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lowoki 's review for:
Devil in the Stack: A Coding Odyssey
by Andrew Smith
informative
medium-paced
The author's a nice enough guy with a massive blind spot. You're provided with plenty of interesting information about computing history, but he doesn't approach the subjects outside of computing with nearly enough rigor (much like the Silicon Valley tech bros he's worried about). The brain scan stuff is barely incidental, used as more of a segue than a real subject. The rest of it is him running his mouth about whatever ideas he finds compelling without much foundation. He attributes a lack of compassion in tech to autism (Which he scarcely takes the time to understand or talk about outside of speaking to a single "expert" that says some incredibly stupid, 1950s tier stuff. He notably doesn't speak to any autistic people on the matter.) or the lack of non-cishet white guys (close!). He often gets painfully close to real insights (could the majority of tech bros coming from rich families and being isolated from normal people have something to do with their antisocial behavior?) but veers away with nothing more than a bit of hand wringing over how sad it all is. His end conclusions are also all over the board. He's correct about machine learning, but anyone with a brain can do that. He does decide, evidently without much thought on the matter, that the solution to people being antisocial is to make all of us use our real identities online. Overall I spent the front half of the book interested and the back half annoyed. I wouldn't personally recommend this book as anything more than a light read if you care remotely about any of the subjects listed. You'd be better off flipping to the bibliography and reading those instead.
Content Warnings
Minor: Ableism