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Last active November 17, 2024 10:54
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2024_reading.md

Things I might read in 2024.

  • 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 Demming - The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education/ audio
  • W. Edwards Demming - 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
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ivan commented Nov 9, 2024

I think you learned the most important lesson of any career: the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42090430

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ivan commented Nov 9, 2024

Maybe it’s all just brutality and brainless conquest and all the rest is smoke and mirrors. Maybe history defers to horror.

https://bsky.app/profile/bencollins.bsky.social/post/3lab4adqogc2m

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ivan commented Nov 9, 2024

we've increased pricing for Claude 3.5 Haiku to reflect its increase in intelligence

https://x.com/anthropicai/status/1853498270724542658

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ivan commented Nov 9, 2024 •
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But every year, California growers apply more than 180 million pounds of pesticides to crops in an effort to defend them from weeds, fungi, insects and other pests.

Now, state regulators report that they have found detectable levels of pesticides floating in the air in multiple large farming regions.

[...]

According to a new state report, the California Department of Pesticide Regulation, or CDPR, collected weekly air samples last year in Oxnard, Santa Maria, Shafter and Watsonville, and found pesticides in nearly 80% of the samples.

Eight pesticides were found at the air monitoring stations, including 1,3-dichloropropene, a fumigant and probable human carcinogen used to kill crop-damaging pests in soil. That pesticide was found at all four monitoring sites. At least one type of pesticide was found in 163 of the 207 samples.

https://www.latimes.com/environment/story/2024-10-25/farm-pesticides-found-floating-in-california-air-samples

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ivan commented Nov 9, 2024 •
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A few months later, Google made headlines when they ended their long-standing tradition of giving lavish holiday gifts to all of their employees. Instead, they used the gift budget to buy advertising disguised as charity Chromebooks for underprivileged schoolchildren.

Shortly after this, I witnessed the following conversation between two employees:

Employee A: You effectively are still getting the gift. Cuts like these increase the value of Google’s stock. You can sell your stock grants and buy any present you choose.

Employee B: What if I told my wife that I wasn’t buying her a Christmas gift, but she could use the money in our bank account to buy any present she wants?

Employee A: You’re in a business relationship with Google. If you’re disappointed that Google isn’t “romancing” you with gifts like you do for your wife, you have a misguided notion of the relationship.

Wait a second. I was in a business relationship with Google.

It may sound strange that it took me two and a half years to realize it, but Google does a good job of building a sense of community within the organization. To make us feel that we’re not just employees, but that we are Google.

That conversation made me realize that I’m not Google. I provide a service to Google in exchange for money.

So if Google and I have a business relationship that exists to serve each side’s interests, why was I spending time on all these tasks that served Google’s interests instead of my own? If the promotion committee doesn’t reward bugfixing or team support work, why was I doing that?

https://mtlynch.io/why-i-quit-google/
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42090430

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ivan commented Nov 9, 2024

We definitely do things wrong in this world.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42094974

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ivan commented Nov 10, 2024

Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25772043

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ivan commented Nov 10, 2024

being too smart actually cripples much of your life, at least from my observation

let ignorance be a virtue

I don't think it's necessarily a lack of ignorance. more like there's an inflection point at which increased raw intelligence causes a rapid decline in equanimity (and often executive function)

i would be much happier if i didn't have to see what i'm seeing or know what i know

I simply decide to not see or know it 😇

https://x.com/_R4V3N5_/status/1855393844889837856

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ivan commented Nov 11, 2024

People learn to work better by reflecting on work. So any framework for self-observation is better than none.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42101729

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ivan commented Nov 11, 2024

this product is not installing. I called support on 11/6 (first day of release) and was told to wait for them to fix the bugs, that it wasn't supposed to be released yet.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R10RREB1WZUND4/

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ivan commented Nov 12, 2024

Efficiency is key to speed.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WhhovQ7HW4k&t=6m58s

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ivan commented Nov 14, 2024

apparently in my org they fired a dude maintaining one of the old key systems then brought him back as a consultant and now he has his own island in greece

a lot of lessons here

The lesson is don't write docs

https://x.com/tekbog/status/1856503673045623233

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ivan commented Nov 14, 2024

The worst thing is that there is so much potential for exploring the horror of psych wards from the angle of medical abuse, ableism, forced treatment/drugging, loss of autonomy, power imbalance, demonization, dehumanization, etc, and YET the horror genre keeps defaulting to "insane asylums and psych wards are scary because there are mentally ill people in there"

https://www.tumblr.com/compassionatereminders/766121440259047424/the-worst-thing-is-that-there-is-so-much-potential

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ivan commented Nov 15, 2024

My favourite Korean idiom is a version of “looking for a needle in a haystack” that goes 서울에 가서 김서방 찾기. It means “searching for a Mr. Kim in Seoul”

https://x.com/AdamCSharp/status/1856319184285614396

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ivan commented Nov 15, 2024 •
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Potential is what something could be, what it should be, and what we hope it will be – not what it actually is. This means that arguments from potential do not accurately reflect reality; rather, they reflect the faith, belief, and desires of the speaker. In fact, when people say that computers have the potential to drive student learning, they are tacitly acknowledging that these tools are not currently achieving this aim.

https://www.afterbabel.com/p/the-edtech-revolution-has-failed
via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42115597

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ivan commented Nov 15, 2024

I work in EdTech, I have for a very long time now, and the problem I have seen is no one in education is willing to ACTUALLY let kids learn at their own level.

The promise of EdTech was that kids could learn where they are. A kid who's behind can actually continue to learn rather than being left behind. A kid who's ahead can be nurtured.

We had this. It worked well, in my opinion at least, and the number of complaints and straight up threats because kids would learn things "they shouldn't be" was just… insanely frustrating.

Now in order to keep schools paying for our services, every kid is banded into a range based on their grade. They are scored/graded based on their grade level rather than their growth. It's such a crying shame.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42115597

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ivan commented Nov 15, 2024

Husbands and wives are not assigned randomly. They are found.

https://x.com/simonsarris/status/1856907786304528395

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ivan commented Nov 16, 2024 •
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there are tons of smart people who don't have very much general knowledge. many people seem not to account for this in their model of the world

https://x.com/zdrks/status/1856547080044794047

Most common failure mode in stereotypically smart people:

Correctly carrying out complex reasoning from assumptions that are false but often in a subtle sort of way.

Thinking that overpowered reasoning makes up for underpowered experience.

What you want is overpowered reasoning AND overpowered experience. That's where the magic happens.

Even standard reasoning and overpowered experience goes a long, long way.

https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1856556337078931950

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ivan commented Nov 16, 2024

Honestly, if you have to choose between PFAS and phthalates... I'd probably take the PFAS. Pthalates are horrifying substances when you see what they can really do to human development.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42120801

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ivan commented Nov 16, 2024

in the study they specifically call out 2 synthetic emulsifiers as being the most problematic (carboxymethylcellulose & polysorbate 80).

https://old.reddit.com/r/science/comments/1gpw1pa/a_common_food_additive_may_be_messing_with_your/lwu4wlc/

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ivan commented Nov 17, 2024

I appreciate that the author disclosed it, but the reason they went to all this effort is likely that they expect to make money as an affiliate for the platforms that they recommended.

Affiliate-driven reviews introduce a major bias into the author's opinion, as they have incentive to speak more positively about platforms that are likely to pay the most.

And email marketing platforms pay a lot in affiliate fees. Just scanning some of the recommendations, if someone signs up for MailerLite through this reviewer's link, they'll pay the reviewer 30% of that subscriber's fees forever.[0] I wouldn't be surprised if the reviewer's top pick is coincidentally the platform with the highest-paying affiliate program.

The thing that really woke me up to affiliate-influenced reviews was the 2017 article, "The War To Sell You A Mattress Is An Internet Nightmare."[1] The reporter figured out that top YouTube mattress reviewers just gave positive reviews to whichever company paid the most in affiliate fees, and when one company lowered their fees, the reviewers retroactively downranked them for contrived reasons.

[0] https://www.mailerlite.com/affiliate

[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/3065928/sleepopolis-casper-blogg...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42146689

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ivan commented Nov 17, 2024

The accountant is overlooking two key points. First, Louie has some theater gigs coming up. And secondly, what about Obama?

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bFhYvADjl4

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