if the myriad creatures of the world are but empty boats

is it okay to enslave them and put them through torture and suffering ?

is it okay to keep them for their meat ? their code output  ?

or should one play along to their rhythms ? 

or chart a course for both, to share the river, to say ? for an empty boat ?

 

ddi you know that the capital of Burundi is Bujumbura. Now you know !

Much has been made of leaving the middle class, of becoming rich by thinking as if you were rich. 

of the mindset books - woo woo - here are the choicest ( not counting the leviathan - think and grow RICH by napolean hill that started it all ... )

* rich dad poor dad

* how rich people think

* secrets of the millionaire mind

these attempt to change the 'script' inside one's head; refactor the perspective so that one doesn't cannibalise 'growth' in favour of essentially 'dead'  'poor-people' behaviours

when attempting to leave the  middle class/ poor  mindset,  at some point you realise that rich people play poker with life, but each game stake is a slice  of their resources, but you are playing poker with your entire resources.

at every stage, society only tells men - good, but not enough. thus they stay enslaved for their lives, until old age comes upon them, and they are ignored, like flawed furniture that sits around the house, unused, but not thrown out.... until it gets in the way once too often. i want to die before i become too embarrassingly obsolete and weak and needy. there is no place for the weak and dependent in this part of town. i want to die away from my bloodsuckers. probably have a cigarette and a beer before i go.

one risk with 'faking it till you make it' and 'talking the talk before walking the walk' is that one might start spending like the 'rich' and end up depleting the core capital reserves, and end up with credit card debt and shiny but deprecated swag

on a different in a different dimension, there are some who can see the blackness within darkness, the spirit in the emptiness. and the ones who can't are multiplying and plopping themselves down everywhere and infecting everything

a strange connect this week - raph koster's theory of fun, and graeber's article on play. to play is the way. ludere est via

being born hindu is like being at a train terminal -there are many trains, you can take any train, but only one at a time.

i tried digging a well ,but the apartment below mine complained, so I had to stop

 can you setup a druid table, and have kafka push a value into it every now and then, then have a flink job read from it and calculate mean, median, mode for so long, and put it into a db or file ?

can you setup a pyke program generating a maze and calculating an agent's next step based on obstacles ?

can you write  the first version of your book ( which you will cut and re assemble later)

american communists shop at TJ MARXs

 When you stand on enough shoulders, you can't see the ground anymore 

 No Truth

  But what you see

Speak it whole

  And may be free

circumstance's slap

  Maybe karma being repaid

Or tomorrow's lesson

  You dont know until

You do

Tendency dances around intent

 But skill changes the game

  

a mallu named Muvin

might have started up a 

relocation company

 today's fortune. capture's the flavor of the day and time. nothing beats the depth of sophistication and range of wisdom of the unix fortune cookie dataset

--------------------------------------------------

The scene: in a vast, painted desert, a cowboy faces his horse.

Cowboy: "Well, you've been a pretty good hoss, I guess.  Hardworkin'.

Not the fastest critter I ever come acrost, but..."

Horse:  "No, stupid, not feed*back*.  I said I wanted a feed*bag*.

--------------------------------------------------

 the probability of acquiring a million dollars thanks to my knowledge of country names, especially ones starting with a specific letter, i now know , are closer to zero, than zero itself. it _was_, all along, but i am ready to give up the ghost now

so many ghosts i need to give up, but they are all i am

 albanian for 'is' is është , pronounced 'uh.sh.they', 

sanskrit for 'is' is अस्ति, pronounced 'uh.sthi'

lithuanian for 'dream (noun)' is svapnas

sanskrit for 'dream (noun)' is 'swapn'

also, a tendency to open windows for cross-ventilation, going for long walks, tolerance for cold food,  "letting the atmosphere come in", these are things my dad gave to me

time for a dna ancestry test 

* * *

 some people pitch their tent right outside the pareto frontier

beware of them

* * *

one pattern i see over time is that whatever was bad for me, whatever i was cautioned against, in a given period,  i see pieces that slowly and surely blur the differences and turn into recommendation _for_ the thing, like,  posts against the grind are now replaced by blogs and podcasts and videos extolling the hustle .it's an old trick, starting with religions, of evil pretending to be good, to be 'good for you', to be 'the right thing', as opposed to things which are good for you, and are the right thing. it is the need of the hour to examine what passes as 'good', and 'right' in this world

 * * *

i want 2024 to be the year of emptying. i want to take all my books, and either throw them away, or write a blog post and then throw them away, or write some code, put that in github, and then throw them away. i want to take all my scribbled 'tomorrow we will do', and throw them away. i want to take all my clothes,  which were gifted during ceremonies, which were given by friends, relatives, which were presents on birthdays, etc, and give them away, and buy one set for myself, and wear only what i've purchased. i want to take all my scribbled art work, and throw them away (they are already on this blog, almost all of them). i want to close all my bank accounts but one ( there are two, and you can't close bank accounts until either the bank dies of , like in the case of citibank retail, in india, or the person dies... so we'll keep this one on paper , i want to be done with self improvement, attaining the ultimate wisdom, learning the coolest math, ( math is so dry, i wonder why, when applied, i've heard, is a different world) , i want to be done with the preparation, the pre-heating the oven, the simmer-simmer-never-boil quality of my life, i want to rip it out and throw it off the balcony, kicking and screaming. enough of the how to solve it, enough of the how to evaluate a company, enough of the yoga books that i never read. enough simmering. 

* * *

problem with journalling in a blog is that i never open up fully, and problem with writing in a book is that it is slow, and i lose context fast, and problem with writing in a notepad is that i don't know who wil read it so i never know how deep to go or how light to keep it

* * *

how to communicate with someone who is continually offended at any attempt to communicate ?

* * * 

intellectuallize, intellectuallize, intellectuallize.   - steve martin

* * * 

every year, i come back to my blogs, read some posts, and exclaim to myself - that's what i need ! i gotta do that ! - and then i sink, the waves of the  tedium and mundanity close over my head, and i disappear without a trace. a year later ...

* * *

was reading escaping java. i have a problem. i am one inch deep, and a million miles wide. no really. it is SAD

 why do i not see things to completion ?

why am i in a perennial state of disconnect with all that i participate in ?

when will i learn to take profit for myself

when will i learn to live by my definition  instinct of what is good ?

probably never

looking for an exit

 journalling is a power tool to normalise your experiences

emotions are a cloud, and ranting/journalling puts them into words and helps your brain get a handle on them (sidwarrier-drpal)

 There is tendency, and there is intention, and in between the two, we dance our dance of life.

Each and every thing that we do, to the world outside, leaves a groove in the fields of the mind.  Then, the things in we do in the mind, echo outside ?

There are no things. only differences. As each wrinkle is smoothed, each thing starts looking more like the next. 

 In the beginning, there was an it. There was no space, no time, so there was no beginning, but there was it.

It was infinitely small, but since there was no space, nobody noticed it being so small. There was nobody too.

It was, however, very smart.  Smarter than my daughter, in fact. 

It had everything  and was everything  so there was nothing it needed or wanted

 Yet it was curious . As Scott Adams said, it had only one itch to scratch, it didn't know what it was , like, to not be. So it tried.

It created space, then, quickly ran from one end of the space to another, and looked back immediately. 

Nothing.

It created and eye, then dashed again, then looked back. Still nothing.

It created a tail. dashed, looked back, again. again nothing.

It winked itself out of existence. This is something like screwing your eyes shut, and holding your breath, but Cosmically. 

Nothing.

Maybe I should leave a part of me behind before I do this, it thought ...

.... to be contd

Ps: 

if you don't look at anything holistically, you are dealing with nothing more than a rorsharch plot. to look at anything holistically, is to look at the whole universe, which also includes looking at the inside of your head from the outside.  This is where most people trip up.at the Hofstadter Gate

When we laugh at something, we are among the gods themselves. Prometheus brought down laughter, in one story

re-stumbled upon ribbonfarm's "acting dead, trading up, and leaving the middle class" post again

 the cracked.com magnum opus - 6 harsh truths - seems to have undergone series of buffing with the sandpaper of political correctness, to the point it now sounds like one of those 6 steps to success canned spiels by motivational speakers on youtube and or cheap books sold pirated on the pavements

thanks to the genius of the wayback machine, we have the originals

https://web.archive.org/web/20130102010540/https://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person

https://web.archive.org/web/20130101170743/http://www.cracked.com/blog/6-harsh-truths-that-will-make-you-better-person_p2/

giles bowkett's original blogspot blog used to be so good cos of all the raw language and almost explicit totally unrelated gratuitious but refreshing imagery . all sobered up

be the person you'd want to hang around

if you're not him, invent him

the narrator (cornelius ?) invented tyler durden

who are you gonna invent ?

 i can't even

the secret life of engineering lightweights

hmm. i wonder if there are stories in which we make out like bandits

 india has 1.2 billion people and growing

number of youtube viewers in india is 400 million at last count.

imagine if a govt department wanted to organise a poll for ten million people, or disseminate information , it would be nigh impossible and prohibitively expensive, yet FAANG has made that possible with youtube, tiktok etc *

the 1.2 billion people in india are not dumb, yet are not 'educated', that makes them unable to participate in the existing economic ground

a video game can bridge the language complexity because it models the real world and not the abstract number based universe of symbolic computation that education teaches you

so many people learned the cycles and nuances of agriculture via farmville, so many have learnt strategy via starcraft, so many have learnt empire building via age of empires , so many have learnt business strategy via railroad tycoon .... we just need the last mile done, to translate entertainment, into education training

for eg, stocks/inventory in a warehouse in a manufacture game, can be represented by a bar graph adjacent to a picture of a car/bike/tv (that which is manufactured in the game) - no need for the player to know the ratios and inventory numbers

1.2 billion people playing such games could become the "distributed-problem-solving machine"  , solving critical problems that were ignored for lack of compute power 

the key would be to take on opaque activity, and represent it in real world equivalent of funky graphical things, and a rules engine that manifests as physical constraints, and a shiny payoff that keeps people playing.

the bridging and gameplay would be key.

also, see foldIt

also, a mute horse would be neigh impossible

*tofler's prosumer rules

 We are supposed to intellectualize and abstract our daily chores so they are automated and invisible. Deliberately putting tasks at the end of your energy and mental limits is madness plain and simple, and must not be allowed to reproduce, yet here we are

 achilles' weak point was his heel, because he was held by the heel and dipped into a magical river which gave him immortality and invincibility wherever the water touched him . he died by an arrow to his heel

duryodhana's weak point was his loins , because he wore a loin-cloth when he went to see the Gandhari, who looked at him with eyes which had been blindfolded for all her married life, out of duty and devotion, and made whichever part she saw, immortal and invincible. he died when bhima hit him below the waist , in the mace fight, 

 sadhguru and brad warner seem to be saying the same things

you must work hard to sit comfortably

slight tweaks to the zen wordings on posture and it collapses into yoga.

so is zazen equivalent to sitting in padmasana for as long as you can ?

this is what i was taught yogis and sadhus do, as part of their sadhana, and pretty much as their goal in life.......

Vadhyar :  इदं न मम !!!

Me : இது என்ன மாமா ?!?!?!!

we've signed up for the course

we've bought the books

we've bookmarked the websites

one day we'll finish the course

then we'll read the books

then we'll chant the lines

until then

it's just 

om

 India is a karma bhoomi because while it is large and wide ,it is also semi closed, allowing pockets of culture to exist and evolve, and move away when threatened, thereby all possible cultural  pathways exist, like a large dna box. also, it is so chaotic at the centers that evolution is forced and only the determined make it without dilution. It is so crowded and chaotic that one super node cannot emerge ( rock paper scissors) hence co operation and tolerance become a core value, which encourages more tolerant complexity to experjment and grow.

 in large sets of measurements, all distributions tend to become gaussian (normal) distributions.  the large number is defined as 30. so in experiments with more than 30 repetitions, 68% of the readings will be clustered around the mean, one standard-deviation on either side...

what does this tell us about the experiment ? that you are not the snowflake you thought yourself to be

also, 97 % will be within 4 std-deviations around the mean

 now that i think about it, i cannot unsee colonel blotto. it's everywhere. from risk, to galcon, to even catan.

embarassingly hopeful still

A very underrated form of wealth is being able to stop doing whatever you are doing, for at least a week, maybe a month or six months, without going down the drain career wise. Modern day 'career' was nothing but slavery, where you had to dress up and show up at a place where others stole your day from you, and returned home tired, angry, and hungry, to pick up the pieces of your life, until it started again the next day.

Thanks to the virus, while work _has_ invaded the home, we have these slivers of time in between, all to ourselves, where we can dream with eyes open, of the things we want to do, in between Slack calls and coding marathons.  This was one reason I had so dreamt about becoming a freelancer after four years in Mumbai. This was why I would save all the blog posts of techies who built products, or websites, and worked on their own time. Ths is why patio11's bingo-card-creator and how he made it (during a 9-9 sarariman job) was so hope-giving. This was why Robert Kiyosaki's line in his main book - if you disappear tomorrow, your job and income will also disappear, but your business will still put money in your pocket - was eye opening. This was why Kiyosaki , and Tim Ferris and the 4-hour work-week held attention so much. It's 2024 and I still am writing form within the walls of my prison. I still have these ideas and these goals and they are written down,  year after year,  on paper, in notebooks, in spreadsheets, in word -documents ... but they never move an inch beyond the abstract. Counting on 2024 to be the year of getting escape velocity.

when you take paychecks, you slowly lose the ability to not take paychecks. 

over time, you end up running faster and faster in the hamster wheel, responding to , what becomes obvious over time, are contrived calamities. yet you are scared to stop because you haven't seen the real world for a long time, and are not ready for the hardships of being off the 'scaly' corporate teat. this slowly robs you of all life, and leaves you with bad back, bad eyes, carpal tunnel, and ignored spouse, children, parents, friends, and self.

instead of growing every year, you remain key-presser for ghosts, pressing keys all day long for a name on a wall and a seat and a desk, in exchange of your precious blood-moments

"in 20 years, the only people who will remember that you did overtime, are your children"

i need to be able to take off any day from my work, and leave it for a few weeks, months, even a year, and come back and pick up without damage, and i need to be able to work from anywhere on it. i'd rather not be given busy work day by day, while my heart pumps blood uselessly and the dreams and potential wither and die

 the good thing about the marketing driven consumerist west is that what has historically been black-magic,  gets eyeballs, and metamorphoses into things like NLP(tm) or RPM ,and eventually feed back into the mainstream in a positive avatar (Tony). 

instead of the altars of Jesus or Krishna, we have the altar of personal-development and productivity and personal wealth towards which people direct their devotion and energy. Eventually, science is brought to bear upon fads, and their verdict becomes part of human collective knowledge. I find this to be extremely democratic.

this also covers deep cog-sci research that easily become atomic habits, psychology insights that become i'm-ok-you're-ok or rock-paper-scissors(kopp),  and esoteric practices that easily become Transcendental Meditation , or , TM(tm)

all cults are false, some cults are useful. cults are co-operation-systems at best, and domination-systems at worst (remember, sheep are eaten once they stop giving wool). 

cults care about spirituality as much as a parent cares about a barbie doll or a GI Joe figure ( nothing, as long as the child doesn't want it)

i foresee the end of the last desert cult will be via a pop culture fad that creates alternates to everything that it offers, soon rendering it unappealing to the modern mind,  appealing only to the closed/damaged/deranged/off-center minds, and hence takes its place in the tapestry as another high-delta , off-centre accumulation of weirdos that lend the centre definition.

human economic systems comprise of agents driven by need. currently, it is driven by humans kept on the bottom rung of the maslow pyramid. without these, the engines of capitalism come to a stop. we hope AI can bring changes to this, however, i am not certain that mankind's utility-sorters and resource-shifters (howard bloom) can envision a planet which doesn't need misery, or one in which mankind's count is small and stable

 i suppose you can work unceasingly in a business which subsidises your addiction

 Does anyone have any questions ?

Yes ! A train keaves chicago for new york at 60 mph....

 study of prices is study of economics itself, because economics is behaviour rooted in scarcity and trade-offs, and this is captured exactly in the price of things.

 Things can be strategic or tactical

But there are no strategic or tactical things