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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 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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