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Last active May 11, 2025 19:26
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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
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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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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ivan commented May 11, 2025

Mentor (from Greek Μέντωρ) is cognate to Sanskrit mantṛ, a wise & trusted counselor or teacher.

Similar to iatrogenic harm through medical error & negligence, there is pedagogic & mystagogic harm through failing to teach the primacy & the art of asking questions.

https://x.com/hokaisobol/status/1293919065313026048

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