Bitwise, a life in code, David Auerbach
Type
Label
Bitwise, a life in code, David Auerbach
Language
eng
Bibliography note
Includes bibliographical references (pages 263-278) and index
resource.biographical
contains biographical information
Index
index present
Literary Form
non fiction
Main title
Bitwise
Nature of contents
bibliography
Oclc number
994517802
Responsibility statement
David Auerbach
Sub title
a life in code
Summary
An exhilarating crossover between memoir and argument demonstrating how computers and algorithms shape our understanding of the world and who we are. As we engineer ever-more intricate algorithms to translate our experiences and narrow the gap that divides us from the machine, we willingly rub out our nuances and our idiosyncrasies--precisely that which makes us human. Bitwise is David Auerbach's thoughtful ode to the computer codes and languages that captured his imagination as a child, and a reflection of how he's both experienced and written the algorithms that have come to taxonomize human speech, knowledge, and behavior--and compel us to do the same. With a philosopher's sense of inquiry and an engineer's eye, Auerbach recounts his childhood spent drawing ferns with the programming language Logo on the Apple IIe, his adventures in early text-based video games, his schooling as an engineer, and his contributions to instant messaging technology developed for Microsoft and then to software built to sift through Google's data stores. His unsettling conclusion--that algorithms are standardizing and coarsening our own lives--is inescapable."--, Provided by publisher
Table Of Contents
Logo and love -- Chat wars -- Binaries -- Interlude: Foreign tongues -- Naming of parts -- Self-approximations -- Games computers play -- Interlude: Adventures with text -- Big data -- Programming my child -- Big human -- Epilogue: The reduction of language, the flattening of life
resource.variantTitle
B1tw1se, a l1fe 1n c0de