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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
@ivan

ivan commented Sep 19, 2025

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You've got a 16 inch Laptop, why are the arrow keys so tiny! And where's the PgUp PgDn Home End Insert Delete cluster? I wish a design-based shop like Framework would have some leadership in the keyboard area

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45033106

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ivan commented Sep 23, 2025 •
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This sub doesn't understand PWM at all

Everyone is hyper focused on modulation depth and frequency but not amplitude and duty cycle. Think of these two scenarios when wanting an average brightness of 100 nits.

  1. 3000 nit display.... on for 3% at 3000 nits off for 97 percent at 480 Hz

  2. DC dimmed down to 110 nits, on for 95 percent with 5 percent off time for oled refresh dip at 480 hz

Both have the same modulation depth and frequency. 1) Will melt your brain whereas 2) will give some people eye strain and others no strain at all.

Why does this sub treat both as equal? The stupid opple charts everyone puts up don't take this into account.

https://old.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/comments/1nnqloa/this_sub_doesnt_understand_pwm_at_all/?depth=99

@ivan

ivan commented Sep 25, 2025

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The best disinfectant is sunlight

Have you actually tried to shine sunlight on online misinformation? If you do you will quickly find it doesn't really work.

The problem is simple. It is slower to produce factually correct content. A lot slower. And when you do produce something the people producing the misinformation can quickly change their arguments.

Also, by the time you get your argument out many of the people who saw the piece you are refuting and believed it won't even see your argument. They've moved on to other topics and aren't going to revisit that old one unless it is a topic they are particularly interested in. A large number will have noted the original misinformation, such as some totally unsafe quack cure for some illness that they don't currently have, accepted it as true, and then if they ever find themselves with that illness apply the quack cure without any further thought.

The debunkers used to have a chance. The scammers and bullshitters always had the speed advantage when it came to producing content but widespread distribution used to be slow and expensive. If say a quack medical cure was spreading the mainstream press could ask the CDC or FDA about it, talk to researchers, and talk to doctors dealing with people showing up in emergency rooms from trying the quack cure, and they had the distribution networks to spread this information out much faster than the scammers and bullshitters.

Now everyone has fast and cheap distribution through social media, and a large number of people only get their information from social media and so the bullshitters and scammers now have all the advantages.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45355032

@ivan

ivan commented Oct 1, 2025

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On a semi-related note, one cool prompting technique is to act like part of the prompt has been cut-off and have the prompt begin with something like:
“(cont'd)
In summation, your task is as follows ...”
or
“[MISSING DATA]
To recap everything we have discussed so far, ...”

That way the model treats the prompt as if a much more detailed set of instructions must have come before it.

https://x.com/LokiJulianus/status/1973129252204626112

@ivan

ivan commented Oct 3, 2025 •
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After migrating a decent amount of their statements to var, they saw an 8% performance improvement across some benchmarks.

https://vincentrolfs.dev/blog/ts-var

@ivan

ivan commented Oct 5, 2025

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Well, Postgres integer primary keys are signed. So there's this WHOLE other half of the 32-bit word that you're not using if you're just auto-incrementing keys. My simple (read stupid) solution, which absolutely worked was to set the sequence on that primary key to -2,147,483,648 and let it continue to auto-increment, taking up the other half of that integer space. It was so dumb that I think we met like three times together with SRE to say things like, "Is it really this simple? Is this really likely to work? Are we really doing something this dumb?" and the conclusion was yes, and that it would buy us up to 3 years of time to migrate, but we would do it within 6-8 months so all IT departments can make alternative arrangements for their API integrations.

https://jeffersonheard.ghost.io/the-best-worst-hack-that-saved-our-bacon/

@ivan

ivan commented Oct 25, 2025

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What tripped me up the one time I really needed to call 911 on a Pixel was it auto-sends the call after the second 1. Any other call, you dial the number, 555-555-5555, then press the green phone button to send the call. Dialing 911, it instantly starts calling, and the send button changes to hangup.

I kept pressing 911 and rapidly pressing where the send key was and moving the phone to my ear to hear silence. Dial 911, press what I thought was send, put it to my ear, silence. The worst sound you want to hear when you're alone and need 911 immediately. Eventually I took a breath and went slow to see what was happening and finally noticed it was automatically sending the call.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45700568

@ivan

ivan commented Oct 25, 2025

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The designers also seem stuck under an assumption the user is operating in an act-look feedback loop. In reality, good tools let you shift your focus away from them once you become proficient - the mechanics of their use becomes second nature and fades into the background allowing you to focus on your task

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45700568

@ivan

ivan commented Oct 29, 2025

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Our older son seems to have picked up some conversation habits from me. He's playing some online multiplayer game with voice chat, and he's politely asking his teammates stuff like "what things were you thinking about when you did [stupid decision]" in a friendly voice

https://x.com/brianluidog/status/1983032568405782886

@ivan

ivan commented Nov 11, 2025

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i recommend that the average thinker think fewer but more correct thoughts. there are already enough thoughts in the world. the thoughts need to be better

i would go so far as to say that there is a "thought correctness crisis"

https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/1988092348736352269

@ivan

ivan commented Nov 11, 2025

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Lots of people misunderstand the point of "getting ahead". They think I'm talking about getting ahead of your peers. What I'm actually talking about is getting ahead of 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.

Of course, when you put in the work to remove skill bottlenecks and open doors early, you also end up ahead of peers who aren't willing to put in that work to get ahead of time, which is most people. But that's not really what it's about.

What it's about is: whether you realize it yet, achieving your dreams is a race against time. Time forces convergence, and premature convergence is what kills dreams.

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.

https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1988134665199177954

@ivan

ivan commented Nov 20, 2025

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I've found that running non steam apps on steam with the proton experimental compatibility usually just works, it has become my go to solution

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45099124

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 1, 2025

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From Ninajirachi, in a RollingStone interview about this song: “I love my computer for a million reasons, but it’s also exposed me to some pretty dubious material when I was far too young to see it. Infohazard is about the first time I encountered a snuff film as a kid. It’s kinda like a rite of passage and loss of innocence moment for people who grew up online. If I’d been in high school a hundred years ago, without ever touching a computer, would I even know things like that existed? I can’t ever really forget about it.”

a comment on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ZdeIKJA8c

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 3, 2025

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I got a call from a criminal defendant I believe is innocent. Before calling me, he voluntarily participated in a police interrogation for several hours. He believed that "I have nothing to hide" and that he could explain to the police why they had the wrong guy.

Defense attorneys might call this naïve, but look at the responses to Fleishman's OP. Even high-IQ people really believe this is how law enforcement works.

Here's the problem. When you agree to a police interrogation, you and the police are playing two different games.

As the suspect, you believe you are playing a multiplayer, collaborative game.

But the police aren't even playing a multiplayer game. They're playing a one-player game, like Tetris.

As the suspect, you're not a player in the game. You're more like the game environment, producing falling blocks for the player—the police.

The police play this game by collecting your statements like blocks and fitting them into a picture that incriminates you. When enough blocks have fit together, the police have won the game and refer the case to a prosecutor.

You believe that, once you convince the police that you are innocent, you will all win. But that's not a real outcome of the game. "Evidence that I am innocent" is not even a game element. From the cops' perspective, if they fail to assemble the blocks into an incriminating picture, they have lost the game.

Suspects who think "I have nothing to hide" are always surprised when the interrogation lasts several hours. "I've already explained everything - why am I still here?" they think.

That's because the longer the game goes on, the more falling blocks the police have to assemble their case. It's in their interests to keep the game going long past what your game required.

All suspects eventually sense this on some gut level and become frustrated. You think: "Wait a minute, - all of their questions are subtly premised on my guilt! But I can prove to them that I'm not guilty. I need to appeal to them to really hear me out."

I.e., "Let's start over with a different game where we can all work together."

But even as you're trying to change the game, you are speaking and therefore generating more blocks.

Here's the only solution. The moment you have any reason to believe you're a suspect, exit the game. Politely ask if you are free to leave. If they say "no," calmly tell them "I invoke my right to remain silent and my right to counsel."

If you're in custody when you say this, the cops will actually physically stand up and leave the room as if you've just uttered a magic incantation.

https://x.com/IanHuyett/status/1962568657017385251

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 3, 2025

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Kang Gyuri, who escaped in 2023, told the BBC that three of her friends were executed after being caught with South Korean content. She was at the trial of one 23-year-old friend who was sentenced to death.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgqdz17ye3o

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 5, 2025

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Samsung = Guaranteed retina destroyer

LG = At least put some effort in to mitigate PWM

https://old.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/comments/1nyr5cr/iphone_panel_differences/

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 5, 2025

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Many people who struggle with excessive guilt subconsciously have goals that look like this:

  • I don’t want to make anyone mad.
  • I don’t want to hurt anyone.
  • I want to take up less space.
  • I want to need fewer things.
  • I don’t want my body to have needs.
  • I don’t want to be a burden.
  • I don’t want to fail.
  • I don’t want to make mistakes.
  • I don’t want to break the rules.
  • I don’t want people to laugh at me.
  • I want to be convenient.
  • I don’t want to have upsetting emotions.
  • I want to stop having feelings.

These are what I call the life goals of dead people, because what they all have in common is that the best possible person to achieve them is a corpse.

https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/the-life-goals-of-dead-people
via https://x.com/xuenay/status/1973840821612130638

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 6, 2025

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This is architectural problem, the LUA bug, the longer global outage last week, a long list of earlier such outages only uncover the problem with architecture underneath. The original, distributed, decentralized web architecture with heterogeneous endpoints managed by myriad of organisations is much more resistant to this kind of global outages. Homogeneous systems like Cloudflare will continue to cause global outages. Rust won't help, people will always make mistakes, also in Rust. Robust architecture addresses this by not allowing a single mistake to bring down myriad of unrelated services at once.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162656

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 7, 2025

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I want to push back against the allegations that I “lost” a game of Tic Tac Toe to a pigeon. I was not properly rested and the pigeon played optimally

https://x.com/tomieinlove/status/1997468802188280199

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 7, 2025

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LLMs as writers

While LLMs are adept at reading and can be terrific at editing, their writing is much more mixed. At best, writing from LLMs is hackneyed and cliché-ridden; at worst, it brims with tells that reveal that the prose is in fact automatically generated.

What’s so bad about this? First, to those who can recognize an LLM’s reveals (an expanding demographic!), it’s just embarrassing — it’s as if the writer is walking around with their intellectual fly open. But there are deeper problems: LLM-generated writing undermines the authenticity of not just one’s writing but of the thinking behind it as well. If the prose is automatically generated, might the ideas be too? The reader can’t be sure — and increasingly, the hallmarks of LLM generation cause readers to turn off (or worse).

Finally, LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.

If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?

https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 10, 2025

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Getting negatively polarized

It’s become too common to hear people talk with pride about how they got negatively polarized into believing something.

  • “The left went crazy and drove me to the far right!”
  • “I used to be a normal liberal but other liberals were so annoying that I’m a communist now!”

This is mental weakness.

It's embarrassing to let people negatively polarize you. You're an adult. Stop it. Negative polarization means your brain got hacked by individual annoying strangers. That’s ridiculous.

When I hear someone say "I once met a very annoying person who believed X and now I hate X as a result" my only thought is that the world has 8 billion individuals in it, each one an infinite story we can just barely begin to understand in our brief time here. This person I’m talking to has let that precious truth slip from their field of vision.

Getting negatively polarized is often a sign that the person enjoys having problems. They like the idea of having someone annoying who is causing them problems and turning them evil. It feels like they’re deriving some sublimated joy from the people who annoyed them. The annoying person has given them an exciting narrative where they get to enjoy being the victim. It should be low-status to enjoy having problems like this.

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/ideological-moves-that-should-be
via https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1998446302053519608

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 15, 2025

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The amount of AI slop I've seen has genuinely been so depressing. I work as a software engineering teacher and a good 30% of the assignments I mark these days are AI. I've genuinely lost so much faith in humanity over this.

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1pmtid2/i_used_to_love_checking_in_here/?depth=99

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 16, 2025 •
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Let me down
Do you feel — better, now?
'cause I— was wrong
And there's questions I can't answer if you're gone

I see everythi—ng
And I feel — better — about it

You say — they love me
But I'm not that kinda magic
It's you they really want, it's really you

Need you to pick me up, I
Spin me around in your lies
When I see the truth I cry
uuh
When I think about it, I cry

Need you to pick me up, I
Spin me around in your lies
When I see the truth I cry
uuh
When I think about it, I

(e uh e uh e uh...)

It's you they really want, it's really you

Need you to pick me up, I
Spin me around in your lies
When I see the truth I cry
uuh
When I think about it, I cry
I cry
(it's really you)
When I think about it, I cry
I cry
(it's really you)
uuh
When I think about it, I cry

Need you to pick me up, I
Spin me around in your lies
When I see the truth I cry
uuh
When I think about it, I cry
I cry
(it's really you)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRIAa1KWG6s

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 17, 2025

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"I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards."

a comment on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNo5fs1iDrs

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 24, 2025

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I’m looking for a cash cart that can run GB games on a GB and GBA games on a GBA, not just GB games on both systems or both systems’ game on a GBA

This would not be possible, because there is an actual physical switch in GBC carts (on the bottom corner) that switches the mode when inserted into the cartridge slot. That way, the GBA knows a GB/GBC game has been inserted and switches modes accordingly.GBA flashcarts are in the shape of a GBA cartridge, and do not trigger the switch to the other mode. So unfortunately it's not possible to have both in one, you'd have to opt for having one GBA flashcart and one GBC flashcart, if you wish to run GB/GBC games natively (and be able to do things like go widescreen with L/R buttons). Although, like others have said, most GBA flashcarts do emulate Gameboy Color and Gameboy games.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Gameboy/comments/q0l47u/is_there_a_flash_cart_that_can_play_on_gb_and_gba/

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 24, 2025 •
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[...] the collective delusion that everyone can start over, that any life, once wasted in its particular, irreversible way, can still be renewed like a field left fallow, or a forgiven debt. We betray others by telling them that they still have time.

[...]

Second marriages, third careers, fourth religions, each time proclaiming “a new page” each time dragging the same chain. There is no clean page, there is only the same page, increasingly crowded, ink bleeding through from previous entries, margins filled with frantic annotations.

https://x.com/stundholz/status/2002827502742597967

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ivan commented Dec 24, 2025

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Try Master Labyrinth instead if you’re not playing with kids. It’s the same game but with more mechanics that make the game a little more strategic.

https://old.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/7g5rf4/anyone_here_play_the_labyrinth_game_by/

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 24, 2025

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I agree with most other reviewers: this is a magisterially well-informed, brilliantly insightful and thoroughly enjoyable look at the wild and woolly progress of attempts to date to provide some kind of coherent account of the foundations of QM.

Adam Becker's account of the personal and professional mechanisms behind the rise of the Copenhagen Interpretation(CI) to almost unchallenged dominance in its field is especially important. I also heartily endorse his call for more informed collaboration and mutual respect among philosophers and scientists.

I do have some caveats.

First, I think Professor Becker underestimates the degree to which subjective and institutional factors are also shaping current non-CI interpretations, though his riveting biographical accounts of the thinkers involved certainly can be taken as notes towards such an sequel.

Second, I believe there is more preliminary work to be done in unsnarling the conceptual entanglements that led thinkers like Bohr and Heisenberg to see the need for something like CI in the first place. For example, the earliest thinkers about quantum "indeterminacy" utterly failed to distinguish between radically different ontological and epistemological meanings of "determine" (ont determining = bringing things about in the world; epist determining = ascertaining a value or result). This helps explain some of the bizarre paths early QM pioneers chose to follow. They simply failed to realize that our lacking information due to instrumental limits remains a story about us, not about the underlying and preexisting physical situations we're attempting to model (lack of evidence remains no evidence of lack, even in QM).

Finally, I think Professor Becker's attempt to defend interpretations based on the universality of Schrodinger's Equation are a bit overenthusiastic. Surely we first need a clear idea of what relationships exist among quantitative models that can be successfully used as a basis for prediction and manipulation, the conceptual readings we can give those models, and the physical world of natural and cosmic history they attempt to abstractly represent before we take leaps of faith like the various Many World/Multiverse interpretations seriously. (To his credit, Professor Becker does, rightly, urge keeping multiple interpretations in mind and holding them loosely rather than rushing to judgement.)

Enough back-benching. None of these reservations should deter anyone from reading, and being delighted by, this really terrific book from a scholar who knows his stuff and can actually write.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R16RJ57NBN0QF2?ie=UTF8 'What is Real?' review

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 27, 2025

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i stated my career as an investment banker and no one talks about the biggest downside to this path: you have to be around boring and uninspired people 24/7 who are only interested in money and satisfying their base desires for comfort and status in the least imaginative ways possible

https://x.com/chthonic_youth/status/2004594929343836297

@ivan

ivan commented Dec 27, 2025

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I feel Christmas isn’t hitting as hard because people are unboxing all year long. Every hour. Unboxing unboxing . Christmas was an unboxing day. Now it’s like a holiday celebrating the invention of unboxing

https://x.com/sighswoon/status/2004668487034372253

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