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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 27, 2024

The study concluded that these individuals ignored evidence of an impending attack because they had a particularly high need for cognitive closure and had already made up their minds that Egypt and Syria would not attack.

Ian James Kidd, et al - Vice Epistemology

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ivan commented Aug 27, 2024

Hiring from the network sounds like a fast way to get qualified employees, but it backfired when we ended up with groups of employees who were too tight (some even shared apartments)

The work place was transformed into a reality show where you had groups of people trying to maneuver "up" in the system, by convincing the management that their way was better. No matter the discussion, they would back each other and support their own guys. As a group they would always win a discussion.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41283877

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ivan commented Aug 27, 2024

Ask HN: What was your biggest startup fail?

amazon.com

it was supposed to be a folksy, communal, whole-earth inspired bookstore that would interact synergistically with actual book stores and the rest of the world.

instead, we built a fucking monster that is awesome for consumers and a nightmare for almost everybody else.

sorry.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41283877

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ivan commented Aug 28, 2024 •
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Kerry Daynes, consultant psychologist and best-selling author, says empathy (like many sweet things) is fantastic in moderation but debilitating in excess: “As a forensic psychologist, often working on cases involving horrendous acts, I often find myself flooded with empathy. If I allowed it to, it would lead at best to some bad practice and decisions on my part, and at worst complete incapacitation.”

It’s a tricky balance, one I battled with constantly when I was a junior doctor. I eventually specialised in psychiatry for six years, where the balance was easier, and though now I’m a full-time writer, the memory of those days is still vivid. I remember watching my consultant deliver devastating news to a patient, and the many crash calls I rushed to proving futile. I could no longer run sobbing to my mum, so, on a regular basis, I would lock myself in a toilet cubicle at the Staffordshire teaching hospital, and very quietly cry.

I found working with elderly patients especially distressing, because they were often alone, and I found nothing more upsetting than an empty plastic chair at a bedside during visiting hours. Hyper-empaths relate heavily to other people, and perhaps the isolation I so often saw in older patients was something I could also see in myself. Medicine was an unexpectedly lonely job. I envied people who could leave it all behind at the hospital gates at the end of a shift, because I took everything home with me.

There were no doctors in my family, and although my mum and partner were supportive, it’s difficult to explain to someone else how it feels to walk the wards. My concentration was shot to pieces and the things that usually brought me comfort – watching a film or reading – became impossible. Instead, I would sit and ruminate, turning over the day’s events in my mind, even ringing the wards on my day off to see how a patient was doing. My hyper-empathy was at it outside work, too. In a supermarket queue, I once overheard a complete stranger discussing a lost dog. I was so upset for this woman, I spent five hours at home trawling internet rescue centres trying to locate it. (The dog came home, by the way – which I’m telling you because I know there will be fellow hyper-empaths reading who will be worried about it.)

It seems counterintuitive that people with hyper-empathy would work in a job where they’re exposed to extraordinary amounts of suffering, but the caring professions are knee-deep in empaths. Perhaps the ability to understand someone else’s pain means we’re especially driven to try to help them, to fix things. But it didn’t take me long to realise there are many things we are unable to fix. It’s a difficult lesson for an empath. The desire to help someone is overwhelming and, on a slightly less altruistic level, if you can make someone else feel better, you will – by default – start to feel much better yourself.

[...]

Daynes says it’s more useful to think of it as “rational compassion”, a concept which originated with author and psychologist Paul Bloom. She says it’s important to separate “feeling for” (the logical quality of caring for others and being concerned about their wellbeing) from “feeling with” (which epitomises empathy, and can be the component that trips us up). If we can let go of the feeling with, but retain the feeling for, we’ve pretty much cracked it.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2022/apr/29/confessions-of-a-hyper-empath

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ivan commented Aug 28, 2024

One last thing that has been important for me is to recognize when I’m confused about something and, instead of feeling bad (“oh no! I don’t know this thing! disaster!”), recognize that it’s a normal feeling and that it just means I’m about to learn something!

I like learning! It’s fun! So if I’m confused, that’s usually a good thing because it means I’m not stagnating. Here’s how I approach it:

  • recognize that I’m confused
  • figure out what the topic I’m confused about is
  • turn that confusion into concrete questions
  • ask someone or research to get the answers
  • I’ve learned something new!! Hooray!

https://jvns.ca/blog/2018/09/01/learning-skills-you-can-practice/

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ivan commented Aug 28, 2024

An experiment where the entropy goes down most (>90%) of the time. The second law isn't that entropy must increase, but rather that the mean change in entropy must be non-negative, <ΔS> ≥ 0. In theory the entropy can almost always go down, if balanced by occasional large entropy increases.

https://x.com/gavincrooks/status/1819407411360551139

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ivan commented Aug 28, 2024

Through the 1970s, the developers of TUTOR took advantage of the fact that the entire corpus of TUTOR programs were stored on-line on the same computer system. Whenever they felt a need to change the language, they ran conversion software over the corpus of TUTOR code to revise all existing code so that it conformed with the changes they had made.[4] As a result, once new versions of TUTOR were developed, maintaining compatibility with the PLATO version could be very difficult.[5]

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

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ivan commented Aug 28, 2024

One of the most exciting, yet stress-inducing aspects of running an early-stage startup is that occasionally opportunities will present themselves that have so much potential you have no choice but to blow up your near-term roadmap, ignore any number of raging fires, and take a shot.

If you read the history of pretty much any successful tech company, you'll be able to identify these exact situations and how those founders capitalized on them. They may not always be "make-or-break", but they were certainly responsible for catapulting the company to the next level.

Granted, you need to limit what you're willing to put at risk, and it should be something that's on your roadmap anyway because, after all, we're not talking about a pivot!

Needless to say (...but I'll say it anyway), continually chasing after one perceived opportunity or another will not only drive you and your team crazy, but it will probably kill your startup, so you have to be extremely selective. In fact, 98% of the time you should be absolutely ruthless about staying the course and keeping any potential distractions at bay. That's how you make real progress.

But ... sometimes, you simply have to go for it.

https://x.com/exojason/status/1820881612156105194

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ivan commented Aug 28, 2024

They need to create a job that's 4 hours of programming in the morning and 4 hours of mindlessly loading boxes onto a truck in the afternoon.

https://x.com/nomanautomata/status/1803191224721088900

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ivan commented Aug 29, 2024

To make a great game, it's not enough to have some good ideas. You also have to say no to all the bad ideas. On a really big team, there will be a huge onslaught of bad ideas. Failure to fight them off will be death for the game.

https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1828186698691551537

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ivan commented Aug 29, 2024

Reference - a great read - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

This book is so good. It's about building early computers but it feels just like tech does today in the way it's described. Which make it feel like this bigger context you're reading into. That even before computers were mainstream, there were still those who tinkered.

Two things are especially memorable to me. One is a casual remark in the book that they found the best way to get things done is to pair someone very experienced and cynical with someone very inexperienced and naive. Combined they would get lots done together compared to either alone. I think this is still true today.

The other thing is the intro. It's about the head of the project getting a group together and renting a sailboat on vacation. On the sailboat the get tossed and at times feel like they barely survived and it ends with someone saying "if this was his vacation...what did this man do for fun!?"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41167615

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ivan commented Aug 29, 2024

The psychology of your users is everything. If you're not laser-focused on what makes them feel good (productive, confident, relaxed, etc.), then you're going to lose.

https://x.com/exojason/status/1436835489814773761

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ivan commented Aug 29, 2024

My biggest recommendation is to listen to Simon Critchley’s Apply-Degger. He’s a new school prof and does an amazing job breaking down Heidegger’s jargon.

Tbf, Heidegger is writing about concepts that are so fundamental even the written language does a poor job representing the ideas. I think it’s the combination of attempting a new way of communicating an idea (common for philosophers to disrespect language), and the difficulty of the idea.

Hegel’s PoS literally feels like I’m on acid.

https://old.reddit.com/r/heidegger/comments/1f3p3k8/heidegger_hurts_my_brain/
via rsaarelm

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ivan commented Aug 29, 2024

I'm not overly impressed with the Google pipe syntax. They talk a good game in the paper. They sound really convincing. But once I started actually looking for use cases and messing with it, I, for one, lost interest in their design. I have hundreds, perhaps thousands, of queries in the Fossil implementation which I went trolling through, and I didn't find any that would be improved by Google pipe syntax over just having FROM-first queries. Maybe Google is more focused on analytical queries against big data. Maybe the pipe syntax works better for really gnarly analytical queries. It doesn't seem to help for the kinds of queries I do in Fossil using SQLite, though, at least not that I've seen.

https://sqlite.org/forum/forumpost/5f218012b6e1a9db

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ivan commented Aug 29, 2024

My favorite is when they do bold by duplicating and slightly shifting the letters. Bboolldd. PDFs are hell.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41347188

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ivan commented Aug 29, 2024

an indicator that chimpanzees are adapted to recognize each other by their rear ends

https://www.thecut.com/2016/12/scientists-think-your-face-evolved-to-resemble-an-apes-butt.html

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ivan commented Aug 29, 2024

In my opinion this experiment is missing a key element of designing for UI density: typography.

These screens use a fixed-width font at a single size. It’s a retro 1980 text-mode UI look, and it’s fine if that was the design constraint they wanted.

But you can squeeze a lot more information on screen if you can have a proper hierarchy of typefaces and sizes.

(As a basic example, the “About” box now consumes almost a quarter of the screen on a phone. A change to a smaller proportional font could fit this information in half the space and still remain readable on a phone.)

If you look at the works of an accomplished information designer like Edward Tufte, he often obsesses about getting the typography right. His books use many typographic elements and scales even for the body text, outside of the visualizations.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41088013

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ivan commented Aug 29, 2024

As a concrete example, a few weeks ago, I invited my dad to my tailnet with the intent of using remote desktop into his machine to help him fix something. He accepted the invite, and then I couldn't ping his machine despite it appearing in my TS domain web interface.

I don’t know if it’s the same issue, but the problem I ran into is that I misunderstood how it works for families who just use gmail addresses. It’s quite counter-intuitive. The organization stuff isn’t for you - instead each person creates their own tailnet and you connect them. See:

tailscale/tailscale#10731

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41080991

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ivan commented Aug 30, 2024

"Let's make the icon weird so people post it all over social media."

"No one is stupid enough to take that bait."

https://old.reddit.com/r/memes/comments/1f4nydl/whats_happened_to_duolingo/lkn4qnw/

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ivan commented Aug 30, 2024 •
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There's nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you

[...]

Vajrayana rejects and inverts renunciation. It celebrates beauty, pleasure, involvement, freedom, power, mastery, and—explicitly—the aristocratic ideal of nobility

https://meaningness.substack.com/p/you-should-be-a-god-emperor

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ivan commented Aug 30, 2024

on the longest Fuji trail they've acknowledged that nobody wants to descend more than 7k vertical feet of switchbacks so there's something called the Big Sand Run (大砂走り) instead

https://x.com/ftlsid/status/1826447333330223415

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ivan commented Aug 30, 2024

i only read books by people who have done things other than writing

https://x.com/imperialauditor/status/1499059146896904195

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ivan commented Aug 31, 2024

In all I liked the book, however the authors' lack of South African military doctrine is glaringly obvious to anybody who served during our Bush War. I cannot help but think that he has attempted to flesh out scraps of conversation he had with Nick Du Toit, and trying to do this he fails miserably, add to this his failure in pronunciation of Afrikaans phrases was a major irritation

https://www.myanonamouse.net/t/91973 (James Brabazon - My Friend the Mercenary)

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ivan commented Aug 31, 2024

They say never judge a book by its cover, but in this case you'd be spot on. 800 pages of non-stop alien-on-human rape. Tentacle rape, roofie rape, mind control rape, impregnation rape, this book has it all. Very much a fetish thing. One of the main plot lines is about an alien that is so horny that it will literally die if it doesn't get to rape any humans. It's also bad in more conventional ways - weak characters, weak plotting, all sorts of holes and inconsistencies, not to mention extremely shallow treatment of the ideas about genetics, hierarchy, transhumanism, etc. In retrospect I have no idea why I kept reading to the end.

https://fantasticanachronism.com/2021/01/18/the-best-and-worst-books-i-read-in-2020/

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ivan commented Aug 31, 2024

Context: I’ve been seeped into GTD and seeking improved productivity and ease of task management from the beginnings of 43folders and being deep into the ethos from David Allen’s work since the early 2000s. I am a....moderately successful professional that spends a lot of my time in executive-level meetings and running half of them at a Fortune 50 company, so I am the exact target audience for GTD. I am the “overwhelmed” worker that the system should help. Not bragging, just giving context of what my day can look like for 12 hours a day, in however you can imagine that.

I can see the writers points. GTD is not for everyone but can seem like the panacea to productivity issues.

Allen will openly talk about how lazy he is and the system is designed to embrace that, to an extent.

The ultimate goal is having a better grasp of projects and tasks that doesn’t require you to hold everything in your head. I don’t find anything disputable within this concept.

After years of working at it, starts, stops, fails, successes, short term glory, long term struggles, here’s what I’ve found (I am no longer in IT so agile or scrum or ITIL or other development cycle does not apply to the below comments, just like architecture is not compatible with these reflections) —

Post it notes and to do lists fail. What everyone needs is a structured and organized system that works for them in their environment. The goal is whatever works, but that is not just a running list that’s as long as a mile, where nothing gets done.

I’ve found that a goal driven system, with a list of projects tends to work best for me. With a project list with minimal tasks, you and mentally track to what to do next. Combine the project list with a set of notes that logs progress and you can always find your bearings.

Example: you have to launch a training module that involves multiple teams. You set the first meeting, and come away with action items. - take notes at the meeting - log your action items - decide when to do each of those, assuming the best. Be flexible if the date does not work - complete your timely actions, and move on to the next project repeating the process

While this is overly simplistic, I’ve found this works well. I would drown when I spent more time in omnifocus or things organizing and sorting perfectly to achieve maximum efficiency, and exhaust all of my energy organizing, rather than actually executing on tasks. Do enough to organize and log action items such that you know what you need to do, commit a certain but controlled brain cycles to remember enough details that you can be flexible, and spend a dedicated amount of time actually completing tasks.

GTD has flaws in being resentful of work. Embrace your functions, but be mindful of how you intake new asks, and take notes that will help remind you what the hell you’ve committed to. Let email sit after you’ve decided what to do with it. If you chase “inbox zero” you’re committing to a goal that’s so hard to hit you’ll be regular set back and feel like your efforts are a failure. Spend less time on aesthetics in tasks and spend more time executing and not having to worry about organizing piles of information and tasks.

https://old.reddit.com/r/gtd/comments/jxcp4e/the_rise_and_fall_of_getting_things_done/

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ivan commented Aug 31, 2024

Sorry, your submission has been removed due to inadequate account karma.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPTCoding/comments/1f51y8s/a_collection_of_prompts_for_generating_high/

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ivan commented Aug 31, 2024

Nah this is madness - anyone can connect to this device at any time. It's crazy. I've been woken up in the middle of the night before by some random stranger connecting to this device. There is no way for you to turn off bluetooh for this device. Isn't that crazy? $450 speakers and you don't have a function to not allow bluetooth connection? Lazy engineering.

https://www.amazon.com/Vanatoo-Transparent-Speakers-Bluetooth-Control/dp/B0CCGFYPG3/ref=sr_1_9?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.3YxjTDhkkvoqM2FfDIYxWfG60TA2Cgm9T-tHJ9QG7iqjZHu01_fUcql__6Xa5KeEvlmSzzCYozmTNwoWzRrwlDivfgOV_jHZ7fTj4grUOUUT7FH33ULCa7lfGh4vs_xqLkGw5b-ZRwf9c0NcWEg2p9E_6WOvRhGthsbNZxNgRAK9TlAHqHw6PLbEe3jopErmqb9kr21ALjCLm9g3AAb39CmcOfCL5nMz_GsCmPXt-qo.5TDI2nfbmYc-C8qI_em8f6G9k0eCFFMFWi6cJonRqH4&dib_tag=se&keywords=computer+speaker&qid=1725132736&refinements=p_36%3A42000-&sr=8-9

I purchased Vanatoo to about 2 months ago and I've been loving them ! I connected them to my dac/amp stack and control the volume from the amp.

The problem started happening yesterday. I live in a huge apartment building and to my surprise, T0s are always in Bluetooth pairing mode. Some random music started blasting from them late at night. It took me a while to figure out what was happening. It turns out some kids in my building are able to pair their device to the speakers. I read the whole manual and the only thing I found was pressing the button in the back to disconnect the all Bluetooth devices, but that doesn't prevent kids from repairing immediately.

So basically, every time I'm not using my speakers, I need to unplug them (which is not ideal) because I don't want kids to blast music from them and it doesn't look like you can turn off the automatic pairing on the speakers.

https://old.reddit.com/r/BudgetAudiophile/comments/ngyorn/vanatoo_t0_i_need_help_with_bluetooth/

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ivan commented Aug 31, 2024

Building great software is about relentlessly removing obstacles. Adding that new feature should be a breeze, but it rarely is. What's slowing you down? What's toilsome? What are you scared of? Those are obstacles. Notice them, get mad at them, remove them.

Building a great company is also about relentlessly removing obstacles. The day you stop getting mad at obstacles, become blind to them, transmit that helplessness to new hires ("this is just the way things are") – that's the day decline sets in.

https://x.com/alangrow/status/1826344757272211938

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ivan commented Aug 31, 2024

okay man i dont thing we've got enough irl mutual goodwill built up to compensate for how consistently tiresome i find our twitter interactions

https://x.com/goblinodds/status/1826386299584184358

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ivan commented Aug 31, 2024

i think a lot of guys miss the fact that girls, even ones who arent thinking abt having kids, are typically hard-wired with some deep expectation of being incapacitated for long periods and legit relying on someone else for help

https://x.com/goblinodds/status/1825946798223143235

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