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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
  • (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

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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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024 •
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p2p internet was good. limewire was good. even if the quality was bad and there was transcoding, people understood that people got things from other people. that abundance comes from your neighbor and from being a neighbor

https://x.com/turtlekiosk/status/1822106553777861016

Yeah looking back at many P2P projects my only criticism is we were all trying to solve too many problems at once and we didn't appreciate how amazing the things we built were.

https://x.com/Lucid00/status/1822116875628671057

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024 •
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Researchers from IOActive have reported that it may be possible for an attacker with ring 0 access to modify the configuration of System Management Mode (SMM) even when SMM Lock is enabled.

https://www.amd.com/en/resources/product-security/bulletin/amd-sb-7014.html
via https://arstechnica.com/security/2024/08/almost-unfixable-sinkclose-bug-affects-hundreds-of-millions-of-amd-cpus/
via https://x.com/arstechnica/status/1822259483940139496

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

The #1 reason for cofounder breakups in the most recent YC batch was co-founders trying to renegotiate a previously agreed equity split.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1rXUOP-FcnIE8eNTkKlELkakZ-MLaIvEyIxUlBOLNZPw/edit

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

Ninety percent of Marrero’s patients came back with elevated amounts of glyphosate in their blood, in one case as high as 15,000 times the test’s lowest detectable concentration.

That line struck me - as an example of innumeracy, or at least misunderstanding of tests. Or maybe it was willful ignorance intended to sound more shocking than it is.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41248069

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

I like how all the aging brain studies don't control for "im bored of this shit after 20 years and have better things to do than compete"

https://x.com/unormal/status/1822125438677717420

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024 •
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If people with high opportunity cost decline to participate in government, laws will be made by those with low opportunity cost

https://x.com/moseskagan/status/1821983315236426040
via https://x.com/patio11/status/1822092419556659615

Singapore tries to do this right with high compensation

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

It brings me no pleasure to say this, but Svelte is dead because LLM base models are better at writing React.

I just pulled the entire Svelte 5 docs into a little script that minifies the tokens and generates a prompt for Claude. Works perfectly.

https://x.com/didiercatz/status/1822188984245559399

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

is there a friendship app for men?

It's called going outside and doing something useful

https://x.com/inkblotistan/status/1821967345113497919

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

you [can] pass an abort signal to .addEventListener

https://x.com/mattpocockuk/status/1817958766756733278

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

i have no idea why i do this. but i will spend 3 hours trying to figure out why a certain thing works. and its always the dumbest most inconsequential thing. but sometimes, only sometimes, it's incredibly useful. to know how a thing works.

this is not related to universal things, no. this is related to how a certain thing was implemented by an engineer of yore at a corporate job. it's not even that interesting most of the time. i just feel. the need to know. i must know

https://x.com/yacineMTB/status/1821180291488370913

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024 •
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Every social media website has a guiding motto, agreed by everyone who joins but never spoken out loud. For example, Reddit's is "everybody ought to think like I do". What began as a way to vote on posts grew into a hyper-conformist dystopia, and now any opinion that goes against the grain is not only dogpiled on but quite possibly banned for the terrible perils that such wrong information may pose. Forget controversial political opinions - saying "you can keep a betta in a 2.6g" in the aquariums subreddit will mark you as a public enemy.

[...]

Anyway, Twitter's motto is "I am so much better than that fellow over there". What began as a way to facilitate one-to-one exchanges grew into a clapback dystopia, and now every public figure is hounded by digital hyenas looking to one-up their posts and earn their fifteen minutes of please-check-out-my-GoFundMe. If you're not clapping back at individuals, you're clapping back at Platonic ideals of things

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/matt-yglesias-considered-as-the-nietzschean/comment/63884247?hide_intro_popup=true

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2024

i like to say goodnight to my code by scrolling though it at the end of the day

tuck it in with a commit

https://x.com/autosourcer0/status/1819995179157274815

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