Rating: 3 out of 5

At some level this really resonated with me and on a few occasions I’ve heard someone say something and also related the storyline as fact - which I guess shows that I engaged with it. I found the storyline drifted a bit, and that I lost interest in the characters about two thirds in. A fun read.

Highlighted passages:

His breath smelled like he’d been gargling turds.

Not a lot of business-reporting assignments involved spending time with half-naked, sun-baked dudes in remote southern junkyards. Still, he sounded nice.

engineering is all about constraint. Given a span of foo feet and materials of tensile strength of bar, build a bridge that doesn’t go all fubared. Write a fun video-game for an eight-bit console that’ll fit in 32K. Build the fastest airplane, or the one with the largest carrying capacity… But these days, there’s not much traditional constraint. I’ve got the engineer’s most dangerous luxury: plenty. All the computational cycles I’ll ever need. Easy and rapid prototyping. Precision tools.

I’m building a tape-loading seashell robot toaster out of discarded obsolete technology because the world is full of capacious, capable, disposable junk and it cries out to be used again.

Lots of people wanted to run businesses, but the number who actually seemed likely to be capable of doing so was only a small fraction.

Stories are how we understand the world, and technology is how we choose our stories.

How are we going to get another generation of tinkerers unless we get kids interested in how stuff works?”

there was one pink area that wouldn’t go. It was his serendipity zone, where things that didn’t match his filters but had lots of interestingness-comments and reposts from people he paid attention to-and some confluence with his keywords turned up.

Originally posted to my Goodreads account