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2024 reading list
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2024_reading.md

Things I might read in 2024.

Now extended into 2025.

  • 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 Deming - The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education/ audio
  • W. Edwards Deming - 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
  • Jefferson Fisher - The Next Conversation/ audio
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ivan commented Jul 3, 2025

one of the worst ways you can mess up people's productivity is regularly making them feel "oh no, if I touch this, something bad might happen!"

there's many flavors of this: the classic example in engineering is convoluted code with nonexistent/bad/too-slow-to-run-often tests, but being unclear/inconsistent about which decisions people on your team can make for themselves or not is just as bad

https://x.com/bschne/status/1940734572570071546

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ivan commented Jul 4, 2025

I will never understand the mind of a politician. Lisa Murkowski is 68 years old. She’s been a senator for nearly 25 years. She had a chance today to make history. who cares if they primaried her? retire with dignity instead of fucking the whole country to hold onto your seat.

https://x.com/crunchyrugger/status/1940236397312713087

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ivan commented Jul 5, 2025

You have no control over yourself or your life, and so you channel your frustration at your own ineptitude and failures on unsuspecting, innocent parties who are unable to fight back without losing their livelihoods

https://x.com/climatepaige/status/1940487868306411717

rufus I think god should kill you

https://x.com/tszzl/status/1940509688610935084

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ivan commented Jul 5, 2025

> buy every game studio
> can’t make game

> partner with biggest ai company
> can’t make ai coding assistant

What the fuck?

[MSFT]

They specialize in generating shareholder value, you wouldn’t understand

https://x.com/Clever_Loon/status/1940984082613391831

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ivan commented Jul 5, 2025

Samurai did head collection with a ritual to beautify severed heads of worthy rivals and put on display.[49] The samurai applied various cruel punishments on criminals. The most common capital punishments up until the Meiji Restoration were (in order of severity): decapitation, decapitation with disgraceful exposure of head post-death, crucifixion (for e.g. parricide), and death by burning with incendiaries.[44] Members of the samurai class had the privilege to perform hara-kiri (suicide disemboweling).[44] If it was not lethal then a friend or relation performed decapitation (kaishaku).[44] In 1597, Toyotomi Hideyoshi ordered the prosecution of 26 Martyrs of Japan.[50] They were tortured, mutilated, paraded through villages and executed by crucifixion, tied to crosses on a hill and impaled by lances (spears).[51] In the 17th century, the Tokugawa Shogunate executed over 400 Christians (Martyrs of Japan) for being more loyal to their faith than the Shogunate.[50] The capital punishments were beheading, crucifixion, death by burning and Ana-tsurushi (穴吊るし; lit. "hole hanging").

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

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ivan commented Jul 7, 2025

A self-serving bias is any cognitive or perceptual process that is distorted by the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem, or the tendency to perceive oneself in an overly favorable manner.[1] It is the belief that individuals tend to ascribe success to their own abilities and efforts, but ascribe failure to external factors.[2] When individuals reject the validity of negative feedback, focus on their strengths and achievements but overlook their faults and failures, or take more credit for their group's work than they give to other members, they are protecting their self-esteem from threat and injury. These cognitive and perceptual tendencies perpetuate illusions and error, but they also serve the self's need for esteem.[3] For example, a student who attributes earning a good grade on an exam to their own intelligence and preparation but attributes earning a poor grade to the teacher's poor teaching ability or unfair test questions might be exhibiting a self-serving bias. Studies have shown that similar attributions are made in various situations, such as the workplace,[4] interpersonal relationships,[5] sports,[6] and consumer decisions.[7]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-serving_bias

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ivan commented Jul 8, 2025

The main problem seems to me to be related to the ancient problem of escape sequences and that has never really been solved. Don't mix code (instructions) and data in a single stream. If you do sooner or later someone will find a way to make data look like code.

That "problem" remains unsolved because it's actually a fundamental aspect of reality. There is no natural separation between code and data. They are the same thing.

What we call code, and what we call data, is just a question of convenience. For example, when editing or copying WMF files, it's convenient to think of them as data (mix of raster and vector graphics) - however, at least in the original implementation, what those files were was a list of API calls to Windows GDI module.

Or, more straightforwardly, a file with code for an interpreted language is data when you're writing it, but is code when you feed it to eval(). SQL injections and buffer overruns are a classic examples of what we thought was data being suddenly executed as code. And so on[0].

Most of the time, we roughly agree on the separation of what we treat as "data" and what we treat as "code"; we then end up building systems constrained in a way as to enforce the separation[1]. But it's always the case that this separation is artificial; it's an arbitrary set of constraints that make a system less general-purpose, and it only exists within domain of that system. Go one level of abstraction up, the distinction disappears.

There is no separation of code and data on the wire - everything is a stream of bytes. There isn't one in electronics either - everything is signals going down the wires.

Humans don't have this separation either. And systems designed to mimic human generality - such as LLMs - by their very nature also cannot have it. You can introduce such distinction (or "separate channels", which is the same thing), but that is a constraint that reduces generality.

Even worse, what people really want with LLMs isn't "separation of code vs. data" - what they want is for LLM to be able to divine which part of the input the user would have wanted - retroactively - to be treated as trusted. It's unsolvable in general, and in terms of humans, a solution would require superhuman intelligence.

--

[0] - One of these days I'll compile a list of go-to examples, so I don't have to think of them each time I write a comment like this. One example I still need to pick will be one that shows how "data" gradually becomes "code" with no obvious switch-over point. I'm sure everyone here can think of some.

[1] - The field of "langsec" can be described as a systematized approach of designing in a code/data separation, in a way that prevents accidental or malicious misinterpretation of one as the other.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44502318

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ivan commented Jul 13, 2025

>this is bad
>why?
>because I don’t like it
>why?
>because it’s bad

https://x.com/ITARviolation/status/1943342065334579414

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ivan commented Jul 13, 2025

I don't think the NPR reporter is deliberately spinning the story. I think a lot of people don't really believe that other people are really different from them. The reporter would never knowingly poison people for money, so it's not comprehensible to them that lots of people in the world just don't care whether they do or not. The only reason in their minds that people would do such a thing are economic desperation combined with ignorance; if those two factors are gone, they really believe the problem has been forever solved.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44535898

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ivan commented Jul 14, 2025

de•ca•thect  (dē′kə thekt**′**),

 v.t. 

  1. to withdraw one's feelings of attachment from (a person, idea, or object), as in anticipation of a future loss:He decathected from her in order to cope with her impending death.

https://www.wordreference.com/definition/de%E2%80%A2ca%E2%80%A2thect

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ivan commented Jul 15, 2025

I would happily pay monthly for Firefox - but not to Mozilla Corporation. Will Pay to developers, development support and operations - not to pad the CEO salary.

Yet we happily do that for everything else.

Either software developers have to figure out how to out compete the CEO ghouls (without becoming CEO ghouls themselves), or we just have to accept that the CEO ghouls will take their cut. There's no version of this where you can pay for a service, but also dictate how that money is spent.

I think that's because those everything else are products with an opaque structure, and Mozilla, and for example Wikipedia, are more transparent. Really highlights why some people don't open up, either themselves, their source code, or their organizational structure: it's just inviting endless criticism.

Adding to the point, donating to Mozilla (or Wikipedia) is optional, and paying for a product is not, legally. So if I'm buying clothing, it's whatever, I need my clothing, and the price is just the functional gateway of getting it. But in case of a Mozilla donation, I'm trying to do something good in the world. And if I discover that it's wasted, then I'm not just getting nothing - I am worse off, because I supported a bad cause.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549029

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ivan commented Jul 16, 2025

I think trolley problems suffer from a different type of oversimplification.

Suppose in your system of ethics the correct action in this sort of situation depends on why the various different people got tied to the various bits of track, or on why ‘you’ ended up being in the situation where you get to control the direction of the trolley.

In that case, the trolley problem has abstracted away the information you need (and would normally have in the real world) to choose the right action.

(Or if you have a formulation which explicitly mentions the ‘mad philosopher’ and you take that bit seriously, then the question becomes an odd corner case rather than a simplifying thought experiment.)

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/h22n4nZQd9J2MEZxq/the-problem-with-trolley-problems#comment-vs4tJiG3DfuiEnr4j

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ivan commented Jul 17, 2025

I'm not tired of reminding everyone that "conflict resolution" is no more than an euphemism for "breaking durability by dropping already committed and acknowledged data".

Either architect for no data overlap on writes across all the "actives" (in which case software like pgactive could be a good deal) or use a purely distributed database (like Yugabyte).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44586474

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ivan commented Jul 17, 2025

normies are usually pretty OK at arriving at pragmatically sound worldmodels through their fuzzy trial and error language games,

but one thing that never ceases to blow my mind everytime I come across it, is that after thousands of years of evolution they still think that a successful opinion generating process is meant to be correct everytime, rather than producing a positive risk adjusted track record

they genuinely cannot comprehend the sharpe ratio, it's "did you have breakfast this morning" for 115 IQs

"you were wrong about this thing you were convicted in"

> yes, I'm not optimizing for never being wrong

"?????"

in normie world getting quote tweeted on some wrong prediction from 5 years ago is a cancellable offence

https://x.com/apralky/status/1945201262745600392

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ivan commented Jul 17, 2025

So sad, all the money in the world and somehow he believes he's a victim.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44572593

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ivan commented Jul 17, 2025

The powerful tend to like the idea of less democratic governments / rigging the game (business) so they win. It's easy, they're not interested in competing in a market (ideas or business) if they can simply cuddle up to a despot and easily get theirs. So we see many line up to take their turn to bend the knee.

There's a weird idea among those on the right in the US where they see business people as somehow having some good insights as far business overall (the market) for the country. But really many of those who gain power are very much not interested in competing / open markets / competition, quite the opposite. They got theirs and for many the inclination is to close the door (market) behind them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44572593

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ivan commented Jul 19, 2025

A lot of stuff is maximizing for attention. But it doesn't build trust. Trust is the scarce resource, not attention.

https://x.com/ejames_c/status/1946093765061693560

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ivan commented Jul 19, 2025

extremely niche esoteric dating discourse take is L ron hubbard says in one of his books that to create a long lasting marriage you would pair people up based on their reaction times and delay in getting to the point when answering a question.

https://x.com/owenbroadcast/status/1946043508902559834

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ivan commented Jul 23, 2025

The Mohist and "Legalistic" version of the rectification of names emphasizes the use of hermeneutics to find "objective models" ("fa", 法) for ethics and politics, as well as in practical fields of work, to order or govern society.[12] Mozi advocated language standards appropriate for use by ordinary people.[8] With minimal training, anyone could use these "objective, particularly operational or measurement-like standards",[13] giving identical names to equivalent social relationships and functions so as to apply identical standards of "correct" behavior in analogous situations.[14][15]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

Society is talkslop
Street is walkslop
School is thinkslop
Sports is moveslop
Shower is cleanslop
Talking to girls is loveslop
Family is lifeslop
Job is moneyslop

https://x.com/7ynt85/status/1908876850782220435

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

Palantir has been stalking people in Coles for 3 years now, all Coles AI is Palantir, they're even rolling it out onto manned registers to snoop on their employees now too

https://x.com/hotnutbar/status/1944587422186213662

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

Spiteful zombies only want to dominate and humiliate. Even my own relatives.

https://x.com/worlddestroyar/status/1947021937311367282

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

being able to honor our curiosity

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/sacrifice

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

They probably know that they're less likely to be fooled if they don't listen to the technical razzle dazzle. I suppose the Dunning-Kruger Effect can't even get started if you resolutely stay ignorant.

https://x.com/RussellJohnston/status/1947140505281691666

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

Got you. I chalk it up to the fact that few people are fundamentally intellectually curious. Some folks are just interested in making money or sounding smart because that's what peers value, and don't realize that deep interest can actually help them make better investments.

https://x.com/andrewgwils/status/1947020269174059277

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

all of the US is operating as an exit scam now. every sector, industry, layer of govt, etc

https://x.com/tolstoybb/status/1947352574015001024
via https://x.com/bryancsk/status/1947498708574343323

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

he actually failed to empathize.
Incorrectly modelled another mind.
His failure is compassion to an active opponent.

https://x.com/unreadlibraries/status/1947782470474371462

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ivan commented Jul 26, 2025

I think it's nice if women and men appreciate and respect each other, and also themselves.

https://x.com/brianluidog/status/1948938473693725092

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ivan commented Jul 26, 2025

what can we do to make sure you can do your best work?

what can we do to make sure you can do your best work?

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ivan commented Jul 26, 2025

The "tech bro" newbies always love talking about incentives. But in the real world, adverse selection is a way more useful concept

https://x.com/brianluidog/status/1948973351214743568

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