Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@ivan
Last active July 7, 2024 18:18
Show Gist options
  • Save ivan/5095670735ba941a6090a69fce4183df to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save ivan/5095670735ba941a6090a69fce4183df to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
2023 reading list

[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
@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 1, 2023

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 1, 2023

Unless I'm just parroting truisms here,

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 1, 2023

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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/

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 11, 2023

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

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 13, 2023

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 13, 2023

My recommendation is keep 14 days of [Vite output] bundles around, have a timestamp and force cutoff marker around and then bring up a bar to trigger reload / auto reload if can be done.

https://twitter.com/mitsuhiko/status/1730156753738731653

Client-side navigation can be buggy if you deploy a new version of your app while people are using it. If the code for the new page is already loaded, it may have stale content; if it isn't, the app's route manifest may point to a JavaScript file that no longer exists. SvelteKit helps you solve this problem through version management. If SvelteKit encounters an error while loading the page and detects that a new version has been deployed (using the name specified here, which defaults to a timestamp of the build) it will fall back to traditional full-page navigation. Not all navigations will result in an error though, for example if the JavaScript for the next page is already loaded.

https://kit.svelte.dev/docs/configuration#version

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 15, 2023

I'm trying to scam you, save yourself!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nn6eq_k2_4g&t=1362s

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 15, 2023

Munger (and Buffett) called this “the circle of competence” and often pointed out that the diameter of the circle doesn’t matter. What does matter is making sure you don’t fool yourself into thinking the diameter is wider than it is.

[...]

“Confucius said that real knowledge is knowing the extent of one’s ignorance…. Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant.”

[...]

“Part of the reason I’ve been a little more successful than most people is I’m good at destroying my own best-loved ideas,” Munger told the Journal in 2019. “I knew early in life that that would be a useful knack and I’ve honed it all these years, so I’m pleased when I can destroy an idea that I’ve worked very hard on over a long period of time. And most people aren’t.”

https://archive.is/kPK8a / https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/charlie-munger-life-money-ae3853ad

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 15, 2023

Every minute of every day each of us diligently works to build and fortify our personal reputations. Showing up on time. Being respectful. Offering sympathy. Helping out. Apologizing when at fault. Telling the truth. Our reputation is our life currency. Then, in one moment, a headline can cause everyone you love and care about to question everything they thought they knew about you. A lifetime of work now in question. It’s great entertainment when it’s about someone else; a different thing when it’s your name in the headline.

https://twitter.com/bryan_johnson/status/1734257098119356900

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 15, 2023

For a particular kind of person (which includes myself), trendspotting is a temptation.

If you’re an “infovore” with a systematic mind, if you like to collect and aggregate and organize information and data, but if maybe you’re not that original or creative yourself1, then you’ll gravitate to the kind of “research” or “writing” or “analysis” that’s essentially trendspotting.

Trendspotting in the broadest sense includes what I do with my regular, more sciencey posts: aggregating information about work that other people do.

I see it as a temptation because being an information aggregator is easier than being a creator. When your “work” is aggregating information, you get the exhilaration of feeling that you’ve been granted an aerial view, that you can see the whole of “what’s going on”, the “big picture.” It can give you the insidious sense that that you’re “above” the object-level toilers who spend their whole lives creating only one of the elements you file in your collection.

https://sarahconstantin.substack.com/p/2024-color-trends

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 15, 2023

The most conscientious employees in your organization are the most bitter. They see the quality issues, they often address them, and they get no recognition for doing so. When they speak up about quality concerns, they get treated like mouthbreathers who want to slow down. They watch the “move fast and break things” crowd get rewarded time after time, while they run around angrily cleaning up their messes. To these folks, it feels like giving a damn is a huge career liability in your organization. Because it is.

https://davidkcaudill.medium.com/maybe-getting-rid-of-your-qa-team-was-bad-actually-52c408bd048b via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38645856

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 15, 2023

The art critic John Berger once wrote that men in paintings act, women appear: 'Men look at women whereas women watch themselves being looked at.' And so it is with Harold Knight's prosaically titled 'Woman Reading,' from 1932.

https://twitter.com/ahistoryinart/status/1735611297859854532

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 15, 2023

But the magic happens in the mortar between the bricks. Sanding pieces together that don’t fit. Pouring elbow grease into the mix until you force things to work out of sheer will. Finding new and unintuitive ways to do things.

https://twitter.com/scottastevenson/status/1734981840866324961

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 15, 2023

every ‘market wizard’ has a mediocre track record after being featured in the book.

The only exceptions are the guys who have other traders/managers working for their firm, i.e., Cohen, Shaw, Dalio (maybe not as successful), Griffin, PTJ, Platt

I hear experienced (30+yrs) traders say all the time that the only way to survive is to adapt. but when I look at history, none of the legends actually ‘adapted’ their own processes/methodologies. They all employed people with fresh ideas and that’s how they ‘adapted’

https://twitter.com/AkulBansal1/status/1735542579759132966

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 15, 2023

My husband brought our daughter to the hospital in Portland once and didn’t like what they were doing to her so he said he wanted her transferred. They said no. He said fine I’ll take her somewhere else myself. They said if he left with her against medical advice they would call CPS. I kid you not J said great call them now get the fuck out of my way and drove her to another hospital. I’m not saying he rudely left I am saying he literally told the pediatrics overlord to “get the fuck out of my way” and carried her out the door. She was fine and the other hospital discharged her home. Never heard another word about it. Point being, sometimes people in positions of what they clearly believe to be infallible authority need to be told what time it is and who is who in the relationship.

https://twitter.com/luinalaska/status/1735315611486671156

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 15, 2023

the thrill of doing research, of making a discovery in science, is the feeling that you’re interacting with the very fabric of reality - that you, for once, have figured out how to talk to it and that you’re graciously granted a coveted answer to your question

https://twitter.com/ulkar_aghayeva/status/1461062162705788929

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment