The effort to still the mind moves the mind so much. Zen also teaches one to stop fiddling with the mind/body so things unfold into a natural smoothness. One may have stupid thoughts filling the monologue without becoming upset and without having the current moment obscured - busy monologue is just more color like the clouds above or the ants around.
There's two aspects to meditation: focus and insight. Focusing the attention on one specific thing, whether a statue, flame, the breath, a mantra, increases the ability to direct focus. When focus is reasonably steady and one relaxes into just being a bit, then the insights about how what we think of our unitary self is a composite set of conditions and how composite sets of conditions constantly change, and so on, start to affect our understanding of our body/mind and life and all that. This practice sound like a focus based practice, which are useful and give rise to all sorts of enjoyable mental states (and can indeed be very instrumentally useful for managing anxiety or increasing performance or that sort of thing), but not really the same as loosening attachment to the ups and downs of each moment.
>The emptier the mind, the slower the passing of time.
In a good way :) like the present moment opening up into pure stillness/infinity - slightly different than sitting and having the thought pop up "It must be 20 minutes now" and then glancing at the incense to see its just the beginning :)
I personally wondered if the growth in general goodness over the last 100 years has been at least partly because some jobs, like driving, involve more practice at evenly suspended attention; good driving is at a surface level like sitting; maybe the uptick in general wickedness recently is because we are distrupting our evenly suspended attention thru networked addictive devices. Just idle speculation of course.
It's kind of hard to say this unless you go out of your way - the scaffolding for interacting with the raw model is a lot better now for many tasks. Is it that 4.7 is so much better than 4.5 or claude 1.119 is so much tuned to squeeze utility out of the LLM despite the hallucinations and lack of self awareness etc. Certainly the current products are great, but I think it's hard to separate the two things, the raw model and the agent workflow constraining the model towards utility.
He's a Field's Medalist so that's automatically one of the most important living. He is good at explaining things; I leaned on his Analysis textbooks when I was taking analysis and functional analysis to great effect; in a research class I was trying to calculate Fourier transforms of algebraic sets and found various almost throw away comments on his blog that were extremely enlightening (alas only to the extent I could follow them). He's a legit great mind of modern mathematics - and also able to communicate well; a historical rarity indeed.
The topic being discussed here has been addressed specifically in his mastodon posts - the pre-LLM math process was understood to be "state a proof, validate a proof" - but the real aim was the not explicit "digest the proof so we can extend to other results" - with LLM/lean making the first two a lot easier and possible to do without accomplishing the digestion into the mathematical community; so we need to add "digesting proofs (from where ever)" into the job description. Thread starts here: https://mathstodon.xyz/@tao/116477351524980995
I don’t know. I kind of like a social safety net, unemployment insurance, limits to the work week, free education for all future adults, paid holidays, mass voting, multiethnic democracy, product liability laws, etc. Our modern society owes a lot to the hundreds of years of struggle to empower hard work and education over inherited wealth.
Volunteer to be the official image maintainer - I had emacs-nox and (screen) installed fleet wide for my own utility :)
I had a friend that even had his public keys added to the /root/.ssh/ but I didin't go that far -I didn't even put my own .emacs out - but I at least could use good tools to look at the tcpdump output or giant log files if needed. "Eight Megs and Constantly Swapping" is not that big of a deal anymore.
And if people want to just use some default open source image, just point out that in modern cloud environments, you don't want each node to customize itself, you want to pre-run that process one time per node type in your "directed graph of image delta pipelines" which takes the input image and publishes the cloud ready app-specific images (with your DNS configs, LDAP integration, whatever, plus emacs/neovim and screen/tmux :)
This will definitely work, but it's not really even necessary. Just have some pre-connect script, that checks if the host is already "configured", and if not, then one-shot some Ansible playbook (or bash even) that installs what's needed. Use /tmp if root is not available. Also works for Kubernetes, though there we have better options.
Old war story: I had an old Sun 4/260 with 2 1G drives - I had SunOS on 1 and Gentoo on the other - my initial Gentoo install worked for a while but then the portage directory used all the configured iNodes - really weird errors and I could not figure it out at the time; error msgs maybe should mention inodes? I had to do #gentoo-sun IRC and someone suggested df -i which was indeed the issues (solve: you can configure extN filesystems to have more iNodes)
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