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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 Jul 15, 2025

I would happily pay monthly for Firefox - but not to Mozilla Corporation. Will Pay to developers, development support and operations - not to pad the CEO salary.

Yet we happily do that for everything else.

Either software developers have to figure out how to out compete the CEO ghouls (without becoming CEO ghouls themselves), or we just have to accept that the CEO ghouls will take their cut. There's no version of this where you can pay for a service, but also dictate how that money is spent.

I think that's because those everything else are products with an opaque structure, and Mozilla, and for example Wikipedia, are more transparent. Really highlights why some people don't open up, either themselves, their source code, or their organizational structure: it's just inviting endless criticism.

Adding to the point, donating to Mozilla (or Wikipedia) is optional, and paying for a product is not, legally. So if I'm buying clothing, it's whatever, I need my clothing, and the price is just the functional gateway of getting it. But in case of a Mozilla donation, I'm trying to do something good in the world. And if I discover that it's wasted, then I'm not just getting nothing - I am worse off, because I supported a bad cause.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44549029

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ivan commented Jul 16, 2025

I think trolley problems suffer from a different type of oversimplification.

Suppose in your system of ethics the correct action in this sort of situation depends on why the various different people got tied to the various bits of track, or on why ‘you’ ended up being in the situation where you get to control the direction of the trolley.

In that case, the trolley problem has abstracted away the information you need (and would normally have in the real world) to choose the right action.

(Or if you have a formulation which explicitly mentions the ‘mad philosopher’ and you take that bit seriously, then the question becomes an odd corner case rather than a simplifying thought experiment.)

https://www.greaterwrong.com/posts/h22n4nZQd9J2MEZxq/the-problem-with-trolley-problems#comment-vs4tJiG3DfuiEnr4j

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ivan commented Jul 17, 2025

I'm not tired of reminding everyone that "conflict resolution" is no more than an euphemism for "breaking durability by dropping already committed and acknowledged data".

Either architect for no data overlap on writes across all the "actives" (in which case software like pgactive could be a good deal) or use a purely distributed database (like Yugabyte).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44586474

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ivan commented Jul 17, 2025

normies are usually pretty OK at arriving at pragmatically sound worldmodels through their fuzzy trial and error language games,

but one thing that never ceases to blow my mind everytime I come across it, is that after thousands of years of evolution they still think that a successful opinion generating process is meant to be correct everytime, rather than producing a positive risk adjusted track record

they genuinely cannot comprehend the sharpe ratio, it's "did you have breakfast this morning" for 115 IQs

"you were wrong about this thing you were convicted in"

> yes, I'm not optimizing for never being wrong

"?????"

in normie world getting quote tweeted on some wrong prediction from 5 years ago is a cancellable offence

https://x.com/apralky/status/1945201262745600392

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ivan commented Jul 17, 2025

So sad, all the money in the world and somehow he believes he's a victim.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44572593

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ivan commented Jul 17, 2025

The powerful tend to like the idea of less democratic governments / rigging the game (business) so they win. It's easy, they're not interested in competing in a market (ideas or business) if they can simply cuddle up to a despot and easily get theirs. So we see many line up to take their turn to bend the knee.

There's a weird idea among those on the right in the US where they see business people as somehow having some good insights as far business overall (the market) for the country. But really many of those who gain power are very much not interested in competing / open markets / competition, quite the opposite. They got theirs and for many the inclination is to close the door (market) behind them.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44572593

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ivan commented Jul 19, 2025

A lot of stuff is maximizing for attention. But it doesn't build trust. Trust is the scarce resource, not attention.

https://x.com/ejames_c/status/1946093765061693560

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ivan commented Jul 19, 2025

extremely niche esoteric dating discourse take is L ron hubbard says in one of his books that to create a long lasting marriage you would pair people up based on their reaction times and delay in getting to the point when answering a question.

https://x.com/owenbroadcast/status/1946043508902559834

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ivan commented Jul 23, 2025

The Mohist and "Legalistic" version of the rectification of names emphasizes the use of hermeneutics to find "objective models" ("fa", 法) for ethics and politics, as well as in practical fields of work, to order or govern society.[12] Mozi advocated language standards appropriate for use by ordinary people.[8] With minimal training, anyone could use these "objective, particularly operational or measurement-like standards",[13] giving identical names to equivalent social relationships and functions so as to apply identical standards of "correct" behavior in analogous situations.[14][15]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rectification_of_names

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

Society is talkslop
Street is walkslop
School is thinkslop
Sports is moveslop
Shower is cleanslop
Talking to girls is loveslop
Family is lifeslop
Job is moneyslop

https://x.com/7ynt85/status/1908876850782220435

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

Palantir has been stalking people in Coles for 3 years now, all Coles AI is Palantir, they're even rolling it out onto manned registers to snoop on their employees now too

https://x.com/hotnutbar/status/1944587422186213662

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

Spiteful zombies only want to dominate and humiliate. Even my own relatives.

https://x.com/worlddestroyar/status/1947021937311367282

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

being able to honor our curiosity

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/sacrifice

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

They probably know that they're less likely to be fooled if they don't listen to the technical razzle dazzle. I suppose the Dunning-Kruger Effect can't even get started if you resolutely stay ignorant.

https://x.com/RussellJohnston/status/1947140505281691666

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

Got you. I chalk it up to the fact that few people are fundamentally intellectually curious. Some folks are just interested in making money or sounding smart because that's what peers value, and don't realize that deep interest can actually help them make better investments.

https://x.com/andrewgwils/status/1947020269174059277

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

all of the US is operating as an exit scam now. every sector, industry, layer of govt, etc

https://x.com/tolstoybb/status/1947352574015001024
via https://x.com/bryancsk/status/1947498708574343323

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ivan commented Jul 24, 2025

he actually failed to empathize.
Incorrectly modelled another mind.
His failure is compassion to an active opponent.

https://x.com/unreadlibraries/status/1947782470474371462

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ivan commented Jul 26, 2025

I think it's nice if women and men appreciate and respect each other, and also themselves.

https://x.com/brianluidog/status/1948938473693725092

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ivan commented Jul 26, 2025

what can we do to make sure you can do your best work?

what can we do to make sure you can do your best work?

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ivan commented Jul 26, 2025

The "tech bro" newbies always love talking about incentives. But in the real world, adverse selection is a way more useful concept

https://x.com/brianluidog/status/1948973351214743568

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ivan commented Jul 27, 2025

Wireless alerts are completely optional since GrapheneOS adds a toggle for the otherwise mandatory presidential alert type. This is particularly useful in Canada where the government abuses the system and sends every type of alert as a presidential alert to stop users from being able to opt out of weather and amber alerts.

https://grapheneos.org/features

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ivan commented Jul 27, 2025

A lot of things in life work like this: If you don’t believe in a better future for yourself or the world, it simply won’t happen. If you don’t believe you’re worthy of love, you’ll sabotage every time someone tries to show you (a la ‘we accept the love we think we deserve’). If you don’t believe your art is worth making, you’ll never finish it.

I’ve come to think there’s a particular kind of delusion that’s actually necessary for creation. People call themselves delusional like it’s an insult, but every brilliant thing was “delusional” at the start. The iPhone, flying machines, falling in love with someone before you know whether they’ll love you back. All creation requires a temporary divorce from consensus reality.

https://velvetnoise.substack.com/p/the-necessary-delusion-why-you-should

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ivan commented Jul 27, 2025

Reddit is so horrifying bc you can go to a sub for people with health problems and see tons of people desperate for help, strategizing on how to be taken seriously, and then you go to a doctor sub and it's full of professionals talking about hysterical women and blue hair.

i’ve had a couple of psych nurses say that a major problem in healthcare is that any psych issue in your chart suddenly becomes the cause of all your potential medical problems

https://x.com/suhtorus/status/1948277430134723044

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ivan commented Jul 27, 2025

How do push notifications and similar things work on GrapheneOS?

Some apps require Google's FCM for push notifications. You need to install Sandboxed Google Play services from the GrapheneOS App Store and grant them unrestricted battery access (so they can run in the background, which is required for maintaining a network connection to FCM and delivering notifications). https://grapheneos.org/faq#notifications

Other apps like Signal use their own background connections, for example WebSockets, to deliver push notifications, but keeping a connection open for each app consumes more battery life than just having one background network connection. Also, not every app supports this.

For Signal specifically, the GrapheneOS project recommends either using FCM via Sandboxed Google Play, or installing Molly (https://molly.im/), a fork of the Signal client for Android, which makes some changes to reduce battery consumption when using WebSocket-based notifications. It also allows you to use UnifiedPush (https://unifiedpush.org/) for notifications instead, but that requires an application called mollysocket (https://github.com/mollyim/mollysocket) running on a server.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44680073

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ivan commented Jul 27, 2025

The most fun feature of GrapheneOS is the ability to look at the logs of any app at any time from the App Info page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44679356

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ivan commented Jul 27, 2025

passive income? brothers i need massive income

https://x.com/kirbxbt/status/1949121352411099314

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ivan commented Jul 28, 2025

With every smiling box you receive, a soul has been depleted of its joy.

a comment on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yO9VRtrTJwc

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ivan commented Jul 31, 2025

Another example: when I was a pimply-faced teenager, I went to this dermatologist who always seemed annoyed to see patients. Like, how dare we bother him by seeking the services that he provides? Meanwhile, Dr. Pimple Popper—a YouTube account that does exactly what it says on the tin—has nearly 9 million subscribers. Clearly, there are people out there who find acne fascinating, and dermatology is the one of the most competitive medical specialties, but apparently you can, through sheer force of will, lack of self-knowledge, and refusal to unpack the details, earn the right to do a job you hate for the rest of your life.

https://www.experimental-history.com/p/face-it-youre-a-crazy-person

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ivan commented Aug 2, 2025

Genuine, if possibly stupid question: how important is it for founders to be comfortable with being alone?

One of the things I always found odd about ‘founder fellowships’ is how much they advertise “find your tribe/meet likeminded folks!”

Whereas my experience of good entrepreneurs is that they’re very comfortable being alone, or more accurately comfortable keeping the counsel of their own thoughts.

Partly this is a selection effect: entrepreneurship is by definition quite lonely.

It’s slightly less lonely if you have cofounders and a good board of advisors, but at the end of the day the buck stops with you.

Which means the livelihoods of all your reports are down to you.

Hence, ability to be lonely.

So it strikes me as odd that these founder fellowships advertise community so much.

Wouldn’t the selection effect be for decidedly mid folks?

https://x.com/ejames_c/status/1951514664887788006

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ivan commented Aug 2, 2025

21 petabytes per second of memory bandwidth

https://www.cerebras.ai/chip

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