if you have many loops in your application code, then you are not doing random access, then you have not setup facility to do random access, which means you are not leveraging typical  free, cheap, powerful, off-the-shelf indexing solutions such as mysql or redis

a typical pattern is doing a lot of processing to get a field, then bubbling that up to a component that uses it. this is a bottom up pattern and it means the problem is not defined clearly

a major problem for programmers is that top-down is not possible until you see the bottom and see if bottom up can meet top-down half-way. otherwise there will be a lot of shoe-horning of processing into abstractions, and an excess of  abstractions which don't _just_ do the job

going top down is the easiest and going bottom up is difficult as the number of things to keep in mind (number of thinks) keeps going up and slows down and eventually fully-halts the thinking process. all discussions and debates are about deciding the abstractions, and the loser side ends up with more complexity cud-chewing. working zig-zag between topd and bottomu is the only way.

using the known to create a predictable product makes one a worker

science, and its boots-on-the-ground-nephew- engineering, aims to build things that aren't yet possible in public consciousness, but should be _-do-able_  in theory

java is getting to a place where it's almost an anti-pattern if you have to create a list or map in your code. this probably means the source of these values isn't outside your system, ie, your program's feet are not firmly planted on the bedrock of other programs

there's no call for writing algorithms to do anything today, for the same reason that it's very hard to find a situation where you have to use a screw-driver or shovel - the economic beast has pervaded the  land so much .... the software equivalent of ' i know a guy ' is 'i have used this library ...'

if you are doing something like this

---

Map<String,List<Set<String>>> sets = new HashMap<>();

for( List<Set<String>> curSets : sets.values() ){ 

---

your need to abstract the set of strings into an object with an id. as you nest abstractions, you can eliminate entire categories of them based on the value of the top or next-to-top ids. the reverse of the previous sentence, forms a design philosophy and also a a prescription for implementation.

a combination of spring-data-rest and graphql converts all of this maneuvering into light-weight text work

a combination of spring-data-rest, mysql, flyaway, with graphql , and varnish and nginx makes for a read-cached, write-through-caching-possible, lightweight, orchestrated , load-balanced service

the equivalent of functional in spring, is to have a component for each bit of processing, and the component to be designed to take inputs and return output. caveat is that components need to embed repositories and third party (http usually) clients, but these are best moved into to the top-level service wrapper

it's important to remember you are not selling code or functionality, you are selling what the man with the money _thinks_ is code/functionality. remember, all things are abstractions, and abstractions are beasts that live in the brains of people, munching cerebral grass and growing fat

 i'm a brain

seeking hands

and feet

i is a brain

seeking hands

and feet

i am a hand

or a foot

for some

brain

the brain

is a hand 

and foot

for 

some mind

 in the economic world, there is no good or bad, only right or incorrect price

this needs a flexibility in perspective 

 one universal space in the world that has business potential

is that those who do things, are always in need of ways to do them faster/better/more

via automation, or training of others, or process

the 20 who do 80 will keep on getting more and more work 

and concentration feeds on itself

 whenever i want to cry

i sing 'over the rainbow'

and remember that scrubs episode 

with the dorothy theme

ending with ted and his group

singing on the roof

***

 the concerted breaths alone, of one billion people can move mountains

the single word, spoken together by a billion people, can shatter continents

on the other hand, we have other fingers 

 in school, when covering history of India and the Buddha, i read that the Buddha's teaching was right action right view right livelihood etc and was at once struck by how correct this was. of course, my version of 'right' at that age came from my parents, and in retrospect, i failed to realise the words i read were empty, that all context there was, was what i brought 

in school, a friend told me that there was a book called 'zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance' that would change your life if you read it. we used to inhabitate a particular wavelength with respect to what was cool - and extremely on the nerdy side. he was a fan of jim reeves and resnick & halliday, read elements of style, and sl loney (2) for fun. i didn't ,and still don't, possess the horsepower to go through the elements of style book entirely.  

 in my mind, the zmm book was a large book with pictures of motorcycles on every page . 

 when in college, i got my hands on the book, read it, put it down, read the lord of the rings trilogy... what i gathered the book was about was a motorcycle trip.. 

 in college, another friend told me that zen and advaita, especially that of ramana maharishi - were one and the same thing. he'd share websites on the headless way, frank-merell-wolf or somebody, etc he would later visit me in mumbai, introduce LISP as awesome, and gift me 'the wisdom of insecurity', that i didn't read correctly. 

 apparently, 'the book on the taboo...' by alan watts was his advaita reveal. had the pdf didn't read it 

 my first job was in a terribly crowded city, with a horribly crowded apartment (5 bachelors sharing a 2 bhk). moments of peace was reading zmm, and neuromancer, while listening to an odd mix of rhcp, pearl jam, metallica etc on my headphones, in the afternoons, on my desktop pc, in the ac of the office,after lunch, when everyone left everyone alone for a while 

 read that one lance-daybreak-shards-of-the-diamond-matrix blog post about hua-yen . read experiences of folks during vipassana at the dhamma.org retreats (7 days silence, hours of meditation, explosions of bliss for simple things like the humble food they served)

 phrases from zmm would re-emerge later in my mind as reality chunks started fitting into passages from the book that i'd read long back, and retained sub-consciously. 

 i moved to another city. this one wasn't that crowded at that time.  i chanced upon shinzen young and found his articles informative, explaining methods clearly..  the idea of inversion was mind-blowing at that time.

 i read the '10 rules of a zen programmer', headed over to the source and read kodo sawaki's exceprts at antaji.

 during one of my 'sabbaticals', i would listen to alan watts' out-of-your-mind series, and found it simultaneously delightful and relaxing, and would nod off to it at night.

 i also did a year of yoga asana practice at this time. 

during this time, i also made a mobile app that would display pages of 'the religion of the samurai' from project gutenberg. this was on java ME (a lovely straightforward java kit before android and the megaliths ). i also read zen culture and zen experience by hoover, on gutenberg. i emailed hoover once and received a response, which i cherished greatly but lost amidst the changing laptops. 

 at some point, i ran into meng's buddhist humor page ,which i've linked to in this blog more than once ( yes, i've been circling ). i laughed so hard, and read about lin-chi and rinzai 

i read zen-flesh and zen bones. noted that the last chapter of it contained kashmiri shaivism... 

was confused for a long time that bodhidharma and buddha were the same person

 i remember reading ten-zen questions of susan blackmore, and feeling that the first two questions, just, nailed it ! ( 1. am i conscious this moment ? 2. was i conscious the last moment ?) 

 
in chicago, i chanced upon a sitting group and showed up to sit, cos they said 'everyone invited no charge'. i had come across brad warner's content, and dismissed it at that time, as i needed some sort of authority to lean on . this was a satellite centre, with the hq in wisconsin. was quietly welcomed. someone commended me for sitting the full duration. i bought black tracks and full hand tee as it was their uniform of no uniform. the roshi ,on a visit ,was surprised to see us, and casually suggested we take a weekend morning and drive up to the hq for initiation. being a creature of habit and comfort, i didn't even think twice about it .after ignoring it, but around 7 years later, i think i should've done that.

it would've added an element of identity, and hence an anchor for my straggler efforts

a brother-in-law of mine took to thai buddhism with fiendish focus (like he does in all things), and i was on a staple diet of ajahn brahm videos, for two-three years. still fall back to it, as the core message of 'relax, it's okay' is needed every once in a while, when 'being somebody doing something' comes up suddenly against a meaner-than-normal encounter with the universe. 

another brother-in-law of mine does retreats with the goldstein/kornfield type centre ) 

 so far, i had logged around nil hours meditated.  what merit ?? none whatsoever !! 

 at one time, i had tabs opened on my browser , each opened to the goodreads.com quotes of tara brach, pema chodron, charlotte joko beck, sharon salzberg, cheri huber ... together they were a gentle embrace of warmth

i read a lot of brad warner content, printed out gudo nishijima's instructions. during the lockdown, i finally sat consistently, and clocked around 60hrs overall.   it was during that time that i also drew the monk cartoon

 the total remains close to that today

 i bought a furiously glaring bodhidharma figurine from a large mall in santa clara, a plaster buddha from an exhibition at vr mall near to our house, and the wife got a laughing buddha tiny-figurine from her home, and a maroon scroll with many golden threads from the tibetan monastery in bylakuppe (incidentally ,this is probably the same place mentioned in one of the lance-daybreak pieces).

i bought a s̶n̶a̶f̶u̶. a zafu

 i even tried to have an altar 

 during my back-problem days, i consulted a physio who was an initiate of a disciple of ramana maharishi. 

later i found a senior colleague at my place of work was also a follower, and had made many trips to the ashram, and had spent time 'blissed out in meditation'

i don't know what's next

 what is the right visualisation to represent code ? 

we like graphs because the graph representation could ideally remove all names, and create a colored-ball network of computation that we can look at and make wide sweeping grand generalisations about the codebase (RIP crystalfab)

i had a problem with graphs

a graph presents ambiguity in that a directed edge could mean the head is being called by the tail, but this is the exact opposite of the direction the computation result travels..

so we would need one for the order of function calls, and another for data flow, and taken separately they are non-intuitive, and taken together they are confusing

what if we went gödel and replaces function names with numbers ?

i am coming to believe that all of the tai chi exercises, like the horse-stance , and the first of the eight-silk, are supposed be done for minutes, not seconds, 

like, they need to be held for much longer than your attention can hold, and in that stretch of attention-less experience, something happens under the hood ; a larger beast than your current attention mind kicks into the forefront of your experience ...

actually, that works for yoga asanas more than anything else.. i might be projecting from there

is chi in the hands warmth or force ?

books we aimed for in 2019

it's 2024 now, time for a review

GEB  - still on my todo list. somewhat higher up on the list, gets thought about during idle times more often

Sciences of the artificial - took the printout with me on the bus once . see PAIP

PAIP - _some_ reading happened in context of rules-engine/expert systems, pyke/CLIPS, the Khemani class video, the PyKe course video etc

A Pattern language  - read one PAGE of it after procuring an electronic version

to be contd .....

what is so awesome about Antenne Bayern Coffee Music ?

what makes it the best for the house while the day rolls on ? what makes this channel suitable for all-day listening ?

the answer is a tripod of features. i broke down the music, and it falls into three things - rhythm, pleasant sounds, and human voices. 

the vocals are closer to conversational than any other type of music. that keeps a thread of my attention hooked. 

while there are repeating chords, notes, and drum beats, they repeat at longer intervals, so i don't feel rushed listening to them

the chords and vocals are pleasant and melodious, and i can keep listening to them forever. 

the slowness leaves gaps in all three, which get complemented by the other two, providing a nice easy roll from one to the other and then the third and back.

all other genres lack one of these. lofi-chill-hop, which i believed would fill this niche, has no human voices making it sterile , soul-less after a while, leaving me craving a motivational video

thank you abcm people, you rock.

in other news, there is a team in france designing kites for decathlon. yes, kite designer as a career choice. isn't it amazing ? isn't it so much hope-giving ?

 no babysitter, no posts

also, temper and goodwill melting away slowly

now i want to watch the world burn

 imagine a school of philosophy that runs a bachelors, a masters and a phd program, and along with learning the philosophy, also provides you excessive training in a chosen tool/machine that is believed to manifest this philosophy

such are the zen robes and bowl

 spreadsheets let you do two out of three of locke's 'facilities of the mind with respect to ideas ....'

- compound them - each tab is an idea, each sheet is a compound idea

- compare them - columns with readings across days or competitors, and easy to make bar graphs 

 Your children are not your children.

     They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.

 You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.

     That's why your back aches so much

 game lounge with variations of colonel blotto 

galcon is one :raised-eyebrow

 The intrapreneur conversation, date for the convo, alternative generation

Extract to re-sell, 

documenting good/bad patterns in tech

Spring data rest flyway varnish mq/redis micronet post/product

Single blog decision

workout to exhaustion

 What if the indranet was a compute net, with each jewel as a compute node ? The purpose of the universe would be computation...

Each node would possess the ability to do any of the computations of the other nodes

Some of them would be able to simulate the computations performed by other nodes:; here's the cutover - each computation is an experience and each node is a soul/mind

There would be federated jewels subnets ...

But for whom?

One hypothesis is that there's a creator , and the universe is actually feedback to the creator

 i am back to my original theme song

there is nothing in life that is so simple that ORM cannot make it worse

 a committee is only as good as the shared vision of the end result ,

and the ability of each member to nix any or all other

rock-paper-scissors, in human form [see kopp] 

the business of business is business

business is the art of buying a dollar machine for cents < 1$

either as a one time payment

or a part of the  $1 , regularly, until some amount is reached

--- 

the key to new things, is to know that incumbent leaders have no time or incentive

to learn about the new thing that is eating their lunch

until threatened, then they will spend money on it to check 

the box called "I am doing something about it"

this is the niche that online courses on AI are surging into.

Executive education is actually executive-soothing for most

--- 

Any incumbent with a huge following is, by definition, ripe for plucking. 

To break apple's monopoly,  the barrier is network effect. Thanks to Android and Java, there is no shortage of app developers . So all a political entity has to do is mandate open standards for devices, with right-to-repair as the rallying cry, maybe. A monopoly can only form by saying NO to million things - starting with options for users. And that is the crack to slide the thin edge of the wedge into.

*** from a book

Austerity means to eliminate the comforts and cushions in your life that you have learned to snuggle into and lose wakefulness. Take away anything that dulls your edge. No newspapers or magazines. No TV. No candy, cookies, or sweets. No sex. No cuddling. No reading of anything at all while you eat or sit on the toilet. Reduce working time to a necessary minimum. No movies. No conversation that isn't about truth, love, or the divine. 

If you take on these disciplines for a few weeks, as well as any other disciplines that may particularly cut through your unique habits of dullness, then your life will be stripped of routine distraction. All that will be left is the edge you have been avoiding by means of your daily routine. You will have to face the basic discomfort and dissatisfaction that is the hidden texture of your life. You will be alive with the challenge of living your truth, rather than hiding from it. 

Unadorned suffering is the bedmate of masculine growth. Only by staying intimate with your personal suffering can you feel through it to its source. By putting all your attention into work, TV, sex, and reading, your suffering remains unpenetrated, and the source remains hidden. Your life becomes structured entirely by your favorite means of sidestepping the suffering you rarely allow yourself to feel. And when you do touch the surface of your suffering, perhaps in the form of boredom, you quickly pick up a magazine or the remote control. 

 Cross dimensional representation as a content creation strategy and exercise for perspective deepening 

Draw a text

Narrate a math

Write up a picture

 Arjuna  :  We shall not do battle today 

Krishna :  Give up this weakness, this feebleness , and fight , O scorcher of foes !!

Arjuna : No, no, it's just that my chatgpt license has expired. It will only come tomorrow 

Krishna : okay, then, dude

 Q. Can memory be implemented via computation itself ?

* stares in redis *

you're one year closer to your death

The  Book of War from Random house, with Caleb Carr as 'series editor', is a combination of two books :  

- The Art of Warfare, Ballantine Books ( part of Random House), 1993, translated by Roger Ames  

- On War, Random House, 1943,  translated by O. J. Matthijs Jolles 

The new book, comprising of the two originals, plus gratuitous commentary, notes, prefaces .. etc serves to extend the copyright protection on the original works. 
Jolles is 'considered by modern scholars' to be the best translation, so that checks off On War from my list.

What remains are , in various combinations of have-possessed and have-read - 

- Prince (Machiavelli wrote in modern English to save us the trouble of evaluation translations via google search )

- The Book of Five Rings

(and this one's a stretch,)

- War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

I plan to leave this list alone

Just a reminder , the D.C Lau translation of the Tao Te Ching was my staple possession for a long time, and, if I remember right, has the best few opening passages..  here's a pic of him from the Guardian

Chuang Tzu keeps coming up but haven't found a good one yet. The ideas of anarch

While Thomas Cleary's works are everywhere, and all-encompassing, they are dry. The Tao of Pooh helped me more, probably, than TCs TTC...

I didn't see ToP in Blossom's this time, and will remember to not buy it again, coz the paper books only add clutter and mites, and competition with my existing reading list, stacked deep and wide, next to my desk.

This is supposed to be the year of tiny actions, accumulated, compounded ..

My original operating system was harmony, but without a base and defined sense of self and boundaries, it quickly degenerated into me becoming docile and pliant and using 'being ego-less' as a rationalisation for failure. The amount of 'escapes' accumulated in the form of 'gathering knowledge' and 'doing-something-else' is at an all-time high.

So this years' metrics are 

- no escape, go where you're afraid,  do the work, doing the unpleasant, doing the pushups(1) with faith

- work for a full hour on a thing

- harmonious increase and profitability in worldly matters, without apology

- system of monthly goal writing at the start of the month, and reviewing at end of month, including finances

- an annual goal writing exercise, with six month reviews ! 

- budgeting for holiday fun, and purchases, and learning ! And ensuring 10% spend on learning and fun

- more networking, coz people are the elements of this ecosystem, not matter, and lots of people can still use what I already have, without the 'flowering' that  I believe is needed

- taking all the shit that comes from home and office, and not hating

- h1bac becomes top burning priority

- I thought, based on some video I watched (Jordan Peterson taking down a woke white girl), that I'd be in the world one percent. Hilariously no. Still, that's a nice illusion to target

- fasting is the prime tool from Taoism, to refactor/baseline/normalise perception. Fasting of the body, fasting of the mind.

- Codie S says accounting is the dumb skill that makes you most money. That.

- re-iterating tony - only one thing gives you power , and that is action. 

- the therapist also says that - your prime weapon against anxiety is action

- this is the endgame, way past the middle. If not now, there will never be a time to be happy, do the happy things. Finish off the bucket list, else I'll be too old. Buy a big car, go on a Europe trip, write a book etc. Time is stored in the things it is spent on.

- to work with the constant confounding, that is something to accept and come to terms with

- turn into the FOMO skid. Let whatsapp,telegram messages in forums pile up. let linkedIn posts lie. Let Youtube shorts go on. let us focus on our yesterday and move it to a better tomorrow

- and some others that I will fill in later.... 

Spinoza (to me, it seems) aligns with the Buddha ( and Guru Ramana) that the main job of the human is to understand, and once done, the mind is now advanced one more step.

I write this down, otherwise

(1) My grandfather , when I was in my 7th or 8th standard, instructed me to do buskie and dandal , a hundred of the first, and around 20 of the second. It's hard to imagine how things would've been if I had just done those daily, till date, but I got seduced by western push-ups, wu-shu from the book we got from the gandhi-nehru library, beach running ,thanks to Rahul, etc