Has ™someone™ experiences with Cyrus-NNTP?
<https://www.cyrusimap.org/imap/reference/admin/nntp.html>
The last time I wanted to try it, it's dependencies on Debian were
broken and I've not retried it since then.
.
On 2/25/25 8:08 PM, Rich wrote:
The prior can also largely be blamed on modern GUI OS'es. They've
reached the point where the unknowing can make use of a computer
without ever needing a command line at any point.
Which meant that computer hardware and software vendors could thus
market their wares to a much larger consumer audience.
D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
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Too much screen reading if you ask me. But when I'm not working, I read a lot of
regular books, or on my eInk device, which is much kinder to the eyes. Reading
is one of my greatest hobbies. My wife gets annoyed at the enormous number of
books I accumulate. She wants me to throw them away, but it would be like >>>> throwing away my children. I cannot do it! =/
I don't know the two of you, but it does sound like a good idea to throw >>> it all away. But I'm suspicious to say it because I often do it. When
Ouch! My children! ;)
I was a freshman, I bought all the books I'd use at the university. I
thought it was expensive, but it was worth it---I thought then. On the
second semester, I couldn't spend that money again and decided to try to >>> just get the books from the library. If the exact book wasn't
available, I'd take another one---a theorem should be the roughly the
same in every book, right? From this experiment, I concluded that I'd
never buy another book (and that every student should do the same). It
was wonderful to always look at other books perspectives.
I bought last years used books. Usually they weren't that expensive, about 20-30
USD or so per book. But if you bought them new, the price were at least double!
The entire university textbook market is one giant scam anyway.
Publisshers make minor updates (often just changing the "exercises") to create "volume 4", and then the professors state "vol 4" as the text
for the class, duping lots of students into paying full price. One
wonders how much of a kickback the professors get for recommending the "updated volume" that is 99.9% identical to the prior volume.
Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school >>programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much >>worthless, but they get a lot of students.
Oh, and I will say that most of the students that I deal with
personally are not CS students at all but engineering students. They
get one programming class, usually in Matlab, and no basic computer
literacy stuff at all.
and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside)
class, all required classes for Engineering. Pascal class was trivial
(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so
just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we
were using. Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate >Fortran in the end. Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already >understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects. The assembler
class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this >point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an >'assembler' of sorts). Just had to "learn the language" rather than
the "how to program" part.
Sounds interesting! I don't know which way would be the best one to
go. To fork leafnode, and add/remove stuff, or to write from scratch.
If you only focus on a subset of nntp maybe writing from scratch might
not be such a huge task?
On 2/24/25 4:28 PM, D wrote:
I'm not a religious person in the traditional sense of the word, but
turns out I find myself one of the most religious person I've ever met
because patience, perseverance, lack of ambition and a certain mastery
of the art of listening seem pretty religious to me. For instance,
pretty much every religious person I know has at least one tattoo on
their skin. I think that's totally non-religious because a tattoo
effectively destroys (at least a bit) something natural that took a
zillion years to be prepared---to protect the person. I think that if
God speaks to us at all, it is done through the movement of nature.
Never been a fan of tattoos. But in my case it is a conservative
upbringing where tattoos where seen as low class. It is strange how
things like that still stick with you. On the other hand, it is
permanent, and since I don't have anything permanent to say, I don't
really see why I should get a tattoo.
Most intelligent people realize that the subcutaneous inks used in
tattooing cause cancer. It's not difficult to predict, when one
observes that most all foreign substances admitted to the body
(whether by breathing, ingestion, etc) lead to cancer.
On Tue, 25 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2025, Rich wrote:
[...]
I often 'frustrate' my wife by going off the beaten path (major roads) >>>> onto back roads (I'll admit, sometimes done specifically for the value >>>> of the 'frustration' part) to get "there" from "here" with no GPS nav
or pre-planning at all and in almost all instances I get "there" even
though the entire route is brand new for me.
This is excellent! Always going the same way, or driving the same route gets
very boring after a while. Sometimes when I walk a new path, I discover a new
store I didn't know existed.
That really happens when you walk instead of driving. Not to mention
that if you're walking, it's okay to stop by at a store. If you're
driving, it's not okay because (at least where I live), it's never easy
to find a parking place. And you might not want to interrupt the song
that's playing or get out of the air conditioning.
This is the truth! I like walking. It is one of the few forms of
exercise I engage in. =) It is also relaxing and can almost be a bit meditative if you get into it.
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
I don't have much information. The command line seemed an awful
experience to them. I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a >>teacher idiosyncrasy.
This is something I see a lot of... we get interns who are engineering students or computer science students and they have never seen a command
line of any sort before. Not bash, not powershell, not anything. They
first of all don't get the command line concept and secondly they don't
get the concept of the heirarchical filesystem. "The file is on the computer!" "But where on the computer?" "It's on the computer!"
We even got a guy with a PhD in CS from a university that I had previously thought reputable who had never used a command line and who just could
not understand how make works in spite of the O'Reilly book.
I think some of these concepts have to be introduced early on, but they
NEED to be introduced early on in order to get any kind of basic computer literacy.
D Finnigan <dog_cow@macgui.com> writes:
On 2/25/25 8:08 PM, Rich wrote:
The prior can also largely be blamed on modern GUI OS'es. They've
reached the point where the unknowing can make use of a computer
without ever needing a command line at any point.
Which meant that computer hardware and software vendors could thus
market their wares to a much larger consumer audience.
Just so. But doesn't address the bizarre observation that PhDs in computer-related domains are utterly unaware of the command line.
The command line is like language.
The GUI is like shopping.
Reports from a very different domain (sorry, I forget the URLs) are
to the effect that university-level teachers of language & literature
find that students are wholly unprepared to read whole, long novels.
They just don't get it. Somehow, despite having reached postsecondary
level, they don't have the attention span -- or can't call up the intellectual resources to invoke the attention span -- to read
attentively something that goes on for a few hundred pages.
A friend and fellow blacksmith -- sadly now deceased -- was very bright
and very skilled but recounted an experience from high school.
Assigned to read a novel -- I forget but I think it was Count of Monte Christo -- he just couldn't get through it. So he bought the Coles
Notes (or similar) version and still ran aground. Then he happened
on the comic book version, bought and read that, got a passing grade on
the review he had to write.
All well. There are differing kinds of intelligence and his strength
lay in spatial relations and tangible physical forms, not language.
But people taking a university-level Great Books course are a
different matter. So are people studying how computers operate.
Language is a fundamental intellectual tool. Shopping, stichomythia,
ideas reduced to 168-char squibs and, yes, shopping look to me like degenerate forms of disciplined thinking.
As a digression, an assignment left for the reader, consider the
command line, even one as intimidating as that for gcc. After decades
of change, with the accretion of a multitude of options, it retains
the same linguistic form of a command.
But how do you get along with a GUI for something of similar
complexity when someone 20 or 30 or 40 years your junior, decides that
a complete redesign of of the GUI is a desirable and necessary
improvement? He grew up in a mental Manhattan or a Mental Tokyo,
demolishes the graphical Boston of your favorite tool and rebuilds it
to match his visual head-space.
So you can learn it all over again. Life-long learning is supposed to
be about learning new stuff, but about learning the same stuff over
and over.
kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:
We even got a guy with a PhD in CS from a university that I had previously >> thought reputable who had never used a command line and who just could
not understand how make works in spite of the O'Reilly book.
What O'Reilly book? Are you saying the PhD was an O'Reilly-published
author? That would be literally incredible.
On Tue, 25 Feb 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
I don't have much information. The command line seemed an awful
experience to them. I suspect that they thought that the command line
was archaic means of system interface and that perhaps it was just a
teacher idiosyncrasy.
This is something I see a lot of... we get interns who are engineering
students or computer science students and they have never seen a command
line of any sort before. Not bash, not powershell, not anything. They
first of all don't get the command line concept and secondly they don't
get the concept of the heirarchical filesystem. "The file is on the
computer!" "But where on the computer?" "It's on the computer!"
Please scott, you are breaking my heart! =(
We even got a guy with a PhD in CS from a university that I had previously >> thought reputable who had never used a command line and who just could
not understand how make works in spite of the O'Reilly book.
Stop, please, for the love of god!
I think some of these concepts have to be introduced early on, but they
NEED to be introduced early on in order to get any kind of basic computer
literacy.
--scott
This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that
I teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are
yo useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of)
the university level?
If so... we'll soon enter a period of decline, if even universities
turn out CS student so ill equipped to develop new brilliant services
in todays world. =(
D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that I >>teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are yo >>useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of) the >>university level?
In the US there is not so much of a clear distinction between college, university, and trade school. We have for-profit trade schools that
now call themselves universities, and colleges with full university
programs.
I can think of a number of places that call themselves universities that
have CS programs that are basically programming programs... they exist
to teach kids to write code so they can get a job and only teach the currently popular buzzwords and have no actual CS anywhere.
I can think of one place that calls itself a college which has a CS
program that is almost entirely theoretical... lots of proofs and lots
of algorithm analysis. Enough programming to be useful but it's expected students will learn that on their own. A full year of graph theory, two years of continuous mathematics.
And there is a standard ACM curriculum and there are places that follow it, but there are a whole lot of places that don't. I think the ACM curriculum is very balanced between theory and practice and includes things like an assembler class and a digital logic class which are not themselves useful
but which need to be taught in order to explain just what a computer actually is.
But all of these places call themselves CS programs even though they have
a huge diversity in what they actually teach.
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much worthless, but they get a lot of students.
Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school >>>programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much >>>worthless, but they get a lot of students.
Oh, and I will say that most of the students that I deal with
personally are not CS students at all but engineering students. They
get one programming class, usually in Matlab, and no basic computer
literacy stuff at all.
Just one programming class..... in Matlab??? For Engineering. Ugh.
I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class,
and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside)
class, all required classes for Engineering. Pascal class was trivial
(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so
just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we
were using. Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate Fortran in the end. Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects. The assembler
class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an 'assembler' of sorts). Just had to "learn the language" rather than
the "how to program" part.
But, /just/ matlab. That is so wrong on so many levels.
In article <864j0g51om.fsf@example.com>, Richmond <dnomhcir@gmx.com> wrote:
kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:
line of any sort before. Not bash, not powershell, not anything. They
first of all don't get the command line concept and secondly they don't
Isn't a command line just like a chat box to students?
That's a great analogy, thank you for it! I will use it!
In article <vpo4uc$2omvt$1@dont-email.me>, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class,
and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside) >>class, all required classes for Engineering. Pascal class was trivial >>(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so >>just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we
were using. Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate >>Fortran in the end. Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already >>understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects. The assembler
class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this >>point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an >>'assembler' of sorts). Just had to "learn the language" rather than
the "how to program" part.
That's pretty unusual. The reason why Fortran is a good thing is because engineers can't be trusted with pointers.
And COMPASS? That's a very very strange assembler to teach....
I went to gatech which had Cyber machines which the CS folks avoided
like the plague. COMPASS is not exactly a normal assembler and has a
lot of fast-float-performance craziness... it is not something I'd
really teach anyone whom I was trying to teach about the principles
of computing or how systems work.
And the PPUs code? That's worse than IBM channel controller stuff.
I'm sorry you had to do that. --scott
Rich <rich@example.invalid> writes:
Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school >>>>programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much >>>>worthless, but they get a lot of students.
Oh, and I will say that most of the students that I deal with
personally are not CS students at all but engineering students. They
get one programming class, usually in Matlab, and no basic computer
literacy stuff at all.
Just one programming class..... in Matlab??? For Engineering. Ugh.
I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class,
and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside)
class, all required classes for Engineering. Pascal class was trivial
(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so
just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we
were using. Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate
Fortran in the end. Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already
understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects. The assembler
class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this
point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an
'assembler' of sorts). Just had to "learn the language" rather than
the "how to program" part.
But, /just/ matlab. That is so wrong on so many levels.
I know of a leading university that gives all engineering students (all
of them), two courses on Python. The first course is just so students
get a minimum of the Python syntax---of course, the course design calls
it ``how to program''. The second half of the year is to learn the very basics of the so-called OOP and then some packages such as numpy, scipy
and matplotlib are *introduced*.
And what do we see in these courses? Nearly all engineering students consider them accessory to their degrees and so they try to ignore these courses to the maximum because they need to work on calculus and physics.
And I can't blame them: these courses are totally uninteresting. I
would have done the same.
Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> writes:
[snip]
The command line is like language.
The GUI is like shopping.
Reports from a very different domain (sorry, I forget the URLs) are
to the effect that university-level teachers of language & literature
find that students are wholly unprepared to read whole, long novels.
They just don't get it. Somehow, despite having reached postsecondary
level, they don't have the attention span -- or can't call up the
intellectual resources to invoke the attention span -- to read
attentively something that goes on for a few hundred pages.
[snip]
I'm sorry for a follow-up with very little to add, but you really said everything.
The command line is language. And, yes, it turns out we
have an entire population who don't master much language at all. And I equate language with thinking.
If you're thinking, you're using language....Anyway, this lack of intellectual abilities, which boils down to language, grammar skills
has crept up even in the computer science graduate group, which is
appalling.
On Tue, 25 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Yes, not to perpetuate the system is one of my reasons for not
voting. It is funny, when I was young, I was very conservative. And as
the years have passed, I've become more libertarian. My father, when
he was young, was a communist, and during his life, he becase a
moderate conservative.
I can say the same. I was quite more leftist years ago. It is very
sensible: if people need protection, say, it makes perfect sense that
we'd use our resources to protect them. But then, with more experience,
you realize how non-trivial the situation is and that all of the
/sensible/ policy actually ends up working against itself.
Many good hearted leftists are leftists because they cannot see or do not think
about second order, or third order, or N order effects. They get stuck at the immediate problem and do not think of how the consequences of their immediate,
knee jerk, solution will cause more pain down the line. This is sad. =(
Then of course you have evil leftists who are fully aware of this, and
are leftists due to political power gains.
But I found a company that did saliva-based tests, and I called a
doctor who watched me perform the saliva based tests on the phone,
and eventually she was so tired of the process that she said, what
ever... write your own certificate, slap my name and signature on
it, and just email me if you travel so I know.
So for 1 years, that's what I did. =D
Lol. She got tired. :)
Yep! But the did also not like the vaccine, and let me in on a little
secret. About 30% of her clinics staff were not vaccinated because
they thought the tests were too few and it was too early. Officially
all said they were, and no one spoke about it out of fear of getting
kicked out of the clinic, but in private, during hushed lunch
conversations, many admitted to not getting vaccinated.
Very interesting. I have a similar experience. Every now and then I
hear from someone that they did not take any vaccine, or took one the
first shots, giving up afterwards. Some (sadly) remark that they took a
first shot (or a few shots) but they never wanted to. I have a very
close friend, for instance, who said she wouldn't take anything at all,
but that her son unfortunately took because he wanted to go to the
cinema. (I almost couldn't believe what I heard.) Another friend
remarked that she took three shots because she couldn't find a way out
due to her work---but she works in the same organization as I do. The
rules were the same for the two of us, so that's a case of unclear
understanding of the rules. That's something I've been telling my
family for many years. We need to understand how the system works---in
this case, what was available at our work place that we could use to
protect ourselves? The more we understand, the better we can protect
ourselves.
I heard about a woman who was kicked out of blue shield due to not taking vaccines. She won a law suit and got millions in damages! =D There is hope!
On Tue, 25 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Oh, that might even make my python script redundant! This gets more
interesting by the minute!
It will surely do. (It is also a powerful filter, so you can organize
your NNTP articles into various different Maildir, essentially being
your NNTP client from the downloading perspective. For uploading, we
will need another program.)
Excellent! I wonder if it can replace mbsync nicely as well? Would be nice to have fdm handle both my mbsync (so sync imap folders to local laptop) _and_ to
take care of news posts! I can easily see how the filters would take care of sorting the posts from various newsgroups into their respective folders in my mail client.
As for posting, my mail client, alpine, has that covered! =)
Never heard of. It was a bit too quick, so I'm still not quite sure what it >>> does. Some of that jumping around can be achieved in vim, but since I'm not >>> familiar with lisp nor with exactly what he was doing, it is difficult
to say.
I'd bet vim can do the same.
It's not important. But the illustration there is that Lisp programmers
don't worry about parentheses; it's all managed by them by editors such
as the GNU EMACS (with its various packages for handling these
specialized operations).
Yes, that makes a lot more sense. Manually typing all of those parentheses would
be horrible! ;) It reminds me of an old xkcd comic... there were your father parenthesis, a more civilized weapon for a more civilized age. ;)
One thing I liked about systemd is that regular users can have their own
daemons. But it turns out that's the only thing about systemd that I
ever liked. And even then I changed my opinion. Daemons are not really
meant to be managed by regular users; if there's any user that should
have the right to run a daemon, then they should have sysadmin powers,
even if specifically just for the task at hand. Bottom line: it's a
neat thing that it does, but it might not quite be a real need.
I agree! That's the problem, it tries to be too neat, and to do too much. In the
end you have this horrible monolithic kludge that will probably crash due to its
complexity, and take the system with it.
Another thing I intensely dislike with it is the long and convoluted syntax of
the commands. I mean just look at "ls"... it's beautiful! And "l" followed by an
"s"! =D
Now look at this horrible mess: "systemctl list-timers" Yuck!
It's alright. As long as there are systems that don't buy the Microsoft
way of things, we're good. And there will always be because hackers
never buy into the nonsense.
That's good! After all, if I don't want systemd, there are distributions without
it. =) The only annoying thing is that since I teach linux I am forced to teach
the most common tools, and sadly that means systemd.
D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
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Too much screen reading if you ask me. But when I'm not working, I
read a lot of regular books, or on my eInk device, which is much
kinder to the eyes. Reading is one of my greatest hobbies. My wife
gets annoyed at the enormous number of books I accumulate. She
wants me to throw them away, but it would be like throwing away my
children. I cannot do it! =/
I don't know the two of you, but it does sound like a good idea to throw >>> it all away. But I'm suspicious to say it because I often do it. When
Ouch! My children! ;)
I was a freshman, I bought all the books I'd use at the university. I
thought it was expensive, but it was worth it---I thought then. On the
second semester, I couldn't spend that money again and decided to try to >>> just get the books from the library. If the exact book wasn't
available, I'd take another one---a theorem should be the roughly the
same in every book, right? From this experiment, I concluded that I'd
never buy another book (and that every student should do the same). It
was wonderful to always look at other books perspectives.
I bought last years used books. Usually they weren't that expensive,
about 20-30 USD or so per book. But if you bought them new, the price
were at least double!
The entire university textbook market is one giant scam anyway.
Publisshers make minor updates (often just changing the "exercises") to create "volume 4", and then the professors state "vol 4" as the text
for the class, duping lots of students into paying full price. One
wonders how much of a kickback the professors get for recommending the "updated volume" that is 99.9% identical to the prior volume.
You know what I think? I believe the problem is more on the teachers.
Too much screen reading if you ask me. But when I'm not working, I
read a lot of
regular books, or on my eInk device, which is much kinder to the
eyes. Reading
is one of my greatest hobbies. My wife gets annoyed at the enormous number of
books I accumulate. She wants me to throw them away, but it would be like >>> throwing away my children. I cannot do it! =/
I don't know the two of you, but it does sound like a good idea to throw
it all away. But I'm suspicious to say it because I often do it. When
Ouch! My children! ;)
I try to go to the beach every day. Today, for instance, I biked to the >>>> beach, swam and then drank coconut water and do my reading. If I'm not >>>Oh, wonderful! Where do you live?
Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
Ahh... the country of eternal sunshine and happiness! At least that is what it
looks like from here on the surface.
But sadly I have also heard that polarization and leftists vs rightist
has infiltrated brazil as well. =( I hope it won't become as bad as
the US, that would be really bad for the country.
I also imagine that it would be difficult to work from the beach. Too many beautiful women, it must be very distracting!
Wonderful! Sounds like an excellent idea! I do save online articles
and stuff as pdf:s and do the same thing sometimes, going to a café
or when flying. I find the effect very similar to yours.
I used to go to cafés too... But they only have bad stuff to eat such as
coffee and coffee-like drinks and anything with gluten. :) Coconut
Bad coffee?? Doesn't brazil have the best coffee in the world?? Be thankful that
you don't have to drink the crap I have here in europe. ;)
I'm currently reading Mirrorshades by Bruce Sterling (and other
authors). Some good, classic cyberpunk.
Sounds interesting. The topic is fascinating. But it might be a little
overrated as well. Currently, I don't think our technology is really
advanced to warrant all the exploration of cyberpunk writing. What I
think we have a lot of hype, which makes sense, given that the industry
has taken over the monarchies over the years. You see, rewind history
until the collapse of the roman empire; then feuds sprang; then
monarchies were established, with help from the churches; eventually the
industrial revolution begins and then the bourgeoisie rises. Now it's
their prime time---no wonder the hype is all in their favor.
It is an interesting thought that kingdoms faded, were replaced by nations. Perhaps now, nations are fading (slowly) and getting replaced with corporations?
Imagine a future were your primary allegiance is to your corporation, and the nation of old, just exists in the background as a faint humming sound, that no
one really cares about.
What do you think?
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> writes:
If you're thinking, you're using language....Anyway, this lack of
intellectual abilities, which boils down to language, grammar skills
has crept up even in the computer science graduate group, which is
appalling.
The other side of the coin is people with the skill (or learned,
calculated ability) to persuade millions of others to do stupid stuff
using semantically vacuous language. Now (YADATROT) you can devise
by trial and error algorithms or neural net constructs to do it for
you.
Thirty years ago, I made jokes about "epistemogical engineering". Now epistemological engineering has probably doomed the world's most
powerful nation to chaos.
Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
In article <vpo4uc$2omvt$1@dont-email.me>, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class, >>>and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside) >>>class, all required classes for Engineering. Pascal class was trivial >>>(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so >>>just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we >>>were using. Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate >>>Fortran in the end. Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already >>>understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects. The assembler >>>class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this >>>point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an >>>'assembler' of sorts). Just had to "learn the language" rather than
the "how to program" part.
That's pretty unusual. The reason why Fortran is a good thing is because
engineers can't be trusted with pointers.
There might be that. I was there before the rise of C as the "be all" language, which is how I had the Pascal and Fortran classes. Five
years later and it was all C.
And COMPASS? That's a very very strange assembler to teach....
It was the timeshare system the university had for students. They had
a Cyber 7600 and a Cyber 8600, I only ever had accounts on the 7600.
But since it was the system they used, Compass (I'd forgotten that
name, but that was it) was the assembler.
I went to gatech which had Cyber machines which the CS folks avoided
like the plague. COMPASS is not exactly a normal assembler and has a
lot of fast-float-performance craziness... it is not something I'd
really teach anyone whom I was trying to teach about the principles
of computing or how systems work.
Well, the assembly class did come after two semesters of the other languages, and it did begin by presuming you "knew how to program" in
the general sense. But yes, indeed, a weird CPU and assembler as
compared to other microprocessors that I was used to at the time.
And the PPUs code? That's worse than IBM channel controller stuff.
I'm sorry you had to do that. --scott
Thankfully they didn't expect us to make use of the PPU stuff. They
just had us essentially cause an abort and effectively a Cyber core
dump and that was what we turned in for our "execution runs", with
circles around the hex (or was it octal?) digits in the dump that were
the "answers". I didn't question the "logic" of it, I just turned in
what they wanted to see. And although a 'weird' CPU to program,
actually making the code perform whatever the assigned task they wanted wasn't hard, provided one knew how to program in the first place.
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:
We even got a guy with a PhD in CS from a university that I had previously >>> thought reputable who had never used a command line and who just could
not understand how make works in spite of the O'Reilly book.
What O'Reilly book? Are you saying the PhD was an O'Reilly-published >>author? That would be literally incredible.
No, I mean that when he didn't know what make was, we handed him the O'Reilly book about make. Because that's how you learn things that
you don't know in the Unix world. It did not seem to help.
He continued trying to write sequential build scripts using make.
D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that I
teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are yo
useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of) the
university level?
In the US there is not so much of a clear distinction between college, university, and trade school. We have for-profit trade schools that
now call themselves universities, and colleges with full university
programs.
I can think of a number of places that call themselves universities that
have CS programs that are basically programming programs... they exist
to teach kids to write code so they can get a job and only teach the currently popular buzzwords and have no actual CS anywhere.
I can think of one place that calls itself a college which has a CS
program that is almost entirely theoretical... lots of proofs and lots
of algorithm analysis. Enough programming to be useful but it's expected students will learn that on their own. A full year of graph theory, two years of continuous mathematics.
And there is a standard ACM curriculum and there are places that follow it, but there are a whole lot of places that don't. I think the ACM curriculum is very balanced between theory and practice and includes things like an assembler class and a digital logic class which are not themselves useful
but which need to be taught in order to explain just what a computer actually is.
But all of these places call themselves CS programs even though they have
a huge diversity in what they actually teach.
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much worthless, but they get a lot of students.
--scott
All well. There are differing kinds of intelligence and his strength
lay in spatial relations and tangible physical forms, not language.
But people taking a university-level Great Books course are a
different matter. So are people studying how computers operate.
Language is a fundamental intellectual tool. Shopping, stichomythia,
ideas reduced to 168-char squibs and, yes, shopping look to me like degenerate forms of disciplined thinking.
As a digression, an assignment left for the reader, consider the
command line, even one as intimidating as that for gcc. After decades
of change, with the accretion of a multitude of options, it retains
the same linguistic form of a command.
But how do you get along with a GUI for something of similar
complexity when someone 20 or 30 or 40 years your junior, decides that
a complete redesign of of the GUI is a desirable and necessary
improvement? He grew up in a mental Manhattan or a Mental Tokyo,
demolishes the graphical Boston of your favorite tool and rebuilds it
to match his visual head-space.
So you can learn it all over again. Life-long learning is supposed to
be about learning new stuff, but about learning the same stuff over
and over.
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
Sounds interesting! I don't know which way would be the best one to
go. To fork leafnode, and add/remove stuff, or to write from scratch.
If you only focus on a subset of nntp maybe writing from scratch might
not be such a huge task?
Totally right. Specially if you know the language quite well, which is
not actually my case---this is my first program in Common Lisp.
Nevertheless, it's the most enjoyable project I've ever worked on in my
life.
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Tue, 25 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2025, Rich wrote:
[...]
I often 'frustrate' my wife by going off the beaten path (major roads) >>>>> onto back roads (I'll admit, sometimes done specifically for the value >>>>> of the 'frustration' part) to get "there" from "here" with no GPS nav >>>>> or pre-planning at all and in almost all instances I get "there" even >>>>> though the entire route is brand new for me.
This is excellent! Always going the same way, or driving the same route gets
very boring after a while. Sometimes when I walk a new path, I discover a new
store I didn't know existed.
That really happens when you walk instead of driving. Not to mention
that if you're walking, it's okay to stop by at a store. If you're
driving, it's not okay because (at least where I live), it's never easy
to find a parking place. And you might not want to interrupt the song
that's playing or get out of the air conditioning.
This is the truth! I like walking. It is one of the few forms of
exercise I engage in. =) It is also relaxing and can almost be a bit
meditative if you get into it.
I agree. :) What I often do at the beach is actually just walk it end
to end. The beach I always go to has about 1 km in length. But lately
I've been trying to swim in the ocean as well. I've taken swimming
classes for various years and I didn't have the energy to continue when
I joined graduate school. Now I'm out and I have been trying to
continue, but after two months swimming in a gym, I decided to quit it
and move to the beach. I'm happy to announce that lately the water has
been crystalline around here. The news called it Caribbean today.
I have been using some fins to give me some ``self confidence''. It's
fairly scary to swim the beach end to end. You need to distance
yourself from the shore to stay a bit away from the waves and even other people. And you can barely see much while swimming: even with
crystalline water, visility is still very limited.
But it's really more pleasurable to be at the beach than at the gym.
Sure, when the water gets pretty dark, I will probably not swim. I hope
I'm lucky enough so that such conditions don't last too long when they arrive.
These days, even computer science departments are completely based on
Google services, say. Students don't even have the chance to run the
local mail server. It's appalling.
This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that
I teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are
yo useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of)
the university level?
I'm afraid it is.
If so... we'll soon enter a period of decline, if even universities
turn out CS student so ill equipped to develop new brilliant services
in todays world. =(
Perhaps the crowd that's brilliant is a minority that hasn't changed
much compared the previous times. (Perhaps it has.) Just because a lot
of people are joining university and coming out of them pretty clueless,
it doesn't mean that we've reduced that small group that carries the
rest of the world on their shoulders. Perhaps this group is still the
same percent compared to the last centuries. (Just guessing hypotheses here.)
But I think you're totally right in that we've entered a period where we
have a lot of people who are completely wasting their degrees, specially
in an area such as computer science. I could be wrong, but it seems
that computer science is housing a lot of nonsense. I'm sure there are declines in mathematics and physics too (likely more so on physics than
in mathematics, I'd guess), but I believe computer science might be the worst. When I look at the student body in computer science, the vast majority seems totally uninterested in computer science---they're
interested in /playing/ video-games, not producing them.
Rich <rich@example.invalid> writes:
Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school
programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much
worthless, but they get a lot of students.
Oh, and I will say that most of the students that I deal with
personally are not CS students at all but engineering students. They
get one programming class, usually in Matlab, and no basic computer
literacy stuff at all.
Just one programming class..... in Matlab??? For Engineering. Ugh.
I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class,
and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside)
class, all required classes for Engineering. Pascal class was trivial
(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so
just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we
were using. Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate
Fortran in the end. Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already
understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects. The assembler
class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this
point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an
'assembler' of sorts). Just had to "learn the language" rather than
the "how to program" part.
But, /just/ matlab. That is so wrong on so many levels.
I know of a leading university that gives all engineering students (all
of them), two courses on Python. The first course is just so students
get a minimum of the Python syntax---of course, the course design calls
it ``how to program''. The second half of the year is to learn the very basics of the so-called OOP and then some packages such as numpy, scipy
and matplotlib are *introduced*.
And what do we see in these courses? Nearly all engineering students consider them accessory to their degrees and so they try to ignore these courses to the maximum because they need to work on calculus and physics.
And I can't blame them: these courses are totally uninteresting. I
would have done the same.
Many good hearted leftists are leftists because they cannot see or do not think
about second order, or third order, or N order effects. They get stuck at the
immediate problem and do not think of how the consequences of their immediate,
knee jerk, solution will cause more pain down the line. This is sad. =(
Quite right. And there is the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B.
Kerr, Steven. ``On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B.''
Academy of Management journal 18.4 (1975): 769-783.
Then of course you have evil leftists who are fully aware of this, and
are leftists due to political power gains.
And there's the post-modernist movement, with their sheer nonsense and confusion, that finds good reception in such groups---probably more so
than in others.
We should check whether she really got the money. Getting a lawsuit
your way doesn't imply an increase in the checking account balance
(until later).
Excellent! I wonder if it can replace mbsync nicely as well? Would be nice to
have fdm handle both my mbsync (so sync imap folders to local laptop) _and_ to
take care of news posts! I can easily see how the filters would take care of >> sorting the posts from various newsgroups into their respective folders in my
mail client.
I'm not a user of mbsync, but if you use mbsync just to download mail
from an IMAP server, then certainly fdm can replace it.
As for posting, my mail client, alpine, has that covered! =)
You should be good then. :)
daemons. But it turns out that's the only thing about systemd that I
ever liked. And even then I changed my opinion. Daemons are not really >>> meant to be managed by regular users; if there's any user that should
have the right to run a daemon, then they should have sysadmin powers,
even if specifically just for the task at hand. Bottom line: it's a
neat thing that it does, but it might not quite be a real need.
I agree! That's the problem, it tries to be too neat, and to do too much. In the
end you have this horrible monolithic kludge that will probably crash due to its
complexity, and take the system with it.
Another thing I intensely dislike with it is the long and convoluted syntax of
the commands. I mean just look at "ls"... it's beautiful! And "l" followed by an
"s"! =D
Now look at this horrible mess: "systemctl list-timers" Yuck!
Yeah---there's a fine line between incrementing language and sticking
with the previous, well-established vocabulary. That's particularly important for hackers because they have an imense amount of vocabulary
to manage and great fluency is essential to their day-to-day operations.
That's good! After all, if I don't want systemd, there are distributions without
it. =) The only annoying thing is that since I teach linux I am forced to teach
the most common tools, and sadly that means systemd.
No intention to question you here, but I'm sure you know how
questionable this might be. I would think it's not really important to
teach about systemd, specially if you don't find it beautiful. The
principles and their concrete illustrations are much more interesting.
The ``everything is a file'' is an example, and you can illustrate with countless examples. Modularity is another relevant word and can be seen
at its prime in UNIX systems (and extremely in software such as qmail),
with opposite examples in sendmail and also in systemd.
On the other hand, I'm thinking here that you'd remark that your courses
are highly practical, involved with system administration per se. I'm
aware of that. But, still, I really don't see system administration
very different from software writing. I would not find it too important
to discuss the operational details of a specific system or software. Certainly a UNIX system has its own particularties in their rc scripts,
but I would spend more time looking at POSIX-sh semantics, style,
philosophy and history because it's primarily sh scripts that engineer
the start-up schemes of UNIX systems. Because then every hacker can use
that kind of culture to investigate whatever system he's interested in.
In other words, I'd go for depth, not immediate working knowledge.
Every system administrator will have to grind through the manuals
anyway. Knowing how to start or stop daemons, say, in a particular
system would not be terribly useful in a classroom. Of course, we would
see how run the commands in whatever system we're using for the
illustrations at the black board or at the computer lab, but merely to
see things in motion.
For many years already, people talk about the concern with technology replacing the human hand in the labor market. ``Machines will replace
humans.'' Machines have already replaced humans a long time ago; the
reason you still find humans in manual labor is merely because humans
are still the cheapest machines around. When the robot becomes cheaper, humans will need to find new means of survival.
Non-sarcastically speaking now, what we should concern ourselves with is
how to live a dignifying life, an objective that seems impossible to
achieve by any method whatsoever: it is precisely by confining life in methods (as if we were scientific problems to be solved) that we become indistinguishable from machines. Methods are useful to solve equations,
but they will not quite help us in *living* in its deep sense.
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
And I can't blame them: these courses are totally uninteresting. I
would have done the same.
OOP, yuck! It never worked well for me. ;) On the other hand, I never
worked as a professional programmer. ;)
Rich <rich@example.invalid> writes:
Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
In article <vpo4uc$2omvt$1@dont-email.me>, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
I had (if memory serves) at least one Pascal class, one Fortran class, >>>>and an assembler (CDC Cyber 7000 - a really weird CPU on the inside) >>>>class, all required classes for Engineering. Pascal class was trivial >>>>(had already done plenty of UCSD Pascal on Apple II in high-school) so >>>>just had to adjust to the small difference in the CDC Cyber Pascal we >>>>were using. Fortran was similarly trivial, but oh did I come to hate >>>>Fortran in the end. Just had to learn the "fortranisms", as I already >>>>understood the over-arching "how to program" aspects. The assembler >>>>class was also itself trivial (had done loads of 6502 assembler by this >>>>point, and some 8086 assembler, provided one considered DOS's debug an >>>>'assembler' of sorts). Just had to "learn the language" rather than >>>>the "how to program" part.
That's pretty unusual. The reason why Fortran is a good thing is because >>> engineers can't be trusted with pointers.
There might be that. I was there before the rise of C as the "be all"
language, which is how I had the Pascal and Fortran classes. Five
years later and it was all C.
And COMPASS? That's a very very strange assembler to teach....
It was the timeshare system the university had for students. They had
a Cyber 7600 and a Cyber 8600, I only ever had accounts on the 7600.
But since it was the system they used, Compass (I'd forgotten that
name, but that was it) was the assembler.
I went to gatech which had Cyber machines which the CS folks avoided
like the plague. COMPASS is not exactly a normal assembler and has a
lot of fast-float-performance craziness... it is not something I'd
really teach anyone whom I was trying to teach about the principles
of computing or how systems work.
Well, the assembly class did come after two semesters of the other
languages, and it did begin by presuming you "knew how to program" in
the general sense. But yes, indeed, a weird CPU and assembler as
compared to other microprocessors that I was used to at the time.
And the PPUs code? That's worse than IBM channel controller stuff.
I'm sorry you had to do that. --scott
Thankfully they didn't expect us to make use of the PPU stuff. They
just had us essentially cause an abort and effectively a Cyber core
dump and that was what we turned in for our "execution runs", with
circles around the hex (or was it octal?) digits in the dump that were
the "answers". I didn't question the "logic" of it, I just turned in
what they wanted to see. And although a 'weird' CPU to program,
actually making the code perform whatever the assigned task they wanted
wasn't hard, provided one knew how to program in the first place.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but despite all the idiosyncrasy of the tools
and equipment you worked with, I would say---as it seems pretty clear
from your very posts here---that the educational opportunities you got
did their job pretty well.
And the fact that you had to know how to program is still an unsolved
problem today, not any failure from the institution you were at the
time.
When I look at almost any programming textbook, I see the problem
is still open. Perhaps the book
How to Design Programs
Matthias Felleisen, Robert Bruce Findler,
Matthew Flatt and Shriram Krishnamurthi
MIT Press, 2014, URL https://htdp.org
is the only meaningful candidate to a solution---as far as I have
looked.
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school
programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much
worthless, but they get a lot of students.
I think maybe those programs try to sell that you can get a nice
FAANG job with 300k starting salary with very little effort. ;)
...But sadly I have also heard that polarization and leftists vs rightist
has infiltrated brazil as well. =( I hope it won't become as bad as
the US, that would be really bad for the country.
You can definitely say that. This theme is very interesting for people interested in Brazil or perhaps the US. The US has a huge influence in
Brazil today.
I also imagine that it would be difficult to work from the beach. Too many >> beautiful women, it must be very distracting!
You're quite right. It is indeed *very* distracting. In fact,
observing such things has given the conclusion that visual stimili (at
least in myself) is a really strong physiological thing: it seems quite
stronger than any will power. I started out reading at the beach so I
would have something to do there, staying longer in the sun. So my slow reading doesn't defeat that purpose. I also often go during week days,
when the beach is not crowded with people. It worked out so well that
it seems to work like a second phase of my work schedule. I write in
the morning and read in the afternoon, intermixed with walking, swimming
and biking. I cannot do it *every* day because I need to ``the office''
some days.
Bad coffee?? Doesn't brazil have the best coffee in the world?? Be thankful that
you don't have to drink the crap I have here in europe. ;)
I think we produce wonderful coffee, but I also think that wonderful
coffee is mostly exported. Makes perfect sense: you sell your best
products to your best customers (those that pay more). That's a sorry
thing when living in a country with too many poor people: the industry
brings the cheapest things for you.
But I consider coffee---no matter how good quality if might be---a drug
to be totally kept on a leash. I don't think we should make regular use
of any stimulants---of any drug at all.
I am probably a naturalist. If coffee ``accelerates your physiology'',
then we can say that such ``speed'' is not the natural way of your body.
If you do it every day, you're totally not respecting the natural way of
the system. Not a religious thing at all---recall that perspective I
had on tattoos. So this is another illustration of why I find myself
more religious than the vast number of very religious people I've ever
met.
It is an interesting thought that kingdoms faded, were replaced by nations. >> Perhaps now, nations are fading (slowly) and getting replaced with corporations?
Imagine a future were your primary allegiance is to your corporation, and the
nation of old, just exists in the background as a faint humming sound, that no
one really cares about.
What do you think?
I think along these lines. Today I see most of government as just
employees of corporations. I think it's very easy to see. Political
parties cannot do anything without money. But they're not companies:
they produce no product in the typical sense of the word. So where do
they money come from? It comes from corporations. Who makes decisions
in a company? The owner or the employees? (Who makes decisions in
society? The goverment or the real owners?)
So when people say that governments don't seem to work in favor of the population, I remark precisely the above---if you owned a company, would
you let your employees have the final say in the decisions? That'd be
absurd; it's your company; you call the shots. Similarly, corporations
(who invest in most of the government officials' careers), should have
the final say in nearly everything.
What do corporations want? Almost nothing. Because they're in power.
The desire of those in power is to keep things as they are.
We can make a parallel here with the relationship between monarchies and
the church. The church partnered with kings because they were useful to
each other: kings won their power by the use of force, which attracts
the interest of any other entity of some meaningful power (such as the church). Their partnership is then natural: the influence of the church
on the people was useful to install the idea that the power of kings had divine origins.
The very idea of a constitutional monarchy comes from the industry: when
the industry realizes that it was their time to be at the top, they
naturally make up a system that reduces the power of the monarchies,
with the brilliant argument that individual guarantees are needed. So republics arise and we can make the parallel that governments take the function that the church had in their partnership with kings. People
now are busy trying to organize themselves by interacting with the bureaucracy of governments---this is the civilized, legal, democratic
way of living.
There is, therefore, a natural conflict between public policy and the interests of corporations. The reason governments have, in principle,
nearly all the power and still are so ineffective against corporation is
a fact that's very illuminating. No fact is a contradiction; all
paradoxes are only apparent.
On Tue, 25 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Mon, 24 Feb 2025, Rich wrote:
[...]
I often 'frustrate' my wife by going off the beaten path (major roads) >>>> onto back roads (I'll admit, sometimes done specifically for the value >>>> of the 'frustration' part) to get "there" from "here" with no GPS nav
or pre-planning at all and in almost all instances I get "there" even
though the entire route is brand new for me.
This is excellent! Always going the same way, or driving the same route gets
very boring after a while. Sometimes when I walk a new path, I discover a new
store I didn't know existed.
That really happens when you walk instead of driving. Not to mention
that if you're walking, it's okay to stop by at a store. If you're
driving, it's not okay because (at least where I live), it's never easy
to find a parking place. And you might not want to interrupt the song
that's playing or get out of the air conditioning.
This is the truth! I like walking. It is one of the few forms of exercise
I engage in. =) It is also relaxing and can almost be a bit meditative if you get into it.
And COMPASS? That's a very very strange assembler to teach....
It was the timeshare system the university had for students. They had
a Cyber 7600 and a Cyber 8600, I only ever had accounts on the 7600.
But since it was the system they used, Compass (I'd forgotten that
name, but that was it) was the assembler.
Oh, I perfectly understand now. (Thanks.) I read ``make'' as a verb in
that phrase. Yeah, it makes sense that someone with no make experience
(at all) could misuse it. He likely didn't have any experience even
with competitors such as gradle or whatever.
Pretty sad story: as I
discovered flaws in my education, I felt hurt---people wasted my time,
made a fool out of me, hurt me emotionally and so on; not as a
conspiracy against me, but as a matter of course. I feel lucky to have >noticed it throughout the process and not at too many decades later.
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school
programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much
worthless, but they get a lot of students.
I think maybe those programs try to sell that you can get a nice
FAANG job with 300k starting salary with very little effort. ;)
Those are also the same "puppy farms" that curn out developers who only
know how to string together calling already written libraries to do
various tasks.
But ask them to do something for which they can't find an already
created library, and they are hopelessly lost.
In article <vpol5t$2r3ql$1@dont-email.me>, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
Scott Dorsey <kludge@panix.com> wrote:
And COMPASS? That's a very very strange assembler to teach....
It was the timeshare system the university had for students. They had
a Cyber 7600 and a Cyber 8600, I only ever had accounts on the 7600.
But since it was the system they used, Compass (I'd forgotten that
name, but that was it) was the assembler.
gatech used the Cybers to teach an emulated assembler... first they used Donald Knuth's idealized machine, then later an 8080 emulator. Much easier to teach than a 60-bit assembler with pipeline issues.
D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school
programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much
worthless, but they get a lot of students.
I think maybe those programs try to sell that you can get a nice
FAANG job with 300k starting salary with very little effort. ;)
Those are also the same "puppy farms" that curn out developers who only
know how to string together calling already written libraries to do
various tasks.
But ask them to do something for which they can't find an already
created library, and they are hopelessly lost.
This is the truth! I like walking. It is one of the few forms of exercise
I engage in. =) It is also relaxing and can almost be a bit meditative if
you get into it.
I enjoy walking, but I rarely get to actually do it..
In article <vpq63t$36lja$2@dont-email.me>, Rich <rich@example.invalid> wrote:
D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school
programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much
worthless, but they get a lot of students.
I think maybe those programs try to sell that you can get a nice
FAANG job with 300k starting salary with very little effort. ;)
Those are also the same "puppy farms" that curn out developers who only >>know how to string together calling already written libraries to do >>various tasks.
This is true...BUT those developers are getting highly-paid jobs stringing together library calls that they don't understand. Just like they were promised. And then WE have to deal with the issues their code creates.
But ask them to do something for which they can't find an already
created library, and they are hopelessly lost.
I was told by an interviewee that it is much faster to do a sort in
Java than C because in Java it only takes one line of code whereas in
C it takes many lines of code.
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, Rich wrote:
D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Scott Dorsey wrote:
We also have a bunch of IT programs which are really business school
programs with some computing added. I think those are pretty much
worthless, but they get a lot of students.
I think maybe those programs try to sell that you can get a nice
FAANG job with 300k starting salary with very little effort. ;)
Those are also the same "puppy farms" that curn out developers who only
know how to string together calling already written libraries to do
various tasks.
But ask them to do something for which they can't find an already
created library, and they are hopelessly lost.
Makes sense. Those type of programmers I think are the ones who will
suffer the most when AI:s becoming better at generating simple code snippets.
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
This was a painful read. =( I thought I saw this due to the fact that
I teach at the vocational school level and not university level. Are
yo useriously telling me that this b.s. goes one (and comes out of)
the university level?
I'm afraid it is.
=(
If so... we'll soon enter a period of decline, if even
universities turn out CS student so ill equipped to develop new
brilliant services in todays world. =(
Perhaps the crowd that's brilliant is a minority that hasn't changed
much compared the previous times. (Perhaps it has.) Just because a
lot of people are joining university and coming out of them pretty
clueless, it doesn't mean that we've reduced that small group that
carries the rest of the world on their shoulders. Perhaps this
group is still the same percent compared to the last centuries.
(Just guessing hypotheses here.)
That would be a comforting thought! Maybe the nr of brilliant people
stays at the same percentage!
In my experience, the brilliant guys hardly need a teacher. All I do
is to feed them problems when they get bored. Then they go away,
work at it 24/7 until they solve it, and come back for more. When I
teach, and have to keep it at a level that is appropriate for the
average level, they get bored and space out.
So I give them the lecture slides and material to read at their
leisure and keep feeding them problems. Occasionally they get stuck,
but very rarely, and then I zoom in.
Those students give me immense joy!
But I think you're totally right in that we've entered a period where we
have a lot of people who are completely wasting their degrees, specially
in an area such as computer science. I could be wrong, but it seems
that computer science is housing a lot of nonsense. I'm sure there are
declines in mathematics and physics too (likely more so on physics than
in mathematics, I'd guess), but I believe computer science might be the
worst. When I look at the student body in computer science, the vast
majority seems totally uninterested in computer science---they're
interested in /playing/ video-games, not producing them.
When I wwas young, it was considered a virtue to expand your mind, to learn new
things, to develop yourself. My home was full of books, we watched documentaries, went to museums. When the computer arrived, I was fascinated with
linux, BSDs, programming.
I hope that this culture is still alive.
It would be so incredibly depressing if the majority of the young
today were to waste away their lives watching podcasts and playing
computer games. It feels they would just waste their lives that way
instead of exploring it and challenging their limits, and breaking
through their limits.
But I've also long felt that 'intelligence', just like most everything
else, tends to follow surprisingly closely a bell curve. There's
always a small percentage of "ultra high" on one end, a large middle of "good to great, but not at the same level of the 'ultra high'" and a following tail who just can't, ever, get it. It just is the way it is.
When I wwas young, it was considered a virtue to expand your mind,
to learn new things, to develop yourself. My home was full of
books, we watched documentaries, went to museums. When the computer
arrived, I was fascinated with linux, BSDs, programming.
I hope that this culture is still alive.
It is. Go look into the "maker community" or "maker space". It has
shifted somewhat from our days back then but much of it is still there.
It would be so incredibly depressing if the majority of the young
today were to waste away their lives watching podcasts and playing computer games. It feels they would just waste their lives that way instead of exploring it and challenging their limits, and breaking
through their limits.
Sadly, remember my 'bell curve' above. Half of them will fall on the
"below median" point, and those will often be the ones who *do* waste
away their life on consuming that which others create.
And a lot of it is motivation. They, for whatever reason, seem to be unmotivated by most any argument to do other than consume for
consumptions sake.
In my experience, the brilliant guys hardly need a teacher. All I do
is to feed them problems when they get bored. Then they go away,
work at it 24/7 until they solve it, and come back for more. When I
teach, and have to keep it at a level that is appropriate for the
average level, they get bored and space out.
I've seen this too. Actually, we all have. The "brainiac" in the
front row of the calculus or physics class that's the one asking
questions that sometimes befuddle the instructor for a moment....
But I've also long felt that 'intelligence', just like most everything
else, tends to follow surprisingly closely a bell curve. There's
always a small percentage of "ultra high" on one end, a large middle of
"good to great, but not at the same level of the 'ultra high'" and a following tail who just can't, ever, get it. It just is the way it is.
And the ones who strike it rich if you go digging you find out that
they were the "survivor bias" ones (i.e., the lucky one that survived)
or that they had "generational backing" (family wealth) that could be leveraged to "buy" the right people to increase their odds of becoming
the "survivor bias" one.
I've also seen what you describe at $job. I spent somewhere on 15-20
years helping train new hires, and it didn't take very long until I got
quite good at "picking out" the new ones who were going to succeed from
the ones who were likely to wash out just by interacting with them for
a surprisingly short period of time.
So I give them the lecture slides and material to read at their
leisure and keep feeding them problems. Occasionally they get stuck,
but very rarely, and then I zoom in.
Those students give me immense joy!
Yes, these are the students you want, sadly, they usually are never
more than about 3-4% of the class. They are also the ones you want HR
to filter through to you from new applicants, but sadly, HR is piss
poor at doing that filtering.
But I think you're totally right in that we've entered a period where we >>> have a lot of people who are completely wasting their degrees, specially >>> in an area such as computer science. I could be wrong, but it seems
that computer science is housing a lot of nonsense. I'm sure there are
declines in mathematics and physics too (likely more so on physics than
in mathematics, I'd guess), but I believe computer science might be the
worst. When I look at the student body in computer science, the vast
majority seems totally uninterested in computer science---they're
interested in /playing/ video-games, not producing them.
When I wwas young, it was considered a virtue to expand your mind, to learn new
things, to develop yourself. My home was full of books, we watched
documentaries, went to museums. When the computer arrived, I was fascinated with
linux, BSDs, programming.
I hope that this culture is still alive.
It is. Go look into the "maker community" or "maker space". It has
shifted somewhat from our days back then but much of it is still there.
It would be so incredibly depressing if the majority of the young
today were to waste away their lives watching podcasts and playing
computer games. It feels they would just waste their lives that way
instead of exploring it and challenging their limits, and breaking
through their limits.
Sadly, remember my 'bell curve' above. Half of them will fall on the
"below median" point, and those will often be the ones who *do* waste
away their life on consuming that which others create.
And a lot of it is motivation. They, for whatever reason, seem to be unmotivated by most any argument to do other than consume for
consumptions sake.
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote:
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, postingWhat I don't tell, they can't post, and the same with what they
photos of you on there.)
don't photograph. Although I guess that does leave a bit of an
information vacuum there which some nutcase could exploit to make
up missing personal info/photos on me if they so desired.
Lately I've been seeing people advocating for a switch to
Codeberg.
I don't know about Codeberg, but there have been lots of
alternatives all along. Tons of projects switched from SourceForge
to GitHub. Many projects have their own websites too, so why not
self-host? GitHub do offer a lot of extra features for free, but
that's dealing with the devil IMHO.
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
I don't know about Codeberg, but there have been lots of
alternatives all along. Tons of projects switched from SourceForge
to GitHub. Many projects have their own websites too, so why not
self-host? GitHub do offer a lot of extra features for free, but
that's dealing with the devil IMHO.
Codeberg is a German non-profit with a lot a github features. Self
hosting is always an option, but not one I necessarily like for a lot of >projects. I've found it not entirely obvious how to download source
(as opposed to just view one version) from some self-hosted projects
and having a issues tracker with an easy sign-up is useful, if only
to see how issue response works. For some things I'm entirely okay
with zero response to bugs, but for other things I'd like to see more.
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, candycanearter07 wrote:
This is the truth! I like walking. It is one of the few forms of exercise >>> I engage in. =) It is also relaxing and can almost be a bit meditative if >>> you get into it.
I enjoy walking, but I rarely get to actually do it..
Why not?
D <nospam@example.net> wrote at 10:48 this Saturday (GMT):
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, candycanearter07 wrote:
This is the truth! I like walking. It is one of the few forms of exercise >>>> I engage in. =) It is also relaxing and can almost be a bit meditative if >>>> you get into it.
I enjoy walking, but I rarely get to actually do it..
Why not?
Suburban hell.
In article <864j0g51om.fsf@example.com>, Richmond <dnomhcir@gmx.com> wrote:
kludge@panix.com (Scott Dorsey) writes:
line of any sort before. Not bash, not powershell, not anything. They
first of all don't get the command line concept and secondly they don't
Isn't a command line just like a chat box to students?
That's a great analogy, thank you for it! I will use it!
--scott
On Wed, 5 Mar 2025, candycanearter07 wrote:
D <nospam@example.net> wrote at 10:48 this Saturday (GMT):
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, candycanearter07 wrote:
This is the truth! I like walking. It is one of the few forms of exercise >>>>> I engage in. =) It is also relaxing and can almost be a bit meditative if >>>>> you get into it.
I enjoy walking, but I rarely get to actually do it..
Why not?
Suburban hell.
This is very sad. Maybe you can move? Or drive to a close by park?
D <nospam@example.net> wrote at 12:39 this Wednesday (GMT):
On Wed, 5 Mar 2025, candycanearter07 wrote:
D <nospam@example.net> wrote at 10:48 this Saturday (GMT):
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, candycanearter07 wrote:
This is the truth! I like walking. It is one of the few forms of exercise
I engage in. =) It is also relaxing and can almost be a bit meditative if
you get into it.
I enjoy walking, but I rarely get to actually do it..
Why not?
Suburban hell.
This is very sad. Maybe you can move? Or drive to a close by park?
Yeah I could see if theres some nearby
On 2025-02-19, D wrote:
On Tue, 18 Feb 2025, Eli the Bearded wrote:
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse,
posting photos of you on there.)
That's an absurd argument. In no world, in no universe can you
reasonably expect people to not talk about you, think about you,
write about you, if they so choose.
Publishing photos and videos of you, without your consent, on the
other hand, is illegal, and can be punished severely.
On 2025-02-24, Rich wrote:
D <nospam@example.net> wrote:
On Sun, 23 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Not compared to git. They did not get to see git. They just hated
fossil to the point of almost giving up on the whole course altogether.
Very likely they knew that other courses would give them the same
credits and they could try it afresh on the next semester.
Ahh, got it! Yes, sadly this happens to me as well. At the slightest
hint of difficulty or effort, about 20% of the class riots, complains
to the school that the teacher is evil, that the difficulty level
should be lowered etc.
The result of 20+ years of "everyone gets a participation trophy, and
no winners are declared" parenting.....
They do not realize, that the only ones they are cheating by doing
that are themselves.
They lack the wisdom that comes with age to recognize this fact.
Some of them will wise up early enough to be able to succeed. The
rest will be set for "table waitress with master's degree" careers.
One guy told me he had no idea and it was amazing the day he
understood the terminal concept. He went on to become a rock star!
Those students are what makes it worth it for me.
And he was someone who *should* have been in that course. Many of the others were likely only present because they had been told the degree
was a magic paper towards a big salary (while omitting that they have
to know what the F they are doing for the magic paper to gain them the
big salary).
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
These days, even computer science departments are completely based on
Google services, say. Students don't even have the chance to run the
local mail server. It's appalling.
Not all hope is lost! ;) My courses are based on linux and for the cloud part,
they are based on our own OpenStack environment! =D
On Tue, 18 Feb 2025, Eli the Bearded wrote:
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)
That's an absurd argument. In no world, in no universe can you
reasonably expect people to not talk about you, think about you, write
about you, if they so choose.
Publishing photos and videos of you, without your consent, on the
other hand, is illegal, and can be punished severely. I have on
several occasions asked web sites to remove information about me,
sometimes they do it, sometimes they don't. I found a workaround by de-registering myself from the country I live in, and this removed my
data from a hueg nr of linked systems.
Then I can just live as a non-registered person, and that works quite
alright to be honest.
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Many good hearted leftists are leftists because they cannot see or
do not think
about second order, or third order, or N order effects. They get stuck at the
immediate problem and do not think of how the consequences of their
immediate,
knee jerk, solution will cause more pain down the line. This is sad. =(
Quite right. And there is the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B.
Kerr, Steven. ``On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B.''
Academy of Management journal 18.4 (1975): 769-783.
True!
Then of course you have evil leftists who are fully aware of this, and
are leftists due to political power gains.
And there's the post-modernist movement, with their sheer nonsense and
confusion, that finds good reception in such groups---probably more so
than in others.
It will destroy itself in time. Since they have abandoned objective
truth, and built their ethos on being the most vulnerable group, they
will go down in flames and in fighting, since nothing can be resolved
without any kind of objective truth to ground discussions. Sadly it
takes time.
It takes time. Intelligence *always* prevails, directly or
indirectly.
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Excellent! I wonder if it can replace mbsync nicely as well? Would be nice to
have fdm handle both my mbsync (so sync imap folders to local
laptop) _and_ to
take care of news posts! I can easily see how the filters would take care of
sorting the posts from various newsgroups into their respective folders in my
mail client.
I'm not a user of mbsync, but if you use mbsync just to download mail
from an IMAP server, then certainly fdm can replace it.
Excellent! As an added bonus, I would then get off mbsync. I think the creator
of mbsync was woke, and changed master/slave to something I no longer remember
in the code, in order not to offend people. Complete nonsense!
daemons. But it turns out that's the only thing about systemd that I
ever liked. And even then I changed my opinion. Daemons are not really >>>> meant to be managed by regular users; if there's any user that should
have the right to run a daemon, then they should have sysadmin powers, >>>> even if specifically just for the task at hand. Bottom line: it's a
neat thing that it does, but it might not quite be a real need.
I agree! That's the problem, it tries to be too neat, and to do too
much. In the
end you have this horrible monolithic kludge that will probably
crash due to its
complexity, and take the system with it.
Another thing I intensely dislike with it is the long and
convoluted syntax of
the commands. I mean just look at "ls"... it's beautiful! And "l"
followed by an
"s"! =D
Now look at this horrible mess: "systemctl list-timers" Yuck!
Yeah---there's a fine line between incrementing language and sticking
with the previous, well-established vocabulary. That's particularly
important for hackers because they have an imense amount of vocabulary
to manage and great fluency is essential to their day-to-day operations.
Another example from hell for me is powershell. I've never seen such long command! Microsoft powershell gurus must really enjoy typing!
to discuss the operational details of a specific system or software.
Certainly a UNIX system has its own particularties in their rc scripts,
but I would spend more time looking at POSIX-sh semantics, style,
philosophy and history because it's primarily sh scripts that engineer
the start-up schemes of UNIX systems. Because then every hacker can use
that kind of culture to investigate whatever system he's interested in.
Oh believe me... I've had to _fight_ to keep any resemblance of
teaching basic bash scripting in the linux course. At first students
hate it, but the brilliant ones later on tell me that they actually
picked up a lot of linux while bash scripting, instead of if we used
python or something else. This makes me happy and works as intended!
;)
In other words, I'd go for depth, not immediate working knowledge.
Every system administrator will have to grind through the manuals
anyway. Knowing how to start or stop daemons, say, in a particular
system would not be terribly useful in a classroom. Of course, we would
see how run the commands in whatever system we're using for the
illustrations at the black board or at the computer lab, but merely to
see things in motion.
I wish we could do that... but the amount of teaching hours and focus
on the vocation schools make that very difficult. =(
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
...But sadly I have also heard that polarization and leftists vs rightist
has infiltrated brazil as well. =( I hope it won't become as bad as
the US, that would be really bad for the country.
You can definitely say that. This theme is very interesting for people
interested in Brazil or perhaps the US. The US has a huge influence in
Brazil today.
Thank you! Very interesting, I had no idea!
I also imagine that it would be difficult to work from the beach. Too many >>> beautiful women, it must be very distracting!
You're quite right. It is indeed *very* distracting. In fact,
observing such things has given the conclusion that visual stimili (at
least in myself) is a really strong physiological thing: it seems quite
I also imagine that in south america it is still fashionable for women to be women, and that women are feminine? I hope so... I like that!
stronger than any will power. I started out reading at the beach so I
would have something to do there, staying longer in the sun. So my slow
reading doesn't defeat that purpose. I also often go during week days,
when the beach is not crowded with people. It worked out so well that
Aha... so that's how you get any work done! I imagine if you would go during beach rush hour, you'd not get a lot of things done. ;)
it seems to work like a second phase of my work schedule. I write in
the morning and read in the afternoon, intermixed with walking,
swimming and biking. I cannot do it *every* day because I need to
[be] ``the office'' some days.
Sounds like you have a very nice job there!
Bad coffee?? Doesn't brazil have the best coffee in the world?? Be
thankful that you don't have to drink the crap I have here in
europe. ;)
I think we produce wonderful coffee, but I also think that wonderful
coffee is mostly exported. Makes perfect sense: you sell your best
products to your best customers (those that pay more). That's a sorry
thing when living in a country with too many poor people: the industry
brings the cheapest things for you.
Ahhh.... never thought about that. On the other hand, there are
counter examples. When I went to japan, I had the best green tea I
ever had! Up until that point, I thought I didn't like green tea. It
always tasted horrible. Then in japan I went to some kind of luxury
tea tasting, and it was really, really good!
And what about beef? I heard there are wars in south america over
whether argentina or brazil has the best beef? Who is right?
But I consider coffee---no matter how good quality if might be---a drug
to be totally kept on a leash. I don't think we should make regular use
of any stimulants---of any drug at all.
Ahh... and here I drink between 0.5 and 0.7 liters per day! ;)
But I don't have to drink it... from time to time I just stop when I
get tired of it and move to tea instead, and never experience any
negative withdrawal symptoms. My favourite tea is Lapsang.
I am probably a naturalist. If coffee ``accelerates your physiology'',
then we can say that such ``speed'' is not the natural way of your body.
If you do it every day, you're totally not respecting the natural way of
the system. Not a religious thing at all---recall that perspective I
had on tattoos. So this is another illustration of why I find myself
more religious than the vast number of very religious people I've ever
met.
Well, maybe principled? I think religious has many supernatural connotations that I find nto so good to mix up in these kinds of discussions.
And this, in turn reminds me of the decades-old "two mathematicians
and a waitress" joke; see, e. g. (URI split for readability):
http://web.archive.org/web/20190622112330/ http://www.math.ttu.edu/~pearce/jokes1/joke-086.html
If you don't completely, then at least stop as you already do but then
Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> writes:
[...]
And this, in turn reminds me of the decades-old "two mathematicians
and a waitress" joke; see, e. g. (URI split for readability):
http://web.archive.org/web/20190622112330/
http://www.math.ttu.edu/~pearce/jokes1/joke-086.html
Lol. I don't get the joke. What's up with the joke? I'm slow. The waitress has a hard-science college degree but can't get a job in her
field? That's not a joke. I don't get the joke. Please explain? :)
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> writes:
[...]
And this, in turn reminds me of the decades-old "two mathematicians >>> and a waitress" joke; see, e. g. (URI split for readability):
http://web.archive.org/web/20190622112330/
http://www.math.ttu.edu/~pearce/jokes1/joke-086.html
Lol. I don't get the joke. What's up with the joke? I'm slow. The
waitress has a hard-science college degree but can't get a job in her
field? That's not a joke. I don't get the joke. Please explain? :)
The joke is that the second mathematician, who should know better, gave
the waitress the wrong answer to repeat.
The waitress pretends to be dumb when he gives her what will be the
wrong answer to his question.
Then, when he asks the question, she repeats his incorrect answer flawlessly, and adds in the correction he should have known himself.
I.e., the joke is that the mathematicians were not quite as "smart" as
they thouoght they were.
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
These days, even computer science departments are completely based on
Google services, say. Students don't even have the chance to run the
local mail server. It's appalling.
Not all hope is lost! ;) My courses are based on linux and for the cloud part,
they are based on our own OpenStack environment! =D
Yay---a 4-leaf clover. :P Seriously, though: good job.
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Tue, 18 Feb 2025, Eli the Bearded wrote:
In comp.misc, Computer Nerd Kev <not@telling.you.invalid> wrote:
Indeed, so long as you block all FB's scripts and images on
otherwise unrelated websites. Although I don't tend to make close
friends so I don't need to worry about controlling their FB usage.
Doesn't stop people from posting about you on FB. (Or worse, posting
photos of you on there.)
That's an absurd argument. In no world, in no universe can you
reasonably expect people to not talk about you, think about you, write
about you, if they so choose.
Publishing photos and videos of you, without your consent, on the
other hand, is illegal, and can be punished severely. I have on
several occasions asked web sites to remove information about me,
sometimes they do it, sometimes they don't. I found a workaround by
de-registering myself from the country I live in, and this removed my
data from a hueg nr of linked systems.
Then I can just live as a non-registered person, and that works quite
alright to be honest.
Nice hack.
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Thu, 27 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Many good hearted leftists are leftists because they cannot see orQuite right. And there is the folly of rewarding A while hoping for B.
do not think
about second order, or third order, or N order effects. They get stuck at the
immediate problem and do not think of how the consequences of their
immediate,
knee jerk, solution will cause more pain down the line. This is sad. =( >>>
Kerr, Steven. ``On the folly of rewarding A, while hoping for B.''
Academy of Management journal 18.4 (1975): 769-783.
True!
Then of course you have evil leftists who are fully aware of this, and >>>> are leftists due to political power gains.
And there's the post-modernist movement, with their sheer nonsense and
confusion, that finds good reception in such groups---probably more so
than in others.
It will destroy itself in time. Since they have abandoned objective
truth, and built their ethos on being the most vulnerable group, they
will go down in flames and in fighting, since nothing can be resolved
without any kind of objective truth to ground discussions. Sadly it
takes time.
It takes time. Intelligence *always* prevails, directly or indirectly.
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
It takes time. Intelligence *always* prevails, directly or
indirectly.
The only thing you safely can bet on is human greed.
Yeah---there's a fine line between incrementing language and sticking
with the previous, well-established vocabulary. That's particularly
important for hackers because they have an imense amount of vocabulary
to manage and great fluency is essential to their day-to-day operations.
Another example from hell for me is powershell. I've never seen such long
command! Microsoft powershell gurus must really enjoy typing!
Besides, it's yet another shell. Even if it were really great... Have
you seen Plan9's rc? It's a very neat shell. But it's not Bourne's sh.
It's hard to overcome the inertia of a large body moving at high speed.
Oh believe me... I've had to _fight_ to keep any resemblance of
teaching basic bash scripting in the linux course. At first students
hate it, but the brilliant ones later on tell me that they actually
picked up a lot of linux while bash scripting, instead of if we used
python or something else. This makes me happy and works as intended!
;)
No shell scripting? Okay---let's investigate a bit how the system
works. ``What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as
sweet.'' That's from a teacher I had called Juliet---she was pretty
In other words, I'd go for depth, not immediate working knowledge.
Every system administrator will have to grind through the manuals
anyway. Knowing how to start or stop daemons, say, in a particular
system would not be terribly useful in a classroom. Of course, we would >>> see how run the commands in whatever system we're using for the
illustrations at the black board or at the computer lab, but merely to
see things in motion.
I wish we could do that... but the amount of teaching hours and focus
on the vocation schools make that very difficult. =(
I know.
I also think that we shouldn't interfere so much with nature's course.
It's not that we don't care---it's that we respect the group. Let's let
the group follow its ``natural'' course. It's different when we're the captain; we then steer as we like.
You can be the captain
And I'll draw the chart
Sailing into destiny
Closer to the heart
-- Neil Peart, Peter Talbot, 1977
Thank you! Very interesting, I had no idea!
An excellent reference to how it got where it is is
United States Penetration of Brazil
Jan Knippers Black,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977
ISBN 0-8122-7720-1.
You're quite right. It is indeed *very* distracting. In fact,
observing such things has given the conclusion that visual stimili (at
least in myself) is a really strong physiological thing: it seems quite
I also imagine that in south america it is still fashionable for women to be >> women, and that women are feminine? I hope so... I like that!
Lol. A declaration like that won't get much support around here. :)
We're living in a globalized world. Even news casters now use words
like ``spoiler''. Literally---no translation needed. My geography
teachers in elementary school now seem like prophets.
stronger than any will power. I started out reading at the beach so I
would have something to do there, staying longer in the sun. So my slow >>> reading doesn't defeat that purpose. I also often go during week days,
when the beach is not crowded with people. It worked out so well that
Aha... so that's how you get any work done! I imagine if you would go during >> beach rush hour, you'd not get a lot of things done. ;)
Lol. You're quite right. One thing that's happening is that I'm a very approachable person and being there nearly every day brings new friends.
Now every now then there appears someone to chat. I feel unable to tell anyone to go away, even because---when people approach for chat---it's evidently the case that they're in need of something. (They might also
think that I'm killing time.) I never really tell them to go away.
That doesn't help the work much. Nevertheless, one of my deadlines got extended by a week and so I was able to get a project's phase done---I'm
on time!
it seems to work like a second phase of my work schedule. I write in
the morning and read in the afternoon, intermixed with walking,
swimming and biking. I cannot do it *every* day because I need to
[be] ``the office'' some days.
Sounds like you have a very nice job there!
It's my favorite ever. My at-the-office phase restarts in two weeks.
And what about beef? I heard there are wars in south america over
whether argentina or brazil has the best beef? Who is right?
I never quite heard of wars, but surely Argentina is known as one of the
best bovine meat producers. And so in Brazil's south. Historically,
they have a lot of tradition (and still do). So Argentina or not, it's
that whole region, going beyond Brazil and Argentina.
As a teenager (with my family), I traveled once to a beach place in the
state of Rio de Janeiro and one thing got stuck in my memory about a
dinner we had an Argentine restaurant. The (small) place was run by the owner himself, who was an Argentine. The meat was unforgettable.
Brazil's south is known as people who know how to barbeque like no one.
I'm sure the same applies to the Argentines.
But I consider coffee---no matter how good quality if might be---a drug
to be totally kept on a leash. I don't think we should make regular use >>> of any stimulants---of any drug at all.
Ahh... and here I drink between 0.5 and 0.7 liters per day! ;)
That's a huge quantity.
But I don't have to drink it... from time to time I just stop when I
get tired of it and move to tea instead, and never experience any
negative withdrawal symptoms. My favourite tea is Lapsang.
If you don't completely, then at least stop as you already do but then
don't substitute it for tea or any other caffeine or theobromine intake
(such as cocoa products like chocolate). Let your system rest from
these substances. The less you take in, the more tolerant you become.
The more you do, the less you get.
I am probably a naturalist. If coffee ``accelerates your physiology'',
then we can say that such ``speed'' is not the natural way of your body. >>> If you do it every day, you're totally not respecting the natural way of >>> the system. Not a religious thing at all---recall that perspective I
had on tattoos. So this is another illustration of why I find myself
more religious than the vast number of very religious people I've ever
met.
Well, maybe principled? I think religious has many supernatural connotations >> that I find nto so good to mix up in these kinds of discussions.
``Principled'' it is. Words don't really matter. We need them here,
but they're just the tags on the pointers. Remember Juliet? ``What's
in a name?''
On Fri, 7 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Wed, 26 Feb 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
These days, even computer science departments are completely based on
Google services, say. Students don't even have the chance to run the
local mail server. It's appalling.
Not all hope is lost! ;) My courses are based on linux and for the
cloud part, they are based on our own OpenStack environment! =D
Yay---a 4-leaf clover. :P Seriously, though: good job.
Thank you! =) I'm hoping that I will be able to convince another
school to dump Azure in favour of our OpenStack environment. Would be wonderful to have combatted the forces of darkness, and won, at two
schools! =)
They like the fact that I can give them a fixed price per student and
month, instead of the shitshow that is Azure pricing. They also like
that the school gets a dedicated server, so should someone break in
and do crypto mining, they won't get a large bill like they do with
Azure.
More often than you would think, do student credentials leak to github
and then they pay for someone crypto mining. That problem they won't
have with my environment. =)
On Fri, 7 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
It takes time. Intelligence *always* prevails, directly or indirectly.
That is the way! Even though it takes time, and the wait is
depressing, eventually, as you say, intelligence and positivity always prevail! =)
My proof: We've had nuclear weapons for many decades, and despite all
the idiots in power, we have _not_ ended civilization. This proves
that there is more good than bad in man. =)
On Fri, 7 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Yeah---there's a fine line between incrementing language and stickingAnother example from hell for me is powershell. I've never seen such long >>> command! Microsoft powershell gurus must really enjoy typing!
with the previous, well-established vocabulary. That's particularly
important for hackers because they have an imense amount of vocabulary >>>> to manage and great fluency is essential to their day-to-day operations. >>>
Besides, it's yet another shell. Even if it were really great... Have
you seen Plan9's rc? It's a very neat shell. But it's not Bourne's sh.
It's hard to overcome the inertia of a large body moving at high speed.
Never seen. How does it differ from plain old bash?
Oh believe me... I've had to _fight_ to keep any resemblance of
teaching basic bash scripting in the linux course. At first students
hate it, but the brilliant ones later on tell me that they actually
picked up a lot of linux while bash scripting, instead of if we used
python or something else. This makes me happy and works as intended!
;)
No shell scripting? Okay---let's investigate a bit how the system
works. ``What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as
sweet.'' That's from a teacher I had called Juliet---she was pretty
True. I'm currently discussing the course plans for the autumn, I think I have a
good chance at sneaking in some good old shell through the backdoor. Keep your
fingers crossed! =D
On Fri, 7 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Thank you! Very interesting, I had no idea!
An excellent reference to how it got where it is is
United States Penetration of Brazil
Jan Knippers Black,
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977
ISBN 0-8122-7720-1.
Thank you for the recommendation. Sadly I do not think my schedule allows it at
the moment, I have way too many philosophical topics on my plate at the moment.
=(
You're quite right. It is indeed *very* distracting. In fact,I also imagine that in south america it is still fashionable for women to be
observing such things has given the conclusion that visual stimili (at >>>> least in myself) is a really strong physiological thing: it seems quite >>>
women, and that women are feminine? I hope so... I like that!
Lol. A declaration like that won't get much support around here. :)
We're living in a globalized world. Even news casters now use words
like ``spoiler''. Literally---no translation needed. My geography
teachers in elementary school now seem like prophets.
What!?! Please don't spoil my dreams of travelling to Brazil meeting
loads of beautiful brazilian women who would be naturally interested
in a swede with blue eyes! ;)
stronger than any will power. I started out reading at the beach so I >>>> would have something to do there, staying longer in the sun. So my slow >>>> reading doesn't defeat that purpose. I also often go during week days, >>>> when the beach is not crowded with people. It worked out so well that
Aha... so that's how you get any work done! I imagine if you would go during
beach rush hour, you'd not get a lot of things done. ;)
Lol. You're quite right. One thing that's happening is that I'm a very
approachable person and being there nearly every day brings new friends.
Now every now then there appears someone to chat. I feel unable to tell
anyone to go away, even because---when people approach for chat---it's
evidently the case that they're in need of something. (They might also
think that I'm killing time.) I never really tell them to go away.
That doesn't help the work much. Nevertheless, one of my deadlines got
extended by a week and so I was able to get a project's phase done---I'm
on time!
Amazing! You couldn't get further from the swedish folk psyche. In sweden two people could sit next to each other for years, and at most nod to each other. Maybe after a year or two, a small conversation might start.
In the subway, no one talks to each other. People mainstain silence and look at
their phones. Only people who know each other talk on the subway. Definitely not
strangers.
it seems to work like a second phase of my work schedule. I write in
the morning and read in the afternoon, intermixed with walking,
swimming and biking. I cannot do it *every* day because I need to
[be] ``the office'' some days.
Sounds like you have a very nice job there!
It's my favorite ever. My at-the-office phase restarts in two weeks.
Ouch! Hopefully it will not last too long!
And what about beef? I heard there are wars in south america over
whether argentina or brazil has the best beef? Who is right?
I never quite heard of wars, but surely Argentina is known as one of the
best bovine meat producers. And so [is] Brazil's south. Historically,
they have a lot of tradition (and still do). So Argentina or not, it's
that whole region, going beyond Brazil and Argentina.
As a teenager (with my family), I traveled once to a beach place in
the state of Rio de Janeiro and one thing got stuck in my memory
about a dinner we had [at] an Argentine restaurant. The (small)
place was run by the owner himself, who was an Argentine. The meat
was unforgettable. Brazil's south is known as people who know how to
[barbecue] like no one. I'm sure the same applies to the Argentines.
Another dream! Except for the women, above, I dream of going to brazil and argentina for a beef and bbq safari! This would be excellent! Maybe I would never leave again? =)
But I consider coffee---no matter how good quality if might be---a drug >>>> to be totally kept on a leash. I don't think we should make regular use >>>> of any stimulants---of any drug at all.
Ahh... and here I drink between 0.5 and 0.7 liters per day! ;)
That's a huge quantity.
Really? Just regular coffee. No espresso! ;)
But I don't have to drink it... from time to time I just stop when I
get tired of it and move to tea instead, and never experience any
negative withdrawal symptoms. My favourite tea is Lapsang.
If you don't completely, then at least stop as you already do but then
don't substitute it for tea or any other caffeine or theobromine intake
(such as cocoa products like chocolate). Let your system rest from
these substances. The less you take in, the more tolerant you become.
The more you do, the less you get.
Interesting experiment! I've tried it due to chance a couple of times, but then
I get so tired in the evening, so I won't get as much quality computer time in
when the wife sleeps. ;)
Rich <rich@example.invalid> writes:
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
The joke is that the second mathematician, who should knowhttp://www.math.ttu.edu/~pearce/jokes1/joke-086.htmlLol. I don't get the joke. What's up with the joke?
better, gave the waitress the wrong answer to repeat.
Why was it the wrong answer? Isn't
(1/3) x^3 + c
the integral of x^2?
The waitress pretends to be dumb when he gives her what will be theThat's a mean waitress.
wrong answer to his question.
I.e., the joke is that the mathematicians were not quite as
"smart" as they thouoght they were.
Thank you! =) I'm hoping that I will be able to convince another
school to dump Azure in favour of our OpenStack environment. Would be
wonderful to have combatted the forces of darkness, and won, at two
schools! =)
They like the fact that I can give them a fixed price per student and
month, instead of the shitshow that is Azure pricing. They also like
that the school gets a dedicated server, so should someone break in
and do crypto mining, they won't get a large bill like they do with
Azure.
More often than you would think, do student credentials leak to github
and then they pay for someone crypto mining. That problem they won't
have with my environment. =)
Wait---is that service you provide yourself for a price?
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Fri, 7 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
[...]
It takes time. Intelligence *always* prevails, directly or indirectly.
That is the way! Even though it takes time, and the wait is
depressing, eventually, as you say, intelligence and positivity always
prevail! =)
My proof: We've had nuclear weapons for many decades, and despite all
the idiots in power, we have _not_ ended civilization. This proves
that there is more good than bad in man. =)
Hey now, hey now... :) I hope you never regret saying that. :)
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Fri, 7 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Yeah---there's a fine line between incrementing language and sticking >>>>> with the previous, well-established vocabulary. That's particularly >>>>> important for hackers because they have an imense amount of vocabulary >>>>> to manage and great fluency is essential to their day-to-day operations. >>>>Another example from hell for me is powershell. I've never seen such long >>>> command! Microsoft powershell gurus must really enjoy typing!
Besides, it's yet another shell. Even if it were really great... Have
you seen Plan9's rc? It's a very neat shell. But it's not Bourne's sh. >>> It's hard to overcome the inertia of a large body moving at high speed.
Never seen. How does it differ from plain old bash?
The thing I recall was that rc had a native list data structure. I
don't recall much more than that; the feeling was that it was neat,
tidy, more concise, more elegant. It felt closer to a general-purpose programming language, while still supporting the loved Bourne syntax.
Oh believe me... I've had to _fight_ to keep any resemblance of
teaching basic bash scripting in the linux course. At first students
hate it, but the brilliant ones later on tell me that they actually
picked up a lot of linux while bash scripting, instead of if we used
python or something else. This makes me happy and works as intended!
;)
No shell scripting? Okay---let's investigate a bit how the system
works. ``What's in a name? A rose by any other name would smell as
sweet.'' That's from a teacher I had called Juliet---she was pretty
True. I'm currently discussing the course plans for the autumn, I think I have a
good chance at sneaking in some good old shell through the backdoor. Keep your
fingers crossed! =D
Fingers crossed. :D
Lol. A declaration like that won't get much support around here. :)
We're living in a globalized world. Even news casters now use words
like ``spoiler''. Literally---no translation needed. My geography
teachers in elementary school now seem like prophets.
What!?! Please don't spoil my dreams of travelling to Brazil meeting
loads of beautiful brazilian women who would be naturally interested
in a swede with blue eyes! ;)
Lol. I think they would be. :) But let me tell you that everywhere in
the world I went I found as many beautiful women as I find over here.
Amazing! You couldn't get further from the swedish folk psyche. In sweden two
people could sit next to each other for years, and at most nod to each other.
Maybe after a year or two, a small conversation might start.
That's horrible.
In the subway, no one talks to each other. People mainstain silence and look at
their phones. Only people who know each other talk on the subway. Definitely not
strangers.
Reminds me of New York City.
I don't think it's too different here in Rio. But I often greet people
as a gesture of recognition of their existence. It turns out people do
like that. At first you greet people alone; it's too unexpected for
them to react. (This makes the greeter feel odd and so people usually
stop on the first attempt.) Little by little, though, things change.
You need to be okay to do this properly. (If you don't feel like
talking to people, you will likely not work.) People like respect. Recognizing their existence is an important gesture. There are psychoanalytical explanations to all of this, but, since it's not
obvious, it would take a while to build the result from first
principles.
At the beach, I don't mean that random people come over for a chat. I
mean people who often find me there---people who work there or who often
go there as well. They're all used to me being there. And every now
and then a friend meets me by chance or knew they would find me there.
It's my favorite ever. My at-the-office phase restarts in two weeks.
Ouch! Hopefully it will not last too long!
Two mornings per week. I still to get lunch at home---thankfully.
Another dream! Except for the women, above, I dream of going to brazil and >> argentina for a beef and bbq safari! This would be excellent! Maybe I would >> never leave again? =)
I wouldn't. :) I really love this place.
And I agree about the women---we really don't have any shortage of
beautiful, caring women. But the fact is that that's true anywhere else
in the world. It is true that women and men are losing their health
early in life, which doesn't favor their looks; still, everywhere I go I
am often hypnotized by feminine natural enchants.
That's a huge quantity.
Really? Just regular coffee. No espresso! ;)
Huge. If it were espresso, it'd be much worse. Remember the American
actor Philip Seymour Hoffman? He likely died out of some drug-related
abuse back in 2014. It seems in those days his morning routine included
a quadruple espresso.
I know kids drink it, but coffee is a drug and it has very strong
effects. It seems people hardly notice it. I conjecture that it's
because people start with very little and increase it over time. To see
the effects, I think you need to start cutting it out, spending a long
time off all kinds of drugs and bad food, and then taking it again.
(Also, get rid of bad quality coffee. There is no reason we can't roast
our own coffee at home, by the way; it's a super simple thing.)
You've mentioned being tired without it. There's no miracle when you're under the influence of coffee. You'll pay for it one way or another;
that's very certain.
Hey, you know where the expression ``coffee break'' comes from? It
comes from World War II---reference below. Factories implemented the
coffee break so that they could get coffee into people's systems.
Coffee (like all drugs) are desensitizers, excellent for war time, in
the factories and in the battle field.
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
Drugs and War: What Is the Relationship?
Peter Andreas, 2019.
Annual Review of Political Science. Vol. 22:57-73 (Volume publication
date May 2019) https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051017-103748
https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-polisci-051017-103748
--8<-------------------------------------------------------->8---
Interesting experiment! I've tried it due to chance a couple of times, but then
I get so tired in the evening, so I won't get as much quality computer time in
when the wife sleeps. ;)
I had a girlfriend once who lived with me. Our relationship lasted for
about 3 years and we lived together for 2. I did this, too---she'd go
to bed earlier and I'd work until a few hours later. I regret all of
that. If I were really serious about my work, I'd wake up a few hours earlier (than her). It's not like I was more productive. What was
really happening was that work was also working like a drug---and I was definitely under the influence of coffee and other nutritional life
killers.
Not going to sleep with your wife is definitely a missed opportunity.
If you don't love your wife, you can split; but if you do, you should go
to bed with her. (Wny wouldn't you? For work? Nonsense.) In fact,
you probably should even be the first to go to bed (and then call her).
Without coffee, I'm sure you get to bed very early (though it's not
gonna happen overnight). And I wouldn't be surprised if you
(eventually) find enough energy to be up first, too.
In comp.misc, Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
Rich <rich@example.invalid> writes:
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
The joke is that the second mathematician, who should knowhttp://www.math.ttu.edu/~pearce/jokes1/joke-086.htmlLol. I don't get the joke. What's up with the joke?
better, gave the waitress the wrong answer to repeat.
Why was it the wrong answer? Isn't
(1/3) x^3 + c
the integral of x^2?
The answer given to the waitress, who pretended not to understand it,
didn't include the +c hence was incorrect.
I'd say the joke is mathematician incorrectly assumes a blonde woman
can't do math.
I.e., the joke is that the mathematicians were not quite as
"smart" as they thouoght they were.
Not smart because they fall for tired stereotypes.
Elijah
------
but would mathematicians really stoop to doing simple calc?
On Sat, 8 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Thank you! =) I'm hoping that I will be able to convince another
school to dump Azure in favour of our OpenStack environment. Would be
wonderful to have combatted the forces of darkness, and won, at two
schools! =)
They like the fact that I can give them a fixed price per student and
month, instead of the shitshow that is Azure pricing. They also like
that the school gets a dedicated server, so should someone break in
and do crypto mining, they won't get a large bill like they do with
Azure.
More often than you would think, do student credentials leak to github
and then they pay for someone crypto mining. That problem they won't
have with my environment. =)
Wait---is that service you provide yourself for a price?
Yes, I do. =) Are you interested? ;)
On Sat, 8 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Fri, 7 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Never seen. How does it differ from plain old bash?Yeah---there's a fine line between incrementing language and sticking >>>>>> with the previous, well-established vocabulary. That's particularly >>>>>> important for hackers because they have an imense amount of vocabulary >>>>>> to manage and great fluency is essential to their day-to-day operations. >>>>>Another example from hell for me is powershell. I've never seen such long >>>>> command! Microsoft powershell gurus must really enjoy typing!
Besides, it's yet another shell. Even if it were really great... Have >>>> you seen Plan9's rc? It's a very neat shell. But it's not Bourne's sh. >>>> It's hard to overcome the inertia of a large body moving at high speed. >>>
The thing I recall was that rc had a native list data structure. I
don't recall much more than that; the feeling was that it was neat,
tidy, more concise, more elegant. It felt closer to a general-purpose
programming language, while still supporting the loved Bourne syntax.
It's a shame it died. =( Wasn't the idea to refine the good, old, Unix
ideas, and improve on lessons learned?
To take the idea of everything as a file, to the extreme?
I often fantasize if I will see another OS revolution like Linux in my lifetime. That would be awesome!
Yes, I do. =) Are you interested? ;)
Not quite. :) I like to run my own stuff. But I'm happy to see that it
works over there. It seems like a pretty nice business. I would really
love to run a business like that. And I would be able to if I we were
back in the 90s, I guess. Am I too off the facts?
It's a shame it died. =( Wasn't the idea to refine the good, old, Unix
ideas, and improve on lessons learned?
I wouldn't say it died. I believe Plan 9 is doing pretty well, but I
don't think they're trying to compete with popular systems. It's a
research system, I'd say. OpenBSD is a research system, even though
it's totally usable. In fact, it's the one I like to use.
I often fantasize if I will see another OS revolution like Linux in my
lifetime. That would be awesome!
I feel the revolution is not Linux per se. Surely Linux is sound---no
doubt there. But it's also quite clear that Richard Stallman had the
*whole* idea in mind easily before Linux. Without Linux, for example,
the GNU project could have taken the FreeBSD kernel and made a complete system out of it. In fact, they did. So, the revolution OS is not
quite Linux. Even because Linux did not bring anything really new back
in the 90s.
Perhaps the novelty of the GNU project was that it was Free Software.
What I think it's hard to do even today is to think of an operating
system for microcomputers that's really different from UNIX. It's UNIX that's the revolution. And now it's stuck in system developers' mind so
much that I think they hard time coming up with something new.
On Sat, 8 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Amazing! You couldn't get further from the swedish folk psyche. In sweden two
people could sit next to each other for years, and at most nod to each other.
Maybe after a year or two, a small conversation might start.
That's horrible.
Well, it can be nice too, if you're an introvert or not in the mood
for talking. =)
Usually there is a talk about the swedish ketchup effect, when
foreigners move to sweden.
They try to get to know swedish people, and they get nothing, nothing, nothing, and then everything at once. It can take years to get to know
a sweden, but once they consider you a friend, it is a deep
connection.
I found this difficult when I was living in the US for a year. It was
super easy to go by myself to a bar, and talk to some people. It was impossible to get to know someone below the shallow facade.
In the subway, no one talks to each other. People mainstain silence
and look at their phones. Only people who know each other talk on
the subway. Definitely not strangers.
Reminds me of New York City.
Maybe... I haven't been there for probably 25 year or more. I imagine that smartphones have infected them as they have infected almost everyone. =/
I don't think it's too different here in Rio. But I often greet people
as a gesture of recognition of their existence. It turns out people do
like that. At first you greet people alone; it's too unexpected for
them to react. (This makes the greeter feel odd and so people usually
stop on the first attempt.) Little by little, though, things change.
You need to be okay to do this properly. (If you don't feel like
talking to people, you will likely not work.) People like respect.
Recognizing their existence is an important gesture. There are
psychoanalytical explanations to all of this, but, since it's not
obvious, it would take a while to build the result from first
principles.
It is interesting. Your life situation can also determine how open you
are.
My father is a widower, and I live in a different country. So he has
been quite alone but he has started to get involved in 2 retired
peoples associations, and also has a weekly game of boule/petanque as
well. That has become his social world, and he has met many new people
that way.
I think, when people reach retirement age, a lot of the facade drops naturally and they become more open perhaps.
And I agree about the women---we really don't have any shortage of
beautiful, caring women. But the fact is that that's true anywhere else
in the world. It is true that women and men are losing their health
early in life, which doesn't favor their looks; still, everywhere I go I
am often hypnotized by feminine natural enchants.
This is the truth. A very interesting phenomenon at the moment is the
global fertility crisis.
My bet is that it is a complex phenomenon consisting of chemicals,
unhealthy lifestyles, shifting norms, feminism and demographics.
Interesting experiment! I've tried it due to chance a couple of
times, but then I get so tired in the evening, so I won't get as
much quality computer time in when the wife sleeps. ;)
I had a girlfriend once who lived with me. Our relationship lasted for
about 3 years and we lived together for 2. I did this, too---she'd go
to bed earlier and I'd work until a few hours later. I regret all of
that. If I were really serious about my work, I'd wake up a few hours
earlier (than her). It's not like I was more productive. What was
really happening was that work was also working like a drug---and I was
definitely under the influence of coffee and other nutritional life
killers.
Not going to sleep with your wife is definitely a missed opportunity.
If you don't love your wife, you can split; but if you do, you should go
to bed with her. (Wny wouldn't you? For work? Nonsense.) In fact,
you probably should even be the first to go to bed (and then call her).
Well, what I do, to be more precise, is that when she goes to bed, we
usually talk for half an hour or so. Then she goes to sleep, and then
I get 2-3 hours to myself.
I need time for myself and my interests, since she is not into
technology and science fiction so the evenings I spend pursuing my
hobbies and interests she has no interest in, so that we can do things
we both enjoy during the days.
Without coffee, I'm sure you get to bed very early (though it's not
gonna happen overnight). And I wouldn't be surprised if you
(eventually) find enough energy to be up first, too.
Waking up early is physically and mentally painful for me. It is
torture. Coffee or no coffee, I have always been a night owl.
I have been know to pay 200 USD more for plane tickets in order to not
have to wake up before 10 in the morning.
Now I am in the blessed situation to live +1 hour time difference from
my main customers, so that allows me to wake up at 10:00 every day,
and start working at around 10:05. =D
I don't know if I would ever be able to wake up at 07:30 to be at an
office at 09:00, then space out for at least an hour before fully
awake, and zombie walk through the day.
I remember when I was young,
I used to sleep 5-6 hours per night,
to still keep my night time hobby time, while having to wake up at
7:30 and go to work. I shudder at the memory and hope I will make it
to retirement age, with my current lifestyle! =)
On Mon, 10 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Yes, I do. =) Are you interested? ;)
Not quite. :) I like to run my own stuff. But I'm happy to see that it
What a shame. =( Would have been great to add a Brazilian school to my customers!
works over there. It seems like a pretty nice business. I would really
It's alright. It's more of a side business actually. The main business
is consulting as teachers, and we then have the lab environment as a
nice value add service that we sell when we get the consulting gig as teachers.
The challenge is inertia and trust. There are a lot of schools who run
azure, are unhappy, and refuse to change because the alterantive is
not azure. So they end up paying 10x or more, because they do not
trust small business. It is very sad. =(
love to run a business like that. And I would be able to if I we were
back in the 90s, I guess. Am I too off the facts?
I think you could do it today if you dedicated a couple of months to
building up the environment. OpenStack has come a _long_ way and is no
longer the enormous beast to setup that it once was.
On Mon, 10 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
It's a shame it died. =( Wasn't the idea to refine the good, old, Unix
ideas, and improve on lessons learned?
I wouldn't say it died. I believe Plan 9 is doing pretty well, but I
don't think they're trying to compete with popular systems. It's a
research system, I'd say. OpenBSD is a research system, even though
it's totally usable. In fact, it's the one I like to use.
Would be nice if someone took Plan 9 and managed to get it to run natively on servers and laptops, or even one brand of server and one brand of laptop. I would definitely try it!
How is openbsd as a daily driver? I've been close to replacing my
opensuse with freebsd. It wasn't quite there in terms of hardware
support (it lacked anything beyond G wifi, which is too slow). Maybe
openbsd is better than freebsd?
I believe Plan 9 is doing pretty well ...
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> writes:
but would mathematicians really stoop to doing simple calc?Didn't get your question, although I understand every word in it.
Calculus is for engineers and physicists, mathematicians want to be
doing things that are not Solved Problems.
Eli the Bearded <*@eli.users.panix.com> wrote or quoted:
Calculus is for engineers and physicists, mathematicians want to be
doing things that are not Solved Problems.
The basics of calculus were hammered out ages ago, but it's still
a big deal for pushing the envelope in pure and applied math.
These days, researchers often mash up calculus with other fields.
Take the I-functions of Calabi-Yau manifolds, for instance.
There, they're throwing calculus together with differential
equations and algebra to get a handle on geometric structures.
These matter for string theory, but still are mathematics.
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
I believe Plan 9 is doing pretty well ...
<https://youtu.be/-zNSQmS2gls>
onion@anon.invalid (Mr Ön!on) writes:
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
I believe Plan 9 is doing pretty well ...
<https://youtu.be/-zNSQmS2gls>
Thanks! Have you watched? Can you explain why they choose the name?
onion@anon.invalid (Mr Ön!on) writes:
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
I believe Plan 9 is doing pretty well ...
<https://youtu.be/-zNSQmS2gls>
Thanks! Have you watched? Can you explain why they choose the name?
In article <87o6y7bomx.fsf@example.com>,
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
onion@anon.invalid (Mr Èn!on) writes:
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
I believe Plan 9 is doing pretty well ...
<https://youtu.be/-zNSQmS2gls>
Thanks! Have you watched? Can you explain why they choose the name?
The operating system or the movie? I don't know why the movie
was called that; perhaps Ed Wood just thought it was clever. It
refers to a plot point, the 9th extraterrestrial plan to destroy
earth.
At Bell Labs, in the 1127 research group, it was something of a
tradition to give things names that were a bit of a joke, and
also gave others headaches. The original name for "Unix" was
UNICS, as a pun on Multics, for example (and some have claimed
it had a double meaning as an off-color joke making reference to
a "castrated" version of its predecessor, especially given that
the usual pronunciation was aliterative with the word "eunuchs".
I'm not sure I believe that, though).
Anyway, Plan 9, the operating system, was named in a similar
vein after the movie. There are a few other historical movie
references associated with it, as well: the original window
system was named "8 1/2" (though using the Unicode code point
for the fraction 1/2), in reference to the Fellini film. In
between the 2nd and 3rd Editions, the working name for the
system at the Labs was "Brazil", in homage to the Terry Gilliam
dystopian cult classic. While the name was changed back to Plan
9 for the open source 3rd Edition release, a small reference to
this is left in the name of the current window system, "rio",
presumably a reference to Rio de Janeiro.
- Dan C.
Addendum: 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' is widely thought to be the worst
movie ever made. I do hope that this does not reflect anybody's adverse >opinion of Plan 9 OS . . .
On 2025-03-08, Rich wrote:
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> writes:
http://web.archive.org/web/20190622112330/
http://www.math.ttu.edu/~pearce/jokes1/joke-086.html
Lol. I don’t get the joke. What’s up with the joke? I’m slow. The
waitress has a hard-science college degree but can’t get a job in her
field? That’s not a joke. I don’t get the joke. Please explain? :)
The joke is that the second mathematician, who should know better,
gave the waitress the wrong answer to repeat.
The waitress pretends to be dumb when he gives her what will be the
wrong answer to his question.
Then, when he asks the question, she repeats his incorrect answer flawlessly, and adds in the correction he should have known himself.
I. e., the joke is that the mathematicians were not quite as “smart”
as they thought they were.
On 2025-02-27, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
But I consider coffee—no matter how good quality if might be—a drug
to be totally kept on a leash. I don’t think we should make regular
use of any stimulants—of any drug at all.
I am probably a naturalist. If coffee “accelerates your physiology”, then we can say that such “speed” is not the natural way of your body. If you do it every day, you’re totally not respecting the natural way
of the system. Not a religious thing at all—recall that perspective
I had on tattoos. So this is another illustration of why I find myself
more religious than the vast number of very religious people I’ve ever met.
These findings justify the assertion that very numerous individual
blood differences exist in man, too, and that there are certainly
other differences which could not yet be detected. Whether each individual blood really has a character of its own, or how often
there is complete correspondence, we cannot yet say.
His colleague Alfréd Rényi said, “A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems”, and Erdős drank copious quantities;
this quotation is often attributed incorrectly to Erdős, but Erdős himself ascribed it to Rényi. After his mother’s death in 1971 he started taking antidepressants and amphetamines, despite the concern
of his friends, one of whom (Ron Graham) bet him $500 that he could
not stop taking them for a month. Erdős won the bet but complained
that it impacted his performance: “You’ve showed me I’m not an addict. But I didn’t get any work done. I’d get up in the morning and stare at a blank piece of paper. I’d have no ideas, just like
an ordinary person. You’ve set mathematics back a month.” After he won the bet, he promptly resumed his use of Ritalin and Benzedrine.
I first got into speed because it was a utilitarian drug and kept you
awake when you needed to be awake when otherwise you’d just be flat
out on your back. If you drive to Glasgow for nine hours in the back
of a sweaty truck you don’t really feel like going onstage feeling
all bright and breezy. […] It’s the only drug I’ve found that I can get on with, and I’ve tried them all – except smack [heroin] and morphine: I’ve never “fixed” [injected] anything.
That's horrible.
Well, it can be nice too, if you're an introvert or not in the mood
for talking. =)
I'd say it can be less scary or more comforting. I don't really believe
that any human deep down prefers to be left alone. My first hypothesis
Usually there is a talk about the swedish ketchup effect, when
foreigners move to sweden.
Ketchup effect? Wow. I had never heard of that. I get it. The whole
thing comes down at once. :)
I found this difficult when I was living in the US for a year. It was
super easy to go by myself to a bar, and talk to some people. It was
impossible to get to know someone below the shallow facade.
I observed the same. I also observed this in other cultures. For
example, the Dutch culture. I found the Americans way more honest and
close than the Dutch. My hypothesis for explaining this was that the
United States offers a more trusting community; the Dutch deal with lots
of in and outflows of people from all over Europe. Europe has much more loose frontiers, say, than the United States. I think I'm trying to say
that the United States is more homogeneous. The Dutch are more smiles
on a first encounter and the Americans less so. But beneath that the Americans are really more friendly.
Other things I've noticed. The Americans easily trust what you say.
(Some will be mildly outraged if you don't trust what they're saying.)
The Dutch are so not like that and you can observe that in commerce.
Now, having said that, it's one thing to talk of Americans in the
Midwest, say. It's another thing to talk of Americans on the East
coast, say. The parallel I make here is between small city and big
city. It's not unusual for us to find people more friendly in small
cities.
Try to ask what is it to a local on 5th Avenue, New York City. They are
not even going to look at you---you'll likely feel like a ghost.
In the subway, no one talks to each other. People mainstain silence
and look at their phones. Only people who know each other talk on
the subway. Definitely not strangers.
Reminds me of New York City.
Maybe... I haven't been there for probably 25 year or more. I imagine that >> smartphones have infected them as they have infected almost everyone. =/
My observations are pre-smartphones. Before smartphones, people's faces
were buried in books on the subway. They've just replaced the book with
the phone.
This is the truth. A very interesting phenomenon at the moment is the
global fertility crisis.
Are we talking about male fertility? I'm gonna follow that one very
closely.
My bet is that it is a complex phenomenon consisting of chemicals,
unhealthy lifestyles, shifting norms, feminism and demographics.
I agree. It seems that way. Although I'd remove feminism if we're
talking about male fertility. But surely women is also involved in
men's everything (and /vice versa/). There's really no separation.
There never was.
There has ``always'' been a war between men and women. It's a pretty
sad one, in fact. It is---to me---much more serious than military wars.
Well, what I do, to be more precise, is that when she goes to bed, we
usually talk for half an hour or so. Then she goes to sleep, and then
I get 2-3 hours to myself.
I need time for myself and my interests, since she is not into
technology and science fiction so the evenings I spend pursuing my
hobbies and interests she has no interest in, so that we can do things
we both enjoy during the days.
Of course, it all makes perfect sense. The burden of the proof is
totally mine because I am the one speaking out unreasonable things. But
I'm not trying to prove anything---it's too hard. So stay alert. :) You don't need time for yourself and your interests. That's actually false.
Time for yourself and your interests is likely a way for you to feel
like that day was worth it. But most likely the reason you feel that
way is because there's something wrong already, before that. You're
living with the assumption that you need to /have fun/ or something like that.
Human life does not really require having fun. Fun is not really
something we need. There's nothing wrong with having fun. One thing I
observe in very young kids is that they need no toys. A little ant,
say, is quite a toy. But then they're given a bunch of toys. You know
those those eye-candies that are hung above a craddle? Babies likely
feel enchanted by them, as they move and shine. I claim they need none
of that. In fact, that's too much stimuli.
You don't need your science and your interests. And I also claim that
you would in fact have a lot more with science and your interests if you
stop pursuing them. Do your work. That's healthy. You do need to
study it. But guide yourself only by a very rational thing. If there
is no time for your science, then there is no time for it. It's not a
bad life. A bad life is an unnatural life. We've distanced ourselves
quite a bit from nature; it's all very seductive. Now we need to really
walk in a different direction in order to get out of this.
Waking up early is physically and mentally painful for me. It is
torture. Coffee or no coffee, I have always been a night owl.
I was a night person as a teenager and carried that on for many years.
I never thought I'd say otherwise. But I can easily say it now. If I
were to go back in time, I wouldn't lose a single night for any reason---except to stay with someone in the hospital, say. It's just
not worth it. Hppainess is physical disposition, which requires
impeccable health.
I have been know to pay 200 USD more for plane tickets in order to not
have to wake up before 10 in the morning.
That's worth it. :)
Now I am in the blessed situation to live +1 hour time difference from
my main customers, so that allows me to wake up at 10:00 every day,
and start working at around 10:05. =D
Enjoy. :) That's also good.
I remember when I was young,
You're still young. :)
I used to sleep 5-6 hours per night,
That's little sleep.
to still keep my night time hobby time, while having to wake up at
7:30 and go to work. I shudder at the memory and hope I will make it
to retirement age, with my current lifestyle! =)
I'm sure you want to keep all the health you have and even recover
anything you've temporarily lost. And it's worth it! That's your best retirement plan. Happiness is health in every sense of the word. Do
not believe the happy people who've lost their health or youth, which is
the same thing.
What a shame. =( Would have been great to add a Brazilian school to my
customers!
You can still add a Brazilian school to your clientele. I'm just not a school. :)
works over there. It seems like a pretty nice business. I would really
It's alright. It's more of a side business actually. The main business
is consulting as teachers, and we then have the lab environment as a
nice value add service that we sell when we get the consulting gig as
teachers.
So the main service is what? A set of teachers to give a school the
ability to teach computer courses? Suppose I'm a high school. How do
would you offer to me your services? I currently have a single teacher
who teaches a Python course---the teacher is a math teacher.
The challenge is inertia and trust. There are a lot of schools who run
azure, are unhappy, and refuse to change because the alterantive is
not azure. So they end up paying 10x or more, because they do not
trust small business. It is very sad. =(
That made me think your service is just a cloud-like service---storage, office-like web applications, mail, calendar, video conference et
cetera. Are there teachers involved?
love to run a business like that. And I would be able to if I we were
back in the 90s, I guess. Am I too off the facts?
I think you could do it today if you dedicated a couple of months to
building up the environment. OpenStack has come a _long_ way and is no
longer the enormous beast to setup that it once was.
That's interesting. But tell me about the teachers because I didn't get
the whole thing yet. I would think a service like that would require a
24-7 support as the most challenging part.
I wouldn't say it died. I believe Plan 9 is doing pretty well, but I
don't think they're trying to compete with popular systems. It's a
research system, I'd say. OpenBSD is a research system, even though
it's totally usable. In fact, it's the one I like to use.
Would be nice if someone took Plan 9 and managed to get it to run natively on
servers and laptops, or even one brand of server and one brand of laptop. I >> would definitely try it!
I've ran Plan 9 on an x86 virtual machine, which means it will probably install okay on popular hardware. I think some people do run Plan 9 as
their daily system.
How is openbsd as a daily driver? I've been close to replacing my
opensuse with freebsd. It wasn't quite there in terms of hardware
support (it lacked anything beyond G wifi, which is too slow). Maybe
openbsd is better than freebsd?
I got in the BSD world by way of FreeBSD. What attracted me to FreeBSD
was the documentation in the system---manuals in particular---and I also appreciated the ports collection. (It was so much easier to compile and
run an application back then than it was to hunt for sources in the GNU systems worlds. That allowed me to make small changes in the software I
was running to learn about how it worked.) In more recent years I had switched to Windows due to working with companies that required me to
run a Windows system. (Also due to personal reasons: when I was in
graduate school, I wanted to keep all my software in a single directory, which was easy on Windows and hard on UNIX. But to use Windows, I
needed a GNU EMACS packed with other programs such as cat, grep, find,
awk, sed, ...) The work and personal reasons have gone away, so I
decided to go FreeBSD again. But ever since hibernation was implemented
in Windows XP that I love the feature. It turns out FreeBSD doesn't hibernate, but OpenBSD does (on my amd64 computer). And then I
discovered that OpenBSD is as impeccable in the documentation as FreeBSD
is. So I went with OpenBSD. I have not found a way to run OpenBSD in a battery-saving mode, though, so my entire battery last about an hour
with OpenBSD, while it would likely last the entire day with Windows 10,
say. There's probably things I can do that I don't know how to do at
the moment. I'm hardly ever in need of a battery, though. So I'm a
pretty happy OpenBSD user.
I also learned about cwm, the ``calm window manager'', which I think it
was built by the OpenBSD people. It's the window manager that has
enchanted me the most.
onion@anon.invalid (Mr Ön!on) writes:
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
I believe Plan 9 is doing pretty well ...
<https://youtu.be/-zNSQmS2gls>
Thanks! Have you watched? Can you explain why they choose the name?
Anyway, Plan 9, the operating system, was named in a similar
vein after the movie. There are a few other historical movie
references associated with it, as well: the original window
system was named "8 1/2" (though using the Unicode code point
for the fraction 1/2), in reference to the Fellini film. In
between the 2nd and 3rd Editions, the working name for the
system at the Labs was "Brazil", in homage to the Terry Gilliam
dystopian cult classic. While the name was changed back to Plan
9 for the open source 3rd Edition release, a small reference to
this is left in the name of the current window system, "rio",
presumably a reference to Rio de Janeiro.
And now we have Peter Thiel highjacking the Tolkien world with
mil- and spook-tech Palantir (as well as Valar, Mithril, Lembas,
Rivendell and Arda.)
He's seems to have overlooked that in the story, it was a palantir
that Sauron used to totally corrupt Saruman and another to utterly
demoralize Denethor, Steward of Gondor. It's not clear to me whether
Thiel thinks of himself as Sauron or as a more resilient Saruman.
The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which
one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920,
the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of
the franchise to women -- two constituencies that are
notoriously tough for libertarians -- have rendered the notion
of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron.
-- Peter Thiel, in CATO Unbound
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
-- Peter Thiel
Okay, Sauron it is.
Mike Spencer <mds@bogus.nodomain.nowhere> wrote:
And now we have Peter Thiel highjacking the Tolkien world with
mil- and spook-tech Palantir (as well as Valar, Mithril, Lembas,
Rivendell and Arda.)
He's seems to have overlooked that in the story, it was a palantir
that Sauron used to totally corrupt Saruman and another to utterly
demoralize Denethor, Steward of Gondor. It's not clear to me whether
Thiel thinks of himself as Sauron or as a more resilient Saruman.
The 1920s were the last decade in American history during which
one could be genuinely optimistic about politics. Since 1920,
the vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of
the franchise to women -- two constituencies that are
notoriously tough for libertarians -- have rendered the notion
of "capitalist democracy" into an oxymoron.
-- Peter Thiel, in CATO Unbound
I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.
-- Peter Thiel
Okay, Sauron it is.
Exactly so. Thiel's use of the name 'Palantir' for his all-seeing eye
has always struck me as being in excruciatingly bad taste.
In article <1r91h98.25ytyrndpbdbN%onion@anon.invalid>,
Mr Ön!on <snipeco.1@gmail.com> wrote:
Addendum: 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' is widely thought to be the worst >>movie ever made. I do hope that this does not reflect anybody's adverse >>opinion of Plan 9 OS . . .
Heh; I've got to admit: I've seen it, and I didn't think it was
_that_ bad. Sure, it wasn't what I'd call a _good_ movie, but I
am pretty sure that I've seen worse.
- Dan C.
Is it so bad it wraps around to being good,
Dan Cross <cross@spitfire.i.gajendra.net> wrote at 17:30 this Tuesday (GMT): >> In article <1r91h98.25ytyrndpbdbN%onion@anon.invalid>,
Mr Ön!on <snipeco.1@gmail.com> wrote:
Addendum: 'Plan 9 From Outer Space' is widely thought to be the worst >>>movie ever made. I do hope that this does not reflect anybody's adverse >>>opinion of Plan 9 OS . . .
Heh; I've got to admit: I've seen it, and I didn't think it was
_that_ bad. Sure, it wasn't what I'd call a _good_ movie, but I
am pretty sure that I've seen worse.
Is it so bad it wraps around to being good, or is it just flat bad?
candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
Is it so bad it wraps around to being good,
Yip. The overflow flips the sign bit.
candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
Is it so bad it wraps around to being good,
Yip. The overflow flips the sign bit.
On Mon, 10 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
I wouldn't say it died. I believe Plan 9 is doing pretty well, but I
don't think they're trying to compete with popular systems. It's a
research system, I'd say. OpenBSD is a research system, even though
it's totally usable. In fact, it's the one I like to use.
Would be nice if someone took Plan 9 and managed to get it to run natively on
servers and laptops, or even one brand of server and one brand of laptop. I >>> would definitely try it!
I've ran Plan 9 on an x86 virtual machine, which means it will probably
install okay on popular hardware. I think some people do run Plan 9 as
their daily system.
Interesting! I'll have to look into that to see if it would run on an older laptop. That would be awesome!
How is openbsd as a daily driver? I've been close to replacing my
opensuse with freebsd. It wasn't quite there in terms of hardware
support (it lacked anything beyond G wifi, which is too slow). Maybe
openbsd is better than freebsd?
I got in the BSD world by way of FreeBSD. What attracted me to FreeBSD
was the documentation in the system---manuals in particular---and I also
appreciated the ports collection. (It was so much easier to compile and
I agree! The documentation and the community is outstanding!
run an application back then than it was to hunt for sources in the GNU
systems worlds. That allowed me to make small changes in the software I
was running to learn about how it worked.) In more recent years I had
switched to Windows due to working with companies that required me to
run a Windows system. (Also due to personal reasons: when I was in
graduate school, I wanted to keep all my software in a single directory,
which was easy on Windows and hard on UNIX. But to use Windows, I
needed a GNU EMACS packed with other programs such as cat, grep, find,
awk, sed, ...) The work and personal reasons have gone away, so I
decided to go FreeBSD again. But ever since hibernation was implemented
in Windows XP that I love the feature. It turns out FreeBSD doesn't
hibernate, but OpenBSD does (on my amd64 computer). And then I
Hmm, really? I think I got it to work on Freebas 14.x or a snapshot of 15 a long
time ago, but I don't quite remember, so could very well be that I tricked myself with suspend. Since I only used it for a week, I didn't check too deeply.
discovered that OpenBSD is as impeccable in the documentation as FreeBSD
is. So I went with OpenBSD. I have not found a way to run OpenBSD in a
battery-saving mode, though, so my entire battery last about an hour
with OpenBSD, while it would likely last the entire day with Windows 10,
say. There's probably things I can do that I don't know how to do at
the moment. I'm hardly ever in need of a battery, though. So I'm a
pretty happy OpenBSD user.
Freebsd I got 13-14 hours out of, and my current opensuse running on a 1.5 year
old laptop still sits at around 12-14 hours.
I also learned about cwm, the ``calm window manager'', which I think it
was built by the OpenBSD people. It's the window manager that has
enchanted me the most.
Yes, I've heard about it. I like the concept! I run XFCE, since it is a nice compromise between batteries included, and some kind of lightness. For business
it works great. If I only did development, I'd look at cwm or perhaps dwm.
yeti <yeti@tilde.institute> writes:
candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote:
Is it so bad it wraps around to being good,
Yip. The overflow flips the sign bit.
Lol! Let me also take the opportunity to thank everyone for this
thread. I don't feel like watching Plan 9 From Outer Space, but if they
had a plan to revive dead corpses on Earth, I believe they mean that
Plan 9 could be seen as a way to revive UNIX? But UNIX isn't dead! :P
On 2025-03-08, Rich wrote:
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
Ivan Shmakov <ivan@siamics.netREMOVE.invalid> writes:
http://web.archive.org/web/20190622112330/
http://www.math.ttu.edu/~pearce/jokes1/joke-086.html
Lol. I don’t get the joke. What’s up with the joke? I’m slow. The
waitress has a hard-science college degree but can’t get a job in her
field? That’s not a joke. I don’t get the joke. Please explain? :)
The joke didn’t seem obscure to any degree to me, TBH, not
requiring much context aside basic calculus knowledge, which
is something I think anyone interested in CS should posess.
Quite unlike, say, “For the umpteenth time, Sam! It’s not
Palantír, it’s Pentium!” Or “Lysenko’s own arrogance was his
undoing: he climbed a pine tree to gather apples, and was killed
when ripe coconuts fell from it.”
The joke is that the second mathematician, who should know better,
gave the waitress the wrong answer to repeat.
The waitress pretends to be dumb when he gives her what will be the
wrong answer to his question.
Then, when he asks the question, she repeats his incorrect answer flawlessly, and adds in the correction he should have known himself.
The way I read it, the waitress doesn’t know the question at
first, so cannot decide whether the answer she’s asked to give
is correct or not. Once she does, she adds the correction.
I. e., the joke is that the mathematicians were not quite as “smart” as they thought they were.
There’s an added irony that even though the second mathematician
insisted that “most people can cope with a reasonable amount of
math,” he evidently didn’t quite believe it himself.
A while ago, I’ve been told that a story like that happened at
the university I’ve graduated from. The students were spending
a break between classes outside, and so was one of the professors.
Hearing them complain of how hard their (fairly basic) math was, the
professor commented something along the lines of “that’s everyone’s
knowledge.” So, he called a guy loitering nearby who looked like
a common tramp and asked him to solve a simple algebra or calculus
problem; thinking for a bit, the guy gave the correct answer.
(Or something like that; my recollection of it is rather vague.)
What I take from the joke is: do not underestimate average Joe.
(Or Jane, as the case might be.) A sentiment that is also at
the core of G. K. Chesterton’s “The Trees of Pride”,
http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Trees_of_Pride .
On Mon, 10 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
The challenge is inertia and trust. There are a lot of schools who run
azure, are unhappy, and refuse to change because the alterantive is
not azure. So they end up paying 10x or more, because they do not
trust small business. It is very sad. =(
That made me think your service is just a cloud-like service---storage,
office-like web applications, mail, calendar, video conference et
cetera. Are there teachers involved?
No, just virtual machines. Too much trouble and too little profit in delivering
office 365 equivalents, calendar and email. We could if we wanted to, but that
would probably require an entire school shifting from Microsoft to us, and I doubt it will happen. It also probably would mean that we would need to hire another person to spread the admin and support load, and that would probably not
make it worth it. I'm not ruling it out, but I'm not actively selling it either.
That's interesting. But tell me about the teachers because I didn't get
the whole thing yet. I would think a service like that would require a
24-7 support as the most challenging part.
No, the lab environment has no SLA:s, since it is just a lab environment, so if
it goes down for 15 minutes the students just shrug their shoulders and try again later. But, to be honest, there is very little downtime, and we also have
3 regions/servers. So in case of downtime, first fix is to shift a
student to another
region/server. That usually solves the problem 9 out of 10 times. If that doesn't work, reboot the 3 servers and wait for 5-10 minutes. If that doesn't work, reinstall the enviroment which might take 20-40 minutes.
On Mon, 10 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Ketchup effect? Wow. I had never heard of that. I get it. The whole
thing comes down at once. :)
Exactly!
I found this difficult when I was living in the US for a year. It was
super easy to go by myself to a bar, and talk to some people. It was
impossible to get to know someone below the shallow facade.
I observed the same. I also observed this in other cultures. For
example, the Dutch culture. I found the Americans way more honest and
Ahh, the dutch! The most loathed culture in europe. They are a pain in the ass
generally. Cheap, painfully direct and besserwissers. No one likes dutch people.
close than the Dutch. My hypothesis for explaining this was that the
United States offers a more trusting community; the Dutch deal with lots
of in and outflows of people from all over Europe. Europe has much more
loose frontiers, say, than the United States. I think I'm trying to say
that the United States is more homogeneous. The Dutch are more smiles
on a first encounter and the Americans less so. But beneath that the
Americans are really more friendly.
Never trust a dutch guy. He'll happily stab you in the back. I trust americans
infinitely more than I trust dutch people.
Other things I've noticed. The Americans easily trust what you say.
(Some will be mildly outraged if you don't trust what they're saying.)
The Dutch are so not like that and you can observe that in commerce.
They are a cheap and suspicious lot.
In the subway, no one talks to each other. People mainstain silence
and look at their phones. Only people who know each other talk on
the subway. Definitely not strangers.
Reminds me of New York City.
Maybe... I haven't been there for probably 25 year or more. I imagine that >>> smartphones have infected them as they have infected almost everyone. =/
My observations are pre-smartphones. Before smartphones, people's faces
were buried in books on the subway. They've just replaced the book with
the phone.
Same here. Or no, actually I think the first smartphones had appeared perhaps. I
feel very old. ;)
This is the truth. A very interesting phenomenon at the moment is the
global fertility crisis.
Are we talking about male fertility? I'm gonna follow that one very
closely.
I think both actually. Not sure however. Maybe you found something?
My bet is that it is a complex phenomenon consisting of chemicals,
unhealthy lifestyles, shifting norms, feminism and demographics.
I agree. It seems that way. Although I'd remove feminism if we're
talking about male fertility. But surely women is also involved in
men's everything (and /vice versa/). There's really no separation.
There never was.
My thought about feminism is more about decreasing social fertility.
The argument, based on my own experience and observation goes like
this. Modern, european feminism is competitive by nature. It makes men
and women competitors and antagonistic. Women start to dress and act
as men in order to make an name for themselves in the workplace.
Men, like me and many others, find this not very attractive and are turned off
those women. The ones who do meet a man, end up being focused on work and not having time for children.
Most, I think 90% of my acquaintances in sweden have wives from southern europe,
eastern europe or south america or asia, where women are more feminine, behave
like women and want to form families.
This is why feminism contributes to less children being born.
There has ``always'' been a war between men and women. It's a pretty
sad one, in fact. It is---to me---much more serious than military wars.
I disagree. I know many people who live in loving relationships full of harmony
and respect.
Well, what I do, to be more precise, is that when she goes to bed, we
usually talk for half an hour or so. Then she goes to sleep, and then
I get 2-3 hours to myself.
I need time for myself and my interests, since she is not into
technology and science fiction so the evenings I spend pursuing my
hobbies and interests she has no interest in, so that we can do things
we both enjoy during the days.
Of course, it all makes perfect sense. The burden of the proof is
totally mine because I am the one speaking out unreasonable things. But
I'm not trying to prove anything---it's too hard. So stay alert. :) You
don't need time for yourself and your interests. That's actually false.
Haha, well, this is about what I subjectively value and enjoy doing in my spare
time. So you'll have a tough time trying to "prove" to something else. ;)
Human life does not really require having fun. Fun is not really
something we need. There's nothing wrong with having fun. One thing I
Fun, or rather happiness, is for me probably the strongest reason for existence
I know. I believe that the reason for ones existence is entirely subjective and
different from person to person. I do not believe science can say anything final
about it, except perhaps to inform us when we select our reason for existence or
grow into it.
observe in very young kids is that they need no toys. A little ant,
say, is quite a toy. But then they're given a bunch of toys. You know
those those eye-candies that are hung above a craddle? Babies likely
feel enchanted by them, as they move and shine. I claim they need none
of that. In fact, that's too much stimuli.
Oh, but we must make a difference between long term happiness, short term destructive happiness, and avoidance of pain. Too many toys can give short term
happiness, but long term might not be for the best. I agree with you here!
You don't need your science and your interests. And I also claim that
you would in fact have a lot more with science and your interests if you
stop pursuing them. Do your work. That's healthy. You do need to
study it. But guide yourself only by a very rational thing. If there
For me, guiding myself based on what gives me joy is the rational thing to do.
is no time for your science, then there is no time for it. It's not a
bad life. A bad life is an unnatural life. We've distanced ourselves
quite a bit from nature; it's all very seductive. Now we need to really
walk in a different direction in order to get out of this.
I think that natural life is a happy life. I think unhappy lives are unnatural
lives.
I remember when I was young,
You're still young. :)
Really? ;)
In article <8734fgvdzr.fsf@example.com>,
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
yeti <yeti@tilde.institute> writes:
candycanearter07 <candycanearter07@candycanearter07.nomail.afraid> wrote: >>>
Is it so bad it wraps around to being good,
Yip. The overflow flips the sign bit.
Lol! Let me also take the opportunity to thank everyone for this
thread. I don't feel like watching Plan 9 From Outer Space, but if they >>had a plan to revive dead corpses on Earth, I believe they mean that
Plan 9 could be seen as a way to revive UNIX? But UNIX isn't dead! :P
"Not only is Unix dead, it's starting to smell really bad."
(from Rob Pike (author of, "The Unix Porgramming Environment"
...and much of the Plan 9 operating system. :-D)
I've never found the original reference for that quote, for what
it's worth, but Rob has never denied it, either.
No, the lab environment has no SLA:s, since it is just a lab environment, so if
it goes down for 15 minutes the students just shrug their shoulders and try >> again later. But, to be honest, there is very little downtime, and we also have
3 regions/servers. So in case of downtime, first fix is to shift a
student to another
region/server. That usually solves the problem 9 out of 10 times. If that
doesn't work, reboot the 3 servers and wait for 5-10 minutes. If that doesn't
work, reinstall the enviroment which might take 20-40 minutes.
Oh, I see; now I got a better view of the business. Congrats---I think that's a pretty nice job. I would like to have a job like that.
Ketchup effect? Wow. I had never heard of that. I get it. The whole
thing comes down at once. :)
Exactly!
I'm gonna smile when I get an opportunity to use that expression. :)
Other things I've noticed. The Americans easily trust what you say.
(Some will be mildly outraged if you don't trust what they're saying.)
The Dutch are so not like that and you can observe that in commerce.
They are a cheap and suspicious lot.
All the things I said sort of implies more or less the same thing about
most countries that fit more or less the reality of Holland. But I once heard that the Dutch have a history of commerce---that they were an
important piece in the distribution of goods to the rest of Europe (from overseas) in, say, the 16h, 17th century and perhaps 'til recent times.
I think commerce is a pretty mistrusting activity and perhaps the Dutch
could be reflecting that still in their current culture. Big cities are
full of people trying to scam you; it's no wonder you can give someone a 10-second attention in the tourist sides of NYC. I'd believe life in commerce is also full of delicate relationships (for lack of a better
word).
I agree. It seems that way. Although I'd remove feminism if we're
talking about male fertility. But surely women is also involved in
men's everything (and /vice versa/). There's really no separation.
There never was.
My thought about feminism is more about decreasing social fertility.
Okay, I see now. (But I'd be much less concerned about that than physiological fertility, if you know what I mean.)
I honestly don't worry much about these social aspects of feminism,
although I feel very sorry for women---who are now even wishing to join
this other world without getting much of any break from the previous
world. And---the subject is quite complicated---but I have a certain argument that puts forth the proposition that feminism is now in vogue
due to industry interests. (Both parents may be earning a salary now,
but they still have the same needs as ever---so we can take a part of
the money given to the man and pass it on to the woman. And ``that's wonderful''---says the industry---because now I work force that's almost
the double as the previous.)
The argument, based on my own experience and observation goes like
this. Modern, european feminism is competitive by nature. It makes men
and women competitors and antagonistic. Women start to dress and act
as men in order to make an name for themselves in the workplace.
Men, like me and many others, find this not very attractive and are turned off
those women. The ones who do meet a man, end up being focused on work and not
having time for children.
Most, I think 90% of my acquaintances in sweden have wives from southern europe,
eastern europe or south america or asia, where women are more feminine, behave
like women and want to form families.
This is why feminism contributes to less children being born.
I hear that. I think this is real, but I think that's a more
surface-real phenomenon. Deep down, I don't think women or men are too
much like that. I could /try/ to compare this to the Donald Trump phenomenon. It's a bit frowned upon to support Trumpism, say, but in
the privacy of one's mind, people do support him. It's frowned upon not
to ``side with women'' (obviously), but in the privacy of their minds,
it could be that the vast majority of women doesn't quite think that
things are going pretty well in that regard.
There has ``always'' been a war between men and women. It's a pretty
sad one, in fact. It is---to me---much more serious than military wars.
I disagree. I know many people who live in loving relationships full of harmony
and respect.
Of course you're right. But I also think we've historically a problem
there, which I'm calling a ``war'' here. And the reason I consider it
pretty bad it's because it's an inner war. When men and women don't get along, that's because they're not getting along with themselves.
I don't really separate men and women. I think of them as two sides of
the same coin.
Of course, it all makes perfect sense. The burden of the proof is
totally mine because I am the one speaking out unreasonable things. But >>> I'm not trying to prove anything---it's too hard. So stay alert. :) You >>> don't need time for yourself and your interests. That's actually false.
Haha, well, this is about what I subjectively value and enjoy doing in my spare
time. So you'll have a tough time trying to "prove" to something else. ;)
It'd be a useless attempt as well. A proof is not a unilateral thing.
A common system must be set up---language, definitions, a deducting apparatus. For instance, one thing I quickly notice is our different definitions of words such as ``happiness'', ``enjoy'' and so on.
So, a proof could never be means for a dispute; on the contrary, a proof
of anything implies a joint work.
Human life does not really require having fun. Fun is not really
something we need. There's nothing wrong with having fun. One thing I
Fun, or rather happiness, is for me probably the strongest reason for existence
I know. I believe that the reason for ones existence is entirely subjective and
different from person to person. I do not believe science can say anything final
about it, except perhaps to inform us when we select our reason for existence or
grow into it.
Here in my notebook, I don't bundle ``fun'' and ``happiness''. I also
don't bundle ``fun'' with ``joy'', say. It's complicated, of course.
If were disputing something technical here---like a lawsuit---, a
statement like ``the reason for ones existence is entirely subjective
and different from person to person'' seems to easily complicate your
life. I'm sure Socrates could throw into wild contradictions because of this. I'm unable to because I'm just the student, but you should see my
teachers. :) (Life cannot be quite subjective. Of course people can
have wild interpretations of their own, but even interpretations fall
into few categories. We could call these categories ``diseases'' and
then proceed to argue that people tend to have one of these few
diseases, showing clearly how reality is not subjective at all.)
observe in very young kids is that they need no toys. A little ant,
say, is quite a toy. But then they're given a bunch of toys. You know
those those eye-candies that are hung above a craddle? Babies likely
feel enchanted by them, as they move and shine. I claim they need none
of that. In fact, that's too much stimuli.
Oh, but we must make a difference between long term happiness, short term
destructive happiness, and avoidance of pain. Too many toys can give short term
happiness, but long term might not be for the best. I agree with you here!
You don't agree with me. :) Here in my notebook the word ``happiness''
could not even be further qualified as you're doing it. It's not your
fault, of course---I never clarified any of this.
You don't need your science and your interests. And I also claim that
you would in fact have a lot more with science and your interests if you >>> stop pursuing them. Do your work. That's healthy. You do need to
study it. But guide yourself only by a very rational thing. If there
For me, guiding myself based on what gives me joy is the rational thing to do.
To translate your comment here to fit in my notebook's framework, I'd probably need to substitute ``joy'' for ``pleasure''. And it would
violate one of my theorems---the pursuit of pleasure is not a rational
thing to do and it's not even quite pleasurable.
is no time for your science, then there is no time for it. It's not a
bad life. A bad life is an unnatural life. We've distanced ourselves
quite a bit from nature; it's all very seductive. Now we need to really >>> walk in a different direction in order to get out of this.
I think that natural life is a happy life. I think unhappy lives are unnatural
lives.
Now we totally agree.
I remember when I was young,
You're still young. :)
Really? ;)
Really. :) That's what I meant with the Linus Torvalds story above.
Hmm, really? I think I got it to work on Freebas 14.x or a snapshot of 15 a long
time ago, but I don't quite remember, so could very well be that I tricked >> myself with suspend. Since I only used it for a week, I didn't check too deeply.
Yeah, I believe FreeBSD can suspend to RAM, but not to disk.
Freebsd I got 13-14 hours out of, and my current opensuse running on a 1.5 year
old laptop still sits at around 12-14 hours.
That's impressive. If I could get some 3 hours with OpenBSD, I'd be
very happy. But, honestly, I hardly ever need it and when I'm on the
go, there's usually an outlet where I need.
I also learned about cwm, the ``calm window manager'', which I think it
was built by the OpenBSD people. It's the window manager that has
enchanted me the most.
Yes, I've heard about it. I like the concept! I run XFCE, since it is a nice >> compromise between batteries included, and some kind of lightness. For business
it works great. If I only did development, I'd look at cwm or perhaps dwm.
I remember I thought XFCE was very ``beautiful''. But I think after it
went down with GTK, it lost its feeling of new kid on the block. So the definition of ``beautiful'' here is just ``different from the same
old''. That's likely a problem I have with graphical interfaces: I get
tired of them. Text interfaces, though, don't seem to bother me at
all---on the contrary, I tend to get addicted to them. For instance, I
love the GNU EMACS and software like slrn, which I don't use anymore
(due to Gnus).
Freebsd I got 13-14 hours out of, and my current opensuse running on
a 1.5 year old laptop still sits at around 12-14 hours.
That's impressive. If I could get some 3 hours with OpenBSD, I'd be
very happy. But, honestly, I hardly ever need it and when I'm on the
go, there's usually an outlet where I need.
Only 3 hours? How old is your laptop? Sounds like you should at least be able to
get 7-8 hours out of a new one, unless you are running enormous amount of VM:s
or scientific calculations.
I also learned about cwm, the ``calm window manager'', which I think it >>>> was built by the OpenBSD people. It's the window manager that has
enchanted me the most.
Yes, I've heard about it. I like the concept! I run XFCE, since it
is a nice compromise between batteries included, and some kind of
lightness. For business it works great. If I only did development,
I'd look at cwm or perhaps dwm.
I remember I thought XFCE was very ``beautiful''. But I think after it
went down with GTK, it lost its feeling of new kid on the block. So the
definition of ``beautiful'' here is just ``different from the same
old''. That's likely a problem I have with graphical interfaces: I get
tired of them. Text interfaces, though, don't seem to bother me at
all---on the contrary, I tend to get addicted to them. For instance, I
love the GNU EMACS and software like slrn, which I don't use anymore
(due to Gnus).
True.
I have 4 virtual desktop. On 1 lives the web browser, 2 alpine email (terminal based email client), 3 qpdf a pdf reader with session
support and on 4 my neovim with aout 18 buffers saved in a session
file.
When I was young(er) I fiddled around a lot with GUI:s, but somewhere
the past 10 years or so, I just wanted something minimal with all
batteries included so that scanning, printing, wifi etc. just work our
of the box. Xfce fulfilled that for me, and I have never bothered to
change it. I did have a quick look at i3 and dwm, but I would still
have to keep xfce around for print/scan/wifi so in the end, what's the
point?
My latest revelation (a few years back) was alpine email, it probably
doubled my email productivity compared with thunderbird, and is a "all
in one" solution that comes with a lot of help included. Still
flexible and extensible though, but probably not as much as mutt or
neomutt, but it strikes a beautiful balance for me. =)
On Fri, 14 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
No, the lab environment has no SLA:s, since it is just a lab
environment, so if it goes down for 15 minutes the students just
shrug their shoulders and try again later. But, to be honest, there
is very little downtime, and we also have 3 regions/servers. So in
case of downtime, first fix is to shift a student to another
region/server. That usually solves the problem 9 out of 10 times. If
that doesn't work, reboot the 3 servers and wait for 5-10
minutes. If that doesn't work, reinstall the enviroment which might
take 20-40 minutes.
Oh, I see; now I got a better view of the business. Congrats---I think
that's a pretty nice job. I would like to have a job like that.
Yes, it is quite a nice job! =) Well, you could have a job like that!
Maybe you could start looking around your school for opportunities to
sell teacher consultants? I'd say that would probably be the easiest
place to start looking for opportunities. =)
On Fri, 14 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Ketchup effect? Wow. I had never heard of that. I get it. The whole >>>> thing comes down at once. :)
Exactly!
I'm gonna smile when I get an opportunity to use that expression. :)
The latest expression I learned was "keeping up with the Joneses".
You learn a lot of odd stuff of usenet and mailinglists! ;)
Other things I've noticed. The Americans easily trust what you say.
(Some will be mildly outraged if you don't trust what they're saying.) >>>> The Dutch are so not like that and you can observe that in commerce.
They are a cheap and suspicious lot.
All the things I said sort of implies more or less the same thing about
most countries that fit more or less the reality of Holland. But I once
heard that the Dutch have a history of commerce---that they were an
This is the truth! See the east india expansions.
important piece in the distribution of goods to the rest of Europe (from
overseas) in, say, the 16h, 17th century and perhaps 'til recent times.
I think commerce is a pretty mistrusting activity and perhaps the Dutch
Depends. Business builds trust. But it does need a substrate of some
kind of "basic" trust before anything can happen. That is why
dictatorships and authoritarian regimes never do well in
business. They are cut throat, lawless and the rule of the strong
applies there. That is basically the worst possible place to do
business.
The more trust, the more business and the easier it is. Of course it
takes time to first build some trust, then business is built in that
trust, which builds more trust.
I honestly don't worry much about these social aspects of feminism,
although I feel very sorry for women---who are now even wishing to join
this other world without getting much of any break from the previous
world. And---the subject is quite complicated---but I have a certain
argument that puts forth the proposition that feminism is now in vogue
due to industry interests. (Both parents may be earning a salary now,
but they still have the same needs as ever---so we can take a part of
the money given to the man and pass it on to the woman. And ``that's
wonderful''---says the industry---because now I work force that's almost
the double as the previous.)
I heard the other day the theory that the rich created feminism in
order to increase the number of consumers, and the government happily
agreed in order to be able to tax the other half of the population!
The argument, based on my own experience and observation goes like
this. Modern, european feminism is competitive by nature. It makes men
and women competitors and antagonistic. Women start to dress and act
as men in order to make an name for themselves in the workplace.
Men, like me and many others, find this not very attractive and are
turned off
those women. The ones who do meet a man, end up being focused on work and not
having time for children.
Most, I think 90% of my acquaintances in sweden have wives from
southern europe,
eastern europe or south america or asia, where women are more
feminine, behave
like women and want to form families.
This is why feminism contributes to less children being born.
I hear that. I think this is real, but I think that's a more
surface-real phenomenon. Deep down, I don't think women or men are too
much like that. I could /try/ to compare this to the Donald Trump
phenomenon. It's a bit frowned upon to support Trumpism, say, but in
the privacy of one's mind, people do support him. It's frowned upon not
to ``side with women'' (obviously), but in the privacy of their minds,
it could be that the vast majority of women doesn't quite think that
things are going pretty well in that regard.
Could very well be. The problem with the privacy of the mind, type of arguments
is that it is difficult to prove anything.
There has ``always'' been a war between men and women. It's a prettyI disagree. I know many people who live in loving relationships full
sad one, in fact. It is---to me---much more serious than military wars. >>>
of harmony and respect.
Of course you're right. But I also think we've historically a problem
there, which I'm calling a ``war'' here. And the reason I consider it
pretty bad it's because it's an inner war. When men and women don't get
along, that's because they're not getting along with themselves.
Interesting. Could you give an example?
I don't really separate men and women. I think of them as two sides of
the same coin.
I think of them as individuals.
The logical end point of "woke" when they realise that all groups
eventually boil down to unique individuals. Welcome to libertarianism!
=D
Of course, it all makes perfect sense. The burden of the proof isHaha, well, this is about what I subjectively value and enjoy doing
totally mine because I am the one speaking out unreasonable things. But >>>> I'm not trying to prove anything---it's too hard. So stay alert. :) You >>>> don't need time for yourself and your interests. That's actually false. >>>
in my spare time. So you'll have a tough time trying to "prove" to
something else. ;)
It'd be a useless attempt as well. A proof is not a unilateral thing.
A common system must be set up---language, definitions, a deducting
apparatus. For instance, one thing I quickly notice is our different
definitions of words such as ``happiness'', ``enjoy'' and so on.
True. This is a common culprit. When I say happy, I tend to mean long
term contentment. When most people hear me, they tend to hear
hedonism.
If were disputing something technical here---like a lawsuit---, a
statement like ``the reason for ones existence is entirely subjective
and different from person to person'' seems to easily complicate your
life. I'm sure Socrates could throw into wild contradictions because of
this. I'm unable to because I'm just the student, but you should see my
Complicate? How come? To me it is one of the most liberating realizations of my
life. =) For me it is I guess an honest life, a life where you think through your values and goals, and then strive to realize them and maximize the amount
of long term happiness you can get.
teachers. :) (Life cannot be quite subjective. Of course people can
have wild interpretations of their own, but even interpretations fall
into few categories. We could call these categories ``diseases'' and
then proceed to argue that people tend to have one of these few
diseases, showing clearly how reality is not subjective at all.)
Oh, this might get complicated. Lived life, as in my subjective experience, I would argue, can never become objectively analyzed, since it is impossible for
descriptive science to "get" what it's like to be the subjective me.
Life, descriptive, external, life, as understood by science, can definitely be
categorized and analyzed. In terms of happiness, you can go so far as positive
psychology and statistically analyze "happy" people and draw conclusions about
what life factors tend to contribute to their happiness.
You don't agree with me. :) Here in my notebook the word ``happiness''observe in very young kids is that they need no toys. A little ant,
say, is quite a toy. But then they're given a bunch of toys. You know >>>> those those eye-candies that are hung above a craddle? Babies likely
feel enchanted by them, as they move and shine. I claim they need none >>>> of that. In fact, that's too much stimuli.
Oh, but we must make a difference between long term happiness, short term >>> destructive happiness, and avoidance of pain. Too many toys can
give short term
happiness, but long term might not be for the best. I agree with you here! >>
could not even be further qualified as you're doing it. It's not your
fault, of course---I never clarified any of this.
As you said above... our definitions probably differ, which would lead us to talking in circles. What are your values and goals in life? Why don't you strive
for happiness? Tell me! =)
You don't need your science and your interests. And I also claim that >>>> you would in fact have a lot more with science and your interests if you >>>> stop pursuing them. Do your work. That's healthy. You do need to
study it. But guide yourself only by a very rational thing. If there
For me, guiding myself based on what gives me joy is the rational
thing to do.
To translate your comment here to fit in my notebook's framework, I'd
probably need to substitute ``joy'' for ``pleasure''. And it would
violate one of my theorems---the pursuit of pleasure is not a rational
thing to do and it's not even quite pleasurable.
Why not? And what is the rational thing to do according to you? And how did you
reach that conclusion?
is no time for your science, then there is no time for it. It's not a >>>> bad life. A bad life is an unnatural life. We've distanced ourselves >>>> quite a bit from nature; it's all very seductive. Now we need to really >>>> walk in a different direction in order to get out of this.
I think that natural life is a happy life. I think unhappy lives are
unnatural lives.
Now we totally agree.
Amen! =) But the problem is then to define "natural". ;)
And why is the natural good? Isn't that a value statement that we
cannot answer by science?
I remember when I was young,
You're still young. :)
Really? ;)
Really. :) That's what I meant with the Linus Torvalds story above.
Ahh... got it!
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Fri, 14 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
No, the lab environment has no SLA:s, since it is just a lab
environment, so if it goes down for 15 minutes the students just
shrug their shoulders and try again later. But, to be honest, there
is very little downtime, and we also have 3 regions/servers. So in
case of downtime, first fix is to shift a student to another
region/server. That usually solves the problem 9 out of 10 times. If
that doesn't work, reboot the 3 servers and wait for 5-10
minutes. If that doesn't work, reinstall the enviroment which might
take 20-40 minutes.
Oh, I see; now I got a better view of the business. Congrats---I think
that's a pretty nice job. I would like to have a job like that.
Yes, it is quite a nice job! =) Well, you could have a job like that!
Maybe you could start looking around your school for opportunities to
sell teacher consultants? I'd say that would probably be the easiest
place to start looking for opportunities. =)
I'll keep that in mind. :)
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Fri, 14 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Ketchup effect? Wow. I had never heard of that. I get it. The whole >>>>> thing comes down at once. :)
Exactly!
I'm gonna smile when I get an opportunity to use that expression. :)
The latest expression I learned was "keeping up with the Joneses".
Why "Joneses"?
Only 3 hours? How old is your laptop? Sounds like you should at least be able to
get 7-8 hours out of a new one, unless you are running enormous amount of VM:s
or scientific calculations.
Right now I get 1 hour, so 3 is a major upgrade. My notebook is quite
new. It's a Lenovo 15IMH05 with 24 GiB of RAM.
True.
I have 4 virtual desktop. On 1 lives the web browser, 2 alpine email
(terminal based email client), 3 qpdf a pdf reader with session
support and on 4 my neovim with aout 18 buffers saved in a session
file.
That's very close to my what I do here. The web on 2. My 1 is work. :)
On 3 is USENET and 4 is literature---PDF.
I run cwm, which is known as not having a virtual desktop thingies, but...
it's actually does. When I press super-1 I go to desktop 1. I created
4 virtual desktops (which is enough), but I think I could have at least
9 of them.
Yeah, these things are important---printer, scanner and wifi. Although
I think wifi is a lot less important than it seems. I've read this
article yesterday called ``the computer built to last 50 years'' and
offline mode is quite an important part of it. I agree with that.
The system would be designed to usually function offline. It's when you connect to the Internet that it does its pull and pushes. With a system
like that, wifi is less important---you connect your system to the
router once a day, say, and, just like pumping gas into a vehicle, you
get everything you need. Now you can go back to your desk, after
unplugging the cable from your router.
I like that.
Clearly, these are people trying to work without distractions and interruptions. I am one of them.
My latest revelation (a few years back) was alpine email, it probably
doubled my email productivity compared with thunderbird, and is a "all
in one" solution that comes with a lot of help included. Still
flexible and extensible though, but probably not as much as mutt or
neomutt, but it strikes a beautiful balance for me. =)
Now I would really look into alpine, but I'm a Gnus user, so I'm
forbidden from performing heretic research.
You learn a lot of odd stuff of usenet and mailinglists! ;)
Indeed. I often recommend it to people who study a foreign language.
Writing it each day is a very efficient way to get the language into
your memory. With the tools we have now, it's even pure joy. But, you
know, so far, I've never seen *anybody* following my advice in this
matter. (I've been making this recommendation for some two decades.)
order to increase the number of consumers, and the government happily
agreed in order to be able to tax the other half of the population!
I wouldn't quite say the rich *created* feminism. But, surely, like
every agent would do, when they see something (that they didn't create)
can help them in their quest, they use it. Obviously. Rulers often
look into philosophy, say, as an accomplice.
What is your USENET client or text editors? Look above---your client or
text editor almost does what's called ``embarrassing line wrap''. It's
quite it because it doesn't mess up quote attribution, but it doesn't
know how to fill the paragraph properly. Perhaps your client could
invoke the GNU EMACS so that you can handle this with the GNU EMACS (or
vim). But your client must leave the message alone after you're done.
I think you use alpine, right? Can it do a better job?
(I often fix your quotes, but I won't fix it this time to let you see it clearly.)
Could very well be. The problem with the privacy of the mind, type of arguments
is that it is difficult to prove anything.
Proving anything is quite useless for regular people. Proving is useful
in math, less in science and that's just about it, I think. (By the
way, when I see people saying things like ``scientifically proven'',
they have no idea what they're talking about.)
Of course you're right. But I also think we've historically a problem
there, which I'm calling a ``war'' here. And the reason I consider it
pretty bad it's because it's an inner war. When men and women don't get >>> along, that's because they're not getting along with themselves.
Interesting. Could you give an example?
Can we begin with women in some Arab cultures? Some don't even let them drive. Doesn't this suggest a certain battle between the sexes?
But let's look at our own culture. Here's a true story. I have a
friend who is considered very sweet and polite by everyone who meets
him. He tells me about all of his dates and girlfriends and whatever.
I never told him because I don't even think he would understand it, but
he objectifies women quite clearly (to me). For instance, he was
chatting with a girl on an app some time ago and they were talking about meeting up. The girl was a bit unstable with the commitment to meeting
in person and he was losing a bit of patience; another girl came up and agreed to meet him. As he was telling me the story, he made remarks
such to the effect of---whatever; I get the problem solved.
In other words, he is looking for services; if one company doesn't
satisfy him; he goes with another and that's it. What looks like
someone's impatience with people's complications might actually be
hiding a certain outlook on life, which I call materialism. He can't
see that he's getting involved with people. His outlook is not that of someone who sees oneself intertwined with everybody else. He seems
himself quite separate from everybody else.
While people often remark how polite and sweet he is---and I like him
too---, I actually say that he has a health problem that makes him quite insensitive. Who is suffering the most? Himself. His insensibility,
for example, blinds him even to his own nutrition. He's losing his
health slowly year after year.
What about women? Same thing. People are very insensitive because
their sensors are all turned off or broken. (And the mystery goes away
when watch them closely: nearly everyone is drugging themselves daily
with coffee, processed foods, medicine and all the rest of it.)
And that's the case with the most of the world.
Oh, here's an example from today. Today I woke up with my neighbor
having a little party in his house early morning---that means it
probably started a night out. He lives in his house with his wife. His
wife was not in this party. It was actually a two-couple party.
Believe it or not, my bedroom faces his pool directly. (Not much
privacy for sure.) I got up, saw what was going on and did not even
open my window to give him a bit of privacy in his little party.
Chatting went on for a while and then suddenly silence. So I looked and
then his friend was likely inside the house and he was having sex in the pool.
And that's the second time I spot something. The first was months ago
in a similar situation. Night out followed by coming home with some new friends. This time the girl was actually cute and perhaps didn't sleep
with him, but he seemed to enjoy kissing her.
I figure he thinks he's enjoying life, but I actually think he doesn't
like his wife at all. So why are they together? There are no paradoxes
in this world. There's some business going on; there is a contract
there. His wife must be getting something from the deal and he's
getting something else.
That's not affection.
Where does this come from? I don't know the beginning of it all, but
surely this goes back to thousands of years. Recently, I learned that archaeologists discovered human civilizations in the tropical forests
150,000 years ago. Was men and women at war back then? I don't know,
but I would easily guess so. I think the problem goes way back.
I don't really separate men and women. I think of them as two sides of
the same coin.
I think of them as individuals.
I know. But we are not individuals. Even evolutionary biologists are getting there already [1].
The logical end point of "woke" when they realise that all groups
eventually boil down to unique individuals. Welcome to libertarianism!
=D
You lost me there.
Today I read for the first time the essay called ``Politics and the
English Language''. I thought I was reading a blog post from last year
or something. At the end of the essay, I saw the author's name and the
date of 1946. I was so amazed! :) I felt so current, so relevant. That author was George Orwell.
True. This is a common culprit. When I say happy, I tend to mean long
term contentment. When most people hear me, they tend to hear
hedonism.
When you say that happiness is long term contentment, I wonder what long
term contentment is. :) (But surely you don't have to answer that.)
Complicate? How come? To me it is one of the most liberating realizations of my
life. =) For me it is I guess an honest life, a life where you think through >> your values and goals, and then strive to realize them and maximize the amount
of long term happiness you can get.
An expert could likely complicate your life by trying to show that it's either false or meaningless. (Don't ask me to do it---I'm just the
student.) They could attack ``reason for one's existence'' as
meaningless and they could certainly attack ``subjective'' by claiming
that the vast majority of the world is quite objective.
Oh, this might get complicated. Lived life, as in my subjective experience, I
would argue, can never become objectively analyzed, since it is impossible for
descriptive science to "get" what it's like to be the subjective me.
To your content perhaps, but people can infer what's in you by looking
from the outside. The inner /is/ the outer. You're a human being.
Everybody else knows what's like to be a human being.
You can deny it all 'til the end of times.
Life, descriptive, external, life, as understood by science, can definitely be
categorized and analyzed. In terms of happiness, you can go so far as positive
psychology and statistically analyze "happy" people and draw conclusions about
what life factors tend to contribute to their happiness.
Freud observed himself and made conclusions that apply to everyone else.
Like everyone else, he perhaps made mistakes in the fine details of
things, but he also made huge contributions---from a unitary sample
space.
As you said above... our definitions probably differ, which would lead us to >> talking in circles. What are your values and goals in life? Why don't you strive
for happiness? Tell me! =)
In my notebook, if you ``strive'', you've already lost a bit of your health---meaning you're not happy.
Happiness is what I value the most because health is what I value the
most. My happiness has increased considerably because (over the years)
I've recovered a lot of health I had been losing year after year. I've
spent countless nights awake having ``fun'', for example.
In my notebook, I have no values and no goals, which is all very
liberating. I've had lots of them. They were no good.
What I do each day is the right thing. What's to do the right thing? Impossible to tell because I don't have a method to say what it is. I
know only what the right thing is when the moment of doing it arrives
and I see only a single possible thing to do---the adequate one.
People often ask me---what would you do in that situation? The answer
is always---I don't know. I might know *then*, but certainly not now.
``Oh, come on; please answer it.'' I could give you an answer, even a serious one; but the fact is that I really only know what I'm going to
really do at the moment I'm doing. (Humorously, if you want to play
around with fiction, I can come up with lots of answers for you.)
This is also very liberating. I make no choices anymore. I only need
to wait, but the wait is not a passive sitting around; the wait is work,
but it's a work with no striving; it's a work in attention, which is not concentration. This way I have never been happier.
And why is the natural good? Isn't that a value statement that we
cannot answer by science?
Oh, I think that's easy. The natural is good because bad, by
definition, is anything that lost equilibrium. Why does sugar taste
good? Because it is actually good. You developed your taste through zillions of years: it was made to feel good when the thing is good for
you. If you have too much of it, it will feel bad and the bad feeling
will push you to come back to equilibrium.
Nature is the current stability of things. Interfere with that
stability and you're off of the natural course of things. If the interference is small, things naturally come back to their equilibrium
(as the system is ``designed'' [if I may] to do that---you can remove
the word ``designed'' but it is a fact that the behavior is to come back
to the equilibrium); if the interference is big and the equilibrium
isn't restored quickly enough, things break.
So the smart thing is to look closely and see what is the equilibrium so
that you can let it be restored when you lose it.
Watch yourself at work: you'll get tired and you're tired you then work
a little more---losing the equilibrium. It's a little bit, so it's
quite unnoticeable until decades later. (And you do this little bit of
this sin against nature precisely because you're already a bit sick.
Your sickness makes you more sick. A natural thing is all quite
balanced: tired, rest; rested, move.)
I remember when I was young,
You're still young. :)
Really? ;)
Really. :) That's what I meant with the Linus Torvalds story above.
Ahh... got it!
And you can get younger. Physiological age goes both ways---forward and backward.
(*) Footnotes
[1] A Radical New Proposal For How Mind Emerges From Matter https://www.noemamag.com/a-radical-new-proposal-for-how-mind-emerges-from-matter/
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
D <nospam@example.net> writes:
On Fri, 14 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Ketchup effect? Wow. I had never heard of that. I get it. The whole >>>>>> thing comes down at once. :)
Exactly!
I'm gonna smile when I get an opportunity to use that expression. :)
The latest expression I learned was "keeping up with the Joneses".
Why "Joneses"?
Because that was the name of "the other family" from the 1910's comic
strip that created the idiom:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keeping_up_with_the_joneses
On Mon, 17 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
You learn a lot of odd stuff of usenet and mailinglists! ;)
Indeed. I often recommend it to people who study a foreign language.
Writing it each day is a very efficient way to get the language into
your memory. With the tools we have now, it's even pure joy. But, you
know, so far, I've never seen *anybody* following my advice in this
matter. (I've been making this recommendation for some two decades.)
It's a good point! I never thought of it like that, but now that you mention it,
the fact that a big part of my working life has always been english written text, I am certain it has helped improve my english.
order to increase the number of consumers, and the government happily
agreed in order to be able to tax the other half of the population!
I wouldn't quite say the rich *created* feminism. But, surely, like
every agent would do, when they see something (that they didn't create)
can help them in their quest, they use it. Obviously. Rulers often
look into philosophy, say, as an accomplice.
This is the truth!
What is your USENET client or text editors? Look above---your client or
text editor almost does what's called ``embarrassing line wrap''. It's
quite it because it doesn't mess up quote attribution, but it doesn't
know how to fill the paragraph properly. Perhaps your client could
invoke the GNU EMACS so that you can handle this with the GNU EMACS (or
vim). But your client must leave the message alone after you're done.
For short messages it is pine. For long messages it's vim.
I think you use alpine, right? Can it do a better job?
(I often fix your quotes, but I won't fix it this time to let you see it
clearly.)
Hmm, I never thought about it. For me, all quotes look alright. Could you send
me an exact copy and mark where the error is? Maybe I've gotten so used to it I
don't notice it?
Could very well be. The problem with the privacy of the mind, type
of arguments is that it is difficult to prove anything.
Proving anything is quite useless for regular people. Proving is useful
in math, less in science and that's just about it, I think. (By the
way, when I see people saying things like ``scientifically proven'',
they have no idea what they're talking about.)
Well, let's make the distinction of proof (math) and evidence
(science). Maybe that makes it more clear?
Of course you're right. But I also think we've historically a problem >>>> there, which I'm calling a ``war'' here. And the reason I consider it >>>> pretty bad it's because it's an inner war. When men and women don't get >>>> along, that's because they're not getting along with themselves.
Interesting. Could you give an example?
Can we begin with women in some Arab cultures? Some don't even let them
drive. Doesn't this suggest a certain battle between the sexes?
Battle for me is something intentional, and intentional conflict between two groups. Even though it is not good, I don't know if I would categorize it as a
"battle" between the sexes. Just a backwards, retarded culture and religion, that will hopefully go away in a generation or two. =/
But let's look at our own culture. Here's a true story. I have a
friend who is considered very sweet and polite by everyone who meets
him. He tells me about all of his dates and girlfriends and whatever.
I never told him because I don't even think he would understand it, but
he objectifies women quite clearly (to me). For instance, he was
chatting with a girl on an app some time ago and they were talking about
meeting up. The girl was a bit unstable with the commitment to meeting
in person and he was losing a bit of patience; another girl came up and
agreed to meet him. As he was telling me the story, he made remarks
such to the effect of---whatever; I get the problem solved.
In other words, he is looking for services; if one company doesn't
satisfy him; he goes with another and that's it. What looks like
someone's impatience with people's complications might actually be
hiding a certain outlook on life, which I call materialism. He can't
see that he's getting involved with people. His outlook is not that of
someone who sees oneself intertwined with everybody else. He seems
himself quite separate from everybody else.
Well, from one point of view, he is. He is an individual, and I would say that
as long as he is open with only looking for certain services, and a woman is looking to provide services, that's good!
While people often remark how polite and sweet he is---and I like him
too---, I actually say that he has a health problem that makes him quite
insensitive. Who is suffering the most? Himself. His insensibility,
for example, blinds him even to his own nutrition. He's losing his
health slowly year after year.
That is sad. =(
What about women? Same thing. People are very insensitive because
their sensors are all turned off or broken. (And the mystery goes away
when watch them closely: nearly everyone is drugging themselves daily
with coffee, processed foods, medicine and all the rest of it.)
And that's the case with the most of the world.
Oh, here's an example from today. Today I woke up with my neighbor
having a little party in his house early morning---that means it
probably started a night out. He lives in his house with his wife. His
wife was not in this party. It was actually a two-couple party.
Believe it or not, my bedroom faces his pool directly. (Not much
privacy for sure.) I got up, saw what was going on and did not even
open my window to give him a bit of privacy in his little party.
Chatting went on for a while and then suddenly silence. So I looked and
then his friend was likely inside the house and he was having sex in the
pool.
Wow! Brazil, here I come! ;)
Hmm, I never think I ever experienced anything like it in the far, far
north. People are way too reserved for anything like that to happen,
at least where I have been living, oh, and of course there's never
been any swimming pools close by as well. ;)
And that's the second time I spot something. The first was months ago
in a similar situation. Night out followed by coming home with some new
friends. This time the girl was actually cute and perhaps didn't sleep
with him, but he seemed to enjoy kissing her.
I figure he thinks he's enjoying life, but I actually think he doesn't
like his wife at all. So why are they together? There are no paradoxes
If all are in on it, who am I to judge? Our dear lord teaches us to "judge not...". On the other hand, if his wife is not in on it, it is very sad and immoral.
in this world. There's some business going on; there is a contract
there. His wife must be getting something from the deal and he's
getting something else.
That's not affection.
Difficult to say without knowing them better. But it certainly does sound unorthodox to me.
Where does this come from? I don't know the beginning of it all, but
surely this goes back to thousands of years. Recently, I learned that
archaeologists discovered human civilizations in the tropical forests
150,000 years ago. Was men and women at war back then? I don't know,
but I would easily guess so. I think the problem goes way back.
I think lumping society into two groups, and thinking abotu conflict in terms of
those two groups, risks obscuring the real issues. I am certain there are many
harmonious couples out there. I try to judge based on individual situations and
behaviours, instead of making blanket statements.
I don't really separate men and women. I think of them as two sides of >>>> the same coin.
I think of them as individuals.
I know. But we are not individuals. Even evolutionary biologists are
getting there already [1].
How come we are not individuals? If not individuals, what then?
The logical end point of "woke" when they realise that all groups
eventually boil down to unique individuals. Welcome to libertarianism!
=D
You lost me there.
Woke is about finding or creating ever smaller groups, and competing to see who
is most hurt, and who gets the most privilege. In the left, this woke movement
has created more and more sub-groups, and they are all competing for a limited
resource (political power) and the more groups there are, the more fighting will
go on between them, and eventually all common ground is lost and it will disintegrate.
The only logical way out of this dilemma, is to continue to shrink the groups until they consist of groups with one member, the individual, and then they can
reach the conclusion that we are all individuals, and the only way to sustainably create a society is if all individuals are respected.
Complicate? How come? To me it is one of the most liberating
realizations of my life. =) For me it is I guess an honest life, a
life where you think through your values and goals, and then strive
to realize them and maximize the amount of long term happiness you
can get.
An expert could likely complicate your life by trying to show that it's
either false or meaningless. (Don't ask me to do it---I'm just the
student.) They could attack ``reason for one's existence'' as
meaningless and they could certainly attack ``subjective'' by claiming
that the vast majority of the world is quite objective.
Hah... I'll take the challenge! ;) I agree, objectively speaking, that there is
no reason.
But since for me, it is moved into the subjective realm, it is safe
from any attack from "experts" since science, being descriptive, is
not able to "crack" the subjective level.
Oh, this might get complicated. Lived life, as in my subjective
experience, I would argue, can never become objectively analyzed,
since it is impossible for descriptive science to "get" what it's
like to be the subjective me.
To your content perhaps, but people can infer what's in you by looking
from the outside. The inner /is/ the outer. You're a human being.
Everybody else knows what's like to be a human being.
You can deny it all 'til the end of times.
You can infer based on behaviour, but you can never "know". My subjectivity and
how I experience things, are "locked" into the processing of my brain, as my cosciousness collides with reality.
So yes, you are right, we can infer, but that is not certain knowledge, and in
some cases, such as quantum physics, not even knowledge.
Life, descriptive, external, life, as understood by science, can
definitely be categorized and analyzed. In terms of happiness, you
can go so far as positive psychology and statistically analyze
"happy" people and draw conclusions about what life factors tend to
contribute to their happiness.
Freud observed himself and made conclusions that apply to everyone else.
Like everyone else, he perhaps made mistakes in the fine details of
things, but he also made huge contributions---from a unitary sample
space.
True, but freud these days is disproven. As you say, he did lay a good foundation for psychology however, and it has progress from him.
In my notebook, I have no values and no goals, which is all very
liberating. I've had lots of them. They were no good.
If you have no goals, how do you determine your actions? Surely they are not just random acts?
What I do each day is the right thing. What's to do the right thing?
Impossible to tell because I don't have a method to say what it is. I
know only what the right thing is when the moment of doing it arrives
and I see only a single possible thing to do---the adequate one.
Well, it seems you do have a goal! Maybe you apply the via negativa?
Do not do the wrong thing, and then pursue, at random or based on
preference, the actions that remain after the obviously wrong ones
(based on your values) are eliminated?
People often ask me---what would you do in that situation? The answer
is always---I don't know. I might know *then*, but certainly not now.
``Oh, come on; please answer it.'' I could give you an answer, even a
serious one; but the fact is that I really only know what I'm going to
really do at the moment I'm doing. (Humorously, if you want to play
around with fiction, I can come up with lots of answers for you.)
It seems, like me, you are not always comfortable with
counterfactuals.
Hmm, I never thought about it. For me, all quotes look alright. Could you send
me an exact copy and mark where the error is? Maybe I've gotten so used to it I
don't notice it?
Omg, it turns out it's *my* fault! Sorry about that. I mean---not my
fault exactly, but Gnus'. Gnus is messing up my quotes when I M-RET at points to reply---it messes up quotes above and sometimes quotes below. Incredible. I must report this. (It sometimes does and I don't see it,
so it goes broken up.)
Proving anything is quite useless for regular people. Proving is useful >>> in math, less in science and that's just about it, I think. (By the
way, when I see people saying things like ``scientifically proven'',
they have no idea what they're talking about.)
Well, let's make the distinction of proof (math) and evidence
(science). Maybe that makes it more clear?
By ``proving anything'' I had in mind any kind of good argument. It's
of no use to a lot of people. People are not making very rational
decisions. I mean---they make rational decisions in a certain level,
but it's not very deep reason. That's why society is full of apparent paradoxes.
Battle for me is something intentional, and intentional conflict between two >> groups. Even though it is not good, I don't know if I would categorize it as a
"battle" between the sexes. Just a backwards, retarded culture and religion, >> that will hopefully go away in a generation or two. =/
It's okay---I don't care for the words. If not war or battle, something else. We're both seeing what's hapenning. I call it one thing and you
call it another. I might find it disturbing and you might call me too sensitive. That's what we're dealing with every day. Similarly, some
people might find it's all beautiful and they could be on drugs, say. :)
We need to deal with this. That's a pretty big part of communication.
That's why I appreciate some of the art of listening. I appreciate
thoughts like those of David Bohm that one would find in ``On
Dialogue''. By the way, whatever changes you're seeing, I say it's all
on the surface.
Well, from one point of view, he is. He is an individual, and I would say that
as long as he is open with only looking for certain services, and a woman is >> looking to provide services, that's good!
Your ``that's good'' here is likely materialist. You might be saying
``if they're happy, what's the problem?'' That's essentially
saying---it's not my problem. People can often claim to be happy and
even appear happy, when in reality... That's parents worry so much
about their children (and often others beyond than theirs).
too---, I actually say that he has a health problem that makes him quite >>> insensitive. Who is suffering the most? Himself. His insensibility,
for example, blinds him even to his own nutrition. He's losing his
health slowly year after year.
That is sad. =(
Such is life. It's difficult. You can tell people of their symptons,
but they don't see it---they don't believe it. When people can't tune themselves to intelligence, it becomes quite difficult to do anything intelligent.
open my window to give him a bit of privacy in his little party.
Chatting went on for a while and then suddenly silence. So I looked and >>> then his friend was likely inside the house and he was having sex in the >>> pool.
Wow! Brazil, here I come! ;)
Lol. You could be getting the wrong impression. :) But the real remark
to be made here, in a more serious tone, is that this is no good. For instance, when I saw them in the swimming pool, the first thing I
thought was---omg, what a place for that. And he was in own home---he
likely left the most comfortable place for his friend. Of course,
people might love this kind of stuff. It's not shameful or obscene or whatever---I couldn't care less about any of that. I'm saying it's just
a someone trying to get some relief, without much of a clue of what's
going on.
By the way, if I were mildly inclined to the same, I could likely be
there myself. When they moved in, they threw various parties and
invited me to them all. I had lots of chances to blend in, but I
couldn't, really: I don't drink; I don't stay up all the night; what I
eat is the nearly the bare minimum and from a very picky selection.
It's a totally different life style. And, hey, don't get me wrong: I actually like them. I like both of them. One of the first things I do
when I wake up is open up my window. I love natural light. I only
opened my window by midday that day---that's when they had already left
home (likely to some more fun). I also spotted my neighbor's friend
with his head down on a table trying to rest a bit. In all probability,
they spent the night out, arrived in the morning with the two girls and didn't sleep for a minute. Of course, with whisky, Red Bulls, beers and
that kind of nonsense.
That's one of the things I eventually noticed. The first thing to do to
put your life in order is to quit all drugs---bad food included. To
enjoy a whole night without sleep, you gotta be on something. The body
loves to sleep if it's well regulated.
Hmm, I never think I ever experienced anything like it in the far, far
north. People are way too reserved for anything like that to happen,
at least where I have been living, oh, and of course there's never
been any swimming pools close by as well. ;)
I do believe Brazilians are on average less reserved. There's a lot of
poor people here. People who live in the slums, for example. I have
never been too close, but they're everywhere so I often observe them.
One problem I've spent some hours (that is, almost nothing) on is why do
poor people talk so loud. My hypothesis is that they grow up in space-deprived environments, neighbors are too close by, no privacy and
so on. It becomes the normal thing, so they might not feel being
exposed at all to whoever is around.
If all are in on it, who am I to judge? Our dear lord teaches us to "judge >> not...". On the other hand, if his wife is not in on it, it is very sad and >> immoral.
I claim she is in on it, not consciously in on it though. But she's in
on it in a deeper level. For instance, I classify her as an alcoholic.
I don't think her husband is an alcoholic in the same level as she is,
but technically I do include him in the alcoholism classification, too.
He surely needs alcohol, for example, to have the kind of night we
described earlier. So many people do.
I know. But we are not individuals. Even evolutionary biologists are
getting there already [1].
How come we are not individuals? If not individuals, what then?
That's too difficult of a conversation. We're in comp.misc. Let's call
it a thread and end this. If you're curious, you could look at two perspectives: one, which is the evolutionary biology one---there's the article I linked in a previous post. Another perspective, more
difficult to parse, is that of someone such as Jiddu Krishnamurti---very interesting perspective there.
The only logical way out of this dilemma, is to continue to shrink the groups
until they consist of groups with one member, the individual, and then they can
reach the conclusion that we are all individuals, and the only way to
sustainably create a society is if all individuals are respected.
Of course.
This stuff is all complete nonsense. Not even worth a discussion. I
don't even use the word you began your paragraph---I never said it out
loud and never wrote it. Let's keep it that way. :)
An expert could likely complicate your life by trying to show that it's
either false or meaningless. (Don't ask me to do it---I'm just the
student.) They could attack ``reason for one's existence'' as
meaningless and they could certainly attack ``subjective'' by claiming
that the vast majority of the world is quite objective.
Hah... I'll take the challenge! ;) I agree, objectively speaking, that there is
no reason.
No reason? I think there is reason. :)
But since for me, it is moved into the subjective realm, it is safe
from any attack from "experts" since science, being descriptive, is
not able to "crack" the subjective level.
I've seen this before. It's typical. You're putting too much precision
into things. For instance, you said (likely below) that we can't know
for sure; we can infer. Sure---knowing for sure is too difficult. We
can infer and that's good. We all look and the see the Moon out there.
We're sure it's there. End of the story. :) It's not subjective.
That's what I mean.
But, sure, I read Descartes's ``Discourse on the Method''. I loved
seeing him doubting everything and starting from scratch. I think that
book has a serious educational philosophy because it gives us the
example of an independent mind (in pretty ordinary steps) organizing
itself and preparing itself for more work.
But I also think (in retrospective) it's a bit childish, too. I don't
need to doubt so much. I see the intellect being too precious, being considered more than it really is. For instance, I just sit and feel
myself. Here I am---therefore I am. End of story. :)
It's not subjective. We all have seen the same stuff. Of course, from
where you look is different from where I look. But we're seeing the
same things---evidently. It's what nearly all of the evidence shows.
You can infer based on behaviour, but you can never "know". My subjectivity and
how I experience things, are "locked" into the processing of my brain, as my >> cosciousness collides with reality.
So yes, you are right, we can infer, but that is not certain knowledge, and in
some cases, such as quantum physics, not even knowledge.
You're correct, of course, but see above.
Freud observed himself and made conclusions that apply to everyone else. >>> Like everyone else, he perhaps made mistakes in the fine details of
things, but he also made huge contributions---from a unitary sample
space.
True, but freud these days is disproven. As you say, he did lay a good
foundation for psychology however, and it has progress from him.
I don't think he's disproven at all. :) Look, it doesn't matter if a mathematician got a conjecture wrong---he did a lot of useful work in
his life. Same with Freud---just his independence from public opinion
makes him a type of Socrates.
In my notebook, I have no values and no goals, which is all very
liberating. I've had lots of them. They were no good.
If you have no goals, how do you determine your actions? Surely they are not >> just random acts?
They're surely not random. I actually try not to determine. I listen closely on a daily basis. Then I see something I need to do, then I do
it.
Well, it seems you do have a goal! Maybe you apply the via negativa?
Do not do the wrong thing, and then pursue, at random or based on
preference, the actions that remain after the obviously wrong ones
(based on your values) are eliminated?
I think you can put it either way. My agreeing with your words or disagreeing won't quite do much of anything to you. But you can count
on my honesty here.
I don't mind saying I have a goal, say. But I think the best choice of
words is to say I don't. Because I really don't. Remember I said I
really wanna have kids? You can call it a goal. :) But that would be
too simplistic to the point of being false. It's not quite true that I
want to have kids. What I want is a healthy life and I think a healthy
life would evolve towards that too. But you can likely bet that I
wouldn't do anything out of the ordinary to make that happen. If all I
can see in my life is a disease and death, say, I think I would go down
with it. Let me put it in terms of chess---lol. If all I can see is no
way out out of the check mate strategy of my opponent, I make all the
moves that I can until he check mates me. No desperation. I think that living life as it is is quite a victory---to use words that are siblings
of ``goal''.
People often ask me---what would you do in that situation? The answer
is always---I don't know. I might know *then*, but certainly not now.
``Oh, come on; please answer it.'' I could give you an answer, even a
serious one; but the fact is that I really only know what I'm going to
really do at the moment I'm doing. (Humorously, if you want to play
around with fiction, I can come up with lots of answers for you.)
It seems, like me, you are not always comfortable with
counterfactuals.
A beg your pardon? I'm not sure what you mean, but I think I agree. A counterfactual is something that goes against the facts. Surely. I
could never deny that 1 + 1 = 2, say. I can't even ignore evidence. I
don't mind leaving questions open at all. Every now and then it's a
good idea to hang a question mark on all those things we've long taken
for granted. (Is that Bertrand Russell again?)
We need to deal with this. That's a pretty big part of
communication. That's why I appreciate some of the art of listening.
I appreciate thoughts like those of David Bohm that one would find in
``On Dialogue''. By the way, whatever changes you're seeing, I say
it's all on the surface.
What is this about? Maybe I should make a note of that text.
Well, from one point of view, he is. He is an individual, and I
would say that as long as he is open with only looking for certain
services, and a woman is looking to provide services, that's good!
Your ``that's good'' here is likely materialist. You might be saying
``if they're happy, what's the problem?'' That's essentially
saying---it's not my problem. People can often claim to be happy and
even appear happy, when in reality... That's parents worry so much
about their children (and often others beyond than theirs).
This is true. But they are adults, and beyond pointing out something,
at the end of the day, I have no legal right or any right for that
matter, to control their lives.
It is perfectly true, what you are saying, and you could be right, and
it would be a tragedy, but I prefer to assume things are alright,
until proven otherwise.
When it comes to parents and children, there is a different set of expectations, both cultural and legal, so I don't think it would carry
over.
There is a fine line between wanting to help, when it is justified,
and being labeled a "Karen".
too---, I actually say that he has a health problem that makes him quite >>>> insensitive. Who is suffering the most? Himself. His insensibility, >>>> for example, blinds him even to his own nutrition. He's losing his
health slowly year after year.
That is sad. =(
Such is life. It's difficult. You can tell people of their symptons,
but they don't see it---they don't believe it. When people can't tune
themselves to intelligence, it becomes quite difficult to do anything
intelligent.
This is the truth! But I think you have done what you can do, and you shouldn't feel bad about it. At the end of the day, he is an adult and responsible for his own life.
open my window to give him a bit of privacy in his little party.
Chatting went on for a while and then suddenly silence. So I
looked and then his friend was likely inside the house and he was
having sex in the pool.
Wow! Brazil, here I come! ;)
Lol. You could be getting the wrong impression. :) But the real remark
to be made here, in a more serious tone, is that this is no good. For
instance, when I saw them in the swimming pool, the first thing I
thought was---omg, what a place for that. And he was in own home---he
likely left the most comfortable place for his friend. Of course,
people might love this kind of stuff. It's not shameful or obscene or
whatever---I couldn't care less about any of that. I'm saying it's just
a someone trying to get some relief, without much of a clue of what's
going on.
True. Could be a good example of pleasure now, at the expense of pain later.
By the way, if I were mildly inclined to the same, I could likely be
there myself. When they moved in, they threw various parties and
invited me to them all. I had lots of chances to blend in, but I
couldn't, really: I don't drink; I don't stay up all the night; what I
Haha, well, sounds like you probably did yourself a favour. I am
fascinated! In sweden, it would be exceptionally rare that any
neighbour would be invited.
eat is the nearly the bare minimum and from a very picky selection.
It's a totally different life style. And, hey, don't get me wrong: I
actually like them. I like both of them. One of the first things I do
when I wake up is open up my window. I love natural light. I only
opened my window by midday that day---that's when they had already left
home (likely to some more fun). I also spotted my neighbor's friend
with his head down on a table trying to rest a bit. In all probability,
they spent the night out, arrived in the morning with the two girls and
didn't sleep for a minute. Of course, with whisky, Red Bulls, beers and
that kind of nonsense.
Haha... wow! I don't think I could do that in my 30s even. ;)
Brazilians are very well trained! ;)
That's one of the things I eventually noticed. The first thing to do to
put your life in order is to quit all drugs---bad food included. To
enjoy a whole night without sleep, you gotta be on something. The body
loves to sleep if it's well regulated.
I probably shouldn't tell your this, but I looooove Mc Donalds
hamburgers! ;) My wife forbids me from eating them too often, so I'm
probably at about 9 per year or so. ;)
Hmm, I never think I ever experienced anything like it in the far, far
north. People are way too reserved for anything like that to happen,
at least where I have been living, oh, and of course there's never
been any swimming pools close by as well. ;)
I do believe Brazilians are on average less reserved. There's a lot of
poor people here. People who live in the slums, for example. I have
never been too close, but they're everywhere so I often observe them.
One problem I've spent some hours (that is, almost nothing) on is why do
poor people talk so loud. My hypothesis is that they grow up in
space-deprived environments, neighbors are too close by, no privacy and
so on. It becomes the normal thing, so they might not feel being
exposed at all to whoever is around.
Loud? Southern europeans are loud by my standard, so if they are loud
by your standards, then they must be _really_ loud! I once had a
brazilian colleague from Sao Paolo for 2 months, and he was a really
nice guy. But once he had some fellow brazilians over and the volume
did increase. =)
I suspect he came from a wealthy family because when he went back to
Brazil, his luggage was full of play stations and electronics that he
said he could easily sell at twice the price. There must have been
some very high tariffs at that time.
If all are in on it, who am I to judge? Our dear lord teaches us to
"judge not...". On the other hand, if his wife is not in on it, it
is very sad and immoral.
I claim she is in on it, not consciously in on it though. But she's in
on it in a deeper level. For instance, I classify her as an alcoholic.
I don't think her husband is an alcoholic in the same level as she is,
but technically I do include him in the alcoholism classification, too.
He surely needs alcohol, for example, to have the kind of night we
described earlier. So many people do.
He sounds like he would be right at home in northern europe. No fun
there unless alcohol is in involved.
The only logical way out of this dilemma, is to continue to shrink
the groups until they consist of groups with one member, the
individual, and then they can reach the conclusion that we are all
individuals, and the only way to sustainably create a society is if
all individuals are respected.
Of course.
This stuff is all complete nonsense. Not even worth a discussion. I
don't even use the word you began your paragraph [with]---I never
said it out loud and never wrote it. Let's keep it that way. :)
You are a philosopher king!
An expert could likely complicate your life by trying to show that it's >>>> either false or meaningless. (Don't ask me to do it---I'm just the
student.) They could attack ``reason for one's existence'' as
meaningless and they could certainly attack ``subjective'' by claiming >>>> that the vast majority of the world is quite objective.
Hah... I'll take the challenge! ;) I agree, objectively speaking,
that there is no reason.
No reason? I think there is reason. :)
But can you prove it, objectively?
If you can, I think you'll have solved 2500 years of ethical
philosophizing.
Or, another out, is the way of definition. Depending on your
definitions, it could of course be "made" objective. The question is
then if I accept the definitions or not. =)
It's not subjective. We all have seen the same stuff. Of course, from
where you look is different from where I look. But we're seeing the
same things---evidently. It's what nearly all of the evidence shows.
Agreed! But boy have I had endless email discussions with people who
reject the proof of their senses.
Freud observed himself and made conclusions that apply to everyone else. >>>> Like everyone else, he perhaps made mistakes in the fine details of
things, but he also made huge contributions---from a unitary sample
space.
True, but freud these days is disproven. As you say, he did lay a good
foundation for psychology however, and it has progress from him.
I don't think he's disproven at all. :) Look, it doesn't matter if a
mathematician got a conjecture wrong---he did a lot of useful work in
his life. Same with Freud---just his independence from public opinion
makes him a type of Socrates.
I did a lot of good, of course, but his theories about dream
interpretation and the psyche I think are no longer relevant. On the
other hand, I am not a psychologist, so who am I to say? =)
It seems, like me, you are not always comfortable with
counterfactuals.
A beg your pardon? I'm not sure what you mean, but I think I agree. A
counterfactual is something that goes against the facts. Surely. I
could never deny that 1 + 1 = 2, say. I can't even ignore evidence. I
don't mind leaving questions open at all. Every now and then it's a
good idea to hang a question mark on all those things we've long taken
for granted. (Is that Bertrand Russell again?)
Not quite. Counterfactuals are questions such as... "imagine you ate an apple this morning, would that mean that later in the day you would have a stomach ache". So when those types of thought experiments are not made with the intention of high lighting something tangible or empirically provable, I find them to be useless idle speculation. That's what I was trying to get at.
On Sun, 16 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Only 3 hours? How old is your laptop? Sounds like you should at
least be able to get 7-8 hours out of a new one, unless you are
running enormous amount of VM:s or scientific calculations.
Right now I get 1 hour, so 3 is a major upgrade. My notebook is quite
new. It's a Lenovo 15IMH05 with 24 GiB of RAM.
Hmm, sounds like something is wrong somewhere. I'd install powertop
and/or tlp and also make sure to disable Intel VMD in case it is
enabled in your bios.
With those three, you should be able to double your battery time at least.
For me, the biggest difference was disabling intel VMD in the bios,
that made a huge difference.
I run cwm, which is known as not having a virtual desktop thingies, but...
it's actually does. When I press super-1 I go to desktop 1. I created
4 virtual desktops (which is enough), but I think I could have at least
9 of them.
Yeah, these things are important---printer, scanner and wifi. Although
I wonder if it is easy to get p/s/w on cwm without having to pull in
all of xfce under the hood? That would be awesome!
I think wifi is a lot less important than it seems. I've read this
article yesterday called ``the computer built to last 50 years'' and
offline mode is quite an important part of it. I agree with that.
The system would be designed to usually function offline. It's when you
connect to the Internet that it does its pull and pushes. With a system
like that, wifi is less important---you connect your system to the
router once a day, say, and, just like pumping gas into a vehicle, you
get everything you need. Now you can go back to your desk, after
unplugging the cable from your router.
I like that.
True. But it would not be convenient for me. The wife would be angry with network cables everywhere. ;)
Clearly, these are people trying to work without distractions and
interruptions. I am one of them.
My latest revelation (a few years back) was alpine email, it probably
doubled my email productivity compared with thunderbird, and is a "all
in one" solution that comes with a lot of help included. Still
flexible and extensible though, but probably not as much as mutt or
neomutt, but it strikes a beautiful balance for me. =)
Now I would really look into alpine, but I'm a Gnus user, so I'm
forbidden from performing heretic research.
Haha... true. Well, if you are already into tui email, I think the
gains will be less. I suspect that alpine is not the most efficient
one. But I think it is perhaps a bit easier to get started with.
Right now I get 1 hour, so 3 is a major upgrade. My notebook is quite
new. It's a Lenovo 15IMH05 with 24 GiB of RAM.
Hmm, sounds like something is wrong somewhere. I'd install powertop
and/or tlp and also make sure to disable Intel VMD in case it is
enabled in your bios.
I run OpenBSD and I believe we don't have programs such as powertop or
tlp around here.
Right now I get 1 hour, so 3 is a major upgrade. My notebook is quite
new. It's a Lenovo 15IMH05 with 24 GiB of RAM.
Hmm, sounds like something is wrong somewhere. I'd install powertop
and/or tlp and also make sure to disable Intel VMD in case it is
enabled in your bios.
I run OpenBSD and I believe we don't have programs such as powertop or
tlp around here. I'm going to look into the BIOS. There are some Intel features there that I could disable. Some virtualization technology. I
have enabled them and I saw that the OpenBSD kernel notices them. But I doubt I use any of that.
With those three, you should be able to double your battery time at least. >>
For me, the biggest difference was disabling intel VMD in the bios,
that made a huge difference.
You give me hopes. :)
I run cwm, which is known as not having a virtual desktop thingies, but...
it's actually does. When I press super-1 I go to desktop 1. I created
4 virtual desktops (which is enough), but I think I could have at least
9 of them.
Yeah, these things are important---printer, scanner and wifi. Although
I wonder if it is easy to get p/s/w on cwm without having to pull in
all of xfce under the hood? That would be awesome!
What's p/s/w?
True. But it would not be convenient for me. The wife would be angry with
network cables everywhere. ;)
That was not the image I had in mind. I had in mind plugging an
appliance into the outlet on a wall. I could perhaps take my computer
from my desk and lay on the couch with it while I plug it to the outlet
near the couch. Then it downloads and uploads stuff (like,
automatically) and then I watch a little TV, say. It would take a
little while because with my new offline-designed system, the downloads wouldn't take just a few seconds for USENET and community messages and e-mails; it would also download a few websites (up to a certain depth)
and videos [interviews, conversations, lectures] and also songs (so that
now I'd have them offline). So after, say, half an hour, I'd unplug it
and get back to my desk to continue work. So maybe I'd only connect
again the next day or whenever.
I really enjoyed this picture.
The author used words like connecting your computer to an outlet like a vehicle that stops by a gas station to pump fuel.
Haha... true. Well, if you are already into tui email, I think the
gains will be less. I suspect that alpine is not the most efficient
one. But I think it is perhaps a bit easier to get started with.
It's probably easier than Gnus, but in my case I think investing even
more into Gnus is the way to go. I wish it were easier to use. The
best thing about Gnus is not actually Gnus itself, but the fact that
it's well integrated with the most pleasurable text editor ever.
What is this about? Maybe I should make a note of that text.
That's a conversation David Bohm held with an audience (in California,
if I recall correctly). The book is a transcription of the
conversation. In those dialogs, David Bohm tries to convey what he
means by a ``dialogue''. While an intellectual discussion is typically
a subtle fight, as Jiddu Krishnamurti (David Bohm's friend) would
describe, Bohm's dialogue is a certain construction among two or more
people in which /listening/ (in the Krishamurti's sense) is key.
I believe it was in an interview that David Bohm gave to Professor Wilkins---which was an interview meant to write a biography of David
Bohm, which I believe never happened---that David Bohm remarked and
pretty much nobody had ever understood his notion of dialogue, and that
made it even more interesting because it suggests that it has a certain subtleness that could be escaping people---and then I wonder if it
escaped me too.
There is a fine line between wanting to help, when it is justified,
and being labeled a "Karen".
Lol. I hadn't heard about ``Karen'' before. Fun.
By the way, if I were mildly inclined to the same, I could likely be
there myself. When they moved in, they threw various parties and
invited me to them all. I had lots of chances to blend in, but I
couldn't, really: I don't drink; I don't stay up all the night; what I
Haha, well, sounds like you probably did yourself a favour. I am
fascinated! In sweden, it would be exceptionally rare that any
neighbour would be invited.
I see a lot of neighbors here that don't get along. I am probably a
I probably shouldn't tell your this, but I looooove Mc Donalds
hamburgers! ;) My wife forbids me from eating them too often, so I'm
probably at about 9 per year or so. ;)
Lol! Here's a sermon made specially for... Lol. Just kidding. To tell
you the truth, I kinda like it a lot, too. Now, one thing is true---it
tastes better if don't eat it every day, say. I've had weeks in which I
indulged in it perhaps eating McDonald's every day, along with ice
cream, coffee and other terrible ideas. Thank God I'm got out of that
alive. These days, gluten hits me pretty bad. It still tastes good,
but it doesn't after the food starts taking its effect. I didn't feel
like that in my teens, but after I started quitting all of this bad
stuff, I can't seem to go back to it at all.
Loud? Southern europeans are loud by my standard, so if they are loud
by your standards, then they must be _really_ loud! I once had a
brazilian colleague from Sao Paolo for 2 months, and he was a really
nice guy. But once he had some fellow brazilians over and the volume
did increase. =)
Lol. Sorry about that! :)
He sounds like he would be right at home in northern europe. No fun
there unless alcohol is in involved.
Yeah---I suppose there might be cultures out there that drink a lot more
than Brazilians. I don't think Brazilians do too bad, but it's been
getting worse. There's an Americanization of the food industry here. Brazilians are going in on it. I remember over 10 years ago seeing on
TV that over 52% of Brazil is overweight. That was unthinkable in the
70s or the 80s, say.
Hah... I'll take the challenge! ;) I agree, objectively speaking,
that there is no reason.
No reason? I think there is reason. :)
But can you prove it, objectively?
Objectively? You mean kinda like a proof that the whole world with
stand in awe, like beautiful math proofs like Godel's Theorems? I
believe I can't and likely wouldn't work on trying. Why should I do
I think proofs are just constructions. In math, for example, their role
is quite clear. I don't even know what it would mean to prove that
there is reason. I think there's reason because we seem to be doing
some stuff here that we decide to call reason and then, evidently, it
exists in the sense that we conclude it does and move on.
Or, another out, is the way of definition. Depending on your
definitions, it could of course be "made" objective. The question is
then if I accept the definitions or not. =)
So you seem to think that a proof is something like too hard to
resist---like a math proof. I believe I don't think like that. A proof
to me is a joint work between a writer and a reader. If the reader that catch the spirit, there is no proof.
For a proof to have meaning, it needs to be shared and recognized by
another person. If you were completely alone in the universe (a counterfactual and ridiculous proposition), you would have to read you
proof a few times in order to simulate a second or third person sharing
and recognizing your proof. In other words, thinking is a collective phenomenon. When we do it alone, we actually simulate someone else
that's listening and talking back. (Pretty strong evidence, I find.)
If someone /rejects/ an axiom I came up with or a definition I wrote,
then there's likely little friendship there. Friendship exists when
people go along with you without judgment. Rejecting /or accepting/
anything is judgment, which is not friendship. When someone proposes me anything, I look at it without accepting it or rejecting it. (Unless
I'm a really bad mood!)
Agreed! But boy have I had endless email discussions with people who
reject the proof of their senses.
Excessive refinement in thinking? They want a kind of super assured certainty? I think that's a waste of time. It's not a waste of time to
care for your math proofs, say, or removing bugs from your programs and
so on. But rejecting the senses as in I don't know if really exist or
I'm being fooled by an evil genius? I think that's excessive thinking. That's when thought escapes from the leash.
I did a lot of good, of course, but his theories about dream
interpretation and the psyche I think are no longer relevant. On the
other hand, I am not a psychologist, so who am I to say? =)
Most psychologist are so full of nonsense that being one wouldn't help
you here. :) I haven't read The Interpretation of Dreams, but I really
would like to do it. The book could be wildly wrong, but notice that
nobody seems to have made any advances since then anyhow.
A beg your pardon? I'm not sure what you mean, but I think I agree. A
counterfactual is something that goes against the facts. Surely. I
could never deny that 1 + 1 = 2, say. I can't even ignore evidence. I
don't mind leaving questions open at all. Every now and then it's a
good idea to hang a question mark on all those things we've long taken
for granted. (Is that Bertrand Russell again?)
Not quite. Counterfactuals are questions such as... "imagine you ate an apple
this morning, would that mean that later in the day you would have a stomach >> ache". So when those types of thought experiments are not made with the
intention of high lighting something tangible or empirically provable, I find
them to be useless idle speculation. That's what I was trying to get at.
Oh, I see. We're in total agreement. I think counterfactual
propositions are useless distractions.
On Sun, 16 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Only 3 hours? How old is your laptop? Sounds like you should at
least be able to get 7-8 hours out of a new one, unless you are
running enormous amount of VM:s or scientific calculations.
Right now I get 1 hour, so 3 is a major upgrade. My notebook is quite
new. It's a Lenovo 15IMH05 with 24 GiB of RAM.
Hmm, sounds like something is wrong somewhere. I'd install powertop
and/or tlp and also make sure to disable Intel VMD in case it is
enabled in your bios.
With those three, you should be able to double your battery time at least.
For me, the biggest difference was disabling intel VMD in the bios,
that made a huge difference.
I run cwm, which is known as not having a virtual desktop thingies, but...
it's actually does. When I press super-1 I go to desktop 1. I created
4 virtual desktops (which is enough), but I think I could have at least
9 of them.
Yeah, these things are important---printer, scanner and wifi. Although
I wonder if it is easy to get p/s/w on cwm without having to pull in
all of xfce under the hood? That would be awesome!
I think wifi is a lot less important than it seems. I've read this
article yesterday called ``the computer built to last 50 years'' and
offline mode is quite an important part of it. I agree with that.
The system would be designed to usually function offline. It's when you
connect to the Internet that it does its pull and pushes. With a system
like that, wifi is less important---you connect your system to the
router once a day, say, and, just like pumping gas into a vehicle, you
get everything you need. Now you can go back to your desk, after
unplugging the cable from your router.
I like that.
True. But it would not be convenient for me. The wife would be angry with network cables everywhere. ;)
Clearly, these are people trying to work without distractions and
interruptions. I am one of them.
My latest revelation (a few years back) was alpine email, it probably
doubled my email productivity compared with thunderbird, and is a "all
in one" solution that comes with a lot of help included. Still
flexible and extensible though, but probably not as much as mutt or
neomutt, but it strikes a beautiful balance for me. =)
Now I would really look into alpine, but I'm a Gnus user, so I'm
forbidden from performing heretic research.
Haha... true. Well, if you are already into tui email, I think the
gains will be less. I suspect that alpine is not the most efficient
one. But I think it is perhaps a bit easier to get started with.
On 21 March 2025 16:26 Salvador Mirzo, wrote:
Right now I get 1 hour, so 3 is a major upgrade. My notebook is quite >>>> new. It's a Lenovo 15IMH05 with 24 GiB of RAM.
Hmm, sounds like something is wrong somewhere. I'd install powertop
and/or tlp and also make sure to disable Intel VMD in case it is
enabled in your bios.
I run OpenBSD and I believe we don't have programs such as powertop or
tlp around here.
Perhaps you could take a look at `obsdfreqd'.
It is available as package.
Put the following in your /etc/rc.conf.local:
apmd_flags=-L
pkg_scripts=obsdfreqd
On Fri, 21 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Right now I get 1 hour, so 3 is a major upgrade. My notebook is quite >>>> new. It's a Lenovo 15IMH05 with 24 GiB of RAM.
Hmm, sounds like something is wrong somewhere. I'd install powertop
and/or tlp and also make sure to disable Intel VMD in case it is
enabled in your bios.
I run OpenBSD and I believe we don't have programs such as powertop or
tlp around here. I'm going to look into the BIOS. There are some Intel
features there that I could disable. Some virtualization technology. I
have enabled them and I saw that the OpenBSD kernel notices them. But I
doubt I use any of that.
Best of luck! OpenBSD is strange. On some things it is far ahead, while on others, it is hopelessly antiquated if things are as you say. =(
With those three, you should be able to double your battery time at least. >>>
For me, the biggest difference was disabling intel VMD in the bios,
that made a huge difference.
You give me hopes. :)
Let me know if it makes a difference for you! =)
True. But it would not be convenient for me. The wife would be angry with >>> network cables everywhere. ;)
That was not the image I had in mind. I had in mind plugging an
appliance into the outlet on a wall. I could perhaps take my computer
from my desk and lay on the couch with it while I plug it to the outlet
near the couch. Then it downloads and uploads stuff (like,
automatically) and then I watch a little TV, say. It would take a
little while because with my new offline-designed system, the downloads
wouldn't take just a few seconds for USENET and community messages and
e-mails; it would also download a few websites (up to a certain depth)
and videos [interviews, conversations, lectures] and also songs (so that
now I'd have them offline). So after, say, half an hour, I'd unplug it
and get back to my desk to continue work. So maybe I'd only connect
again the next day or whenever.
I really enjoyed this picture.
Ahh got it! Yes, that makes much more sense. I wrote a script that
plugs into my email program that enables me to download any link in an
email and get the download as an email itself. It's great! I get an
email with a link to an article, then I do not need to leave my email program. I just highlight the link, press a button, and a minute later
the article comes in text only mode, as an email. Pure bliss! =D
Best of luck! OpenBSD is strange. On some things it is far ahead, while on >> others, it is hopelessly antiquated if things are as you say. =(
I doubt OpenBSD was actually designed to save battery. I think secure /servers/ are their target. I think best system is the one you know
best and like best. OpenBSD has been very comforting because you read
their documentation and you just understand everything. OpenBSD has
been giving me a strong sense of control, which is what makes software
use pleasurable. (See Donald A. Norman.)
You give me hopes. :)
Let me know if it makes a difference for you! =)
I don't have VMD actually. What I could disable (that was enabled) was
a virtualization feature. It doesn't feel like it's doing much, but
let's until for a few more days.
Ahh got it! Yes, that makes much more sense. I wrote a script that
plugs into my email program that enables me to download any link in an
email and get the download as an email itself. It's great! I get an
email with a link to an article, then I do not need to leave my email
program. I just highlight the link, press a button, and a minute later
the article comes in text only mode, as an email. Pure bliss! =D
Wow. :) What is this e-mail client again?
I run OpenBSD and I believe we don't have programs such as powertop or
tlp around here. I'm going to look into the BIOS. There are some Intel >features there that I could disable. Some virtualization technology. I
have enabled them and I saw that the OpenBSD kernel notices them. But I >doubt I use any of that.
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
I run OpenBSD and I believe we don't have programs such as powertop or
tlp around here. I'm going to look into the BIOS. There are some Intel
features there that I could disable. Some virtualization technology. I
have enabled them and I saw that the OpenBSD kernel notices them. But I
doubt I use any of that.
There is something similar available for BSD called powermon(1). As much
as I am a fan of BSD and as much as I bemoan the horrible linux bloat and linux's move away from modularism, I have to say that in general BSD is
a poor choice for laptops, if only because ACPI support for BSD isn't
very good.
--scott
On Mon, 24 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Ahh got it! Yes, that makes much more sense. I wrote a script that
plugs into my email program that enables me to download any link in an
email and get the download as an email itself. It's great! I get an
email with a link to an article, then I do not need to leave my email
program. I just highlight the link, press a button, and a minute later
the article comes in text only mode, as an email. Pure bliss! =D
Wow. :) What is this e-mail client again?
Alpine. Check it out here: alpineapp.email. Eduardo, the current
maintainer is active from time to time on the usenet group for alpine,
and gives great help!
It's written in C, compiles very easily (at least for me), and is
quite "hackable". =)
Salvador Mirzo <smirzo@example.com> wrote:
I run OpenBSD and I believe we don't have programs such as powertop or
tlp around here. I'm going to look into the BIOS. There are some Intel >>features there that I could disable. Some virtualization technology. I >>have enabled them and I saw that the OpenBSD kernel notices them. But I >>doubt I use any of that.
There is something similar available for BSD called powermon(1). As much
as I am a fan of BSD and as much as I bemoan the horrible linux bloat and linux's move away from modularism, I have to say that in general BSD is
a poor choice for laptops, if only because ACPI support for BSD isn't
very good.
Alpine. Check it out here: alpineapp.email. Eduardo, the current
maintainer is active from time to time on the usenet group for alpine,
and gives great help!
It's written in C, compiles very easily (at least for me), and is
quite "hackable". =)
It's a TUI, right? I kinda like to compose a message, stop on it, keep
it open, visible, get back to the the inbox, search some stuff, open
other messages, perhaps compose new (quick) messages, send them out,
look at my previous message being composed and continue with writing
it...
So a TUI usually means I must draft the on-going message, get it out of
the way so I can continue the use the application. For that reason
alone, I think I need a GUI one.
I used to love slrn for the USENET, for example. I had not discovered
Gnus back then yet, so I would draft one article, look at another, draft
the new one, edit the previous... I did a lot of that at times. It's definitely okay, but with Gnus around...
But I'm glad to know that Alpine has been going great.
On Wed, 26 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
Alpine. Check it out here: alpineapp.email. Eduardo, the current
maintainer is active from time to time on the usenet group for alpine,
and gives great help!
It's written in C, compiles very easily (at least for me), and is
quite "hackable". =)
It's a TUI, right? I kinda like to compose a message, stop on it, keep
it open, visible, get back to the the inbox, search some stuff, open
other messages, perhaps compose new (quick) messages, send them out,
look at my previous message being composed and continue with writing
it...
So a TUI usually means I must draft the on-going message, get it out of
the way so I can continue the use the application. For that reason
alone, I think I need a GUI one.
Ahh... yes. The closest you can get in alpine is "postpone"
messages. So I write, then I postpone it, which means it gets saved in
a special folder. I can then continue to do other stuff, and once I
hit "C" for compose, alpine asks if I want to compose a new message or
finish a saved on, and I have then a list of saved messages. It is a
TUI in the terminal, so not possible to have several open messages in parallel I'm afraid.
On Fri, 21 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
What is this about? Maybe I should make a note of that text.
That's a conversation David Bohm held with an audience (in California,
if I recall correctly). The book is a transcription of the
conversation. In those dialogs, David Bohm tries to convey what he
means by a ``dialogue''. While an intellectual discussion is typically
a subtle fight, as Jiddu Krishnamurti (David Bohm's friend) would
describe, Bohm's dialogue is a certain construction among two or more
people in which /listening/ (in the Krishamurti's sense) is key.
I believe it was in an interview that David Bohm gave to Professor
Wilkins---which was an interview meant to write a biography of David
Bohm, which I believe never happened---that David Bohm remarked and
pretty much nobody had ever understood his notion of dialogue, and that
made it even more interesting because it suggests that it has a certain
subtleness that could be escaping people---and then I wonder if it
escaped me too.
Sounds a bit like Jürgen Habermas and his ideal dialogues.
By the way, if I were mildly inclined to the same, I could likely be
there myself. When they moved in, they threw various parties and
invited me to them all. I had lots of chances to blend in, but I
couldn't, really: I don't drink; I don't stay up all the night; what I
Haha, well, sounds like you probably did yourself a favour. I am
fascinated! In sweden, it would be exceptionally rare that any
neighbour would be invited.
I see a lot of neighbors here that don't get along. I am probably a
Ahh... sounds more normal! ;) In my current apartment, the community
is either non-existent or nuts. I don't like them, and therefore I am
selling the apartment.
In the other 2 places I have apartments, I do like the community! 66% goodness! ;)
I probably shouldn't tell your this, but I looooove Mc Donalds
hamburgers! ;) My wife forbids me from eating them too often, so I'm
probably at about 9 per year or so. ;)
Lol! Here's a sermon made specially for... Lol. Just kidding. To tell
you the truth, I kinda like it a lot, too. Now, one thing is true---it
I mean, come on... who doesn't? ;)
indulged in it perhaps eating McDonald's every day, along with ice
cream, coffee and other terrible ideas. Thank God I'm got out of that
alive. These days, gluten hits me pretty bad. It still tastes good,
but it doesn't after the food starts taking its effect. I didn't feel
like that in my teens, but after I started quitting all of this bad
stuff, I can't seem to go back to it at all.
Interesting. I have also noted more weird feelings in my stomach as
I've gotten older. I wonder, is it age? When I was young I could eat
and drink anything and never get a weird feeling in my stomach.
Loud? Southern europeans are loud by my standard, so if they are loud
by your standards, then they must be _really_ loud! I once had a
brazilian colleague from Sao Paolo for 2 months, and he was a really
nice guy. But once he had some fellow brazilians over and the volume
did increase. =)
Lol. Sorry about that! :)
No worries... it is very interesting to note these differences between cultures. =)
He sounds like he would be right at home in northern europe. No fun
there unless alcohol is in involved.
Yeah---I suppose there might be cultures out there that drink a lot more
than Brazilians. I don't think Brazilians do too bad, but it's been
getting worse. There's an Americanization of the food industry here.
Brazilians are going in on it. I remember over 10 years ago seeing on
TV that over 52% of Brazil is overweight. That was unthinkable in the
70s or the 80s, say.
That's horrible! =(
But I think it is a global phenomenon.
I think our increasingly sedentary lifestyles are to blame as well as
the mindset of instant gratification which makes people want to
achieve things with the minimum amount of energy necessary.
I also think this ties in with the fertility crisis we spoke of
before.
I am lucky! I do not like to exercise, but my wife forces me to. ;)
Hah... I'll take the challenge! ;) I agree, objectively speaking,
that there is no reason.
No reason? I think there is reason. :)
But can you prove it, objectively?
Objectively? You mean kinda like a proof that the whole world with
stand in awe, like beautiful math proofs like Godel's Theorems? I
believe I can't and likely wouldn't work on trying. Why should I do
What a shame! =(
I think proofs are just constructions. In math, for example, their role
is quite clear. I don't even know what it would mean to prove that
there is reason. I think there's reason because we seem to be doing
some stuff here that we decide to call reason and then, evidently, it
exists in the sense that we conclude it does and move on.
You do sound like a philosopher to me! ;)
Or, another out, is the way of definition. Depending on your
definitions, it could of course be "made" objective. The question is
then if I accept the definitions or not. =)
So you seem to think that a proof is something like too hard to
resist---like a math proof. I believe I don't think like that. A proof
to me is a joint work between a writer and a reader. If the reader that
catch the spirit, there is no proof.
Based on a recent conversation, there can be proof, as in math, and
evidence, as in empirical science. Since philosophy is not about
empiricism, I'd say proof is probably it. There is of course a new
branch of philosophy called practical philosophy, but to me, it seems
more like a closet branch of sociology or psychology.
If someone /rejects/ an axiom I came up with or a definition I wrote,
then there's likely little friendship there. Friendship exists when
people go along with you without judgment. Rejecting /or accepting/
anything is judgment, which is not friendship. When someone proposes me
anything, I look at it without accepting it or rejecting it. (Unless
I'm a really bad mood!)
There is a theory of truth called the consensus theory of
truth. Sounds as if that might be what you are thinking about?
Agreed! But boy have I had endless email discussions with people who
reject the proof of their senses.
Excessive refinement in thinking? They want a kind of super assured
certainty? I think that's a waste of time. It's not a waste of time to
So do I. In 2500 years no such thing has been found, so I am quite
happy and content to accept what my senses tell me. ;)
care for your math proofs, say, or removing bugs from your programs and
so on. But rejecting the senses as in I don't know if really exist or
I'm being fooled by an evil genius? I think that's excessive thinking.
That's when thought escapes from the leash.
Agreed! That is why I do not care much for interpretations of quantum
theory as well. Plenty of thoughts escaping from the leash there, and
plenty of useless (in my opinion) speculation.
I did a lot of good, of course, but his theories about dream
interpretation and the psyche I think are no longer relevant. On the
other hand, I am not a psychologist, so who am I to say? =)
Most psychologist are so full of nonsense that being one wouldn't help
you here. :) I haven't read The Interpretation of Dreams, but I really
would like to do it. The book could be wildly wrong, but notice that
nobody seems to have made any advances since then anyhow.
I find the Dodo effect quite facsinating. It says that it is not the
school of psychology that makes a difference in therapy, but only the
person.
A beg your pardon? I'm not sure what you mean, but I think I agree. A >>>> counterfactual is something that goes against the facts. Surely. I
could never deny that 1 + 1 = 2, say. I can't even ignore evidence. I >>>> don't mind leaving questions open at all. Every now and then it's a
good idea to hang a question mark on all those things we've long taken >>>> for granted. (Is that Bertrand Russell again?)
Not quite. Counterfactuals are questions such as... "imagine you ate
an apple this morning, would that mean that later in the day you
would have a stomach ache". So when those types of thought
experiments are not made with the intention of high lighting
something tangible or empirically provable, I find them to be
useless idle speculation. That's what I was trying to get at.
Oh, I see. We're in total agreement. I think counterfactual
propositions are useless distractions.
Excellent! There has been a meeting of minds! ;)
I see a lot of neighbors here that don't get along. I am probably a
Ahh... sounds more normal! ;) In my current apartment, the community
is either non-existent or nuts. I don't like them, and therefore I am
selling the apartment.
Not an unwise decision. But the wises decision is to buy a house. An
apartment is like living together with strange people, except that you
have a very nice room (that comes with a kitchen inside) that gives you
a good sense of privacy. (But you have none.)
In the other 2 places I have apartments, I do like the community! 66%
goodness! ;)
Dude, 66% is no good. :)
admit it. I had never eaten a Cheddar McMelt 'til then. I never
thought I would like it. Many years later I tried it out. It's all I
eat now when I go there---once every 5 years?
No worries... it is very interesting to note these differences between
cultures. =)
It was more like a joke---I'm apologizing on behalf of my countrymen.
Surely it's not my responsibility that my countrymen are not very
polite. :) (Except that it is because they're all humans.)
Above all, I identify myself with people with vigor, passion and energy.
I think our increasingly sedentary lifestyles are to blame as well as
the mindset of instant gratification which makes people want to
achieve things with the minimum amount of energy necessary.
I also think this ties in with the fertility crisis we spoke of
before.
Yeah---the experts always include nutrition in their hypotheses.
I am lucky! I do not like to exercise, but my wife forces me to. ;)
Doesn't sound like fun. If you take a half hour walk each day, you
should probably be good.
I've reached a routine I've been looking for for a long time. I wanted
to bike to the beach, walk and swim. I was swimming in a gym pool.
It's not very good for me: the chlorine water doesn't feel right at all.
Sea water, on the other hand, is ideal. I live in a part of the town
that's elevated. When I bike to the beach, I must go down. Coming back
is not easy.
I think proofs are just constructions. In math, for example, their role >>> is quite clear. I don't even know what it would mean to prove that
there is reason. I think there's reason because we seem to be doing
some stuff here that we decide to call reason and then, evidently, it
exists in the sense that we conclude it does and move on.
You do sound like a philosopher to me! ;)
Lol. I should probably take that as a compliment. On a more serious
tone, I'd ask what is a philosopher to you.
Based on a recent conversation, there can be proof, as in math, and
evidence, as in empirical science. Since philosophy is not about
empiricism, I'd say proof is probably it. There is of course a new
branch of philosophy called practical philosophy, but to me, it seems
more like a closet branch of sociology or psychology.
I had never heard of practical philosophy.
If someone /rejects/ an axiom I came up with or a definition I wrote,
then there's likely little friendship there. Friendship exists when
people go along with you without judgment. Rejecting /or accepting/
anything is judgment, which is not friendship. When someone proposes me >>> anything, I look at it without accepting it or rejecting it. (Unless
I'm a really bad mood!)
There is a theory of truth called the consensus theory of
truth. Sounds as if that might be what you are thinking about?
No. Certainly not. I have nothing to do with consensus. Truth should
have nothing to do with consensus. We can easily imagine an outrageous
group denying obvious facts.
I'm quite okay with the keeping ``truth'' undefined. I may have some
idea in my mind that I think it's totally true. Perhaps I can't get you
to assert the same. So what? Does that keep in doubt? So? I can't
see any problem with living life with a little doubt. Every now and
then it's a good idea to hang a question mark on those things we've
taken for granted. (Have you located where Russell said this? I can't
even be sure it was him.)
Excessive refinement in thinking? They want a kind of super assured
certainty? I think that's a waste of time. It's not a waste of time to
So do I. In 2500 years no such thing has been found, so I am quite
happy and content to accept what my senses tell me. ;)
Our senses also do make mistakes. And some things can't come directly
from the senses---what we see in a microscope, for example.
Even ``senses'' is a complicated word. I met someone at the beach last Saturday. It's a person who lives very far from the beach---another
town. For about a year and half, I've been thinking about (as I walk on
the beach as I always do) that I could someday meet that person by
chance on that beach. But, of course, this is just fantasy because it
nearly makes no sense. So, after my Saturday surprise, I was thinking
to myself---omg, how weird! Do the things I imagine come true or is
this imagination a kind of premonition? (Or just coincidence?)
This is not the first time this happens. But many of the other past coincidences (such as this one), I have been able to explain in a
special way, which I have been calling long-range planning. I can spend years imagining a certain situation (a little bit every now and then)
and then I end up putting myself in a position where I can live that
imagined situation. I could then claim to have materialized that
situation or that somehow my imagination was having a glimpse of the
future. But I actually call that long-range planning.
But the beach event of last Saturday seems very much outside of my
control. The most I could do is to always go to beach, which in fact I
have been doing lately... Still... It still feels totally outside my control.
care for your math proofs, say, or removing bugs from your programs and
so on. But rejecting the senses as in I don't know if really exist or
I'm being fooled by an evil genius? I think that's excessive thinking.
That's when thought escapes from the leash.
Agreed! That is why I do not care much for interpretations of quantum
theory as well. Plenty of thoughts escaping from the leash there, and
plenty of useless (in my opinion) speculation.
The case of quantum mechanics is a necessary one, though. Yeah, surely there's a lot of imagination there, but I think that's part of science.
Quantum mechanics is giving us great philosophical problems. It's a
very hard read, but to see them all you could skim a quantum theory book
by descant. Interpretation of quantum mechanics force us to make up
our minds about how we want to see the world. The fun thing is no
matter which perspective we take, they're all problematic.
Most psychologist are so full of nonsense that being one wouldn't help
you here. :) I haven't read The Interpretation of Dreams, but I really
would like to do it. The book could be wildly wrong, but notice that
nobody seems to have made any advances since then anyhow.
I find the Dodo effect quite facsinating. It says that it is not the
school of psychology that makes a difference in therapy, but only the
person.
I had never heard of it and I can't look up anything right now, but it
makes perfect sense to me. The inner is the outer. What a person lives
in the outside is a reflection of you'd find on the inside. A
therapist, like any intelligent person, can be of help, but you can't
put your life in order if you are not able to find order where you
should be looking.
Not quite. Counterfactuals are questions such as... "imagine you ate
an apple this morning, would that mean that later in the day you
would have a stomach ache". So when those types of thought
experiments are not made with the intention of high lighting
something tangible or empirically provable, I find them to be
useless idle speculation. That's what I was trying to get at.
Oh, I see. We're in total agreement. I think counterfactual
propositions are useless distractions.
Excellent! There has been a meeting of minds! ;)
This is the USENET. We could be yelling at each other for an entire
year. Instead, we do something completely different. We're weird. And
we don't even use our real names. Our friendship can't leave the
USENET.
On Sat, 29 Mar 2025, Salvador Mirzo wrote:
I see a lot of neighbors here that don't get along. I am probably a
Ahh... sounds more normal! ;) In my current apartment, the community
is either non-existent or nuts. I don't like them, and therefore I am
selling the apartment.
Not an unwise decision. But the wises decision is to buy a house. An
True. But a house means higher cost, more maintenance, more time lost doing things I do not enjoy. So there is no perfect solution. But I have actually thought about getting a house. So let's see what the future holds! =)
apartment is like living together with strange people, except that you
have a very nice room (that comes with a kitchen inside) that gives you
a good sense of privacy. (But you have none.)
True. It is a little bit better in northern europe where people do not
want to socialize. Most of the time you meet no one. Another solution
could be to buy a nice pent house apartment, making sure you share the
floor with no one, and ideally, a private elevator! =D
In the other 2 places I have apartments, I do like the community! 66%
goodness! ;)
Dude, 66% is no good. :)
It's better than 0%! ;)
admit it. I had never eaten a Cheddar McMelt 'til then. I never
thought I would like it. Many years later I tried it out. It's all I
eat now when I go there---once every 5 years?
Interesting, I have never seen this burger in europe! How does it
differ from regular cheese burgers?
Above all, I identify myself with people with vigor, passion and energy.
Sounds like a nice group of people to identify with if you can find
them. =) I've always been a loner from that point of view, so I tend
to not identify with others much at all.
I think our increasingly sedentary lifestyles are to blame as well as
the mindset of instant gratification which makes people want to
achieve things with the minimum amount of energy necessary.
I also think this ties in with the fertility crisis we spoke of
before.
Yeah---the experts always include nutrition in their hypotheses.
The question is... how can we, you and me, change the trend? ;)
I am lucky! I do not like to exercise, but my wife forces me to. ;)
Doesn't sound like fun. If you take a half hour walk each day, you
should probably be good.
I do walk, voluntarily, but the wife judges that not to be enough. I
am thankful that she makes me train, since it is healthy. Without her,
I would be a lot less healthy and eating a lot more junk food. So yes,
it is one of those things that are annoying in the short term, but
good in the long term! =)
I've reached a routine I've been looking for for a long time. I wanted
to bike to the beach, walk and swim. I was swimming in a gym pool.
It's not very good for me: the chlorine water doesn't feel right at all.
Sea water, on the other hand, is ideal. I live in a part of the town
that's elevated. When I bike to the beach, I must go down. Coming back
is not easy.
Why not try an electric bike? ;)
I think proofs are just constructions. In math, for example, their role >>>> is quite clear. I don't even know what it would mean to prove that
there is reason. I think there's reason because we seem to be doing
some stuff here that we decide to call reason and then, evidently, it
exists in the sense that we conclude it does and move on.
You do sound like a philosopher to me! ;)
Lol. I should probably take that as a compliment. On a more serious
tone, I'd ask what is a philosopher to you.
This could definitely be the start of an eternal conversation. 2500
years has not been able to pin down the definition. ;)
A wise man, someone who is full of wonder, someone who likes to ask questions? Many ways to define a philosopher.
Based on a recent conversation, there can be proof, as in math, and
evidence, as in empirical science. Since philosophy is not about
empiricism, I'd say proof is probably it. There is of course a new
branch of philosophy called practical philosophy, but to me, it seems
more like a closet branch of sociology or psychology.
I had never heard of practical philosophy.
It is a fairly new branch of philosophy, about 100 years old or so, depending on
how you define it.
If someone /rejects/ an axiom I came up with or a definition I wrote,
then there's likely little friendship there. Friendship exists when
people go along with you without judgment. Rejecting /or accepting/
anything is judgment, which is not friendship. When someone proposes me >>>> anything, I look at it without accepting it or rejecting it. (Unless
I'm a really bad mood!)
There is a theory of truth called the consensus theory of
truth. Sounds as if that might be what you are thinking about?
No. Certainly not. I have nothing to do with consensus. Truth should
have nothing to do with consensus. We can easily imagine an outrageous
group denying obvious facts.
There are facts, and then there are "facts". Is it true that blue is
the best color? Good luck answering that objectively. ;)
Is it true that there is a coffee mug on my right on a table, yes! And
if you were here with me, I am 100% certain that we would agree.
I'm quite okay with the keeping ``truth'' undefined. I may have some
Even if your life depends on it?
idea in my mind that I think it's totally true. Perhaps I can't get you
to assert the same. So what? Does that keep in doubt? So? I can't
see any problem with living life with a little doubt. Every now and
then it's a good idea to hang a question mark on those things we've
taken for granted. (Have you located where Russell said this? I can't
even be sure it was him.)
Excessive refinement in thinking? They want a kind of super assuredSo do I. In 2500 years no such thing has been found, so I am quite
certainty? I think that's a waste of time. It's not a waste of time to >>>
happy and content to accept what my senses tell me. ;)
Our senses also do make mistakes. And some things can't come directly
from the senses---what we see in a microscope, for example.
True, but just because we sometimes make mistakes I do not think is
enough of an argument to refute completely the idea that what we can
confirm with our senses is not the truth.
When it comes to the microscope, it is true, but at the end of the
day, we do use our senses to look into the microscope.
Even ``senses'' is a complicated word. I met someone at the beach last
Saturday. It's a person who lives very far from the beach---another
town. For about a year and half, I've been thinking about (as I walk on
the beach as I always do) that I could someday meet that person by
chance on that beach. But, of course, this is just fantasy because it
nearly makes no sense. So, after my Saturday surprise, I was thinking
to myself---omg, how weird! Do the things I imagine come true or is
this imagination a kind of premonition? (Or just coincidence?)
My theory, conincidence, selective memory, and priming your psychological filter.
1. Yes, sometimes it is just conincidence.
2. You think a lot of things, and forget a lot as well. If you think about an event x, and x never happens, you would have forgotten about it. If you envounter event x, after first thinking about x, you'll say to yourself, Oh, I
did think about x, how strange that I know encountered x.
3. When thinking about a thing deeply, you are in a way telling your subconscious mind to be on the lookout for that. So when you filter your 1000s
of daily sense impressions, your usbconscious mind has been programmed to "trigger" based on what you thought about.
Those are my 3 theories around why that happens.
This is not the first time this happens. But many of the other past
coincidences (such as this one), I have been able to explain in a
special way, which I have been calling long-range planning. I can spend
years imagining a certain situation (a little bit every now and then)
and then I end up putting myself in a position where I can live that
imagined situation. I could then claim to have materialized that
situation or that somehow my imagination was having a glimpse of the
future. But I actually call that long-range planning.
True! No hocus pocus at all! =)
But the beach event of last Saturday seems very much outside of my
control. The most I could do is to always go to beach, which in fact I
have been doing lately... Still... It still feels totally outside my
control.
care for your math proofs, say, or removing bugs from your programs and >>>> so on. But rejecting the senses as in I don't know if really exist or >>>> I'm being fooled by an evil genius? I think that's excessive thinking. >>>> That's when thought escapes from the leash.
Agreed! That is why I do not care much for interpretations of quantum
theory as well. Plenty of thoughts escaping from the leash there, and
plenty of useless (in my opinion) speculation.
The case of quantum mechanics is a necessary one, though. Yeah, surely
there's a lot of imagination there, but I think that's part of science.
Oh yes... I am not against imagination and speculation, if that serves
to motivate a person, or inspire him, or help him advance theories. My
main beef is when people confuse speculation and theorizing, with what
we can or cannot prove. Mistaking the map for the real world so to
say.
Quantum mechanics is giving us great philosophical problems. It's a
Yes!
very hard read, but to see them all you could skim a quantum theory book
by descant.
Interpretation of quantum mechanics force us to make up our minds
about how we want to see the world. The fun thing is no
I think we are never forced to make up our minds. I am happily
agnostic about the interpretations of QM and I live my life just
fine. I am just content to note that some interpretations are absurd,
some impossible (in my opinion) some meaningless, and some I do not understand.
Most psychologist are so full of nonsense that being one wouldn't help >>>> you here. :) I haven't read The Interpretation of Dreams, but I really >>>> would like to do it. The book could be wildly wrong, but notice that
nobody seems to have made any advances since then anyhow.
I find the Dodo effect quite facsinating. It says that it is not the
school of psychology that makes a difference in therapy, but only the
person.
I had never heard of it and I can't look up anything right now, but it
makes perfect sense to me. The inner is the outer. What a person lives
in the outside is a reflection of you'd find on the inside. A
therapist, like any intelligent person, can be of help, but you can't
put your life in order if you are not able to find order where you
should be looking.
Like the buddha said somewhere... he cannot do the work for you. You
have to do the work (meditate, live a good life) yourself if you want
peace. Buddha can facilitate, point in the right direction, but you
have to do the work to experience the result.
Not an unwise decision. But the wises decision is to buy a house. An
True. But a house means higher cost, more maintenance, more time lost doing >> things I do not enjoy. So there is no perfect solution. But I have actually >> thought about getting a house. So let's see what the future holds! =)
I hope you get one. It's all true about the work, but I also think
that's good work. A lot less USENET, a lot more house work is a good
idea. We can start with offlining the USENET. If there's little work
to do, increase the uniform distribution of times you connect to
exchange articles. If there's more work, decrease it.
True. It is a little bit better in northern europe where people do not
want to socialize. Most of the time you meet no one. Another solution
could be to buy a nice pent house apartment, making sure you share the
floor with no one, and ideally, a private elevator! =D
Living in an apartment never feels like the right thing. One almost
doesn't own the place. If you decide to do something to it, you get to approval of the condominium. The same would apply if you live in a
house in a condominium. Of course, the same thing applies to any house
in any country. But the less the better (while holding other important variables constant).
Dude, 66% is no good. :)
It's better than 0%! ;)
Better doesn't imply good. :)
Interesting, I have never seen this burger in europe! How does it
differ from regular cheese burgers?
I think a regular cheese burger would not be a Cheddar cheese burger.
But I agree any Cheddar is a cheese burger. Over here now they have two options: you get the traditional Cheddar McMelt or you can order the
double one. The double one comes with three burgers, IIRC. Besides the melted Cheddar, it also comes with chopped onions mixed in the Cheddar.
I think that's it. And a cheese burger is a burger with some slices of cheese. I'm not the right person to ask about such things because I go
there once in a few years, always planning never to come back. :)
Sounds like a nice group of people to identify with if you can find
them. =) I've always been a loner from that point of view, so I tend
to not identify with others much at all.
Oh, if you're a loner, you can identify yourself with pretty much
everyone. :) In a way I'm a loner as well.
Yeah---the experts always include nutrition in their hypotheses.
The question is... how can we, you and me, change the trend? ;)
I don't think we can. That would mean that a point can change the
uniform average. We could do something if we go from a uniform average
to a weighted one and we somehow acquire the huge weight. Nah. I don't think there's true change that way. I don't think we can change the
world. I don't think we should change the world. Let nature follow its
own course.
Should a 4-leaf clover try to make every other a 4-leaf one?
Hey, there are 7 helicopters going round and round around a certain
region where my house is. They're all gray in color. One follows the
other. They're really going around a circumference. Any idea what this
is? I'd guess it's military exercise. They're boringly going round.
Not in high speeds. They're not high in the sky; probably between
100--200 meters from the ground. Probably 50 meters from the top of a
hill around which they seem to flying.
I had never heard of practical philosophy.
It is a fairly new branch of philosophy, about 100 years old or so, depending on
how you define it.
Kinda funny to me. Philosophy is totally practical. The impractical philosophy is that which is nonsense---you can't make sense of.
I think it's the most practical of them all because it applies to what happens most of the day---for those who don't ignore the stimuli.
No. Certainly not. I have nothing to do with consensus. Truth should
have nothing to do with consensus. We can easily imagine an outrageous
group denying obvious facts.
There are facts, and then there are "facts". Is it true that blue is
the best color? Good luck answering that objectively. ;)
There are meaningless sentences and questions. Chomsky constructs the
famous one---colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Good luck trying to picture that in any way. Truth (and philosophy) is not about nonsense.
It's about honestly making sense of things.
Sometimes people take language to great abstractions, which should come
with lots of examples and simplicity. If people fail do that, it is not
a bad idea to ignore it. For instance, Kant is recognized for having
made the distinction between synthetic truths and analytic ones. Have
you ever understood? I don't think it too unwise to ignore all that.
But I don't mean it's bad work.
Is it true that there is a coffee mug on my right on a table, yes! And
if you were here with me, I am 100% certain that we would agree.
Of course. There's no point in even questioning that for too long. We
have so many other important questions to work on. For instance, is
there anything bothering any bit of your days? How could we give you a better life?
I'm quite okay with the keeping ``truth'' undefined. I may have some
Even if your life depends on it?
My life would never depend on such intellectual matters. Life depends
on food, shelter and relationships. We could easily argue here that
you're likely valuing the intellect more than you should. The intellect
has to be kept on the leash.
Our senses also do make mistakes. And some things can't come directly
from the senses---what we see in a microscope, for example.
True, but just because we sometimes make mistakes I do not think is
enough of an argument to refute completely the idea that what we can
confirm with our senses is not the truth.
When it comes to the microscope, it is true, but at the end of the
day, we do use our senses to look into the microscope.
Totally right. When it comes to information, it has to come through the senses at least indirectly.
My theory, conincidence, selective memory, and priming your psychological
filter.
1. Yes, sometimes it is just conincidence.
2. You think a lot of things, and forget a lot as well. If you think about an
event x, and x never happens, you would have forgotten about it. If you
envounter event x, after first thinking about x, you'll say to yourself, Oh, I
did think about x, how strange that I know encountered x.
3. When thinking about a thing deeply, you are in a way telling your
subconscious mind to be on the lookout for that. So when you filter your 1000s
of daily sense impressions, your usbconscious mind has been programmed to
"trigger" based on what you thought about.
Those are my 3 theories around why that happens.
My theory is that it's not that much of an improbable thing. The reason
I imagine this specific person is likely because she's a pretty likely
one, in fact. My imagination is never quite towards fantasy---it's
always towards making sense of things and making things reasonable. I probably choose to imagine the person that actually had some reasonable probability of coming over. But what I find very funny is that I guess
I was right. And it didn't take very long for it to happen.
Now, I certainly maximized the occurrence of the event because I'm
always at the beach. Nevertheless, though, it could be that somehow
that's not the whole story.
True! No hocus pocus at all! =)
You see, we have this preference for destroying mystery. Other people
prefer the mystic. We are more warranted in our preference than the
others are in theirs, but we should do it very carefully because
otherwise we're doing the same silly thing other people do.
Oh yes... I am not against imagination and speculation, if that serves
to motivate a person, or inspire him, or help him advance theories. My
main beef is when people confuse speculation and theorizing, with what
we can or cannot prove. Mistaking the map for the real world so to
say.
Most people hardly have an education. They don't know what a theory is
and what speculation is very well. Unfortunately.
very hard read, but to see them all you could skim a quantum theory book >>> by descant.
Lol---what?! By descant? Lol. That's a spurious end of sentence. I
was totally offline, unable to look anything up, but I wanted to make a reference to the book
I think we are never forced to make up our minds. I am happily
agnostic about the interpretations of QM and I live my life just
fine. I am just content to note that some interpretations are absurd,
some impossible (in my opinion) some meaningless, and some I do not
understand.
It's a real puzzle. It's not about choosing axioms one would prefer.
Any choice is problematic. That's the fun. Reading d'Espagnat would
clarify how puzzling it is, but reading it would also be a problem in
itself.
Like the buddha said somewhere... he cannot do the work for you. You
have to do the work (meditate, live a good life) yourself if you want
peace. Buddha can facilitate, point in the right direction, but you
have to do the work to experience the result.
Yeah. No royal road---a beautiful law of nature.
idea. We can start with offlining the USENET. If there's little work
to do, increase the uniform distribution of times you connect to
exchange articles. If there's more work, decrease it.
True. My usenet/mailinglist debt is starting to grow. I have become
involved in way too detailed and deep interesting conversations, and
they are starting to take their toll. =(
Interesting, I have never seen this burger in europe! How does it
differ from regular cheese burgers?
I think a regular cheese burger would not be a Cheddar cheese burger.
But I agree any Cheddar is a cheese burger. Over here now they have two
options: you get the traditional Cheddar McMelt or you can order the
double one. The double one comes with three burgers, IIRC. Besides the
melted Cheddar, it also comes with chopped onions mixed in the Cheddar.
I think that's it. And a cheese burger is a burger with some slices of
cheese. I'm not the right person to ask about such things because I go
there once in a few years, always planning never to come back. :)
This is making me hungry! =D
Yeah---the experts always include nutrition in their hypotheses.
The question is... how can we, you and me, change the trend? ;)
I don't think we can. That would mean that a point can change the
uniform average. We could do something if we go from a uniform average
to a weighted one and we somehow acquire the huge weight. Nah. I don't
think there's true change that way. I don't think we can change the
world. I don't think we should change the world. Let nature follow its
own course.
What if it is in my nature to change the world? Then that would be nature following its own course. ;)
The biggest change can start with the smallest idea!
Should a 4-leaf clover try to make every other a 4-leaf one?
Yes!
Hey, there are 7 helicopters going round and round around a certain
region where my house is. They're all gray in color. One follows the
other. They're really going around a circumference. Any idea what this
is? I'd guess it's military exercise. They're boringly going round.
Not in high speeds. They're not high in the sky; probably between
100--200 meters from the ground. Probably 50 meters from the top of a
hill around which they seem to flying.
Sounds scary! Be safe! =( In stockholm, due to the excessive
uncontrolled crime recently, police drones and helicopters are
becoming more and more common. I hate the surveillance society that
sweden has been turned into and do not want to live in it.
As we discussed above, I think a house in the country side, deep
inside the forest would be the ideal place for me!
I had never heard of practical philosophy.
It is a fairly new branch of philosophy, about 100 years old or so,
depending on
how you define it.
Kinda funny to me. Philosophy is totally practical. The impractical
philosophy is that which is nonsense---you can't make sense of.
Ah, you mean modern analytical philosophy? ;) Pick up a book on
metaphysics and marvel at the nonsense! ;)
No. Certainly not. I have nothing to do with consensus. Truth should >>>> have nothing to do with consensus. We can easily imagine an outrageous >>>> group denying obvious facts.
There are facts, and then there are "facts". Is it true that blue is
the best color? Good luck answering that objectively. ;)
There are meaningless sentences and questions. Chomsky constructs the
famous one---colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Good luck trying to
picture that in any way. Truth (and philosophy) is not about nonsense.
It's about honestly making sense of things.
Sometimes I think that is lost in a lot of modern philosophy.
Sometimes people take language to great abstractions, which should come
with lots of examples and simplicity. If people fail do that, it is not
a bad idea to ignore it. For instance, Kant is recognized for having
made the distinction between synthetic truths and analytic ones. Have
you ever understood? I don't think it too unwise to ignore all that.
But I don't mean it's bad work.
Well, for me, Kants biggest insight, is that we can never get to the metaphysical through the physical. But then he adds a lot of stuff
onto that, and I don't quite agree with where he goes.
Is it true that there is a coffee mug on my right on a table, yes! And
if you were here with me, I am 100% certain that we would agree.
Of course. There's no point in even questioning that for too long. We
have so many other important questions to work on. For instance, is
there anything bothering any bit of your days? How could we give you a
better life?
Amen! A very important question that should be asked from time to
time. I am tomorrow leaving for a 2 month vacation. First 1 month in
spain, then a weekend in Lyon, and then a month in sweden. I am
already looking forward to a lot of good food in spain and 20+ C
weather!
I am not looking forward to travel. Modern travel I find
dehumanizing. It is all built around controlling the masses, and
treating them as badly as possible, while still taking their money.
If I had infinite amounts of money, I would travel by private jet. If
I had an infinitely compassionate wife I would not travel at all. I
would be perfectly content to spend the rest of my life in my house,
deep in the forest, fishing.
I feel I have done enough for the world. I feel like I can retire to
fishing with a perfectly clear conscience. =D
I'm quite okay with the keeping ``truth'' undefined. I may have some
Even if your life depends on it?
My life would never depend on such intellectual matters. Life depends
on food, shelter and relationships. We could easily argue here that
you're likely valuing the intellect more than you should. The intellect
has to be kept on the leash.
What ever we make into an obsession, tends to control our lives. I
prefer to be in control, so it's always good not to get too focused
and one sided about things.
Now, I certainly maximized the occurrence of the event because I'm
always at the beach. Nevertheless, though, it could be that somehow
that's not the whole story.
Let's see tomorrow!
True! No hocus pocus at all! =)
You see, we have this preference for destroying mystery. Other people
prefer the mystic. We are more warranted in our preference than the
others are in theirs, but we should do it very carefully because
otherwise we're doing the same silly thing other people do.
It is dangerous to argue against peoples beliefs. That wakes up the
worst in people.
Oh yes... I am not against imagination and speculation, if that serves
to motivate a person, or inspire him, or help him advance theories. My
main beef is when people confuse speculation and theorizing, with what
we can or cannot prove. Mistaking the map for the real world so to
say.
Most people hardly have an education. They don't know what a theory is
and what speculation is very well. Unfortunately.
Well, from that point of view, we are lucky to have had a good
education! I just look at the students I have today, and get
depressed. =(
Last friday I had a meeting with the management of the school, and
they forbade me to have dead lines for assignments out of fear that
fewer students will pass the courses.
That's complete b.s. And I told them that they are prioritizing profit
over quality of education.
They smiled and said that no, they would like both profit _and_
education.
I said that that is unrealistic
[...] especially if they remove all demands, and want courses to be
easier. Then I asked them to imagine how their children would be if
they said yes to their every wish. Would that be how they raise their children or do they teach them to respect dead lines, boundaries and
work hard?
They said, well, you do have a point. But we are your customer, and we
pay, so we decide the rules.
And I had to agree with that, sadly. But at least I told them what
will happen, so now they cannot blame me when the credibility of their students degrees drop in the market!
At least I won a small victory. Apparently they could possibly
consider a dead line in _one_ course, if the task is changed from lab
to project. But probably only in one course.
Very sad state of affairs. If this is a global trend, we are getting
closer to the end of civilization! =(
very hard read, but to see them all you could skim a quantum theory book >>>> by descant.
Lol---what?! By descant? Lol. That's a spurious end of sentence. I
was totally offline, unable to look anything up, but I wanted to make a
reference to the book
Hmm, sorry, I must have slipped on the keyboard. I actually have no
idea what I meant to say! =/
True. My usenet/mailinglist debt is starting to grow. I have become
involved in way too detailed and deep interesting conversations, and
they are starting to take their toll. =(
I think I saw some of your chats on rec.food.cooking. You gotta get
outta there. That group is crazy and the volume, insane.
I don't think we can. That would mean that a point can change the
uniform average. We could do something if we go from a uniform average
to a weighted one and we somehow acquire the huge weight. Nah. I don't >>> think there's true change that way. I don't think we can change the
world. I don't think we should change the world. Let nature follow its >>> own course.
What if it is in my nature to change the world? Then that would be nature
following its own course. ;)
The biggest change can start with the smallest idea!
Today I watched the documentary series called
The Century of the Self
It's a good illustration of people mean by ``change'' in the world. :)
Should a 4-leaf clover try to make every other a 4-leaf one?
Yes!
Lol. Speechless. :)
As we discussed above, I think a house in the country side, deep
inside the forest would be the ideal place for me!
Sounds very interesting.
Ah, you mean modern analytical philosophy? ;) Pick up a book on
metaphysics and marvel at the nonsense! ;)
Specially if it's contemporary writing.
There are facts, and then there are "facts". Is it true that blue is
the best color? Good luck answering that objectively. ;)
There are meaningless sentences and questions. Chomsky constructs the
famous one---colorless green ideas sleep furiously. Good luck trying to >>> picture that in any way. Truth (and philosophy) is not about nonsense.
It's about honestly making sense of things.
Sometimes I think that is lost in a lot of modern philosophy.
By ``modern'' do you mean contemporary philosophy? ``Modern''
philosophy is that of Descartes, for example.
Well, for me, Kants biggest insight, is that we can never get to the
metaphysical through the physical. But then he adds a lot of stuff
onto that, and I don't quite agree with where he goes.
I'm not sure what exactly you're talking about here. I'm not a Kant
reader. Are you talking about the Critique of Pure Reason? I did read
Prolegomena do Any Methaphysics
(that will be able to come forward as a science)
and that's a pretty understandable book. This book is a good
introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, but I think I don't really recommend you get into any of this stuff. There's a lot more
interesting things in life.
Amen! A very important question that should be asked from time to
time. I am tomorrow leaving for a 2 month vacation. First 1 month in
spain, then a weekend in Lyon, and then a month in sweden. I am
already looking forward to a lot of good food in spain and 20+ C
weather!
Nice. Enjoy!
I am not looking forward to travel. Modern travel I find
dehumanizing. It is all built around controlling the masses, and
treating them as badly as possible, while still taking their money.
Oh, that's quite right. I see the same. The best way to travel in the
end is by your own means such as by car, but then there's how good the
roads are, how far you go... Staying in hotels used to be a great experience, but it's not quite anymore. We have a complete
deterioration of everything.
If I had infinite amounts of money, I would travel by private jet. If
I had an infinitely compassionate wife I would not travel at all. I
would be perfectly content to spend the rest of my life in my house,
deep in the forest, fishing.
Yeah---gotta question a bit the need for traveling and tourism. What's
that all about? I like to travel to see people, not places. I honestly
care very little to see culture and places. It's different if you are
my friend and you're interesting---then Sweden becomes interesting, too.
So I'm usually interested where my family and friends are.
I feel I have done enough for the world. I feel like I can retire to
fishing with a perfectly clear conscience. =D
Sounds like wisdom to me.
True! No hocus pocus at all! =)
You see, we have this preference for destroying mystery. Other people
prefer the mystic. We are more warranted in our preference than the
others are in theirs, but we should do it very carefully because
otherwise we're doing the same silly thing other people do.
It is dangerous to argue against peoples beliefs. That wakes up the
worst in people.
So true. My observation is that people's behavior really comes from
deep within, not from the surface, so working on the surface is a
complete waste of time. (And the intellect is on the surface.) That's
why people behave ``irrationally'', meaning that's why we can't
understand them at all.
Well, from that point of view, we are lucky to have had a good
education! I just look at the students I have today, and get
depressed. =(
Same here, but it's not clear what you mean by education. In a sense I
don't think it's our education, really, because I think education is on
the surface.
Last friday I had a meeting with the management of the school, and
they forbade me to have dead lines for assignments out of fear that
fewer students will pass the courses.
That's complete b.s. And I told them that they are prioritizing profit
over quality of education.
They smiled and said that no, they would like both profit _and_
education.
Lol! _And_. I do agree that it's obviously a lie. Those lies that
nearly everyone accepts and even repeats themselves.
I said that that is unrealistic
You're so delicate. :)
[...] especially if they remove all demands, and want courses to be
easier. Then I asked them to imagine how their children would be if
they said yes to their every wish. Would that be how they raise their
children or do they teach them to respect dead lines, boundaries and
work hard?
They said, well, you do have a point. But we are your customer, and we
pay, so we decide the rules.
And I had to agree with that, sadly. But at least I told them what
will happen, so now they cannot blame me when the credibility of their
students degrees drop in the market!
At least they're minimally honest. I'm okay with that.
At least I won a small victory. Apparently they could possibly
consider a dead line in _one_ course, if the task is changed from lab
to project. But probably only in one course.
I'd say don't push it hard. Let them do what they want. You've already shared your view. Let nature follow its own course. You don't have to influence them any further after sharing your view: they are also
equally in the position to direct their lives. Let nature follow its
course.
Very sad state of affairs. If this is a global trend, we are getting
closer to the end of civilization! =(
It is a global trend. And I think we have worse problems---fertility, chronic diseases, work and the general quality of life people have been living. We're not at the bottom yet. I think things are gonna down a
lot more still.
Lol---what?! By descant? Lol. That's a spurious end of sentence. I
was totally offline, unable to look anything up, but I wanted to make a
reference to the book
Hmm, sorry, I must have slipped on the keyboard. I actually have no
idea what I meant to say! =/
It was I who said it. :) I wanted to remember the author's name and I couldn't. I forgot to look it up (later) and ended up posting the
message. That's a down side of being offline. Sometimes you can't fill
up the blank that you could if you were online. I was literally offline
that day. I have the printed book, but it's boxed in the basement and I surely didn't feel like digging it up.
Hey, are you getting USENET access during your vacation? I wanna give
you my e-mail address. Take care!
Hey, are you getting USENET access during your vacation? I wanna give
you my e-mail address. Take care!
I do get usenet access! Please let me know your email, and I'll send
you mine. Email I never miss. Usenet messages I do miss from time to
time, especially now when I'm on vacation and do not check it every
day.
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