STG's

 Super Learning, by Peter Hollins, talk about learning techniques. As usual for his books, this one is short and to the point, and present its material well.  I had seen most of the techniques elsewhere (probably Scott Young's books, and  Jonathan Levi courses and book), but there were still a few new ones for me.

Jornada Improvável: A História do RenovaBR, a Escola Que Quer Mudar a Política no Brasil , por Eduardo Mufarej, obviamente fala do RenovaBR - uma escola para políticos. A leitura foi agradável, e a iniciativa muito importante. Infelizmente todo político adora falar da importância da educação, ao mesmo tempo que acha que é só chegar no governo e quase automaticamente vai saber o melhor jeito de fazer as coisas. Imagina se os engenheiros também fizesse assim? (não vou falar de médicos porque a residência é em parte isso...) Mas não tem problema, não é como se nossos políticos fizessem algo de importante... Só governar o país inteiro e fazer todas suas leis... Obviamente o RenovaBR já teve bons resultados - com muitos candidatos já eleitos, e também ajudando a criar cursos para deputados eleitos, outra iniciativa que acho importante. Espero que continuem com a jornada, e expandam ainda bastante!

 Islanders is, supposedly, a minimalist city builder game. In practice it reminds me of some tablet games, such as a Simcity version, and another that had a real state theme I played many years ago. It mostly rewards you for placing city-themed objects in certain relations (such as mansions near city centers, house near other houses and city centers, etc). In the high score mode, after a while you will unlock a larger island. That is, in fact, not unlike a city builder, so I guess the "minimalist city builder" is somewhat accurate. But it feels different to me - like comparing Mini Metro for one of the regular train network games, such as OpenTTD. The game has nice (but minimal) graphics, and pleasant music. I found it somewhat enjoyable, but it feels like a game you will play for a few minutes and then stop, not something you will spend hours with. Given that the price is proportionally right, seems like a reasonable purchase.

I've been using tab groups on Chrome, and I really like it.  There are a ton of courses, articles, and more that I intend to watch. In the past, they would accumulate as tabs, then I'd dump them to bookmarks, and I would (usually - I keep notes on courses I want to take later) forget about them.  Now I just add them to my Courses group tab, and I'm much more likely to see them, and at the same time, in regular use my Chrome tabs are not cluttered at all. And you just have to right-click each tab and choose Add tab to Group.

 The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, is a gothic horror novel written long ago - 1959 - and adapted on movies and TV several times. It feels pretty generic right now, of course, after decades of similar novels. I really liked the beginning, and the overall haunting part is ok, if a little underwhelming. By the end it was just ok for me.

Providence, by Max Barry, is a SF book. In this future, humanity is apparently flying around in FTL and suddenly meets aliens, and is traditional, the aliens (called salamanders) proceed to kill the humans, who then start to hunt the aliens across the galaxy. The real story is the group of just four people, that gets placed in an AI ship that is fighting the salamanders.   This was good, don't get me wrong. But after reading Jennifer Government I expected a little more. As it is, it was quite enjoyable, and the ending was nice, if traditional in a sense. **SPOILERS FOLLOW** It is kind of nice that the aliens communicated in the end, but nothing was solved by it (except for reaffirming the human stance of trying to kill them all, as they killed two other races already).  I realize this used to be the standard, but lately I have read/seen too much SF that goes that way. The AI is kind of sentient sub-plot was kind of subtle, I think I like that (while I really like AI centric st...

 Desistir não é opção, de Camila Farani, é um livro sobre empreendedorismo. Achei que tem uma série de ideias úteis, muitas se referindo a princípios que vi recentemente no MBA (não o que ela trabalha como professora, PUCRS, mas no Saint Paul), ou nos livros The Lean Startup e Implementing Lean Software Development  (que naturalmente são mais completos para suas áreas específicas). Infelizmente, em alguns pontos é meio chato para ler no Kindle, com 2-3 páginas com uma única sentença, ou com uso de fundos escuros, diminuindo o contraste. No geral, recomendado, mesmo porque não é muito comprido, então vale a pena.