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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
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ivan commented May 18, 2025

in 2020 I killed a man in self defense and was arrested for the first time in my life on first degree murder charges. I spent the next two years and two months in a panopticon style jail with no windows awaiting trial. The lights were on 24 hours a day. There was zero privacy. I couldn't even shit without being watched. Everything was white concrete with teal accents. There was no sound dampening, sometimes inmates would scream all night and the sound filled the entire facility. Three meals a week we had a prepared meal of actual food, the rest was peanut butter and jelly or bologna with chips. My mental and physical health quickly declined. I lost several teeth, had to wait sometimes three months to see a dentist. If I needed something, I had to write it on a piece of paper and leave it in a crack in the cell door for a guard to pick up. Minimum 24 hours response time , even for something as simple as painkillers. My life devolved into a state of almost total detachment. Every day was the same. It was more than a year before I saw grass or a tree again.

It took the jury less than 45 minutes to find me innocent.

I was released in December of 2022, now homeless, with no support or even counselling from the system. Thank god I have some very good friends that were able to take me in.

I'm still not right. I lost everything, including most of my sense of self. Still trying to process everything. Random breakdowns still happen. I am not the same man I was.

I guess there's not really a point to all this other than to say its not just criminals that face these conditions, sometimes even the innocent can be caught in this system. Post incarceration care is basically nonexistent in the US.

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfo21u8bf-o

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ivan commented May 18, 2025

Subjectively, I’ve found FSRS to be a huge upgrade to my quality of reviews over the previous, SuperMemo-2–derived Anki algorithm. The review load is much lighter. The feeling of despair when missing a card is significantly minimized, since doing so no longer resets you back to day 1. And the better statistical modeling FSRS provides gives me much more confidence that the cards Anki counts me as having learned, are actually sticking in my brain.

https://domenic.me/fsrs/

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ivan commented May 19, 2025

I started using Roam and as a proper geek, dug through the data it sends back and forth about me and my notes in the browser console. It was doing access logs and some random day I saw some random dude’s name in the access log for my notes. I reached out to ask. They told me he was a new employee. I saw no reason to save personal notes and ideas on a platform where any employee can enjoy them. Thereafter I took my notes to tools i wrote myself. Very enlightening to the incentives for building such tools.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44023423

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ivan commented May 19, 2025 •
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With this achievement comes the possibility of a different kind of a loss, and therefore a different kind of grief. If we hurt someone we care about, the damage is done and can't be undone. If someone leaves it, they can't be replaced. Their unique qualities are forever lost to us. This loss can no longer be effectively denied or minimized or undone through borderline-level defenses. With the capacity to recognize the indelible harm we can do to others, also comes recognition of the ways they can harm us. And that casts our vulnerability and dependency on those we care about into stark relief. Unlike earlier developmental stages where the lost object can be magically replaced, denied, or split into good and bad parts, the depressive position involves the realization that people we love are whole, irreplaceable, and capable of being hurt by us. Just as we ourselves are whole, irreplaceable, and capable of being hurt by those we love. With this recognition comes guilt, concern, and the need for reparation. All of which are hallmarks of depressive-position thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD8PQxf1flI&t=9m38s 'The Birth of Sorrow | Part 2: Emotional Life in Neurotic-Level Narcissism'

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ivan commented May 20, 2025 •
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Another observation I have had along this line is someone in the org preventing (gatekeeping) the sale because the product competes with his internal project and he may lose his job if the company buys the product.

This is incredibly real. Another reason you need high touch human sales at the enterprise level. A huge part of a good sales person's job is navigating internal structure and conflicts to close the deal. It's a complex puzzle, and that's why good sales people make bank.

You think high level SWEs at FAANG companies make bank? You think $1M/year TC is good? Wait until you see how much the top sales people at enterprise sales companies make. They can pull that in (and a lot more) in a quarter. And it's worth every penny.

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1924935989946155068

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ivan commented May 21, 2025

When people attribute injustice and tragedies of the past to "ignorance," I think this is mistaken in an important way. It's almost never a true lack of knowledge, but rather false knowledge or pretend knowledge resulting from pathological methods, that is at fault.

This is true in the witchcraft prosecutions, in which people were in possession of pretend knowledge about witches - that witches contract with the devil, that they bear a devil's teat, that their spirits can go abroad to hurt people, and much more. Convictions were obtained by pathological methods such as the introduction of spectral evidence, searches for said devil's teats, denial of counsel for the accused, etc.

The causal importance of the pathological methods in Salem is strengthened by the fact that in prosecution attempts in 1692 in nearby Connecticut, when "spectral evidence" and devil's teat evidence was excluded, the prosecutions could not continue and the panic ended before anyone died. The people of Connecticut were equally as "ignorant" about science or whatever as the people of Massachusetts, but did not allow pretend knowledge to kill people. They ultimately insisted on the same honest ignorance that modern courts insist on in excluding most hearsay evidence.

If anything, we are more ignorant now about witches than people of the past, because we don't produce and distribute pretend information about them. And that's a good thing!

It was structures of pretend knowledge, not honest ignorance, that maintained belief in astrology and prevented acceptance of advancement in astronomy. A lot of people STILL believe in astrology, and it is not because of ignorance as such. Ghost hunters of today are adept at misusing technology to produce "evidence" of spirit visitation, within their framework of pretend knowledge. (There is even popular pretend knowledge about the witchcraft panics themselves - the ergotism thing for example.)

Today we are still replete with pretend knowledge and invest heavily in pathological methods for its production and maintenance, to our discredit: polygraphy, all kinds of dubious methods of healing, spooky psychological studies of behavioral priming (also called nudging), mouse butt acupuncture to cure Tourette syndrome, the "placebo effect," "mass hysteria," the vast majority of "cognitive bias," etc. These will turn out to be illusion, maintained by pathological methods of evidence production, and ascribed in the future to the ignorance of our time. But they are precisely the opposite of honest ignorance.

https://x.com/literalbanana/status/1909213798403285415

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ivan commented May 27, 2025

ok so given that is your first thought, what is your second thought?

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1925746936587399258

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ivan commented May 28, 2025

i don't think it's safe for humans to directly access the internet any more

https://x.com/vikhyatk/status/1926469315315839306

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ivan commented May 28, 2025

Hate when people ask what I’m thinking. Don’t worry about it. Come back with a warrant.

https://x.com/growing_daniel/status/1926516457631781150

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ivan commented May 29, 2025

he keeps special track of everything that confuses and contradicts him, since he knows that he forgets those facts faster than average

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/private-notebooks

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ivan commented May 29, 2025

One of the design principles for evergreen notes described by Matuschak is atomicity (Evergreen notes should be atomic): a note should capture just one thing, and if possible, all of that thing. A related point is that it should be possible to understand a note by (1) reading it, and (2) traversing the notes that it links to and recursively understanding those notes.

[...]

no free variables: do not rely on one-off objects that are defined incidentally upwards in the hierarchy; turn them into atomic nodes that can be linked;

https://www.forester-notes.org/tfmt-0001/index.xml

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ivan commented May 29, 2025

never crash out, never give up, never kill yourself, never lose the plot

https://x.com/selkiechu/status/1928174107247403049

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ivan commented May 30, 2025

And just a tip for who may be intersted: Claude Opus with Extended Thinking seems to be very good at converting existing code into TLA+ specs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44135638

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ivan commented May 30, 2025

An example of a non-advertised, extremely nice version of a mundane thing I only recently learned about: moving managers.

My family recently had to move out of our house into a rental temporarily while we remodel. Our old house had to be completely empty, including the garage. The old and new house are both pretty large. Some stuff was going to storage, some donation, some sold, some to family/friends, and some to the new house. Meanwhile, our kid at the time was 18 months old.

Some friends with kids around our age had recently moved and told us how much of a nightmare it was. Moving is hard enough to begin with, even if you hire movers. Now add a toddler on board...

So I was building a Gantt chart for how we were going to move with minimal disruptions. I was showing my project plan to a friend and he says, "I'm going to introduce you to somebody I know and trust." I get a phone call later that day from someone out of state. They say they're a "moving manager."

Turns out this person works only through word of mouth, and had up to this point only worked with NBA players (when an NBA player gets traded and needs a new place and all their stuff moved ASAP, how does that work? Moving managers.)

Okay so what do they do? Well, basically, they handle your move quickly and discretely and you don't have to do a thing (almost).

She asked us to send photos of every room in our current house and the new house, and to send us any videos or other resources to show how we live. For example, she asked for a video of our toddler bedtime routine, us cooking dinner, etc. She takes notes on our flow, the brands of products we use, where everything is.

She asked us if we had any preferences on storage location, marketplaces, if we knew any consignment vendors, etc etc. If not, no problem, she'd figure it out.

Then she asked us if we could take a 24 hour trip somewhere. One night. We already had a one night trip planned for a family obligation so I told her about it and she said perfect, I'll be there that morning when you wake up (which was 730 AM).

She told us when we come back home from the trip, to drive straight to the new house. The move will be done.

So that's what we did. We left our house at 730 AM. Nothing packed. Nothing started. We came home the next day at 2 PM (so, around 30 hours later) and drove straight to the new house.

Everything was moved. Rooms were setup. Kitchen and bathrooms organized. Spare supplies (with the same brands we use) in storage. Refrigerator and pantry stocked (with what we'd normally have -- drawn from the videos). They also made a second pass through the house and fixed any issues such as broken light bulbs, cleaning outdoor furniture, etc.

Not only was the move complete but the stuff we didn't want (we tagged in advance) was sold or transferred to their predesignated new owner (family or friends). They continued to sell items for the following week (you can't simply sell everything in 24 hours at a fair price, of course). But most importantly we didn't have to be aware or deal with any of it. Any sold items were deducted from the final invoice.

And that's it. It was the easiest move I've ever done. Well, I didn't really do anything except write a check. I woke up in my bed one day and went to sleep in that same bed the next day and my whole routine even with a toddler felt almost identical. It was seamless.

So how much did this all cost? I'm not super comfortable saying. But, it was roughly 4x what movers alone would cost us (more than $10K, less than $50K).

Oh, and the moving manager? No website. No yelp. No social media. No advertising of any kind. Pure word of mouth, share their phone number with people you trust. That's it. She's been doing it for a decade now.

Extrapolate this same general pattern to every mundane task, and you can make a good living doing it.

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1928539528823976057

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ivan commented Jun 2, 2025

This is why I started hiring D1 athlete engineers. You can't buy that level of dedication and quick thinking. The first time I had one in an interview, he had the most country accent I've ever heard in a professional setting. It was a remote interview and I almost fucked up by judging him poorly.

I no longer had to go in early to make sure that the early things were done. I never had an issue with his work that we weren't able to resolve within reason. I would happily work with him any day on anything.

Passion, integrity, and drive are hammered into these people (if you are impressed by male athletes for their work ethic, you will be blown away by the women).

And their connection to athletics actually gets treated like a disadvantage by some of the bigger nerds, so they aren't impossible to acquire.

I know that I might be giving away an edge in hiring, but I would be happier in a world where this kind of dedication is rewarded more, so I'm willing to share my findings.

https://old.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1l1ibpj/quick_thinking_for_the_win/mvl6spb/

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ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user’s present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered - no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088599

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ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

The scale of World War II was completely insane. Today the US military has something like 15,000 aircraft, far more than anyone else. Over WWII, the US built 300,000 military aircraft.

https://x.com/benlandautaylor/status/1929586142900638136

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ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

One nice thing about being in my late 30s is that I can tell Zoomer friends: “here is an ancient text with timeless wisdom about your present situation” and it’s a blog post from 2011.

https://x.com/ByrneHobart/status/1929325634938982809

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