a philosophy which explains everything, or rather , enough things sufficiently well, becomes a science which becomes a technique

science has world universal abstractions, philosophy has its own abstractions, and technique deals with only real world objects.

when a philosophy-turned-science-turned-technique achieves subscribers and a single point of power and authority and then a hierarchy, it becomes a religion.

the first philosophies/abstractions were  stories  - and oral societies and religions formed around them.
then came the text symbols stories and their religions of the books
then came math ,and industrial societies. all three of them coexist today.

but capitalism and division of labour is still a religion, a faith in God that one believes, and assumes that it explains our life and things that happen to us.

today's newspapers and journal articles tell us stories embedded with numbers to indicate that a math machine is behind the scenes working.

the newspapers of tomorrow will be equations and graphs, and the dashboards are already being built - the gdp equation, the health equation , the war equation, the currency equation....

( I guess it follows that the newspapers of the future will be read only by computing machines - this must be true at some level - with machines reading user stats of cat sites and remarking 'oh quite!' )

a side-note, though obvious - math is the bedrock of science.  all of science involves capturing behaviour in symbol arrangements.

a religion acquires subscribers, then a hierarchy and power structure amongst them, and then followers and recruits and the lay. we can call it head and body for the sake of convenience.

philosophies which don't benefit all require partial knowledge on the part of the body, and just like the 80/20 can be applied to the 20 of the 80, partial knowledge on the part of the 80 of the  head.

we can call it the brain and senses, or supremo &  party,  or  king & ruling family.

a lot of social abstractions are like money in the bank - you can see it as long as everybody doesn't ask to

a horse is a social abstraction. each horse you meet will deviate from the definition of the horse that you might form, and with each horse you see and whose features you add to you definition, each future horse would deviate from it in some way. ultimately, what a horse is is only a set of features in your head that you just say is a horse.
 the 'just comes into play, say, when boston dynamics will ask to run its horses in the derby.
 the 'just' is also the key word here, and your opinion should never be 'just', as per pirsig and kant.

i see from my window that the Bangalore smog is back, and the horizon of squat ugly concrete buildings is hidden, thankfully.

a philosophy generator, therefore , need no universal truths or agreed upon abstractions to work with, rather  it just needs to generate patterns with a base set of 'elements'. hence the runaway success of the I-ching.

a philosophy generator might be a strange idea, but a hypothesis generator is not.

 prevalence of  genetic programming is proof of this.

you see, we live in a world where symbol lists can produce real world changes.

the symbol list that you know  as 'real' , for eg, "Manuel, bring the car around" or "would you like fries with that"  is only a specific version of the general symbolic logic framework you swim in,like water, oblivious.

earliest symbol lists were things like 'Offler needs a sacrifice', then came printed word 'the country needs you', and now we have 'you have x new messages!'

and we can compute them very fast now.

functional programming brings us closest to dna, and godel, church and turing were talking about manipulating such sequences long back.

come to think of it, dNA is a symbol sequence made of matter, rather than being electro-magnetic  like the text in this document.


'We live in a mediated world'. - William Gibson

abstractions grow on your mind and become a body  in itself. the better more exhaustive it is, the more it mediates. eventually all reality stops passing through the jvm of abstraction and does not reach the bare metal ever. Some cultures manage this platforming too.

computer programming has many parallels to this abstractions/symbols becoming reality

meditation seeks to undo the damage of the abstractions on the brain. de-semantic-ize symbols, scrub meaning from them, so to say.

(Java successfully adapts whole new paradigms into its existing syntax. it might be possible to learn new things with existing human language, but sapir-whorf might disagree)

side -note : if you consider a person growing up and 'learning' things (this is always in a local, specific way - one learns what one's nearby people   and subscribing organisations know or allow to know),

then when one leaves those circles, 'unlearning' is needed. The abstractions/symbols need to be un-mapped. If you consider the abstractions to be 'stratified' when unlearning is required, then reading this - (art :delanda's destratified ) will explain the success of LSD in curing mental disorders, or increasing creativity.

side-note : all art is just representing reality differently, or rather showing equivalence of abstractions.

side-side-note :  The most important thing in art is The Frame. - Frank Zappa

side-side-side-note - a thing is defined by what it is not, eg borders. hence consciousness lives only in borders.

like programming languages, most reality eventually passes down into your abstraction

side -note : while most programming languages  go down the Tao scale towards myriad things, LiSP ascends towards the Tao, with less  ).

five colors blind the eyes, five notes deafen the ears ..

it follows that songs and stories are the most potent of tools of control. and a bard would be the most powerful at organising people until religions drew in song and story within its fold inside the stone walls of churches or mosques.

when you play, a different part of your brain lights up in your head, than when you recite a rote poem. only when you attain skill enough via rote-repeat does this first part light up again.

inside out - the abstract thought chamber. too much thinking 'flattens out' an imprint and makes it dessicated, as abstraction is the removal of all real world connections. (SICP)

cultural assist:

tao te ching . John C Wu Translation . Terebess

Autumn Leaves, Eric Clapton, Gabriella Quevedo(youtube)

ran prieur - LSD overdoses cure bipolarity , lyme disease pain etc ...

version control for writers. never throw anything away.
 “What do I miss, as a human being, if I have never heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics? The answer is: Nothing. And what do I miss by not knowing Shakespeare? Unless I get my understanding from another source, I simply miss my life. Shall we tell our children that one thing is as good as another-- here a bit of knowledge of physics, and there a bit of knowledge of literature? If we do so, the sins of the fathers will be visited upon the children unto the third and fourth generation, because that normally is the time it takes from the birth of an idea to its full maturity when it fills the minds of a new generation and makes them think by it.    Science cannot produce ideas by which we could live.”  ― E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

problem with software engineering is that it's an art masquerading as a science.
the source of neurosis is the belief that things are determinate.

Arting allows cross pollination of abstractions and allows a viewer to get free of the particular manifestation of the abstraction.hence all growth is via art


Slava akechmet - shakespeare as important as e mc2


How can lsd cure mental conditions? It rewires by messing up the traijing sets of the bio neuralnetworks


It follows that bytes in the brain form our realities like in a compiter


Humans are pattern recognizers, all kodels are false some are useful


Just like the mel programmers are pushed aside by compiler optimizers, data scientists who know which model to apply will be pushed aside by shotgun blasts of genetic programming or algos


Is it true is it right is it good ?
Is it permamnent is it universal is it appealing to almost all ? Does it match a story you ready have in your gut ? Is it something others will tolerate you doing ,even appreciate ? Will it bring profit ? Is it legal? Will you have fu doing it?


When a component can detect its own action, we have feedback, the basis of intellihence


Weiner was a 'made' genius, the kindninaspired to be, by memorising 2^64

People in Chicago wear t-shirts to hide for the fact that their souls are ever wearing a suit.

The structure of writing — there’s a start , then comes a middle, and then an end.

The challenge will be to write a lot of pieces, and adhere to the structure above. The simultaneous challenge will be to keep the story meaningful.

Zinsser said you’ll never write anything definitive. Aim to bite of a corner and make it your own.

Adding a constraint of ,say 300 words — a hundred for the start, same for the rest. A picture for each ? no, adding images, drawing , scanning ,cutting to fit, attributing — no end of distractions. Though it might work if required as an editing step.

The art of working in a straight line, from conception to finish — don’t fool yourself- it is a skill and a craft. If not present, the duty to make it so is incumbent upon us. There is no greater line to adulthood, to maturity, than this.

An aside on straight lines. There are none in nature. Apart from the zero, the straight line is mankind’s biggest invention. It functions both as an abstraction , and also a guide wire for the experiment of thought.

straight lines gave us maps that don’t represent the territory, yet allow for infinite conquest and transport networks.

writing is a form of thinking. it’s uses the simplest form of symbol capturing/ memo ing to record that one has thought.

shipping is the moment of truth. only when you ship can you know where you stand. it connects your work and the real world , only after you ship can you mark
remember our formula - act, measure, mark, exceed

JVM platforms hide the bare metal from you, making you a consumer, a mediated citizen. Java libraries do the work for you, leaving you the job of creating objects and feeding them to the priests to feed to the machine. earlier ( hackers,levy) big metal had acolytes to feed the machine the  cards.
today we have the JVM and its million libraries.

it is not for nothing that it is said " low level programming is good for the programmer's soul"

quantum curling trousers of time theory, universal mind'ers, looping multiverse segments ...

as you know, every possibility is played out, and creates an infinitude of universes all same as each other till one point before they diverge into their own destinies
scientists discovered that some such universes circled back to where they branched off from, and rejoined the original path of probabilistic evolution.
sometimes they kept circling , creating a limbo, a groundhog day for all involved, who never noticed that monday followed sunday followed monday ..
and some circled a few times and moved past, and in some cases, the branch-ed off univ  died and the parent continued on a different path.
we called these looptiverses.
in an alternate part of the world, people discovered that the universe didn't exist, rather was like a single program running, and that the world we knew was the equivalent of each byte broadcasting
a view which others shared and edited as they too went past the cpu.
that the universe was one mind ,split, and playing splinter against splinter like waves in an ocean.t
his gave rise to the possiblity of magic, that while the individual perceived hard limits of physics, the Indivdiual did not, and so, by transcending individual identity, one might transcend physics, and lfly through the air or lift impossible weights etc
some transcended memory regions ,giving rise to the idea of akashic records, clairvyance, mind-reading etc
these came from internal voyagers, rather than scientists
only among these some found the way to jump across looptiverses, thus becoming voyaggers of the impossible

the true nitpicking stickler nerds came ot the ultimate conclusion of all. it was all stories. the stories were the dominant form of life, consisting of many many cells made of humans and animals.

this one belongs to the ortra

The web needs serving, and the its goblins are in high demand . 

The barbarian hordes are at the gates ..er. loadbalancers !! with eyes wild from the pain of their mundane existence, an affliction not of the body, but of the soul, they are hungover from their charades of being , their faces empty, hearts silently aching from the denied connection and engagement with anything real, for they live in the mediated world of Man, where they live fro what seems forever, caffeine to keep working , pills to keep from dying, forever straining at the juggernauts of the economy, being counted as the faithful, and in the body of the successful state, paying taxes and being ‘represented’, for all human polity is a farm, and people are its crop.

I mean, Retail Therapy, baby!

They are in the house, grubby mitts all over the merchandise, pawing and persusing, with no promise of purchase, a desultory masturbation , repeated daily, the defining characteristic of my generation.

a word on the "ortrta"

it stands, of course, for 'the one ring to rule them all'

and if such a ring could exist, its power wouldn't exist on its own, but would arise from the nature of the ones it has impact on.

the ring is none other than the social contract, and under its tyranny, we have made the earth a place where none can escape it, no matter how far you go into the wilderness.

Groups have always formed around  getting , or avoiding . and the tiger-bush-bias of the brain is the fact of nature exploited forever, to create an  us-vs-them  dynamic . 

fear and terror is the reason for the base of the Maslow hierarchy to be what it is.

and this forms the strongest catalyst for a group to form

(an implicit promise that the barbarians will be held at bay, and hint of a promise of gourmet food, fashionable clothes,   and the latest gadget. and an explicit depiction -not-promise of unlimitedness of babes.)

a formed group generates its own 'truths', and also achieves. and hereby all good and evil are formed.

I ran an experiment where I collected noted across a week and published it at the end of it. It made interesting reading. Nothing much happens in a day worth writing about.

It's quite depressing when you can scribble for 16 years yet not turn out a book.

What's the role of feelings, taste and partialness in a thinking mind ? the same as the role of hunger and sleep in a thinking mind. They are just points on the map.

Special thanks to https://www.editpad.org/    to help fix the copy-pasta errors

“Nature loves courage. You make the commitment and nature will respond to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles. Dream the impossible dream and the world will not grind you under, it will lift you up. This is the trick. This is what all these teachers and philosophers who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold, this is what they understood. This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall. This is how magic is done. By hurling yourself into the abyss and discovering it's a feather bed.”


“We have to create culture, don't watch TV, don't read magazines, don't even listen to NPR. Create your own roadshow. The nexus of space and time where you are now is the most immediate sector of your universe, and if you're worrying about Michael Jackson or Bill Clinton or somebody else, then you are disempowered, you're giving it all away to icons, icons which are maintained by an electronic media so that you want to dress like X or have lips like Y. This is shit-brained, this kind of thinking. That is all cultural diversion, and what is real is you and your friends and your associations, your highs, your orgasms, your hopes, your plans, your fears. And we are told 'no', we're unimportant, we're peripheral. 'Get a degree, get a job, get a this, get a that.' And then you're a player, you don't want to even play in that game. You want to reclaim your mind and get it out of the hands of the cultural engineers who want to turn you into a half-baked moron consuming all this trash that's being manufactured out of the bones of a dying world.”


― Terence McKenna




Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.


For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor. Running day after day, piling up the races, bit by bit I raise the bar, and by clearing each level I elevate myself. At least that’s why I’ve put in the effort day after day: to raise my own level. I’m no great runner, by any means. I’m at an ordinary – or perhaps more like mediocre – level. But that’s not the point. The point is whether or not I improved over yesterday. In long-distance running the only opponent you have to beat is yourself, the way you used to be.



― Haruki Murakami, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running



"It's very hard in the beginning to understand that the whole idea is not

to beat the other runners. Eventually you learn that the competition is

against the little voice inside you that wants you to quit."



The mind's first step to self-awareness must be through the body.



― George Sheehan



Goals are for losers. Your mind isn’t magic. It’s a moist computer you can program. The most important metric to track is your personal energy. Every skill you acquire doubles your odds of success. Happiness is health plus freedom. Luck can be managed, sort of. Conquer shyness by being a huge phony (in a good way). Fitness is the lever that moves the world. Simplicity transforms ordinary into amazing.”

― Scott Adams, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big: Kind of the Story of My Life




Meditation practice isn't about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It's about befriending who we are already.”

― Pema Chödrön, The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World

if i don't know who you are, then i don't know who i am

- silicon valley

we overreact for the small stuff, coz the big stuff -the life that right job the good house the family and children - the joy is so pure and sublime that we know deep down that such beauty is not meant for the mud and dirt of the earth and our lives, and so we know deep down it was a gift , and so we don't cry too much for it, coz the only options are to break or move on.
so we never cry for the big stuff.
the small stuff ? that's different.


i realised something was wrong when ,even in my daydreams, i found myself crying

landscape

square

picasso'd dragons of crayon -1

do we miss pablo's ?

**

Dr. P: How many of you have self-help books? Okay, that's your first problem. You can't help yourself, because your *self* sucks!

**

You're quite good at this game, Mr. Green. I know because I'm quite good at this game.
- Revolver

**

Dunning–Kruger effect From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Part of a series on Psychology

In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognise their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people cannot objectively evaluate their competence or incompetence.[1]

**

"Looking by, over my shoulder, with an aching deep in my heart"
  - Mike and the Mechanics

**

You need a coach, a friend and a community.

You can learn all the katas alone, from books or videos, but weaving them together , and having a challenge that requires compound skills in a controlled environment that allows failure, review and retries is something you cannot do alone.

You can write something every day.  Reading a passage and then summarising in your own words is a known and recommended way of learning. It also helps concentration along with  knowledge of the  subject matter.
Written notes are the external memory of the human computer. 

The basic necessity list now consists of diet, sleep, exercise,   arts, friends, and do-nothing time.

I have attempted 5BX for a week now, and moved from Chart-1-B to Chart-1-B+. The stress on the body is tremendous. Seven days at each level is simply not enough.  The back also starts going for a toss. Not sure if this is sitting related, or due to the exercise.

The first thing in meditation practice is time and place. It's smoothest to sneak in a few minutes at the easiest time of the day.  I decided to ignore a full stomach and sat after lunch. The second thing would be to give up control to the timer. An app which rings a bell at the start and end of the session lets you offload all thought and action related to session management ,thereby removing all excuses to distract yourself on the basis of this.

‘Mathematics is the music of reason’ – James Joseph Sylvester



Logical thinkers suffer from Cartesian-itis. Or seeing straight lines where there are none. Extrapolate straight lines and you'll get planes, combine planes and you'll get surfaces and other compound objects that are the bread-and-butter (again a western affliction - we prefer rice-and-lentils) of our daily matrix. So seeing boxes or lines or balls or spheres or curves , is seeing abstractions, which by definition are unreal ( see Note1). The affected are many, namely, the large middle of the West - those who are unable to ,either transcend to the top, or are pushed to the bottom.  As Neo said, there is no spoon. There is no spoon of Job Satisfaction, nor Success, defined Cartesian-ically. Hence futile pursuits and trips to shrinks.

Or seeing ghosts . Pirsig goes on and on about Western ghosts. I'm reciting his words now, myself.

When I was in school, a fellow-book-reading-friend told me about ZMM, and that it would change lives. I assumed it'd be about motorcycles, and leather jackets, and that a reader would sort of give up on studiously studying and become 'cool' and ride around the country .
In college, I got a copy and read it. It was relaxing and bike-ridey.
On my first job, I wrangled a text-only copy and would read it, delved into the philosophy part of it.
Sometime later, I started noticing my brain throwing up sentences from the book to match unrelated real world I was thinking about. At some point, I started echoing sentences from the book which I'ld forgotten.

Note 1:
The third is separating them from all other ideas that accompany them in their real existence: this is called abstraction, and thus all its general ideas are made.

—John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

... 

advice to random strangers on the interweb

i'm forty and haven't figured out anything.
that doesn't stop me from yakking.
so here's advice worth what you paid for it.
keep track of your personal standards. try and raise them regularly ( annually is fine).
if you are not motivated change the timeline of your goals. you might not be able to achieve a daily goal and end up wasting your time binge-watching/surfing,
whereas a monthly goal is something that can sit in your mind and might let you not waste time.
invest your life in diet and exercise. they will pay off forever.
work with faith that you'll make it . without too much frustration that you aren't there yet - sometimes the goose takes a few years to cook.
try to replace every negative emotion and bad feeling with constructive action - angry ? pushups - fear ?  do some work , sad ? go for a walk ,
bored ? explore or hobby-task ..
remember, most people who give advice know NOTHING about you, and their language might have the same words for same things as you, so you have to
measure and steer your life day to day as well on a yearly basis. develop the yardsticks for this
try not to be needy - if you think you are not good enough or too good - don't let that stop you from taking action. if you maintain a sense of
good-enough, you'll attract more things. finding the balance between satisfied-and-sitting-back and hungry-and-working-hard is a personal stewardship job.
practice the crafts whenever . writing painting singing cooking needlework whatever. the soul connects with the universe when you do it.

Orderliness and industriousness ,said Jordan Peterson

Deflation over currency devaluation

we peak in June ?

I see coupon ads

this is my mandala

art in boring times

The weekend is for renewal. Even Big-J rested.

This weekend, we'll focus on
* what is compaction
* what small piece of useful information can we extract from the Kleppman book and set in code ?
* let's clear all the cool Baeldung single page tips
* build a Brainf*ck processor and github it
* do one leetcode algorithm problem
* read about data and control planes in SDN
* read some more in the Intro  to General Systems book.
* Do one Darebee cardio workout
* bake a breakfast muffin
* setup a clojure, python or even spring chassis to serve as a lab and building block , learn and build today world systems

Optimisation and statistics, with probability  seem to be the  fundamental problems of business .

Why do the Darebees warmup routine and my SVYASA teacher's warmup routine match exactly ?
Is it possible that yoga asanas are Hungarian  gymnastic routines, or best East European calisthenics done slow, with a control layer of breath , mixing in the Patanjali's yoga ?

The standing half back rotations are vital to de-stress the eyes that have been over-focussing on screens at an arm's length for whole daylights. The visioning tends to get locked, and the head rotation with eyes open works out these 'ruts', without which you are heading for motion-sickness.
The buildup of bubbles in the neck eventually leads to their stiffening, causing the Spondy muffler/scarf.
Neck twists break these, and allow for much more vigorous stretching of the neck's tendons and muscles.
The warmup and stretches are the insect crawling up the tower with the thin silk thread.  Asanas don't come to a body that is not tempered by the warmups, stretches and  some strengthening. Muscle , tendon and ligament strength go together.
While it is normal for the human to view the human as an upright stick,  with training we are more like a wheel, think Vitruvian man.

"If you have a hero, look again, you have diminished yourself in some way." - Sheldon Kopp
Some people get this young. The wretched, like me,  have it thrust upon them. Will we change ?

That which says "you must know all before you can do some work , you aren't yet qualified, pedigreed .." is a lie. Remember Pirsig -
"It should be inserted here parenthetically that there’s a school of mechanical thought which says I shouldn’t be getting into a complex assembly I don’t know anything about. I should have training or leave the job to a specialist. That’s a self-serving school of mechanical eliteness I’d like to see wiped out. That was a "specialist" who broke the fins on this machine. I’ve edited manuals written to train specialists for IBM, and what they know when they’re done isn’t that great. You’re at a disadvantage the first time around and it may cost you a little more because of parts you accidentally damage, and it will almost undoubtedly take a lot more time, but the next time around you're way ahead of the specialist. You, with gumption, have learned the assembly the hard way and you’ve a whole set of good feelings about it that he’s unlikely to have."

Yesterday's Project-Product- Valuation analysis is today forgotten, so is  the blazing insight of the multi-axis tool of biz-function /biz-ops/ cs->engg->ops / deployment-app-lib-cs  classifications.

I remember writing in big letters "You must have fun working out" after which I installed Darebees and a Shamatha timer on my phone.
app-> product
lib -> app
app->depliyment->product
product->inc
inc->tax savings everywhere as director costs
Hope this makes sense sometime.

Given that remote working is here to stay, we are not limited to companies in the 4km radius. I can accept jobs in MG Road, or even Mumbai, not to mention Germany or US.
Will this cause expat Indian engineers to return home ?
Remote working has eaten up all my quota of data as per the plan. In the past few days I have installed Bandwidth+ and Network Link Conditioner. I noticed that meetings and browsing alone ( 9gag,my bad) brought my data usage to 3GB+ per day, so now it's throttled at 1mbps (3 mbps during meetings). There is also a python script to turn off and on wifi ,but I feel that will break something - I think of wifi as a physical thing, like a radio knob or clackety-clacking switch, and that turning it off and on frequently would probably cause the 'wifi card' to break out of its moorings on the 'board.

Being involved in hiring has zero upside. At best the folks you bring in skew the average moderately against you, at worst the skew the average so badly that they take your job.  However, if the organisation is small, then hiring can bring in superstars in other, and possibly your, areas whose work you can see up close and learn and grow.

I've been struggling with Gerald Weinberg's Intro to General Systems Thinking for some time now. Reading has drifted down to mobile, and is read only at interstitial times when I'm lounging, or mornings before the laptop comes up. I haven't been able to allot a daytime slot for disciplined pursuit of progress. So I'm stuck somewhere in the middle, with GW talking about complementarity.
I found most of the views the book very liberating, having armchair overthought through similar routes myself in the past. It's gladdening to see these put as fact( good/true/right/profitable),  with even a college course giving this topic.