All the books I won't read

Comments (2)

lfpeb8b45ez · 11m ago

I was really hoping this would be a list of books you had decided not to read, with short (ideally flippant) justifications. Followed, inevitably, by passionate and erudite rebuttals.

nomilk · 7h ago

The two facts you provide, 1. life is short and 2. books are time-consuming lead to the conclusion you should be extremely judicious about which ones you read, and not hesitant in ditching any you believe are unworthy of your time.

I'm also a slow reader; lucky to finish 10 books/year. I notice I'm a much faster reader on topics I'm familiar with.

Also, exercise aforementioned judiciousness with Sapiens; it's 400 pages of conjecture masquerading as fact.

Show HN: X11 desktop widget that shows location of your network peers on a map (github.com)

Agents built from alloys (xbow.com)

Staying cool without refrigerants: Next-generation Peltier cooling (news.samsung.com)

XMLUI (blog.jonudell.net)

iMessage integration in Claude can hijack the model to do anything (generalanalysis.com)

Log by time, not by count (johnscolaro.xyz)

New colors without shooting lasers into your eyes (dynomight.net)

Slow Motion Became Cinema's Dominant Special Effect (newrepublic.com)

Simulating Hand-Drawn Motion with SVG Filters (camillovisini.com)

Stdio(3) change: FILE is now opaque (OpenBSD) (undeadly.org)

The Genius Device That Rocked F1 (youtube.com)

EU commissioner shocked by dangers of some goods sold by Shein and Temu (theguardian.com)

Coding with LLMs in the summer of 2025 – an update (antirez.com)

Peep Show – The Most Realistic Portrayal of Evil Ever Made (2020) (mattlakeman.org)

What birdsong and back ends can teach us about magic (digitalseams.com)

What My Mother Didn't Talk About (2020) (buzzfeednews.com)

SIOF (Scheme in One File) – A Minimal R7RS Scheme System (github.com)

FFmpeg devs boast of another 100x leap thanks to handwritten assembly code (tomshardware.com)

Speeding up my ZSH shell (scottspence.com)

IPv6 Based Canvas (canvas.openbased.org)

Subreply – an open source text-only social network (github.com)

Why not to use iframes for embedded dashboards (embeddable.com)

JOVE – Jonathan’s Own Version of Emacs (1983) (github.com)

Computational complexity of neural networks (2022) (lunalux.io)

Show HN: Conductor, a Mac app that lets you run a bunch of Claude Codes at once (conductor.build)

Logical implication is a comparison operator (btdmaster.bearblog.dev)

Digital vassals? French Government 'exposes citizens' data to US' (brusselssignal.eu)

Insights on Teufel's First Open-Source Speaker (blog.teufelaudio.com)

Discovering what we think we know is wrong (science.org)

AI is killing the web – can anything save it? (economist.com)

Tough news for our UK users (blog.janitorai.com)

A Tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab (2006) (davidweiss.blogspot.com)

Hacking a Toniebox (schafe-sind-bessere-rasenmaeher.de)

Async I/O on Linux in databases (blog.canoozie.net)

The old Caveman Chemistry website (1996-2000) (cavemanchemistry.com)

Java was not underhyped in 1997 (2021) (dylanbeattie.net)

QuakeNotch: Quake Terminal on your MacBook's notch (quakenotch.com)

The Minecraft game score unexpectedly became big business for its composer (billboard.com)

Australia Wants to See Your Papers Before You Press Play (reclaimthenet.org)

“The Bitter Lesson” is wrong. Well sort of (assaf-pinhasi.medium.com)

Senators throw weight behind military right to repair (theregister.com)

Payment processors' bar on Japanese adult content endangers democracy (2024) (automaton-media.com)

A human metaphor for evaluating AI capability (mathstodon.xyz)

Hygiene Hypothesis (en.wikipedia.org)

LLM architecture comparison (magazine.sebastianraschka.com)

The current hype around autonomous agents, and what actually works in production (utkarshkanwat.com)

Laminar Flow Airfoil (aviation-history.com)

Master Foo and the Script Kiddie (1996) (soda.privatevoid.net)

Show HN: ggc – A terminal-based Git CLI written in Go (github.com)

How Higher education failed America's poor (washingtonpost.com)

All the books I won't read

Comments (2)