Monday, December 28, 2020

 it's hard to persuade someone  to do zazen, because there is no reason to do zazen.

those who do do it, find the experience to be very real.

so , people must be tricked into it.  this seems immoral.

however, those who don't do zazen are deluded, and we must use their delusions ,or the effect of it to persuade them

zazen is an end in itself, but unless you know this from experience, or rather your gut and spine are conditioned to  this zazen state,  you cannot be convinced to do some

so we say, zazen relieves stress. zen is cool, zazen makes you sharper at stock trading etc..

these are like the  cars that take you to the airport so that you can fly in an airplane ..


When I try to 'work hard', I make the mistake of measuring the endeavour by the amount of sweat and grunting involved. For a knowledge-work task, I measure by the not-happening-ness of it.

It is  easy to confuse the effect with the result. I seem to have developed a tendency to associate not-completing , not-achieving with working hard. It's an easy cop out.

I tend to plan & structure work in an outrageous way such that  it never completes. Then, when I set to do this futile task after binge-ing on some secret-agent based tv series, I feel like I am working hard. Or punishing myself. The rationalisation doesn't get caught . Actual work gets done when someone asks for it. Left to myself, the task is planned perfectly and then abandoned. **

The normal - planning actual work to complete in the given time for an expected result, then doing it -   gets avoided but feels amazing when done. 

Maybe normalising this takes away an easy /within reach /dependable hit, and the novelty is needed to keep it fresh. Solution is to suck it, and seek better sources of happiness - like higher results than completing given tasks such as , say, completing a product ...

essentially the delayed gratification muscle is atrophied beyond recognition.

** solution here is to not plan the task in abstract to the end, but get off the ground in small chunks....

fomo.

when stepping into a task with a probability of failure, there is fear of never coming back to the happy place i started from - the environment, the identity, the fantastic self constructed from hours of day-dreaming and copy-paste-ing from online media and tv..

Ever since meetings have started ,maybe its 1.5 year long fatigue or what, I have 2 months worth of tickets proceeding at a glacial pace

I can jump ahead when someone's talking to me but I need to leach off others' mental constructs....




So far, this blog has been dedicated to things that are completely non-things. I've gone out of my way to avoid putting anything here that is representative. Maybe that was a mistake.


today, I  want to write about diversifying  . here are ideas that i have been harbouring for too long.

1) alternate index of a retail site/ sub site/ amazon mini stores

retail giants have pages optimised for certain things, such as max throughput. there must be a market for others, like artisanal products, products made by certain orgs etc etc

small stores will need more eyeballs

some users prefer cute non flashy store fronts

- newspaper mode store (monocle)

- 3d store

- just a typical retail site but with focus on, say, laptops. - cos on amazon, the spectrum is not clear

amazon purchase lists - this will help 


2) home network purchaser

buy from wholesalers for apartment complex, maybe from affiliate links

3) self help book. seriously, you've read it all

action/result quadrants ( now on

tripod of self

checklist planning

4) stock market speculation

find highly fluctuating stocks of companies with  sound fundamentals

5) redbubble/threadless model (no postergully)

just make art, have the site fulfil it, promote on your own website, just focus on marketing

6) monocle

personal site with  twitter and blog feeds ,games, chat, todo lists, notepad/blogpad, portfolio ,maps etc, for a personal social circle at family level

(decentralize facebook - federated social media )

also a good project todo

can also do personal library with pics

7) ? scale + ai = do what how ? dunno. 


I will come back with more, hopefully, and flesh these out, put them in my violence-of-action gun and fire them


Wednesday, December 23, 2020


 

Sunday, December 20, 2020

the trouble with a big brain

a)

is that more grey matter means higher sensory acuity, and much faster processing within a given time frame. in other words, larger heads perceive more 'tigers in the bushes',  a lot faster, and have more vivid being-torn-to-pieces scenarios running all the time inside their heads.

if you could harness large heads  for positive things ,of course there is huge upside.

it is more typical that these large heads set up demons all over their environment and get tipped into horror story movies in their head. 

 not their fault, brain is wired for simulating disaster.  

so when the subconscious thinks 'how can we avoid the tiger eating me ?', it first simulates all scenarios where tiger-eats-me as well as tiger-doesn't-eat-me, and then tries to pick the latter. however, the damage is done. the mind-man has been eaten by the tiger many times and has felt abstract pain.  Some people have a 'totem' which puts in relief this abstract pain to reality, and lets them off the hook. Others, not so lucky, don't know for sure that it won't happen, and suffer endlessly.

b)

you can run simulations of others  inside your head. superb empathy.

if you don't control it, others' moods are your moods, others' personality , attitudes and behaviours are yours tool. it's like a personality prison . you also have trouble when with more than one person - you flip between cliches. ultimately you don't have a unique personality, only bits of others that you thought were worth emulating, and now you only show up when they do.

c)

watching dr gabor mate on addiction  - rationalising trauma ends up with having to assign personal responsibility to it. if it happened to you ,you caused/wanted it in some way. this cannot co-exist in your brain with the   normal person instincts of success, friends, puppies and ice cream. the first casualty is personality - you do things that are you, and also not you. a bit of the abyss is in you now. 

 so you try to destroy that mind ( here mind is a neural network system of weights that has now assimilated personal hurt along with other goals ) . 

since the mind is invisible,  you try to destroy the brain. 

your mind is now warped, as your actions feed to your image of yourself, and incite further actions.

addictions are ways to escape this pain. 

if this is not clear, here is another attempt. 

your mind knows : a 'good person' is nice to people, works hard towards positive goals.

your body does - being nice to people, working hard towards good grades, or a promotion etc .

your environment : some body systematically does bad things to you that you are not able to control. a harassment, being mean, stealing your work/credit,  and there's no recourse, no one to acknowledge that this is wrong 

your mind : let's reconcile things. If bad things happen to you ,you must've deserved it  somehow or caused it somehow due to failure on your part, or lack of virtue ( I  always thought virtue was something like attitude or moral principles, never realised 'virtue' just mean ability, like arnold has more 'pumping-weight-ability' virtue than you ( I bet that's a word in german ( w-t-f*ck!  Pumpengewichtsfähigkeit)))

no, i was wrong -virtue means 'behaviour showing moral standards', and *greek* virtue   =  ability to excel to max potential, like be the best water carrier, don't worry about being a quarter back ?)

OR

your body : bad things happened to me, i don't feel like working on my work tasks, i need ice cream or alcohol or to sack out instead of working , or yell at kid when she's pestering me to come play

mind : when you take the two things above together,  you'll see that this person does <bad thing> so must be a bad person

once this little event is part of your identity, you are now a double person, and your actions get divergent .

the dark  misinformed part of you either 

a ) starts doing bad things to reconcile with the 'i am bad' "fact" inside your mind, or 

b)  resorts to  pleasure-seeking to alleviate 

         1) the pain of the bad thing that happened to you  , or  

         2) the guilt of   doing a) above  or

         3) loss of success from all the pleasure seeking/guilt avoidance

as you can see, this is a self feeding cycle and grows exponentially without intervention.

in highly crowded regions , personal boundaries are less and people are more borg-y and hence wouldn't mind telling off someone trying to do something wrong, and vice versa. - a person wouldn't try to resort to self damaging action as the self is partly others too ( wouldn't damage state soul machinery, would you ?)


religions try to come up with moral models which allows for the self to accept the hurt and appeal to a higher power for succour and help.

 buddhism has anatman 

but, this cannot be solved by theory alone.

ajahn brahm says you need to treat addicts by engaging the part that is not warped. 

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=addictions

 https://www.verywellhealth.com/understanding-anticipatory-grief-and-symptoms-2248855 

this has been a very unorganized post .

being an engineer, one can see that the suffering inside the head is real. being a 'realist' one can see that it is simply not true and has no reason to exist. the latter doesn't give you a tool to work with, unless you develop strong 'ignorer' muscles in your brain.

again, let-go meditation.

both alan watts and nicholas cage agree - never go to war with yourself, self-improvement is a kind of aggression against the self etc etc


Saturday, December 19, 2020

this is why i love cracked 2

https://www.cracked.com/article_20398_5-ways-your-brain-tricking-you-into-being-miserable.html

1. your brain latches on to the bad stuff by default

2. killing negative thoughts only makes them stronger (pink elephant)

3. grief is addictive

4. you'd rather be unhappy than uncertain

5. being happy takes effort


https://www.cracked.com/article_20297_5-popular-self-help-tips-that-actually-hurt-your-career.html

1. being too smart makes you crack under pressure

people with large working memories crack under pressure . those without, don't.

people can be born with HWM or can train for it (which means they can untrain it ?)

same part of the brain handles anxiety under pressure

2. visualising your success makes you lazier

'the secret' doesn't work.

3. telling your goals to your friend makes you give up faster

4. getting constant feedback leads to poor decisions

5. morally questionable slows you down

I don't like this list so much

https://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-your-brain-turning-you-into-jerk/

1. we defend our consumer choices

2. asymmetric insight 

  - you know you as a good guy as your thoughts are visible to you. you think others are jerks on what they do. vv

3. woozle effect 

 the brain has a tendency to rely on previous information no matter how flawed it may be



the money shoot

https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person/

if you want a billion value, give billion people a value

this is why I love cracked.com 1

 https://www.cracked.com/article_21744_6-ways-your-brain-programmed-to-keep-you-unhappy.html

1. we think happiness is for stupid people

    we think happiness is for people who are child-like or very stupid

    too much self awareness is literally fatal - self absorption paradox

   self reflection makes you happier, self rumination makes you more miserable

2. we think optimism means being delusional

   in the James Bond Stockdale camp, delusional optimists died when their dreams didn't come through. 

   JBStockdale persisted because he was optimistic of getting out but realistic on when.

   "don't worry be happy" will probably kill you inside

3. minor inconveniences enrage us more than actual tragedies

    the doctor prescribes Vicodin for a severed finger but not for a hangnails. So we go through life with the canvas of pains painted exclusively with hangnails which we have no defence against. And minor irritations drive us to rage

4. relationships hurt, loneliness hurts more ( hedgehog dilemma)

   intimacy requires allowing others into inner circle, and lowering defenses, inevitably hurt happens, and betrayal . so your options are

   start dropping out of society more, until isolation turns to anger

   keep a safe distance from everyone and have a sterile relationship

   go out and get hurt again, accept that relationships are pain

5. we lie about what we want , because we think it makes us selfish

    abilene paradox ( Applebees paradox) everyone ends up at applebees as they think others like it, and so they say they like it too. 

6. you don't want to be a burden, which makes you a burden to others

    dependency paradox . people need to depend on other people in relationships. this is a thing. ignoring this and trying to be an island makes one dysfunctional.


Friday, December 18, 2020

 


Rewatching silicon valley se1e1 after dipping into graebers debt (chapter 1).

Bang. Peter Gregory talking about college being a system that creates unemployed debtors.

Enraged audience beard :Value of a college education is intangible

Pg ::Value of snake oil is intangible as well

Execs cant think in abstract.

Richard : imagine you are a song writer

Pg ::I couldn't write a song

Bachman is a mini russ who is a gavin belson only at the other end of the hick scale button the same sociopath level

Jared is like Andy grove without a science/ engg education

The VPs are ass kissers.

Without bachman and his 10% claim,  pied piper would have been an internal affair

 Pimps,moneylenders,sheikhs,nobles

How did peter Gregory get bigheads number ?

Without richard getting a call from pg, he would've taken the promotion and stayed in hooli.

With pgs name ,price went to 60k,with pgs offer, price went to 3million

Only fire fights fire

Richard wants not to be a corporate co.

I guess 37signals is what he meant

People ONLY know jason fried coz they use something he built 

If you arent being an asshole, you create a void that is quickly filled with other assholes

Bachman, Jared Dunn, richard - vision,manager,  tech - the e myth trinity

Sunday, December 13, 2020

 Sunday evening 5 pm,

end of the year, dec 13

age 41, wonder how much more to go

all the years goals and resolutions are done, scattered like paper plates littering the parking lot after a party 

the epiphany is the salvation through the technique following lists dispassionately 

life  is now the watching of videos on calisthenics, tony robbins', atomic habits, vivaldi  ..  on youtube  , while the code compiles , has been so for the past year and half 

I wonder if any of the soul is left in the hard firm mature bamboos 

doing some work to alleviate the dark gloomy teatime of the soul, build's running

remember enjoying listening to Douglas Adams audiobook gotten from the Northbrook library, while driving. Was I ever happier after that ?

house lamps are not lit and it's not too bright , can see the colors of the books in the shelves but not the text


listening to Alan watts talks on zen, remarkable how alive it seems, compared to Brad Warner's dry academic sessions based on translations

the former relishes in spontaneity, and in a way being alive

we kept saying we'll move out of Java into building real systems. every year we become more firmly entrenched into the same.

the crowds are distinctly apathetic these days

around 14 years ago, we started blogging - made some friends, wasn't smart enough to keep any, weren't playing to win

build's completed ? time to go ..

wondering if Jackie Chan Adventures are available in DVD. guilty pleasures to fall to when tired at the end of the day, then guilt and regret 



in the mornings, assuaged by watching a productivity video,  who wil l do the work and when ?

build's failed . code is a pile of crap

for a while now, a curious inversion has happened . so occupied with setting up spaces to work in , i get so jaded/disconnected by the time i move to reside into those spaces, i am capable of not working nor having fun. 

some people have therapists. when does talking to a spouse feel like someone's running razor blades across your shoulders ?

Alan watts has a book named 'this is it', Sheldon Kopp's Esch. Laundry list starts with 1. this is it.

some people keep fit, others eat large carb meals and be dumb with a full belly. good for the state as per tao, not so good personally



the left hand types faster than the right 

reading casino royale, the first three chapters are promising, and puts the movie's jingping story introduction  in perspective

as ever , i only realise tests are an equal effort when it's time to do them. darkness grows

sending a linkedIn request to a former blog acquaintance feels like standing outside a friends' house watching them play ,  through the windows..



everybody seems to have a trick, have it figured, a schtick , i alone am so lost, wondering if the parts of me even add up to a full human, let alone a man 

past the boondocks, approaching the stinking cooum

bruce springsteen's 'streets of philadelphia' - this guy sings about the pain of being american ?


code quality found lacking by the static analysis tool, hello shovel ,where are you !

our tragedy is that we need to be part of a group that works to rid the earth of other groups so we don't have to see each other at all ..  

I remember reading YNHarari equivocating on domestic animals bred in captivity for food, saying they have a safe life have no diseases etc ..

I remember having a discussion with a friend couple on why we shouldn't have cars , one point in favour being that the chap walks to office and 'gets' the exercise as a benefit.  


'Getting' exercise when you ddin't ask for it, and also inhaling pollution over which you have no control , didn't seem like benefits to me. I speak from experience. In 2015 I walked to office. It gave me anxiety w.r.t getting there in time and not getting hit by vehicles, and having to see the slummy sides of bangalore, and eventually fell ill very badly .

people good in one area seem to think this makes them competent in others too


Tuesday, December 08, 2020

 thanks to ranprieur.com for another amazing link

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/747866835?book_show_action=true&from_review_page=1


scarcity : how scarcity causes people to tunnel focus, thereby leaving out the important for the urgent

the power of meditation is to calm the fires and make the brain continue to focus on the important

however, this is not an attitude thing -it's a computation /resource calculation



Friday, December 04, 2020


 analogies and metaphors work by not being not part of the framework/hierarchy  of knowledge under use,  so they are only useful to get perspective , once  and maybe twice. after this they ring no more bells.


Thursday, December 03, 2020