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Last active January 28, 2026 15:16
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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 Jan 10, 2026

He is not being criticized for talking about his fuckups but for ranting endlessly about how other people were not doing what he wanted, putting the blame squarely on them.

It's a classic problem when someone reaches the edge of their competence, but still cares about success. They don't see anything they can do differently, and the focus becomes how other people are (apparently) screwing up.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46548940

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ivan commented Jan 10, 2026

SV tech startups are an incredibly niche form of business, nobody should base their thinking on general management around them alone. They function within an ecosystem designed for them, like plants that only grow in a rainforest.

Most management books that most people recommend are not based on scientific evidence, studies, academic literature, etc. They're mostly memes; relatively recent books written by some kind of famous person, benefiting from the heuristics that make people favor the famous, successful, or high status [regardless of the fact that their lessons are usually from one source, type of company, culture, etc]. Compare that to practical management books based on evidence and studies; they're boring and old, or simply not catchy or sexy, so nobody recommends them.

There's also books that some people know about, and have a good track record, yet nobody follows. Deming's books should be mandatory reading for anyone in management, and anyone who cites Toyota as a model should absolutely have read them. But good luck finding anyone who actually follows the advice (same for Ackoff, Goldratt, Senge, Jacques, etc). Likely they are just too complicated and most people are not smart enough to manage this way.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46550801

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ivan commented Jan 12, 2026

reading Project Hail Mary tonight and wondering at how dated it feels for the protagonist to not have an intelligent ai to chat with and consult.

it's so easy to take ai for granted but truly it is awesome to realize- humans are no longer alone

https://x.com/mimi10v3/status/2004873447302987840

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ivan commented Jan 13, 2026

Normies love escape rooms. It’s like they know deep down in there somewhere that there is something needing to be escaped from. But they don’t know what. So they go into simulated hamster cage escape environment to “have fun”

https://x.com/bronzeageshawty/status/2011035810796380647

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ivan commented Jan 16, 2026

Every person gets his own intelligence agency. You need a trillion machine eyes watching the world, filtering and aggregating information, letting you make sense of things and chart a course.

https://x.com/worlddestroyar/status/2012112623412895988

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ivan commented Jan 16, 2026 •
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This reads as genuinely nightmarish.

Our civilization is doomed if this is the future. Zero quality, zero resiliency, zero coherent vision, zero cohesive intent. Just chaotic slop everywhere, the ultimate Ouroboros."

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46518216

Software-as-a-Psychosis

https://x.com/niemerg/status/2011154303797563606

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ivan commented Jan 18, 2026

website similar to twitter but every tweet has a default-invisible notes section. and for a tweet to be posted, it requires a discussion in the notes evaluating each concept used in the tweet and each claim made, defending it against obvious objections

https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/2012993229549977888

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ivan commented Jan 19, 2026 •
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and now my review there warns other consumers that those are only for DIY use

Actually make sure with a incognito window that this review is actually visible. I've noticed that some reviews of mine have been "shadow-banned" and while it looks like they're still there when I'm logged in, once I try in a incognito window the review doesn't show up publicly anymore. My reviews were just basically facts about the products themselves, and received no word from Amazon about breaking any rules.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678205

I've noticed this too. Vine Gold Amazon program member, but sometimes my reviews are rejected or shadow banned for no discernible reason. I think there may be some corruption in the review moderation process (as well as in the commingling process, which I've also had problems with).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46678205

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ivan commented Jan 21, 2026

i think the role that a sense of satisfaction plays in causing human irrationality is under-explored. thorough checking for flaws can produce satisfaction but superficial checking plus strong emotional resonance can produce it much more easily

https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/2010919521574646129

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ivan commented Jan 21, 2026

What could happen if chocolates are not stored as required?

Lindt chocolates are very sensitive to any excessive condition, whether too hot or too cold. Chocolates can be adversely affected if exposed to unfavorable conditions after manufacture which results in bloom. Bloom is a greyish coating on the surface of chocolates and is more visible on dark chocolate. There are two kinds of bloom, fat bloom, which is caused by fat migration and sugar bloom caused by humidity. Both these types of blooms happen during improper storage of chocolates. Chocolates should ideally be stored at around 57° to 68°F and the relative humidity should not exceed 65%. We take every care in the handling of our products within our own distribution system, however once the product leaves our care we have little control over such things as the storage conditions for example, the temperature and humidity the chocolate is kept in.

https://www.lindtusa.com/lindt-frequently-asked-questions

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ivan commented Jan 22, 2026

the problem with people who disagree with me is that they're not very agreeing with what is true according to me

https://x.com/VesselOfSpirit/status/2014228715790594094

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ivan commented Jan 23, 2026

One of my core principles is this: if I wouldn’t use it on myself or my own children, I won’t sell it to others or their children. This principle helps my business on the correct track.

https://x.com/Engineer_Wong/status/2014589077182714121

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ivan commented Jan 23, 2026

Sitting in front of a painting for 20 minutes is the easiest way for me to relax and come into myself. I tend to be a bit restless and overactive, but a painting gives me just enough to concentrate on to hold my attention fully, while also being almost completely void of thought.

https://x.com/phokarlsson/status/2014649560254333017

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ivan commented Jan 25, 2026

Addons broken in profile copied to new PC despite attempted fix

Ok, I seem to have found the solution to my own problem on Reddit, specifically nicolaasjan1955's reply to this post: https://old.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/xt6pxy/extensions_not_working_after_moving_profile_from/

I copied over the profile again, changing the paths in extensions.json and pkcs11.txt, and then this time deleted addonStartup.json.lz4 like nicolaas suggests. Then I restarted Firefox twice with that profile, and boom, extensions all appearing and working, even after continuing to restart a couple times!

https://support.mozilla.org/mk/questions/1471372

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ivan commented Jan 27, 2026

image

Foundations of Engineering

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ivan commented Jan 28, 2026

Christopher Alexander has an observation about problem solving that I like: you should always be focusing on solving the part that has the fewest degrees of freedom.
When figuring out how to design a kitchen, for instance, there are a bunch of subproblems to solve: where to put the stove and the windows and the kitchen table. And which of these have the fewest degrees of freedom? The windows. If you want good light, there is going to be only one wall where you can place the windows, and at best two spots on that wall where the window looks natural. So you put the window there. And now what? The kitchen table, because you want to have that where the good light falls. The stove can wait because that can sit nearly anywhere. If you start by placing the stove, there is a big risk that you block the only good position for one of the other subproblems that have fewer degrees of freedom, and so the whole design will suffer.

https://x.com/phokarlsson/status/2016462003272093944

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