qbit

I’ve always been somewhat dissatisfied with image viewing/browsing software. Gqview and Sequential came close to being what I wanted, but there were things about both that I didn’t like. I finally just wrote my own custom viewer using pyqt. For me, it is perfect software!

A chicken once beat a friend of mine at tic-tac-toe at a state fair.

I just wanted to mention how I cope with occasional restless leg syndrome. I find that a wall sit for two minutes right before trying to fall asleep works every time. I have to do it long enough and push hard enough to make my legs really burn from the exertion. The more unpleasant it is, the better it works. Afterwards, I immediately get in bed and try to go to sleep (it doesn’t work unless I do it right before attempting to fall asleep). Usually by the time my heart rate returns to normal, I’m asleep.

I disable js in safari (which is my main browser) on ios. If there is something that I really want to see that requires js, I switch to brave which has js enabled. But most of the time if a site requires js, I just leave the site. I now find browsing the web with js enabled to be intolerable.

Great story. But the end bothered me. Particularly this part:

“Some of you will succumb and some of you won't, and my sending this warning won't alter those proportions.”

Of course sending the warning will have an effect because it becomes part of the conditioning of the people who read it! They don’t get to choose how they will be affected by it, but it will certainly have an effect. To say that a person has no free will is not to say that they are not affected by their environment.

I would make an even stronger assertion that this is almost certainly the case. ;-)

If you can find a copy, the first edition of ‘Introduction to Functional Programming’ by Richard Bird covers the concepts of functional programming in a language-agnostic way.

Another perhaps more esoteric approach is pointed to by Ramana Maharshi (and others) who encouraged people seeking happiness to inquire into "the one who is unhappy". In other words, to ask oneself, "Who is it that is unhappy?" The idea being that the independent entity that most of us take ourselves to be is just a fictional story (an I-thought) with no real existence, and that it comes about from an erroneous identification with thoughts. Once that is fully realized, the problem of happiness is permanently solved because the "I-thought", as he calls it, is the real root of the problem. In fact, according to him, it's the root of all of our problems. ;-)

"You need to..." is one of my favorites. I'm often guilty of it myself when offering advice to others, but recently I've realized how off-putting it can be and have made an attempt to stop phrasing things in that way.

"The Ants" by Bert Holldobler and Edward O. Wilson.