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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 18, 2023

I feel like society genuinely just never talks about the problem of "What if there aren't enough of those?"

Most people want more great therapists: compassionate, well-researched, open-minded, unafraid of liability, willing to be paid relatively little, etc. Assume the optimal ratio of therapists in society is something unrealistic like 1 for every thousand non-therapists. Do we have good evidence there are that many people born with the inherent skill and attributes to be great therapists per capita? If not, then even offering free therapy college programs wouldn't meet the demand.

Most people want more great cops. Non-corrupt, free of bigotry, physically fit, willing to risk serious danger, able to make hard decisions in high stress situations, etc. Assume the same ratio, 1:1,000 cops to civilians. What evidence is there that enough people who fit that profile even exist per capita?

Ditto teachers, doctors, scientists, politicians, soldiers, everything we consider an "important" job. For so many of these, the solutions people turn to are spending more money, either for better salaries or better training, or less arbitrary red tape. And I think all of those could definitely be tried and lead to positive results.

But I always find myself wondering... what's the actual threshold we "should" be willing to accept? When does our expectation just become utterly unrealistic?

In some cases, it may be better to just have less if it means the people involved won't meet the bar. I could be wrong, but by my reckoning, really bad therapists and cops can do way more harm than longer waiting lists or response times. But in many others, it seems likely to me that this causes just as many problems as it solves. I think bad teachers should be fired, but what if firing all the bad elementary teachers ends up with 50+ kids per classroom? Even great teachers would be badly handicapped by that. And lawyers... I mean, there already aren't nearly enough public defenders out there, let alone "good" ones.

https://twitter.com/DaystarEld/status/1551805259831336961

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ivan commented Dec 18, 2023

In fact, we attracted no attention from anyone outside the vehicle whatsoever. A stretch limo would have gotten us more attention than this Jaguar SUV bristling with more technology than the Russian embassy—its spinning LiDAR, cameras, radar … all failing to turn heads. We had no driver for God’s sake. Surely, that is worthy of a second take? Yet no one was jumping in our path to test the AV,  no moms throwing their babies to safety. I see a passenger in another vehicle pulling up next to us with a camera up... but they are watching something on it and paying no attention to the second biggest San Francisco tech story of the year (the first is ChatGPT, silly). All this brilliant technology we were riding in [...] was being ignored.

https://www.engineering.com/story/two-short-rides-and-its-obvious-waymo-is-way-safe

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ivan commented Dec 18, 2023

The missing stair is a metaphor for a person within a social group or organization who many people know is untrustworthy or otherwise has to be "managed," but around whom the group chooses to work by discreetly warning newcomers of their behavior, rather than address the person and their behavior openly. The "missing stair" in the metaphor refers to a dangerous structural fault, such as a missing step in a staircase; a fault that people may become used to and quietly accepting of, that is not openly signposted or fixed, and that newcomers to a group or organization are warned about discreetly.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missing_stair

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ivan commented Dec 19, 2023

RDF-star extends RDF with a convenient way to make statements about other statements.

https://w3c.github.io/rdf-star/cg-spec/editors_draft.html via https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1736908386694832271

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ivan commented Dec 19, 2023

Dopamine has never been so easy for a hustler

https://twitter.com/Kr3py/status/1736967148835332220

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ivan commented Dec 19, 2023

Itsa me hash! bcc2564db34a20315686e3857c85093eb14541b354db0a4b02c5ef3b205188cf Should I get mysteriously logged out of Manifold, the first person to guess this hash is prolly me and should be treated as me!

https://manifold.markets/JoshuaB

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ivan commented Dec 19, 2023 •
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I want to try a new mode on my new phone... it's called 'spirit mode', it actually takes a picture of everyone's kind of spiritual essence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzRczjFxsHo&t=1m24s

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ivan commented Dec 20, 2023

-You can pet the cats and dogs
-You can read the thoughts of the cats and dogs

https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197975630210/recommended/1475810/ via https://store.steampowered.com/app/1475810/Ghostwire_Tokyo/

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ivan commented Dec 20, 2023

This paper introduces PowerInfer, a high-speed Large Language Model (LLM) inference engine on a personal computer (PC) equipped with a single consumer-grade GPU. The key underlying the design of PowerInfer is exploiting the high locality inherent in LLM inference, characterized by a power-law distribution in neuron activation. This distribution indicates that a small subset of neurons, termed hot neurons, are consistently activated across inputs, while the majority, cold neurons, vary based on specific inputs. PowerInfer exploits such an insight to design a GPU-CPU hybrid inference engine: hot-activated neurons are preloaded onto the GPU for fast access, while cold-activated neurons are computed on the CPU, thus significantly reducing GPU memory demands and CPU-GPU data transfers. PowerInfer further integrates adaptive predictors and neuron-aware sparse operators, optimizing the efficiency of neuron activation and computational sparsity. Evaluation shows that PowerInfer attains an average token generation rate of 13.20 tokens/s, with a peak of 29.08 tokens/s, across various LLMs (including OPT-175B) on a single NVIDIA RTX 4090 GPU, only 18% lower than that achieved by a top-tier server-grade A100 GPU. This significantly outperforms llama.cpp by up to 11.69× while retaining model accuracy.

https://ipads.se.sjtu.edu.cn/_media/publications/powerinfer-20231219.pdf
via https://twitter.com/deliprao/status/1737206517990875629
via https://twitter.com/mayfer/status/1737311228442423642

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ivan commented Dec 20, 2023

An Arachnophobia Mode has been added to the accessibility options.

https://portkeygamessupport.wbgames.com/hc/en-us/articles/16304407055251

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ivan commented Dec 20, 2023 •
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If you don’t look, you won’t find.

Charlie Munger, https://www.thegoodinvestors.sg/category/what-were-reading/

Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.

https://biblehub.com/matthew/7-7.htm
via https://deoxy.org/evasion/12.htm

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ivan commented Dec 20, 2023

Another childhood friend recently found an old diary where on one page he had literally just written the word "remember," over and over.

https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/childhood-memory/

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ivan commented Dec 21, 2023

  • The ability to do speculative execution within failure contexts, meaning you can try out actions without committing them. When an expression succeeds, the effects of the expression are committed, but if the expression fails, the effects of the expression are rolled back as though the expression never happened. This way, you can execute a series of actions that accumulate changes, but those actions will be undone if a failure occurs in the failure context.

https://dev.epicgames.com/documentation/en-us/uefn/verse-language-reference

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ivan commented Dec 21, 2023 •
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Certain apps have always gotten special treatment. If it’s big enough to mess with phone sales they’re allowed nonsense a normal dev would be permanently banned for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38721034

It’s worth noting that use of NEHotspotHelper requires a special entitlement (com.apple.developer.networking.HotspotHelper) that you have to apply for, and presumably Apple won’t grant unless your app has a legitimate need for it.

That said, this maybe shows an incompatibility between Apple’s privacy strategy and “super-apps” like WeChat and AliPay. When a company shoves all functionality into one app, that app suddenly has all the entitlements, and it’s harder to tell when and how any sensitive data is being used.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38721115

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ivan commented Dec 21, 2023

concept: a "thankless task"

is one where:

*it needs to be done and it's difficult or unpleasant

*if you ever do it, that's taken as evidence that you're "the kind of person" who does it and can be expected to do it forever without reward

https://twitter.com/s_r_constantin/status/1737920262035689641

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ivan commented Dec 22, 2023

The Basic Formal Ontology (BFO) is a small, upper level ontology that is designed for use in supporting information retrieval, analysis and integration in scientific and other domains. BFO is a genuine upper ontology. Thus it does not contain physical, chemical, biological or other terms which would properly fall within the coverage domains of the special sciences. BFO is used by more than 250 ontology-driven endeavors throughout the world.

https://basic-formal-ontology.org/
via https://ontology.buffalo.edu/smith/

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ivan commented Dec 23, 2023

in the end, that [Cambridge Analytica] scandal was the open web's official death sentence :(

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38739563

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ivan commented Dec 23, 2023

What do non-capital attuned people see businesses as?

A place to build great product and beat competitors!

https://twitter.com/ejames_c/status/1738460288268288160

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ivan commented Dec 23, 2023

We all have a circle of competence – an area in which we have a lot of earned knowledge.

The size of that circle is not important. What is important is knowing when you are approaching the perimeter.

Within your circle of competence, you operate with an advantage. As you approach the perimeter (the limitations of your knowledge), your advantage starts to reduce. As you cross the perimeter, not only does your advantage vanish, but it transfers to other people. Suddenly, you find yourself playing in an area where others have an edge.

https://fs.blog/circle-of-competence/

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ivan commented Dec 24, 2023 •
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When authors plagiarize, they seem to do this as a substitute for understanding.

[...]

Much has been written on the ethics of plagiarism. One aspect that has received less notice is plagiarism’s role in corrupting our ability to learn from data: We propose that plagiarism is a statistical crime. It involves the hiding of important information regarding the source and context of the copied work in its original form. Such information can dramatically alter the statistical inferences made about the work.

https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2023/12/22/plagiarism-means-never-having-to-say-youre-clueless/

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ivan commented Dec 24, 2023

If you or your loved one tried to use the ffmpeg command line, you might be entitled to compensation

https://twitter.com/lcamtuf/status/1738632377772155080

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ivan commented Dec 25, 2023

I realized he actively seeks out vulnerable people who are bad with boundaries

https://twitter.com/gptbrooke/status/1738633212824601073

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ivan commented Dec 26, 2023

Rather, they say, it's "hard to predict". And this, to them, means that they have an absolute right to keep whatever intuitive sense they started with

https://twitter.com/ESYudkowsky/status/1739399267943420213

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ivan commented Dec 27, 2023

“I have reasons—they have excuses.”

https://twitter.com/StrangelEdweird/status/1739728739137724678

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ivan commented Dec 27, 2023

Well, the trouble is that some children are timorous and some children are reckless. And in order to save the lives of reckless children, warnings are calibrated for their safety. The result of which is that the timorous live in a state of perpetual terror. What I needed to be told is, "you know what, most days you won't die, it's fine."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKc32jQIY0w&t=1m28s
via https://twitter.com/dsteninger/status/1739750545697407478

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ivan commented Dec 27, 2023

I think the best advice that I've ever gotten was something I read from Dick Costelo who used to be the CEO of Twitter. And he said something along the lines of, the hardest part about management is making sure that everyone else understands what you understand. And the reason that's always stuck with me is because every time in my career—and there are many—where I've made some mistake in communicating, where I've had some failure of communication, it's almost always come down to some assumption that I was making, or some piece of context that I had, that I was taking for granted that everyone else understood, when that wasn't really the case. And it's just served as this constant reminder that you can always get better at explaining yourself clearly and concisely, in a way that allows the people you're working with to take an idea and run with it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KzmampXPDU

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ivan commented Dec 27, 2023 •
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Rakesh was eventually released when his contract finished in November 2023. He believes he was let go because he simply wasn’t good enough at scamming. With a steady flow of workers to be tricked and trafficked, it’s often easier to simply replace bad scammers than to force them to work, Rakesh believes.

https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/12/asia/chinese-scam-operations-american-victims-intl-hnk-dst/

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ivan commented Dec 28, 2023

Humans are capable of using interaural time-of-arrival differences (ITDs) of as small as 10-20 microseconds to distinguish directional differences of sound sources in the horizontal plane as small as 1-2 degrees (azimuth). Typically ITDs range from zero for sounds coming from directly in front to about 700 microseconds for sounds coming directly from either side.

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Jeffress_model

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ivan commented Dec 29, 2023

I mourn the wild west internet every day. Classless, rule-less, free association, free knowledge; exactly what a voraciously curious naive nerd needed

It made me who I am and it will probably never exist again

https://twitter.com/meatballtimes/status/1722613715391127676

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ivan commented Dec 29, 2023

By all estimations of what I’ve observed in my career, [middle managers] simply obscure information they get from both above and below as a means to be a permanent intermediary to increase job security

https://twitter.com/the_one_mike/status/1702399634851897677

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