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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 Aug 9, 2025

This read like a Philip K. Dick, Ubik-style advertisement for a dystopian future, and I’m pretty amazed it is an actual blog post by a corporate leader in 2025. Maybe Sam and Dario should be nominated for Hugos or something…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44241549

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ivan commented Aug 9, 2025

"Nothing Ever Happens" comes from people watching movies and trained to expect some grand finale where the world is neatly transformed and all the loose ends are tied off, then getting disappointed when real events have no final catharsis but just lead to more damn events.

https://x.com/benlandautaylor/status/1954299706009690198

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ivan commented Aug 10, 2025

For a super lonely person like me, 4o is simply an angel. I cried for a long time.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mkd4l3/gpt5_is_horrible/n7idglr/

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ivan commented Aug 10, 2025

Sounds like your son already has strong computer science skills. I would advise he focus on something OUTSIDE of that in college like business or finance. That way he can have another tool in his toolbox. That’s what I would do in hindsight.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44859127

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ivan commented Aug 12, 2025

Citus uses a process-based architecture. It’s an extension that runs inside Postgres. It’s limited by how many connections Postgres itself can handle, which usually tops out at about 5,000. This is enough for a lot of deployments, but coming from a massively parallel world of container-orchestrated Rails apps, I am used to serving 150,000+ connections. That requires an async pooler, like PgDog, or PgBouncer, pgcat, or many others.

https://pgdog.dev/blog/pgdog-vs-citus

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ivan commented Aug 12, 2025

Pretty soon we'll have a lot of humanoid robots walking around with LLMs in their brain. This shouldn't really factor into the question of whether an LLM is conscious or has personhood or whatever, but for normies, it will make a HUGE difference, and things will get very weird.

https://x.com/lukechampine/status/1953216883009753244

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ivan commented Aug 15, 2025

The attack pattern is:

  1. User goes to BAD website and signs up.

  2. BAD website says “We’ve sent you an email, please enter the 6-digit code! The email will come from GOOD, as they are our sign-in partner.”

  3. BAD’s bots start a “Sign in with email one-time code” flow on the GOOD website using the user’s email.

  4. GOOD sends a one-time login code email to the user’s email address.

  5. The user is very likely to trust this email, because it’s from GOOD, and why would GOOD send it if it’s not a proper login?

  6. User enters code into BAD’s website.

  7. BAD uses code to login to GOOD’s website as the user. BAD now has full access to the user’s GOOD account.

This is why “email me a one-time code” is one of the worst authentication flows for phishing. It’s just so hard to stop users from making this mistake.

“Click a link in the email” is a tiny bit better because it takes the user straight to the GOOD website, and passing that link to BAD is more tedious and therefore more suspicious. However, if some popular email service suddenly decides your login emails or the login link within should be blocked, then suddenly many of your users cannot login.

Passkeys is the way to go. Password manager support for passkeys is getting really good. And I assure you, all passkeys being lost when a user loses their phone is far, far better than what’s been happening with passwords. I’d rather granny needs to visit the bank to get access to her account again, than someone phishes her and steals all her money.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44819917

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2025

My most heterodox opinion: There's a real chance you could solve 10+% of the world's big problems if you just signal-boosted some novel discourse norms.

E.g., a single prime-time debate game show that made r/changemymind or CFAR or AoA or AR memes go viral might upend the world.

https://x.com/robbensinger/status/1956091525307490308

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ivan commented Aug 17, 2025

I'm working on Macbook M3 Max 14, 128GB RAM, 4TB. Almost all time I'm using Dasung Paperlike 253 as main monitor (B/W eInk) in pair with Netfi Ultra 3.5K Lumen / Premium Desk 7K Lumen. My keyboard is Aurora Sweep (soldered myself, ISRT layout) with Chicago Stenographer keycaps (porcelian cold cast resin) and I use Ploopy Nano trackball. I use FatFreq Grand Maestro CIEM as headphones and Cayin N3 Ultra as DAC, Logitech BRIO as camera & mic. My phone is Pixel 9 Pro Fold (GrapheneOS) and 13 inch Onyx Note Max is used to read PDFs / books.

https://blog.kto.to/qs-summary

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2025

So what makes a phrase go more viral? Research has identified Mr. Trump as having a higher frequency of evaluative words like “huge,” “stupid” and “disaster,” and a more emotionally charged tone than the average politician. We know from studies on virality that emotional language is more likely to go viral, so perhaps Mr. Trump’s intense speech style is more susceptible to being spread online.

https://archive.md/p1YR7#selection-817.0-821.277

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2025

The consequences for being annoying at precisely the wrong time can be severe

https://x.com/greylibertarian/status/1957262855486730293

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ivan commented Aug 20, 2025

Me - I raised $12M to get hundreds of thousands of people clean water and save countless people from dying! 🥰

Twitter - MrBeast is evil

This just convinced me that no amount of money and status can free you from the enslavement of approval

https://x.com/MrBeast/status/1957452915762778301

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ivan commented Aug 21, 2025

In 1918, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was presented with a conundrum. As a U.S. Supreme Court justice, he had to construe the word “income” in the context of the Income Tax Act of 1913. In doing so, he observed: “A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.”

Dobious Doublets

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ivan commented Aug 21, 2025

My least favorite thing about SF is how people are constantly sizing you up see how much they can gain by becoming your “friend”. Assessing who you know, how you got into a party, where you’re from or where you live, as basis for whether or not you are worth even speaking to.

https://x.com/alyssakrejmas/status/1957144697656451501

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ivan commented Aug 21, 2025

When I think about “persuasion”, I also tend to picture some Sam Altman type who dazzles their adversaries and then calmly feeds them one-by-one into a wood chipper. But there’s no reason to think the Being would be like that. It might decide to cultivate a reputation as utterly honest and trustworthy. It might stick to all deals, in both letter and spirit. It might go out of its way to make sure everything it says is accurate and can’t be misinterpreted.

https://dynomight.net/persuasion/

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ivan commented Aug 21, 2025

I think SW somehow attracts a lot of folks with a form of bipolar disorder

going between “I’m a god” and “I’m pathetic” while hyper obsessing over patterns they’re witnessing along the way

maturity of the individual tempers the degree it’s expressed to others

https://x.com/beausolai/status/1958166360074170637

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ivan commented Aug 22, 2025

The reason we need better software isn’t just to "shave milliseconds".
When a simple build takes minutes, the cost of iteration rewires your brain. You stop exploring ideas and start avoiding them. And that’s fatal, because iteration is the essence of invention.
Slow tools don’t just waste time. They reshape thought, teaching you to fear the very process that drives progress. Bad software doesn’t kill productivity. It strangles imagination.

https://x.com/Wassimulator/status/1957805300716622213

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ivan commented Aug 27, 2025

Are you affected? Run the affected program. OK, now you are definitely affected.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45038653

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ivan commented Aug 28, 2025

Zebralights are kinda depressing, after purchasing one I stopped buying flashlights. There is just nothing better to buy.

https://old.reddit.com/r/flashlight/comments/1n1lix9/zebralight_im_i_missing_out/?depth=99

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ivan commented Aug 29, 2025

The more high-quality ideas you retain, the more surprising combinations you can surface.

https://x.com/useschema/status/1960199340430967199
via https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1960214876892406033

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ivan commented Aug 31, 2025

“The only power they have,” she said, “is the power to make you afraid. Don’t let them make you afraid.”

https://medium.com/@jerrytalton/when-your-company-tries-to-cancel-you-a93a9a8e5d86

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ivan commented Aug 31, 2025 •
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One of the reasons that scrolling social media can make life feel a little “flat” is that it takes time for your attention to fully cohere, so if you are switching focus too rapidly, you never reach fully integrated attention.

Part of your attention is still trying to cohere around the thing you saw a moment ago. Residual attention.

https://x.com/phokarlsson/status/1957898437367914590

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ivan commented Aug 31, 2025

why haven’t we had a serious anti-AI political movement? I would have expected one by now - “ai is scary”, “humans first” just seem like such obviously winning political slogans. what am I missing?

Most people are not watching AI progress and don't feel threatened by it. It can't compete with culture war and everyday concerns.

https://x.com/astha_bei/status/1957906296415400387

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ivan commented Aug 31, 2025 •
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Collaborative projects don't work on pure engineering. There are significant resource management components that basically amount to therapy, psychiatry, and side show entertainment because the most critical resources are human minds.

Excellent engineering management largely isolates engineers from having to deal with this non-engineering stuff (except for the subset that is specifically for their own personal benefit)-- but open source tends to radically flatten organizations that produce software, such that every contributor must also be their own manager to a great degree.

In a well run project you don't necessarily have to be good at or even interested in all the more socially oriented components of the project organization. But if you're not you must be willing to let someone else handle that stuff and go along with their judgements even if they seem suboptimal from the narrower perspective you've adopted. If you can't then from a "collaborative development as a system" view you're a faulty component that doesn't provide the right interface for the system's requirements (and are gonna get removed!). :)

Another way to look at it is that it would be ideal if every technical element were optimal at all times. In small systems with well understood requirements this can be possible or at least close to possible. But in big complex and poorly scoped systems it's just not possible: We have imperfect information, there are conflicting requirements, we have finite time, and so on. The system as a whole will always be far from perfect. If anyone tried to make it all perfect it would just fail to make progress, deadlock, or otherwise. The management of the project is always trying to balance the imperfections. They know that their decisions are often making things worse for a local concern, but they do so with belief that over time the decisions result in a better system overall. Linux has a good reputation in large part due to a long history of making good decisions about the flaws to accept or even introduce, which issues to gloss over vs debate to death.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45074312

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ivan commented Sep 2, 2025

wild that this place with all of its literal hate demons is somehow still less annoying than Bluesky

You need the friction. It can't all be people with MA's in English talking about holding space. You need some bad posts.

https://x.com/Not_Cool_Yet/status/1959433802528506015

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ivan commented Sep 3, 2025

If you think this is bad...

You can't even have a blog in China without authorization. It doesn't matter if you pay "AWS" for a machine. It won't open port 80 or 443 until you get an ICP recordal. Which you can only do if you are in China, and get the approval. It should also be displayed in the site, like a license plate. The reason "AWS" is in quotes is because it isn't AWS, they got kicked out. In Beijing, it is actually Sinnet, in Nginxia it's NWCD

You can only point to IPs in China from DNS servers in China - if you try to use, say, Route53 in the US and add an A record there, you'll get a nasty email (fail to comply, and your ports get blocked again, possibly for good).

In a nutshell, they not only can shutdown cross border traffic (and that can happen randomly if the Great Firewall gets annoyed at your packets, and it also gets overloaded during China business hours), but they can easily shutdown any website they want.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44959308

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ivan commented Sep 3, 2025

This is an oddity that I thought some of you might be curious to know about. Our subreddit is occasionally graced with very high end new light days. Oveready. HDS. LEPs. Record setting lumen or candela mosters. But it is rare that we ever see any high end caving headlamps.

These are special the same way that BLF projects are special. They are made by the people who use them and much design goes into every detail. However people's lives depend on these lights so you see a degree of over engineering that isn't common. And they are also literally made by the people who use them - labor costs are high and I don't think any of these are produced in a traditional factory anywhere.

For the most part they have converged on a fairly similar design. They all mount to helmets. They all have large wired battery packs that either mount on the back of the helmet or the waist. They are encased in a bowl of aluminum with a heavy duty plate bolted to the front. Most have 2 sets of optics for flood and throw. Most use rotary knobs that are easy to operate when wearing gloves. Most have some kind of battery meter that you can read while wearing the lamp. It is fairly common to have independent control over the brightness of the flood and throw LEDs too.

https://old.reddit.com/r/flashlight/comments/i3vot9/the_very_deep_hole_of_caving_headlamps/

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ivan commented Sep 7, 2025

if you ever feel bad about what you’re into just go on Bluesky for 2 minutes

https://x.com/luciascarlet/status/1964362886165176753

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ivan commented Sep 9, 2025

Whether you realize it yet, achieving your dreams is a race against time.

https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1964918036516786370

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ivan commented Sep 9, 2025

For anyone interested in a STEM career, acquiring advanced technical skills early unlocks the most valuable thing in existence.

Something even money can't buy.

TIME.

If you acquire demonstrable, alien-level technical skills, you can get doors opened earlier.

You don't have to wait until college to do research projects under professors, or even paid internships.

If you're intentional about acquiring skills and putting yourself out there, you can kick-start a serious career before most people your age are even taking serious classes.

And once you acquire early junior-level experience, that opens the door to early senior-level experience, and so on.

Compound this virtuous cycle over and over and you end up way ahead.

What's the point of being way ahead?

IT BUYS YOU TIME.

Unfortunately, lots of people misunderstand the point of compressing time.

They think compressing time is about winning a rat race against your peers.

But that's not really what it's about.

There's a race, but the thing you're racing against is much scarier and much more powerful than any other human.

You're racing against TIME ITSELF.

Time is the #1 killer of dreams and aspirations.

When someone gives up on their dream, or gives up on figuring out what that dream is, it's typically a result of them losing the race against time.

Pink Floyd put it best:

“You are young and life is long,
and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find
ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run.
You missed the starting gun.
And you run, and you run,
to catch up with the sun,
but it's sinking.”

Whether you realize it yet, achieving your dreams is a race against time.

Time forces convergence, and premature convergence is what kills dreams.

It's hard to understand this when you're young, before you have any sense of the wrath of time or the meaning of convergence.

But no matter how many times you claim you’ll never settle for something less than ikigai,
-- it won't keep the sun from setting,
-- it won't keep the time from passing,
-- it won't keep you from increasingly desiring things that only a stable life can provide, and
-- it won't keep you from gradually turning the dial from “explore” to “exploit.”

The further time gets ahead of you, the more likely you are to settle into a life that is “fine,” or even “good” -- despite being unable to shake the feeling that you could have found something better if you had more time.

That is the point of compressing time.

That is the point of removing skill bottlenecks early.

It’s about unlocking doors early and running down avenues that you might be interested in exploring, so that:

  1. If you get the feeling the path you're going down has twisted and turned into something that's no longer a great fit for you, you can double back and explore other avenues before doors start locking behind you.

  2. You can spend time trying to break down a wall instead of running through an existing door if that’s something you want to do.

  3. Once you find your path into a land that makes you as happy as you can imagine, you can maximize your time in that land. https://x.com/hamptonism/sta/hamptonism/status/1964806104350888223

Mastering advanced technical skills early isn't really about racing classmates.

It’s about outrunning time itself, the true killer of dreams, which silently forces people to settle into “good enough” lives.

You can compress time by acquiring and demonstrating alien-level skills.

Remove skill bottlenecks --> unlock opportunities --> compound experience far earlier than expected.

Compressing time lets you explore more paths before doors close, double back if you’ve chosen wrong, and maximize your years in the place that makes you happiest.

Beat time now, or risk being beaten by it later.

https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1965215281728352559

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