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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 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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ivan commented Sep 14, 2024

Nick Sutrich from Android Central embarked on the journey of tweaking the Pixel 8 Pro with a custom boot image that doubles the PWM refresh rate to 480Hz, requiring the device to be rooted, among other things, beforehand. Through further modification, Sutrich says he’s been able to run the Pixel 8 Pro at 3840Hz without any obvious issues besides a noticeable green tint and some other color oddities, which is presumably why Google doesn’t run the device like this out of the box.

https://9to5google.com/2024/07/29/pixel-8-pro-mod-improves-the-display-for-users-sensitive-to-pwm-refresh-rate/

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ivan commented Sep 14, 2024

I stopped hoping for any changes. I will keep my iPhone 11 as long as it would be operational, and then will move over to something else suitable for my needs. If they don't care about [PWM] sensitive people, I'm not going to care about their products anymore.

https://old.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/comments/1fcul9k/iphone_16_pwm_updates/

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ivan commented Sep 15, 2024

You are correct about Mirena being more effective than Paragard. This study shows that the 7-year pregnancy rate for TCu380A (Paragard) is 2.5 per 100, but only 0.5 per 100 for Mirena.

Mirena had a lower pregnancy rate than Paragard in every year of the study. Mirena is still more effective than Paragard in years 6 and 7, despite it only being licensed for 5 years whereas Paragard is licensed for 12.

Yes, both are extremely effective methods of contraception, but anyone who says they are equal is misinformed.

https://old.reddit.com/r/birthcontrol/comments/6jx5vn/hormone_911_mirena_iud_vs_paraguard/djidey5/

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ivan commented Sep 16, 2024 •
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Apply-Degger is a long-form, deep dive into the most important philosophical book of the last 100 years. Each episode of this podcast series will present one of the key concepts in Heidegger’s philosophy. Taken together, the episodes will lay out the entirety of Heidegger project for people who are curious, serious and interested, but who simply don’t have the time to sit down and read the 437 densely-written pages of the book. It is our hope that this series will show how Heidegger’s thinking might be applied to one’s life in ways which are illuminating, elevating and beneficial.

https://www.onassis.org/channel/apply-degger-podcast-simon-critchley

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ivan commented Sep 16, 2024

No, Heidegger explicitly attempts to refute and attack Descartes's supposition "cogito ergo sum" (the first therefore). And one can read all of Heidegger's early philosophy as an attempt to undo the errors started by Descartes: Heidegger faults Descartes with stymieing all of modern philosophy with a false first presupposition.

Heidegger's fault with Descartes lies in the very first two words: "I think." Heidegger does not believe that the "I" (Dasein/Being) is the thing that thinks (directly at least). In Descartes' world, humans are "res cogitans" ("thinking machines"): the "I" is that which thinks. For Descartes, there is some thing that is doing the thinking. In Heidegger's world, there is not some mysterious being that thinks, but rather the "I" is the experiencing/thinking itself (the "thrown-openness"). This is why Heidegger always uses verbs/gerunds to describe Being.

For Heidegger, the simple statement "I think" cannot possibly be true because there is no "I" behind the thinking. For Heidegger, the analog basic first-claim would instead simply be: "there is thinking" (the "ego"/"I" as we think about it is the "thinking" itself for Heidegger).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20956949

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ivan commented Sep 16, 2024

There's a separate entitlement used for remote access software without the repeated prompts (com.apple.developer.persistent-content-capture), so you basically need Apple's permission to build that category of software now, and open source remote access software is not possible.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41559761

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ivan commented Sep 16, 2024 •
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No matter the framework, if you see something with “effect” in the name, try not to use it. Seriously. Do your best.

one of the reasons Svelte 5 has a rune called '$effect' (rather than something like 'watch' or 'autorun' or whatever) is to discourage you from actually using it

basically they're complexity magnets — people use them for the wrong things (e.g. updating state that should be derived, or doing work that belongs in an event handler), and spaghetti ensues. They're mostly escape hatches

https://x.com/Rich_Harris/status/1835439010195677317

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ivan commented Sep 16, 2024 •
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Which translation of "Being and Time" should I get?

I have read both as well as the original German text. I don't think the SUNY [Stambaugh] translation does as good of a job defining the terms and their intent/purpose.

https://old.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/n7lrj/which_translation_of_being_and_time_should_i_get/

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ivan commented Sep 17, 2024

The first part of Being and Time analyzed what life is like in a completely new way, which I think points toward the solution. Heidegger abandoned the fundamental eternalist assumption that meaning must come from some ordering principle such as God or rationality. He showed how life is structured instead by “circumspection,” a non-dual awareness in which everyday circumstances show up as always already meaningful in our interactions with them. This understanding of meaning as neither objective nor subjective, but interactive is fundamental to Meaningness.

Then Heidegger took a wrong turn. The further analysis of meaning he developed in the second half of the book was definitely mistaken (as he later acknowledged).

https://meaningness.com/further-reading

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ivan commented Sep 18, 2024

I don't think you're taking into account the context or intended audience. It's a casual forum message posted in reply to someone else's message.

They have not written a "falsehoods programmers believe" article. They have proposed that one ought to be written and have given a starting point for what it might cover.

They offered their list to "get the ball rolling", confirming that they don't see it as a finished product.

They sent it to other readers of the same forum, who might be expected to have more knowledge of this topic, not to whoever runs across it on the front page of HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41541770

on Hacker News commenters thinking everything is an article written for them

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