Skip to content

Instantly share code, notes, and snippets.

@ivan

ivan/2024_reading.md

Last active January 4, 2026 08:16
Show Gist options

  • Select an option

    Learn more about clone URLs
  • Save ivan/a36e2489623469d96c1ad79077b6dcf9 to your computer and use it in GitHub Desktop.

Select an option

Learn more about clone URLs
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 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

@ivan
Copy link
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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 16, 2025 •
edited
Loading

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

@ivan
Copy link
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

@ivan
Copy link
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/

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 24, 2025 •
edited
Loading

[...] 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

@ivan
Copy link
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/

@ivan
Copy link
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

@ivan
Copy link
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

@ivan
Copy link
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

@ivan
Copy link
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

@ivan
Copy link
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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 28, 2025 •
edited
Loading

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/

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Dec 28, 2025 •
edited
Loading

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

@ivan
Copy link
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?'

@ivan
Copy link
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/

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Jan 4, 2026

"Nothing is gendered. Except popsockets."

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

@ivan
Copy link
Author

ivan commented Jan 4, 2026

Every new horror a footnote. Every fucking day.

https://www.metafilter.com/211682/Musks-CSAM-Factory

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