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2024 reading list
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2024_reading.md

Things I might read in 2024.

  • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Richard Howard (translator) - The Little Prince
  • Sayaka Murata, Ginny Tapley Takemori (translator) - Convenience Store Woman (via)
  • Jorge Luis Borges - Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius (in Labyrinths)/ printed (via)
  • Franz Kafka - The Metamorphosis (via)
  • William Olaf Stapledon - Star Maker/ audio, go to 12m35s to skip past the introduction spoilers

Lectures/videos

Interactive fiction

unplanned notable things read

unplanned and abandoned

  • Ichiro Kishimi, Fumitake Koga - The Courage to Be Disliked/ audio
  • Matt Dinniman - Dungeon Crawler Carl/ audio
  • Charles Eisenstein - The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know Is Possible/ audio
  • Geoff Smart - Who: The A Method for Hiring
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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

The study [of chlorpropham in potatoes] also showed that peeling removed 91–98% and washing 33–47%.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chlorpropham

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

Khosla, who was also a partner at Kleiner Perkins (which ended up backing Google) at the time, said he had “a lot of interesting discussions” with Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at the time (early 1999). The story goes that after Excite CEO George Bell rejected Page and Brin’s $1 million price for Google, Khosla talked the duo down to $750,000. But Bell still rejected that.

https://techcrunch.com/2010/09/29/google-excite/

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

If you want to beat your competitors, start by doing the work none of them are willing to do.

https://twitter.com/AlexHormozi/status/1782608566454812695

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

I think what Google doesn't realise is that they're driving around with an open container of petrol slushing around on the floor. It just needs a spark (from a new competitor) and fire is real.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40137188

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

Larry & Sergey are only human. They can get bamboozled by people just like anyone. And they are in a situation where the very best bamboozlers are trying to bamboozle them, all the time. The people "failing up" are, in some cases, the Lebron James's of bamboozlement.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40134837

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

Vic had somehow convinced Larry through grima-style wormtonguing that social feed was the future for google, and Larry had fallen for it.

I don't think it was Vic who convinced Larry or Sergey of that. It was Mark Zuckerberg. Google was in a frenzy about the sudden explosion of social for a few years before Google+ came along. Facebook's growth and rampant poaching of Google employees had left upper management despondent and fearful. It appeared (though in hindsight we know this was wrong) that social graph integration was so powerful that adding social to any app would automatically make it win. A commonly cited example was that Google had bought Picasa and worked on it for years only to see it be smoked by Facebook Photos, a product with way fewer features. Then Facebook Messages started taking away all the personal email communication from Gmail, and they got into ads and so on.

So you can see why Eric, Larry and Sergey were afraid. They were worried that Facebook might ultimately do a search engine that somehow integrated social recommendations, and that'd be the end of Google. That fear was shared by other top execs like Hoelzle and Alan Eustace iirc. No wormtonguing was required. They convinced themselves of that thesis all by themselves.

In that environment lots of teams were trying to sprinkle social magic onto their product, often in hamfisted ways. The GMail team launched an ill-fated social network called Buzz that immediately upset lots of users who clicked through the consent popup without reading it and discovered that their address books were suddenly public. Maps was adding their own social features. Orkut was an actual social network popular in Brazil. But, none of these products integrated with each other in any way. They mostly even had their own separate user profiles! Like, there wasn't even one place to set a profile picture for your Google account. It was pretty disastrous.

Given that, some attempt at a unifying social layer was inevitable. Gundotra gets unfairly demonized in my view. Google+ was probably the best that Google could have done to compete with Facebook. It wasn't enough because it was a me-too product driven by corporate fear, and such products are rarely compelling. But it also wasn't terrible. Some users really liked it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40134837

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

Worth noting though the latter has long been the going assumption internally at Google: Search was the cash cow that funded Google's expeditions in finding the Next Big Thing. This plan has been complicated by the appearance that Google seems to not be terribly good at the kind of product execution that would lead them to the Next Big Thing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40134762

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

Figure skating. It should be illegal to have so much fun. The feeling of gliding out there on the ice with nearly zero friction is amazing. It's a great community too. Not cheap, but a lot cheaper than many hobbies. Less than $1k will get you a nice pair of skates, plenty of group lessons, and access to the rink for a few months. It's fun for the family or single adults. There are always tons of people just starting. Private lessons can get expensive, but for the average interested adult, you can probably do a single private lesson like once a month and then work on what you learned at the rink.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40127166

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024 •
edited

I did not realize that learning Fusion 360 was going to be such a huge chapter in my current journey. Looking back, I'm kind of stumped at how I avoided it as long as I did.

I would now put learning CAD in the same category of mandatory life skill as learning to code. The ability to translate what you see in your mind to something that can be repeatably fabricated is an incredible power move, akin to learning how to communicate complex ideas with empathetic language.

My advice is to start by following this tutorial step-by-step. It's a 90 minute video that took me ten days to get through. Step two is to take an existing project and change it in a significant way. Step three is to create something from scratch which solves a problem that you have.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mK60ROb2RKI

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40125892

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

PDF files, and why the heck they are so slow to read. Hours upon hours of perf(1) and fiddling with ugly things in C. My main takeaway is everyone in the world is doing things HORRIBLY wrong and there's no way to stop them.

(Digression: did you know libpng, the one everyone uses, is not supposed to be an optimized production library—rather it's a reference implementation? It's almost completely unoptimized, no really, take a look, anywhere in the codebase. Critical hot loops are 15 year old C that doesn't autovectorize. I easily got a 200% speedup with a 30-line patch, on something I cared about (their decoding of 1-bit bilevel to RGBA). I'm using that modified libpng right now. I know of nowhere to submit this patch. Why the heck is everyone using libpng?)

The worst offender (so far) is the JBIG2 format (several major libraries, including jbig2dec), a very popular format that gets EXTREMELY high compression ratios on bilevel images of types typical to scanned pdfs. But: it's also a format that's pretty slow to decompress—not something you want in a UI loop, like a PDF reader is! And, there's no way around that—if you look at the hot loop, which is arithmetic coding, it's a mess of highly branchy code that's purely serial and cannot be thread- nor SIMD- parallelized. (Standardized in 2000, so it wasn't an obvious downside then). I want to try to deep-dive into this one (as best as my limited skill allows), but I think it's unlikely there's any low-hanging optimization fruit, like there's so much of in libpng. It's all wrong that everyone's using this slow, non-optimizable compression format in PDF's today, but, no one really cares. Everyone's doing things wrong and there is no way to stop them.

Another observation: lots of people create PDF's at print-quality pixel density that's useless for screens, and greatly increases rendering latency. Does JBIG2 support interlacing or progressive decoding, to sidestep this challenge? Of course it doesn't.

Everyone's doing PDF things wrong and there is no way under the blue sky to make them stop.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40127016

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

I fell into the rabbit hole of delinking programs back into object files.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40127109

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

Installing and exploring V7 UNIX (1979) on a PDP11 emulator.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40121103

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

As someone who uses Clear, it has a significant benefit in that, for a comparatively low cost, it makes time through the airport more consistent.

If I have priority check-in through airline status, or am not checking baggage, then security waiting time is the main variable in the time to get from the terminal entrance to the gate (we'll ignore disaster airports like LAX where time from the freeway to the terminal is a major variable). If Clear lets me essentially not wait in line for security, that reduces an expectation of a, say, 0-45 minute time through security to a 0-5 minute time through security. Even if it might often not save me any time getting through security, the reduction in uncertainty means I can safely plan to arrive at the airport much later, while having the same low chance of missing the flight.

Some airline status provides priority security, but it is less common, usually at higher levels, and less consistent outside major hubs for each airline. Flying business or first would work, but would be vastly more than the cost of Clear for frequent travellers, while providing few other benefits for short flights.

In Europe, some airports just directly offer a paid priority security option, which sometimes is actually quite inexpensive. But it seems this may not be allowed by the TSA, and the alternative is the fiction of Clear supposedly offering some identity verification benefit.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40115811

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

I've got the same number of years as this guy, and my biggest career regret is I focused too deeply on the technicals and never learned how to bullshit and self-promote.

The people who graduated with me, but put all their "skill points" into Charisma instead of Technical Mastery, are all Directors, VPs, very high level people right now, running their show. Some switched careers into investment banking or consulting and are now set for life. I'm still sitting here after 25 years and an advanced degree, chugging along as a mid-level individual contributor, no budget, not even a single direct report, let alone a tree of engineers under me. It doesn't seem fair, but it is the way it is. I gambled that "knowing what I'm doing" was enough and lost.

If I had to give advice to a 20 year old getting ready to graduate from university and go into engineering, it would be: Learn how to dress well, how to smile, how to engage with small talk, how to exaggerate in ways that you can plausibly defend later, how to figure out what someone wants to hear and tell it back to them in a way that makes you look good, how to take something you did and explain it in a way that makes you look like a much bigger contributor than you were. These are the actual skills you need in the modern workforce.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40098113

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

For context, I started an open source project that is arguably 10x more popular than Nutjs (20k stars on github vs 2k). I also gave up on maintaining it, but others stepped in to take care of it so it's still running.

The parallels between open source and bolshevism are interesting. I'm not a history expert, but this is just how it appears to me.

  • Contempt for property
  • Pitches itself as a movement by "the people", ends up being a tool of the powerful (e.g. Microsoft's use of open source)
  • Punishes the producers by destroying the economics of production, rewards the stooges
  • Creates a high-low alliance between powerful and unskilled, drains the middle class

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40140256

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

I think it was Manuel Simoni who said: the most important thing about a programming language is how it makes you feel.

https://blog.lambdaclass.com/austral/

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ivan commented Apr 24, 2024

I have worked for several US businesses with global footprints and working with China (and some other countries) required whole or part ownership of the business by entities within that nation. So we partnered with businesses in China to set up and operate our infra, and had to manage everything through contracts.

Further, Chinese government officials would show up unannounced and plug shit into our networks, and required access to our encryption keys and accounts databases and employee & customer lists etc. We had to build independent systems just for China to prevent sharing information about non-China based customers and employees. Where we couldn’t do that, we had to build filtered replication “diodes” to prevent data leakage.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40146665

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ivan commented Apr 25, 2024 •
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every time there's a "look at this gamedev code" post, it's usually from a cs graduate, often fresh.

for them, code is a means to demonstrate knowledge

they've never been tested on "making things maintainable" or "exploratory programming", but they have had to spend exam after exam writing code to show that they know fancy tricks. the idea that code can be boring is almost anathema.

this habit continues well into their career: you don't have to look further than a technical interview or code review to see more senior programmers setting up elaborate games to show how clever they are.

that's why when they bump up against gamedev code, be it 5000 if statements, or three state machines lovely crafted into a powerset to handle events, it just feels wrong. the code works, does what it needs to, but no-one gets to feel smart about it. what gives?

"i get it, you've only seen code in a textbook"

https://cohost.org/tef/post/5705278-we-are-trapped-in-a

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ivan commented Apr 25, 2024

Dealing with Google these days seems a lot like dealing with an authoritarian government. To operate safely on Google's platforms, you need a friend who works at Google who can vouch for you as their over-eager police keep trying to put you in jail.

I'm not sure how this would work legally with employment contracts, but it would be worth it to get your employees hired at Google so they can professionally execute that role for you. We have joked before about not poaching friends from Google since they are more valuable working there than at your company.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23285466

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ivan commented Apr 26, 2024

hey can you come over i don’t have enough enrichment in my enclosure

https://twitter.com/sadderlizards/status/1783625416856744235

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ivan commented Apr 26, 2024

'Bout to take my lady Selfridges, new drip on the way, uh-huh Rap nigga still sellin' bricks, half a cake on the way, uh-huh Take a flight, she wanna take a Lyft, for the molly man, he's on the way, uh-huh I might take her The Shard, I might take her The Ritz, it don't matter, baby, I'm straight, uh- huh I feel like I'm in Prince's housе, purple paint all on the walls, uh-huh Sittin' down on this fancy couch and I can't see straight, I'm a state, uh-huh 22, I'm in Paris, baby, got a strippеrs tits in my face, uh-huh Pull up in a Bentley, I want Christian, I want Fendi, I want Prada (Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh) I already make that paper, I don't need to chase no clout, wow I don't usually pipe up but I don't like how you runnin' your mouth, wow I already make that paper, I don't need to chase no clout, wow I don't usually pipe up but I don't like how you runnin' your mouth, wow You're a side piece from east, then I'm a bad bitch from south, wow Baby, baby, I got more money coming in than going out 'Bout to take my lady Selfridges, new drip on the way, uh-huh Rap nigga still sellin' bricks, half a cake on the way, uh-huh Take a flight, she wanna take a Lyft, for the molly man, he's on the way, uh-huh I might take her The Shard, I might take her The Ritz, it don't matter, baby, I'm straight, uh- huh I feel like I'm in Prince's housе, purple paint all on the walls, uh-huh Sittin' down on this fancy couch and I can't see straight, I'm a state, uh-huh 22, I'm in Paris, baby, got a strippеrs tits in my face, uh-huh Pull up in a Bentley, I want Christian, I want Fendi, I want Prada (Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFMYL0XQ3lA

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ivan commented Apr 27, 2024

As much as Apple would like us to think otherwise, this is where we are: iPhones are just phones. To most people — even to someone who spends all day selling them — they’re just a tool, and getting a new one feels like an inevitability, not an event. Something about as exciting as upgrading your washing machine.

https://www.theverge.com/24141929/apple-iphone-imessage-antitrust-dma-lock-in

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ivan commented Apr 29, 2024

Well Being Notice: Receiving this email outside of normal working hours? Managing work and life responsibilities is unique for everyone. I have sent this email at a time that works for me. Please respond at a time that works for you.

https://twitter.com/IGoBySteve/status/1782595243550155019

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ivan commented Apr 30, 2024

I KNEW FROM THE NEW YORKER THAT ANDREESSEN had grown up in an impoverished agricultural small town in Wisconsin, and despised it. But I certainly was not prepared for his vituperation on the subject. He made it clear that people who chose not to leave such places deserved whatever impoverishment, cultural and political neglect, and alienation they suffered.

It’s a libertarian commonplace, a version of their pinched vision of why the market and only the market is the truly legitimate response to oppressive conditions on the job: If you don’t like it, you can leave. If you don’t, what you suffer is your own fault.

I brought up the ordinary comforts of kinship, friendship, craft, memory, legend, lore, skills passed down across generations, and other benefits that small towns provide: things that make human beings human beings. I pointed out that there must be something in the kind of places he grew up in worth preserving. I dared venture that it is always worth mourning when a venerable human community passes from the Earth; that maybe people are more than just figures finding their proper price on the balance sheet of life …

And that’s when the man in the castle with the seven fireplaces said it.

“I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.”

https://prospect.org/power/2024-04-24-my-dinner-with-andreessen/

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ivan commented May 1, 2024

Leprechaun economics was a term coined by economist Paul Krugman to describe the 26.3 per cent rise in Irish 2015 GDP, later revised to 34.4 per cent,[a] in a 12 July 2016 publication by the Irish Central Statistics Office (CSO), restating 2015 Irish national accounts.[5][6][7][8] At that point, the distortion of Irish economic data by tax-driven accounting flows reached a climax.[1][2][9] In 2020, Krugman said the term was a feature of all tax havens.[10]

While the event that caused the artificial Irish GDP growth occurred in Q1 2015, the Irish CSO had to delay its GDP revision and redact the release of its regular economic data in 2016–2017 to protect the source's identity, as required by Irish law.[11] Only in Q1 2018 could economists confirm Apple as the source, [12][13][14] and that this was the largest ever base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) action,[15] and the largest hybrid–tax inversion of a U.S. corporation.[3][16]

The event marked the replacement of Ireland's prohibited BEPS tool, the Double Irish, with the more powerful Capital Allowances for Intangible Assets (CAIA) tool.[13][14] Apple used the CAIA tool to restructure out of its hybrid–Double Irish tool, on which the EU Commission would levy a €13 billion fine in August 2016.[b][13][14] As a result of the action by Apple, a range of academics calculated that Ireland, already held by some to be a major tax haven, was the world's largest tax haven.[18][19][20][21]

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

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ivan commented May 1, 2024

low-ambient mini-split [air conditioner]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ggxasHA0z0I

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ivan commented May 1, 2024 •
edited

With layer upon layer of complex devices, the LHC detectors generate a staggering petabyte of collision data per second_._ As Eric Bonfillou, the deputy group leader of CERN’s IT Fabric group, aptly put it, “it’s an amount of data no one can really deal with.” 

The computing farms within the LHC sift and filter the data in real time. Only the most essential data get shipped to the primary data center, now home to more than an exabyte.

https://blog.westerndigital.com/inside-cerns-exabyte-data-center/

LinkedIn now stores 1 exabyte of total data across all Hadoop clusters.

https://www.linkedin.com/blog/engineering/open-source/the-exabyte-club-linkedin-s-journey-of-scaling-the-hadoop-distr
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40219172

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ivan commented May 1, 2024

Random PSA: box breathing has been exceptionally effective for me -- I wish I'd discovered it sooner. After around a minute of it, I reliably can start sleeping wherever I am. Useful with jet lag adjustment, random naps in the back of a car, etc.

(Box breathing: inhale, hold, exhale, hold, with each step lasting five seconds.)

https://twitter.com/patrickc/status/1784667525034438770

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ivan commented May 2, 2024

There's definitely some mechanisms in place to help you out here.

For internal LAN traffic, between systems on your network, there's Unique Local Addresses. Think of them like RFC1918 addresses; they'll only work within your network. You'll be able to use these addresses for any communication within your network borders; just carve off some nets from fd00::/8 and have your routers start advertising them.

In a normal deployment, this will mean that your nodes all possess (at least) 3 IPv6 addresses; a link-local fe80::/64 address (which can only talk to other nodes on its broadcast domain), a unique local fd00::/8 address (which can talk to everything in your LAN), and a public address.

Now, this still means you're renumbering everything when you change ISPs (which you're doing now anyway for publicly addressable nodes assuming you don't own IPv4 space), just that you don't need to worry about all of the internal communication, which can stay on the Unique Local range.

That might cover your concerns - but there's also the NPTv6 proposal, for which there is currently an experimental RFC. This would allow you to translate the public prefixes to the private ranges at the network edge, meaning no renumbering internally when you change ISPs, and the ability to utilize multiple ISPs with disparate assigned addresses seamlessly (either permanently or during a transition period for a provider change).

https://serverfault.com/questions/349950/ipv6-without-nat-but-what-about-an-isp-change

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ivan commented May 2, 2024

Use the "prefix ::/64 { }" shortcut in radvd.conf (yes, an "all zeroes" /64), which means take whatever is assigned on this interface, and advertise that.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ipv6/comments/a345ny/got_around_to_setting_up_ipv6_at_home_dynamic/

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