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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
@ivan

ivan commented May 31, 2026

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I am not getting anything out of the meeting. I am learning nothing. Because there are no experiments, this field is not an active one, so few of the best men are doing work in it. The result is that there are hosts of dopes here and it is not good for my blood pressure: such inane things are said and seriously discussed here that I get into arguments outside the formal sessions (say, at lunch) whenever anyone asks me a question or starts to tell me about his “work” [...] There is great deal of “activity in the field” these days, but this “activity” is mainly in showing that the previous “activity” of somebody else resulted in an error or in nothing useful or in nothing promising. It is like a lot of worms trying to get out of a bottle by crawling all over each other.

https://meaningness.substack.com/p/why-i-left-academia-love-letters

@ivan

ivan commented Jun 5, 2026

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Demanding everything be free and open source is important if you don't want independent developers to be able to make a living, and instead wish to create a world where the vast majority of software is controlled by big tech, who are the benefactors of "free" software. The less you're willing to pay people making good software, the more territory predatory ad/tracking-fueled "free" software gets. The more territory you give them, the more they're going to buy out open source software to destroy. We see this happening more and more recently, with uv, bun, vite etc. being bought out - if they can't put food on the table, they will sell out to monopolists.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48383667

@ivan

ivan commented Jun 13, 2026

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The correct mood for art is a kind of loving misanthropy. There may be no use for art when we are as the angels. Comedy in particular is powered very deeply by cruelty.

https://x.com/BjarturTomas/status/2065657344042967059

Comedians tend to be uneven minds. The humor of whole minds is often a humor of minutia.

https://x.com/BjarturTomas/status/2065657586075177217

@ivan

ivan commented Jun 17, 2026

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there isn't really any "prompt engineering" involved

You should make an experiment; take someone who never used any LLMs or agents, and tell them to use it for the first time in front of you, and tell them to build something like a calculator program or whatnot. Bonus points if they're ICs or at least not-managers.

I think there is a lot us engineers take for granted, when it comes to communicating via text, how to state things clearly and what we think/reason when we read things. A lot of people don't have those "skills" innate, and the first time they use LLMs, they basically don't know how to interact with them, until they realize what they're able to do and not. Then they also learn what to say to steer the model into the right way, this is quite literally a "prompt engineering" skill they're now learning.

You don't even have to go outside engineers. I have teammates that get very little out of Claude Code because the way they integrate their own knowledge doesn't allow them to think of what Claude might not know. They'd say a task was impossible with the tooling, and I'd get instant answers, because I understand what is weird internal business logic sitting 6 repos away, and what is knowledge claude has by default. I can commit Claude.md files for them, but I have to include EVERYTHING, because otherwise they'll let Claude make assumptions and waste minutes, if not hours.

It's a big part of what, in my experience, is separating the very good engineer from the iffy one: Do you have a good mental model, and can you put yourself in the shoes of people sitting in a different mental model? It makes you a better dev, and even more so when it comes to AI tools, which have their own kind of alien brain.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48553224

@ivan

ivan commented Jun 20, 2026

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Assertions detect programmer errors. Unlike operating errors, which are expected and which must be handled, assertion failures are unexpected. The only correct way to handle corrupt code is to crash. Assertions downgrade catastrophic correctness bugs into liveness bugs. Assertions are a force multiplier for discovering bugs by fuzzing.

https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/TIGER_STYLE.md

@ivan

ivan commented Jun 22, 2026

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Not really. Software development includes a lot of soft skills, architectural decisions, processes, interpersonal things, working relationships with colleagues, things bare AI cannot (yet) cover. For personal projects - I either do a learning project with no AI or a fun quick project with AI. For work - it's just another tool.

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1ubvauy/ai_is_making_me_want_to_quit_everything_related/?depth=99

@ivan

ivan commented Jun 22, 2026

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It's not even close. The CEMU version is objectively the best way to play the game. Over any Switch emulator or the Switch 2.
All the mods (google BCML and check out gamebanana's CEMU BOTW page), graphic packs, reshade presets, the motion control support with any gamepad incl. Steam Deck, higher performance even at 4k... The ONE thing the Switch emulated version has going for it, a texture mod, is also entirely usable on PC with an unpacked game (the only caveat being some shrines may crash on load, so it's better to keep a vanilla dump for shrines if they do).

Otherwise, CEMU is so much better in every way. Switch also has mods, but they are far fewer and require more steps to set up and use BCML for.

https://old.reddit.com/r/cemu/comments/1ljqlrb/is_cemu_still_the_best_for_breath_of_the_wild/

@ivan

ivan commented Jun 24, 2026 •
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If It's Worth Your Time To Lie, It's Worth My Time To Correct It

https://x.com/danwilliamsphil/status/2069712003464048777

@ivan

ivan commented Jul 3, 2026

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My background is in embedded systems, specifically routers, in which bugs and unexpected operations happen from time to time, causing problems. In this environment, storage space is at a premium (most routers do not have hard drives, and only a limited amount of RAM and non-volatile flash memory), and devices are often deployed at remote sites with no operator at the console. Embedded devices are expected to function properly without human intervention, and crashes or other malfunctions are rare compared to interactive applications.

In this environment, when an error occurs, it is a good idea to record as much information as possible, because asking the operator to turn on extra event logging and then try to re-create the failure is only going to make the customer more angry ("my network has already broken once today, you want me to intentionally break it again?"). That one crash is the only chance you have to learn about the cause.

https://raw.githubusercontent.com/zooko/foolscap/refs/heads/master/doc/logging.xhtml

@ivan

ivan commented Jul 7, 2026

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There's a huge case of survivorship bias when trying to recall historical analogues, because in every instance where margins collapsed and competition made the industry a commodity business, the big proprietary names are no longer with us. Here's a selection of examples, though:

1. Memory chip margins collapsed so much in the 80s that Intel exited the memory chip business entirely. At the time, they were known much more as a memory chip company than a microprocessor company.

2. Margins for high-end workstations collapsed in the face of cheaper IBM PC clones and an explosion of MS Windows software. This led directly to the deaths of SGI, Sun, Symbolics, Lucid, LMI, etc.

3. Proprietary UNIX variants like HP-UX, IRIX, AIX, and SCO Unix have basically completely died out, replaced by lower-cost proprietary OSes like Windows and MacOS, or by open-source descendants of Linux and BSD.

4. Many commercial database vendors like Oracle, dBase, Sybase, FoxPro, and Microsoft (SQL Server and Access) found themselves very much under margin pressure from PostGres, MySQL, and SQLite. Oracle survived thanks to their massive installed base and legal department, and Microsoft survived because they could cross-subsidize from their OS and Office monopolies, but dBase, Sybase, and FoxPro are no longer with us.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48809877

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ivan commented Jul 9, 2026

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LLMs drive the unit cost of cognition to zero. Therefore, you will exhaust yourself near-instantly trying to drive differentiated value out of cognitive work. Non-arbitrable labor is one safe haven: bending steel, drilling wells, running cables, flying drones, etc. Physical agency gets you a premium the clankers can’t (yet?) trespass upon. That’s why guys building data centers are making bank & job-hopping while the SAs administering the computational guts of them are struggling. A second vector is reputational: either by authority (you’re a regulator) or by taste (you’re a rare/reknown specialist) you make quality attestations about cheaply-produced cognitive artifacts. The first vector is a big community; the second is not. Get out of being in a knife fight with the clankers on their own turf, they’ll gut you.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48839984

@ivan

ivan commented Jul 12, 2026

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the triumphal afterglow of a successful slop project

https://catpranks.tv/posts/andrew-kelley-did-nothing-wrong/

@ivan

ivan commented Jul 13, 2026

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I have never interacted with a more annoying entity, human or otherwise, than this thing. I hate it more than I have ever hated any human being. I hate that I am constantly, frantically typing away “chatting” with this fucking thing and that’s how I make my living now. I hate that if I choose not to talk to this obnoxious piece of shit that I will fall behind the rest of the people at my job because the baseline is now “chatting” with, wrangling, waiting for this smug, twee digital sex pest who I would never, ever desire to speak to in real life if it were a person. I hate when it says my name. I hate when it pretends to speak like an ensouled human instead of an arc welder with the incidental capacity for English. I hate the cynical, faux-precocious new elite that sits behind it and has shoved it into our lives. I only believe it will eliminate my job because I’ll have finally had enough and switched to digging for clams in the mud.

https://x.com/pneumic/status/2074662768175681857

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