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Last active June 5, 2025 05:24
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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
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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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ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

Being useful means that you are good at getting things done in a specific area, so that people above you can delegate that completely. You are reliable, efficient, maybe even indispensable in the short term. But you are seen primarily as a gap-filler, someone who delivers on tasks that have to be done but are not necessarily a core component of the company strategy. “Take care of that and don’t screw up” is your mission, and the fewer headaches you create for your leadership chain, the bigger the rewards.

Being valued, on the other hand, means that you are brought into more conversations, not just to execute, but to help shape the direction. This comes with opportunities to grow and contribute in ways that are meaningful to you and the business.

https://betterthanrandom.substack.com/p/if-you-are-useful-it-doesnt-mean

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ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

This book is gratefully dedicated to the critics with whom during the past four decades I have disagreed, some of whom I cite in the following pages: without the stimulus of their contrariety I would have accomplished nothing.

Opposition is true Friendship.

https://x.com/yyallian/status/1928940901809926569

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ivan commented Jun 4, 2025 •
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Man, I’ve been there. Tried throwing BERT at enzyme data once—looked fine in eval, totally flopped in the wild. Classic overfit-on-vibes scenario.

Honestly, for straight-up classification? I’d pick SVM or logistic any day. Transformers are cool, but unless your data’s super clean, they just hallucinate confidently. Like giving GPT a multiple-choice test on gibberish—it will pick something, and say it with its chest.

Lately, I just steal embeddings from big models and slap a dumb classifier on top. Works better, runs faster, less drama.

Appreciate this post. Needed that reality check before I fine-tune something stupid again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44174965

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ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

peace time: deploying fiber internet takes days per mile and will cost you $60k

war time: fiber internet is flying at you at 40mph for free. there's nothing you can do to stop it

https://x.com/xsphi/status/1930358467925266601

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ivan commented Jun 5, 2025

He makes up explanations that seem reasonable, but are actually false; he attacks the character of the person who is trying to point out what he’s doing; it’s like a DDOS attack of the soul

https://archive.is/4zSZT#selection-2197.298-2197.487

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ivan commented Jun 5, 2025

everyone says it's a terrible idea. that's how you know it has alpha.

https://loginasroot.net/linux_root_login_faq

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