Things I enjoyed reading in 2024

“That’s the duty of the old,” said the Librarian, “to be anxious on the behalf of the young. And the duty of the young is to scorn the anxiety of the old.”

They sat for a while longer, and then parted, for it was late, and they were old and anxious.

She had asked: What is he? A friend or an enemy?

The alethiometer answered: He is a murderer.

When she saw the answer, she relaxed at once. He could find food, and show her how to reach Oxford, and those were powers that were useful, but he might still have been untrustworthy or cowardly. A murderer was a worthy companion. She felt as safe with him as she’d done with Iorek Byrnison the armoured bear.

True wealth had two faces: hard currency in vaults, and even more real, numbers in thick bound ledgers covered with old cracked leather. My mind spun with the possibilities of futures trading, speculation, and marginalized lending. No aspect of shipping or industry was safe from my daydreaming.

My mouth became dry, and it had little to do with the heat of the cave. Worse, Lord Alkazarian’s speech did not seem to be rhetorical; he expected an answer. From me.

“Well,” I began. Not the best start, all things considered. How best to proceed in such a way that would not make a snack of me? “The term ‘value’ is somewhat fluid. Malleable even. Like gold. Gold’s value is derived from three factors…”

I cast about my person but found nothing to aid my demonstration. I turned to Lady Arkelai. “Is there perhaps a slate and some chalk here?”

The time is now 10 PM. All citizens should be indoors, and all magical girls transformed.

Even if you didn’t ever fight again, you’ve officially saved one person. That’s more than most people can say. No sense sweating the small stuff.

You know, under other circumstances, I might have [told you]. We might have even agreed that it was my fault. But honestly, now I feel like… I don’t owe that explanation to someone I don’t even know.

Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.

When adults say, “Teenagers think they are invincible” with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don’t know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of our parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

Humans were supposed to be cowards.

The Galactic Federation’s species registry had them listed as a 2 of 16 on the aggression index. Our interactions with the Terran Union up until this point supported those conclusions. They had not fought any wars among themselves in centuries, and had formed a unified world government prior to achieving FTL travel. They had responded with eagerness rather than hostility to first contact, unlike many species.

Using “Which school is better” as an example, I want to try to outline a different approach from the usual paradigm of “increasing confidence in making the correct choice between A and B”. Instead, I’d like to propose: “Increasing confidence in landing in a satisfying world, for either the decision A or B.”

The human brain is a cultural artifact. We don’t load culture into a virgin brain like software loading into a computer; rather, culture helps to wire the brain. Brains then become carriers of culture, helping to create and perpetuate it.

The word “smile” doesn’t even exist in Latin or Ancient Greek. Smiling was an invention of the Middle Ages, and broad, toothy-mouthed smiles (with crinkling at the eyes, named the Duchenne smile by Ekman) became popular only in the eighteenth century as dentistry became more accessible and affordable.

My idea for a Bible class was based on a fourth way to select Bible verses for study, making use of a mathematical principle that provides an effective way to gain knowledge about complicated things: A large body of information can be comprehended reasonably well by studying more or less random portions of the data. The technical term for this approach is stratified sampling.

I have found names to be amazingly significant in my own work as a computer programmer; for example, when I write a program I frequently find myself blurring the distinction between a reference to an object and the object itself. I’ve often noticed that new computer software systems seem to jell and to take on a life of their own once they have been given a name, but not before.

As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself[…] The critical issue is allowing yourself to know what you know. That takes an enormous amount of courage.

We have learned that trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that experience on mind, brain, and body. This imprint has ongoing consequences for how the human organism manages to survive in the present. Trauma results in a fundamental reorganization of the way mind and brain manage perceptions. It changes not only how we think and what we think about, but also our very capacity to think.

A lot of software engineers (including me) go through phases where we’re passionate enough about computing that we try to convince ourselves that it’s the pathway to other things we want, because that would be really convenient. Which is, of course, not how the universe works.

Being an excellent programmer is good, but you aren’t a carpenter creating a beautiful chair in the sacred temple of woodwork. At most organizations, a third of the room is interested in making a good chair, another third is hell-bent on removing three of the legs to look good on wood-savings with the intention of leaving for a bigger woodworking operation before the whole thing collapses, and the last third have never seen a chair but nonetheless insist on getting a turn with the hammer. Even if all you want to do is craft beautiful code, it seems that the more important skill is to develop the antibodies requires to defend your craftsmanship. I can’t do my job if some random guy gets to pick all my fellow carpenters despite the fact they aren’t one themselves, and decides how long a chair “should” take to make as if the reality respects human opinions.

“Father,” he said, “you have already told me these things. You have told me that I must learn to use OBS, the Open Broadcaster Software, and become familiar with the Twitch community guidelines. You have told me that I must set up my ‘scenes’ ahead of time and make sure that my room is acoustically balanced before I spend too much on microphones. I know I can do all of that. And I believe that the people of the world wish to watch me play Luigi’s Mansion 3.”