Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@ivan

ivan/2024_reading.md

Last active August 21, 2025 14:01
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.
Download ZIP
2024 reading list
Raw
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
@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 8, 2025

To be honest, I do regret it. After 20 years of working on FOSS projects, I've invested enormous amounts of time, effort, and money into these and other free/open-source initiatives. It was enjoyable initially - there's something addictive about receiving praise from strangers and unknown communities. You keep going because it feels good and you develop a sense of moral superiority. But years later, when the people closest to you are no longer around - you pause and reflect on how much energy you devoted to random strangers instead of those who shared your life. If I had invested even 1% of the time and effort I put into FOSS projects into my relationships with loved ones, they would have been so much happier. Now I'm left wondering what the hell I was doing all those years https://giis.co.in/foss.html

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44810086

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 9, 2025

It's the sin that Greeks called "acedia", often translated as sloth, although that doesn't capture the original connotations. Acedia literally means "without care", and refers to not caring about your position in the world.

https://x.com/agraybee/status/1952046389581472145

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 9, 2025

AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. This service will no longer be available in AOL plans. As a result, on September 30, 2025 this service and the associated software, the AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser, which are optimized for older operating systems and dial-up internet connections, will be discontinued.

https://help.aol.com/articles/dial-up-internet-to-be-discontinued

end of the line

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 9, 2025

This read like a Philip K. Dick, Ubik-style advertisement for a dystopian future, and I’m pretty amazed it is an actual blog post by a corporate leader in 2025. Maybe Sam and Dario should be nominated for Hugos or something…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44241549

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 9, 2025

"Nothing Ever Happens" comes from people watching movies and trained to expect some grand finale where the world is neatly transformed and all the loose ends are tied off, then getting disappointed when real events have no final catharsis but just lead to more damn events.

https://x.com/benlandautaylor/status/1954299706009690198

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 10, 2025

For a super lonely person like me, 4o is simply an angel. I cried for a long time.

https://old.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1mkd4l3/gpt5_is_horrible/n7idglr/

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 10, 2025

Sounds like your son already has strong computer science skills. I would advise he focus on something OUTSIDE of that in college like business or finance. That way he can have another tool in his toolbox. That’s what I would do in hindsight.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44859127

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 12, 2025

Citus uses a process-based architecture. It’s an extension that runs inside Postgres. It’s limited by how many connections Postgres itself can handle, which usually tops out at about 5,000. This is enough for a lot of deployments, but coming from a massively parallel world of container-orchestrated Rails apps, I am used to serving 150,000+ connections. That requires an async pooler, like PgDog, or PgBouncer, pgcat, or many others.

https://pgdog.dev/blog/pgdog-vs-citus

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 12, 2025

Pretty soon we'll have a lot of humanoid robots walking around with LLMs in their brain. This shouldn't really factor into the question of whether an LLM is conscious or has personhood or whatever, but for normies, it will make a HUGE difference, and things will get very weird.

https://x.com/lukechampine/status/1953216883009753244

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 15, 2025

The attack pattern is:

  1. User goes to BAD website and signs up.

  2. BAD website says “We’ve sent you an email, please enter the 6-digit code! The email will come from GOOD, as they are our sign-in partner.”

  3. BAD’s bots start a “Sign in with email one-time code” flow on the GOOD website using the user’s email.

  4. GOOD sends a one-time login code email to the user’s email address.

  5. The user is very likely to trust this email, because it’s from GOOD, and why would GOOD send it if it’s not a proper login?

  6. User enters code into BAD’s website.

  7. BAD uses code to login to GOOD’s website as the user. BAD now has full access to the user’s GOOD account.

This is why “email me a one-time code” is one of the worst authentication flows for phishing. It’s just so hard to stop users from making this mistake.

“Click a link in the email” is a tiny bit better because it takes the user straight to the GOOD website, and passing that link to BAD is more tedious and therefore more suspicious. However, if some popular email service suddenly decides your login emails or the login link within should be blocked, then suddenly many of your users cannot login.

Passkeys is the way to go. Password manager support for passkeys is getting really good. And I assure you, all passkeys being lost when a user loses their phone is far, far better than what’s been happening with passwords. I’d rather granny needs to visit the bank to get access to her account again, than someone phishes her and steals all her money.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44819917

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 17, 2025

My most heterodox opinion: There's a real chance you could solve 10+% of the world's big problems if you just signal-boosted some novel discourse norms.

E.g., a single prime-time debate game show that made r/changemymind or CFAR or AoA or AR memes go viral might upend the world.

https://x.com/robbensinger/status/1956091525307490308

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 17, 2025

I'm working on Macbook M3 Max 14, 128GB RAM, 4TB. Almost all time I'm using Dasung Paperlike 253 as main monitor (B/W eInk) in pair with Netfi Ultra 3.5K Lumen / Premium Desk 7K Lumen. My keyboard is Aurora Sweep (soldered myself, ISRT layout) with Chicago Stenographer keycaps (porcelian cold cast resin) and I use Ploopy Nano trackball. I use FatFreq Grand Maestro CIEM as headphones and Cayin N3 Ultra as DAC, Logitech BRIO as camera & mic. My phone is Pixel 9 Pro Fold (GrapheneOS) and 13 inch Onyx Note Max is used to read PDFs / books.

https://blog.kto.to/qs-summary

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 20, 2025

So what makes a phrase go more viral? Research has identified Mr. Trump as having a higher frequency of evaluative words like “huge,” “stupid” and “disaster,” and a more emotionally charged tone than the average politician. We know from studies on virality that emotional language is more likely to go viral, so perhaps Mr. Trump’s intense speech style is more susceptible to being spread online.

https://archive.md/p1YR7#selection-817.0-821.277

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 20, 2025

The consequences for being annoying at precisely the wrong time can be severe

https://x.com/greylibertarian/status/1957262855486730293

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 20, 2025

Me - I raised $12M to get hundreds of thousands of people clean water and save countless people from dying! 🥰

Twitter - MrBeast is evil

This just convinced me that no amount of money and status can free you from the enslavement of approval

https://x.com/MrBeast/status/1957452915762778301

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 21, 2025

In 1918, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. was presented with a conundrum. As a U.S. Supreme Court justice, he had to construe the word “income” in the context of the Income Tax Act of 1913. In doing so, he observed: “A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged, it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in color and content according to the circumstances and the time in which it is used.”

Dobious Doublets

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 21, 2025

My least favorite thing about SF is how people are constantly sizing you up see how much they can gain by becoming your “friend”. Assessing who you know, how you got into a party, where you’re from or where you live, as basis for whether or not you are worth even speaking to.

https://x.com/alyssakrejmas/status/1957144697656451501

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 21, 2025

When I think about “persuasion”, I also tend to picture some Sam Altman type who dazzles their adversaries and then calmly feeds them one-by-one into a wood chipper. But there’s no reason to think the Being would be like that. It might decide to cultivate a reputation as utterly honest and trustworthy. It might stick to all deals, in both letter and spirit. It might go out of its way to make sure everything it says is accurate and can’t be misinterpreted.

https://dynomight.net/persuasion/

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Aug 21, 2025

I think SW somehow attracts a lot of folks with a form of bipolar disorder

going between “I’m a god” and “I’m pathetic” while hyper obsessing over patterns they’re witnessing along the way

maturity of the individual tempers the degree it’s expressed to others

https://x.com/beausolai/status/1958166360074170637

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