books that transcend

1. The Wind in the Willows -there have been many, but this stood out. I read and read and read this, every summer vacation

2. Alice in WOnderland - for a while

3. Three men in a boat - helped me a lot in the early bangalore days

4. Chronicles of Master Li & Number Ten Ox - Bridge of Birds - right now. I feel it is truly divine

 

from Wikipedia page on Travis Kalanick,

in two lines,  what makes successful people successful 

Kalanick has been described as a passionate libertarian and a fan of author Ayn Rand.^[127] However, Kalanick supported Obamacare because it allows Uber drivers, as independent contractors, to maintain health insurance as they transition between jobs.^[128]

 The cognitive dissonance of living in dull daily domestic certainty coupled with an overwhelmingly uncertain future creates an unbearable tension that can leave us exhausted and demoralized.

source : https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/life-smarts/202103/covid-19-induced-lack-motivation

 in my house, the floor is like an eternal pizza , whose toppings only we keep eating

a 2 year old who is independent, and has strong opinions on food ownership (miney!!!)

ensures the toppings keep coming

what if 

 Every neural network contained 

a smaller ,refined neural network within, 

trained exactly as per itself, 

but with attenuated signal levels

Therefore the internal neural network

Functions as a governor...?

also see : bagging and boosting in random forests

 Does she have a POS machine ?

https://twitter.com/RenukaJain6/status/1455481096515186690

Boom boom maadu

https://twitter.com/nsitharaman/status/1456291677186842628

 "Cybernetics, or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine" by Norbert Wiener 

- Although Wiener was an American mathematician, his book had a profound impact on Soviet cybernetics. The book was translated into Russian in 1950 and became a foundational text for Soviet cybernetics.

"General Theory of Information Transfer and Communication Channels" by A.N. Kolmogorov 

- This book, published in 1949, provided a mathematical framework for the study of information theory and had a significant impact on the development of cybernetics in the Soviet Union.

"Essays on the Theory of Control Systems" by Victor Glushkov 

- Glushkov was a Ukrainian mathematician who developed an early computer called the Kiev Institute of Cybernetics. His book, first published in 1966, presented his theory of the management of complex systems and the use of cybernetics to model and control them.

"The Biological Computer" by A.I. Kitov 

- This book, published in 1965, explored the use of cybernetic principles to study the brain and nervous system, and proposed the idea of the "biological computer" as a model for artificial intelligence.

These and other Russian books on cybernetics helped to shape the field and contributed to its development in the Soviet Union and beyond.

remembered  an oooold ooooold blog I used to read and think myself superior

ooold

don't exactly when I stopped reading it. Strand days yes, mu-sigma - maybe no, probably gave up after payflex

maybe before nile ? I was reading a lot of different motivational during groupon days, very fundamental stuff...

fantastic article that whips today's "tech" into the trashcan . exactly what I feel but couldn't articulate

https://www.takimag.com/article/the_myth_of_technological_progress/

the blog
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/

and numbered points  from a motivational 

https://www.takimag.com/article/tips_for_big_babies/2/

Be discriminating and judgmental. 

Dress like you have self-respect. 

stop wearing your fucking backpack. 

Get a job.

 Get physically fit.

Stop playing fake sports 

Make your peace with your family 

Stop being a passive lump waiting for something nice to happen to you 

Make stuff. 

Stop living life according to your whims and passions. 

Do something nice for others once in a while 

 Lao Tzu pales in comparison to Master Li

" I will point out that a noise some people hear and others don’t isn’t speaking to the ears. It’s speaking to the heart, and you have a hole in your heart. All young people do. It’s there to catch the wonderful things of the world, and later on it gets filled up by broken things. Forget about your ears. Listen with your heart."

"The supernatural can be very annoying until one finds the key that transforms it into science," he observed mildly. "I''m probably imagining complications that don’t exist. Come on, Ox, let’s go out and get killed."

The Chronicles of Master Li and Number Ten Ox 

- Barry Hughart

re-framing lao-tzu

under your foot, today, right now, lies the first step of a thousand-mile journey, to kamchatka, to vladivostok, to svalbard ... it lies there like the tail of a snake narrowing down to almost nothingness

pick it up, follow the thread, open the folds, adventure is yours

 stupid and evil isn't an axis. it's usually the both , just looks one or the other in different contexts

 When your degrees of freedom

Are fixed few and not decided by you

The land is now stratified 

And you are a serf

cross-expressing

 cross-express : assemble components of one category, in the elements of another

for eg, 

- a water-color of micro-services

-  a poem involving machine-learning technique

- a slide deck of the Tao Te Ching or Thief of Time

- a computer program capturing behaviours of the Tao

- a musical composition expressing robot library patterns

- a four part play involving conversations. between the database, the spring service etc on a typical day

cross-expressing information sitting in one's head as a form of catharsis, done regularly , is a good technique for mental hygiene

it also is a great tool for learning new material, locking them in, and understanding their powers and  limits

analysis of my bookshelf, the categories -

1. Order in disorder -topics typically include  chaos, cybernetics, Complexity - Melanie Mitchell, Model-thinking , Ashby,  Alvin Toffler, Drucker, Godel Escher Bach, Winkless/Browning. All hard science,tech books are a hard subset of this.

1.1. all hard tech/science books - feynman, android-zechner, sicp, paip,see 1above

2. Philosophy - this might as well be a primordial form of 1. This category can be a subset of 1. McLuhan,  Deleuze & Guattari, 

3. War & Conflict - The Art of War, On War, Certain to Win, Games of Strategy, any printouts on ooda loops, Book of Five Rings

4. Economics and wealth - psychology of money, intelligent investor,  how stock markets work, cartoon guide to economics 1 & 2, wealth of nations

5. Psychology - books on habits - this is still a subset of 1, William James

6. Health & Human condition. - graeber, fung , yoga books. meditation practice printouts and books, toffler, systemantics

7. God/Hypotheses/Heuristics - multiple books on Zen, Gita versions,Vaishnavism, multiple books by Buddhists.    It's a toss-up whether the practice parts of these books end up in 5 or 6   or here. Works of Vivekananda ( some works border on 1)

*keep the meta books in each category in the right end of the shelf'

** freakonomics seemingly combines 4,5, and 6, wgibson 1.1 and 6

Philosophy, and its children, science, math, logic, language & grammar  .. etc seek the order in the seemingly disorderly

Art seeks to express the orderly using seemingly disorderly & chaotic elements

art if a way of understanding and learning, and thinking beyond ( somebody quoted this)

 ideas, like seeds, in the mind take root. then flower into perspectives which grow like the woods

until you can see the sky only through the gaps in the leaves

the mind becomes captive(1) to perspectives, unable to see other things

hence it becomes necessary to deconstruct, & refactor regularly

via art or chemicals, or both

here art is nothing but cross-compiling

and chemicals facilitate de-stratification

Footnotes

1. you only see what you believe. perspective drives perception

2. all things are objects of some perspective (3)(4)

3. all perspectives are wrong, some are useful

 A robot told me

After i met about twenty people, i realised humans are gross

 Those who live by the sword , die by the sword

Those who dont live by sword, die at the hands of the swords of those who do

The medium is the message botches

In this phenomenal (ly long) post, there is much good reading and much Graeber like vibes thrown off...
the related post on millenial burn-out got me hooked/floored completely, nodding at every sentence thinking-saying "hey, that's me .... !!!" , and I didn't even know before reading this, that I was a millenial 

( I always thought Gen X  - nintendo playing , suit wearing,  proactive quoting suburban-dwelling office-goer )
yet, it loses the plot when we reach here .... I quote the post ..

But, when you think through the implications, we don’t actually want less productivity as a society. We want more…

* We want energy to be more efficient in order to reduce climate change.
* We want more powerful and smaller supercomputers in our pockets for the same price.
* We want less waste filling up landfills.
* We want the things we buy to cost less while also getting better and faster.

to be honest, I don't care about ANY of the above. I am pretty sure no normal human does. Or he's lying.

Productivity is not a term used by a normal human. It is a term used by an industrial human. And given to him by his managers. It is a term of the capitalist.

We REALLY don't care a f*ck about climate change. Not when the trillions of tons of CO2 released  in the process of constructing un-livable cities,   monstrous cars,  an infinite number of pieces of plastic kitsch which we need to use and throw, all the while using up our time and life and giving us a life of slavery ,  within metal boxes , beige colored cloth boxes and drywall boxes , through which we cycle, like a gerbil in its wheel.

After meaning has been ripped away with the deluge of bullsh!t jobs, and our connection to the Earth has been ripped away - we can no longer see beyond house, office, city, country... we are told to - what - take a bicycle to work ? to save the planet ? or use paper bags ? 
The entire debt driven economy keeps driving us running faster and faster doing things we hate more and more and constructing a world that is more and more meaningless, senseless, and un-palatable. You want to save the planet, then take a hard look at the economy and kill some of your sacred cows  such as   profit-over-humans... the planet'll naturally recover

In a connected world, profit becomes a zero sum game. Learn the term 'pareto efficient'

And this is the kicker , the smoking gun - the piece of shit sitting in th middle of your plate of your so called thousand-dollar-caviar - 
We want more powerful and smaller supercomputers in our pockets for the same price.

We don't. we have plenty of computing power. People have launched space shuttles on less computing power than in a typical pocket phone.  We want those closed eco-systems opened, the processing power of our devices actually unshackled. 

We don't want to be forced to buy new phones every year. Forced to throw away previously bought ,perfectly working phones. A wikipedia page viewed on a CRT monitor does not convey any less information than when viewed in 4k. 

Pictures of your beloved in 4k will always be a lesser stand-in than time spent with them in real space-time, as opposed to commuting from said unlivable cities to your bullsh!t meaningless job  to earn money to buy more and more disposable mass produced low quality cr@p what excels at stealing life and time from its makers.  

We are all running captive on a capitalist-consumerist treadmill, which keeps speeding up. The socially approved drugs of society give it away. Caffeine (it's not coffee anymore),  to up and get things done for your boss, and alcohol to shut down the body and mind, and take the edge off of your rage at the emptiness , while you grab a meal of massively subsidised wheat injected with  sugar, and varieties of palm oil, these are the only tastes available now anywhere.

And the way this sentence is worded, so specifically, while the rest of three seem like vague generic  points in a corporate social accountability powerpoint, or some enlightened high-schooler's anti-capitalist manifesto. 

Freeing the planet from debt and even money , is the only way to free up the 7 billion supercomputers that are today struggling to make it on the bottom tier of the Maslow Pyramid.

UBI  has been proposed by more intelligent minds, way in the past, but that would stop the gusher of 'profit' from the 'engines of economy', so I don't see it happening. Until the entire planet is a large wasteland.

Is consciousness in a thing the same as its behaviour ? the sum total of behaviours ? or is it something else - something more ? something inside ?

Here is where philosophy stops and religion begins. Religion takes one hypothesis, elevates it to the level of an axiom, then proceeds to build a system of rules on top of this and live out a life on these rules.

Samkya claims there are many ,  Buddhist Anatman claims there isn't one. Advaita claims there is one. Visista Advaita claims there are many, of which one is exalted and worth worshipping..

At this point, we know a thing for what it does. even physical properties can be expressed as a 'does' ;

for eg, what a surface 'does' when you touch it makes it hard or soft or clay-ey 

This is primarily because we 'know' reality through our sensors. 'we' 'know' our reality through our sensors. It is not possible to be aware of something without physical interaction with it. 

now suddenly Sciences of the Artifical pops up as a prime candidate

and so does  (a)reading on intrinsic value, and munger's list of mental models  (both printouts)

the more we dig in and tease out the strands of curious wondering into  skein ..... , the more it seems somebody has already done that much more polishedly

religion - we are now doubling down on 

a) concentration - see tibetan elephant pictures 

b) body awareness (by tightening and loosening , and along with breath ) (asana. what else!)

c) exercising the body in all forms (mens sana corpore sano) like long walks,  treadmill hard, strength up etc

don't know where zazen fits into this, nor chanting, not eight silk, nor a devotion to universal bhagavan

might do to learn muscle-ology (anatomy? musculature ?) for b)

d) and also finally a daily metta practice. this is also for health

in retrospect, all this 'religion' just seems 'bompu zen'

reconciling advaita and anatman,  reading Vvknnda's Samkya, then incorporating daily recollection of the Brahman, this seems more like religion

also fasting, self-denial, prayer &cleansing routines , etc fall under operational religion

while you're here remember to check out 

* uncouth reflection

* 

 tell me what the world is,

and how you see your life play out

froogy, ain't it

 

difference between real-world types and bookish types is that the latter can only compute things on the same page, whereas life throws things in a sequence, and almost never in the same page, rather,  one must compute a 'page' in ones own head across many episodes