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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 31, 2023

You know it’s a real weakness to want to be liked, a real weakness. I do not have that.

https://twitter.com/RMac18/status/1730316954932740535

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

Charnel grounds, as you might expect, are associated with a certain amount of horror in the Indian imagination, but as you probably don’t expect, also with morality tales, philosophy, and contemplation. The famous Betaal-Pachisi cycle of stories, which I blogged about in 2009, has a frame story that involves King Vikram repeatedly returning to a charnel ground to recapture an underworld creature known as a betaal, for complicated reasons. The stories within the frame story are a series of non-horror, often even comedic, moral dilemmas that the betaal poses to the king; a sort of allegory of his moral development through the 25 stories, as he solves each dilemma. His ultimate escape from the cycle of repeatedly returning to recapture the betaal from the charnel ground can be understood as a sort of enlightenment allegory about escaping the karmic cycle.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2023/12/21/charnel-vision/

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023 •
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To be more specific: there are clearly at least some limited senses in which we have goals.  We: (1) tell ourselves and others stories of how we’re aiming for various “goals”; (2) search out modes of activity that are consistent with the role, and goal-seeking, that we see ourselves as doing (“learning math”; “becoming a comedian”; “being a good parent”); and sometimes even (3) feel glad or disappointed when we do/don’t achieve our “goals”.

But there are clearly also heuristics that would be useful to goal-achievement (or that would be part of what it means to “have goals” at all) that we do not automatically carry out.  We do not automatically:

  • (a) Ask ourselves what we’re trying to achieve;
  • (b) Ask ourselves how we could tell if we achieved it (“what does it look like to be a good comedian?”) and how we can track progress;
  • (c) Find ourselves strongly, intrinsically curious about information that would help us achieve our goal;
  • (d) Gather that information (e.g., by asking as how folks commonly achieve our goal, or similar goals, or by tallying which strategies have and haven’t worked for us in the past);
  • (e) Systematically test many different conjectures for how to achieve the goals, including methods that aren’t habitual for us, while tracking which ones do and don’t work;
  • (f) Focus most of the energy that *isn’t* going into systematic exploration, on the methods that work best;
  • (g) Make sure that our "goal" is really our goal, that we coherently want it and are not constrained by fears or by uncertainty as to whether it is worth the effort, and that we have thought through any questions and decisions in advance so they won't continually sap our energies;
  • (h) Use environmental cues and social contexts to bolster our motivation, so we can keep working effectively in the face of intermittent frustrations, or temptations based in hyperbolic discounting;

[...]

Our verbal, conversational systems are much better at abstract reasoning than are the motivational systems that pull our behavior.

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PBRWb2Em5SNeWYwwB/humans-are-not-automatically-strategic

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

the right combination of calmness and urgency

[...]

Inspiration is perishable and life goes by fast. Inaction is a particularly insidious type of risk.

https://blog.samaltman.com/what-i-wish-someone-had-told-me

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

At its shining moment, Twitter was like the Tower of Babel before it fell.

https://www.wired.com/story/del-harvey-twitter-trust-and-safety-breaks-her-silence/

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

“a seamless web of deserved trust” in which a company deals fairly with employees, customers, competitors and other constituencies

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

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023 •
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flavours of excellence

[...]

Any power granted through affiliation with a person or institution is borrowed power. This is not necessarily bad and is often incredibly useful. But operate with the wariness that it is not truly yours.

[...]

building things that last: long-standing relationships, capability, and intuition

[...]

11. Tactile, manual labor is good for you

There was a multi-week period where I would spend 14 hours a day at my laptop. My body was just a vessel to send code/words to us-west-2. I picked up some machining work to counter this and felt better.

[...]

Getting sunlight first thing in the morning has been helpful to keep my sleep schedule on track. It’s also a good excuse to start the day with a walk.

https://anson.substack.com/p/look-what-the-cat-brought-in

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

my 2024 intent: to be stupidly brave

https://twitter.com/visakanv/status/1741058281517490357

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

Living in India is high cognitive load on the system.

It’s just too much people management

https://twitter.com/cubanheat/status/1740954153315422344

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023 •
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don't let me catch you having opinions about Wittgenstein before you hit $50M ARR

[...]

do not confuse academic curiosity in successful founders as anything other than a cute affectation.

https://twitter.com/zhayitong/status/1740593401052193118

it's not what people want to hear, but if you want to create a generational company, have to put most hobbies away, which makes you temporarily uninteresting

https://twitter.com/lsukernik/status/1740708565957152816

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

do you get a distinct sense when someone is "managing" you?

what's it like? what gives it away?

surface-level attentiveness to my concerns while consistently being unable to/refusing to pass my ITT and integrate my POV into the shared POV we use together

https://twitter.com/quotidiania/status/1740798348876234941

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

Did anybody else like to lean on the window of the bus as a kid and let the vibrations violently shake your skull and brain?

https://twitter.com/saltydkdan/status/1739831825701171605

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

Personally, I suspect he likes the idea of radical change because he's an intensely intelligent man who is easily bored by the everyday world. He finds it impossible to believe that it makes sense to continue, as human beings, in our exact same form. "Do we really want more of what we have now?" he asks, sounding incredulous. "More millennia of the same old human soap opera? Surely we have played out most of the interesting scenarios already in terms of human relationships in a trivial framework. What I'm talking about transcends all that. There'll be far more interesting stories. And what is life but a set of stories?"

https://www.wired.com/1995/10/moravec/#extinction
via https://twitter.com/gwern/status/1700958056228483404

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

YouTube Shorts is freaking scary. Apparently I do not have the self control to handle Shorts and every 30 days I tell YouTube to hide them. If that feature goes away I think I just need to cancel my YouTube Premium subscription and block the site.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38783195

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

“searchandizing”

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38772067

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

tempo is the most important thing when you’re building something new & big

https://twitter.com/fkasummer/status/1739013538385957370

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ivan commented Dec 31, 2023

tfw ur decades-long incredibly fascinating career of early post-Cartesian embodied AI research and novel synthesis of minor householder tantra with critique of rationalism is completely overshadowed by your discovery that 600W of LED light on your face feels nice in the winter

https://twitter.com/meekaale/status/1739027086042345681

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024 •
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[Duolingo] figured out how to deliver just the right amount of dopamine to keep users on paid subscriptions while slowing the actual pace of learning to an absolute crawl

if users learn their target language quickly, duolingo makes less money.

https://twitter.com/AlexBerish/status/1738381781320028515

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

Underrated quality of HIIT classes is they force you to tolerate significant pain and suffering.

When we're almost never made to do so in any other aspect of cushy modern life.

Feels like a worthwhile thing to be exposed to 1-2x a week. A little reminder of struggle.

https://twitter.com/Mappletons/status/1738523523696439633

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

its important to set aside some time every day for looking at distant objects

https://twitter.com/chromalisque/status/1057038258721513474

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

That’s why I think charnel vision is a healthy thing. A world that desperately celebrates optimism and medicates pessimism is a world that is not truly willing to look at itself and contemplate the death and decay that must necessarily accompany life and growth.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2023/12/21/charnel-vision/

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

FINDING A FUTURE: SELF-NARRATIVE AND SELF-TRUST

The facility for viewing one’s life as a narrative may be what’s missing in addiction. And the loss of an accessible self-narrative corresponds with clues that the dorsolateral PFC becomes partially disconnected from the motivational core, both in episodes of now appeal and over the long-term course of addiction. My focus on the left dorsolateral PFC, although partly speculative, can help make sense of what goes wrong when people seem unable to quit. Not only are memories and ambitions difficult to access, but the sense of time as a linear dimension, connecting now to later, is replaced by a sense of time as cyclical—the right hemisphere’s proclivity. Instead of a future stretching out ahead, addicts can only imagine the reiteration of the present. If this is an accurate picture, then reconnecting the left dorsolateral PFC with the motivational core would allow desire and perspective to work together, and that might be the best way, in fact the only way, to build a road from the present to the future.

Addicts experience something breathtaking when they can stretch their vision of themselves from the immediate present back to the past that shaped them and forward to a future that’s attainable and satisfying. It feels like shifting from momentary blobs of experience to the coherence of being a whole person. It feels like being the author and advocate of one’s own life. It feels like being real.

Now imagine what that means for the capacity to trust one’s own judgements, values, instincts, and attainments. From making choices that are obviously self-destructive, there is a shift to making choices that are self-enhancing and self-sustaining. The value of this transformation cannot be overstated. Addicts can live for years without experiencing a kernel of self-trust. Why trust that you will actually be different when the evidence suggests that you’ll go on being the same? Why believe that you can pursue what’s beneficial rather than what’s immediately available, when you’ve bypassed that junction a thousand times?

To experience a sense of continuity between me now, me then, and me in the future is precious. But when it’s been missing for a while, perhaps for one’s whole life, it’s not easy to find. It requires a perspective that can only be obtained by addressing the future in the context of the past. And it requires one other thing, one fundamental resource: desire itself. There’s no way to reach forward with determination and hope unless you want badly to get there.

Marc Lewis - The Biology of Desire: Why Addiction is Not a Disease

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

do you ever think about how for a decade or so we could just make weird little animations and games and things in flash with almost no prior knowledge, like you could just have a bad idea and work on it that same day and share it online. and now we don't have that at all

https://twitter.com/innesmck/status/1736866727634616532

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

My own theory with "Right Way Guys" is that some people have been able to find a lot of success by leveraging the knowledge that's stored in the hivemind of society. They don't really know what they're doing when you consider what's going on inside their skull. But they have successfully copied success up till now. The plus side is that they're able to inherit successful methodologies that have survived over time without having to do all the hard work themselves. The down side is that they literally don't understand when they're in a scenario where it will lead to failure.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38709586

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

Balmer took 8% equity [in Microsoft] to cancel the profit share

Most of that came from Gates’s end

Then Balmer just never sold

https://twitter.com/patrick_oshag/status/1737233878429966666

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

We lost +50.000 USD from SEPA double refund fraud on Stripe

https://old.reddit.com/r/stripe/comments/12jyvlq/stripe_customer_support_is_the_most_terrifying/

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

I've talked about this before as has @therobotjames - your positions should always be driven by the exposures you want to have, not primarily driven by what the market gives you. Even if your conviction doesn't change, you sometimes need to adjust your exposures in response to the market to avoid taking outsized risk in a small number of names - particularly important in a volatile market (like crypto ... but also single-name equities!)

https://twitter.com/macrocephalopod/status/1741826679310303519

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

continued in 2024 at https://gist.github.com/ivan/a36e2489623469d96c1ad79077b6dcf9

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

What separates the top 3-5 firms from the tier 2 firms after them?" - a thread by my colleague

I've carried out a lot of #quant research interviews & ran a fund. I've noticed that junior candidates tend to obsess over vanity metrics like alpha, latency, AUM, Sharpe, etc. These are important, but here's 3 things that are probably more predictive of a firm's success.

When you look at tier 1 and 2 firms in any niche, they all have strong QRs and engineers, pedigree, similar tech, capital, shared knowledge of microstructure tricks. So you can't explain what sets them apart by simple vanity metrics—maybe you could have prior to 2012—but not now.

Instead, most of the differentiation is explained by 3 things:

1. Production cycle. How often do they miss the market open after a major change like a protocol update? What happens between code review and deployment for a new feature/strategy/signal?

How fast is it to port over a strategy inspired at an old job? From Python scripts and notebooks to production? What's the marginal work to add the next symbol? The next market? The next data center? The next asset class?

2. Operational efficiency. Asymptotically, a trading firm is like a glorified recruiting business. A lot of success is explained by how you incentivize employees, attract talent, ensure smooth succession, set compensation.

The top firms are very good at making you want to stay on just another year because the bonus was just good enough to retain you. Also, are they at the pareto frontier for buy-vs-build?

How concentrated is the firm on key persons for the final go-ahead on a strategy or deployment? Good resource sharing between teams? How efficient is the colo/data procurement process in supporting the sequence of new market rollout?

3. Scale. Market access, fees, connectivity, regulatory capture. People to do the less glorious grunt work like data preprocessing, CI/CD, BOD/EOD pipelines, exchange relationship management, config management, etc. Do they have a good market simulator?

There's a selection bias for these 3 things. Meaning, it's tempting to chalk this up to competence ex post of a firm's success. But there's a surprising amount of luck involved. e.g. Hiring 1-2 right persons at the right time. Chancing upon the right infrastructure decisions.

So if you're interviewing with a firm that's trying to break into tier 1, these are things I would ask about.

https://twitter.com/christinaqi/status/1736791355232596316

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ivan commented Jan 1, 2024

One thing I really love about seedy anime websites and YouTube mp3 converters is like. They actually do what they say they’re doing. But they WILL try to trick you into downloading a virus. Like it’s almost just a greeting at this point. I try to extract a song from a YouTube video and it says free VPN installer tonight perhaps? Free VPN installer tonight queen? And I say YouTube-mp3 converter you sly dog, you know what I’m here for. Show me the goods. And YouTube-mp3 converter says ahhh you got me, no getting one over on you. Thought it was worth a try tho. Here you go king x

https://boykisses.tumblr.com/post/736546102329950208/one-thing-i-really-love-about-seedy-anime-websites (via)

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