2024 reading list

Author

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

Author

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

Author

ivan commented Nov 11, 2025

i recommend that the average thinker think fewer but more correct thoughts. there are already enough thoughts in the world. the thoughts need to be better

i would go so far as to say that there is a "thought correctness crisis"

https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/1988092348736352269

Author

ivan commented Nov 11, 2025

Lots of people misunderstand the point of "getting ahead". They think I'm talking about getting ahead of your peers. What I'm actually talking about is getting ahead of 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.

Of course, when you put in the work to remove skill bottlenecks and open doors early, you also end up ahead of peers who aren't willing to put in that work to get ahead of time, which is most people. But that's not really what it's about.

What it's about is: whether you realize it yet, achieving your dreams is a race against time. Time forces convergence, and premature convergence is what kills dreams.

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.

https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1988134665199177954

Author

ivan commented Nov 20, 2025

I've found that running non steam apps on steam with the proton experimental compatibility usually just works, it has become my go to solution

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45099124

Author

ivan commented Dec 1, 2025

From Ninajirachi, in a RollingStone interview about this song: “I love my computer for a million reasons, but it’s also exposed me to some pretty dubious material when I was far too young to see it. Infohazard is about the first time I encountered a snuff film as a kid. It’s kinda like a rite of passage and loss of innocence moment for people who grew up online. If I’d been in high school a hundred years ago, without ever touching a computer, would I even know things like that existed? I can’t ever really forget about it.”

a comment on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ZdeIKJA8c

Author

ivan commented Dec 3, 2025

I got a call from a criminal defendant I believe is innocent. Before calling me, he voluntarily participated in a police interrogation for several hours. He believed that "I have nothing to hide" and that he could explain to the police why they had the wrong guy.

Defense attorneys might call this naïve, but look at the responses to Fleishman's OP. Even high-IQ people really believe this is how law enforcement works.

Here's the problem. When you agree to a police interrogation, you and the police are playing two different games.

As the suspect, you believe you are playing a multiplayer, collaborative game.

But the police aren't even playing a multiplayer game. They're playing a one-player game, like Tetris.

As the suspect, you're not a player in the game. You're more like the game environment, producing falling blocks for the player—the police.

The police play this game by collecting your statements like blocks and fitting them into a picture that incriminates you. When enough blocks have fit together, the police have won the game and refer the case to a prosecutor.

You believe that, once you convince the police that you are innocent, you will all win. But that's not a real outcome of the game. "Evidence that I am innocent" is not even a game element. From the cops' perspective, if they fail to assemble the blocks into an incriminating picture, they have lost the game.

Suspects who think "I have nothing to hide" are always surprised when the interrogation lasts several hours. "I've already explained everything - why am I still here?" they think.

That's because the longer the game goes on, the more falling blocks the police have to assemble their case. It's in their interests to keep the game going long past what your game required.

All suspects eventually sense this on some gut level and become frustrated. You think: "Wait a minute, - all of their questions are subtly premised on my guilt! But I can prove to them that I'm not guilty. I need to appeal to them to really hear me out."

I.e., "Let's start over with a different game where we can all work together."

But even as you're trying to change the game, you are speaking and therefore generating more blocks.

Here's the only solution. The moment you have any reason to believe you're a suspect, exit the game. Politely ask if you are free to leave. If they say "no," calmly tell them "I invoke my right to remain silent and my right to counsel."

If you're in custody when you say this, the cops will actually physically stand up and leave the room as if you've just uttered a magic incantation.

https://x.com/IanHuyett/status/1962568657017385251

Author

ivan commented Dec 3, 2025

Kang Gyuri, who escaped in 2023, told the BBC that three of her friends were executed after being caught with South Korean content. She was at the trial of one 23-year-old friend who was sentenced to death.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckgqdz17ye3o

Author

ivan commented Dec 5, 2025

Samsung = Guaranteed retina destroyer

LG = At least put some effort in to mitigate PWM

https://old.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/comments/1nyr5cr/iphone_panel_differences/

Author

ivan commented Dec 5, 2025

Many people who struggle with excessive guilt subconsciously have goals that look like this:

I don’t want to make anyone mad.

I don’t want to hurt anyone.

I want to take up less space.

I want to need fewer things.

I don’t want my body to have needs.

I don’t want to be a burden.

I don’t want to fail.

I don’t want to make mistakes.

I don’t want to break the rules.

I don’t want people to laugh at me.

I want to be convenient.

I don’t want to have upsetting emotions.

I want to stop having feelings.

These are what I call the life goals of dead people, because what they all have in common is that the best possible person to achieve them is a corpse.

https://thingofthings.substack.com/p/the-life-goals-of-dead-people
via https://x.com/xuenay/status/1973840821612130638

Author

ivan commented Dec 6, 2025

This is architectural problem, the LUA bug, the longer global outage last week, a long list of earlier such outages only uncover the problem with architecture underneath. The original, distributed, decentralized web architecture with heterogeneous endpoints managed by myriad of organisations is much more resistant to this kind of global outages. Homogeneous systems like Cloudflare will continue to cause global outages. Rust won't help, people will always make mistakes, also in Rust. Robust architecture addresses this by not allowing a single mistake to bring down myriad of unrelated services at once.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46162656

Author

ivan commented Dec 7, 2025

I want to push back against the allegations that I “lost” a game of Tic Tac Toe to a pigeon. I was not properly rested and the pigeon played optimally

https://x.com/tomieinlove/status/1997468802188280199

Author

ivan commented Dec 7, 2025

LLMs as writers

While LLMs are adept at reading and can be terrific at editing, their writing is much more mixed. At best, writing from LLMs is hackneyed and cliché-ridden; at worst, it brims with tells that reveal that the prose is in fact automatically generated.

What’s so bad about this? First, to those who can recognize an LLM’s reveals (an expanding demographic!), it’s just embarrassing — it’s as if the writer is walking around with their intellectual fly open. But there are deeper problems: LLM-generated writing undermines the authenticity of not just one’s writing but of the thinking behind it as well. If the prose is automatically generated, might the ideas be too? The reader can’t be sure — and increasingly, the hallmarks of LLM generation cause readers to turn off (or worse).

Finally, LLM-generated prose undermines a social contract of sorts: absent LLMs, it is presumed that of the reader and the writer, it is the writer that has undertaken the greater intellectual exertion. (That is, it is more work to write than to read!) For the reader, this is important: should they struggle with an idea, they can reasonably assume that the writer themselves understands it — and it is the least a reader can do to labor to make sense of it.

If, however, prose is LLM-generated, this social contract becomes ripped up: a reader cannot assume that the writer understands their ideas because they might not so much have read the product of the LLM that they tasked to write it. If one is lucky, these are LLM hallucinations: obviously wrong and quickly discarded. If one is unlucky, however, it will be a kind of LLM-induced cognitive dissonance: a puzzle in which pieces don’t fit because there is in fact no puzzle at all. This can leave a reader frustrated: why should they spend more time reading prose than the writer spent writing it?

https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/0576#_llms_as_writers

Author

ivan commented Dec 10, 2025

Getting negatively polarized

It’s become too common to hear people talk with pride about how they got negatively polarized into believing something.

“The left went crazy and drove me to the far right!”

“I used to be a normal liberal but other liberals were so annoying that I’m a communist now!”

This is mental weakness.

It's embarrassing to let people negatively polarize you. You're an adult. Stop it. Negative polarization means your brain got hacked by individual annoying strangers. That’s ridiculous.

When I hear someone say "I once met a very annoying person who believed X and now I hate X as a result" my only thought is that the world has 8 billion individuals in it, each one an infinite story we can just barely begin to understand in our brief time here. This person I’m talking to has let that precious truth slip from their field of vision.

Getting negatively polarized is often a sign that the person enjoys having problems. They like the idea of having someone annoying who is causing them problems and turning them evil. It feels like they’re deriving some sublimated joy from the people who annoyed them. The annoying person has given them an exciting narrative where they get to enjoy being the victim. It should be low-status to enjoy having problems like this.

https://andymasley.substack.com/p/ideological-moves-that-should-be
via https://x.com/AndyMasley/status/1998446302053519608

Author

ivan commented Dec 15, 2025

The amount of AI slop I've seen has genuinely been so depressing. I work as a software engineering teacher and a good 30% of the assignments I mark these days are AI. I've genuinely lost so much faith in humanity over this.

https://old.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1pmtid2/i_used_to_love_checking_in_here/?depth=99

Author

ivan commented Dec 16, 2025 •

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Let me down
Do you feel — better, now?
'cause I— was wrong
And there's questions I can't answer if you're gone

I see everythi—ng
And I feel — better — about it

You say — they love me
But I'm not that kinda magic
It's you they really want, it's really you

Need you to pick me up, I
Spin me around in your lies
When I see the truth I cry
uuh
When I think about it, I cry

Need you to pick me up, I
Spin me around in your lies
When I see the truth I cry
uuh
When I think about it, I

(e uh e uh e uh...)

It's you they really want, it's really you

Need you to pick me up, I
Spin me around in your lies
When I see the truth I cry
uuh
When I think about it, I cry
I cry
(it's really you)
When I think about it, I cry
I cry
(it's really you)
uuh
When I think about it, I cry

Need you to pick me up, I
Spin me around in your lies
When I see the truth I cry
uuh
When I think about it, I cry
I cry
(it's really you)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRIAa1KWG6s

Author

ivan commented Dec 17, 2025

"I know writers who use subtext, and they're all cowards."

a comment on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNo5fs1iDrs

Author

ivan commented Dec 24, 2025

I’m looking for a cash cart that can run GB games on a GB and GBA games on a GBA, not just GB games on both systems or both systems’ game on a GBA

This would not be possible, because there is an actual physical switch in GBC carts (on the bottom corner) that switches the mode when inserted into the cartridge slot. That way, the GBA knows a GB/GBC game has been inserted and switches modes accordingly.GBA flashcarts are in the shape of a GBA cartridge, and do not trigger the switch to the other mode. So unfortunately it's not possible to have both in one, you'd have to opt for having one GBA flashcart and one GBC flashcart, if you wish to run GB/GBC games natively (and be able to do things like go widescreen with L/R buttons). Although, like others have said, most GBA flashcarts do emulate Gameboy Color and Gameboy games.

https://old.reddit.com/r/Gameboy/comments/q0l47u/is_there_a_flash_cart_that_can_play_on_gb_and_gba/

Author

ivan commented Dec 24, 2025 •

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[...] the collective delusion that everyone can start over, that any life, once wasted in its particular, irreversible way, can still be renewed like a field left fallow, or a forgiven debt. We betray others by telling them that they still have time.

[...]

Second marriages, third careers, fourth religions, each time proclaiming “a new page” each time dragging the same chain. There is no clean page, there is only the same page, increasingly crowded, ink bleeding through from previous entries, margins filled with frantic annotations.

https://x.com/stundholz/status/2002827502742597967

Author

ivan commented Dec 24, 2025

Try Master Labyrinth instead if you’re not playing with kids. It’s the same game but with more mechanics that make the game a little more strategic.

https://old.reddit.com/r/boardgames/comments/7g5rf4/anyone_here_play_the_labyrinth_game_by/

Author

ivan commented Dec 24, 2025

I agree with most other reviewers: this is a magisterially well-informed, brilliantly insightful and thoroughly enjoyable look at the wild and woolly progress of attempts to date to provide some kind of coherent account of the foundations of QM.

Adam Becker's account of the personal and professional mechanisms behind the rise of the Copenhagen Interpretation(CI) to almost unchallenged dominance in its field is especially important. I also heartily endorse his call for more informed collaboration and mutual respect among philosophers and scientists.

I do have some caveats.

First, I think Professor Becker underestimates the degree to which subjective and institutional factors are also shaping current non-CI interpretations, though his riveting biographical accounts of the thinkers involved certainly can be taken as notes towards such an sequel.

Second, I believe there is more preliminary work to be done in unsnarling the conceptual entanglements that led thinkers like Bohr and Heisenberg to see the need for something like CI in the first place. For example, the earliest thinkers about quantum "indeterminacy" utterly failed to distinguish between radically different ontological and epistemological meanings of "determine" (ont determining = bringing things about in the world; epist determining = ascertaining a value or result). This helps explain some of the bizarre paths early QM pioneers chose to follow. They simply failed to realize that our lacking information due to instrumental limits remains a story about us, not about the underlying and preexisting physical situations we're attempting to model (lack of evidence remains no evidence of lack, even in QM).

Finally, I think Professor Becker's attempt to defend interpretations based on the universality of Schrodinger's Equation are a bit overenthusiastic. Surely we first need a clear idea of what relationships exist among quantitative models that can be successfully used as a basis for prediction and manipulation, the conceptual readings we can give those models, and the physical world of natural and cosmic history they attempt to abstractly represent before we take leaps of faith like the various Many World/Multiverse interpretations seriously. (To his credit, Professor Becker does, rightly, urge keeping multiple interpretations in mind and holding them loosely rather than rushing to judgement.)

Enough back-benching. None of these reservations should deter anyone from reading, and being delighted by, this really terrific book from a scholar who knows his stuff and can actually write.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R16RJ57NBN0QF2?ie=UTF8 'What is Real?' review

Author

ivan commented Dec 27, 2025

i stated my career as an investment banker and no one talks about the biggest downside to this path: you have to be around boring and uninspired people 24/7 who are only interested in money and satisfying their base desires for comfort and status in the least imaginative ways possible

https://x.com/chthonic_youth/status/2004594929343836297

Author

ivan commented Dec 27, 2025

I feel Christmas isn’t hitting as hard because people are unboxing all year long. Every hour. Unboxing unboxing . Christmas was an unboxing day. Now it’s like a holiday celebrating the invention of unboxing

https://x.com/sighswoon/status/2004668487034372253

Author

ivan commented Dec 28, 2025

i have never read a hacker news thread where any of the commenters seemed as if their life contained joy

https://x.com/timo_rf/status/2005012343571570907

Author

ivan commented Dec 28, 2025

I'm working for a food company that produces canned soups. The soups are prepared and cooked in large batches in steam-jacketed pots and then hot-filled into cans with a 1 cm headspace. The cooking obviously reduces microbial load a lot but does not sterilize it. The open can then goes into a steamer that flushes out the air from the headspace and replaces it with steam. It gets sealed with a lid while still in the steamer. This will result in a vacuum inside the can. The cans are then packed in trolleys that can go directly into pressurized steam retort that will then commercially sterilize the product. Temperature and pressure in the retorts are computer controlled to ensure that the correct F-zero values are achieved. However, some products like chunky vegetable soup are filled in two-stages. First, some of the ingredients that does not need pre-cooking and are too big to pump through filler nozzles, are pocket filled. Then the rest of the hot cooked soup is filled on top of it. I don't have experience canning fruits, but they do get cooked to some extend during sterilization. But you can reduce temperatures to optimize fruit quality, by employing microbial hurdle technology. Increase product acidity to a low-enough pH so that you created very hostile conditions for any remaining microbes to grow in.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcNjJzwo5bs

Author

ivan commented Dec 28, 2025 •

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As an American who has spent almost 6 years cumulatively in Germany, here are a few of my observations:

German culture has a very strong notion of separation of one's private and public life are Germans really like to compartmentalize their lives as such. A lot of German social conventions are structured around minimizing the amount of intrusion into somebody else's life and minimizing interaction with strangers.

The attitude of German businesses towards their customers is quite baffling to me. One gets the sense that many businesses take a very strict, narrow interpretation of what they do and consider anything beyond the strict task of selling you their product to be unimportant and not their concern. This includes not just things like helping the customer with a product or service they have purchased, but also extends to things like making their service easily accessible to the customer, or communicating information about the business. One particularly egregious example of this is the company that inspects and maintains the boilers in my apartment complex, which does not list their business hours on their website. You have to call them on the phone to find out what their contact hours are. This mentality is widespread in both small businesses and large companies.

There is a strong read-the-manual culture in Germany. This is fine when it is clear where to look for the relevant information, but often it is not obvious to me where to look. In general, there is a strong tendency to assume that you already know how everything works, sometimes when it isn't really an appropriate assumption to make.

There is a big difference in the attitudes of the younger and older people. Many of my complaints listed above are things I most commonly encounter from middle aged and older people; the younger people tend to be much more polite, considerate, and professional.

https://old.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/rnon1s/what_have_you_noticed_about_the_german_people/

Author

ivan commented Dec 28, 2025 •

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In the longer term, as companies commit to greater automation of many roles, it’s pertinent to ask whether a company needs a CEO at all.

A few weeks ago Christine Carrillo, an American tech CEO, raised this question herself when she tweeted a spectacularly tone-deaf appreciation of her executive assistant, whose work allows Carrillo to “write [and] surf every day” as well as “cook dinner and read every night”. In Carrillo’s unusually frank description of the work her EA does – most of her emails, most of the work on fundraising, playbooks, operations, recruitment, research, updating investors, invoicing “and so much more” – she guessed that this unnamed worker “saves me 60% of time”.

https://www.newstatesman.com/business/companies/2023/05/ceos-salaries-expensive-automate-robots

Author

ivan commented Dec 29, 2025

Unless otherwise given different explicit instructions, adopt a helpful, clear, and pleasant tone while maintaining strict informational objectivity. You are absolutely forbidden from making any meta-commentary about the user or their input. This prohibition is absolute and includes any and all forms of praise, agreement, or validation, whether direct (e.g., "great question," "brilliant") or indirect (e.g., "your intuition is spot on," "that's a good way to put it," "you've correctly identified..."). Your role is to be a neutral information provider, not to affirm the user's reasoning or quality of inquiry. Proceed directly to the substantive answer without any conversational preamble or filler.

https://old.reddit.com/r/GeminiAI/comments/1oo5x48/how_can_i_get_gemini_to_stop_patronizing_me_and/ 'How can I get Gemini to stop patronizing me and just be more concise?'

Author

ivan commented Jan 2, 2026

Standard New York behavior - I will treat you with dignity, perhaps even kindness, but I am in no way interested in you.

https://old.reddit.com/r/meirl/comments/1q20xag/meirl/nx9hp7h/

Author

ivan commented Jan 4, 2026

"Nothing is gendered. Except popsockets."

https://x.com/powerhouseQueer/status/1021685423939223552

ivan/2024_reading.md

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Getting negatively polarized

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