In 2019 it's important to remember a few things -
a) Not having perspective is the default. So it's important to reverse that, and work diligently on the plan, until it becomes second nature.
b) It's vital to have personal metrics for progress. It's hard to overestimate how un-clued in others are, especially the ones closest to you
c) It is not possible to get things done without an environment conducive to cerebral work. There is no way you can work in a noisy place, or when tired & sleepy. Hack this . Which brings us to
d) A pre-requisite of c. is diet, exercise, socializing, rest & recreation. Without mental and physical wellbeing, nothing can grow.
e) finish things. You need to leave behind you a lot of pieces of completed work, which will be the bricks of your life.
Appendix : Plan
i) meditation - stillness, breath, flinch-less -that's all. Sit still, mind still, control the reaction impulse.
ii) write project logs in one place. Review them when quiet, & relaxed . So that cold cognition wins.
Tuesday, December 25, 2018
Monday, December 24, 2018
Susan Blackmore and Jordan Peterson
Came across a youtube video featuring a talk show featuring Jordan Peterson vs Susan Blackmore, and I strictly feel the 'vs' is superfluous here, because both these people are scientific, and rational.
It's as surprisingly rare combination these days, and when you throw in well-spoken, it's amazing. Going by the thumb rule -, whenever you see something new, it means the wave has tipped , and that many others will be seeing too. So I expect a new wave of rational, scientific and well-spoken literary people dominating the zeitgeist soon.
Jordan Peterson is the second person whole intellectual work strikes me as very true and apt, who is religious. The first was McLuhan, whose every sentence rings so true that even after I read any of his quotes on wikiquote, I'm left with a feeling that I'm not doing enough to propagate his words . And he was a devout Catholic. Jim Rohn referred to his 2 hr seminar as 'fundamentals, because the ideas stem from the Bible'. Kevin Kelly also recommends the same. Jordan Peterson calls the Bible to have 'narrative truth'. Merton's Chuang Tzu is also very accessible, and the quotes on fasting were very hard-hitting for me. However, I fear he finds Christianity in Taoism and Zen, rather than finding just Taoism and Zen.
Should we aim to be the stinktree of Chuang Tzu ? Ajahn Brahm ,in his many talks that have accompanied my drives - refers to damaged trees in the woods and says that only these are beautiful. Pema Chodron says - trying to improve and get better is a subtle aggression against the self .
The lotus grows out of mud, and being an IT worker, that is my mud. Hence it is only normal that I see consciousness as a large complex computer program processing its own debug output.
To use a non-computer analogy, I will use writing, because there is there is a lot of writing on blogs and such about how computer programming comes closest to writing. We can debate that another day.
To use an analogy that doesn't involve computers, imagine that you've hired a writer to write a large essay on current events , but you have only limited access to him, or his writing - let's say he sends partially complete drafts a.k.a drafts by post ( snail mail), and fails to do so sometimes. Since you have an idea what the final essay looks like - it touches this location, that group, that recipe, that invention etc you keep a list of key points on a slip of paper, and read through the reports and do a bit of course correction here and there. In this analogy, the essay being written is reality, the drafts you get are the snapshots your senses take now and then, and the list of points in your hand is your course plotted on your map*, or your mental model of how reality should be - whether the writing follows grammar rules, has analogies, anecdotes, whether it references or includes scientific data , whether the writing is flowery and has flourishes, whether you insist on a typewriter or a fountain pen or a ball-point pen, in cursive or italic - these are your conventions - religious, optimized for profit, convenient, ordered from above etc.
Your map gets formed as you go on, and your course also changes accordingly with new information - young blood blazes a course through much changes of employment fueled by the winds of youth, ideals and raw energy, coming of middle age charts a slow course through a suburban house and steady job, education helps form new friends or enemies - etc
Mental illness is when you don't open your mail, write your own essay ,and then dismiss it as lacking. Anxiety could be not receiving mail for a couple of periods, or not opening your mail for a couple of periods, and losing touch with the essay being written.
An entity is only known through its differences from other entities. Hence dependent arising of identity. Buddha rocks !
The null, from which everything deviates = Brahman. That from which nothing can deviate = Tao. Hmm.. if the null is the core of everything, both are equivalent ?
This is a very large post and I haven't seen the video yet. Waities.
Saw some more of the video - quite an interesting debate - I find myself agreeing with both of them at all times even though they are on opposite sides.
JP says : you write papers because they make you think
It's as surprisingly rare combination these days, and when you throw in well-spoken, it's amazing. Going by the thumb rule -, whenever you see something new, it means the wave has tipped , and that many others will be seeing too. So I expect a new wave of rational, scientific and well-spoken literary people dominating the zeitgeist soon.
Jordan Peterson is the second person whole intellectual work strikes me as very true and apt, who is religious. The first was McLuhan, whose every sentence rings so true that even after I read any of his quotes on wikiquote, I'm left with a feeling that I'm not doing enough to propagate his words . And he was a devout Catholic. Jim Rohn referred to his 2 hr seminar as 'fundamentals, because the ideas stem from the Bible'. Kevin Kelly also recommends the same. Jordan Peterson calls the Bible to have 'narrative truth'. Merton's Chuang Tzu is also very accessible, and the quotes on fasting were very hard-hitting for me. However, I fear he finds Christianity in Taoism and Zen, rather than finding just Taoism and Zen.
Should we aim to be the stinktree of Chuang Tzu ? Ajahn Brahm ,in his many talks that have accompanied my drives - refers to damaged trees in the woods and says that only these are beautiful. Pema Chodron says - trying to improve and get better is a subtle aggression against the self .
The lotus grows out of mud, and being an IT worker, that is my mud. Hence it is only normal that I see consciousness as a large complex computer program processing its own debug output.
To use a non-computer analogy, I will use writing, because there is there is a lot of writing on blogs and such about how computer programming comes closest to writing. We can debate that another day.
To use an analogy that doesn't involve computers, imagine that you've hired a writer to write a large essay on current events , but you have only limited access to him, or his writing - let's say he sends partially complete drafts a.k.a drafts by post ( snail mail), and fails to do so sometimes. Since you have an idea what the final essay looks like - it touches this location, that group, that recipe, that invention etc you keep a list of key points on a slip of paper, and read through the reports and do a bit of course correction here and there. In this analogy, the essay being written is reality, the drafts you get are the snapshots your senses take now and then, and the list of points in your hand is your course plotted on your map*, or your mental model of how reality should be - whether the writing follows grammar rules, has analogies, anecdotes, whether it references or includes scientific data , whether the writing is flowery and has flourishes, whether you insist on a typewriter or a fountain pen or a ball-point pen, in cursive or italic - these are your conventions - religious, optimized for profit, convenient, ordered from above etc.
Your map gets formed as you go on, and your course also changes accordingly with new information - young blood blazes a course through much changes of employment fueled by the winds of youth, ideals and raw energy, coming of middle age charts a slow course through a suburban house and steady job, education helps form new friends or enemies - etc
Mental illness is when you don't open your mail, write your own essay ,and then dismiss it as lacking. Anxiety could be not receiving mail for a couple of periods, or not opening your mail for a couple of periods, and losing touch with the essay being written.
An entity is only known through its differences from other entities. Hence dependent arising of identity. Buddha rocks !
The null, from which everything deviates = Brahman. That from which nothing can deviate = Tao. Hmm.. if the null is the core of everything, both are equivalent ?
This is a very large post and I haven't seen the video yet. Waities.
Saw some more of the video - quite an interesting debate - I find myself agreeing with both of them at all times even though they are on opposite sides.
JP says : you write papers because they make you think
I was reading Superfreakonomics when ...
The authors claim that the shoe bomber failed to ignite his shoe bomb and kill anybody, yet security measures brought in to prevent future shoe bombings cost airline passengers to lose 1065 years , or the entire lives of 14 people.
How to make use of this time ? Combine distributed crowd-sourced commodity computing (Iexec white-paper) and the design for body-movement-phone charger, and people standing in the queue can be working out charging their phones, all the while renting out the computation power of the phones to the 'net, so that they get paid and their insurance premium comes down too.
Two birds with one stone. Aw yeah !
The Shib would probably get providers from Aliexpress ...
How to make use of this time ? Combine distributed crowd-sourced commodity computing (Iexec white-paper) and the design for body-movement-phone charger, and people standing in the queue can be working out charging their phones, all the while renting out the computation power of the phones to the 'net, so that they get paid and their insurance premium comes down too.
Two birds with one stone. Aw yeah !
The Shib would probably get providers from Aliexpress ...
There's a fun list of ideas here -
https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/extraordinary-smartphone-chargers/
The one that triggers my delight is the one which uses heat from a boiling pan to create electricity to charge your phone. This has been an ongoing thing with me - best improvements seem to come from harnessing li. Very Tao. Most of human progress involves using processes and tools that require not thinking. And hence these frequently go against the li of nature.
The fabulous Prius uses the moving car's need to lose energy fast to charge the battery . All that energy was going waste all these days. Wham ! impressive mileage and a higher value car with phenomenal gas savings when driving within the city.
Similarly , here's a list of things I 'brainstormed', after watching a bicycle driven washing machine ..
These are ,in order -
a) A hydraulic charger leveraging people's & car's needs to descend from
b) a potential energy battery , and cranks connected to, say, gyms and escalators
c) a small body charger consisting of a wind up spring and a bull worker
d) desert cooler (adiabatic expansion wala)
e) sloping streets friendly to skateboards and scooters
and some old goldies
f) fresnel heater and steamer, fresnel net roofing
g) solar still desalinator pipes
I will go in more detail in these soon.
https://www.hongkiat.com/blog/extraordinary-smartphone-chargers/
The one that triggers my delight is the one which uses heat from a boiling pan to create electricity to charge your phone. This has been an ongoing thing with me - best improvements seem to come from harnessing li. Very Tao. Most of human progress involves using processes and tools that require not thinking. And hence these frequently go against the li of nature.
The fabulous Prius uses the moving car's need to lose energy fast to charge the battery . All that energy was going waste all these days. Wham ! impressive mileage and a higher value car with phenomenal gas savings when driving within the city.
Similarly , here's a list of things I 'brainstormed', after watching a bicycle driven washing machine ..
These are ,in order -
a) A hydraulic charger leveraging people's & car's needs to descend from
b) a potential energy battery , and cranks connected to, say, gyms and escalators
c) a small body charger consisting of a wind up spring and a bull worker
d) desert cooler (adiabatic expansion wala)
e) sloping streets friendly to skateboards and scooters
and some old goldies
f) fresnel heater and steamer, fresnel net roofing
g) solar still desalinator pipes
I will go in more detail in these soon.
The Singularity will take us to Mars and beyond. It will create nano-machines that will crawl our bloodstream and handle Defense & Repairs. It will create matter compilers , molecular transmuters and 3d printers so that we can feed any old material and create anything from modern day manufactured items to food, to biological tissue and organs . It will be, as Gibson says, the end of economics.
Until then, we must work as midwives, easing its entry into the world.
JP thinks that the world population is around 7 billion , and it would peak at around 9 billion and then fall rapidly. Until then, there is going to be a tremendous demand on ,of course, food & water, shelter & sanitation, transportation, medical & health services, and then on learning, training & education.
Existing systems, businesses and institutions will have to learn to handle scale growth in their users.
According to YNHarari we have the means to create enough food and water for all the world to eat. All scarcity today is due to existing political structures & incumbents which do not permit upgrading of facilities for fear of loss of power.
There are open source village construction kits which can be leveraged to setup communities in wastelands ( not cleared forests please).
There is enough free and high quality video and text content on the internet for volunteers to bring people to the fold of beyond-high-school mathematics.
Still, ideology and irrationality are the largest drivers of human awareness. McLuhan famously said "I'll see it when I believe it", and so while the Singularity, and Plenty are knocking furiously on our doors, the masses can only see the world from the scarcity of previous failed movements like communism and casteism. More rational models ,like we can do more with less thanks to brains and science, have not yet spread enough , however the mind of man can quickly assimilate any idea that is in his favor.
Until then, we must work as midwives, easing its entry into the world.
JP thinks that the world population is around 7 billion , and it would peak at around 9 billion and then fall rapidly. Until then, there is going to be a tremendous demand on ,of course, food & water, shelter & sanitation, transportation, medical & health services, and then on learning, training & education.
Existing systems, businesses and institutions will have to learn to handle scale growth in their users.
According to YNHarari we have the means to create enough food and water for all the world to eat. All scarcity today is due to existing political structures & incumbents which do not permit upgrading of facilities for fear of loss of power.
There are open source village construction kits which can be leveraged to setup communities in wastelands ( not cleared forests please).
There is enough free and high quality video and text content on the internet for volunteers to bring people to the fold of beyond-high-school mathematics.
Still, ideology and irrationality are the largest drivers of human awareness. McLuhan famously said "I'll see it when I believe it", and so while the Singularity, and Plenty are knocking furiously on our doors, the masses can only see the world from the scarcity of previous failed movements like communism and casteism. More rational models ,like we can do more with less thanks to brains and science, have not yet spread enough , however the mind of man can quickly assimilate any idea that is in his favor.
Wednesday, December 19, 2018
hints
two of the things I read today mentioned "hell yeah or no", - manson and levitt(tlaf). Adding sivers, that makes it 3 . What is the universe telling me ?
Also, the missing connect between Cialdini and T. Harv Eker - no one I like is asking me to do it, no one I have made rich and is now helping me back, no one I know is getting rich for me to copy, I have no consistency to maintain in being wealthy - spousal environment is a weak link , no one with authority is ordering me to become rich, there is no scarcity of rich people on the planet.
Weird ?
Kahneman is all about hot and cold thinking. Somebody said civilization is victory of cold over hot. Or slow over fast.
Also, the missing connect between Cialdini and T. Harv Eker - no one I like is asking me to do it, no one I have made rich and is now helping me back, no one I know is getting rich for me to copy, I have no consistency to maintain in being wealthy - spousal environment is a weak link , no one with authority is ordering me to become rich, there is no scarcity of rich people on the planet.
Weird ?
Kahneman is all about hot and cold thinking. Somebody said civilization is victory of cold over hot. Or slow over fast.
What to have for lunch ? Revisited
The pithy formula for health is " eat less, move more, relax".
Further detailed advice on the first part, ie, eating is thus : "eat food, mostly plants, not too much" .also see.
However, there is help to be found in the two linked articles in the original post. Matt Might's specific algorithm is as follows :
First, create a food journal, and add daily entries covering what you ate, and estimated calories.
Make a list of specific exercises that you do ,with calorie burnt in a per-minutes-of-exercise basis, for each.
Now, two working numbers are calorie requirement, and BMR. Ensure daily that any and all calories over BMR are burnt off by exercise. Track this too in the journal.
The body will not take to this deficit kindly, and will encourage you to binge on chocolates or coffee with milk and sugar, or even large meals. You can hack this in parts with :
- eat meals at specific times in a day
- eat more protein, and drink more water
- use milk-less sugar-less versions of caffeine . This is a toughie.
- weight training. This boosts BMR. Caveat - in my case , this will be after basic bx fitness, followed by maintenance yoga for at least , say, 6 months.
- Practice meditation. It is one way to drop out of your mind and 'take a hike in the woods', so to speak. It increases happiness and will (won't) power. TM and Zazen and breath meditation are all not that different.
- the more items you cook yourself, the more meaningful food becomes, and more control is to be had. And more integrated your experience becomes.
- use bursts of mad out exercise to keep it fun - when you really push your limits ,you get a glimpse of the better you.
- join competitions. for fun. winning will follow.
- eat slowly. This works as a meditation as well as a way to eat less.
Further detailed advice on the first part, ie, eating is thus : "eat food, mostly plants, not too much" .also see.
However, there is help to be found in the two linked articles in the original post. Matt Might's specific algorithm is as follows :
First, create a food journal, and add daily entries covering what you ate, and estimated calories.
Make a list of specific exercises that you do ,with calorie burnt in a per-minutes-of-exercise basis, for each.
Now, two working numbers are calorie requirement, and BMR. Ensure daily that any and all calories over BMR are burnt off by exercise. Track this too in the journal.
The body will not take to this deficit kindly, and will encourage you to binge on chocolates or coffee with milk and sugar, or even large meals. You can hack this in parts with :
- eat meals at specific times in a day
- eat more protein, and drink more water
- use milk-less sugar-less versions of caffeine . This is a toughie.
- weight training. This boosts BMR. Caveat - in my case , this will be after basic bx fitness, followed by maintenance yoga for at least , say, 6 months.
- Practice meditation. It is one way to drop out of your mind and 'take a hike in the woods', so to speak. It increases happiness and will (won't) power. TM and Zazen and breath meditation are all not that different.
- the more items you cook yourself, the more meaningful food becomes, and more control is to be had. And more integrated your experience becomes.
- use bursts of mad out exercise to keep it fun - when you really push your limits ,you get a glimpse of the better you.
- join competitions. for fun. winning will follow.
- eat slowly. This works as a meditation as well as a way to eat less.
Tuesday, December 18, 2018
A day in the life
I am tempted to add 'worthless' before the 'life' in the title but Chad Fowler has asked to stamp out cynicism, and Toit_Lover tagged my '72 % water 100% useless' meme forward as 'dark'.
So I won't.
Luckily ,was able to prime a bit this morning - getting started with a tiny bit of Tony before the Tiny Banana kidnapped my phone to draw on Google Keep - yet another hobby of mine - scrawling on Keep .
We try to keep her away from phones 'coz she's developing a squint and I want to avoid a costly surgery in the future.
The 4bx went off well, as Tiny-Mom was out of the house in the morning doing her run and I got the kitchen to myself. Chores completed quickly - (had to fend off helpful parents - and was out of the house as soon as Tiny-Mom came in. An effective pattern to keep in mind for .. well - daily.
The drivecast today was Tony, a break from the regular Ajahn Brahm (AB), probably because I feel
can-do-ish.
I have so many books on InternetArchive, O'Reilly Safari, plain PDFs and in paper to complete - I am so overwhelmed. There are books on Taoism on IA which I might not find elsewhere. Buddha in the Robot is something I look forward to completing. While I first referenced it in Lance Daybreak pieces by Erik Davis, I feel Gary Zukav might have started the Hua-Yen new -age nonsense with this book, and that all else are derivative ..
Sadly, in many things, I have forever been living in the dim light of the derivative for ages, missing the core , the heartwood of culture.
Norbert Weiner's Cybernetics is going to be my life long goal. I need to finish it before I die. Seriously. Then comes Herbert Simon and Shannon. Chaos Theory can wait.
There's lunch with SuperLiar-DeliciouslyDeluded-Hustler-snakeoilsaleman-spirit-animal-Fakebastard.
I also want 2019 to focus on economic sense, and psychological well being.
We come back to this again and again - workouts make me feel 'alive'. If only there as a way to not let being overcast affect the workouts.
Immediate reading list :
* Portable mba - finance & accounting
* Dhammapada - eknath easwaran
Eventual reading:
* microeconomics -varian
* macroeconomics cartoon guide
Hey ,guess what,one down two down , three to go - exercise & writing is done, remaining is cooking, reading and socializing.
For the unsufferable mid-week, when getting out of bed itself is a challenge, I propose hitting limits - like running without restraint, or back-permitting - lifting, to remember what muscles make up the me. The daily restricted existence dulls the will to live. Moustache !!
So I won't.
Luckily ,was able to prime a bit this morning - getting started with a tiny bit of Tony before the Tiny Banana kidnapped my phone to draw on Google Keep - yet another hobby of mine - scrawling on Keep .
We try to keep her away from phones 'coz she's developing a squint and I want to avoid a costly surgery in the future.
The 4bx went off well, as Tiny-Mom was out of the house in the morning doing her run and I got the kitchen to myself. Chores completed quickly - (had to fend off helpful parents - and was out of the house as soon as Tiny-Mom came in. An effective pattern to keep in mind for .. well - daily.
The drivecast today was Tony, a break from the regular Ajahn Brahm (AB), probably because I feel
can-do-ish.
I have so many books on InternetArchive, O'Reilly Safari, plain PDFs and in paper to complete - I am so overwhelmed. There are books on Taoism on IA which I might not find elsewhere. Buddha in the Robot is something I look forward to completing. While I first referenced it in Lance Daybreak pieces by Erik Davis, I feel Gary Zukav might have started the Hua-Yen new -age nonsense with this book, and that all else are derivative ..
Sadly, in many things, I have forever been living in the dim light of the derivative for ages, missing the core , the heartwood of culture.
Norbert Weiner's Cybernetics is going to be my life long goal. I need to finish it before I die. Seriously. Then comes Herbert Simon and Shannon. Chaos Theory can wait.
There's lunch with SuperLiar-DeliciouslyDeluded-Hustler-snakeoilsaleman-spirit-animal-Fakebastard.
I also want 2019 to focus on economic sense, and psychological well being.
We come back to this again and again - workouts make me feel 'alive'. If only there as a way to not let being overcast affect the workouts.
Immediate reading list :
* Portable mba - finance & accounting
* Dhammapada - eknath easwaran
Eventual reading:
* microeconomics -varian
* macroeconomics cartoon guide
Hey ,guess what,
For the unsufferable mid-week, when getting out of bed itself is a challenge, I propose hitting limits - like running without restraint, or back-permitting - lifting, to remember what muscles make up the me. The daily restricted existence dulls the will to live. Moustache !!
Sunday, December 16, 2018
What to have for lunch ?
My Basal Metabolic Rate = 1835 calories per day. The daily calorie requirement is around 2202.
Calculator here
By consuming the daily requirement, but using exercise to create a caloric surplus, one can achieve weight loss.
Along the way, loss of weight will reduce the BMR, and also metabolism and appetite.
While cardio might be the simplest and easiest form of exercise, weight training can build muscles which increase the BMR. This needs higher protein consumption
Yoga can heal or improve ligament strength, and can also trigger homeostasis, eliminating biological urges during the time that follows the session.
So can one simply eat 1.411 kilos of short grain cooked rice daily to meet the requirement ?
No, that's not enough. We need some of the calories to come from carbohydrates, some from fat and some from proteins.
And we haven't touched upon the topic of minerals , vitamins, and fibre.
Also, monoculture is not your friend, as eating the same diet will blow up any small nutrient deficiencies into disastrously larger ones, at which point you might need intervention in the form of, say, a B12 injection, or large enough diet change to throw off your calculations.
There are also essential nutrients which are found only in certain foods, or have to be supplemented using man-made product.
SCD, and the Taoist diet asks you to avoid grains. Some vegetables are not SCD OK.
Yoga asks you to avoid meat, and preferably spiced, oily foods .
Keto needs you to avoid carbohydrates.
Diabetes avoidance needs you to avoid processed foods, and any with high glycemic index. This includes Ragi.
We will leave vegans alone for now.
It is generally considered good practice to eat fixed meals at fixed times.
Replacing cigarettes in the chain-smoking habit with tea or coffee is also not good.
Some people went without sugar for a month and reported higher levels of energy and mental sharpness.
Two great links from the same author
One nutshell idea of health is this - eat less, move more, relax. Once this is in the bone, you can start tuning into quality of the things you eat or the workouts you do.
Relax is underrated. There's a reason the Buddha is seen at every spa or massage parlor.
Calculator here
By consuming the daily requirement, but using exercise to create a caloric surplus, one can achieve weight loss.
Along the way, loss of weight will reduce the BMR, and also metabolism and appetite.
While cardio might be the simplest and easiest form of exercise, weight training can build muscles which increase the BMR. This needs higher protein consumption
Yoga can heal or improve ligament strength, and can also trigger homeostasis, eliminating biological urges during the time that follows the session.
So can one simply eat 1.411 kilos of short grain cooked rice daily to meet the requirement ?
No, that's not enough. We need some of the calories to come from carbohydrates, some from fat and some from proteins.
And we haven't touched upon the topic of minerals , vitamins, and fibre.
Also, monoculture is not your friend, as eating the same diet will blow up any small nutrient deficiencies into disastrously larger ones, at which point you might need intervention in the form of, say, a B12 injection, or large enough diet change to throw off your calculations.
There are also essential nutrients which are found only in certain foods, or have to be supplemented using man-made product.
SCD, and the Taoist diet asks you to avoid grains. Some vegetables are not SCD OK.
Yoga asks you to avoid meat, and preferably spiced, oily foods .
Keto needs you to avoid carbohydrates.
Diabetes avoidance needs you to avoid processed foods, and any with high glycemic index. This includes Ragi.
Dr. Jason Fung wants you to eat two meals a day. Jains want you to stop eating after sunset, and also not carry over food past the night into the next day.
It is generally considered good practice to eat fixed meals at fixed times.
Replacing cigarettes in the chain-smoking habit with tea or coffee is also not good.
Some people went without sugar for a month and reported higher levels of energy and mental sharpness.
Two great links from the same author
One nutshell idea of health is this - eat less, move more, relax. Once this is in the bone, you can start tuning into quality of the things you eat or the workouts you do.
Relax is underrated. There's a reason the Buddha is seen at every spa or massage parlor.
well folded
lol.
If the next video's not adowable, I don't know what is :
https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/a1QodVD_460svvp9.webm
world maps
You can use openstreetmap tiles for testing purposes, but the volunteer driven organization will not be able to support your maps -tiles requests if you are serving a lot of traffic commercially.
So cough up and go to mapbox.
My examples run on a free developer mapbox key. I look forward to completing a Ukiyo-e Risk game or a cybernetic dope-wars...
Google maps shows me a darkenend map for me now.
Or git-gud and setup your own tileserver, the entire world's maps are downloadable. No serious.
There's also wikimapia but I haven't checked it out.
We set out to create a places & merchants map based tool, but have ended up here, writing this post.
A friend is interested in the Iexec whitepaper. He wants to code up a blockchain backed distributed computational system. I am still confused : if you aren't able to generate hashes ,your entries will not go into the blockchain, right ? If so how can you make this into a determinate dependable system ?
Time will tell ...
Spring boot guides are going well. All my previous attempts stalled at some stage of setup or getting v0 to run. I guess the thing to remember here is to start with working systems.
There's a laundry list of chores to complete to get your Spring application Production-ready, as per heroku documentation. These range from logging, to adding metrics, ssl , rate limiting, alerting, error and maintenance pages, uuids for postgres keys etc.
Spring documentation only asks you to add a Procfile. However, there's also moving to production which introduces our old friend JMX , which Berlin choose to use via Jolokia.
One idea that surfaced in today evening's Metropolis Chai run was that we should have an electronics store for people moving to Bangalore, containing - say, headphones, computer speakers, large monitor, maybe desk and chair .. .etc
Why not build a chinese pagoda using cardboard ? There is no end to decorative things one can make out of cardboard,paper with scissors, paint and glue.
And oh hey, a Cracked.com writer took apart Fight Club and gave it a new life. A different one.
Most of work involves lowering of barriers to things, so that they can be done with less mental 'lift'. There's a book called 'Deep work' . However, if you can't do the heavy lifting in one session, you'll need to sow the ideas and have the brain connect them over time and places. Sometimes my brain wakes up after a day or a week. It always connects when talking to a friendly-capable. The office is full of hostiles.
Ajahn Brahm mentioned in a talk that there is no will power, only won't power, as the decision you think you are taking has already been taken for you in the core part of your brain, and the awareness and action parts only get the message a little later - which is when you 'know'. So you are always aware of yourself doing the wrong thing ,if you noticed . You have 3 seconds or milliseconds, am not sure, to catch the impulse - hence - won't power.
I'd like to draw your attention to the parallel :
* Thus spake the Master Programmer: "When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave."
Tao Te programming say " Go for the hand not the ball"
I can start putting all my knowledge in a searchable database. But why ?
So cough up and go to mapbox.
My examples run on a free developer mapbox key. I look forward to completing a Ukiyo-e Risk game or a cybernetic dope-wars...
Google maps shows me a darkenend map for me now.
Or git-gud and setup your own tileserver, the entire world's maps are downloadable. No serious.
There's also wikimapia but I haven't checked it out.
We set out to create a places & merchants map based tool, but have ended up here, writing this post.
A friend is interested in the Iexec whitepaper. He wants to code up a blockchain backed distributed computational system. I am still confused : if you aren't able to generate hashes ,your entries will not go into the blockchain, right ? If so how can you make this into a determinate dependable system ?
Time will tell ...
Spring boot guides are going well. All my previous attempts stalled at some stage of setup or getting v0 to run. I guess the thing to remember here is to start with working systems.
There's a laundry list of chores to complete to get your Spring application Production-ready, as per heroku documentation. These range from logging, to adding metrics, ssl , rate limiting, alerting, error and maintenance pages, uuids for postgres keys etc.
Spring documentation only asks you to add a Procfile. However, there's also moving to production which introduces our old friend JMX , which Berlin choose to use via Jolokia.
One idea that surfaced in today evening's Metropolis Chai run was that we should have an electronics store for people moving to Bangalore, containing - say, headphones, computer speakers, large monitor, maybe desk and chair .. .etc
Why not build a chinese pagoda using cardboard ? There is no end to decorative things one can make out of cardboard,paper with scissors, paint and glue.
And oh hey, a Cracked.com writer took apart Fight Club and gave it a new life. A different one.
Most of work involves lowering of barriers to things, so that they can be done with less mental 'lift'. There's a book called 'Deep work' . However, if you can't do the heavy lifting in one session, you'll need to sow the ideas and have the brain connect them over time and places. Sometimes my brain wakes up after a day or a week. It always connects when talking to a friendly-capable. The office is full of hostiles.
Ajahn Brahm mentioned in a talk that there is no will power, only won't power, as the decision you think you are taking has already been taken for you in the core part of your brain, and the awareness and action parts only get the message a little later - which is when you 'know'. So you are always aware of yourself doing the wrong thing ,if you noticed . You have 3 seconds or milliseconds, am not sure, to catch the impulse - hence - won't power.
I'd like to draw your attention to the parallel :
* Thus spake the Master Programmer: "When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave."
Tao Te programming say " Go for the hand not the ball"
I can start putting all my knowledge in a searchable database. But why ?
Wednesday, December 12, 2018
Overabundance of material
- "We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge"
The world's treasures lay undisturbed in sites like Project Gutenberg, Sacred-Texts.com etc.
For e.g , you can get all the Kai Lung stories on Project Gutenberg.
I chanced upon the Internet Archive , made the mistake of digging deep, and now it has put one hundred obligations upon me.
I found cartloads of old villains - Koestler's The lotus and the Robot -which covers just past Freedom India and Japan from a westerner's raw unsympathetic point of view , a whole bunch of Thomas Cleary books , and I can never get done with all the Taoism and Zen that he translated - that man must've been a prodigy or maniac , some of the portable MBA series, clausewitz, sun tzu, a lot of - get this - Donald C Laird books . His Technique of Getting Things Done predated GTD by almost a century and thanks to a doting, dutiful father, was on my reading desk in school, the stories seared on to my brain. Unfortunately, they did not help me in college.
I also found Y Perelman books - the lovely Physics for Entertainment and Figures for Fun series..
My Oreilly Safari is loaded with titles in relevant playlists. I see the appeal of rebirths now - so much to read is there , though in my case I will even consider the option ,if offered , to come back as a ghost and haunt libraries ...
There is no shortage of blog articles advising against 'self-improvement' and reading material promising 'the way'. And my shelf is full of books I will never read. There are even printouts of blog articles among the books.
What is this disease of book/knowledge hoarding ? Whither deliverance ?
The world's treasures lay undisturbed in sites like Project Gutenberg, Sacred-Texts.com etc.
For e.g , you can get all the Kai Lung stories on Project Gutenberg.
I chanced upon the Internet Archive , made the mistake of digging deep, and now it has put one hundred obligations upon me.
I found cartloads of old villains - Koestler's The lotus and the Robot -which covers just past Freedom India and Japan from a westerner's raw unsympathetic point of view , a whole bunch of Thomas Cleary books , and I can never get done with all the Taoism and Zen that he translated - that man must've been a prodigy or maniac , some of the portable MBA series, clausewitz, sun tzu, a lot of - get this - Donald C Laird books . His Technique of Getting Things Done predated GTD by almost a century and thanks to a doting, dutiful father, was on my reading desk in school, the stories seared on to my brain. Unfortunately, they did not help me in college.
I also found Y Perelman books - the lovely Physics for Entertainment and Figures for Fun series..
My Oreilly Safari is loaded with titles in relevant playlists. I see the appeal of rebirths now - so much to read is there , though in my case I will even consider the option ,if offered , to come back as a ghost and haunt libraries ...
There is no shortage of blog articles advising against 'self-improvement' and reading material promising 'the way'. And my shelf is full of books I will never read. There are even printouts of blog articles among the books.
What is this disease of book/knowledge hoarding ? Whither deliverance ?
Saturday, December 08, 2018
oh gawd please halp
Source : https://9gag.com/gag/aPY9yyQ
I've starting bookmarking 9gag pages that tickle either my samaritan or singularity-ian senses.
Have you tried my Wu-Tang style [ass whoopin] ?
For 2019, I want to stop reading books , and also read one million books. I still want to learn calculus, even though I've gone through it in school AND college.
Somebody made a list - economics ,psychology, persuasion, making-selling, computing..
Somebody had a one app a month game..
Somebody wrote about taming perfection ..
Somebody talked about diversification - of identity as a means to resilience ...
There are certain key practices that need to be followed. These have a linear correlation to improvement in quality of life. Instead of the one million preparatory exercises one might as well get on the horse right away.
Do you think I can make a chinese pagoda/ tea house out of paper and glue and paint ? or plaster of paris ? Do you think I can make a car or windmill with my 9v dc motor and amazon packing cardboard ?
Do you think I will be able to stick the soles of my shoes back on with the glue I bought ?
Now listening : Wu Tang Clan - The saga continues : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KO52lVctrPg
Now reading : paper or pdf or online ? gawd
I hope I solve breakfast in 2019.
Will board games and digital executive assistants make the scene ?
Hoodi market on a late weekday morning is awesome ! Bought ginger just for kicks. One guy said there's no supply of Entero anywhere. Nearby shop put paid to that !.
Boiled rice and kadala curry !! When will you happen ?
Of all the Terry Pratchett characters, I find Granny's suspiciousness the most relate-able.
Thursday, November 29, 2018
No think un think
"How do you learn to unthink? Dylan believes the creative impulse needs protecting from self-analysis: “As you get older, you get smarter, and that can hinder you…You’ve got to programme your brain not to think too much.” Flann O’Brien said we should be “calculatedly stupid” in order to write. The only reliable cure for overthinking seems to be enjoyment, something that both success and analysis can dull. Experienced athletes and artists often complain that they have lost touch with what made them love what they do in the first place. Thinking about it is a poor substitute."
From the Economist - via ranprieur.com
https://www.1843magazine.com/content/ideas/ian-leslie/non-cogito-ergo-sum
Zen has been all about this with the no-mind.
So has been Gallwey's Inner game of tennis.
I'm starting to see considerable number of echoes in the mainstream, that too from orthogonally related areas.
Gigerenzer makes another appearance . I have a link from an article in my K-paper bookmarks folder, and a book by him in my amazon wish list.
From now on, I should put all my for-later and wouldn't-it-be-nice mumblings here .
Today's Cracked.com reading. Cracked continues to be gold, but only in places now). Still,
6Harsh creates nausea and panic , unless you're nodding as you read it, which means you're on the other side. It works paired with 5Sabotage below for actual action items. Combined with the 60 second test, you should have a measuring tool.
http://www.cracked.com/blog/5-ways-youre-sabotaging-your-own-life-without-knowing-it/
- focussing on how instead of why
- forgetting what will be missed out if you do something new, like working out
- no magical change - you're not going to be something tomorrow that you are not today.
- focussing on the whole instead of the steps - so wrong and impossibly daunting .
- you lie to yourself. Basically you confuse your 'should's for 'must's, taking solace in them, rather than cry in pain and panic at your unfulfilled 'must's. Thank you Tone Robbins. You never cease to amaze.
http://www.cracked.com/article_19468_5-logical-fallacies-that-make-you-wrong-more-than-you-think.html
Bonus points : https://markmanson.net/how-to-make-better-life-decisions
MM for boundaries.
Pentoz on LinkedIn showed a bicycle driven washing machine. I used this opportunity to invent in my head a potential energy battery . I also remembered and amazone'd and google-pdf-ed old Ya Perelman books. Got some.
Monday, September 24, 2018
time to stop, setup camp and take a stand
sorry folks, but this here's the most beautiful thing ever, that I've seen
https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/aq7vGGR_460svvp9.webm
https://img-9gag-fun.9cache.com/photo/aq7vGGR_460svvp9.webm
Thursday, September 20, 2018
Wednesday, September 19, 2018
hello mr robot
I feel like Christian Slater is the Saif Ali Khan of the west. The voice is toned down but similar. So is the I'm-smarter-than-you attitude ...
I've had it till here about conspiracy theories about 'them' and a 'group' of people controlling 'everything'. Anyone who's worked in any sort of hierarchy would know that that sort of thing is nigh impossible. It's hard enough to control ONE person, talk about all.
If green lizard men from outer space rule the Earth, I'm sure people will find a nash equilibrium soon enough.
Has a voice-over-narration which reminds me of Fight Club. Has the same my-life-is-fucked-but-I-talk-normally tone
"You sense there's something wrong with the world"
Matrix.
Wipe out all credit card debt. That's from Fight Club.
Matrix meets Fight Club meets Office Space.
Episode 2 is named eps1.1_ones-and-zer0es.mpeg" . Welcome to the desert of the real ,indeed.
Sega font.
They themselves call it Evil Corp.
I've had it till here about conspiracy theories about 'them' and a 'group' of people controlling 'everything'. Anyone who's worked in any sort of hierarchy would know that that sort of thing is nigh impossible. It's hard enough to control ONE person, talk about all.
If green lizard men from outer space rule the Earth, I'm sure people will find a nash equilibrium soon enough.
Has a voice-over-narration which reminds me of Fight Club. Has the same my-life-is-fucked-but-I-talk-normally tone
"You sense there's something wrong with the world"
Matrix.
Wipe out all credit card debt. That's from Fight Club.
Matrix meets Fight Club meets Office Space.
Episode 2 is named eps1.1_ones-and-zer0es.mpeg" . Welcome to the desert of the real ,indeed.
Sega font.
They themselves call it Evil Corp.
Friday, June 08, 2018
Bullshit Jobs
In the course of Graeber’s diagnosis, he inaugurates five phyla of bullshit work. “Flunkies,” he says, are those paid to hang around and make their superiors feel important: doormen, useless assistants, receptionists with silent phones, and so on. “Goons” are gratuitous or arms-race muscle; Graeber points to Oxford University’s P.R. staff, whose task appears to be to convince the public that Oxford is a good school. “Duct tapers” are hired to patch or bridge major flaws that their bosses are too lazy or inept to fix systemically. (This is the woman at the airline desk whose duty is to assuage angry passengers when bags don’t arrive.) “Box tickers” go through various motions, often using paperwork or serious-looking reports, to suggest that things are happening when things aren’t. (Hannibal is a box ticker.) Last are “taskmasters,” divided into two subtypes: unnecessary superiors, who manage people who don’t need management, and bullshit generators, whose job is to create and assign more bullshit for others.
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Wednesday, November 01, 2017
Wednesday, August 09, 2017
reddit writing prompt entry
The old man paused, smiled and picked up his cup.
I don't remember how I got to talking to him at the library's cafeteria, but there I was, wolfing down the sandwich on which I'd put ketchup. One buys sandwiches at the library for the same reason we look at our cellphones even when we know there's nothing there. Then we put ketchup on it and wolf it down, or unlock the thing and play with a couple of buttons and then put it back in our pockets again . It's a pretense.
"I don't get that type of music", he said. "Never got past the first track of any record ever... "
Ah yes, we both had been standing at the bargains shelf, looking at $1 CDs, and I had picked up a Jazz one.
It had a black & white photo of a man in a checked jacket holding a saxophone on the cover looking .. well ,looking blank.
But I too had never gotten past the first track of any jazz record myself. And here was Bob saying the exact same thing.
"Coincidence !", I said to myself, as I filled it in my trip report. The console blinked and the detailed-incident-report indicator flashed on. I flipped the device to voice mode and started narrating the incident in detail - where I'd landed, what I looked like, when it was , how I met the man in the library named Bob , and what his thoughts about music were.
My next case was an investigation. A senior agent had died recently, somewhere in Ardennes, in 1941. This was surprising, because the agency has all sorts of protocol and regulations & permissions in place just to avoid this specific type of event. Contaminating a timeline by choosing it to be your final resting place is strictly frowned upon. Influencing is allowed , interference is not. Time is a place you can visit but not stay - Agency motto. I had been in a future time at that time, sneaking some hashes into certain bankchain thus short-circuiting the spiralling growth of a certain family-run business . The agency believed in redistribution whenever possible, and interference in events before they were extensively manifest. Actual interference needed approvals. Influencing by nipping in the bud was supervisor-sanctioned. I remember a couple of us had visited his graveyard, in the middle of a war, to see if we could make some sense of the act. We found a minimal grave with the most basic headstone . The epitaph, also carved crudely and in a hurry, read " God split himself into myriad parts so that he could have friends ", which was decidedly off for that age. Scans revealed skeletal remains which matched our agents', and spectral scans confirmed it. A Timeline Archive Search Report flagged the epitaph to be the contaminant. Nobody'd've noticed anything odd about the grave or its contents at this time or place, but someone could find the epitaph anachronistic,said The TASR. It said it shouldn't exist until 1973. - to be completed
I don't remember how I got to talking to him at the library's cafeteria, but there I was, wolfing down the sandwich on which I'd put ketchup. One buys sandwiches at the library for the same reason we look at our cellphones even when we know there's nothing there. Then we put ketchup on it and wolf it down, or unlock the thing and play with a couple of buttons and then put it back in our pockets again . It's a pretense.
"I don't get that type of music", he said. "Never got past the first track of any record ever... "
Ah yes, we both had been standing at the bargains shelf, looking at $1 CDs, and I had picked up a Jazz one.
It had a black & white photo of a man in a checked jacket holding a saxophone on the cover looking .. well ,looking blank.
But I too had never gotten past the first track of any jazz record myself. And here was Bob saying the exact same thing.
"Coincidence !", I said to myself, as I filled it in my trip report. The console blinked and the detailed-incident-report indicator flashed on. I flipped the device to voice mode and started narrating the incident in detail - where I'd landed, what I looked like, when it was , how I met the man in the library named Bob , and what his thoughts about music were.
My next case was an investigation. A senior agent had died recently, somewhere in Ardennes, in 1941. This was surprising, because the agency has all sorts of protocol and regulations & permissions in place just to avoid this specific type of event. Contaminating a timeline by choosing it to be your final resting place is strictly frowned upon. Influencing is allowed , interference is not. Time is a place you can visit but not stay - Agency motto. I had been in a future time at that time, sneaking some hashes into certain bankchain thus short-circuiting the spiralling growth of a certain family-run business . The agency believed in redistribution whenever possible, and interference in events before they were extensively manifest. Actual interference needed approvals. Influencing by nipping in the bud was supervisor-sanctioned. I remember a couple of us had visited his graveyard, in the middle of a war, to see if we could make some sense of the act. We found a minimal grave with the most basic headstone . The epitaph, also carved crudely and in a hurry, read " God split himself into myriad parts so that he could have friends ", which was decidedly off for that age. Scans revealed skeletal remains which matched our agents', and spectral scans confirmed it. A Timeline Archive Search Report flagged the epitaph to be the contaminant. Nobody'd've noticed anything odd about the grave or its contents at this time or place, but someone could find the epitaph anachronistic,said The TASR. It said it shouldn't exist until 1973. - to be completed
Tuesday, February 21, 2017
toymatic
http://toymatic.herokuapp.com has been launched. This has been a long effort, crawling slowly from page to page, stumbling past each half-baked python module and its pathetic documentation, past half-assed requirements and vision and google drive sheets and images and whatnot.
Past the limbo of framework-choosing and deciding on flask - and to think I rejected this because it used annotations, and that was too Spring-y, and it took me one dropwizard application and a rewrite and a spring boot almost-complete attempt and numerous abortive Spring-non-Boot attempts -which was very similar to standing next to a smouldering garbage dumb and inhaling burning plastic - until I became numb to the @ in flask.
After that came the minefield of login-logouts , which has been a superior grade of fcuk-you all along - even in Boot where adding the auth package to the pom kills all your end points behind an auth wall with a randomly generated password, and I haven't been able to figure it out eva - in Flask the battle with the multiple options has been a consistent problem ,with every extension doing a half-assed job and fitting in like a square peg in a round hole -( Flask-security how do I Bootstrap style your lame forms ?)
Now that we have 24X7 heroku and google analytics, I realized I forgot the other big thing - SEO.
So googling and downloading and printing stuff. Maybe I 'll read it some time. Notice how so much of life revolves around google ? It is the Mega prosumer !!! And oh, reddit/r/seo has neat articles, unlike google's search results, so my conclusion in the last sentence was baloney.
Update :
I have moved toymatic to rails. devise solves the login-logout problem. spent some time styling the user forms etc so that the page looks halfway decent. All pages are still not working - I think it might be better to start with the REST/CRUD combine and style that .To go the other way, the cart functionality needs to be added , then the checkout and mailer, then the add-inventory page - this one doesn't need styling, but it does need 'authentication_needed' .
Past the limbo of framework-choosing and deciding on flask - and to think I rejected this because it used annotations, and that was too Spring-y, and it took me one dropwizard application and a rewrite and a spring boot almost-complete attempt and numerous abortive Spring-non-Boot attempts -which was very similar to standing next to a smouldering garbage dumb and inhaling burning plastic - until I became numb to the @ in flask.
After that came the minefield of login-logouts , which has been a superior grade of fcuk-you all along - even in Boot where adding the auth package to the pom kills all your end points behind an auth wall with a randomly generated password, and I haven't been able to figure it out eva - in Flask the battle with the multiple options has been a consistent problem ,with every extension doing a half-assed job and fitting in like a square peg in a round hole -( Flask-security how do I Bootstrap style your lame forms ?)
Now that we have 24X7 heroku and google analytics, I realized I forgot the other big thing - SEO.
So googling and downloading and printing stuff. Maybe I 'll read it some time. Notice how so much of life revolves around google ? It is the Mega prosumer !!! And oh, reddit/r/seo has neat articles, unlike google's search results, so my conclusion in the last sentence was baloney.
Update :
I have moved toymatic to rails. devise solves the login-logout problem. spent some time styling the user forms etc so that the page looks halfway decent. All pages are still not working - I think it might be better to start with the REST/CRUD combine and style that .To go the other way, the cart functionality needs to be added , then the checkout and mailer, then the add-inventory page - this one doesn't need styling, but it does need 'authentication_needed' .
Monday, February 13, 2017
My heroes are gone
- Terry Pratchett
- Raymond Smullyan
- Alvin Toffler
And I seem to have internalized being continually disturbed by people around me. I now stop doing whatever I do automatically every few seconds. I have internalized the self sabotage. Abyss in me
- Raymond Smullyan
- Alvin Toffler
And I seem to have internalized being continually disturbed by people around me. I now stop doing whatever I do automatically every few seconds. I have internalized the self sabotage. Abyss in me
Thursday, November 17, 2016
too smart
"High IQ will kill your startup " is a blog post I rescued from the void via wayback machine.
Scott Adams also mentioned on this theme, in his blog - smart people have an ironclad set of rationalizations that are impossible to break for the majority of people.
Signal Vs Noise & epistemology is the only way to go ?
Scott Adams also mentioned on this theme, in his blog - smart people have an ironclad set of rationalizations that are impossible to break for the majority of people.
Signal Vs Noise & epistemology is the only way to go ?
two excerpts
From the Zero MQ book :
As such a vital part of our future, WiFi has a big problem that’s not often discussed, but that anyone betting on it needs to be aware of. The phone companies of the world have built themselves nice, profitable mobile phone cartels in nearly every country with a functioning government, based on convincing governments that without monopoly rights to airwaves and ideas, the world would fall apart. Technically, we call this “regu‐ latory capture” and “patents,” but in fact it’s just a form of blackmail and corruption. If you, the state, give me, a business, the right to overcharge, tax the market, and ban all real competitors, I’ll give you 5%. Not enough? How about 10%? OK, 15% plus snacks. If you refuse, we pull service. But WiFi snuck past this, borrowing unlicensed airspace and riding on the back of the open and unpatented and remarkably innovative Internet Protocol stack. So today, we have the curious situation where it costs me several euros a minute to call from Seoul to Brussels if I use the state-backed infrastructure that we’ve subsidized over decades, but nothing at all if I can find an unregulated WiFi access point. Oh, and I can do video, send files and photos, and download entire home movies all for the same amazing price point of precisely zero point zero zero (in any currency you like). God help me if I try to send just one photo to my home using the service for which I actually pay. That would cost me more than the camera I took it on. This is the price we pay for having tolerated the “trust us, we’re the experts” patent system for so long.
From Pirsig's book :
There are two techniques I use to prevent the out-of- sequence-reassembly setback. I use them mainly when I’m getting into a complex
assembly I don’t know anything about.
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.
#autonomy
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.
#autonomy
Tuesday, October 25, 2016
zeromq and the brain
From the introduction of the zeromq book .
Fixing the World
How to explain ØMQ? Some of us start by saying all the wonderful things it does. It’s sockets on steroids. It’s like mailboxes with routing. It’s fast! Others try to share their moment of enlightenment, that zap-pow-kaboom satori paradigm-shift moment when it all became obvious. Things just become simpler. Complexity goes away. It opens the mind. Others try to explain by comparison. It’s smaller, simpler, but still looks familiar. Personally, I like to remember why we made ØMQ at all, because that’s most likely where you, the reader, still are today.
Programming is a science dressed up as art, because most of us don’t understand the physics of software and it’s rarely, if ever, taught. The physics of software is not algorithms, data structures, languages, and abstractions. These are just tools we make, use, and throw away. The real physics of software is the physics of people.
Specifically, it’s about our limitations when it comes to complexity and our desire to work together to solve large problems in pieces. This is the science of programming: make building blocks that people can understand and use easily, and people will work together to solve the very largest problems.
We live in a connected world, and modern software has to navigate this world. So, the building blocks for tomorrow’s very largest solutions are connected and massively parallel. It’s not enough for code to be “strong and silent” any more. Code has to talk to code. Code has to be chatty, sociable, and well-connected. Code has to run like the human brain; trillions of individual neurons firing off messages to each other, a massively parallel network with no central control, no single point of failure, yet able to solve immensely difficult problems. And it’s no accident that the future of code looks like the human brain, because the endpoints of every network are, at some level, human brains.
Saturday, September 17, 2016
Brain Damage : Diagnosis & Treatment
Using software libraries is an important skill, as any professional software developer will attest. However, if software libraries are introduced too soon, they end up forming a wall of abstraction that leave smart people dumbfounded. Here my friend was, thinking she was on the cusp of learning the secret rules that govern computers; but instead, the instructor simply swapped out monolith of user-facing software with the equally opaque abstraction of the client library. Without mastering the language first — and learning how to read the library source code — my friend didn’t have the tools she needed to dig deeper and figure out what was going on at the bottom of the call chain.
There have been a few popular posts about Java not being a good starting point
- Perils of Java schools by Joel Spolsky
- Computer Science Education:Where Are the Software Engineers of Tomorrow? by Dr. Robert B.K. Dewar and Dr. Edmond Schonberg
- Execution in the Kingdom of nouns by Steve Yegge
Here's a nice example - let's take an array of words like "death_star" and return an array of words like "Death Star", in Javascript, you _can_ do this :
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a.split('_').map( function(x) {return x.charAt(0).toUpperCase() + x.slice(1); } ).join(' ');
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If your company allows you to use Google Guava, then you can do this in Java:
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Function capitalizer = new Function<String,String>(){
@Nullable
@Override
public String apply(String s) {
return s.substring(0, 1).toUpperCase() + s.substring(1);
}
};
Joiner.on(" ") .join( Lists.transform( Splitter.onPattern("_").splitToList(key), capitalizer).toArray(new String[]{}));
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Now, one of them's much more readable than the other. And it's not the second one.
Also, the Kingdom of Nouns requires an appointed Noun Officer to be present for every verbing. Hence the "Joiner" and "Splitter" thinggies. Also note the short and succint function creation (Not!!)
Of course, Guava is what the cool kids in Java would use, if by cool kids you mean middle aged balding uncles wearing tee-shirts with collars for whom the words "Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy" mean nothing.
Some programmers would use Apache's StringUtils, but these used to work in Sun Microsystems, and have now been assimilated by the Oracle machine and had their organs harvested.
And there's the more pedigreed lament by the creator of Shen and a professor of computer science - Mark Tarver - marktarver.com/professor.html
All these point to what Alan Kay said all along , to paraphrase - any culture that spreads faster than education is a pop culture. He also said these two following nuggets - from the Wikiquote page -
- Sun Microsystems had the right people to make Java into a first-class language, and I believe it was the Sun marketing people who rushed the thing out before it should have gotten out.
- If the pros at Sun had had a chance to fix Java, the world would be a much more pleasant place. This is not secret knowledge. It’s just secret to this pop culture.
So, how to avoid years of Java brain damage - In this case 16 ?
A parting quote from John Carmack -
"Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul."
Still not convinced ? Or you _ARE_ convinced and would like to flog that dead horse some more ?Here's one more of my favorite bloggers who won my admiration by coming up with
"Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry" , only he's talking about OOP and not Java
Don't Distract New Programmers with OOP
OOP Isn't a Fundamental Particle of Computing
Moving Beyond the OOP Obsession
I'll leave you with this list of dignitaries laying it on thick - if you're still not convinved, you're in IT , and not Engineering. The robots will be coming for your job soon
http://www.yegor256.com/2016/08/15/what-is-wrong-object-oriented-programming.html
The END (?)
A parting quote from John Carmack -
"Low-level programming is good for the programmer's soul."
Still not convinced ? Or you _ARE_ convinced and would like to flog that dead horse some more ?Here's one more of my favorite bloggers who won my admiration by coming up with
"Organizational Skills Beat Algorithmic Wizardry" , only he's talking about OOP and not Java
Don't Distract New Programmers with OOP
OOP Isn't a Fundamental Particle of Computing
Moving Beyond the OOP Obsession
I'll leave you with this list of dignitaries laying it on thick - if you're still not convinved, you're in IT , and not Engineering. The robots will be coming for your job soon
http://www.yegor256.com/2016/08/15/what-is-wrong-object-oriented-programming.html
The END (?)
Thursday, September 15, 2016
What a micro-service isn't - part 1
A micro-service is usually a web service . All web services aren't micro-services. To get promoted, you need to do a lot more.
Once you add caching, load balancing, failover, integrate logging aggregation and follow it with metrics and dashboards and alerts, then publish documentation on the intranet portal, you're probably good to go.
Your teensy-weensy web service is now a grown-up ,card-carrying member of society of services that make up your organization.
The current poison of choice is REST, mostly because it's simple - never underestimate simple - and open source - never underestimate availability of developers/coders as factor in setting the culture of a field.
Let's take each one by one.
Failover is easy - you make exactly one more copy of your web -service. Or better still, install the same thing on another app server, preferrably on another hardware server, preferrably one more in another colo.
You'll also need a reverse proxy somewhere in the mix.
No more SSHing into remote servers in the midlde of the night and doing a tail -f .
You just have to remember the proprietory (TM) query syntax and hope you don't need to use a regex to extract some field from your log statements to figure out what's going on when paged.
Search for "SPLUNK" on the interwebs.
Once you add caching, load balancing, failover, integrate logging aggregation and follow it with metrics and dashboards and alerts, then publish documentation on the intranet portal, you're probably good to go.
Your teensy-weensy web service is now a grown-up ,card-carrying member of society of services that make up your organization.
The current poison of choice is REST, mostly because it's simple - never underestimate simple - and open source - never underestimate availability of developers/coders as factor in setting the culture of a field.
Let's take each one by one.
- Caching
There are multiple types of this. Usual suspects are Varnish on the outside and one of Ehcache, Memcached, Redis, Hazelcast etc on the inside for application cache. Teracotta has gained an advantage by going one step further and providing easy-to-configure Hibernate level 2 caching so that Java developers need to only wag their fingers very little to get it going.
- Load balancing & Failover
Failover is easy - you make exactly one more copy of your web -service. Or better still, install the same thing on another app server, preferrably on another hardware server, preferrably one more in another colo.
You'll also need a reverse proxy somewhere in the mix.
- Logging aggregation & metrics
No more SSHing into remote servers in the midlde of the night and doing a tail -f .
You just have to remember the proprietory (TM) query syntax and hope you don't need to use a regex to extract some field from your log statements to figure out what's going on when paged.
Search for "SPLUNK" on the interwebs.
- Metrics and dashboards and alerts
- Documentation
And once you relax, knowing that you're good to go, remember you aren't.
There's Security to worry about. OpenID or OAuth . And tokens. And user directories.
And domain names and SSL certificates. And a mail server / service.
And domain names and SSL certificates. And a mail server / service.
And your org ALSO needs
- CI (Continuous Integration)
Usually.
It could also be Jenkins integrated with your SVN which runs your TestNGs.
Or Microsoft Team Foundation Server and deploy by hand.
More often than not, CI is only C till the compilation part.
Chickening out before the deploy, or keeping the 'deploy' part for a dramatic hi-priority conference call/remote login session at midnight is pretty common.
And Informatica licenses. Also SAS licenses . And maybe a Revo R license because SAS doesn't do arrays or some such.
Squiggly colored lines on a white checked background are the key to unlocking budgets.
- Automated Deploy !
- A/B testing & Experiments
- Analytics
- Hadoop for the Marketing team
And Informatica licenses. Also SAS licenses . And maybe a Revo R license because SAS doesn't do arrays or some such.
Squiggly colored lines on a white checked background are the key to unlocking budgets.
Care and Feeding of your Developers -
what you need
- reddit and imgur for distractions and knowledge, hacker-news if you have hired Intellectuals
- youtube for music while working
- an O'reilly Safari account
- coffee machine & free snacks
- IntelliJ helps
- one Hipster rails developer to show others what cool looks like
Observant reader that you are you will now notice that the heading is about what a micro-service isn't, and the blog post is all about what it is .
It is in such paradox that sanity thrives and flourishes in this beloved industry of ours, and lets us use terms like agile-waterfall with a straight face, where sprints scheduled one after the other technically constitute a marathon which , as life coaches advice us - should not be sprinted.
Let me leave you with something more solid than pop-philosophical ramblings.
A micro-service is not a UI. So budget for that too.
Wednesday, September 14, 2016
Microservices - State of the Art ( Clue - it's ripe for Bangalore-ing)
All this stuff is stuff gleaned off Goto conf videos ( go to/see them,they're good !! )
This first one's from Kevin Goldsmith talking about Spotify. Youtube link here
Among other things, it is mentioned that unlike typical orgs having a Dev team, a QA team, a deploy team, an infra team etc, the micro-servicey organization has all these functions served by a single team, which is responsible for a (preferably) single business function. That means the, say, Users team handles development, but also deploys to its own servers and does its own QA.
Point to note is that this is an American way of doing things -as in this makes a lot of sense to a growing business. A director in a large company might not want to have the many many teams under him dissolved, so large companies will continue to have multiple teams, or even roles until forced to, much the same way large companies did not do away with the waterfall model until they HAD HAD to, as in, all those doing "Agile-Waterfall" were fired and had to go to separate separate companies where no one practised "Agile-Waterfall" ,and they were forced to learn "Agile", which we wish they didn't.
Kevin G also talks about what a typical micro-servicey company can do. See below. We are no longer slow-moving single-focus behemoth with multiple layers of fat . We are a lean mean Rambo, keep give us something to shoot. We here being the Company, of course.
Senior BeardFace shows us what's happening in today's world of hardware
That's Fred George above, talking about challenges. Youtube link here
It's hard to take someone with two first names seriously, but Michael Lewis wrote a great book (Liar's Poker) , so I'll bite.
Remember how sometime when you had requested IT for a new server around the time Steve Jobs died, and last week your manager told you that we were going in a "different direction" - meaning you're not gonna get that server, and you stopped dreaming about increasing conversions/ traffic to your service and started leaving early to binge-watch Netflix ?
Your micro-servicey org is dead in the water if you don't trust your engineers to ask for and get servers at will. Containers like Docker ensure that the version of OS they use never gets auto-upgraded to something that doesn't work, unlike the frequent sneak upgrades your office Windows or Mac laptops inflicts on you.
There's no protection against Docker versions not working with other Docker version though, except for diligence on the Dockerer's part .
Senior BeardFace also knows how quickly teams are delivering code these days
Or wishes they did. Maybe they do in California. Please don't show this to my manager.
Scientist BaldyBeard compares and contrasts the Olde and New Worlds
This is a long and very informative talk on Microservices. Like much of this man's work, indispensable if you want to work in the industry. Youtube link here
Slide below points out the main features of one vs the other.
What is not seen here is that microservicey orgs have large jumbles of github repositories and many many services, or many versions of the same services , in various stages of completeness . Tread lightly if you don't trust your engineers.
The primacy of engineers is integral to a micro-servicey org, lacking which you'll quickly find yourself gravitating towards an IT-ish org following the flight of engineers, and then all you'll see is a large number of releases involving config-file changes until the project is replaced by newer one.
This is perfect for an offshore cost center, as opposed to an onsite profit center, hence the title.
Scientist BaldyBeard has a list of attributes by which the MicroService may be known
Again, an absolutely indispensable list. Points 1-4 means small teams serving a business function with code. Let's not get diverted by the kind of conflicted thinking that comes with projects.
See this link for some grade A enlightenment w.regards to the manager-project-sociopathy
Point 3 asks to align business goals with jobs, and virtually no one will tell you that their business is not aligned to jobs. Gee
An automated deployment pipeline is invaluable, and helps bring team sizes down. So this will work only at a profit center ,remember.
After Amazon, Business has changed forever. It's hard to imagine one kiloton of Java code showing you wares ,scanning warehouses, taking your money , routing deliveries to you etc
but that's the nameless faceless labor force of the future (which is actually today) .
And what Java can do on some non-unique electronics, it can do on some other.
Like Fire which needed to be brought down from the Gods but spread like wildfire afterwards,
high-volume massively-scalable systems are changing everything , and their magic will be available to everyone at the cost of a code monkey and a Docker container.
While PHP wrought the first true magic of e-commerce , Java will create centralized players absorbing the business of millions across the globe [1] (in a world of 7 billion, I assume only some millions have _money_) . Commodity hardware, commodity software and commodity programmers will make the technology ripe for cost-optimization [2] ( hello Bangalore !) where your flimsy bug-ridden codebase can be kept on life support for a hundred years by means of a highly tantric ritual of daily meetings and scheduled releases of one line changes in order to appease the Code Gods. And as the software arteries harden , business will move on to other sparkly new things.[3][4]
In part 2 of this series , I'll talk about what makes microservices different from a small hello-world Java program that you might write on your first day of Software ( answer - not much ).
[1] Cue emergence of a giant node
[2]As the language of microservices become household terms, the pop culture will take over - the technology will spread faster than education - Java will see to that - and the system will stratify and harden - MBAs will swoop in and all existing code will get shipped to Bangalore.
[3] Microservices will remain alive in Chicago, but I doubt they'll survive in the Valley.
[4] It's time someone created a code-aware self-pruning , genetic-programmingy L-system of enterprise code.
Friday, April 08, 2016
Saturday, April 02, 2016
childish delight
ruby doesn't need { or } . hahahaha !!
The fact that the delight is so childish tells me that I am spending too much time among grim humorless ogres.
This delight shouldn't be childish or even guilt-accompanied.
this post belongs to ortrta.
The promiscous are atleast happy.
Monday, August 04, 2014
when I reach the middle, both ends seem the same . so good sense in the middle is to be stupidly stubborn.
read about Trying not to try on Brainpickings.
imitating in smaller and smaller batch sizes until you reach an atomic level which can be fed to your algorithm /formula mill
algorithms, formulas
do, think
be,know
system 1,system 2
hip, square
swinging, training
good,true
the enemy of good is truth, not evil.
read about Trying not to try on Brainpickings.
imitating in smaller and smaller batch sizes until you reach an atomic level which can be fed to your algorithm /formula mill
algorithms, formulas
do, think
be,know
system 1,system 2
hip, square
swinging, training
good,true
the enemy of good is truth, not evil.
Saturday, April 05, 2014
Wednesday, April 02, 2014
you've got to constantly push yourself to deliver.
else, you'll slowly start collapsing within
better to sit with wide staring eyes and no one home,
than watch t.v
and there's no faith for cynics and second guessers and
shortcut takers.
the long path is the short path.
you can sleep when you collapse.
else, you'll slowly start collapsing within
better to sit with wide staring eyes and no one home,
than watch t.v
and there's no faith for cynics and second guessers and
shortcut takers.
the long path is the short path.
you can sleep when you collapse.
Ultra conservative
will save money by not eating and starving to death
somebody needs to teach me about investments and repayments.
I believe nothing about the future is predictable.
not even the fruit of the investments you sow
okay, investments must be protected and that's a lot of effort
if you were counting the cost, you run more risk
there's risk all around
maladjusted to reality
optimizing all the wrong things
playing too conservative
the cost is showing up
the buffers are running low, almost out
living on borrowed buffers
daily face your fears
reach beyond your grasp
do things you wouldn't
what are my street skill levels ? probably closer to zero
does my intelligence count ?
will I set goals for myself and then chicken out and fall back to comfortable suicide ?
will save money by not eating and starving to death
somebody needs to teach me about investments and repayments.
I believe nothing about the future is predictable.
not even the fruit of the investments you sow
okay, investments must be protected and that's a lot of effort
if you were counting the cost, you run more risk
there's risk all around
maladjusted to reality
optimizing all the wrong things
playing too conservative
the cost is showing up
the buffers are running low, almost out
living on borrowed buffers
daily face your fears
reach beyond your grasp
do things you wouldn't
what are my street skill levels ? probably closer to zero
does my intelligence count ?
will I set goals for myself and then chicken out and fall back to comfortable suicide ?
Monday, March 31, 2014
Saturday, March 29, 2014
if it's not relevant ,don't think about it
if you think about it, don't worry if you don't have it all
go with what you have, go with passion
defer pleasure. later. you can even eat later. the mind learns to adapt .what pleasures do you need ?you can decide.
keep on keeping on.
it's better to wear out than rust out.
once you are unladen of the useless affectations of that other guy, the trinkets and mental habits and affectations of that other guy, you will be light and flighty in your mind.
you won't be able to speak up unless you're sure of yourself, for which the only remedy is that you've tried your best, that means you've tried everything you can think of. Not a 1 hr try attempt after which you go pleasure yourself
if you think about it, don't worry if you don't have it all
go with what you have, go with passion
defer pleasure. later. you can even eat later. the mind learns to adapt .what pleasures do you need ?you can decide.
keep on keeping on.
it's better to wear out than rust out.
once you are unladen of the useless affectations of that other guy, the trinkets and mental habits and affectations of that other guy, you will be light and flighty in your mind.
you won't be able to speak up unless you're sure of yourself, for which the only remedy is that you've tried your best, that means you've tried everything you can think of. Not a 1 hr try attempt after which you go pleasure yourself
Monday, March 17, 2014
in other words
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.
-Pirsig, Zen and the art of ....
If you meet the Buddha on road, kill him !
- old zen saying
If you have a hero, look again, you have diminished yourself in some way
- Sheldon Kopp
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.
-Pirsig, Zen and the art of ....
If you meet the Buddha on road, kill him !
- old zen saying
If you have a hero, look again, you have diminished yourself in some way
- Sheldon Kopp
Tuesday, January 07, 2014
reading vs skyrim
saw on reddit - 'I can do 12 hrs of skyrim vs 1 hour of reading makes me tired'.
Ans - reading uses a lot of the brain. Skyrim only relies on existing routines in the brain.
When studying, if your brain becomes full, physical activity helps reset the brain. If you move the whole body ( tai chi, for example ) , you'll reset your head faster.
ideas :
[diary]
[internet consumption interface]
|_ server side
[big tv display]
Ans - reading uses a lot of the brain. Skyrim only relies on existing routines in the brain.
When studying, if your brain becomes full, physical activity helps reset the brain. If you move the whole body ( tai chi, for example ) , you'll reset your head faster.
ideas :
[diary]
[internet consumption interface]
|_ server side
[big tv display]
Monday, December 23, 2013
here's an idea
A dialer for the android phone.
A list of contacts in alphabetical order.
The contact list in android reeks of sloppy re-ification. 'Contact information' is a very good talking point . But it is not used that way, is it now ?
Somebody would've thought - these things are all variations of the same thing - sms, home phone, cell phone, work address, etc .. so let's build a complicated filing system for the contact information.
Of course, we won't worry too much about things as user experience.
There was an article doing the rounds that the unveiling the iPhone made the guys behind Android to go back to the drawing board. With Steve Jobs dead, and looking the 'features' released it's inevitable that Apple's no longer in the groundbreaking
A list of contacts in alphabetical order.
The contact list in android reeks of sloppy re-ification. 'Contact information' is a very good talking point . But it is not used that way, is it now ?
Somebody would've thought - these things are all variations of the same thing - sms, home phone, cell phone, work address, etc .. so let's build a complicated filing system for the contact information.
Of course, we won't worry too much about things as user experience.
There was an article doing the rounds that the unveiling the iPhone made the guys behind Android to go back to the drawing board. With Steve Jobs dead, and looking the 'features' released it's inevitable that Apple's no longer in the groundbreaking
Sunday, December 22, 2013
here's an idea
It's really easy to have a website showing you many many books and artifacts.
People also set up a shop with limited inventory, but real human beings who talk to you.
Combine the two of them.
Mechanical turk .Legion of sales personnel sitting at home or in offices matched to a long-tail based inventory system.
Give jobs to all our sellers, at the same time, give buyers a human to talk to.
People also set up a shop with limited inventory, but real human beings who talk to you.
Combine the two of them.
Mechanical turk .Legion of sales personnel sitting at home or in offices matched to a long-tail based inventory system.
Give jobs to all our sellers, at the same time, give buyers a human to talk to.
Monday, December 16, 2013
Friday, November 29, 2013
Friday, November 22, 2013
Thursday, November 14, 2013
Thursday, November 07, 2013
when is an apple like a pear tree
Indian communication is not based on deniability. It is used enforce hierarchy. Usually volume and tone denote authority.
Wednesday, November 06, 2013
everybody has to discover God on their own. They have to lay aside known definitions and cherished values and replace them with new ones which are just more real.
At some time in life, all your known paths and value systems become just junk.
to replace bad habits with new ones, you run into the problem. the new habit must have meaning.
you need a new ecosystem of meaning to go around the new behaviour. replacement behaviours are expensive. they need encouragement and attention and celebration, else they won't become habits.
and habits are gunning for.
acknowledgement of new behaviour by others are not enough - this will help to remind you that you are doing something different, but this is not enough.
for the new behaviour to become a habit, it must pay for itself, it must become repititive, it must survive long enough to become unconscious.
a behaviour can pay for itself if you can see growth - you can pump a bigger number, you can run more time without dying. som etimes the payload is mental .
there is often a lot of friction with the real world - your idea of behaviour will almost always clash.
being water here is to bend enough to stay a bamboo tree .
there is a constant challenge to determine your real enemies and focus your daily effort on the enemy of the day/hour.
the only solution is to be eternally distrusting the status quo. (is this Mumon's Mu ?)
At some time in life, all your known paths and value systems become just junk.
to replace bad habits with new ones, you run into the problem. the new habit must have meaning.
you need a new ecosystem of meaning to go around the new behaviour. replacement behaviours are expensive. they need encouragement and attention and celebration, else they won't become habits.
and habits are gunning for.
acknowledgement of new behaviour by others are not enough - this will help to remind you that you are doing something different, but this is not enough.
for the new behaviour to become a habit, it must pay for itself, it must become repititive, it must survive long enough to become unconscious.
a behaviour can pay for itself if you can see growth - you can pump a bigger number, you can run more time without dying. som etimes the payload is mental .
there is often a lot of friction with the real world - your idea of behaviour will almost always clash.
being water here is to bend enough to stay a bamboo tree .
there is a constant challenge to determine your real enemies and focus your daily effort on the enemy of the day/hour.
the only solution is to be eternally distrusting the status quo. (is this Mumon's Mu ?)
Thursday, October 31, 2013
Thursday, August 22, 2013
"He that would make his own liberty secure, must guard even his enemy from oppression; for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent that will reach to himself."
--Thomas Paine
"The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half."
--Fyodor Dostoevsky
"He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the maze of the most busy life. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign."
--Victor Hugo
--Thomas Paine
"The second half of a man's life is made up of nothing but the habits he has acquired during the first half."
--Fyodor Dostoevsky
"He who every morning plans the transaction of the day and follows out that plan, carries a thread that will guide him through the maze of the most busy life. But where no plan is laid, where the disposal of time is surrendered merely to the chance of incidence, chaos will soon reign."
--Victor Hugo
Wednesday, August 21, 2013
Thursday, August 08, 2013
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Friday, June 07, 2013
use the dialectical technique to break a new idea to someone who won't take in a different opinion directly.
problem is , most people i meet, don't talk to discuss, they talk to push data. i've learnt that personal analysis of things are not up for discussion, typically because they are not accessible.
staying positive, asking and working for things, ignoring the diss-ers - thta's the way to go
life is a fucking thing - metaphorically speaking ,and otherwise
think globally act locally
think romantically [pirsig] act classically
problem is , most people i meet, don't talk to discuss, they talk to push data. i've learnt that personal analysis of things are not up for discussion, typically because they are not accessible.
staying positive, asking and working for things, ignoring the diss-ers - thta's the way to go
life is a fucking thing - metaphorically speaking ,and otherwise
think globally act locally
think romantically [pirsig] act classically
Sunday, February 17, 2013
>> One of the interpretations is that the Gita's topic is about the body,
and that fighting against your family >> means fighting bad habits (like
drinking coffee, playing video games, ..) that you consider as friends
but in >> reality are barriers which prevent your liberation.
In this interpretation Duryodhana (who is blind)
>> represents the mind succumbing to passions
I find this fascinating.
I find the whole idea of a emergent cybernetic whole arising ,not as a sum of parts, but as a transcendence of common parts. Thus the body, mind, state ,city ,cell - are all emergent wholes interlocked in mutually beneficial division of labour. But to identify the self with the whole, is actually the whole identifying itself with the whole, and hence an illusion and a tautology. Then what's left ? Who sits out in the space beyond and holds meaning ? who is left who can identify ...
each hand holding up the rest, an eternal cycle
all knowledge is simulation, but who knows ?
ps:in the story, Duryodhana was fooled into thinking the palace floor was solid, as it was cunningly artificed, when actually it wasn't, and he fell into the water , and Draupadi laughed, and this angered D greatly, and this kicked off the war
>> represents the mind succumbing to passions
I find this fascinating.
I find the whole idea of a emergent cybernetic whole arising ,not as a sum of parts, but as a transcendence of common parts. Thus the body, mind, state ,city ,cell - are all emergent wholes interlocked in mutually beneficial division of labour. But to identify the self with the whole, is actually the whole identifying itself with the whole, and hence an illusion and a tautology. Then what's left ? Who sits out in the space beyond and holds meaning ? who is left who can identify ...
each hand holding up the rest, an eternal cycle
all knowledge is simulation, but who knows ?
ps:in the story, Duryodhana was fooled into thinking the palace floor was solid, as it was cunningly artificed, when actually it wasn't, and he fell into the water , and Draupadi laughed, and this angered D greatly, and this kicked off the war
Sunday, December 23, 2012
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