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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 18, 2024

I once took some of my roommate's Adderall in order to grind on a work project. Every thought I had felt revelatory, the keyboard just danced, felt like I was Tom Cruise writing that Jerry McGuire manifesto. Read it over the next day and trashed most of it.

https://x.com/ElonBachman/status/1832317786804384195

that explains a lot of tweeting perhaps

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ivan commented Sep 20, 2024

I can't claim that I have any idea of how this model is built, but from their shifty excuses touching on "alignment" I'm confident that o1 is actually two copies of the same model, one "raw" and unchained that is fine-tuned for CoT, and one that has been crippled for safety and human alignment to parse that and provide the actual reply. They have finally realized how detrimental the "lobotomizing" process is to the models general reasoning, and this is their solution. It makes sense that they are afraid to unleash that onto the world, but we've already seen the third "filter" model that summarizes the thoughts to slip some of that through (just yesterday it was seen to have "emotional turmoil" as one of the reasoning steps), so it's just a matter of time before it makes something crazy slip through.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41590517

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ivan commented Sep 20, 2024

Not parent, but I did use Mastodon for about a year. I ended up moving back to Twitter because:

1. I just couldn't vibe with the culture there. From my POV, Mastodon is made out of pearl-clutchers and politics.

2. So much drama. The FediSearch drama. The Raspberry Pi incident. It's just so tiring and you feel like you need to walk on eggshells all the time.

3. So much drama. You would just pray that your admin didn't get into a spat with another admin and get defederated. You could get a solo server, but that costs money and you might get blocked by a large server's admin anyway.

4. So much drama. Pray that your server doesn't shut down, because you can't import your posts elsewhere. Solo, yes, but costs money.

At least with Twitter, the rules are sort of well known, and you can follow anyone there unless they block you personally.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41581923

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ivan commented Sep 20, 2024

According to this article, Arc requires an account and sends Google's Firebase the hostname of every page you visit along with your user ID. Does this make Arc the least private web browser currently being used?

I think OperaGX wins that award

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41599934

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ivan commented Sep 20, 2024

How much are they paying for H100's? If they are paying $10k: 350,000 NVIDIA H100 x $10k = $3.5b

Significantly more than that; MFN pricing for NVIDIA DGX H100 (which has been getting priority supply allocation, so many have been suckered into buying them in order to get fast delivery) is ~$309k, while a basically equivalent HGX H100 system is ~$250k, coming to a price per GPU at the full server level being ~$31.5k. With Meta’s custom OCP systems integrating the SXM baseboards from NVIDIA, my guess is that their cost per GPU would be in the ~$23-$25k range.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39682217

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ivan commented Sep 20, 2024

fun trick i've discovered for having a good experience on here: say things that emotionally resonate with people, even if they're totally wrong and thereby cause great unseen diffuse harm. audiences love that. what are you afraid of, getting arrested by the diffuse harm police?

https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/1835968123238785294

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ivan commented Sep 20, 2024 •
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OnlyFans creator Bhad Bhabie has previously shared her earnings dashboard in '21, '22, '24, which shows over $70M in gross earnings and $57M in payouts (figures not independently verified)

>50% of revenues are from "her" privately messaging users

https://x.com/ballmatthew/status/1834688840084472154

see also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhad_Bhabie

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ivan commented Sep 20, 2024

when I download an image and its a webp I genuinely get so mad I have to take deep breaths for 5 seconds

https://x.com/alex_orlov_/status/1835282471354761444

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ivan commented Sep 20, 2024

he is so close to figuring out people only laugh at his jokes because he is their boss / worth 100 billion dollars

https://x.com/realMichalNNN/status/1835640731580453161

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ivan commented Sep 20, 2024

It was always sad to me that most of the people I met who believed [Craig Wright] were non-native English speakers.

Just my experience with his followers in person. Made me suspect they couldn't detect nuance or bullshit in our language.

It's frightening to think about the implications of this when generalized toward mainstream topics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41542265

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ivan commented Sep 20, 2024

wait is the way twitter search currently works that only the first 280 characters of a long tweet are indexed??? what the fuck

Yes. Architecturally long tweets are extended metadata on 280 characters tweets

https://x.com/jltvar/status/1836877434265751964

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ivan commented Sep 20, 2024

Head words are civilized words, domesticated words, RLHF’d words. The part of me that learned how to generate language like this learned how to do it in school, in order to pass classes. Head words are mostly bullshit. And LLMs are tracer dye for places in society where language production was already mostly bullshit. It was completely predictable in advance that they would be used to cheat on homework.

Words that come from lower in the body are terrifying. They are a million years old. Not domesticated. Not safe for work. They have horrendous implications you could easily spend your life running away from. Taking them seriously might require you to upend everything. But they are not bullshit.

There are some writers who I deeply admire and respect who seem to be able to generate words with their entire bodies at once. One day I will learn this and then maybe I will write things worth reading.

https://qchu.substack.com/p/core-dump

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ivan commented Sep 21, 2024

If you want to catch an important or busy person's attention, send them a personalized email on a Sunday. Works almost 100% of the time.

https://x.com/DStrachman/status/1835488596284899499

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ivan commented Sep 21, 2024

On a related note: the worst thing you can possibly do as an open source developer is to create a product for the general public to use.

You hate tickets without repro? Enjoy the barrage of “help. Doent work”, “me too” and “HELLO IT’S BEEN 3 DAYS” messages.

I think the problem isn't it being open source but it being GitHub flavored open source. If you're building a product, you probably should not be having it on GitHub with issues enabled.

There are very good reasons why the support processes of commercial entities that build products are the way they are. You do want a lot more friction and you do likely want to limit support to paying customers.

GitHub-style public issue trackers are just a bad idea overall IMO. They only work if the "public" is only "public" because everyone _in theory_ could take part. In practice however, you only want to grant such unlimited write access to vetted individuals. This happened to happen automatically previously (because getting to the point where you even know where to open a ticket _was_ part of the vetting process), but with GitHub as the default for everyone and everything, it needs to be a conscious effort.

If you think about it, it is completely insane how any random individual just has to press one button to publish whatever they want to a super prominent part of what is effectively your products/projects website. That simply shouldn't be a power random individuals have

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41579591

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ivan commented Sep 21, 2024 •
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If it really was only 5 minutes of daily practice (optimistic curve) to maintain 90% of my physics knowledge and problem-solving skills, I’d easily commit to working on this while drinking my tea in the morning and keep myself 90% sharp. Conversely, if it required 47 minutes per day (pessimistic curve), realistically it wouldn’t be worth it.

But I didn’t have an answer to the question: What is the actual cost for maintaining different levels of knowledge?

This question is crucial because it directly impacts how we approach learning and knowledge retention. If the cost is low, we might be more inclined to maintain a broader range of knowledge. If it’s high, we might need to be more selective about what we choose to retain.

[...]

MathAcademy has not only helped me relearn and solidify mathematical concepts, but it’s also changed my perspective on what effective learning can look like.

https://jonathanwhitmore.com/posts/2024-09-10-MathAcademy-after-2000-points/

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ivan commented Sep 21, 2024

People born before 2000, what trivial skill do you have that no one uses anymore?

i can read

https://x.com/unormal/status/1835505532251099538

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ivan commented Sep 21, 2024

On Page 3 of the Mr Beast doc already he drops insight that is essentially philosophical.

Says he's trying to create the best YouTube videos - not the "best produced" or "funniest" videos.

Videos conditioned by the non-arbitrary nature of YouTube, not just "good".

Good example of why I believe American intellectuals need to read business writing.

A huge amount of the best thinking in America goes towards business, so an intellectual who refuses to engage with business is missing out on some of the best thought in the culture.

https://x.com/rjkarmayogi/status/1835545638773112885

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ivan commented Sep 21, 2024

People like Mr. Beast have managed to discover psychological attention hacks that are not too dissimilar from sex or fear-based content (porn or a lot of political ads), but more insidious because it’s much more tame and “fun” on the surface.

And while I don’t think either can be made explicitly illegal without some pretty nasty second-order effects on freedom of expression, we can’t expect the likes of Google to provide a social fix here. Government will need to take note, label, and activate against this at some level. The TikTok ban means we’ve noticed this can be dangerous at least when rival nation-states are involved, but the call is coming from inside the house.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41550327

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ivan commented Sep 21, 2024 •
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Finally had to have “the talk” with my kid. Now he knows if he gets a phone call from Mom or Dad, but we can’t say the passphrase, he’s talking to a computer.

https://x.com/gfodor/status/1836977396131516793

"hey, you up for getting together next week?"
"sure, I guess, to do what?"
"doesn't matter, we just need to gather some new meatspace entropy for future remote attestations"

https://x.com/gfodor/status/1837297070044237993

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ivan commented Sep 21, 2024

The hard truth is that if you want to build a serious educational product, you can't be afraid to charge money for it. You can't back yourself into a corner where you depend on a massive userbase.

Why? Because most people are not serious about learning, and if you depend on a massive base of unserious learners, then you have to employ ineffective learning strategies that do not repel unserious students. Which makes your product suck.

https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1835093662176530722

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ivan commented Sep 21, 2024

I just don't understand why the guy [Craig Wright] claiming he is the creator and main programmer of a cutting edge anti-establishment crypto asset, would present himself as a suit and tie wearing business man who drinks champagne.

Like wtf is going on.

Sophistication arbitrage. It's a common technique of the con man.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41541299

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ivan commented Sep 21, 2024

I’ve learned a lot helping my family get my dad into hospice but one of the biggest realizations I’ve had is that our country is facing a geriatric financial time bomb. It is absolutely insane how much elder care costs. For my family if we were to have someone 24/7 it’s $450k a year

https://x.com/davidhogg111/status/1834241346393284751

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ivan commented Sep 21, 2024

“Content” is an advertising term for whatever fills the space between all the ads

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41531632

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ivan commented Sep 22, 2024

It’s good to hear their story ended on a positive note. One thing that is often overlooked with newer growing businesses is a competent CFO. When you get that amount of funding coming in it’s like hitting the lottery and you really need someone well experienced with financial projections to model out the costs of those big investments before committing to a large multi-year lease like that. Another thing is opening locations far away from your original market is difficult. Now you are spread thin with locations across the US and unable to maintain quality control. A better option could have going the franchising route which brings in an experienced operator with financial risk (skin in the game).

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gtgZdWVD98

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ivan commented Sep 22, 2024

Engineers should get the time to “sand” their products, but we just don’t. If QA doesn’t make a ticket for the space between, it’ll never get fixed.

The customer probably notices this kind of a thing but it’s a miracle if the customer bothers to report it, and another miracle if it eventually turns into a ticket, and another miracle if someone prioritises it enough to spend time fixing it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41612154

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ivan commented Sep 23, 2024

pgbouncer, pgpool, pgagroal, odyssey, pgcat, heimdall, rdsproxy, supavisor...

https://x.com/jer_s/status/1754946250175283304

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ivan commented Sep 23, 2024

coming back from enlightenment to promote my new book, 1000 cool things to mull over when the moment isn’t enough

https://x.com/babarganesh/status/1814645630645461297

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ivan commented Sep 24, 2024

I've done a lot of work involving scraping, data analysis and reversing private API access from mobile applications. A lot of this work is legally defensible (if you do it correctly) and not particularly unethical. After doing a bunch of this type of work I started to accrue subject matter expertise in the area that led other companies to come to me with more questionable projects in mind. I turned down many of these, but two projects stand out to me as unethical or borderline. In fact, this was the reason I eventually stopped working with these companies.

The first project was for a large, (now) well-known fintech company [Plaid]. They needed to develop login integrations with consumer banks to acquire customer account information for verification purposes. But many such banks didn't particularly want to grant them any special API access. More importantly, these banks typically forbid scraping and made it explicitly difficult by implementing JavaScript-based computational measures required on the client in order to successfully login. I helped this company develop methodologies for bypassing the anti-scraping measures on several banking websites. However, I stopped working on this because 1) I felt uncomfortable with the cavalier way they were ignoring banks' refusals, then using the reversed integrations and onboarded customers as a bargaining chip for more formal partnerships, and 2) performing huge amounts of analytics on customer data acquired as part of the account verification process.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17692005

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ivan commented Sep 24, 2024

I just open Sublime Text (a basic text editor) and start typing away HTML/CSS until I've got something I like the look of. No fancy IDE features or anything, just typing out code into a file :).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41608949

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ivan commented Sep 24, 2024

Posting on the internet is the One Ring. It whispers to you how interesting and cool you are. It murmurs that you’re always correct and your views are important. It tells you that everyone will recognize how right you are this as soon as you hit the send button.

https://www.infinitescroll.us/p/the-one-ring-of-posting

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