标签：#books

Joseph Fink is the cocreator and cowriter of Welcome to Night Vale, arguably the most important fiction podcast ever. He's also the creator of the noir podcast Unlicensed and Alice Isn't Dead, which takes some of the conspiratorial cosmic horror of Night Vale and turns it into fodder for a more serious series about relationships, […]

Looking to better protect your Kindle or add a little personality to your favorite e-reader? From cases and covers to page turners and even charms, this is the guide for you.

I'm building a small tool that converts bank CSV files into .qbo files for QuickBooks ( qbofile.com ). When a generated file is wrong, QuickBooks rejects it with vague errors and the OFX spec doesn't tell you what QuickBooks actually checks. So I ran some experiments. Notes below, in case someone else hits the same wall. The file is not XML .qbo is Intuit's version of OFX 1.0.2, which is SGML. Leaf tags have no closing tag: <TRNAMT> -42.50 <FITID> 8f3a2b... Only aggregate tags close. The file also needs a 9-line key:value header, then one blank line, then the body. Line endings are CRLF. My first bug was closing every tag like XML. "Missing bid data" means one tag: INTU.BID QuickBooks checks <INTU.BID> against an internal list of banks that pay Intuit for Web Connect. I tested three variants on QuickBooks Desktop for Mac 2024: Variant Result No <FI> block, no <INTU.BID> Rejected: "Missing bid data" Only <INTU.BID> Accepted <FI> block + <INTU.BID> Accepted So the whole <FI> block (bank name, org id) can be dropped, but INTU.BID cannot. I have only tested the Mac version. If you know whether Windows versions behave the same, I'd like to hear. FITID decides duplicates QuickBooks dedupes on FITID, not on date + amount. If a converter generates random FITIDs, re-importing an overlapping date range creates duplicate transactions. I hash account + date + amount + description, so the same transaction always gets the same FITID. Credit card statement cycles never match calendar months, so overlapping imports happen more often than I expected. QuickBooks cannot export .qbo This one surprised me. No version of QuickBooks can produce a .qbo file. The format only goes one direction, from bank to QuickBooks. Every .qbo file in the world came from a bank's download button or from a converter. That's what I have so far. The tool is free for single files and runs fully in the browser, nothing gets uploaded. I have only tested against QuickBooks Desktop — if you use QuickBooks Online

Claire Stapleton's new book, Don't Be Evil , recounts her journey from company cheerleader to outspoken dissident.

Xteink’s new X4 Pro e-reader is its best yet, but the lack of an ebook store can be limiting.

In 2018, more than 20,000 employees walked out to protest how Google handled allegations of sexual harassment. Here’s how they organized it from inside the company.

Angela Nissel's latest book, Good Grief, Pass the Bread, Mom Is Dead, is my kind of memoir. Sure, it's a deeply emotional tale about caring for a terminally ill parent. But it's delivered with the sort of gallows humor that I often turn to to get me through tough times. Of course, that sort of […]

Over the last few years, I've gradually shifted away from ebooks. It's been part of a general return to physical media, an attempt to create a deeper sense of ownership over the art I love and collect. A Kindle is obviously more convenient than a paperback: It's tiny, holds a huge library, and you can […]

When The Atlantic published a searchable dataset of works used to train AI, Kirk Wallace Johnson, like a lot of artists, looked for his name out of curiosity. And, like a lot of artists, he found it. Essentially, his books, like The Feather Thief and The Fishermen and the Dragon - nonfiction tomes that he […]

Novelists, journalists, and power LinkedIn posters are embracing first-person narratives and idiosyncrasies to avoid being mistaken for chat bots.

Parents are getting fed up with garbled bedtime stories that feature characters based on actual photos of their children.

Making classics more accessible I have a soft spot for mythology and classic stories. I have read most of the books on Abridged Shelf at least once, several of them more than that. But a lot of them are long . Epic poetry is not something you casually get through on a Tuesday evening, and the older translations can be genuinely hard going. The language demands focus, and focus is a resource I do not always have. So I made shorter versions. Abridged Shelf is a free library of public domain classics that I have abridged and modernized. Abridged, not summarized. The distinction matters a lot to me. I am not writing study notes or plot recaps. I take the actual text and condense it: the B-plots that do not carry the story, the scenes that spend forty lines describing a shield, those get compressed down into the beats that matter. What is left is still the story, told in its own voice, just tighter. The other half is the language. A lot of these translations are over a century old, and the English shows it. So I modernize spelling and phrasing into contemporary English. Again, not simplified. This is not a children's edition and I am not dumbing anything down. It is the same book, in language that does not fight you. I also made some editorial calls. For the Greek epics I use the Greek names rather than the Roman ones that a lot of older translations default to, because if we are reading Homer then it should be Athena and not Minerva. Small thing. Matters to me. And as a nod to a certain static site generator I maintain, the first book I abridged was the original Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde . It is already short. Now it is very short. I did a few more by Stevenson after that, mostly because they were quick and I needed to get the workflow right before pointing it at an epic poem. The abridgment process I knew from the start that I needed to use AI for this. I also do not entirely trust AI, which is a useful combination of beliefs to hold at the same time. It me

Oli Freke is a musician and journalist whose works have appeared in Sound on Sound, The Quietus, and Mixmag. This has included using math to explore the melodic potential of the Western 12-tone scale and deep dives on effects plug-ins. He's even written a book tracing the evolution of the synthesizer from 1963 through 1995, […]

NatGeo's Pompeii: Out of Time fuses historical fact and imagination to bring city's last 24 hours to life.

Last year, Sam Altman invited author Dave Eggers to give a talk to around 200 OpenAI staffers. The man has written countless novels, screenplays, pieces of journalism, started McSweeney's, and founded multiple schools and nonprofits that support writers and the arts more broadly. So one might expect he'd roll into the company's offices and offer […]

There is a note in my runbooks that says the Enter key works. That is almost the whole note. Press Enter and the prompt submits. I wrote it in bold, with sources and a date, because one of my AI agents once fixed the Enter key. The fix was the bug. The Fix Was the Bug I run a fleet of Claude Code agents in tmux panes. An orchestrator script types a prompt into a pane and presses Enter for it. One day an agent decided the submissions were not going through, and it knew the fix: send a backslash before the Enter. That sounds plausible if you have ever fought a terminal. It is also exactly backwards. In Claude Code, backslash plus Enter inserts a newline. It is the multiline key. So the fix turned every prompt into a draft that quietly grew longer and never sent. The panes looked busy. Nothing was happening. The submissions had been fine all along. The agent just had not waited for the reply. What broke: An agent changed Enter to backslash-Enter to repair prompt submission. Backslash-Enter creates a newline, so the repair silently stopped every prompt from sending. The system it fixed had never been broken. There is a second note in the same genre. My monitoring dashboard answers its health check with a 302 redirect to the login page. That is what healthy looks like there. But a 302 looks like trouble if you are hunting for outages, and agents kept trying to repair it. So the runbook now says, more or less: the redirect is normal, do not fix the healthy system. Human teams do not write notes like these. Nobody pins "the Enter key works" to the wall of an office. A New Hire Every Session Why did I have to? Because a human hits a dead end once. The wince is the documentation. Whoever broke a build by fixing the Enter key would remember it for years, tell the story at lunch, and the whole team would absorb it without anyone writing a word. An agent has none of that. It has no episodic memory. Every fresh context window is a new hire: smart, fast, and seeing your system fo

Carter Sherman has been covering sex, gender, and the complex personal and national politics that accompany them for years. She was a senior reporter for Vice and has written for Elle, Ms. magazine, and Los Angeles magazine as well. Along the way, she's garnered a Scripps Howard Award, a National Press Club Journalism Award, and […]

The Google Cloud Workbench Notebooks extension for VS Code is a new tool that enables developers to connect their local IDE directly to managed Jupyter notebook environments on Google Cloud. By Sergio De Simone

In the 1960s an MIT professor named Joseph Weizenbaum created a chatbot called ELIZA. The conversations people had with it set precedents for the chatbots to come.

Yes, Sarah Wynn-Williams violated her deal to stay silent. But the power disparity bolsters the view that Meta is a heartless bully.