of no value. Specially for someone that is in need of some light, it's a good story that makes you rethink your own experiences, and that's value on that. There's no difference between The Alchemist or any other Hindu, Taoist, Greek or put_your_own_ancient_philosophy_of_choice crap. The thing is to know how to read a book and take out of it what you can that can provide value for you or others. Marx is a charlatan as well, still Capital: A Critique of Political Economy is a good Economy treatise. Same about Atlas Shrugged, it's a good story and there are good sociology and economy lessons on there, if one believes entirely in any of those philosophies, that's entirely one's fault, and the book isn't less good because of that. Again, one have to learn what you can take out of a book that can be enlightening and good to you. Even though you're completely shiting both books I still recomend them to OP. As I have studied Engineering and Chemistry, I also value Science and "data", still society is way more complex than that and pure data or supposedly rational decisions have no place in real life. (by sypposedly rational I mean that a pure rational posture can be faulty) There is a lot of biologists and engineers over there that don't believe in Covid or vaccines, and they do have supposedly data on that, damn even some physicians have gone crazy on that. And look at the result, millions died, and professionals still deny and have data to back up madness. Just as well as there is a lot of data on global warming even though physicists and meteorologists also have data against that. Science and data first sounds like a very good and rational way of looking at the world and making decisions, until it isn't, unfortunately. But those are just some observations on top of your observations. I don't agree nor do I disagree.
>8 anthk @ 2022/11/07 11:29
>>7 >There is a lot of biologists and engineers over there that don't believe Argumentum ad authoritam. Science cares about what does people say, not who. I see lots of Humanities/Arts people falling in that trap again and again. That's why Newton's points on Alchemy are nonsense but the Principia still works today for the 99% of the book. For the rest, pick up Maxwell's and Einstein's works on relativity. On social studies, those are just emergent properties raising up from Biology and chaotic systems. For more info on chaotic/emergent systems, read "The Computational Beauty from Nature", the book it's from the MIT. The code for the book can be found at some GitHub (Google/DDG it), you could build them on most tildes. If not, for sure you can find someone to run the exercises for you and share the output. Under OpenBSD, it's just a matter of: doas pkg_add gmake git clone https://github.com/gwf/CBofN cd CBofN sed -i 's,make,gmake,g' gmake CC=cc The examples are at ./bin Sadly you can't run them over SSH except if you run them with ssh -X user@foo.bar. Also, you would need to convince your Linux admin to install libx11-dev and build-essential (most common packages at Ubuntu/ Debian). It can give you an amazing overview of the universe. I would say I spotted the fractal nature of it when I was child as I realized that by just staring at trees you could see branches were similar to each other in every tree and to themselves on the smaller branches hanging from the top, but I lacked the math background for it.
>9 andif @ 2023/08/02 06:50
>>OP Gosh, so many! The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts, by Douglas Adams, is one of my all-time favs. Read this if you want to find out what God's final message to his people was or why 42 is the meaning of life... A bunch of stuff by Oscar Wilde. You could start with The Nightingale and the Rose, a magical short story, allegedly intended for children. Then move onto The Picture of Dorian Gray, which is definitely for adults. Non-fiction: Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid, by Douglas R. Hofstadter is a great way into lots of different loopy, self-refertial things in logic/comp sci, art, and music. Also has a lovely intro to Zen koans, short dialogues that are designed to free the mind of logic. Rewriting the Rules: An integrative guide to love, sex and relationships, by Meg-John Barker, written by a psychologist and therapist, is a great anti-self-help book on exploring social norms about all the things: gender, sexuality, relationships, personality, body shapes, etc. Each chapter has exercises on trying to make sense of where our beliefs on these topics come from and ideas to gently challenge them. Something a bit heavier, but fun, Galen Strawson (2010), Freedom and Belief, Revised Edition. What is free will and how does it relate to determinism and indeterminism. If the world is determined, can we still have free will. or, if you want a preview, try his paper on why ultimate moral responsibility is impossible. Warning: only read if you have a group of people to discuss with... https://philosophy.as.uky.edu/sites/default/files/The%20Impossibility%20of%20Moral%20Responsibility%20-%20Galen%20Strawson.pdf Finally, I started working through this last summer and it helped me get into the basics of quantum computing and then back to the basics of quantum mechanics: Flarend, A., & Hilborn, B. (2022). Quantum computing: from Alice to Bob. Starts with the basics, e.g., how to multiply matrices, and moves onto all that weird looking bra-ket notation like (1/sqrt(2)(|0> + |1>).
>10 leach @ 2023/08/08 03:34
>>OP I'm not sure if changed my life is a good way to describe some of the books I'll mention, but they certaintly have left an inpact on my life. The first book I read that really changed my perspective on living was 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. I read this shortly after a family member had passed, or maybe they just had been sick. Either way it gave me a lot of insite into dealing with problems and people. It gave me a framework for going about things and learning to take care of myself and improve myself so I can take what I have learned and help others. I next read Atomic Habits by James Clear. This book was all about learning what a habit is, how they impact our bahviour, and what we can do with that newfound knowledge to deal with bad habits in our life or create good ones. It really goes into the nitty gritty of how these behavours are impacted by our habits and how that all works. It gave me great insite to recognizing and extinguishing bad habits and setting realistic goals to build new ones. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius is the next book I read that really impacted me, so much so I've re-read it several times and carry it with me almost everywhere I go. My current copy got destroyed, So I'll have to buy a new one an re-read and re annotate what I had in my original. I specifically read the translation by Gregory Hayes, as that is the most modern and easy to read version. I find the book fascinating, and there are many themes and philosphies that I found useful for dealing with the human condition and everyday life. Something about reading it feels all so human too, A young 20 something with not much to his name reading the private thoughts of a long dead emperor and drawing meaning from his words for thier own life. I find the things Marcus writes about and struggled with are very human and real. I find his wisdom sobering and something to keep in mind. I will warn you that the themes he talks about are quite heavy and death is brought up very frequently and may be one of the most prevelant subjects of the book. I think its quite a profound work though and worth reading. There are plenty of other books that havent changed my life but definitely altered my aesthetics and style. Neuromancer, Snow Crash, 1984, Brave new world, House of leaves. There are plenty of video games that have had a pretty big impact on me as well. but I'll save those for another time.