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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 Sep 1, 2024

The theme of Brian's talk was that the conventional wisdom about how to run larger companies is mistaken. As Airbnb grew, well-meaning people advised him that he had to run the company in a certain way for it to scale. Their advice could be optimistically summarized as "hire good people and give them room to do their jobs." He followed this advice and the results were disastrous. So he had to figure out a better way on his own, which he did partly by studying how Steve Jobs ran Apple. So far it seems to be working. Airbnb's free cash flow margin is now among the best in Silicon Valley.

https://paulgraham.com/foundermode.html

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ivan commented Sep 1, 2024

I've decided a while back that I will never work with these kinds of "professional" liars ever again. The lies will always accumulate and ruin every goddamn thing. I'd rather be unemployed and barely scraping by than worry if some psychopath is going to piss away 10 years of my hard work.

I think truth seeking is more important than any particular mode of operation. Founders are more likely to do this because they genuinely want to win the entire game, not just Q3.

I think I've already seen a few managers walking around in founder's garb. Again, these people are professional liars. They're going to be hard to spot unless you're looking for it.

My next venture will probably involve unconditional dictatorship with hair trigger termination policies for deceptive behavior. Until then, I'll be working smaller contract jobs and otherwise scraping by.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41415723

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ivan commented Sep 1, 2024 •
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  • How am I feeling right now? Why? Where is it coming from?
  • Are there any narratives I've invented in my head that might be leading me in the wrong direction?
  • What's really bothering me? What are the problems?
  • In what ways am I causing those problems? How am I contributing to them?
  • How many different problems are there? Are they related?
  • Is there a root cause underneath them all?
  • Is anything going well? What? Why?
  • What am I trying to accomplish? Where am I trying to get to? How will I know if it's worked?
  • What are my options?
  • What are the tradeoffs of those options? Are they worth it?
  • What hard lessons am I learning right now that might help me do better next time?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTpBFiW5PBo&t=10m Jack Conte

Our specific problems and solutions require our personal investigation and analysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTpBFiW5PBo&t=14m40s Jack Conte

We asked more questions to help us figure that out:

  • What are we doing that isn't helping us hit these goals?
  • What could be simpler?
  • What could save us time?
  • What feels draining?
  • Where is our time going? How can we categorize our hours?
  • Which categories of activities and time are getting us close to those goals?
  • Which are holding us back?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTpBFiW5PBo&t=25m20s Jack Conte

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ivan commented Sep 1, 2024

Say who you are. Really say it in your life and in your work. Tell someone out there who is lost, someone not yet born, someone who won't be born for 500 years. Your writing will be a record of your time. It can't help but be. But more importantly, if you're honest about who you are, you'll help that person be less lonely in their world.

Charlie Kaufman
via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTpBFiW5PBo&t=31m Jack Conte

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ivan commented Sep 1, 2024

Another problem with advice is that in lots of cases the person giving the advice has absolutely no skin in the game. If the advice is bad, it’s only the advice-taker that suffers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41415254

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ivan commented Sep 1, 2024

no matter how much you think you need to take that extra hour instead of sleep, it's not worth it because you will lose two days to catching up in sleep

https://x.com/yacineMTB/status/1830290120098087106

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ivan commented Sep 1, 2024

When you realize that there are no real playbooks for achieving success, and that every triumph in history has been the result of the convergence of unique, unrepeatable circumstances, you start to feel more free

https://x.com/mcneilly_alex/status/1828815372952244362

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ivan commented Sep 2, 2024

Most of the pain of running databases in k8s is all of the "day 2" operations like backups, clustering, scaling, upgrading, tuning, etc., so I'm glad to see all that accumulated knowledge built into controllers like this.

The problem is typically day 1000 problems: The database broke, nobody really understands all the stuff and dependencies by the kubernetes helm chart and still you have to fix it.

Downtime is now calculated in days and not hours.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41411122

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ivan commented Sep 2, 2024

There are four common functions of social support:[9][10][11]

  • Emotional support is the offering of empathy, concern, affection, love, trust, acceptance, intimacy, encouragement, or caring.[12][13] It is the warmth and nurturance provided by sources of social support.[14] Providing emotional support can let the individual know that he or she is valued.[13]
  • Tangible support is the provision of financial assistance, material goods, or services.[15][16] Also called instrumental support, this form of social support encompasses the concrete, direct ways people assist others.[12]
  • Informational support is the provision of advice, guidance, suggestions, or useful information to someone.[9][17] This type of information has the potential to help others problem-solve.[12][18]
  • Companionship support is the type of support that gives someone a sense of social belonging (and is also called belonging).[9] This can be seen as the presence of companions to engage in shared social activities.[19] Formerly, it was also referred to as "esteem support" or "appraisal support",[9] but these have since developed into alternative forms of support under the name "appraisal support" along with normative and instrumental support.

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

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ivan commented Sep 3, 2024

I lived in Moscow & LA for 3 decades before moving to a rural village in Slovenia.

I firmly believe that to slow down time a person needs to reduce the daily quantity of sensory stimulus, in addition to the advice you offered.

Human body and psyche were simply not evolutionarily designed to do what's expected of busy people in modern cities with the current level of tech all around us.

The pace is just different. Even with a never-ending start-up project plan and all routines, after work you find time to get bored, you sit and reflect, you watch the seasons change with nature all around you, you find joy in old hobbies and have much higher quality time with those close to you.

It's both isolating and freeing like nothing I've ever experienced before. Adaptation takes time but then it becomes impossible to go back to the insanity of modern cities. I love traveling to the them, I just wouldn't live in one full time.

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuueRRdbi1w

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ivan commented Sep 4, 2024

I've always hated that I couldn't clone or backup my personal yubikey. It's one of the reasons I've avoided using it everywhere.

Good news then, since the article is discussing the discovery of that exact feature.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41438667

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ivan commented Sep 4, 2024

Have you worked at a company where it was easy to get up and running as a new hire? Where it was easy to find instructions on setting up your development environment, how to do database migrations, seed data, or how to get access to AWS?

In my experience, this process is always subpar. There is no clear place to find documentation; even if it's there, it's often outdated.

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I feel like writing, reading, and maintaining documentation could get much smoother and, frankly, more fun!

Do you have any ideas on how to improve it all?

Huawei. They have system analysts, who are basically living documentation. There's also some overlap with 'team lead' in western orgs and I'd say they have similar pay. These folks are idle by default; they're meant to be interrupted and their main focus is mentoring. They also handle a lot of the PRs, code quality, documentation.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41416067

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ivan commented Sep 4, 2024 •
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I myself don't engage in politics, but if you do so or are around people who do, pay attention to the tone of the conversation. Are people having a reasonable conversation, or are they frantically trying to force others to have the same view as them? Does anyone seem calm, and conscious of what they're saying or doing? Are you aware of your body as you hear them speak? Very likely not, right? This is an example of how easy it is to manipulate dissociated people, and society uses that all the time.

The solution is very simple but not easy. It consists in grounding yourself in your body, using something similar to the prompts I've written for instance. Notice how you didn't need to learn anything to become aware of your body, you simply needed to remind yourself. Being aware of your body is more like a capacity that you already have and can develop so that you can access it more easily, rather than something truly new to learn. And it's a very important tool if you wish to be free from society’s more toxic aspects.

In the case of the news, another solution could be to cut your exposure to it, which is something I personally do, though it's unlikely you can remove all indirect exposure to it. People around you are definitely going to be talking about world events - again it's probably not a conscious act on their end - and having the ability to stay grounded while hearing those is a real test of that capacity.

As I've alluded, this is not the only situation where dissociation makes you prone to being controlled, though it is a major one2. A good rule of thumb is that anytime someone or some group doesn't allow you to just slow down - the rhythm of the body is significantly slower than that of the unregulated mind - then they benefit from you being dissociated and will use that to control you. They might not do that consciously, for instance a lot of people in activism probably have good intentions, but that coercion is very real regardless.

You might notice that it's actually hard to find a section of society that doesn't lead to dissociation. This is because the body is not very useful to society, since it is inherently tied to the present moment and quality, and society is far more interested in the future-obsessed mind that can generate quantity. Nonetheless, it shows us that there is always a move towards a more authentic life, and that move can be as simple as deciding to be aware of what's always with us: our bodies.

[...]

There is more to say about the problem of dissociation, such as how the body is the primal source of power, vitality but also truth - the mind only knows consistency not truth - but this is for another time.

https://inkolore.substack.com/p/somatic-hazard

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ivan commented Sep 4, 2024 •
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While one-to-one relationships, a string of individual 1:1 relationships, or participation in an online group can provide some benefits—including a feeling of connection—they fall far short of actually producing community, which requires overlapping institutions and activities, things that are very hard to achieve if you don’t share a physical place with one another.

[...]

First, you can select a place to live based on its social wealth. When my wife and I were ready to have kids, we were determined to find a supportive community to live in. We spent a year checking out half a dozen options between New York City (where we lived) and Washington, D.C. (where I was doing more work). In most cases, we visited, stayed overnight, met lots of people, and asked lots of questions. In the end, we chose the D.C. suburb where I live now—a warm, welcoming, and institutionally rich place.

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-upstream-cause-of-the-youth-mental
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41139149

The upstream cause of this is, essentially, "the rent is too damn high". Not necessarily in a sense of housing prices, but -

In order to have a community, that community needs a space. (The early 'net was interesting in that "space" was cheap/nearly free - IRC, forums, etc, which might be one reason it took over as a social space to begin with)

Extremely consistently, I see efforts at forming communities fail simply due to a lack of regular space in which to have them, and from what little I know talking to organizers, it pretty much always comes down to the cost of the space - the rent.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41141362

I was in middle school when the iPhone first became popular among teens. Within a couple of months, everything changed. Kids talked a lot less on the bus, at lunch, etc. If you didn't have an iPhone, your friends probably did, so same issue. It felt a whole lot worse and stayed that way. I ended up becoming closer with my few friends who didn't have phones and further from my old best friends, just because of who was more willing to hang out together.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41139977

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ivan commented Sep 4, 2024 •
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You need a breakthrough insight

In our session, Andy emphasized a very fundamental lesson of greatness — in order to create something legendary, you have to have an insight that is non-consensus and right.

[...]

Most people don’t realize that if you are in the right and consensus square, you will usually not achieve greatness. Your startup might have a good idea, but if it’s too obvious, multiple me-too competitors will get funded by me-too VCs. As competition floods the market, prices erode, and sales cycles lengthen. And the exit options become less attractive.

The path to greatness is to be non-consensus and right.

Being non-consensus and right affords the startup the time to survive, adapt, and succeed after trial and error without fatal consequences. No one preys on them because no one believes their idea is important.

This gives the startup time to master differentiable and specific skills and build strengths for inevitable competitive battles that will come in the future. When you’re starting out, it’s way better if your potential competitors don’t care about what you’re doing.

[...]

What is my “Earned Secret?” What work have I done to find something out that others don’t know? How did I uncover the secret? Why is it a secret? What work did I do to develop the conviction that my secret is real?

https://medium.com/starting-greatness/andy-rachleff-and-startup-lessons-of-greatness-you-need-a-breakthrough-insight-ae846196ba7

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ivan commented Sep 5, 2024

yeah usually much better results getting a list of ~10 fuzzy keyword search results, 10 semantic/embeddings results, and using something like Cohere rerank (or just a cheap GPT model) to choose the best 5-10 results from the pile

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41426318

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ivan commented Sep 5, 2024

What surprised you about Nanite?

  1. The goal of the DAG is not to "use fewer triangles for far objects". The goal is to have a consistent 1 pixel == 1 triangle across the entire screen. A triangle is our "unit of data". The artist imports a sculpture from ZBrush. We need to need a way (through an error metric) to display it no matter if it's 1m or 500m from the camera. This is not possible with discrete LOD meshes (each LOD level is a separate geometry). Sometimes you would want an LOD between 2 levels. You need continuous LODs. This is the reason for the meshlet hierarchy. It allows you to "sample" geometry at any detail level you choose.

https://github.com/Scthe/nanite-webgpu

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

Early on in my career (I was a late bloomer and already in early 30's) as a developer, I got burnt out pretty bad twice. After the second time and teetering on a third, I knew I had to do something to change what I was doing and how I managed my work load.

I just focused on getting MY stuff done and that was it. I stopped taking on other's people work. I stopped taking on more work once I got my stuff done. I would do exactly what a Sprint called for. Nothing more, nothing less. If I finished early with my tasks, I would stretch out the time and just tell the scrum master I was close, but not done yet, but always finished on time. I basically just did what was required of me. I wasn't out to impress anybody, I just became "Mr. Dependable" on any of the teams I worked on.

This was the approach that changed everything.

Now, some ten years later? I'm never too high or too low. I still do the same thing, I still just do what is asked of me and that's it. 5pm every night? Laptop gets turned off. Friday at 6pm? Laptop is off for the entire weekend. I turn it back on right before my meetings on Monday. Separating my personal life from my work life with a hard delimiter was paramount.

I found out that if you don't protect your sanity and your own well being, people will take advantage of you and your time and it will never end. Once you break the cycle and get that time back for yourself? You'll make sure you never willingly give it to someone else ever again.

Protect yourself. Protect your sanity. Once you lose it, like OP said, it's very, very hard to get back.

I hope this helps someone else struggling to break this cycle.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41461499

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

Spontaneous action arises naturally from spacious involvement. Spaciousness frees you to act instead from fresh, panoramic perception of what is happening and what is becoming possible. Perception, by contrast with mental contents, is transient, transparent, always specific, always here and now. Every moment is new, and so can invite a unique, spontaneous interaction. Then you are no longer performing a script; perception is liberated from fixed patterns.

Charlie Awberry - Opening Awareness

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024 •
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The lesson here is not that I shouldn’t have become more paranoid. I think it was reasonable to update my behavior based on what happened. But my paranoia could’ve been a lot more effective. Effective paranoia would have looked like incorporating a rather specific message: “As you build your internet audience, it’s more likely that unsavory people will be drawn into your world—so, be less transparent and trusting with new people, especially people you don’t meet through trusted friends.” But that’s not what happened. Instead, it seems like what happened is that, somewhere in me, there’s a dashboard that stores my background assumptions about the world, and the “general social safety” dial got turned down a little bit, without my realizing it. So my nervous system learned a lesson that wasn’t 100% wrong, but certainly not as granular as it could’ve been. My behavior was crudely adjusted to avoid downside, and this was probably net negative.

[...]

I’m glad that I interrupted this behavioral loop. But it occurs to me that I could’ve caught it much earlier if I had been in the habit of repeatedly asking myself: am I behaving in accordance with my values? If not, is there a good explanation, or am I just being bossed around by a mysterious sense of unease? I have now built questions like this into my weekly planning routine.

I think it is worth considering that something similar might be going on with you, or might in the future. I think we all have gut-level sentiments about the world that influence our behavior: how safe we are socially, how safe we are professionally, how likely we are to be rewarded for aberrant behavior, how scary the downsides of straying off our usual path are. And I think that much of the time, these gut feelings are concealed—we’re only primarily aware of their subsidiary manifestations, not the feelings themselves.

So, take a moment to consider your gut-level disposition towards the world, which is something you might not always be able to perceive directly. You say that you are curious about people, interested in trying new things, that you value beauty and novelty, that you want to finish this project. Well, okay: is there evidence of this on your calendar this week? If not, I’m sure there are reasons for this that come to mind. But perhaps these reasons are not genuine, or not the core issue. Maybe it’s a matter of gut feeling. And perhaps that feeling is derived from an incorrect lesson you didn’t choose to learn.

https://sashachapin.substack.com/p/i-was-not-acting-like-me-are-you

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

meditation gives you the ability to re-calibrate your experience of what is pleasurable and your experience of what is satisfying. a common dead-end is trying to maintain the experience of pleasure while pursuing essentially unsatisfying activities. this is the tech bro trying to maintain a light jhana while grinding away creating a saas product he knows to be personally meaningless. it’s a “spiritual”-ified version of the investment banker riding a cocaine high to get through fourteen hours of soulless work, but it is not essentially different. it’s just another attempt to transform what is ultimately unsatisfying into mere pleasure.

one alternative is to become more sensitive to what is truly satisfying and fulfilling. this makes the pleasure in what is satisfying more obvious, and what is pleasurable and what is satisfying start to converge. your ideal behaviors become more and more effortless and intrinsically motivated.

eventually, you stop sensationalizing and dramatizing pleasure and pain altogether and see them as they are. you’re left with the deep satisfactions and resonances that only come from fully inhabiting your particular life. it might look like doing a lot of cocaine in a midtown office building, but it might not. and isn’t that worth finding out?

https://x.com/grantbels/status/1831010437330346232

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

when people are annoying me i’m like all great stories require great villains

https://x.com/grantbels/status/1825914399472890226

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

sometimes it seems like meditation is just exposure therapy to being the particular human creature you are. like you don’t have to spend your whole life flinching from your own thoughts and feelings and desires and dislikes and dreams. it’s ok

https://x.com/grantbels/status/1826999081887236554

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

today i learned anthropologists can tell which long dead people chose to spend their time hiking long distances, which spent years hunched over making pottery, which were ball players, which threw thousands of spears, which chose to spend a life playing the clarinet— all by analyzing the patterns of wear on their bones. how beautiful: the way you choose to spend your time gets etched into your bones. the choices you make and the experiences you have alter the literal structure of your being. your will and intentions— your mind— become matter, grooves in calcium, traces of what you were

https://x.com/grantbels/status/1821701640900198704

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

you know those bumper stickers that say “student driver?” i want a tattoo that says “student being.” i’m always still learning how

https://x.com/grantbels/status/1777129592672972882

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

So, there’s important teaching here: labeling a person (or even a place) as having “negative energy” is a way of avoiding responsibility for your own inner state. I would argue that shifting this paradigm is crucial for one’s spiritual life. For example, instead of blaming the other person for draining you, you could take responsibility for feeling drained when you don’t tell them the truth about your experience, such as “I’m sorry, but I really don’t have the time or energy to listen to you right now” or “I care about you, but honestly I need space from this relationship”—or whatever the truth actually is. You choose how much time and energy to give someone. You choose whether to draw a boundary. You choose whether to speak your feelings and honor your own needs. And if your response to me is “But I’m afraid that they will get upset or will judge me if I draw a boundary and speak the truth about my needs,” then that is where your spiritual work lies. You dishonor yourself if you don’t draw a healthy boundary before you feel drained, and you dishonor the other person if you don’t tell them the truth. And please be crystal clear about this: the other person is never the one draining you. You are draining you. The responsibility for taking care of yourself lies with you.

Christopher Wallis - Near Enemies of the Truth

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

you shouldn't trust anyone who has never taken BART

https://x.com/_R4V3N5_/status/1831747842974871682

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

very cool online persona of high intelligence you have cultivated. now let's see what you've actually shipped

https://x.com/_R4V3N5_/status/1824336177962553686

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

I don't have time for therapy I must code

https://x.com/_R4V3N5_/status/1818692689782882778

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

One of my biggest learnings as a founder and being around a lot of high performing people is: there are people doing work with the intensity that you would play Starcraft. Full days of incredible "actions per minute". I wouldn't have thought it possible unless I saw it.

https://x.com/scottastevenson/status/1831363658594795561

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