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2023 reading list
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2023_reading.md

[This page is best viewed with https://github.com/ludios/expand-everything, which will load all the comnents below.]

Wherein I try to prioritize reading for the limited amount of time I have this year, and to remind myself to read more than just comments on the Internet. Because of problems of time and shifting interests, I will consider this a success if I read a third of the list. I'll reflect on the reading and deviations from the plan in Jan 2024.

{+} = added after initial planning

  • Albert Camus - The Fall/ audio
  • {+} John Kennedy Toole - A Confederacy of Dunces/ audio, go to 6m44s to skip past the introduction spoilers
  • {+} pirate aba - The Wandering Inn/ audio
  • William Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker/ audio, go to 12m35s to skip past the introduction spoilers
  • Tae Kim - A Guide to Japanese Grammar
  • Noboru Akuzawa - Japanese Sentence Patterns Training Book for JLPT N5
  • Noboru Akuzawa - Japanese Sentence Patterns Training Book for JLPT N4
  • Jay Rubin - Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You/ the romaji is miserable; may have useful grammar insights
  • struggle through Japanese Wikipedia for some topics I know about
  • Daniele Minnone - A learning handbook for Joyo Kanji/ the first third, pg. 1 - 98

(my initial source for learning Japanese is https://cijapanese.com/ and not any of the reading.)

Lectures

maybe in 2024? not sure

  • {+} Paul Bourke - Fractals, Chaos, Self-Similarity
  • {+} Alex Komoroske - The Compendium / after I convert the Firebase export in code/websites/compendium-cards-data/db.json to a single HTML page
  • {+} James Betker - Non_Interactive
  • {+} Denny Britz’s Blog
  • {+} Robert Root-Bernstein - Discovering: Inventing and Solving Problems at the Frontiers of Scientific Knowledge
  • {+} Steven H. Strogatz - Infinite Powers: How Calculus Reveals the Secrets of the Universe
  • {+} Lexi Mattick & Hack Club - Putting the “You” in CPU
  • Lou Keep - The Uruk Series
  • Knut Schmidt-Nielsen - How Animals Work (via)
  • Edward O. Wilson - The Diversity of Life
  • James L. Gould, Carol Grant Gould - The Animal Mind (via)
  • Symbols and mental programs: a hypothesis about human singularity/ printed
  • Robert Yarham - How to Read the Landscape
  • Richard Powers - The Overstory/ audio
  • Rigdzin Shikpo - Openness Clarity Sensitivity/ printed
  • Michael R. Canfield (editor) - Field Notes on Science & Nature (via)
  • Sabine Hossenfelder - Existential Physics
  • George Soros - The Alchemy of Finance/ printed
  • Eric Gill - An Essay on Typography/ printed; I know he's bad
  • {+} Richard Hamming - The Art of Doing Science and Engineering

unplanned cool things read

unplanned and abandoned

  • Chuck Klosterman - The Nineties/ audio
  • Rick Rubin - The Creative Act/ audio
  • Mike Rinder - A Billion Years: My Escape From a Life in the Highest Ranks of Scientology/ audio
  • Sarah Steel - Do As I Say: How Cults Control, Why We Join Them, and What They Teach Us About Bullying, Abuse and Coercion/ audio
  • Benjamín Labatut - When We Cease to Understand the World/ audio
  • Kathryn Petras, Ross Petras - Awkword Moments: A Lively Guide to the 100 Terms Smart People Should Know/ audio
  • Adam Galinsky, Maurice Schweitzer - Friend & Foe: When to Cooperate, When to Compete, and How to Succeed at Both/ audio
  • Han Kang - The White Book/ audio
  • Niccolò Machiavelli - The Prince/ audio
  • Anthony Bourdain - Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly/ audio
  • Kristie Macrakis - Espionage/ audio
  • Christopher Winn - Legal Daisy Spacing (via)
  • Justin E. H. Smith - The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is/ audio
  • Alice Schroeder - The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life/ audio (~77% in)
  • Morgan Housel - Same as Ever/ audio
  • Amanda Montell - Cultish: The Language of Fanaticism/ audio
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ivan commented Nov 28, 2023 •
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there's this big rationalist norm where you're supposed to take the "outside view" a lot and kinda average your opinion with other people's opinions and i think it sucks actually. you're reneging on your responsibility as a thinker by double-counting other people's thoughts

like, you are already exposed to other people's thoughts and those thoughts already have an effect on yours in the native mental architecture, there's no need to top-down impose a second round of effects. your job as a thinker is to alchemize what you've experienced

in practice what this norm mostly ended up doing was producing an intelligence status ladder where people had a rough sense of who was like "the most rational" (although we didn't call it that) and you were supposed to defer to people's opinions higher up on the ladder

that was awful and in practice taught people to ignore their own knowing and substitute other people's. i may disagree with yann lecun object-level but meta-level he's doing his job as a thinker by sticking to his guns and calling it like he sees it

https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1728527049105838499

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ivan commented Nov 28, 2023 •
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@cmuratori I'm trying to write a game UI system (immediate mode) as an exercise and I'm wondering whether you had any pointers about layout / positioning. I'd like to end up with something that looks right on various aspect ratios, and the fundamentals of a layout system escape me..

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but something that can be very helpful if you are not familiar with it is to read up on the original principles of typography. This can be very helpful to gain a baseline (pun intended) understanding of what a layout system is trying to do.

The typographic parts are the ones I'm familiar with, but I can't come up with a nice mental model for how the layout should work for say an inventory screen - should I do like macOS AutoLayout and add constraints between pairs of objects, or should I do like CSS?..

Always hand-code. This is a classic trap for UI design, and it always ends in disaster :) The minute you think you can generically describe typography, it's game over.

So the goal of systems like this is to make it easy for someone to code a bunch of decision-like things into their design. Things like "try putting this in the lower corner and stacking them horizontally, but if it turns out that that would go past the middle of the screen, then split the group in half and put them on top. If the number is odd, then make a triangle instead." Etc., etc.

This is how actual typography works. The ideas behind things like CSS, Qt, MacOS, etc. are all just bad and don't actually work if you actually want things to be good.

https://twitter.com/cmuratori/status/1729035818235539904

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ivan commented Nov 28, 2023

Web push is basically useless because Google hasn't prioritized fixing the issues causing Android to delay the notifications by 10 minutes or more. They are basically only useful for "re-engagement" spam, nothing time critical.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=777106

There are a whole bunch of sad bugs about Web Push in the issue tracker. It's disappointingly typical of the PWA APIs. They sound like they have the capabilities you need until you try to use them and uncover a minefield of five year old known issues that will never be fixed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38430581

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ivan commented Nov 28, 2023 •
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He was, however, more eccentric than I had expected. He was a maverick. Even though there was nothing contentious about his research, he objected in principle to having it reviewed by the university research ethics committee, whose purpose is to protect the safety and well-being of experiment subjects.

He requested a meeting with the committee. I was not present but was told that he had questioned the authority and expertise of the committee members, had insisted that he alone was in a position to judge whether his research was ethical and that, in any case, he was fully capable of making such decisions himself. He was impervious to the fact that subjects in psychological research had been, on occasion, subjected to bad experiences, and also to the fact that both the Canadian and United States governments had made these reviews mandatory. What was he doing! I managed to make light of this to myself by attributing it to his unbridled energy and fierce independence, which were, in many other ways, virtues. That was a mistake.

Another thing to which I did not give sufficient concern was his teaching. As the undergraduate chair, I read all teaching reviews. His were, for the most part, excellent and included eyebrow-raising comments such as “This course has changed my life.” One student, however, hated the course because he did not like “delivered truths.” Curious, I attended many of Jordan’s lectures to see for myself.

Remarkably, the 50 students always showed up at 9 a.m. and were held in rapt attention for an hour. Jordan was a captivating lecturer — electric and eclectic — cherry-picking from neuroscience, mythology, psychology, philosophy, the Bible and popular culture. The class loved him. But, as reported by that one astute student, Jordan presented conjecture as statement of fact. I expressed my concern to him about this a number of times, and each time Jordan agreed. He acknowledged the danger of such practices, but then continued to do it again and again, as if he could not control himself.

He was a preacher more than a teacher.

[...]

I rarely challenged him. He overwhelmed challenges with volumes of information that were hard to process and evaluate. He was more forceful than I, and had a much quicker mind.

https://www.thestar.com/opinion/i-was-jordan-peterson-s-strongest-supporter-now-i-think-he-s-dangerous/article_085724d2-94de-5fd2-81c3-b3b2822fd38a.html

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ivan commented Nov 28, 2023

Most of the trades in that stock have been routed through dark pools (they don't hit lit exchanges), so even if there are (huge) trades you wouldn't necessarily see the price move.

Dark pool trades are reported to the FINRA TRF within at most 10 seconds and appear on the consolidated market data feed.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38451374

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ivan commented Nov 29, 2023

She created a world of her own, and we all have a place in it. Her influences are obvious (Y. Tiersen, J. Cage, E. Svensson, E. Satie, A. Pärt, B. Eno, P. Glass, L. Anderson), yet she has a very personal melodic "signature". A long journey into music is all we can wish for her, with confidence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp3B97N67Cw 'Hania Rani - @arteconcert's Piano Day'

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ivan commented Nov 30, 2023

This is what I constantly tell my students: The hard part about doing a tech product for the most part isn't the what beginners think makes tech hard — the hard part is wrangling systemic complexity in a good, sustainable and reliable way.

Many non-tech people e.g. look at programmers and think the hard part is knowing what this garble of weird text means. But this is the easy part. And if you are a person who would think it is hard, you probably don't know about all the demons out there that will come to haunt you if you don't build a foundation that helps you actively keeping them away.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38477399

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ivan commented Nov 30, 2023

Analogies may be good for generating ideas, but treating them as a source of truth is a path to madness.

https://www.pathsensitive.com/2023/09/its-time-for-painkillers-vitamins-die.html

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ivan commented Nov 30, 2023

Sounds as if the ANC is trying to cancel out its own sound.

https://crinacle.com/rankings/headphones/

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ivan commented Dec 1, 2023

There is an experience, the beginnings of which are described at the beginning of this post, which it feels accurate to describe as 'being attacked by a hell realm.' These experiences are something like Jhana, but for negative states. Tightly contracted attention on some aversive feeling tone in the body like helplessness, hopelessness, fear, separation/loneliness, disgust, etc. A solution to these problems is to open the aperture of attention wider to include neutral objects (most of the sensorium at any given time) but this doesn't feel available in the moment due to the threat of the fear object (tunnel vision etc.) A bunch of contemplative practices are oriented around making this degree of freedom on the attentional aperture available at all times. When it isn't directly available as an immediate move and all we have to work with are the contents themselves an analytical approach can be helpful. The underlying assumption that powers the whole investigation is that emotions are strategies to orient the organism usefully under some model of the world, and that those emotions won't be willing to pass until they're satisfied that we're actually dealing with the situation and not just pulling our usual bullshit of hand waving things we don't like away. This means investigating what the goal of the feeling is on the feeling's own terms, and feeling a genuine sense of connection and care for whatever that goal is, since it is some positive experience it wants you to have.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/nnCjjdXEXdRhzTAPE/buddhist-psychotechnology-for-withstanding-apocalypse-stress

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ivan commented Dec 1, 2023

but in German almost every other line has hyphenated words at the end (and I'm guessing in other languages with long composed words such as Finnish or Hungarian as well)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38441747#38444096

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ivan commented Dec 1, 2023

Everything I’ve read about Musk and the hours of interviews with him indicates he’s got a singularly engineering mind. I’ve seen throughout my career the divide between those with engineering minds and the bizarre world of traditional advertising, replete with smoke and mirrors, fake air kisses and squishy talk of purpose and “lovemarks.” This isn’t Mars and Venus. This divide is galaxies away.

https://www.therebooting.com/p/message-recieved

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ivan commented Dec 1, 2023 •
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Then, in July, just three months before the attacks, a veteran analyst with Unit 8200, Israel’s signals intelligence agency, warned that Hamas had conducted an intense, daylong training exercise that appeared similar to what was outlined in the blueprint.

But a colonel in the Gaza division brushed off her concerns, according to encrypted emails viewed by The Times.

“I utterly refute that the scenario is imaginary,” the analyst wrote in the email exchanges. The Hamas training exercise, she said, fully matched “the content of Jericho Wall.”

“It is a plan designed to start a war,” she added. “It’s not just a raid on a village.”

[...]

Underpinning all these failures was a single, fatally inaccurate belief that Hamas lacked the capability to attack and would not dare to do so. That belief was so ingrained in the Israeli government, officials said, that they disregarded growing evidence to the contrary.

[...]

The analyst warned that the drill closely followed the Jericho Wall plan, and that Hamas was building the capacity to carry it out.

The colonel in the Gaza division applauded the analysis but said the exercise was part of a “totally imaginative” scenario, not an indication of Hamas’s ability to pull it off.

“In short, let’s wait patiently,” the colonel wrote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/world/middleeast/israel-hamas-attack-intelligence.html

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ivan commented Dec 1, 2023

Unless I'm just parroting truisms here,

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38472124#38481897

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ivan commented Dec 1, 2023

given: A customer is a novel and stable pattern of human behavior.

thinking of apps as crude, and slow to evolve, pattern matchers

https://twitter.com/fkasummer/status/1729701349808292199

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ivan commented Dec 1, 2023 •
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Developing exobrain systems that work for me in a pleasant rather than onerous, virtue based way.

[...]

frequency of hamster pellet checks (fb, email, messaging, etc.)

[...]

Realizing that I can't use the outputs of other people's processes as my process (as you would be doing if you tried to instantiate this list as a set of processes rather than using it as inspiration to examine your own life more closely)

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/H5N5Npyd5udCtRwph/2017-an-actual-plan-to-actually-improve?commentId=nsAkLxux7zdH6zNZW

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ivan commented Dec 1, 2023

Say that I come to absolutely know you, but you do not know me. In this I gain complete power over you, and you will lack the ability to resist me.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkiyz8QSnpI&t=19m

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ivan commented Dec 1, 2023

A mental movement I can recommend: looking at someone and deciding to take them absolutely seriously, like you are watching the main character of an extremely good movie.

https://twitter.com/FPallopides/status/1730700187058794804

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ivan commented Dec 3, 2023

Idris works on his phone six hours a night for about 400 Naira (87¢) an hour.” While he chats, he pretends to be the owner of the account, who is pretending to be a woman in the United States, who is pretending to be hundreds of virtual women.

https://arstechnica.com/culture/2023/05/this-is-catfishing-on-an-industrial-scale/

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ivan commented Dec 4, 2023

yes in fact I have structured my whole personality around such a self-referential satire to circumvent the trauma of being bullied for thinking

https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1731719036403073403

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ivan commented Dec 4, 2023

Companies yearn for an ideal employee who is drunk on meaning, possessed by work, and spiritually immersed in their work persona, which has come to take over most if not all other parts of their identity.

https://www.fastcompany.com/90451328/are-you-a-spiritual-workaholic via https://twitter.com/animal/status/1217250339801436164 via https://twitter.com/search?q=%22drunk+on+meaning%22&src=spelling_expansion_revert_click

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ivan commented Dec 8, 2023

The most valuable gifts are primarily information. You're making a product recommendation that you're so confident in that you're willing to bet your own money that they'll like it.

https://twitter.com/moultano/status/1728803375590817858

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ivan commented Dec 9, 2023

V8 heap snapshots, saved as .heapsnapshot, can now be visualized in VS Code. There is both a traditional tabular view as well as a graphical representation of the retainers of a given memory object.

https://code.visualstudio.com/updates/v1_85#_javascript-debugger

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ivan commented Dec 10, 2023

The main thing SaaS companies do is navigate the politics of selling into businesses. The software is an implementation detail. So you can replicate the product, but you still have to do the (much harder) work of selling.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38595864

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ivan commented Dec 11, 2023

they’re starting to teach “lowercase tweet-style” on LinkedIn now

https://twitter.com/nabeelqu/status/1734019137792294969

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ivan commented Dec 12, 2023

What programmers call "constant space" and what computational complexity theorists call "log space" are the same complexity class.

https://twitter.com/ModelOfTheory/status/1719423775207510403 via https://twitter.com/_Mira___Mira_/status/1725835451377004725

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ivan commented Dec 12, 2023

I increasingly consider avoiding anything that I know to have been hyper-optimised by a powerful entity to be a basic hygiene practice

https://twitter.com/utotranslucence/status/1734388325702906230

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ivan commented Dec 13, 2023

One thing that holds back working-class people when talking with "professional class" like lawyers or bigcorps is that they don't know the right way to ask for info. e.g. if you ask a lawyer what you should do legally, they will always give an absurdly safe answer that's useless

So, real life prompt engineering

https://twitter.com/MaikkiTao/status/1734691452549296543

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ivan commented Dec 13, 2023

During the second quarter of this year, SpaceX alone sent nearly 80 percent of world’s payload by mass into space, according to an analysis by one industry consultant, Bryce Tech.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/19/us/politics/elon-musk-white-house-pentagon.html

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ivan commented Dec 13, 2023 •
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When software engineers say "declarative" they generally mean that state changing operations are inferred from the existence of a description of the state.

In a way it feels 'opposite' to event sourcing where the desired state is produced from a sequence of events. When we are declarative, we must infer the sequence of events that given an origin state can produce the desired state.

When creating a declarative file format you realise that by storing the desired state in a declarative way (1) you lose things like an undo/version history, and (2) it's possible for it to be 'lossy': differing journeys to the same desired state can operate differently.

I've been thinking about this because I recently created a program that can export a backend or apply changes to it via a declarative YAML file. But these files are not backups as they are 'lossy' and there is sequence sensitivity with regard to how we reach the desired state.

Declarativeness can feel like a bit of a dark art, because you have to rely on heuristics and principles about what a 'good' journey to a particular desired state looks like.

For example, do you reparent items by deleting them and then recreating them with different identities belonging to a new parent or do you have a way of re-assigning them?

https://twitter.com/sebinsua/status/1728101060332646550

I think the greatest value in being declarative is:

  1. the ability to be certain about your eventual state
  2. retention only of intentional state, ideally with frequent purging of unintentional state

https://twitter.com/bgreysk/status/1728116280308429275

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