SP-287 What made apollo a success?, NASA
Technical Paper, Read in Apr 2026
The launch of a spacecraft Artemist2 is definitely one of the headlines of this month. To be honest, I am not a crazy space guy. I didn’t know what Artemist but then I started watching many youtube videos on this topic and came across one interesting talk which recommend this book.
Luckily isn’t such a long one and it’s more in the format of technical paper which makes it very slow / hard to read with full of acronyms — which I got used to after half way into the book, for example LM / CSM. It’s very fascinating to look back that 60 years ago human had made such a big achievement with so little (computing) resource. In the age of AI, we need top of the line game GPU to run LLM to get barely usable / trustable output. The situation we are in is so contrast to Apollo computer which I guess it is probably slower than 2$ ESP32 nowadays. At work, we build a system that does so little with elegant state of the art architecture / microservices / reusable packages / advance automation CICD — better described by another video here.
Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI, Yuval Noah Harari
History, Read in Mar 2026
In the last couple of years, it’s no doubt that AI is one of the hottest topic around whether at work or at home. Me personally I don’t use it at every breath, may be I should. I don’t really trust it and as a human, I do believe we human could do better, could be more creative. But lately I felt the need to keep my mouth shut because AI is smart! However, I don’t appreciate as much because at work I need to clean up a lot of AI generated code added by irresponsible people who have already lost their mind to AI. Learning new skills become meaningless to those people. One of the Yuval talks about AI recommended to my by AI youtube algorithms piqued my interest in this book.
This book gives me a different dimension about AI by comparing it to other human inventions (clay tablet, printing, industrialization, TV, internet). Me hating AI when now is just at the beginning of this new technology isn’t fair — I felt like an old man resisting to adopt new technology. However, purely seeing AI as an isolated technology is also too simplistic/idealistic view point. Again, this book discusses AI in broader perspective that human creates technology and technology in-turn shape human, society and politics.
This book also demonstrates a few thought experiments (just like other Yuval’s book). As an engineer / scientist, we are used to only see experiments as processes that can be proved / disproved repeatedly in synthetic / isolation environment or through deduction or well accepted fact. I am not so familiar societal / historical experiments where it’s not possible to do direct experiment, where we could only observes from historical facts and reason what would it be otherwise.