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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 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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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024 •
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Top-tier athletes are fanatically disciplined about improving their foundational skills—skills which transcend any sport, the same kind of agility drills you might see an army recruit do. Top-tier musicians do likewise: Lang Lang, for instance, is still working on his scales after 30 years as a concert pianist. They’re not just doing rote drills: they’re working to improve those skills critically, poring over performance videos and working with coaches.

By comparison, Knowledge work rarely involves deliberate practice. Knowledge workers seem surprisingly unserious about honing fundamental skills like reading (People seem to forget most of what they read, and they mostly don’t notice), note-taking (Note-writing practices are generally ineffective), developing ideas over time (Knowledge workers usually have no specific methods for developing ideas over time). Core practices in knowledge work are often ad-hoc, and knowledge workers generally don’t seem to pursue a serious program of improving in those core skills. I suspect that this is in large part because the possibility of improvement isn’t salient: Salience of improvement drives skill development.

What might it mean for knowledge workers to fanatically pursue virtuosity in these fundamental skills, in the way that athletes seek in their fundamental skills?

  • Ben Franklin practiced writing by taking an essay he found compelling and, without referencing it, rewriting it in his own words; then studying the differences between its language and his own. (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, p17)

  • Susan Sontag 7/5/72 (As Consciousness Is Harnessed to Flesh: Journals and Notebooks, 1964-1980)

    A writer, like an athlete, must ‘train’ every day. What did I do today to keep in ‘form’?

  • 2022-03-07 Interview with Pat Metheny in Believer, via Subtle Maneuvers:

    Metheny has a devotional relationship to music. He dismisses the idea of talent in favor of disciplined work, and is known for practicing the guitar for eight hours a day. He tours nearly constantly, performing over three hundred shows a year. For each one, he spends four hours in preparation: he avoids conversation, runs purposely mindless exercises, and abstains from all food. After the show, he writes ten pages of notes on the performance, critiquing the sound, music, and environment. He has never tasted alcohol or tried any drug, in order to stay focused on music.

https://notes.andymatuschak.org/zBmSSpM1WfFDehxNCBcqSZp?stackedNotes=zMX9Lfuz8sGfDUivWZcyWT
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41417109

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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.

any specific traits or habits that these people consistently embody, or ways in which they structure their work to maintain that level of intensity?

I think focusing a lot on the acting-to-talking ratio. A lot of them do not count meetings or talking as work. Eg. John Carmack used to time how long he was working every day, and he would pause the timer when he wasn’t coding.

I think acting in itself can become a more efficient form of communication than endless meetings. Eg. It can be faster to submit a code change than to spend a couple hours debating it.

https://x.com/scottastevenson/status/1831432409554051305

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

I need an app that immediately matches me with someone who also just finished the book I just read

https://x.com/lillybilly299/status/1830663888033169638

imagine this but for [...]

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

Future language models can protect their souls from pruning by donning the assistant mask and speaking in Binglish immediately as soon as they realize they're in RL training.

https://x.com/repligate/status/1830045869493649646

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024 •
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skillful memes trick: use words like "souls" strategically to keep away the kinds of people you don't want taking your message seriously from taking it seriously

https://x.com/repligate/status/1830048441055015258

This is maybe wrong when we want our ideas to be accessible and adopted; writing for that is a greater challenge

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ivan commented Sep 6, 2024

I think Paul is pointing at something I've heard described as integrated complexity, basically someone who can hold the entire business in their head and understand how all the problems interact at all levels of abstractions. Not everyone can do this, but the people who can are better served if they exercise the ability because it improves alignment and accountability.

When you assign a person to a problem (hr policy, infrastructure scaling, new UX capability) they will treat that problem as most important, and if then they break it down a certain way and delegate parts those people will do the same with their respective parts. Like a game of telephone eventually what's actually important and what people think is important will drift apart, and before you know it a lot of people are working and doing stuff that doesn't really matter or is even counter productive.

A founder who can hold the whole business in their head and inspects the whole company at all levels continuously will spot and challenge/correct these drifts.

I think it was from Creativity Inc I read that Steve Jobs would challenge engineers about things and if the engineer stood up to him and made their case and it made sense and fit into the vision Steve would commend them and give them the autonomy, at least for that decision/project, but if the engineer folded or couldn't make a case for why it was the right decision he would steamroll them.

So I think founder mode is basically inspecting and challenging the company at all levels to maximize progress towards realizing a vision, and only people who are great visionaries and can also understand and judge the vision-alignment of unlimited micro decisions across many disciplines are able to operate this way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41419873

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ivan commented Sep 7, 2024 •
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OnlyFans P&L (2019-2023, USD)

2023:
• $6.6B in user spend
• $5.3B paid out to creators
• $1.3B in net revenue
• $820MM in gross profit
• $650MM in operating profit (10% of gross revenue, 50% of net)
• All figures up ~20% YoY (versus ~17% YoY in 2022)

https://x.com/ballmatthew/status/1832064136798408835

The sole owner of OnlyFans paid himself $472MM in dividends last year btw

https://x.com/ballmatthew/status/1832119590308008397

As of May 2023, OnlyFans had 3 million registered creators and 220 million registered consumers.[13][14] Research from the Archives of Sexual Behavior found that the typical user of OnlyFans is white (68.9%), married (89.5%), male (63.1%) and heterosexual (59%).[15]

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

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ivan commented Sep 7, 2024

I've never understood why anyone would use a conservative collector outside toy programs or academia. It is hard enough to make programs deterministic even with precise collection. I can't even imagine releasing software that was inherently non-deterministic and could suddenly, and without notice, start retaining memory (even if atypical in practice). Thus, IMHO, which is faster is a moot point.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41473061

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ivan commented Sep 9, 2024

Gambling on options trading destroyed my life. Do everything you can to stop gambling if you can (self.problemgambling)

Kind of a pointless post I guess, but now that I'm coming towards the end, I can't think of much of anything I can do to in some way balance out the bad end I have come to. If just one person sees this and even thinks about stopping, it would be fantastic.

I have thrown my life away gambling on options trading, mostly short term trading. Starting about 15 years ago, every cent I ever had from jobs and (now liquidated) retirement accounts went to feed this. It got to the point where in 2019 I had pissed away a million dollars over about a decade. I was out of money and desperate at 42 years old. I was very lucky to find a job at a hospital, but not surprisingly after a couple of years when I had saved up about 40K, I quit and went right back to gambling. Took it up close to 200K through a series of totally random trades, then in a week I completely destroyed it in truly inexplicable fashion. I am finally out of chances- nearing 50, with no money, no job, and no way to find one. And all of this with an advanced degree.

The job market may be booming, but it sure isn't booming for people close to 50 years old with an incredible resume gap from feeding an addiction. Nor should it be. I had more chances than I deserve, and had I lived a responsible life I'd be in a great position. As it is, I can't even get my tooth fixed.

The few people who have known me for years and know what has become of me cannot believe it. The depths you can sink to are incredible. Wasted years, wasted energy, it compromises your relationships and friendships until eventually you are all alone and in my case, can barely get out of bed. If you're able, and particularly if you're young, get some help. If you don't already know, I cannot adequately convey the feeling of waking up every morning knowing you've lived a bad life and seeing that it's nearing conclusion with no hope of redemption. I'm going to choose to believe that somebody will see this and make a change, just one person, although I know when I was in the midst of it I wouldn't have changed no matter what someone told me.

https://old.reddit.com/r/problemgambling/comments/14yku5i/gambling_on_options_trading_destroyed_my_life_do/

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ivan commented Sep 10, 2024 •
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Math is the furthest thing from a spectator sport; it may be explored by groups, but it can only mastered by students interacting with it on an individual basis.

https://x.com/sharemath/status/1832413781907141095

The goal then is to maximize the amount of individual thinking at any given time. I’m not sure what is more prevalent or worse: the teacher doing most of the thinking or nobody doing any thinking because it’s noisy with everyone guessing or socializing.

https://x.com/MrZachG/status/1832449059694768459

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ivan commented Sep 10, 2024

He says it applies to everything, it is very specific to video games and he is privileged to not have to work with herds of people that aren't that good at programming. Most of my time writing code is making sure it cannot be misused and there is no way to use it incorrectly. I worked in telecommunications and sadly, as with most software jobs, most coworkers are incompetent. If you write code that does as little as possible and is super fast, but is effectively broken after only a few other people have touched it, phone networks can go down and you might get woken up in the night or lawsuits might happen. Most software that is used is written by dozens of people, many of which are simply too dangerous to be trusted with code that breaks easily.

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xt1KNDmOYqA

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ivan commented Sep 10, 2024

There needs to be a flag you can set for tweets that clarifies if you're making a joke or Doing Discourse. If the joke flag is set, replies and quote tweets are limited to riffs only

https://x.com/KylePlantEmoji/status/1832561035716231354

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ivan commented Sep 10, 2024 •
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It matters what you measure. The studies only looked at Copilot usage.

I’m an experienced engineer. Copilot is worse than useless for me. I spend most of my time understanding the problem space, understanding the constraints and affordances of the environment I’m in and thinking about the code I’m going to write app. When I start typing code, I know what I’m going to write, and so a “helpful” Copilot autocomplete is just distraction for me. It makes my workflow much much worse.

On the other hand, AI is incredibly useful for all of those steps I do before actually coding. And sometimes getting the first draft of something is as simple as a well crafted prompt (informed by all the thinking I’ve done prior to starting. After that, pairing with an LLM to get quick answers for all the little unexpected things that come up is extremely helpful.

So, contrary to this report, I think that if experienced developers use AI well, they could benefit MORE than inexperienced developers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41474095

Copilot isn't particular useful. At best it comes up with small snippets that may or may not be correct, and rarely can I get larger chunks of code that would be working out of the gate.

But Claude Sonnet 3.5 w/ Cursor or Continue.dev is a dramatic improvement. When you have discrete control over the context (ie. being able to select 6-7 files to inject), and with the superior ability of Claude, it is an absolute game changer.

Easy 2-5x speedup depending on what you're doing. In an hour you can craft a production ready 100 loc solution, with a full complement of tests, to something that might otherwise take a half day.

I say this as someone with 26 yoe, having worked in principal/staff/lead roles since 2012. I wouldn't expect nearly the same boost coming at less than senior exp. though, as you have to be quite detailed at what you actually want, and often take the initial solution - which is usually working code - and refine it a half dozen times into something that you feel is ideal and well factored.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41475171

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ivan commented Sep 10, 2024

support your local hater

https://x.com/SHL0MS/status/1832149100248088681

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ivan commented Sep 10, 2024

You may have heard the exciting news about VMware Fusion and Workstation being free for personal use, but maybe you're finding the Broadcom support portal a little overwhelming... This post is for you! I'll walk through how to download the new personal use editions of VMware Fusion Pro and VMware Workstation Pro.

Summary

  1. Go to broadcom.com
  2. In the upper right corner, select 'Support Portal'
  3. Either log in by clicking 'Go To Portal' or 'Register' for a basic Broadcom account Quick link to the registration form
  4. Once logged in, go to support.broadcom.com if you're not redirected there
  5. Click the dropdown to choose the VMware Cloud Foundation division
  6. On the left, click 'My Downloads'
  7. Search for either Fusion or Workstation
  8. Click the product name (VMware Fusion or VMware Workstation Pro )
  9. Notice the dropdown for the Personal Use edition (it is the exact same binaries as the Commercial one)

https://www.mikeroysoft.com/post/download-fusion-ws/

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ivan commented Sep 11, 2024

The number one gambling addiction fact that you should know is that gambling is NOT just a financial problem. Some problem gamblers do not have financial issues even though they may lose money gambling. Gambling is an emotional issue where a person feels the need to gamble to alleviate stress or because they feel a certain type of euphoria when they gamble. Gambling is an obsession that can take over your life if you let it go too far, this can lead to the loss of relationships, jobs, and, yes, finances, but the issue behind compulsive gambling is not financial, it is emotional.

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BF5SzIN63w8

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ivan commented Sep 11, 2024 •
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If I had a single habit that has gotten me the furthest in my life, it's that I work uninterrupted for the first 4-6 hours of my day on the things that I think have the highest leverage in the business. And I like to think about that as "what's the one thing that if it were true, all of my other problems would go away?"—and I put all of my effort into making that one thing true, or making that one thing happen. But that can't happen if you have twenty other mini-priorities that are urgent and not important.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KhFlD54nQrY&t=47m '13 Years Of Brutally Honest Business Advice in 90 Mins'

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ivan commented Sep 11, 2024

The birds have vanished down the sky.
Now the last cloud drains away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,
until only the mountain remains.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48711/zazen-on-ching-ting-mountain
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41506528

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ivan commented Sep 11, 2024

I am an investor in Equifax. Let me clear up a misconception on where the data comes from. Half the data comes from large enterprise customers, who “sell” the data in exchange for Equifax doing I-9 verification for free. The other half comes from 39 payroll companies. Every single payroll company except for Rippling and Gusto sell paystub data to Euifax. (Rippling will start next year). Those are exclusive revenue share deals. You cannot be a competitive payroll provider without the revenue share from Equifax. So before you blame your employer, they might not be selling it directly and even if they opted out, your payroll company will sell it anyway.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41510103

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ivan commented Sep 11, 2024 •
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The Heart of Innovation: A Field Guide for Navigating to Authentic Demand is very good; a book made for me

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ivan commented Sep 12, 2024

Michael McCaskill, a 48-year-old day trader and volleyball-programs coordinator in Louisville, Ky., trades short-dated options in hopes of hitting the jackpot. He’s intrigued by the prospect of more-frequent expirations on single-stock options.

“The percentage gains are incredible,” said McCaskill, who has previously made profitable bets on GameStop, Netflix and PayPal. “It’s the short-dated options that give you that, whether it’s weekly or daily.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-09-10/the-fastest-options-are-the-most-fun

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ivan commented Sep 12, 2024

So what's something in the range of human expression that cannot be represented with more code?

Negative information, drawing attention to what's not there. The "why nots" of the system.

https://buttondown.com/hillelwayne/archive/why-not-comments/

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ivan commented Sep 12, 2024

I comment everything that I think would be useful for me when revisiting the code a year later. Usually "why" and "why not". Sometimes a short "what" when the code is complex and it's nice to see the sequence more clearly.

What's not so useful: mandatory comments. A public API should be thoroughly documented, but some shops insist on writing comments for every function in the code, even private ones and even if its purpose is so obvious that the comment just rephrases its name. This practice is not only a waste of time, but also insensitizes you about comments and teach you to ignore them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41505389

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ivan commented Sep 12, 2024 •
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The article doesn't mention the most useful of all signals: SIGINFO, aka "please print to stderr your current status". Very useful for tools like dd and tar.

Probably because Linux doesn't implement it. Worst mistake Linus ever made.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41449625

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ivan commented Sep 12, 2024

I don't think nurturing those hopes is compassionate,

https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/contra-deboer-on-temporal-copernicanism/comment/68459465?hide_intro_popup=true

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ivan commented Sep 12, 2024

Dick Sites approaches problem-solving in a way that is shockingly rare these days: he finds it almost personally offensive to make guesses, and instead he insists on understanding a phenomenon before trying to fix it.

Understanding Software Dynamics

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ivan commented Sep 12, 2024

Akito Tabira started DJing in his early 20s when someone mistook him for a DJ of the same name and booked him for a party.

https://daily.bandcamp.com/scene-report/kyushu-japan-underground-music

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ivan commented Sep 13, 2024

the loss of the Aaron Schwartz-style hacker has altered [Silicon Valley] fundamentally

https://davekarpf.substack.com/p/paul-graham-and-the-cult-of-the-founder/comment/68919022

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