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Last active January 4, 2026 08:16
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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 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

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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

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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

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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

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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/

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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

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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?'

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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/

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ivan commented Jan 4, 2026

"Nothing is gendered. Except popsockets."

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

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ivan commented Jan 4, 2026

Every new horror a footnote. Every fucking day.

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

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