2024 reading list

Author

ivan commented May 1, 2025

Conveyor belt sushi!

https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/1kcah8v/its_not_moving_fast_enough/

Author

ivan commented May 1, 2025

As mentioned, it's to taste. I just got the roulette and really enjoy it. But not for what most people might think. The rotation device is mostly a gimmick but it works. I use it for drawing and sketching. The reason I love this pencil is the reason many criticize. The squishyness of the tip. For me this cushion adds another level of sensitivity that gives you more of a dynamic range in terms of pencil pressure. Great for sketching and getting nice lines. The rotation mech works as well as it should but honestly does not change anything for me. I really enjoy the squish. I have also tried the pipe slide in store and by comparison feels cheap next to the roulette. If you can take care of it, roll with the roulette, if you need a beat em up that's pocket safe go with the slide.

https://old.reddit.com/r/mechanicalpencils/comments/7m7rrn/which_is_better_kuru_toga_pencil_to_write_pipe/

Author

ivan commented May 2, 2025

why are humans so good at making up fake path dependencies for themselves?

https://x.com/bschne/status/1917975678382727469

Author

ivan commented May 2, 2025

I have a lot of friends both in New York and Washington DC at investment banks, commercial banks, hedge funds, pension funds, etc. that get face time with the administration.

They are almost all unanimously telling me something similar and very disturbing.

Regardless of the policies the administration is attempting to implement, the actual level of competence (especially amongst lower/career staffers) is simply not there.

They say that this is a stark contrast from 2017, when Trump first came in and largely just left Obama’s infrastructure in place at the Treasury, IRS, Commerce, Trade, etc.

This time around, Trump came in and purged the lifelong employees at these places and replaced them with people he owed favors to on his farewell tour.

People that are just simply unqualified to be doing these gloryless jobs.

Regardless of the merits of the actual policy changes, nearly everyone I speak to is saying the incompetency, lack of sophistication, lack of substance, and the elementary level understanding of the global economy and global capital markets, is stunning them on a daily basis.

I cannot get into specifics here, out of respect for my friends privacies, but the Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, and Bloomberg have all begun reporting on this open secret in depth in the past couple of days.

Feel free to cross examine me with their reporting!

https://x.com/SpencerHakimian/status/1917626195895537715

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ivan commented May 3, 2025 •

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Robert Altmeyer's research shows that for a population of authoritarian submissives, authoritarian dominators are a survival necessity. Since those who learn their school lessons are too submissive to guide their own lives, our society is forced to throw huge wads of money at the rare intelligent authoritarian dominants it can find, from derivative start-up founders to sociopathic Fortune 500 CEOs. However, with their attention placed on esteem, their concrete reasoning underdeveloped and their school curriculum poorly absorbed, such leaders aren't well positioned to create value. They can create some, by imperfectly imitating established models, but can't build the abstract models needed to innovate seriously. For such innovations, we depend on the few self-actualizers we still get; people who aren't starving for esteem. And that does not include the wealthy, the powerful, and the 'smart'; they learned their lessons well in school.

https://www.edge.org/response-detail/23876

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ivan commented May 4, 2025 •

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"Fewer Users" Warning Hurting Specialized and New Apps - Need Answers

I'm frustrated with the Google Play "This app has fewer users compared to others on Play" warning that appears on our app's store page. This warning is killing our conversion rates despite having a quality app. Here's why this warning system is problematic:

Good Metrics Being Penalized: Our app has ~1,000 downloads with 500 active users (50% retention rate!), yet we're still getting this warning. What's the threshold? This seems arbitrary.

Specialized Use Cases: Our app serves a specific function that requires specialized hardware. Users don't need to open it daily for it to be valuable.

"As-Needed" App Design: Many users download our app to solve a specific problem (car issues), use it once successfully, then naturally don't open it again until needed months later. Low daily engagement doesn't mean low quality - it means the app successfully solved the user's problem!

Punishing New Entrants: Every app starts with zero users. This warning creates an impossible chicken-and-egg situation for new apps.

Driving Bad Behavior: This system incentivizes developers to spam users with unnecessary notifications just to artificially boost "engagement" metrics, which degrades the user experience.

Zero Transparency: The complete lack of documentation about what triggers this warning makes it impossible to address.

Has anyone successfully had this warning removed? Are there specific metrics thresholds we should aim for? Has Google published any official guidance on this?

We're investing significantly in marketing only to have potential users greeted with what amounts to a "don't install this" warning. It feels like Google is unfairly punishing smaller, specialized developers in favor of mass-market apps.

https://support.google.com/googleplay/android-developer/thread/330114530/fewer-users-warning-hurting-specialized-and-new-apps-need-answers?hl=en
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43869794

Author

ivan commented May 4, 2025

How it works

DBSC introduces a new API that allows servers to create an authenticated session that is bound to a device. When a session is initiated, the browser generates a public-private key pair, storing the private key securely using hardware-backed storage such as a Trusted Platform Module (TPM) when available.

The browser then issues a regular session cookie. During the session lifetime, the browser periodically proves possession of the private key and refreshes the session cookie. The cookie's lifetime can be set short enough so that stealing the cookie won't be a benefit for attackers.

https://developer.chrome.com/blog/dbsc-origin-trial

Author

ivan commented May 4, 2025

I don't want to derail the conversation too much with this but this is the kind of thing that blows my mind with seeing obscenely wealthy/powerful people like Musk and Trump on social media.

At some level of wealth you reach a point where no one can get to you physically. You're completely physically safe and isolated and can't be hurt. That means that the only way someone can get to you is through communicating with you and making you hurt yourself.

That means that social media is your only weakness. This is how adversaries can affect your plans and goals and disrupt your mind. Yet so many of these people seem so oblivious to this and are as terminally online as your average 4channer or facebook mom.

Does this speak to some sort of weakness in these kinds of people or the addictiveness of social media?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43854113

Author

ivan commented May 4, 2025

reddit is overwhelmingly fake content, like a massive percentage of it. a post on reddit these days is not actually evidence of anything real, at all

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43870819

Author

ivan commented May 4, 2025

I will discuss the history of how nobility was lost. And because the form of nobility that last existed is no longer adequate for current conditions, I believe we need to construct a new conception of nobility, a new practice of nobility. As a practical matter, I will suggest activities informal groups or organizations may employ to promote the development of nobility.

https://meaningness.substack.com/p/nobility-and-virtue-are-distinct

Author

ivan commented May 4, 2025

Finally, there’s optimization — the fine-tuning you can do to nearly anything and everything you use. I’ve become increasingly active in seeking out and adjusting even the most detailed of application and device settings, shaping my experiences to be quieter, more limited, and aligned with my intentions rather than the manufacturers’ defaults.

I spent thirty minutes nearly redesigning my entire experience in Slack in ways I had never been aware were even possible until recently. It’s made a world of difference to me. Just the other day, I found a video that had several recommendations for altering default settings in Mac OS that have completely solved daily annoyances I have just tolerated for years. I am always adjusting the way I organize files, the apps I use, and the way I use them because I think optimization is always worthwhile. And if I can’t optimize it, I’m likely to eliminate it.

https://www.chrbutler.com/discernment-in-the-digital-age

Author

ivan commented May 4, 2025

One type of external cheat relies on a direct memory access (DMA) attack. DMA cheats require players to use specialized hardware — think high-speed PCI Express cards — that exfiltrates all of Valorant‘s memory to a separate computer that can scrutinize the game on dedicated hardware, outside of the purview of Vanguard.

By doing this, the cheater’s separate computer can be used to identify other players; in-game objects like walls, ammunition and weapons; and identify precisely where players and items are in the map. This can also include objects that are not visible to gamers. Then, using the firmware installed on the cards, the cheat creates a radar on a second screen that they can look at to spot rival players — even if they are hidden — to gain an unfair advantage.

A more advanced version of this type of cheat, according to Koskinas, relies on HDMI fusers, which overlay what’s read by the separate computer back on the cheater’s main screen. This way, the cheater doesn’t have to look between computer displays to see where their opponents are, letting them focus on the display they are playing the game with.

https://techcrunch.com/2025/05/03/how-riot-games-is-fighting-the-war-against-video-game-hackers/

Author

ivan commented May 4, 2025

Over time, some of our Elasticsearch indices housed the data for some very large Discord guilds. Naturally, large guilds post a LOT of messages, causing the incides to grow very large. Each of our Elasticsearch indices is a single Lucene index under the hood, and Lucene has a MAX_DOC limit of about 2 billion messages per index. As we learned the hard way, once you hit this limit, all indexing operations will fail.

https://discord.com/blog/how-discord-indexes-trillions-of-messages

Author

ivan commented May 4, 2025

With all due respect to folks working on web and phone apps, I keep getting the feeling that AI is great for high level, routine sorts of problems and still mostly useless for systems programming.

As one of those folks, no it's pretty bad in that world as well. For menial crap it's a great time saver, but I'd never in a million years do the "vibe coding" thing, especially not with user-facing things or especially not for tests. I don't mind it as a rubber duck though.

I think the problem is that there's 2 groups of users, the technical ones like us and then the managers and C-levels etc. They see it spit out a hundred lines of code in a second and as far as they know (and care) it looks good, not realizing that someone now has to spend their time reviewing the 100 lines of code, plus having the burden of maintenance of those 100 lines going into the future. But, all they see is a way to get the pesky, expensive devs replaced or at least a chance squeeze more out of them. The system is so flashy and impressive looking, and you can't even blame them for falling for the marketing and hype, after all that's what all the AIs are being sold as, omnipotent and omniscient worker replacers.

Watching my non-technical CEO "build" things with AI was enlightening. He prompts it for something fairly simple, like a TODO List application. What it spits out works for the most part, but the only real "testing" he does is clicking on things once or twice and he's done and satisfied, now convinced that AI can solve literally everything you throw at it.

However if he were testing the solution as a proper dev would, he'd see that the state updates break after a certain amount of clicks, and that the list was glitching out sometimes, and that adding things breaks on scroll and overflows the viewport, and so on. These are all real examples of an "app" he made by vibe coding, and after playing around with it myself for all of 3 minutes I noticed all these issues and more in his app.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43878850

Author

ivan commented May 4, 2025

For many people ChatGPT is already the smartest relationship they have in their lives, not sure how long we have until it’s the most fulfilling. On the upside it is plausible that ChatGPT can get to a state where it can act as a good therapist and help helpless who otherwise would not get help.

I am more regularly finding myself in discussions where the other person believes they’re right because they have ChatGPT in their corner.

I think most smart people overestimate the intelligence of others for a variety of reasons so they overestimate what it would take for a LLM to beat the output of an average person.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43872426

Author

ivan commented May 5, 2025

Optimizing AI agents requires writing down the valuable institutional knowledge in your company. Big co’s will struggle with this: middle managers worry about becoming replaceable and leaders worry about leaks. If they don’t do it, they’ll be crushed by competitors who do.

https://x.com/harjtaggar/status/1918323067484553429

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ivan commented May 5, 2025 •

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Other known limitations:

Links that require login or not publicly accessible could not be saved

Some websites block automated bots, we can't save such webpages yet

Maximum size of entire web-page/file is limited by 70 MB

Video, audio and iframes included in web-page could not be saved

https://help.raindrop.io/permanent-copy

Other bookmarking things: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43857196

Author

ivan commented May 6, 2025 •

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No offense to other posters here, but both positive and negative opinions on effect expressed here are rather shallow and random, I've used effect-ts since it was just starting to take shape, so I have a lot of experience with it. But I'm not a maintainer or a contributor, just a user, so I don't think I am blinded by some privileged knowledge or bias.

The best projector for intuition for effect would be to think of it as the same as nextjs/nuxt/sveltekit are to their respective frameworks, but to typescript itself. Just as they are meta-frameworks in their ecosystem, effect acts as a sort of meta-language for typescript. Calling it DSL suggests an operating Domain it is Specific to, which there is none, it does allow developers to very easily construct their own actual DSL using itself though. Saying it mirrors rust-style is also a misnomer. Effect in the core is a direct 1:1 port of ZIO from the Scala landscape. It just so happens, that like many other languages with type classes and unions, there are data types like Option, Either, and the likes. Other than that, there is no resemblance to Rust what-so-ever, and if you try to take that resemblance further to more advanced concepts like concurrency and batching, it falls apart really quickly. So while these are simplicitic and easy to chew analogies, they are just completely off the mark..

Effect eschews abstract ideas often tauted by functional libraries and focuses on actual usage and real-world scenarios, and makes a real effort to allow you to write the best code you understand and want to write, that is to say, there is no dogma or fancy-pants language to writing effect code. A very simple but potent example is the many ways effect allows you to utilize their case classes construction (a data container that implements equality by value instead of by reference. very very useful, I honestly can't live without it anymore)

Data.case - plain interface based construction

Data.struct - ad-hoc construction

Data.tagged - like .case, but with a predefined _tag member (used for discrimination)

Data.Class - like .case, but for the class syntax

Data.TaggedClass - take a guess

Schema.data - ad-hoc transformation from raw to Case

Schema.Class - all class-based schemas automatically produce cases nvm the terminology that is still vague, I just wanted to show how many ways there are to produce the same result, depending on your own preferences, needs, and code-style.

But, it is not a free pickup. Like the aforementioned meta-frameworks, and tools like rxjs, react, or even typescript. this is not something you can just pick up and run with blind. Effect is extremely powerful, but it requires a great initial effort to chew through.

When I say it's extremely powerful, I mean EXTREMELY powerful. here is a non exhaustive list of tools I dropped entirely thanks to effect making them redundant, inadequate, or useless. (All are great tools btw, not dissing them)

lodash/ramda/remeda/fp-ts/similar

express/koa/h3/other servers

react-query

redux/xstate/jotai/zustand/other state management

rxjs

purify-ts

date-fns and similar

inversify

zod/typebox/yup/joi/and so on

all stream related libs

axios/got/ky/superagent/similar

this is off top of my head and who knows how many one-offs I've rid myself off. There's also a surprisingly vibrant, if small, ecosystem around effect for other more specialized issues like db access or even a full-blown monolithic framework al-a nextjs. Everything powered by effect and completely interoperable with it and everything else that is built on it

Downplaying the error handling is really narrow-minded. Meaningless declarations like "I throw only when things break" are of course utter none sense. Error handling is not the same as exception handling. All software is allowed to safely error, the question is how you paint these errors, throwing them as exceptions is only one of them. But that's a whole topic and my comment is long enough.

I've only scratched the tip of this, there's more good, and more bad to effect, though I think I said plenty

TL;DR Effect fundamentally changed how I write code and I can't recommend it enough-- but only for those who are willing and wanting to learn to use it. If you want a free win, effect isn't it. What it is, is production ready (I and many others used it in prod for nearly 2 years in real companies without issues), very powerful, replacement for most of the tools you use and much much more than that.

https://old.reddit.com/r/typescript/comments/16w3iwn/opinions_about_effectts_do_you_recommend_using_it/

How does it replace Express? Really curious, because I haven't found this yet.

You can find example here http-server, looks like Express replacement.

It's better to create HttpApi though, because you split specification and implementation. API becomes type-safe, compilers checks that you don't forget to implement endpoints and you get OpenAPI specification for free

https://old.reddit.com/r/typescript/comments/16w3iwn/opinions_about_effectts_do_you_recommend_using_it/

Author

ivan commented May 6, 2025

The lime-colored Green Treefrog is common in the southeastern states. The male calls and the female comes to him. BUT sometimes a silent interloper ("satellite" male) steals the mating as in this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYm2Mm6z850

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ivan commented May 6, 2025

they really know when they're playing a game they're going to win and they don't go outside of that game

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii8tDwkizJQ&t=2m

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ivan commented May 6, 2025

Don’t just read it; fight it! Ask your own questions, look for your own examples, discover your own proofs. Is the hypothesis necessary? Is the converse true? What happens in the classical special case? What about the degenerate cases? Where does the proof use the hypothesis?

Paul Halmos

quoted in Euclid’s “Elements” Redux

Author

ivan commented May 6, 2025

A major mistake I made in my undergrad is that I focused way too much on mathematical lens of computing - computability, decidability, asymptotic complexity etc. And too little on physical lens - energy/heat of state change, data locality, parallelism, computer architecture. The former is interesting; The latter bestows power.

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1919647115099451892

Author

ivan commented May 7, 2025

I have not had the opportunity to own any other optical or ECG sensors, so I can't compare the usability. I can say this thing worked immediately out of the box and has been rock solid since I've owned it. I don't feel the need to even consider something else.

Having the Apple Watch, I've discovered that while the heart rate monitor works fine during a run, the watch must be on very tight and there is some serious lag in the readings, making running to heart rate or doing intervals to heart rate very dodgy. These are the reasons I bought this monitor. It has exceeded my expectations. The heart rate is constantly updating, and it never has me feeling like I'm waiting on it.

Here are some Apple Watch/Coros Monitor specifics you may want to know about:

You do not need to download the Coros app in order to use this with your Apple Watch. Thank you Coros for not making that necessary. It may give you stats on battery level or whatnot, but I just toss it on the charger once a week and I'm good. No need for the app.

It truly is "wear it to turn it on, take it off to turn it off" in the most nearly flawless way. There is a sort of "soft latch" it has on your watch's internal heart rate monitor, so there is a blackout period where manually reading your heart rate on your watch will not work. It's not a long time, but it is noticeable.

One thing I don't care for is that the monitor comes on when charging. I don't see why this is necessary. The impact that has is that while it's charging, it is connected to your watch if it's in range, and you will not be able to manually read your heart rate.

However, the good news is that it appears that the watch continues to do the random readings with your watch's internal heart rate monitor regardless of whether the Coros monitor is charging and hijacking your watch, if you are wearing the monitor, or if you've just taken the monitor off and are in the "blackout" period where your watch is waiting to release that connection. I believe the watch somehow separates the source of the readings based on workout data or health tracking. It looks like the automatic health tracking does not utilize the external monitor at all.

It took me a while to figure out what was going on, and I hope this is helpful to Apple Watch users considering this monitor. It doesn't appear to be well documented, I'd imagine since the watch is not their product.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1JJ1L1O91GW61/ref=cm_cr_arp_d_rvw_ttl?ie=UTF8&ASIN=B0CH8LJL3Y
via https://www.amazon.com/product-reviews/B0CH8LJL3Y/ref=cm_cr_dp_d_show_all_btm?ie=UTF8&reviewerType=all_reviews

Author

ivan commented May 8, 2025 •

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I’m Leslie Lamport from Microsoft Research. I’ve been a researcher most of my adult life, that means I’ve primarily been a writer and also a performer. I’ve written papers and I’ve performed talks at conferences and other venues. I’ve been successful because I’m a pretty good writer.

Good writing will be crucial to your success. The most obvious reason is because people will judge you by your writing, not just by reports or papers that you write, but also by your emails and texts. What does it tell you about a person, if he sends you email with lots of errors, and with sentences that make no sense?

Learning to write well takes practice. You have to think before you write, and then you have to read what you wrote and think about it. And you have to keep rewriting, re-reading and thinking, until it’s as good as you can make it, even when writing an email or a text.

A less obvious reason to improve your writing, is to improve your thinking. You should think before you write. You should think before you do anything, because it will help you understand what you’re doing, which will help you to do it better. And as someone said, “Writing is nature’s way of showing you how fuzzy your thinking is.” If you think you understand something, and don’t write down your ideas, you only think you’re thinking. To think clearly, you need to be able to write down your ideas clearly, which requires being able to write well.

Learning to write well will improve your thinking. And learning to think better, will improve your writing. It’s a virtuous cycle. You have to write better to think better to write better. And you should start that cycle now, by trying to write better.

https://mentors.fm/2019/08/13/think-and-write-with-leslie-lamport/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RnY5iJea5ww

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ivan commented May 8, 2025 •

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To understand the unknown type, it helps to think about any in terms of assignability. The power and danger of any come from two properties:

All types are assignable to the any type.

The any type is assignable to all other types. (With the exception of never.)

If we “think of types as sets of values”, the first property means that any is a supertype of all other types, while the second means that it is a subtype. This is strange! It means that any doesn’t fit into the type system, since a set can’t simultaneously be both a subset and a superset of all other sets. This is the source of any’s power but also the reason it’s problematic. Since the type checker is set based, the use of any effectively disables it.

The unknown type is an alternative to any that does fit into the type system. It has the first property (any type is assignable to unknown) but not the second (unknown is only assignable to unknown and, of course, any). It’s known as a “top” type since it’s at the top of the type hierarchy. The never type is the opposite: it has the second property (can be assigned to any other type) but not the first (no other type can be assigned to never). It’s known as a “bottom” type.

Effective TypeScript

Author

ivan commented May 8, 2025

I have to admit that I have a suspicion that people who can’t express themselves clearly in writing also aren’t going to be very good at structuring their ideas in code. To me, these abilities are closely correlated.

https://bsky.app/profile/janstette.bsky.social/post/3lon6tix6a22q

Author

ivan commented May 8, 2025

I came to realize something which I should have realized earlier: what I realized is that what we makes stands testament to who we are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLb9g_8r-mE Jony Ive

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ivan commented May 9, 2025

Experimental spending on even probabilistic improvements builds up so much value over time.

https://x.com/RomeoStevens76/status/1920937194614571475

Author

ivan commented May 9, 2025

Importing types without type keyword

Due to the nature of type stripping, the type keyword is necessary to correctly strip type imports. Without the type keyword, Node.js will treat the import as a value import, which will result in a runtime error. The tsconfig option [verbatimModuleSyntax][] can be used to match this behavior.

https://github.com/nodejs/node/blob/daced4ab98be82953ef2fa73e0f81e2b1967be8b/doc/api/typescript.md

Author

ivan commented May 10, 2025

a simple truth: a lot of current RL research is to translate fuzzy, subjective real-world tasks into objective and unhackable rewards that you can reliably optimize during training

https://x.com/karinanguyen_/status/1921348292694167672

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Importing types without `type` keyword