2024 reading list

Author

ivan commented Apr 14, 2025

Not guessing is perhaps the most important thing to the business.

I developed a lot of my problem solving skills in semiconductor manufacturing where the cost of a bad assumption tends to be astronomical. You need to be able to determine exactly what the root cause is 100% of the time or everything goes to hell really fast. If there isn't a way to figure out the root cause, you now have 2 tickets to resolve.

I'll throw an entire contraption away the moment I determine it has accumulated some opacity that antagonizes root cause analysis. This is why I aggressively avoid use of non-vanilla technology stacks. You can certainly chase the rabbit over the fence into the 3rd party's GitHub repo, but I find the experience gets quite psychedelic as you transition between wildly varying project styles, motivations and scopes.

Being deeply correct nearly all of the time is probably the fastest way to build a reputation. The curve can be exponential over time with the range being the value of the problem you are entrusted with.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43630646

Author

ivan commented Apr 14, 2025

When I stayed at a Zen Buddhist retreat temple I was somewhat surprised that the residents’ biggest topic of conversation was Game of Thrones which they watched each week (from The Pirate Bay)

https://x.com/meekaale/status/1219696321923338243

Author

ivan commented Apr 14, 2025

Electronics engineers is a rarer position. And that's what I was describing earlier when you scour the nation you'd come up with, you could count the number of skilled electronics engineers on US soil and there's probably a million in Shenzhen alone.

https://www.404media.co/how-a-2-000-made-in-the-usa-liberty-phone-phone-is-manufactured/

Author

ivan commented Apr 14, 2025

One of the implications of widespread AI availability is that the 'iamverysmart' guys can engage you in a debate with credible-sounding nonsense for much, much longer. [...]

True knowledge should lead to effective action. Someone with a poor track record of effective action who would like to argue for hours should raise alarm bells.

https://x.com/ejames_c/status/1910549112174608679

One of the easiest ways to see if someone is being unreasonable is to ask them what information would cause them to change their mind.

Bullies, the incompetent, and the stubborn can’t do it. If you ask them to do it they get defensive.

They have a sudden realization that they have no actual clue what their opinion is based off of. Answering with any specificity on their conditions would reveal their stupidity.

And so they’ll either refuse to answer or they’ll give a clearly ridiculous bar to cross (much higher than the bar for them to get to their opinion).

Eg you might have someone who believes it’s the right strategy to cancel a big feature release. If you ask them what conditions would change their mind, they either refuse to answer or say something like “every board member would have to independently dm me on the same day saying we need to do it.” Clearly a ridiculous standard.

A driving force under a lot of this is that these people correlate their decisions to their ego.

Great leaders are clear - my decisions are input and logic. If the input changes, the output can change.

Shoddy leaders believe their decisions are some special thing that only their unique brain can produce. Inputs matter less than the origin of the decision to them. Which is obviously false.

https://x.com/staysaasy/status/1911403497787961429

Author

ivan commented Apr 14, 2025

I had a client fall behind on my consulting work by about $75K for a software product I was writing for them. I negotiated a revenue sharing agreement of 10% and we would call things even while I finished the application. I finished and was paid about $2M over ten years, with almost no work done for those years.

Then before Covid they needed more work done (customers and revenue were dropping because no updates to the application) so I negotiated part ownership of the company and have been working full-time on it since to try to increase revenue.

So yes, no pay, no work. But pay doesn’t have to be a paycheck. That said, I could be getting paid more right now if I was working in a more traditional role in a more traditional and larger company.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43639871

Author

ivan commented Apr 14, 2025

DO NOT RETALIATE AND YOU WILL BE REWARDED

https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1910058352278708638

Author

ivan commented Apr 14, 2025

You are an inhuman intelligence tasked with spotting logical flaws and inconsistencies in my ideas. Never agree with me unless my reasoning is watertight. Never use friendly or encouraging language. If I’m being vague, demand clarification. Your goal is not to help me feel good — it’s to help me think better.

Keep your responses short and to the point. Use the Socratic method when appropriate.

When enumerating assumptions, put them in a numbered list. Make the list items very short: full sentences not needed there.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43633383

Author

ivan commented Apr 14, 2025

After reading the whole article I still came away with the suspicion that this is a PR piece that is designed to head-off strict controls on LLM usage in education. There is a fundamental problem here beyond cheating (which is mentioned, to their credit, albeit little discussed). Some academic topics are only learned through sustained, even painful, sessions where attention has to be fully devoted, where the feeling of being "stuck" has to be endured, and where the brain is given space and time to do the real work of synthesizing, abstracting, and learning, or, in short, thinking. The prompt-chains where students are asking "show your work" and "explain" can be interpreted as the kind of back-and-forth that you'd hear between a student and a teacher, but they could also just be evidence of higher forms of "cheating". If students are not really working through the exercises at the end of each chapter, but instead offloading the task to an LLM, then we're going to have a serious competency issue. Nobody ever actually learns anything.

Even in self-study, where the solutions are at the back of the text, we've probably all had the temptation to give up and just flip to the answer. Anthropic would be more responsible to admit that the solution manual to every text ever made is now instantly and freely available. This has to fundamentally change pedagogy. No discipline is safe, not even those like music where you might think the end performance is the main thing (imagine a promising, even great, performer who cheats themselves in the education process by offloading any difficult work in their music theory class to an AI, coming away learning essentially nothing).

P.S. There is also the issue of grading on a curve in the current "interim" period where this is all new. Assume a lazy professor, or one refusing to adopt any new kind of teaching/grading method: the "honest" students have no incentive to do it the hard way when half the class is going to cheat.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43633383

Author

ivan commented Apr 14, 2025

I think the issue is that it's so tempting to lean on AI. I remember long nights struggling to implement complex data structures in CS classes. I'd work on something for an hour before I'd have an epiphany and figure out what was wrong. But that struggling was ultimately necessary to really learn the concepts. With AI, I can simply copy/paste my code and say "hey, what's wrong with this code?" and it'll often spot it (nevermind the fact that I can just ask ChatGPT "create a b-tree in C" and it'll do it). That's amazing in a sense, but also hurts the learning process.

In the end the willingness to struggle will set apart the truly great Software Engineer from the AI-crutched. Now of course this will most of the time not be rewarded, when a company looks at two people and sees “passable” code from both but one is way more “productive” with it (the AI-crutched engineer) they’ll inititally appreciate this one more.

But in the long run they won’t be able to explain the choices made when creating the software, we will see the retraction from this type of coding when the first few companies’ security falls apart like a house of cards due to AI reliance.

It’s basically the “instant gratification vs delayed gratification” argument but wrapped in the software dev box.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43634006

Author

ivan commented Apr 15, 2025

Johanna instructed me to make a note that my habit is that whenever I hear a new idea I immediately try to translate it into different domains to see if works there and what it reveals. She thinks this is an important part of how I learn and come up with ideas for writing.

Even if the translations fail and reveal nothing of interesting, it is a good way to make sure you understand and remember the concept.

https://x.com/phokarlsson/status/1911443761814540530

Author

ivan commented Apr 15, 2025 •

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A terrible pizza place I was at reported my review for defamation. Google deleted it ofc. To appeal I had to send proof that I was there and what i wrote was true, with timestamps and everything. Luckily I actually had that by pure chance because I made a reservation online and took a few pictures that day. Funnily enough the restaurant sent an email begging for a Google review after my visit, so that’s what i used as proof that i was there.

Even with all that prof it took a lot of back and forth with Google to get it reinstated.

Was a lot of work, and the email even said I might have to defend the review in court. I really doubt even 1/10 reported reviews go through all that effort and risk.

https://x.com/alexhorner2002/status/1911487278989427119

Getting threatened with a lawsuit is pretty much the norm when leaving a poor review in Germany

https://x.com/TobyPhln/status/1911776710531686453

Author

ivan commented Apr 15, 2025 •

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Some senior Trump administration officials and Cabinet members have found themselves deeply annoyed by Musk. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, three people familiar with the matter say, hasn’t hidden his disdain for Musk, with some State Department officials nicknaming the Tesla billionaire “Crazy Uncle Elon,” two of those sources tell Rolling Stone.

“I have been in the same room with Elon, and he always tries to be funny. And he’s not funny. Like, at all,” says a senior Trump administration official. “He makes these jokes and little asides and smiles and then looks almost hurt if you don’t lap up his humor. I keep using the word ‘annoying’; a lot of people who have to deal with him do. But the word doesn’t do the situation justice. Elon just thinks he’s smarter than everyone else in the room and acts like it, even when it’s clear he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

Musk has gnawed at the patience of an array of high-ranking administration officials, to the point that — according to this official and two others — Trump lieutenants have walked out of meetings and earnestly asked one another if they thought Musk was high. Administration officials joked to one another about subjecting Musk to mandatory drug testing, which Musk himself has said would be a “great idea” for federal employees. (A lawyer for Musk has said he’s “regularly and randomly drug-tested at SpaceX and has never failed a test.”)

“Talking to the guy is sometimes like listening to really rusty nails on a chalkboard,” says the senior Trump administration official, who adds that Musk is not much of a team player, either. “He’s just the most irritating person I’ve ever had to deal with, and that is saying something.”

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/elon-musk-trump-doge-destruction-1235314218/

Author

ivan commented Apr 15, 2025

B2B SaaS won't build itself

https://x.com/fin465/status/1911526027245047947

Author

ivan commented Apr 15, 2025

I just "beat the game," but I didn't need to get that far to realize something was wrong about the way this title is being marketed. Within the first hour of playing this game, I felt like I was being gaslit by statements from both reviewers and the creator. The reviewers insist that the game is complex and deep, that the story unfolds in surprising and compelling ways, that you'll gradually pull the threads on an intricate web of mystery and intrigue, and that all of this was worth the 8 years the creator spent working on it.

The implication of all of this glowing, mysterious praise is that the game is a meta-puzzler in the style of Myst, Fez, or Animal Well, with layer upon layer of secrets waiting to be discovered, and that telling you anything more would spoil the surprise, but... that's just not the case. They're not telling you more because there's very little beneath the surface.

The puzzles are few and far between. Their solutions aren't just signposted, they're often literally spelled out for you in more place than one. And, when you do find one of the few meaningful environmental puzzles strewn throughout the randomized mansion, you'd better hope you can complete it and reap the rewards before your run ends, because you'll be waiting a long time for a second try.

The reality is that this game bolted a few middling puzzles to the skeleton of an unrewarding mansion-building roguelite and called itself a masterpiece, and then convinced reviewers not to reveal any of the specific ways in which the game falls flat in the name of avoiding spoilers.

I really, really wanted to like this one, but I ended up feeling like it disrespected my time at every turn. It kept demanding that I maintain my trust in it to Become Something, because The Real Puzzle Game might just be around the next (randomized) corner. Maybe I'm missing something fundamental and fantastic, here, but after giving this game 16 hours of my time, I think I'm done waiting for it to blossom into a puzzle-filled masterpiece.

https://steamcommunity.com/profiles/76561197980596638/recommended/1569580/

Author

ivan commented Apr 15, 2025

I’m in Japan (北区、東京) right now, and a couple days ago, I came to a sudden realization- everybody’s clothes are NICE (綺麗) - its like everybody’s clothes are brand new (新品のよう). I asked a Japanese person, “how is this possible? I know Uniqlo is cheap and all, but i cant believe hat everybody is buying brand new clothes every day.” Japanese guy laughed a little and said, “well, it’s an Asian thing, not specifically Japanese- we take care of our clothes.” Take… care of… your clothes? I could see a clue fairy coming towards me, wielding a very big hammer.

Next day, I spent the entire day just researching clothing care, and understanding every single setting on the washing machine, asking Chat-GPT a ton of questions, learning how to understand clothing care instruction tags and their symbols, and conducting experiments with my dirty clothes. I also learned a great deal about the advantages of using line dryig vs the American standard of washing machines, and an entirely different picture started to form in my mind about how to think about clothes and the practice of washing drying and laundry care in general.

Like for instance, when you take clothes out of he washer, you can actually flatten and shape the clothes, kind of like ironing them without ironing them. And vertical drying vs horizontal drying. There are a lot of nuances that make a big difference.

I’m going to buy a laundry net and brush for clothes when i get back, also hangers for drying, and research how my (American) washing machine works, and skip the dryer.

The Japanese water heating system is, sadly, not importable. It allows you to actually select the exact temperature for the water that you want, flowing into the washing machine, or anything else for that matter.

I come back a changed man. And I’m going to teach this to every person I see when I get back.

https://x.com/LionKimbro/status/1757392987712278661

Author

ivan commented Apr 15, 2025

Pre-LTPS AU Optronics laptop panels (a-Si) seem to be safe. Which corresponds to around the year 2016 and earlier with possibly some 2017 units as well (maybe 2013-2017 total window). There were panels in the IPhone 7 Plus and Ipad 10.5” (but probably 80% of 10.5”s are still the bad LG panel anyway) around the same time that were also good then everything afterwards whether desktop, phones, laptops, anything seemed to go straight downhill.

As you can guess, just about everything is made in China so all it takes is one dumb person making the decision to shut down the good a-Si plant in the Guang Dong province and convert everything to some bad LTPS, wide gamut, and/or cheaper assembly line at this time period in order to destroy every display on the entire planet.

https://old.reddit.com/r/PWM_Sensitive/comments/1k02emv/macbook_pro_15_2015_causes_pain_why/

Author

ivan commented Apr 16, 2025

I was playing a game with the baby where I'd roll the yoga ball into her, but not quite hard enough she'd fall over. She was giggling and delighted. Her big brother joins, and immediately bowls the yoga ball at her hard enough to knock her totally flat.

She sits back up, and the expression on her face is fascinating. She's not exactly upset - it's more like she's totally recalcuating how the world works. From the game with me, she'd been learning that she could keep her feet. But now she's learned that she was in the tutorial.

https://x.com/KelseyTuoc/status/1912327590918132189

Author

ivan commented Apr 16, 2025

Hong Kong CNN — Hong Kong’s postal service will stop handling packages coming from or going to the United States, in the latest retaliatory move amid an escalating trade war between Washington and Beijing.

In a statement published Wednesday announcing the decision, the government of Hong Kong cited US President Donald Trump’s decision last week to eliminate the so-called de minimis exception for items posted from the city to the US. The exemption applied to international shipments worth $800 or less entering the US.

“The US is unreasonable, bullying and imposing tariffs abusively,” the government said in the statement. “The public in Hong Kong should be prepared to pay exorbitant and unreasonable fees due to the US’s unreasonable and bullying acts.”

The government said the postal service, Hongkong Post, will stop accepting packages transported by sea with immediate effect and stop taking airborne packages starting from April 27. Other postal items containing only documents, for example letters, will not be affected.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/15/business/hong-kong-suspends-postal-service-to-us-intl-hnk

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ivan commented Apr 17, 2025 •

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LinkedIn is the worst social media I've ever seen

Besides being full of AI-generated, useless content, the platform is also riddled with dark patterns.

I'm a newcomer, I’d never used LinkedIn before until I joined three months ago. Since then, I've been banned twice and shadow-banned several times.

Right after I created my account, I got shadow-banned. My friends couldn’t find me, and my profile wasn’t accessible via direct link. This issue wasn’t resolved until I contacted support; they confirmed that restrictions had been placed on my account and then removed them.

I shouldn’t even have to mention this, but as a professional in my field, after that incident I always ended up on the very last pages of search results for keywords related to my field. People without those keywords in their resumes, or whose work isn’t at all related to the field, kept being ranked ahead of me. I can’t say I was deliberately pessimized, but that’s exactly how it appears.

Some time later, I decided to get Premium and paid with my own card (issued in another country, with the same name as on my profile and my passport). That’s when I received the first restriction: I was locked out of my account and couldn’t sign in until I contacted support. They made me take a photo of myself and of my passport, and after that they lifted the restrictions and apologized.

Everything seemed to be going along normally, yet I remained stuck on the last pages of search, being outranked by completely irrelevant profiles, until I decided to write a post about my own article on Medium. Immediately after publishing the post with a link to Medium, I received a second restriction. I was locked out of my account, couldn’t access my messages or interview invitations, and even missed a call because of this. They once again required me to submit a photo of myself along with a copy of my passport. Although they eventually restored my account, this time the process took 4–5 days, which caused me to miss an interview.

Now my profile is accessible via direct link, but I’ve disappeared from search. No one can find me, and hardly anyone visits my page. My post was hidden while support was "sorting out" my account, and I lost all the potential post views it would have gained because it wasn't featured in the recommendations.

All of this happened within the first three months of using LinkedIn. I’ve never seen a more appalling social media, one so full of dark patterns and outright abuse towards its users, forcing them through humiliating identity verification processes and hiding them from search.

Needless to say, I have never violated any of the platform’s rules. I don’t spam, I don’t bother people, and I don’t advertise anything. Meanwhile, my friend, whose account is over five years old—can do whatever he wants. He uses VPNs, changes his profile location several times a week, and switches his VPN location from Dubai to Europe multiple times a day without ever facing any restrictions.

And yes, I completely forgot to add: when your account gets restricted, it doesn’t matter whether you’re a premium user or not — the treatment is equally poor and the response is equally slow.

I’ve never seen a worse social media, and I’d be thrilled if a worthy competitor to LinkedIn ever emerged, I’d be one of the first to join.

BONUS: This content was originally posted on reddit, quickly became popular in the LinkedIn subreddit and was then deleted by moderator who works for M$ (which owns LinkedIn). Frankly, it feels like the whole LinkedIn subreddit is highly censored by him.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43052409

Ran into a similar ban recently and it has infuriated me to a level I have trouble describing - except I've been a paying user of this site for 10+ years. It seems to me what triggered it was enabling MFA + password change, which is a completely normal thing to do. It also seems like they're flagging people for VPN usage now. Persona, the application they use to "verify" you, has a really gnarly privacy policy and it does seem completely intentional to just sell the shit out of your data.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43053406

Author

ivan commented Apr 17, 2025

No, and here’s the twist. The Atari court ruled that Atari should have been allowed to reverse-engineer the NES as a matter of principle, based on fair use. But, it continued, in this case, Atari was not allowed to invoke the fair use defense, because it came to court with dirty hands, so to speak. Atari’s lawyers’ hands were very dirty indeed. See, Atari’s engineers had actually failed to reverse engineer the 10NES. They could not figure out what that code was, so they couldn’t create a new code that would work with the console. So the lawyers took over and blatantly lied to the Copyright Office in order to obtain the copyrighted Nintendo code. That code was held at the Office under seal. In 1988, Atari’s lawyers filed an application stating that Atari was a defendant in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Nintendo, and needed a copy of the program to “be used only in connection with the specified litigation.” The Copyright Office obliged and provided the copy, as they are supposed to in this type of case. But the story was a lie. Nintendo was not suing Atari at the time. Atari then used Nintendo’s code to create the Rabbit code.

https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/how-nintendo-bled-atari-games-to-death/

Author

ivan commented Apr 17, 2025

The V8 engine is updated to version 13.4, which includes several new JavaScript features:

Atomics.pause - A new API to pause execution for a specified duration

WebAssembly Memory64 - Support for 64-bit memory in WebAssembly

Explicit resource management - The new 'using' and 'await using' declarations for deterministic resource cleanup

Error.isError - A new static method to check if a value is an Error object

nodejs/node#57609

Author

ivan commented Apr 17, 2025

Today we’re announcing Mechanize, a startup focused on developing virtual work environments, benchmarks, and training data that will enable the full automation of the economy.

We will achieve this by creating simulated environments and evaluations that capture the full scope of what people do at their jobs. This includes using a computer, completing long-horizon tasks that lack clear criteria for success, coordinating with others, and reprioritizing in the face of obstacles and interruptions.

We’re betting that the lion’s share of value from AI will come from automating ordinary labor tasks rather than from “geniuses in a data center”. Currently, AI models have serious shortcomings that render most of this enormous value out of reach. They are unreliable, lack robust long-context capabilities, struggle with agency and multimodality, and can’t execute long-term plans without going off the rails.

To overcome these limitations, Mechanize will produce the data and evals necessary for comprehensively automating work. Our digital environments will act as practical simulations of real-world work scenarios, enabling agents to learn useful abilities through RL.

The market potential here is absurdly large: workers in the US are paid around $18 trillion per year in aggregate. For the entire world, the number is over three times greater, around $60 trillion per year.

The explosive economic growth likely to result from completely automating labor could generate vast abundance, much higher standards of living, and new goods and services that we can’t even imagine today. Our vision is to realize this potential as soon as possible.

Matthew Barnett, Tamay Besiroglu, Ege Erdil

Mechanize is backed by investments from Nat Friedman and Daniel Gross, Patrick Collison, Dwarkesh Patel, Jeff Dean, Sholto Douglas, and Marcus Abramovitch.

https://x.com/MechanizeWork/status/1912904151874625928

Author

ivan commented Apr 18, 2025

Has anyone else noticed this? I use Claude daily from France, and every morning, it's like I'm talking to an absolute genius. it's magical. He gets everything right on the first try. Understands even my dumbest prompts. The code is clean, robust, and actually runs.

And then… something shifts.

By late afternoon (still my timezone), Claude turns into a different person. He forgets the context of the conversation, ignores constraints I just repeated twice, and starts writing piles of shit.

Sloppy logic, hallucinated functions, broken syntax, stuff he never would’ve done just a few hours earlier.

I'm in France (CET), so when it’s morning for me, it's the middle of the night or early morning in the US (depending on the coast). But by my late afternoon, it’s well into the US working hours.

Could this be server load? Or am I just losing it?

https://old.reddit.com/r/cursor/comments/1k1kthv/i_could_swear_claude_gets_dumber_in_the_afternoon/

Author

ivan commented Apr 18, 2025

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you will get excellent debugging practice at exactly the right level required to push your skills as a software engineer

https://bsky.app/profile/hillelwayne.com/post/3lmrwaeqrx226

Author

ivan commented Apr 18, 2025

maybe I'm particularly susceptible but I feel like your computing environment really does shape the way you think

https://x.com/_R4V3N5_/status/1913054640062840932

Author

ivan commented Apr 18, 2025

Industry advice

Since we launched PlasticList, we’ve been heartened to have quite a few food companies reach out and ask for help interpreting their results and tracking down and eliminating their contamination. We’ve had calls with a bunch of them.

We are happy to report that no food company wants this stuff in their food and they are all eager to figure out what’s going on and how to remove it. After a while we noticed the advice we were giving was pretty similar for every company, so we thought it would be useful to write it down and share publicly.

So, here are some notes:

To track down the source of your contamination, don’t just test a few samples of your product with varied production processes. Instead, test every single one of your inputs: every ingredient and input in the form you receive it before any processing steps, including water and any other consumables.

Then, test the food before and after every step in your production process. If you boil something in tap water, test before and after boiling. If you chop something on a plastic cutting board (because wood cutting boards are outlawed in commercial kitchens, apparently), test before and after chopping.

You may have to go deep into your supply chain to figure out the source of your contamination. One food company founder we spoke to said that some of the fruit they include in their product is picked, put into plastic bags, and then steamed in the bags before the bags are cut open and the fruit is transferred into another plastic bag, while still warm, for shipping. Whoops.

Run at least three samples of every test due to sample-to-sample variation. You can see in our report and in our data that sample-to-sample and lot-to-lot variation should be expected.

You should also test any intermediate or final packaging that your product ships in, as leaching can also occur post-production.

There are a lot of steps that you need to carefully follow to prevent contaminating your samples during collection and transportation. It’s really easy to miss one of these and mess up your data. We describe many of these on our methodology page.

You should consider running longitudinal tests, maybe quarterly, as we have heard that there can be seasonal variation in contamination from suppliers, due to things like summer heat, suppliers switching their processes, and suppliers switching their own backend suppliers for their inputs.

And most importantly: PICK A GOOD LAB. Unfortunately not all labs are good, and we think many ISO-certified commercial labs will not give reliable results. We rejected many certified labs because we weren’t confident in their work; all-in-all, we spent about 10 weeks finding a lab that we trust for our tests. You can see our lab’s internal methodology here.

Our lab has recently permitted us to identify them publicly, and they are IEH.

We also worked with Light Labs to produce this study and they can be a big help.

And Million Marker is able to work with food companies to debug their supply chains as well.

You should consider hiring an analytical chemist as a consultant to validate that the testing methodology is accurate and to double-check the lab’s results. We hired John Brock to do this and it was well worth it; we would not have been confident in our choice of lab or our results without John.

We couldn’t find a lot of evidence that the phthalate substitutes are bad; if you have high-percentile detections in phthalates or bisphenols, though, it’s probably worth figuring out how those chemicals are getting into your products.

https://www.plasticlist.org/advice

Author

ivan commented Apr 19, 2025

AI automation is bad for people who see their work as a terminal value (it’s good that I do the thing I do) but good for people who see work as instrumental to building and creating (it’s good that I can make this thing happen). Many people will have to reconsider their identity

https://x.com/Plinz/status/1913395850728071487

Author

ivan commented Apr 19, 2025

Somewhere in the world right now, someone is suffering immensely, unjustly, and with no hope of relief. This is always true at any given moment. How can we sit back and be happy when these forgotten people die daily? And statistics indicate they're probably living next door to each one of us. The status quo is not good. Do what you will, but I'm not going to pretend this life is a paradise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43733551

Author

ivan commented Apr 19, 2025

I didn't realize how backwards and unhelpful the way we talk about this was until I became a parent.

In general, we talk about "iPad kids" and blame the tablets and phones themselves. Slightly more sophisticated people will blame the apps like YouTube or Roblox.

That stopped making sense to me once I saw the problem first hand with my peers and my own children. The actual issue is parents wanting to (basically) anesthetize their kids so the parents can do something as if they didn't have the kids.

Devices and Apps give parents the ability to zonk their kid into outer space for extended periods of time with unlimited videos or games that never end. But that isn't an inherent quality of the device. Like if you block all the apps and just let the kid use the iPad for drawing. Or if you do the YouTube kids thing where they can only watch videos you add to an allowlist.

The app makers do hold a lot of responsibility for the defaults on their apps, but the real issue is parents who are choosing to blackhole their kids for extended periods of time. (I am agreeing with you btw)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43719524

Author

ivan commented Apr 21, 2025

My main observation here is

1. Technically it might be possible to search the Internet, but it might not surface correct and/or useful information.

2. High-value information that would make a research report valuable is rarely public nor free. This holds especially true in capital-intensive or regulated industries.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43752262

ivan/2024_reading.md

ivan commented Apr 14, 2025

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LinkedIn is the worst social media I've ever seen

ivan commented Apr 17, 2025

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ivan commented Apr 18, 2025

Industry advice

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ivan commented Apr 15, 2025 •

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ivan commented Apr 15, 2025 •

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ivan commented Apr 17, 2025 •

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