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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
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ivan commented Sep 9, 2025

For anyone interested in a STEM career, acquiring advanced technical skills early unlocks the most valuable thing in existence.

Something even money can't buy.

TIME.

If you acquire demonstrable, alien-level technical skills, you can get doors opened earlier.

You don't have to wait until college to do research projects under professors, or even paid internships.

If you're intentional about acquiring skills and putting yourself out there, you can kick-start a serious career before most people your age are even taking serious classes.

And once you acquire early junior-level experience, that opens the door to early senior-level experience, and so on.

Compound this virtuous cycle over and over and you end up way ahead.

What's the point of being way ahead?

IT BUYS YOU TIME.

Unfortunately, lots of people misunderstand the point of compressing time.

They think compressing time is about winning a rat race against your peers.

But that's not really what it's about.

There's a race, but the thing you're racing against is much scarier and much more powerful than any other human.

You're racing against TIME ITSELF.

Time is the #1 killer of dreams and aspirations.

When someone gives up on their dream, or gives up on figuring out what that dream is, it's typically a result of them losing the race against time.

Pink Floyd put it best:

“You are young and life is long,
and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find
ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run.
You missed the starting gun.
And you run, and you run,
to catch up with the sun,
but it's sinking.”

Whether you realize it yet, achieving your dreams is a race against time.

Time forces convergence, and premature convergence is what kills dreams.

It's hard to understand this when you're young, before you have any sense of the wrath of time or the meaning of convergence.

But no matter how many times you claim you’ll never settle for something less than ikigai,
-- it won't keep the sun from setting,
-- it won't keep the time from passing,
-- it won't keep you from increasingly desiring things that only a stable life can provide, and
-- it won't keep you from gradually turning the dial from “explore” to “exploit.”

The further time gets ahead of you, the more likely you are to settle into a life that is “fine,” or even “good” -- despite being unable to shake the feeling that you could have found something better if you had more time.

That is the point of compressing time.

That is the point of removing skill bottlenecks early.

It’s about unlocking doors early and running down avenues that you might be interested in exploring, so that:

  1. If you get the feeling the path you're going down has twisted and turned into something that's no longer a great fit for you, you can double back and explore other avenues before doors start locking behind you.

  2. You can spend time trying to break down a wall instead of running through an existing door if that’s something you want to do.

  3. Once you find your path into a land that makes you as happy as you can imagine, you can maximize your time in that land. https://x.com/hamptonism/sta/hamptonism/status/1964806104350888223

Mastering advanced technical skills early isn't really about racing classmates.

It’s about outrunning time itself, the true killer of dreams, which silently forces people to settle into “good enough” lives.

You can compress time by acquiring and demonstrating alien-level skills.

Remove skill bottlenecks --> unlock opportunities --> compound experience far earlier than expected.

Compressing time lets you explore more paths before doors close, double back if you’ve chosen wrong, and maximize your years in the place that makes you happiest.

Beat time now, or risk being beaten by it later.

https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1965215281728352559

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ivan commented Sep 10, 2025 •
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Disables pulse width modulation to provide a different way to dim the OLED display, which can create a smoother display output at low brightness levels. Disabling PWM may affect low brightness display performance under certain conditions.

https://www.macrumors.com/2025/09/09/iphone-17-pro-pwm-toggle/

If I understand correctly it will be similar to "DC dimming" but as it use LTPO variable refresh rate, it will use fixed PWM frequency to not create gamma change(seen as "flicker") when the display lower it refresh rate like many QD-oled or WOLED monitors and TV do Most LTPO variable refresh rate have very high modulation but even if they set it to 95 precent with long duty cycle(Around 90 precent) they can achieve high acceptability of flicker even at low level of brightness like the Chinese variant of oneplus 13(when you enable it). The oneplus 13 have high acceptability of flicker until around 17 nits using this mode. The issues that can occur using this kind of dimming is worse uniformity(can be at not acceptable level) and black crush at low brightens level. The black crush issue can be solve by apple by applying different calibration(3dlut) at some lower brightness level but then there will be apparent difference when you lower to this brightness point that can bother some people. I think that good PWM implantation is better solution because of this issues, with good PWM implantation you can still get high acceptability of flicker on low level of brightness. Unfortunately the iPhone 16 pro max have high acceptability of flicker until around 60 nits, which is not low enough for dim environments. It is still far superior to other device like the Samsung s22,23,24,25 (ultra) or pixel 9(all of them) as 60 nits is low enough for most environments. I think that most people prefer to use their phone higher then 60 nits anyway.

https://old.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/comments/1ncztxn/iphone_17_pro_has_toggle_to_disable_screen/?depth=99

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ivan commented Sep 14, 2025

The thing I want most from the iPhone camera system right now is a consistent number of megapixels across all cameras in all shooting situations, with that consistent number being more than 12. 24MP would be fine.

As it stands now, 48MP is actually up to 48MP. Emphasizing that "up to" part is not great for marketing, and if you directly compare it across all shooting situations, you get a clear picture of how inconsistent the iPhone shooting experience is.

On a 16 Pro with your camera set to 48MP ProRAW, you can actually walk away with pictures ranging anywhere from 9MP to 48MP.

  • 13mm ultra wide (0.5x) - up to 48MP but sometimes is 36MP
  • 24mm main camera (1x) - up to 48MP and usually is
  • 28mm zoom (1.3x) - up to 36MP and usually is
  • 35mm zoom (1.5x) - up to 24MP and usually is
  • 48mm (2x) - up to 12MP and usually is
  • 120mm telephoto (5x) - up to 12MP but can be as low as 9MP

https://old.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/1hy3a0y/iphone_17_pro_main_camera_sensor_smaller_than/

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ivan commented Sep 19, 2025

You've got a 16 inch Laptop, why are the arrow keys so tiny! And where's the PgUp PgDn Home End Insert Delete cluster? I wish a design-based shop like Framework would have some leadership in the keyboard area

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45033106

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ivan commented Sep 23, 2025 •
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This sub doesn't understand PWM at all

Everyone is hyper focused on modulation depth and frequency but not amplitude and duty cycle. Think of these two scenarios when wanting an average brightness of 100 nits.

  1. 3000 nit display.... on for 3% at 3000 nits off for 97 percent at 480 Hz

  2. DC dimmed down to 110 nits, on for 95 percent with 5 percent off time for oled refresh dip at 480 hz

Both have the same modulation depth and frequency. 1) Will melt your brain whereas 2) will give some people eye strain and others no strain at all.

Why does this sub treat both as equal? The stupid opple charts everyone puts up don't take this into account.

https://old.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/comments/1nnqloa/this_sub_doesnt_understand_pwm_at_all/?depth=99

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ivan commented Sep 25, 2025

The best disinfectant is sunlight

Have you actually tried to shine sunlight on online misinformation? If you do you will quickly find it doesn't really work.

The problem is simple. It is slower to produce factually correct content. A lot slower. And when you do produce something the people producing the misinformation can quickly change their arguments.

Also, by the time you get your argument out many of the people who saw the piece you are refuting and believed it won't even see your argument. They've moved on to other topics and aren't going to revisit that old one unless it is a topic they are particularly interested in. A large number will have noted the original misinformation, such as some totally unsafe quack cure for some illness that they don't currently have, accepted it as true, and then if they ever find themselves with that illness apply the quack cure without any further thought.

The debunkers used to have a chance. The scammers and bullshitters always had the speed advantage when it came to producing content but widespread distribution used to be slow and expensive. If say a quack medical cure was spreading the mainstream press could ask the CDC or FDA about it, talk to researchers, and talk to doctors dealing with people showing up in emergency rooms from trying the quack cure, and they had the distribution networks to spread this information out much faster than the scammers and bullshitters.

Now everyone has fast and cheap distribution through social media, and a large number of people only get their information from social media and so the bullshitters and scammers now have all the advantages.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45355032

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ivan commented Oct 1, 2025

On a semi-related note, one cool prompting technique is to act like part of the prompt has been cut-off and have the prompt begin with something like:
“(cont'd)
In summation, your task is as follows ...”
or
“[MISSING DATA]
To recap everything we have discussed so far, ...”

That way the model treats the prompt as if a much more detailed set of instructions must have come before it.

https://x.com/LokiJulianus/status/1973129252204626112

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ivan commented Oct 3, 2025 •
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After migrating a decent amount of their statements to var, they saw an 8% performance improvement across some benchmarks.

https://vincentrolfs.dev/blog/ts-var

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ivan commented Oct 5, 2025

Well, Postgres integer primary keys are signed. So there's this WHOLE other half of the 32-bit word that you're not using if you're just auto-incrementing keys. My simple (read stupid) solution, which absolutely worked was to set the sequence on that primary key to -2,147,483,648 and let it continue to auto-increment, taking up the other half of that integer space. It was so dumb that I think we met like three times together with SRE to say things like, "Is it really this simple? Is this really likely to work? Are we really doing something this dumb?" and the conclusion was yes, and that it would buy us up to 3 years of time to migrate, but we would do it within 6-8 months so all IT departments can make alternative arrangements for their API integrations.

https://jeffersonheard.ghost.io/the-best-worst-hack-that-saved-our-bacon/

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ivan commented Oct 25, 2025

What tripped me up the one time I really needed to call 911 on a Pixel was it auto-sends the call after the second 1. Any other call, you dial the number, 555-555-5555, then press the green phone button to send the call. Dialing 911, it instantly starts calling, and the send button changes to hangup.

I kept pressing 911 and rapidly pressing where the send key was and moving the phone to my ear to hear silence. Dial 911, press what I thought was send, put it to my ear, silence. The worst sound you want to hear when you're alone and need 911 immediately. Eventually I took a breath and went slow to see what was happening and finally noticed it was automatically sending the call.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45700568

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ivan commented Oct 25, 2025

The designers also seem stuck under an assumption the user is operating in an act-look feedback loop. In reality, good tools let you shift your focus away from them once you become proficient - the mechanics of their use becomes second nature and fades into the background allowing you to focus on your task

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45700568

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ivan commented Oct 29, 2025

Our older son seems to have picked up some conversation habits from me. He's playing some online multiplayer game with voice chat, and he's politely asking his teammates stuff like "what things were you thinking about when you did [stupid decision]" in a friendly voice

https://x.com/brianluidog/status/1983032568405782886

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