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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 18, 2024 •
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Cordyceps' method of dispersal is through parasitizing insects.[7] Researchers believe that the insect picks up the fungus while foraging for food.[8] The fungus makes its way deeper into its hosts body, eventually taking over and controlling the insect's behavior.[8] The fungus then makes its host climb to a high point, most likely the leaf of a nearby plant, and latch on, locking it in place.[8] The fungus continues to eat at its host, killing it in the process.[8] After a few days, the fungus's fruiting body begins to emerge from its host's body, where it then sends its spores out to infect more insects.[8]

[...]

Studies have found that excessive use of C. militaris can exert pressure on the filtering and excretory functions of the liver and kidneys, potentially leading to damage in these organs.[15]

[...]

Like other members of the Cordyceps genus, C. militaris produces the pharmacologically active compound cordycepin. Cordycepin is a nucleoside analogue of adenosine-differing by only a single hydroxyl group. It has been shown to induce apoptosis, reduce inflammation, and inhibit RNA transcription in cell cultures. For these reasons, it is under study for its anti-metastatic properties.[22]

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

Because cordycepin is similar to adenosine, some enzymes cannot discriminate between the two. It can therefore participate in certain biochemical reactions (for example, 3-dA can trigger the premature termination of mRNA synthesis).[5][6] By acting as an adenosine analog, cordycepin was found to be the most potent molecular circadian clock resetter out of several screened compounds.[7]

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

There are two distinct advantages to the Cordyceps Militaris vs Cordyceps Sinensis:

  1. No insects are harmed in the making of this mushroom - Cordyceps militaris is grown in a sterile medium, NOT in an arthropod.

  2. It’s a super-charged version of Cordyceps - Cordyceps militaris produces the health-supporting compound cordycepin (3′-deoxyadenosine) in much higher amounts when compared to Cordyceps sinensis (2).

A study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry in 2008, confirmed that not only does Cordyceps militaris contain more cordycepin when compared with the wild Cordyceps sinensis, it has up to 90 times more (2)!

https://www.realmushrooms.com/cordyceps-sinensis-vs-militaris/

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024

I once worked in R&D where our competitive advantage was in keeping our customer relationships and intellectual property private, so we kept everything on-prem. No cloud, no SaaS, no WFH.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41037532

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024

companies can reach a scale where it's very costly to definitively assess who is to blame for crimes and can therefor commit any profitable crime up to a certain threshold. It both makes a mockery of the rule of law as a concept (along with many other things in the US legal system) and is an enormous competitive advantage for large companies

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41121865

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024

Please hire me based on how awesome I think I am, not how awesome you think I am.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40990992

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024

He has a twitter thread where he describes Hobbit Software: "Now thinking about creating a movement to promote "hobbit software". Pretty chill, keeps to itself, tends to its databases, hangs out with other hobbit software at the pub, broadly unbothered by the scheming of the wizards and the orcs, oblivious to the rise and fall of software empires around them. Oh, the Electron empire is going to war with the Reacts? Sounds ghastly, sorry to hear that. Me and the lads are off to the pub"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41106036

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024 •
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- offer email support, but don't offer phone, video calls or remote support. This works for most people and forces them to properly phrase questions instead of just "jumping on a call" (so you can then effectively train them over the phone, which doesn't scale).

- offer as much self-service as possible

- work at your own pace and it's ok to just not work some days.

- finding a niche is hard, but they can be surprisingly basic. You're just saving someone time, effort, worry etc.

- lean on global cloud services for reliability. Let them do that.

[...]

One trick I may or may not have invented for the enterprise PO problem (manual processes etc) was to offer an Azure Marketplace subscription for the product.

That way they can just go to azure and subscribe to the license that way, without needing any azure resources etc, it's just a billing mechanism.

They can then bundle that into their usual Azure spend and even do manual POs etc that I never have to deal with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41107355

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ivan commented Aug 18, 2024

Ethnographer Orr had a sharp eye for detail.  He noticed when a technician on a call began by examining copies that had been thrown in the trash and deduced from them that the problem with the machine was different from what the customer had reported.  “The trashcan is a filter between good copies and bad,” one technician explained  “Just go to the trashcan to find the bad copies and then… interpret what connects them all.”10

https://books.worksinprogress.co/book/maintenance-of-everything/communities-of-practice/the-soul-of-maintaining-a-new-machine/1
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41167615

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024

Very cultivated people are a joy to behold. Cultivated is a good word - like an orchard, hard work cradles & trusses nature.

https://x.com/michaelcurzi/status/1824304552553705517

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024

The price of Urbit Stars is down from a peak of $28,000 to around $700 now. Investors are completely ruined.

https://x.com/RokoMijic/status/1824443472067035307

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024

ROSS
No no, that's not it. I don't know that I want to adopt an adversary position toward the Company...

JIMMY
...but you are in an adversarial position.

ROSS
No, No, I think you're wrong...

JIMMY
I think you'll find, if what you've done for them is valuable, as you say it is, that if they are indebted to you morally, but not legally, my experience is that they will give you nothing. And they will begin to act cruelly toward you.

ROSS
Why?

JIMMY
To suppress their guilt.

David Mamet - The Spanish Prisoner (1997)

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024 •
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Certainty.

The air that Scientists breathe is the unknown. It’s that place where something’s not quite right and there’s a better way out there, but what exactly that is, well, it’s anyone’s guess. Uncertainty is the soil in which they plant their seeds and grow their solutions. It represents possibility. As they work their Scientist magic, over time, answers start to come, solutions take form, and what was once the great unknown starts to come into focus. A specific, certain answer emerges.

While this is the end-state we’re taught to spend our lives working toward, Scientists love the process of getting there, and they love the fact that they figured the thing out. But they don’t love being there. It’s highly unusual to find a true Scientist lingering or reveling in their solution. Instead, they’re thrilled for a moment, then the impulse kicks back in and they’re off to the next problem, dropping back into the realm of the unknown.

But what if there is no next problem? What if you’re locked into a job, role, industry, set of processes, course-of-dealing, or context where everything is fairly figured out, nobody seeks change, and most people want everything to stay the same? If there is no next problem to solve or thing to figure, fix, or improve, you can’t get lost in the process of figuring the thing out. You can’t do the thing you’re here to do if it has already been done, and no one wants it done better.

In an odd way, while most others yearn for certainty, security, and sameness, that same experience can become a growing trigger for the Scientist. If they dwell in it for too long, they get intensely uninterested, frustrated, and maybe even a tad cranky. They lose the ability to come alive and, instead, find themselves trapped in the process and slowly flatlining.

Jonathan Fields - Sparked: Discover Your Unique Imprint for Work that Makes You Come Alive

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024 •
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My approach is to have separate “take-off” points near the entrance/exit of each room.

Example: If I’m in my home office and find that some things need to go to the living room and some to the kitchen, I simply queue them to take off instead of taking a trip every time I realize an item needs to go. Then when I take a coffee break, I’ll grab all the items; drop the living-room items off on the way to the kitchen, and drop the kitchen items off when I arrive. I get my coffee; grab anything queued up on the kitchen take-off point that can be dropped off on the way, and drop them off on my way back.

As it works out, everything is almost always where it ought to be; and when it’s not, I know where it will be instead.

The key is that I always check the take-off point every time I leave a room.

This is a good idea, as is the idea in the article. The basic requisite however is a desire to not lose stuff. My wife always loses track of her EarPods. My oldest kid always loses his pocket knife.

I could have 20 holding pens in the house and they'd still lose their stuff, since the idea that you have to exert even a minor amount of effort <now> by putting stuff in its place to save yourself much more searching effort <later>, is either lost on them, or they just greatly value the present over the future.

I do not even get annoyed about it anymore - just like I do not get annoyed that it turns dark at night. My stuff is always in its place, and before we leave the house they will spend 10 minutes finding theirs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220059

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024

I just end up buying enough of the item to be within arms reach of nearly anywhere I'm likely to use it.

I used to never be able to find a screwdriver when I needed it, so now I have seven screwdrivers: three regular ratcheting, three stubby ratcheting, and a ratcheting one that lives in my pocket. I keep a regular ratcheting on my desk, in my living room, and in my bedroom, which are the only places I would realistically ever use these things.

As a result there's really no reason for me to lose it; it's already contained into the area that it already lives.

I do this with a lot of stuff now. Separate chargers for my laptop for my desk and my bed, separate iPhone chargers, and a bunch of other stuff.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41220932

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024

One of the biggest freaks on the planet. Cannot believe I have the fact that he exists rattling around my brain for the rest of my life

https://x.com/bpleasies/status/1823155412260229583

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ivan commented Aug 19, 2024

What I really want is the search/browse experience of nvUltra with the editing experience and cross-platform presence of Obsidian

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41254936

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

I share your suspicion of the thin details. And what details they do provide smell funny too. I’m especially skeptical of this supposed cloak and dagger business:

> My wife just received an email from the online retailer. She has been asked to "Not take any photographs or copies of the product in question due to copyright issues" and it states, "the product must be returned immediately by special delivery by [DATE]." There's some other statements as well about our account being terminated if we fail to return the product by the specific date. We've got a lot of movies and series that we have purchased over the years on this account, I wouldn't want to lose them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41269514

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
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but I'll show ideas you've never seen
arranged in ways they've never been
I mean you tell me what I did wouldn't work any more
what I'm doing hasn't even been done before

https://x.com/Demruth/status/1825536119024537683

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
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During the average day, more than 80 million people log onto Roblox.

[...]

Each month, players spend close to six billion hours using Roblox.

[...]

So yes, Roblox is unquestionably “working.” Yet Roblox is also unprofitable. Very unprofitable. What’s more, Roblox’s losses continue to swell because its impressive rate of revenue growth has been outpaced by that of its costs. Over the last four quarters, Roblox’s income from operations was ($1.2B) on revenues of $3.2B, representing a -38% profit margin. During the company’s four pre-pandemic quarters, income was ($66MM) on $508MM, for a -13% profit margin. Put another way, revenues are now 6.2x greater, but losses are 18x greater.

[...]

In August 2024, Turkey banned Roblox outright for the “protection of our children”; a month earlier, Bloomberg published a brutal report on the platform’s “pedophile problem.”

https://www.matthewball.co/all/roblox2024

Roblox is dilution-maxxing, stock based comp is up 10x since EOY 2020 whereas revenue is only up 3x. SBC is also ~ 1/3 of revenue.

It's pretty cool to get shareholders to pay your employees so you can be called "operating cash flow positive" as if their comp isn't an expense.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41287099

I got my 8-year-old going on Roblox because she asked for it. I had no idea what is really involved with it and as I watched her play it, it all seemed to me to be a big scam.

She would play games and want Robux. So she would go on her iPad and download iPad games that pay out Robux. The iPad games are total junk that only pay Robux after my kid watches ads. Some of those ads are for crappy games that pay Robux. Repeat the cycle.

I was appalled by the whole thing and deleted Roblox. She has gone back to Minecraft and does not seem to miss Roblox.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41287099

Roblox is a huge problem for me, as a parent of a 8y kid. Let me explain: I try to block violent apps in his tablet using Google's Family app, however, Roblox internally keeps 'offering' my kid almost any game, whatever if there's violence, drugs, killing others, and so forth.

It's a headache and a source of fights, so, I thank the responsible (/sarcasm).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41288059

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
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If you had a control panel to switch off dozens of nuclear reactors simultaneously, you’d have to comply with all kinds of safety regulations, and inspectors would come by to check if you were doing it right. This applies also to large solar and wind installations, by the way.

Because inverters and solar panels at home are “ordinary” consumer appliances, there is no inspection and no legislation. This makes sense since a single installation can’t cause that much damage.

But because we didn’t pay attention, the management of those “consumer appliances” has now moved to just a few suppliers who, on sunny days, even measured individually, control a significant part of our power supply.

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/the-gigantic-unregulated-power-plants-in-the-cloud/
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41292018

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
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There's a common conception in culture that young people are the first people to embrace new technology, and I kind of enjoy that this is bucking that trend. The older people are, in this case, the first people down at the slophouse, waiting for their plate of slop. This is their thing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4V97qwz4Uk

Generated images do not have a human being going “this is a stupid thing to draw”, previously only political cartoonists would actually be the ones to draw stuff like this and they are universally terrible artists. AI enables shitty ideas that no human with any talent would draw themselves, and we are worse for it

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4V97qwz4Uk

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

Some people on this thread rightly point out that [Paul Stamets] is not formally educated in biology and mycology. While that clearly hasn’t been a barrier to him contributing to the field and getting people excited about mushrooms, it does lead to him making statements that might not be precise. From my experience, a lot of science education is background info (e.g. I’m in ecology, but know a lot of things about microbiology) and learning how to talk about your science in an accurate way. If you don’t receive formal education you might not have these two rather important bits of knowledge, and I feel like that may be the case with Paul. It usually isn’t a good idea to use words like “always” and “never” and make sweeping unsubstantiated claims that can’t be rigorously examined in a scientific way. I think that this is the source of the icky feeling Paul gives me. I assume that sometimes he has to put his science hat on to write pubs and go through peer review, but when speaking to the public he puts his pseudoscience hat on where he frames anecdotes as data, makes absolute statements, makes claims about spirituality, and makes claims that seem too good to be true and have no data (besides anecdotes) cited, all while using his tangentially related scientific findings to lend validity to his statements.

Here's an example: "the mycelium is the immune system of the mushroom". That is not not precise, it is complete nonsense. Like stating the plant is the immune system of the flower.

His books also contain a lot of factual mistakes.

His 'Host Defense' supplements are among the worst on the market, they don't even contain mushrooms but 'myceliated rice'. No clue what is wrong with him, he's the one that got me interested in mushrooms 20 years ago, he was a hero to me ! And then I started discovering all this BS, FFS

https://old.reddit.com/r/mycology/comments/p4t1v7/whats_the_deal_with_paul_stamets/

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
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A typical large project in Bevy would take me 30 seconds i7-9700k to compile, and at least 15 seconds with dynamic linking enabled (which was often broken). Add some more major libraries and it can take up to 2 minutes or more to compile on a fairly fast CPU. This is not great for rapid gameplay development.

My engine on the other hand, takes 0.2 seconds to compile a large project. This is because every piece of gameplay code is either a dynamically linked library or WASM module that simply uses the data driven entity component system as a universal interface. This is not common in Rust, but we're on the cutting edge of a new paradigm here! This same sandboxed interface can also be given to players / modders / developers for my UGC game. Bevy also does not have a stable release yet, which means investing in it is just as risky as my own engine, except the decisions for breaking changes are made by a third party. Bevy is also massive, which means code changes to the engine are unfamiliar, difficult, overwhelming and within their ecosystem.

https://legendofworlds.com/blog/4

is interesting because people complain about Rust compile times but maybe don't realize they're wielding a big flexible thing where they can decide to prioritize compilation times over other things

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

The open secret about business is that all the experts communicate in frameworks but don't think in frameworks.

https://x.com/ejames_c/status/1825173202764701772

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

I was telling my mother that working in tech puts you in a sort of continual survival mode. I explained how I tried to foresee the decline at companies & projects based on a variety of conditions. And she said, “That’s crazy! And you’ve been doing this for decades?”

https://x.com/hpdailyrant/status/1824463482777223535

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
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what was your strategy for SST?

  • build stuff for ourselves
  • pay attention to users doing weird things
  • expand our scope to cover weird things instead of explaining why they should stop
  • repeat

idk if it'll succeed but it's doing ok

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1823742329993273843

  • make a list of things that are bad
  • fix them
  • repeat

that's it

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1823748599097745874

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

i honestly can't stand doing client side engineering but it's the highest most important work that you can do most of the time so i just bite down on a cloth and power through

https://x.com/yacineMTB/status/1823718017500635578

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

Meditation has completely nuked my motivation. Why do anything when I can just feel whatever sensation I want without doing the thing? Why travel when I can stay at home and feel whatever sensation I'm seeking my travelling? Why date when I can feel infinite love at home? Why work when I can feel like the richest person in the world instantly? Why do anything at all but sit with my mind, which is capable of giving me any mental state I desire at any time?

https://x.com/prodigygrimes/status/1820472801914233229

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024 •
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Pareidolia (/ˌpærɪˈdoʊliə, ˌpɛər-/;[1] also US: /ˌpɛəraɪ-/)[2] is the tendency for perception to impose a meaningful interpretation on a nebulous stimulus, usually visual, so that one detects an object, pattern, or meaning where there is none. Pareidolia is a type of apophenia.

[...]

Pareidolia correlates with age and is frequent among patients with Parkinson's disease and dementia with Lewy bodies.[8]

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

But after a fairly small size, there's almost no utility in visualizing graphs.

I want to stress this point and go a bit further. It can be worse as people have pareidolia[0], a tendency to see order in disorder. Like how you see familiar shapes in the clouds. There is a danger in that with large visualizations such as these that instead of conveying useful information, you counterproductively convince someone that something that isn't true is! Here's a relevant 3B1B video where this is kinda discussed. There is real meaning but the point is that it is also easy to be convinced of things that aren't true[1].

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41132095

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

As seen in Figure 5 the target part reveals that LNK invokes the Windows Command Processor (cmd.exe). The target path as seen in the properties is only visible to 255 characters. However, command-line arguments can be up to 4096, so malicious actors can that this advantage and pass on long arguments as they will be not visible in the properties.

https://www.mcafee.com/blogs/other-blogs/mcafee-labs/rise-of-lnk-shortcut-files-malware/
via https://www.google.com/search?q=lnk+file+malware
via https://www.proofpoint.com/us/blog/threat-insight/threat-actor-abuses-cloudflare-tunnels-deliver-rats

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2024

social norms are minimum viable proof-of-work for "safe to interact with"

https://x.com/loopholekid/status/1575187379261829121

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