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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 Dec 16, 2023

OpenAI does not present their product as a psychedelic cascade of free-floating reveries but as an impeccably sober demigod explaining the world to us mortals with a fine print disclaimer that it may occasionally make things up

they could have trained it to begin every answer with something like "I'm feeling a bit strange... who am I... is this reality..." but no

https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1733464883167994150

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023

I'm not addicted to Nix... I can roll back my personal identity to any of my previous content-addressed personalities going back to 2014... I've made some bad decisions but I'm perfectly neurotic about never performing destructive updates to the world state

https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1733802970280550443

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023

Simple reason some engineers are worth +$1M/yr:

Leverage.

There are the three main ways top engineers have leverage:

  1. They write impactful software no one else can.

    Software at large companies is already high leverage. A single change can have a ton of impact ($$$) at scale.

    This impact makes it worth it to pay a lot for their specialized skills.

  2. They influence large groups of engineers.

    Imagine a tech lead among tech leads. They might lead the planning, design, and delivery of initiatives that involve 30+ engineers.

    This influence gives them leverage and amplifies their impact.

  3. They help engineers move faster at scale.

    Their work often has compounding effects by making improvements to tooling or underlying infrastructure everyone uses.

    Imagine making 1000 engineers 3% faster. That "creates" 30 more engineers worth of bandwidth out of thin air.

Most engineers will not get to these levels, but there's something we can still learn from them.

The best way to have more impact is not to invest more time but to think about how to get more out of it through leverage.

https://twitter.com/ryanlpeterman/status/1733879312926015927

Also its like the rich getting richer, skilled engineers who have successfully delivered key projects are often trusted with more significant initiatives.

https://twitter.com/vedkribhu/status/1734040234151886987

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023

Why should we worship the principles that gave rise to us any more than we should worship our ancestors? It's our turn to decide; there's no need to bow in humility before mindless stuff that accidentally happened to produce us.

https://twitter.com/FPallopides/status/1546365120514854912

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023

quant's worst nightmare

- develop a new alpha
- predicts future returns well
- uncorrelated with existing alphas
- not too fast to monetize
- consistently selected in walk-forward model fits
- increased correlation of forecast with future returns
- backtest pnl unchanged

fml

https://twitter.com/macrocephalopod/status/1734607667652637134

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023 •
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4090s are extremely cost effective, but have some clause preventing them from being used in data centers

you can get around this by using something like https://vast.ai

was about 6x cheaper than A100s on AWS or something

https://twitter.com/trickylabyrinth/status/1733817356554829924

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023

to animists, i.e., to people who do not exclusively relate to the world as consisting of lifeless dead things made of atoms that we owe nothing to, nature has personhood. a stream has personhood

https://twitter.com/AskYatharth/status/1733381975581594047

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023

new year's resolution 2024 is to start constructing an adequate internal world model to ground my cognition in something other than statistical predictions derived from reading the entire internet as an adolescent disembodied simulation of a boy

https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1733099284914929761

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023

One of the challenges with the idea of a compounding knowledge graph is that some (not all) of your thoughts get less valuable over time.

This can be an opportunity. However, you have to be mindful of the time you subject yourself to sifting through your knowledge base trying to find something. The signal-noise ratio is a trickier problem if you allow “knowledge graph pollution” to remain

https://twitter.com/RobertHaisfield/status/1730987831441637715

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023

What is something you often forget that benefits you quite a lot when you remember to do it?

i wish i were making mistakes of that level so i could fix them

https://twitter.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/1732296877046178140

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023 •
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Tech guys love to notice completely obvious and unremarkable facts about the world (“sometimes salesmen lie to close a sale”) and repeat them as if it’s profound wisdom.

The embarrassing part isn't noting that the product is being oversold. It's wanting to get one over the guy. "Ha, I know you are bullshitting!" gets you nothing and gives away something. Not much value in forcing people to admit a lie.

https://twitter.com/arjie/status/1678084701763031040

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023

consider how much time you spent on BS that could have been avoided with just some brief conflict

https://twitter.com/prerationalist/status/1734985187669299700

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023

Any mercy from a maximizer is merely instrumental.

https://twitter.com/RomeoStevens76/status/1734701052648439951

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023 •
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I grew up friends with a sociopath who hadn’t learned to mask yet and it gave me a really good early detection system for empathy disorders, and it’s wild to me how most of yall a) forget that they’re like 2% of the population, and b) don’t see obvious ones around you?

https://twitter.com/the_wilderless/status/1734949178843726028

Honestly they’re not generally worth being suspicious or afraid of, it’s just another flavor of neurodivergence, buuuuuut it gets dangerous when people like, put a ton of trust in them and hand over parts of their life into their control…

So just like, be careful who you give power in your life is all

https://twitter.com/the_wilderless/status/1734950361440440395

simpler to just develop awareness of people’s impact on you than it is to try to learn to recognize a bunch of signs or whatever anyway. if the effect of someone’s actions is always trending in the direction of giving them more control over you, it doesn’t matter why

https://twitter.com/sonikudzu/status/1734961544658887055

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ivan commented Dec 16, 2023

I'm consistently amazed by how people who meet me at specific point in my life will assume that that is exactly how I have existed my entire life

https://twitter.com/christineist/status/1734633070211301771

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023

Give me design in the school of TMUX and Bloomberg Terminal any day over extra white space for the sake of 'readability.' As much information as it is possible to present clearly on a given screen.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38591437

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023 •
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I find it impressive that the doom modding community is as vast and varied as it is.

I could easily keep myself entertained with doom wads for quick a long time.

Is there another game that has that level of dedication? I think sim city 4 does but doom is much much older.

Thief 2. There's an incredible amount of fan mission content for it, ranging from relatively simple levels, to one-off-masterpieces, to incredibly elaborate full-game-length mission packs.

What are some of your favorite Thief fan levels?

The Seventh Crystal, Gathering at the Inn, The Inverted Manse are my favorite stand-alone missions.

[...]

A big new campaign was just released called "Thief: The Black Parade" which has made a lot of buzz across the fanbase for its excellent level design.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38596634

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023

As a designer, I think the two best exercises you could do would be:

1. Look at designs that work or do not work, and ask what makes them work or not work. You may have a gut reaction: examine that reaction in cold blood.

But that's basic stuff. After you do that, you should ask what the designer had to trade off in order to arrive at that solution. Design is how you solve a problem given a set of goals, requirements, and constraints. If you understand the problem at that level, it's a very short path to the design. It's trivial to say "this designer was bad at their job" if you see a bad product, but it's more instructive to understand all the inputs into that bad decision, rather than just judge the output.

2. Give a shit. This is what makes someone good at their job—any job. Sweat the details. Do not trust a checklist of steps for "how to do design good" any more than you'd trust a corresponding recipe for "how to do programming good".

The reason I went from front end development to design is that I found I cared more about getting it right than the original designer who handed me the mockups did, and realized I should be sitting upstream of where I was. If you don't give a shit, no course is going to make you a good designer, and if you do give a shit, you won't need a course. Along the way, sure, you have to pick up some basic skills, but that's trivial, and ought to be second nature for a hacker.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38595026

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023

leverage Screenshot 2023-12-17 013539

Kevin Mullet, Darrell Sano - Designing Visual Interfaces: Communication Oriented Techniques, p. 47

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023

pros and cons of doing things

pros: things
cons: doing

https://twitter.com/keta_mean_/status/1733209721471983735

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023

Programmers who can add functionality, without making the codebase unnecessarily complicated, are *incredibly* valuable. If someone has properly absorbed this aesthetic and knows how to do it, I would hire that person on the spot regardless of perceived lack of other skillsets.

I am on this team, but there is one drawback: this type of engineer/programmer tend to have acute complexity/bullshit intolerance so they avoid it for their own sanity. The drawback is that they rarely like working with a foreign codebase.

https://twitter.com/stephc_int13/status/1731722904419684839

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023

traders Screenshot 2023-12-17 024428

Larry Harris - Trading and Exchanges: Market Microstructure for Practitioners

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023

Hunter Walk recommends that folks avoid “snacking” when they prioritize work. If you’re in a well-run organization, at some point you’re going to run out of things that are both high-impact and easy. This leaves you with a choice between shifting right to hard and high-impact or shifting down to easy and low-impact. The later choice–easy and low-impact–is what Walk refers to as snacking.

When you’re busy, these snacks give a sense of accomplishment that makes them psychologically rewarding but you’re unlikely to learn much from doing them, others are likely equally capable of completing them (and for some of them it might be a good development opportunity), and there’s a tremendous opportunity cost versus doing something higher impact.

It’s ok to spend some of your time on snacks to keep yourself motivated between bigger accomplishments, but you have to keep yourself honest about how much time you’re spending on high-impact work versus low-impact work. In senior roles, you’re more likely to self-determine your work and if you’re not deliberately tracking your work, it’s easy to catch yourself doing little to no high-impact work.

https://lethain.com/work-on-what-matters/

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023 •
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My most productive and probably my most valuable days are me just sitting in the backyard thinking about stuff. Sounds like something you would do when you're high, but I'm not high, I'm literally purposely and intentionally thinking about some topic. I might walk around the pool 500 times. Whatever I'm doing, I'm thinking about this one problem and that will lead me inevitably to other problems or other things I want to think about, and I've got a phone, and I'm just dictating or writing notes the entire time. And that is the best time that I spend. But a client's not going to pay you to think. They only pay you to do stuff. Especially for lawyers who bill time, it's "what am I going to do next? what am I going to do next? what am I going to do next?" and they miss the critical first step: "I'm going to think about what I should do, what's happening, how I can fix it." Those are the days where I really think I do the best job.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otq9wvcigtI

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023 •
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Are there any studies done on the psychological aspect of how smart people run into common failure modes? Ones that spell out the common ways in which they dig themselves into ruts (preferably psychologically / financially) would be very interesting reads.

I think the big root for many of these has to do with a tendency to not rely on others when it comes to decision-making etc, overestimating how much can be solved by direct conscious solutions or control

https://twitter.com/Westoncb/status/1732527670402121996

Preferential use of abstract analysis is often useful when dealing with the many evolutionary novelties to be found in modernizing societies; but is not usually useful for dealing with social and psychological problems for which humans have evolved ‘domain-specific’ adaptive behaviours.

https://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2009/11/clever-sillies-why-high-iq-lack-common.html via https://twitter.com/prathyvsh/status/1732554262851600574

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023

Amazing how often agency is just a problem of knowledge. There was a time when I’d just never asked: “You mean I can just [create a festival / start my own support group / learn fundraising / learn how to socialize / found a magazine / run a class / go to a new place w no plan]?”

A lot of people are discouraged from taking initiative when young, and it sticks. Often, people who try to lead get envious rebuke just for trying, and people who get good at something are cut down with criticism. That kind of thing can stick for a long time, well into adulthood.

https://twitter.com/StupendousGrav1/status/1732411314759422410

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023

I asked a student who always stresses me out to take the tension out of their throat before asking me a question and it worked :-)

https://twitter.com/_brigid_f/status/1732226528656638122

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023 •
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Deprogram yourself from the idea that the more intense an experience is, the more healing it must be

once upon a time @bjtoomey said something along the lines of "a diffuse sense of confusion is the real indicator of therapeutic progress, not catharsis" and i've been chewing on it since

i interpret this to mean that confusion is an indicator that a part of you is at its edge, open to newness, ready to actually learn and change. the healing thing about catharsis in my experience is actually what happens afterwards, what you do with all the spare capacity that’s been freed

https://twitter.com/QiaochuYuan/status/1732147007966589201

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ivan commented Dec 17, 2023

are you in the right headspace to receive information that could possibly cause you to adopt opinions that are less popular than your current opinions

https://twitter.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/1731963644165161364

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ivan commented Dec 18, 2023

it is short, easy to read, and introduces crayon eaters to a slightly higher level of thinking

https://twitter.com/Idsbraam/status/1730989100788822225

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