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2024_reading.md

Things I might read in 2024.

  • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Richard Howard (translator) - The Little Prince
  • (Translation by) Sam Hamill - Yellow River: Three Hundred Poems From the Chinese
  • 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
  • The Heart of Innovation: A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand/ audio (via)
  • Peter D. Kaufman - Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger, Expanded Third Edition
  • Lia A. DiBello - Expertise in Business: Evolving with a Changing World (in The Oxford Handbook of Expertise) (via)
  • Joël Glenn Brenner - The Emperors of Chocolate: Inside the Secret World of Hershey and Mars
  • Elad Gil - High Growth Handbook/ audio
  • W. Edwards Demming - The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education/ audio
  • W. Edwards Demming - The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education/ the PDF or ebook
  • Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland/ including the posts I SingleFile'd
  • the relevant-looking posts on benkuhn.net/posts
  • Commoncog Case Library Beta
  • Keith J. Cunningham - The Road Less Stupid: Advice from the Chairman of the Board/ audio
  • Keith J. Cunningham - The 4-Day MBA/ video
  • Cedric Chin's summary of 7 Powers
  • Akio Morita, Edwin M. Reingold, Mitsuko Shimomura - Made in Japan: Akio Morita and Sony
  • Nomad Investment Partnership Letters or redacted (via)
  • How to Lose Money in Derivatives: Examples From Hedge Funds and Bank Trading Departments
  • Brian Hayes - Infrastructure: A Guide to the Industrial Landscape
  • Accelerated Expertise (via)/ printed, "read Chapters 9-13 and skim everything else"
  • David J. Gerber - The Inventor's Dilemma (via Oxide and Friends)
  • Alex Komoroske - The Compendium / after I convert the Firebase export in code/websites/compendium-cards-data/db.json to a single HTML page
  • Rich Cohen - The Fish That Ate The Whale (via)
  • Bob Caspe - Entrepreneurial Action/ printed, skim for anything I don't know

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/ audio
  • Genki Kawamura - If Cats Disappeared from the World/ audio
  • Paul Stamets - Fantastic Fungi: How Mushrooms Can Heal, Shift Consciousness, and Save the Planet/ audio
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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024 •
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Erik Hoel, an American neuroscientist, posits that the industries AI are disrupting are not all that lucrative. He coined the phrase “supply paradox of AI” — the notion that the easier it is to train AI to do something, the less economically valuable that thing is.

“This is because AI performance scales based on its supply of data, that is, the quality and size of the training set itself,” said Hoel. “So when you are biased towards data sets that have an overwhelming supply, that, in turn, biases the AI to produce things that have little economic value.”

Hoel raises an interesting point. Generative AI’s current applications include writing, image and video creation, automated marketing, and processing information, according to the US Census Bureau’s Business Trends and Outlook Survey. Those are not particularly high value. Using specialist data, sophisticated models could do deeper scientific work, but that data can be in short supply or even restricted.

[...]

What I wanted to point out here though is actually something deeper. Which is that the longer AI takes to show up in any positive economic indicators, the more it becomes the case that AI has brought increasing existential risk in exchange for minimal upside.

https://www.theintrinsicperspective.com/p/all-the-existential-risk-none-of

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

Can other people free-ride on your skill? Can they look at your track record and say “everything this person picks goes down, so I should short it”? I mean! Tuttle Capital Management once launched some very rude exchange-traded funds to fade Jim Cramer’s and Cathie Wood’s stock picks, but I don’t think those had any real alpha; it is not actually the case that Cramer or Wood has this sort of anti-skill. In general, if your stock picks are known broadly, they’re probably not bad enough to make betting against you a reliable strategy.

On the other hand, your broker probably knows (1) what you’re buying and (2) how you’re doing. If you’re terrible, your broker might be tempted. Here is a funny CME Group disciplinary action against a futures broker called Wing Fung Futures Limited:

Pursuant to an offer of settlement in which Wing Fung Futures Limited (“Wing Fung”) neither admitted nor denied the rule violations or factual findings upon which the penalty is based, on July 16, 2024, a Panel of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange Business Conduct Committee (“Panel”) found that between July 22, 2020, and July 7, 2022, Wing Fung deployed an automated trading system (“ATS”) in the Australian Dollar, British Pound, Canadian Dollar, Euro FX, Japanese Yen, New Zealand Dollar, E-mini NASDAQ, Micro E-mini NASDAQ, and E-mini S&P 500 futures markets wherein the ATS’s strategy was to submit orders based upon trades executed by its clients who were regularly unprofitable. Specifically, upon a target client establishing a short/long position, the ATS generated a trading signal to enter an order in the same market for the same price and quantity as the client, though to establish the opposite short/long position. The Panel found that by employing this strategy, Wing Fung attempted to profit from its knowledge of its clients’ record of losses, which was not available to others in the marketplace. Additionally, the Panel found that Wing Fung employees used Wing Fung’s clients’ unique operator IDs to enter orders into Globex. The Panel further found that Wing Fung’s leadership fundamentally did not understand, or were otherwise completely unaware, of Exchange rules that prohibited the activity described above. Therefore, the Panel found that Wing Fung failed to diligently supervise its employees and agents.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-07-22/bad-trades-are-also-valuable

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

Jump had a conundrum. The firm needed to test the mettle of its would-be staffers—whether they could parse the nuances in financial markets and translate them into algorithmic trading models. But it couldn’t give the temporary hires the keys to the kingdom, with its proprietary strategies and billions of dollars in capital.

Crypto offered a solution. The sector had its own tradable assets, exchanges, and quirks, but it was separated enough from Jump’s world of stocks and bonds that it wouldn’t pose a threat. “It was a bit of a toy market,” says one former employee, who spoke with Fortune on the condition of anonymity to discuss their previous firm. ...

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-08-05/the-good-trades-have-gone-bad

training/evaluation area

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

Data analytics firm Grocery Doppio’s “State of Digital Grocery Performance Scorecard: H1 2024” found reduced grocery spending among 97% of consumers who had taken GLP-1 medications — glucagon-like peptide-1 receptor agonists, including semaglutide drugs Ozempic, Rybelsus and Wegovy, prescribed for diabetes or obesity.

Their grocery bills were down by an average of 11%, yet they spent 27% more on lean proteins from lean meat, eggs and seafood. Other gainers were meal replacements (19%), healthy snacks (17%), whole fruits and vegetables (13%) and sports and energy drinks (7%).

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-07-22/bad-trades-are-also-valuable

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

Dude bought at the peak and is selling now 🤣 🤣 🤣

Elon Musk backs down from $45 million a month pledge to Trump: I don't subscribe to cult of personality

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024 •
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As Joseph Heath points out in Cooperation and Social Justice, the ability to appreciate “explanatory inversions” is one of the things that most sharply distinguishes a scientifically informed worldview from a “commonsense” one:

“One of the clearest points of demarcation between specialist discourses and everyday commentary and debate is that the former are often structured by what might be thought of as “explanatory inversions.” These arise as a consequence of discoveries or theoretical insights that have the effect of changing, not our specific explanations of events, but rather our fundamental sense of what needs to be explained.”

To illustrate, Heath gives the example of social deviance in criminology:

“Common sense tells us that most people, most of the time obey the law. Crime is an anomaly, and as such, stands in need of explanation. Common sense provides us with a wealth of explanations, which seek to identify the motives that impel people toward criminal acts. But if one stops to examine these motives… the most striking thing about them is how ordinary and ubiquitous they are. For every angry person who commits an assault, or greedy person who steals from others, there are hundreds of equally angry, equally greedy people who refrain from doing so.”

In other words, the “root causes” of crime are simply the benefits of crime. Nothing is deeply puzzling about why people cheat, steal, fight, rape, and murder. People rob banks because that is where the money is.

“This is what prompted the realization… that it is not crime that cries out for explanation, but rather law-abidingness.”

Why do most people fail to appreciate this?

“Common sense is wrong on this point because we are all reasonably well-socialized adults, living in a well-ordered society, and so we take for granted the institutional arrangements that secure our compliance with the rules. But the underlying mechanisms are ones that we do not really understand, as a result of which it is difficult to explain why more people do not break the law more often (since it is so often in their interest to do so).”

As Heath observes, the crime example manifests a more fundamental, explanatory inversion concerning human cooperation.

[...]

“The truth about distant or complex matters,” writes Walter Lippmann, “is not self-evident.” Given this, “The pictures inside people’s heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside.”

These points are obvious in some ways. But I think they are greatly underappreciated in how many people instinctively think about topics like “misinformation,” “ideology,” and “science denial.”

In complex, modern societies, the relationship between reality and our representations of reality—between what Lippmann called the “real environment” and the “pseudo-environments” that make up our mental models of the real environment—is heavily mediated by complex chains of trust, testimony, and interpretation.

Think of the economy, society-wide crime trends, vaccines, history, climate change, or any other possible focus of “public opinion.” Not only is the truth about such topics typically complex, ambiguous, and counter-intuitive, but almost everything you believe about them is based on information you acquired from others—from the claims, gossip, reports, books, remarks, opinion pieces, teaching, images, video clips, and so on that other people communicated to you.

Moreover, to organise all that socially acquired information, you relied on simplifying categories, schema, and explanatory models that reduce reality's complexity to a tractable, low-resolution mental model.

In this heavily mediated process, there are countless sources of error and distortion. This is true even if you are ideally rational. But of course, you are not; you are human. Not only is the construction of your pseudo-environment twisted and distorted by prescientific intuitions and innumerable cognitive biases, but you are not a disinterested truth seeker. Instead, your beliefs are biased by motives and interests like self-aggrandisement, status-seeking, tribalism, and social conformity.

Just as importantly, the people from whom you have acquired your information about the world are similarly flawed, fallible, and biased. In some cases, they were outright liars and propagandists, but most were simply influenced by the same mundane sources of motivated reasoning as you.

For these reasons, the truth is not the default when people form beliefs about the world beyond their immediate material and social environment.

Of course, in some sense, this should be obvious. Just as poverty is humanity’s default state throughout history, so are ignorance and misperceptions. At least relative to a modern scientific worldview, almost everything people have ever believed about the world they are not in close perceptual contact with has been completely wrong.

Nothing is puzzling about this_._ The puzzle is that humans sometimes overcome the countless sources of error and illusion that distort beliefs and form accurate perceptions of how things are.

https://www.conspicuouscognition.com/p/why-do-people-believe-true-things

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

Civ 5 is a turn based game you absolute noob. Everytime i read what you write you just prove to be the noobiest noob ive ever layed my autist eyes on.

https://angelicism.substack.com/p/technologists/comment/62461710

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

But Musk has more recently embraced conservative politics, especially the issue of free speech.

https://www.businessinsider.in/politics/world/news/trump-says-he-has-no-choice-but-to-support-electric-vehicles-because-elon-musk-endorsed-me-very-strongly/articleshow/112270769.cms

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024 •
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So basically a GA Airbus. I think this is a pretty cool project, and while it may not achieve the lofty goals you’ve set forth, any improvement in safety is worthwhile.

As other commenters have point out though, where this stuff falls short is ultimately still the human. Ok, great… your aircraft won’t stall in Normal Law. However you’ve now lost a generator and a whole FCC and you’re in direct law. The 400 hr pilot hasn’t actually flown a plane with direct input since their primary training 5 years ago. They also don’t remember what the different flight envelopes do and do not provide. Essentially the system is more complex but normally it works so the complexity is hidden. They’re not equipped to handle flying the airplane anymore.

This is where GA really ultimately falls short IMHO, proficiency. Airlines are the safest they’ve ever been because the pilots make an entire career out of being prepared for every contingency. People using airplanes as a personal travel tool can be trained and proficient to the same degree but often they are not because flying an aircraft is ancillary to their primary mission.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41163382

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

[Quick reminder: you’re getting this dispatch because you asked to be kept up to date with Sparketype-related news, breakthroughs, research, and valuable resources for work and life.]

email from Sparketype

brackets for sidenotes in email

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024 •
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Among states with access to online betting, the likelihood of filing for bankruptcy increases by 25-30% after three to four years.

https://www.slowboring.com/p/online-sports-betting-hurts-consumers
via https://x.com/mattyglesias/status/1822302611065765906

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

he devised an optical character recognition processing cluster by chaining together a dozen dilapidated second-generation iPhone SEs and harnessing Apple's Live Text optical character-recognition feature to find possible inventory tags, barcodes, or other corporate labels in listing photos. The system monitored for new listings, and if it turned up a possible hit, Bryant would get an alert so he could assess the device photos himself.

In the case of the Time Capsule, the listing photos showed a label on the bottom of the device that said “Property of Apple Computer, Expensed Equipment.”

https://www.wired.com/story/apple-prototypes-corporate-data/

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ivan commented Aug 11, 2024

You can’t actually construct a useful framework built around something you define in the negative, which this is.

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/bQ6zpf6buWgP939ov/frame-control#comment-9WeR3QpHmxC3YoSQw

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ivan commented Aug 12, 2024

Katamari Dama-C++

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41211119

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

Google should not be allowed to control both the web browser and the web ads. This should be part of the monopoly break-up.

https://old.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1esbyod/google_pulls_the_plug_on_ublock_origin_leaving/?depth=99

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

Paul Alfille had the brilliant idea of changing Baker's Game in one respect, allowing cards to be packed on the tableau downward in alternate colors, as in familiar games like Klondike and Demon (Canfield), thus producing the game we know as FreeCell. This has the happy effect of making nearly every deal winnable, though many are still quite difficult. Alfille wrote the first version of FreeCell for the PLATO educational computer system in 1978. The popularization of the game is also due to Jim Horne, who wrote a character-based version for DOS and later a full graphical version for Windows. The latter first appeared in 1992 on Microsoft Entertainment Pack 2 (and later in the Best of Microsoft Entertainment Packs). Later versions were bundled with Windows For Workgroups and Win32s (the 32-bit extension to Windows 3), and eventually with Windows 95 (and 98).

http://www.solitairelaboratory.com/fcfaq.html

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

Women's sports exist to give women a space where they can plausibly win, since there are only a few sports where biological females can hope to medal in competition with men: sports like horseback riding, where the muscle is externally provided, and sports designed to privilege women's greater flexibility, such as women's gymnastics, synchronized swimming, and figure skating. Women can get close to gold in a couple of ultra-endurance sports, and may possibly medal in ultra-endurance swimming, but otherwise, without a separate women's category, the Olympics would be all male.

https://x.com/asymmetricinfo/status/1823475047513907658

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

ULPT: Woman being fobbed off from receiving medical care? Lie and say you've been trying to conceive for over a year (self.UnethicalLifeProTips)

I didn't lie, it's true. The medical attention I've received has exponentially gone through the roof. They finally did a full panel blood and urine test, uncovering an autoimmune disease which they refused to test for for years. Woman trying to live a healthy life? No help. Potential vessel for motherhood? All the help.

https://old.reddit.com/r/UnethicalLifeProTips/comments/1eqmosg/ulpt_woman_being_fobbed_off_from_receiving/

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

Since then, my stance on Cloudflare is "take whatever I can get from them for free, and never spend a single dime in any of their services".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41230500

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

if you have POST
/user/setName
/user/setEmail

you will need to add /user/setNameAndEmail if you want to have a performant api if people need to do both

this idea applies to apis everywhere like in stdlib - you can’t make any api performant, its design needs to factor that in

btw good test is if you can read this post and understand the point or if you can only focus on the rest api design in the example

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1822287652990722122

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

same. honestly. I was in a milieu of people who had intense theories about the world and I mistook this for thinking deeply. eventually I realized they were just a different flavor of fundamentalist religious people

https://x.com/_deepfates/status/1823095284156801368

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2024

This is common in cases of plagiarism, fabulists, & serial fabricators: "there's never just one cockroach in the kitchen".

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41167131

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024

In addition to violating a sense of justice, victims of narcissists feel that narcissists are attacking them personally. If it wasn't personal, it really wouldn't matter as much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SRd5LnIEXJM

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024

There is no second gear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNpeVRB19xU

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024

are you megadosing aspirin and taking enclomiphene, bpc-157, cialis, and cordyceps yet

https://x.com/mccraydotlink/status/1782541713992536348
via https://x.com/search?q=taking%20cordyceps&src=spelling_expansion_revert_click&f=live

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024

Lately I keep saying “Yeah, I just don’t think that’s true” and it’s so funny watching people react to someone just outright disagreeing with them. You’d think that’s never happened before

https://x.com/DarbraDawn/status/1815385224303231463

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024

Most of my intellectual success comes from refusing to forget what I already know. Sometimes the things that "everyone knows" are logically inconsistent with each other. If you notice these, it turns up lots of little mysteries.

https://x.com/benlandautaylor/status/1815818656204611850

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024 •
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The Spanish Prisoner is a confidence trick originating by at least the early 19th century, as Eugène François Vidocq described in his memoirs.[1][2]

The scam

In its original form, the confidence trickster tells his victim (the mark) that he is (or is in correspondence with) a wealthy person of high estate who has been imprisoned in Spain under a false identity. Some versions had the imprisoned person being an unknown or remote relative of the mark.[3] Supposedly the prisoner cannot reveal his identity without serious repercussions, and is relying on a friend (the trickster) to raise money to secure his release.[3] In this classic pigeon drop game archetype, the trickster offers to let the mark put up some of the funds, with a promise of a greater monetary reward upon release of the prisoner, and sometimes the additional reward of marrying a beautiful woman stated to be the prisoner's daughter.[4] After the mark has turned over the funds, he is informed further difficulties have arisen, and more money is needed. With such explanations, the trickster continues to press for more money until the victim is cleaned out, declines to put up more funds, or dies.

Characteristics

Key features of the Spanish Prisoner trick are the emphasis on secrecy and the trust the trickster apparently places in the mark not to reveal the prisoner's identity or situation. The trickster will typically claim to have chosen the mark carefully, based on his reputation for honesty and straight dealing, and may appear to structure the deal so that the trickster's ultimate share of the reward will be distributed voluntarily by the mark.[citation needed]

Modern variants

Modern variants of the Spanish Prisoner fraud include the advance-fee scam, in particular the Nigerian money transfer (or 419) scam.[3][5]

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

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024

i generally avoid getting into discussions about code because you’re all stupid and i don’t wanna hear your dumbass thoughts

i tried it a bit today and realized that not only are you all stupid, you also have no hope at becoming less stupid

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1816275222204670188

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ivan commented Aug 16, 2024 •
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so many engineers struggle with suspending disbelief so they can make it to a more interesting thought

We had a product manager who couldn't imagine anything that didn't exist

It was wild

Real wild

https://x.com/GremlinIndustry/status/1824502773993316821

often times when trying to think hard about something it's helpful to think of exaggerated scenarios and follow what flows from that

it's not that you think the exaggerated scenario is likely just that it's a useful way to think about things

people often get hung up on this

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1824471608129417407

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