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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
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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

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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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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

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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/

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ivan commented Apr 17, 2025

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

nodejs/node#57609

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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

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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/

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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

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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

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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:

  1. 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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

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

  6. 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.

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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.

  11. 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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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ivan commented Apr 21, 2025

Easy way to identify people that are pointless to engage with: they never consider the idea that actions they take could be counterproductive.

https://x.com/brianluidog/status/1914083001757208870

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