Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@ivan
Last active June 5, 2025 05:24
Show Gist options
  • Save ivan/a36e2489623469d96c1ad79077b6dcf9 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
Save ivan/a36e2489623469d96c1ad79077b6dcf9 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.
2024 reading list

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
@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Jun 5, 2025

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment