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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 Jan 12, 2026

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reading Project Hail Mary tonight and wondering at how dated it feels for the protagonist to not have an intelligent ai to chat with and consult.

it's so easy to take ai for granted but truly it is awesome to realize- humans are no longer alone

https://x.com/mimi10v3/status/2004873447302987840

@ivan

ivan commented Jan 13, 2026

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Normies love escape rooms. It’s like they know deep down in there somewhere that there is something needing to be escaped from. But they don’t know what. So they go into simulated hamster cage escape environment to “have fun”

https://x.com/bronzeageshawty/status/2011035810796380647

@ivan

ivan commented Jan 16, 2026

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Every person gets his own intelligence agency. You need a trillion machine eyes watching the world, filtering and aggregating information, letting you make sense of things and chart a course.

https://x.com/worlddestroyar/status/2012112623412895988

@ivan

ivan commented Jan 16, 2026 •
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This reads as genuinely nightmarish.

Our civilization is doomed if this is the future. Zero quality, zero resiliency, zero coherent vision, zero cohesive intent. Just chaotic slop everywhere, the ultimate Ouroboros."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46518216

Software-as-a-Psychosis

https://x.com/niemerg/status/2011154303797563606

@ivan

ivan commented Jan 18, 2026

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website similar to twitter but every tweet has a default-invisible notes section. and for a tweet to be posted, it requires a discussion in the notes evaluating each concept used in the tweet and each claim made, defending it against obvious objections

https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/2012993229549977888

@ivan

ivan commented Jan 19, 2026 •
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and now my review there warns other consumers that those are only for DIY use

Actually make sure with a incognito window that this review is actually visible. I've noticed that some reviews of mine have been "shadow-banned" and while it looks like they're still there when I'm logged in, once I try in a incognito window the review doesn't show up publicly anymore. My reviews were just basically facts about the products themselves, and received no word from Amazon about breaking any rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678205

I've noticed this too. Vine Gold Amazon program member, but sometimes my reviews are rejected or shadow banned for no discernible reason. I think there may be some corruption in the review moderation process (as well as in the commingling process, which I've also had problems with).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678205

@ivan

ivan commented Jan 21, 2026

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i think the role that a sense of satisfaction plays in causing human irrationality is under-explored. thorough checking for flaws can produce satisfaction but superficial checking plus strong emotional resonance can produce it much more easily

https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/2010919521574646129

@ivan

ivan commented Jan 21, 2026

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What could happen if chocolates are not stored as required?

Lindt chocolates are very sensitive to any excessive condition, whether too hot or too cold. Chocolates can be adversely affected if exposed to unfavorable conditions after manufacture which results in bloom. Bloom is a greyish coating on the surface of chocolates and is more visible on dark chocolate. There are two kinds of bloom, fat bloom, which is caused by fat migration and sugar bloom caused by humidity. Both these types of blooms happen during improper storage of chocolates. Chocolates should ideally be stored at around 57° to 68°F and the relative humidity should not exceed 65%. We take every care in the handling of our products within our own distribution system, however once the product leaves our care we have little control over such things as the storage conditions for example, the temperature and humidity the chocolate is kept in.

https://www.lindtusa.com/lindt-frequently-asked-questions

@ivan

ivan commented Jan 22, 2026

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the problem with people who disagree with me is that they're not very agreeing with what is true according to me

https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/2014228715790594094

@ivan

ivan commented Jan 23, 2026

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One of my core principles is this: if I wouldn’t use it on myself or my own children, I won’t sell it to others or their children. This principle helps my business on the correct track.

https://x.com/Engineer_Wong/status/2014589077182714121

@ivan

ivan commented Jan 23, 2026

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Sitting in front of a painting for 20 minutes is the easiest way for me to relax and come into myself. I tend to be a bit restless and overactive, but a painting gives me just enough to concentrate on to hold my attention fully, while also being almost completely void of thought.

https://x.com/phokarlsson/status/2014649560254333017

@ivan

ivan commented Jan 25, 2026

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Addons broken in profile copied to new PC despite attempted fix

Ok, I seem to have found the solution to my own problem on Reddit, specifically nicolaasjan1955's reply to this post: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/xt6pxy/extensions_not_working_after_moving_profile_from/

I copied over the profile again, changing the paths in extensions.json and pkcs11.txt, and then this time deleted addonStartup.json.lz4 like nicolaas suggests. Then I restarted Firefox twice with that profile, and boom, extensions all appearing and working, even after continuing to restart a couple times!

https://support.mozilla.org/mk/questions/1471372

@ivan

ivan commented Jan 27, 2026

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image

Foundations of Engineering

@ivan

ivan commented Jan 28, 2026

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Christopher Alexander has an observation about problem solving that I like: you should always be focusing on solving the part that has the fewest degrees of freedom.
When figuring out how to design a kitchen, for instance, there are a bunch of subproblems to solve: where to put the stove and the windows and the kitchen table. And which of these have the fewest degrees of freedom? The windows. If you want good light, there is going to be only one wall where you can place the windows, and at best two spots on that wall where the window looks natural. So you put the window there. And now what? The kitchen table, because you want to have that where the good light falls. The stove can wait because that can sit nearly anywhere. If you start by placing the stove, there is a big risk that you block the only good position for one of the other subproblems that have fewer degrees of freedom, and so the whole design will suffer.

https://x.com/phokarlsson/status/2016462003272093944

@ivan

ivan commented Feb 17, 2026

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Not sure if I'm reading northshore correctly, but the connection that I perceive is: value systems which were ascendant throughout the 20th century, and were incipient in the 19th century and earlier, were assumed to represent true and final forms of human nature. In the first paragraph, the value of authenticity over naked commercialism; in the second paragraph, the self-evident horror that anyone should be subject to permanent public stigmatization.

But it turns out that those ideas were not in fact the final form of humanity, and the young are already turning away from them. It turns out that we are already old, and our vision for the future dies with us.

https://mitigatedchaos.tumblr.com/post/808687359881347072/there-is-a-tremendous-amount-of-work-to-do-it-is

@ivan

ivan commented Feb 20, 2026

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Can you explain this gap in your posting?

https://x.com/chloe21e8/status/1934734349183652169

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 4, 2026

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[regaining sentience after scrolling for two hours] As troubling as it may be to consider, I am beginning to suspect that my mind is being imposed upon

https://x.com/Fredward3948576/status/2029047508236657108

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 4, 2026

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Spend enough time with normies and you begin to understand autists, spend enough time with autists and you run back to normies. It’s a Möbius strip of misunderstanding, both unbearable in their own way. We stand in the cursed fold, belonging nowhere, despised by both.

https://x.com/graveair/status/2021624830706188692

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 19, 2026

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If you file a Github issue without a patch, or without declaring your intention to file a pull request addressing that issue, it may be summarily closed or deleted at the maintainer's sole discretion. The issue list is an active worklist, and if no work will occur on an issue, even if the issue is real and verifiable, it will be closed. There are lots of acknowledged deficiencies in TenFourFox and not everyone is going to prioritize a deficiency the way you might. If you are not willing or able to fix your most important issues yourself, you may not want to use this browser.

https://github.com/classilla/tenfourfox

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 19, 2026

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OP here... after some patient experimenting, I've noticed that it works very well, if the rubber feet are slowly moved into the gap between the bottom key row and the rim of the keyboard area. NuPhy seems to have designed it, so the rubber feet fit well within this small gap. Then it works, even without standing up the legs -- as advertised. But you really have to be careful when placing the keyboard.

https://old.reddit.com/r/NuPhy/comments/1mebb34/placing_air75_v3_on_a_macbook_keyboard/

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 19, 2026

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The web is the only medium the world has ever seen where its highest-profile decision makers are people who despise the medium and are trying to drive people away from it.

https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/your_frustration_is_the_product

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 21, 2026

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Doing the reading is a superpower, and it's even better in a world where "no one" is doing the reading. (Inspired by a conversation I had with some college students.)

https://x.com/patio11/status/2035057378324832306

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 23, 2026

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iBook G3 800 or 900 mhz or PowerBook G3 500 mhz

G4 tibooks are good but if you’re planning on playing any games on there you’re going to want a 4:3 screen so that makes the G4 a tougher choice.

https://old.reddit.com/r/VintageApple/comments/1hfmxk6/best_mac_os_9_machine/

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 24, 2026

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War is an invention. School is an invention. We can keep inventing things.

https://x.com/worlddestroyar/status/2036427968524714218

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 25, 2026

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As human developers, I think we're struggling with "letting go" of the code. The code we write (or agents write) is really just an intermediate representation (IR) of the solution.

For instance, GCC will inline functions, unroll loops, and myriad other optimizations that we don't care about (and actually want!). But when we review the ASM that GCC generates we are not concerned with the "spaghetti" and the "high coupling" and "low cohesion". We care that it works, and is correct for what it is supposed to do.

Source code in a higher-level language is not really different anymore. Agents write the code, maybe we guide them on patterns and correct them when they are obviously wrong, but the code is just the work-item artifact that comes out of extensive specification, discussion, proposal review, and more review of the reviews.

A well-guided, iterative process and problem/solution description should be able to generate an equivalent implementation whether a human is writing the code or an agent.

A compiler uses rigorous modeling and testing to ensure that generated code is semantically equivalent. It can do this because it is translating from one formal language to another.

Translating a natural prompt on the other hand requires the LLM to make thousands of small decisions that will be different each time you regenerate the artifact. Even ignoring non-determinism, prompt instability means that any small change to the spec will result in a vastly different program.

A natural language spec and test suite cannot be complete enough to encode all of these differences without being at least as complex as the code.

Therefore each time you regenerate large sections of code without review, you will see scores of observable behavior differences that will surface to the user as churn, jank, and broken workflows.

Your tests will not encode every user workflow, not even close. Ask yourself if you have ever worked on a non trivial piece of software where you could randomly regenerate 10% of the implementation while keeping to the spec without seeing a flurry of bug reports.

This may change if LLMs improve such that they are able to reason about code changes to the degree a human can. As of today they cannot do this and require tests and human code review to prevent them from spinning out. But I suspect at that point they’ll be doing our job, as well as the CEOs and we’ll have bigger problems.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47394022

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 25, 2026

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Can you explain why it's -48 VDC as opposed to 48 VDC with the + and - inputs mislabeled?

Because the chassis is connected to ground (as in, a literal grounding rod hammered into the soil) and by definition your 0V reference point.

The crucial difference is the direction in which the current is flowing: is it going "in to", or "out of" a hot wire? This becomes rather important when those wires are leaving the building and are buried underground for miles, where they will inevitably develop minor faults.

With +48V corrosion will attack all those individual telephone wires, which will rapidly become a huge maintenance nightmare as you have to chase the precise location of each, dig it up, and patch it.

With -48V corrosion will attack the grounding rod at your exchange. Still not ideal, but monitoring it isn't too bad and replacing a corroded grounding rod isn't that difficult. Telephone wires will still develop minor faults, but it'll just cause some additional load rather than inevitably corroding away.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47511703

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 26, 2026

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I often find myself thinking about the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who argued in the introduction of After Virtue that modernity had destroyed the shared moral language once supplied by traditions and religion, leaving us with only the language of individual preference. Virtue did not disappear, I think, so much as it died and was reincarnated as the market. It is now the market that tells us what things are worth, what events matter, whose predictions are correct, who is winning, who counts. Money has, in a strange way, become the last moral arbiter standing—the final universal language that a pluralistic, distrustful, post-institutional society can use to communicate with itself.

https://www.derekthompson.org/p/we-havent-seen-the-worst-of-what

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 28, 2026 •
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Your account is suspended

After careful review, we determined your account broke the X Rules. Your account is permanently in read-only mode, which means you can’t post, Repost, or Like content. You won’t be able to create new accounts. If you think we got this wrong, you can submit an appeal.

https://x.com/

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 29, 2026

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twitter was so good pre-elon

https://x.com/sihleri/status/2037985447906038155

@ivan

ivan commented Mar 29, 2026

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Every once in a while you meet someone who seems more Alive than everyone else. It's like everyone else is pretending to exist, but they're actually consciousness manifest - they're dynamic, both funny and tragic, passionate, aware. They've got eyes that actually look at things instead of merely passing them over. It's like coming into contact with the kind of person reality was actually made for.

https://x.com/teachrobotslove/status/2034101191299199045

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