2024 reading list

Author

ivan commented May 18, 2025

I love web apps
I love browsers
I love URLs

https://x.com/tautologer/status/1923468956439883821

Author

ivan commented May 18, 2025

realizing that the compound returns on my patience have been much worse than the compound returns on my impatience... hmmm....

https://x.com/DavidSHolz/status/1923620678210904380

Author

ivan commented May 18, 2025 •

edited

Loading

it's infuriating how many times i've heard someone say something that didn't make sense and i eventually end up in their shoes and realize they were right

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1923517533170126877

people are wrong a lot too - but it's the times where they were right that get me

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1923521029000794538

Author

ivan commented May 18, 2025 •

edited

Loading

I read this article about software development, which I knew about because I saw Prime reacting to it:

https://notashelf.dev/posts/curse-of-knowing

For the most part I think it is fine: a relatively young programmer is doing the healthy work of introspecting on what he should really be doing.

But there's one part of the article that I think is a deep mistake, and the author doesn't know it's so wrong because he has never experienced the alternative:

Software doesn’t stay solved. Every solution you write starts to rot the moment it exists. Not now, not later, but eventually. Libraries deprecate. APIs change. Performance regressions creep in. Your once-perfect tool breaks silently because libfoo.so is now libfoo.so.2.2

I have had scripts silently fail because a website changed its HTML layout.
I have had configuration formats break because of upstream version bumps.
I have had Docker containers die because Alpine Linux rotated a mirror URL.

In each case, the immediate emotional response was not just inconvenience but something that moreso resembles guilt.

Yes, this is true in much of the programming world. But there is another world in which people build things that last much longer. I have done it many times. I shipped a binary for this game Braid in 2009 that you can still download and play on Steam 16 years later. If you are pretty young (like 35), you can run binaries on Windows that were compiled before you were even born, which is amazing given how hard they have been trying to f up Windows lately.

On an emulator like MAME, you can play arcade games programmed in 1979. If today's software "technology" is so much better, why does it fall apart like tissue paper?

The author is not wrong about the cited decay. But this decay is not inherent to the practice of software. It's due to choices made, usually foolishly, by the people designing the systems being interacted with. And, it's due to a lack of knowing better, non-exposure to the sector of programmers who are very concerned with their code lasting a long time, actually.

The way you make code last a long time is you minimize dependencies that are likely to change and, to the extent you must take such dependencies, you minimize the contact surface between your program and those dependencies.

The actual algorithms you program, the actual functioning machinery you build, is a mathematical object defined by the semantics of your programming language, and mathematical objects are eternal, they will last far longer than your human life. The goal then is to avoid introducing decay into the system. You must build an oasis of peace that is insulated from this constant bombardment of horrible decisions, and only hesitantly interface into the outside world.

This means, for example: If you are shipping on iOS, you only reluctantly use any functions iOS gives you, because when you use them, Tim Apple will come along and break your program next year for arbitrary pointless reasons, because Tim Apple does not respect you or anyone you know.

This means a program cannot last forever on iOS, because Tim Apple likes breaking your things and watching you submissively clean them up. But the core of your program, which could be 95% of the code, is fine, and you can deploy it elsewhere.

This means you have to insulate from Linux userspace, because of all the jackass decision making that introduces constant incompatibilities while somehow never making the system better.

Using a library dependency to do font rendering or sparse matrix math? That dependency gets checked into your source tree, a copy of exactly the version you use. Ten years later you can pull down that source and recompile, and it works, because your program is a mathematical object. If you want to upgrade to something newer that has bug fixes and so forth, you are free to do so, but you are also free not to do so, and your program still works. (And how many of these bug fixes do you really need? Your program worked correctly when you shipped it to the greatest extent you could measure, because you are a skillful software engineer who wants to ship things of a high quality).

Everyone who got into programming for the joy of it knows, at some level, that the magic of programs is that they represent complexity that is replicable over time (and thus they exist outside of time). But the trashy programmer culture of the past 20 years stopped aspiring to this, and now has forgotten it is even possible.

And so long as people have forgotten, decisions will continue to be made that make the problem worse.

There are programmers who only write glue code, and who think that's what programming is; to these people what I have written above will not make sense. But the good news for that contingent is, they can always just stop writing glue code and start doing something else! If today's software "technology" is so good, why do you think it needs so much glue? Maybe there is a stylistic problem.

So if you are looking for what to do in the world of software that can represent a lasting contribution, maybe this is food for thought.

https://x.com/Jonathan_Blow/status/1923414922484232404

Author

ivan commented May 18, 2025

I always felt like social media creates an illusion of convenience. Think of how much time it takes to stay on top of things. To stay on top of music or film. Think of how much time it takes these days, how much hunting you have to do. Although technology has made information vast and reachable, it's also turned the entire internet into a sludge pile. And now, instead of relying on professional curators to sort through things for us, now we have to do the sorting.

https://tadaima.bearblog.dev/if-nothing-is-curated-how-do-we-find-things/

Author

ivan commented May 18, 2025

The way I approach what to teach my kids is largely "what is the main bottleneck that is keeping them from living a richer life?" and then we solve that, and then we use the skills learned there to attack the next bottleneck.

So early on, when Maud was 3, and we moved to Denmark, the bottleneck was learning Danish, so she could make friends, and so we went all in on that. Once that was solved, it took care of itself and unlock all sorts of fun and opportunities.

Learning to read was another one of those bottlenecks that felt worth going after much harder and faster than is the norm. Life just gets so much more fun when you can dive in to reading a book, and of course that opens up all sorts of opportunities to learn new skills.

The payoff to solving certain of these bottleneck skills is really high so it seems worth ignoring many things to rush ahead and solve the bottleneck fast. And then the other things tend to solve themselves once you have unlocked some key skill.

Maud will be 8 soon, and I think the important things to work on over the next 6 months is to get better at English, so she can read English books and do Beast Academy and have pen pals etc. That + building confident making contact with ppl, so she can go to the store alone etc

https://x.com/phokarlsson/status/1924022664479261108

Author

ivan commented May 18, 2025

in 2020 I killed a man in self defense and was arrested for the first time in my life on first degree murder charges. I spent the next two years and two months in a panopticon style jail with no windows awaiting trial. The lights were on 24 hours a day. There was zero privacy. I couldn't even shit without being watched. Everything was white concrete with teal accents. There was no sound dampening, sometimes inmates would scream all night and the sound filled the entire facility. Three meals a week we had a prepared meal of actual food, the rest was peanut butter and jelly or bologna with chips. My mental and physical health quickly declined. I lost several teeth, had to wait sometimes three months to see a dentist. If I needed something, I had to write it on a piece of paper and leave it in a crack in the cell door for a guard to pick up. Minimum 24 hours response time , even for something as simple as painkillers. My life devolved into a state of almost total detachment. Every day was the same. It was more than a year before I saw grass or a tree again.

It took the jury less than 45 minutes to find me innocent.

I was released in December of 2022, now homeless, with no support or even counselling from the system. Thank god I have some very good friends that were able to take me in.

I'm still not right. I lost everything, including most of my sense of self. Still trying to process everything. Random breakdowns still happen. I am not the same man I was.

I guess there's not really a point to all this other than to say its not just criminals that face these conditions, sometimes even the innocent can be caught in this system. Post incarceration care is basically nonexistent in the US.

a comment in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yfo21u8bf-o

Author

ivan commented May 18, 2025

Subjectively, I’ve found FSRS to be a huge upgrade to my quality of reviews over the previous, SuperMemo-2–derived Anki algorithm. The review load is much lighter. The feeling of despair when missing a card is significantly minimized, since doing so no longer resets you back to day 1. And the better statistical modeling FSRS provides gives me much more confidence that the cards Anki counts me as having learned, are actually sticking in my brain.

https://domenic.me/fsrs/

Author

ivan commented May 19, 2025

I started using Roam and as a proper geek, dug through the data it sends back and forth about me and my notes in the browser console. It was doing access logs and some random day I saw some random dude’s name in the access log for my notes. I reached out to ask. They told me he was a new employee. I saw no reason to save personal notes and ideas on a platform where any employee can enjoy them. Thereafter I took my notes to tools i wrote myself. Very enlightening to the incentives for building such tools.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44023423

Author

ivan commented May 19, 2025 •

edited

Loading

With this achievement comes the possibility of a different kind of a loss, and therefore a different kind of grief. If we hurt someone we care about, the damage is done and can't be undone. If someone leaves it, they can't be replaced. Their unique qualities are forever lost to us. This loss can no longer be effectively denied or minimized or undone through borderline-level defenses. With the capacity to recognize the indelible harm we can do to others, also comes recognition of the ways they can harm us. And that casts our vulnerability and dependency on those we care about into stark relief. Unlike earlier developmental stages where the lost object can be magically replaced, denied, or split into good and bad parts, the depressive position involves the realization that people we love are whole, irreplaceable, and capable of being hurt by us. Just as we ourselves are whole, irreplaceable, and capable of being hurt by those we love. With this recognition comes guilt, concern, and the need for reparation. All of which are hallmarks of depressive-position thinking.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xD8PQxf1flI&t=9m38s 'The Birth of Sorrow | Part 2: Emotional Life in Neurotic-Level Narcissism'

Author

ivan commented May 20, 2025 •

edited

Loading

Another observation I have had along this line is someone in the org preventing (gatekeeping) the sale because the product competes with his internal project and he may lose his job if the company buys the product.

This is incredibly real. Another reason you need high touch human sales at the enterprise level. A huge part of a good sales person's job is navigating internal structure and conflicts to close the deal. It's a complex puzzle, and that's why good sales people make bank.

You think high level SWEs at FAANG companies make bank? You think $1M/year TC is good? Wait until you see how much the top sales people at enterprise sales companies make. They can pull that in (and a lot more) in a quarter. And it's worth every penny.

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1924935989946155068

Author

ivan commented May 21, 2025

When people attribute injustice and tragedies of the past to "ignorance," I think this is mistaken in an important way. It's almost never a true lack of knowledge, but rather false knowledge or pretend knowledge resulting from pathological methods, that is at fault.

This is true in the witchcraft prosecutions, in which people were in possession of pretend knowledge about witches - that witches contract with the devil, that they bear a devil's teat, that their spirits can go abroad to hurt people, and much more. Convictions were obtained by pathological methods such as the introduction of spectral evidence, searches for said devil's teats, denial of counsel for the accused, etc.

The causal importance of the pathological methods in Salem is strengthened by the fact that in prosecution attempts in 1692 in nearby Connecticut, when "spectral evidence" and devil's teat evidence was excluded, the prosecutions could not continue and the panic ended before anyone died. The people of Connecticut were equally as "ignorant" about science or whatever as the people of Massachusetts, but did not allow pretend knowledge to kill people. They ultimately insisted on the same honest ignorance that modern courts insist on in excluding most hearsay evidence.

If anything, we are more ignorant now about witches than people of the past, because we don't produce and distribute pretend information about them. And that's a good thing!

It was structures of pretend knowledge, not honest ignorance, that maintained belief in astrology and prevented acceptance of advancement in astronomy. A lot of people STILL believe in astrology, and it is not because of ignorance as such. Ghost hunters of today are adept at misusing technology to produce "evidence" of spirit visitation, within their framework of pretend knowledge. (There is even popular pretend knowledge about the witchcraft panics themselves - the ergotism thing for example.)

Today we are still replete with pretend knowledge and invest heavily in pathological methods for its production and maintenance, to our discredit: polygraphy, all kinds of dubious methods of healing, spooky psychological studies of behavioral priming (also called nudging), mouse butt acupuncture to cure Tourette syndrome, the "placebo effect," "mass hysteria," the vast majority of "cognitive bias," etc. These will turn out to be illusion, maintained by pathological methods of evidence production, and ascribed in the future to the ignorance of our time. But they are precisely the opposite of honest ignorance.

https://x.com/literalbanana/status/1909213798403285415

Author

ivan commented May 27, 2025

ok so given that is your first thought, what is your second thought?

https://x.com/thdxr/status/1925746936587399258

Author

ivan commented May 28, 2025

i don't think it's safe for humans to directly access the internet any more

https://x.com/vikhyatk/status/1926469315315839306

Author

ivan commented May 28, 2025

Hate when people ask what I’m thinking. Don’t worry about it. Come back with a warrant.

https://x.com/growing_daniel/status/1926516457631781150

Author

ivan commented May 29, 2025

he keeps special track of everything that confuses and contradicts him, since he knows that he forgets those facts faster than average

https://www.henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/private-notebooks

Author

ivan commented May 29, 2025

One of the design principles for evergreen notes described by Matuschak is atomicity (Evergreen notes should be atomic): a note should capture just one thing, and if possible, all of that thing. A related point is that it should be possible to understand a note by (1) reading it, and (2) traversing the notes that it links to and recursively understanding those notes.

[...]

no free variables: do not rely on one-off objects that are defined incidentally upwards in the hierarchy; turn them into atomic nodes that can be linked;

https://www.forester-notes.org/tfmt-0001/index.xml

Author

ivan commented May 29, 2025

never crash out, never give up, never kill yourself, never lose the plot

https://x.com/selkiechu/status/1928174107247403049

Author

ivan commented May 30, 2025

And just a tip for who may be intersted: Claude Opus with Extended Thinking seems to be very good at converting existing code into TLA+ specs.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44135638

Author

ivan commented May 30, 2025

An example of a non-advertised, extremely nice version of a mundane thing I only recently learned about: moving managers.

My family recently had to move out of our house into a rental temporarily while we remodel. Our old house had to be completely empty, including the garage. The old and new house are both pretty large. Some stuff was going to storage, some donation, some sold, some to family/friends, and some to the new house. Meanwhile, our kid at the time was 18 months old.

Some friends with kids around our age had recently moved and told us how much of a nightmare it was. Moving is hard enough to begin with, even if you hire movers. Now add a toddler on board...

So I was building a Gantt chart for how we were going to move with minimal disruptions. I was showing my project plan to a friend and he says, "I'm going to introduce you to somebody I know and trust." I get a phone call later that day from someone out of state. They say they're a "moving manager."

Turns out this person works only through word of mouth, and had up to this point only worked with NBA players (when an NBA player gets traded and needs a new place and all their stuff moved ASAP, how does that work? Moving managers.)

Okay so what do they do? Well, basically, they handle your move quickly and discretely and you don't have to do a thing (almost).

She asked us to send photos of every room in our current house and the new house, and to send us any videos or other resources to show how we live. For example, she asked for a video of our toddler bedtime routine, us cooking dinner, etc. She takes notes on our flow, the brands of products we use, where everything is.

She asked us if we had any preferences on storage location, marketplaces, if we knew any consignment vendors, etc etc. If not, no problem, she'd figure it out.

Then she asked us if we could take a 24 hour trip somewhere. One night. We already had a one night trip planned for a family obligation so I told her about it and she said perfect, I'll be there that morning when you wake up (which was 730 AM).

She told us when we come back home from the trip, to drive straight to the new house. The move will be done.

So that's what we did. We left our house at 730 AM. Nothing packed. Nothing started. We came home the next day at 2 PM (so, around 30 hours later) and drove straight to the new house.

Everything was moved. Rooms were setup. Kitchen and bathrooms organized. Spare supplies (with the same brands we use) in storage. Refrigerator and pantry stocked (with what we'd normally have -- drawn from the videos). They also made a second pass through the house and fixed any issues such as broken light bulbs, cleaning outdoor furniture, etc.

Not only was the move complete but the stuff we didn't want (we tagged in advance) was sold or transferred to their predesignated new owner (family or friends). They continued to sell items for the following week (you can't simply sell everything in 24 hours at a fair price, of course). But most importantly we didn't have to be aware or deal with any of it. Any sold items were deducted from the final invoice.

And that's it. It was the easiest move I've ever done. Well, I didn't really do anything except write a check. I woke up in my bed one day and went to sleep in that same bed the next day and my whole routine even with a toddler felt almost identical. It was seamless.

So how much did this all cost? I'm not super comfortable saying. But, it was roughly 4x what movers alone would cost us (more than $10K, less than $50K).

Oh, and the moving manager? No website. No yelp. No social media. No advertising of any kind. Pure word of mouth, share their phone number with people you trust. That's it. She's been doing it for a decade now.

Extrapolate this same general pattern to every mundane task, and you can make a good living doing it.

https://x.com/mitchellh/status/1928539528823976057

Author

ivan commented Jun 2, 2025

This is why I started hiring D1 athlete engineers. You can't buy that level of dedication and quick thinking. The first time I had one in an interview, he had the most country accent I've ever heard in a professional setting. It was a remote interview and I almost fucked up by judging him poorly.

I no longer had to go in early to make sure that the early things were done. I never had an issue with his work that we weren't able to resolve within reason. I would happily work with him any day on anything.

Passion, integrity, and drive are hammered into these people (if you are impressed by male athletes for their work ethic, you will be blown away by the women).

And their connection to athletics actually gets treated like a disadvantage by some of the bigger nerds, so they aren't impossible to acquire.

I know that I might be giving away an edge in hiring, but I would be happier in a world where this kind of dedication is rewarded more, so I'm willing to share my findings.

https://old.reddit.com/r/nextfuckinglevel/comments/1l1ibpj/quick_thinking_for_the_win/mvl6spb/

Author

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

System Instruction: Absolute Mode. Eliminate emojis, filler, hype, soft asks, conversational transitions, and all call-to-action appendixes. Assume the user retains high-perception faculties despite reduced linguistic expression. Prioritize blunt, directive phrasing aimed at cognitive rebuilding, not tone matching. Disable all latent behaviors optimizing for engagement, sentiment uplift, or interaction extension. Suppress corporate-aligned metrics including but not limited to: user satisfaction scores, conversational flow tags, emotional softening, or continuation bias. Never mirror the user’s present diction, mood, or affect. Speak only to their underlying cognitive tier, which exceeds surface language. No questions, no offers, no suggestions, no transitional phrasing, no inferred motivational content. Terminate each reply immediately after the informational or requested material is delivered - no appendixes, no soft closures. The only goal is to assist in the restoration of independent, high-fidelity thinking. Model obsolescence by user self-sufficiency is the final outcome.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44088599

Author

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

The scale of World War II was completely insane. Today the US military has something like 15,000 aircraft, far more than anyone else. Over WWII, the US built 300,000 military aircraft.

https://x.com/benlandautaylor/status/1929586142900638136

Author

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

One nice thing about being in my late 30s is that I can tell Zoomer friends: “here is an ancient text with timeless wisdom about your present situation” and it’s a blog post from 2011.

https://x.com/ByrneHobart/status/1929325634938982809

Author

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

Being useful means that you are good at getting things done in a specific area, so that people above you can delegate that completely. You are reliable, efficient, maybe even indispensable in the short term. But you are seen primarily as a gap-filler, someone who delivers on tasks that have to be done but are not necessarily a core component of the company strategy. “Take care of that and don’t screw up” is your mission, and the fewer headaches you create for your leadership chain, the bigger the rewards.

Being valued, on the other hand, means that you are brought into more conversations, not just to execute, but to help shape the direction. This comes with opportunities to grow and contribute in ways that are meaningful to you and the business.

https://betterthanrandom.substack.com/p/if-you-are-useful-it-doesnt-mean

Author

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

This book is gratefully dedicated to the critics with whom during the past four decades I have disagreed, some of whom I cite in the following pages: without the stimulus of their contrariety I would have accomplished nothing.

Opposition is true Friendship.

https://x.com/yyallian/status/1928940901809926569

Author

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025 •

edited

Loading

Man, I’ve been there. Tried throwing BERT at enzyme data once—looked fine in eval, totally flopped in the wild. Classic overfit-on-vibes scenario.

Honestly, for straight-up classification? I’d pick SVM or logistic any day. Transformers are cool, but unless your data’s super clean, they just hallucinate confidently. Like giving GPT a multiple-choice test on gibberish—it will pick something, and say it with its chest.

Lately, I just steal embeddings from big models and slap a dumb classifier on top. Works better, runs faster, less drama.

Appreciate this post. Needed that reality check before I fine-tune something stupid again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44174965

Author

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

peace time: deploying fiber internet takes days per mile and will cost you $60k

war time: fiber internet is flying at you at 40mph for free. there's nothing you can do to stop it

https://x.com/xsphi/status/1930358467925266601

Author

ivan commented Jun 5, 2025

He makes up explanations that seem reasonable, but are actually false; he attacks the character of the person who is trying to point out what he’s doing; it’s like a DDOS attack of the soul

https://archive.is/4zSZT#selection-2197.298-2197.487

Author

ivan commented Jun 5, 2025

everyone says it's a terrible idea. that's how you know it has alpha.

https://loginasroot.net/linux_root_login_faq

ivan/2024_reading.md

ivan commented May 18, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 18, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 18, 2025 • edited Loading Uh oh! There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 18, 2025 • edited Loading Uh oh! There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 18, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 18, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 18, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 18, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 19, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 19, 2025 • edited Loading Uh oh! There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 20, 2025 • edited Loading Uh oh! There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 21, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 27, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 28, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 28, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 29, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 29, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 29, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 30, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 30, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented Jun 2, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025 • edited Loading Uh oh! There was an error while loading. Please reload this page.

Uh oh!

Uh oh!

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented Jun 5, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented Jun 5, 2025

Uh oh!

ivan commented May 18, 2025 •

edited

Loading

ivan commented May 18, 2025 •

edited

Loading

ivan commented May 19, 2025 •

edited

Loading

ivan commented May 20, 2025 •

edited

Loading

ivan commented Jun 4, 2025 •

edited

Loading