“Before I learned the art, a punch was just a punch, and a kick, just a kick. After I learned the art, a punch was no longer a punch, a kick, no longer a kick. Now that I understand the art, a punch is just a punch and a kick is just a kick.” - Bruce Lee
For the interested, the original Dōgen zen koan goes something like this —
Before I began to practice, mountains were mountains and rivers were rivers. After I began to practice, mountains were no longer mountains and rivers were no longer rivers. Now, I have practiced for some time, and mountains are again mountains, and rivers are again rivers.
I believe this is also tied to La Subida del Monte Carmelo from San Juan de la Cruz. I'm oversimplifying, but basically it goes like this:
As San Juan climbs Monte Carmelo, he finds nothing at the base of the monte, then he finds nothing at the middle, but then, at the cusp, he finds Nothing (capital N Nothing).
There's quite a bit of parallels between proper "Catholic Mystics" and Zen teachers...
I highly recommend both the San Juan de la Cruz works, in particular Ascent of Mount Carmel and The Dark Night, along with The Cloud of Unknowing, which was an inspiration for him.
The book contains a collection of Koans along with Mumon's (et al) Commentary, Mumon's Verse, as well as modern day notes that help us understand some of the concepts hidden behind what looks like "poetical nonsense" at first, as well as giving the context for historical and mythological figures that are mostly unknown for those "outside the loop." What I love about the notes is that they still leave you with the opportunity to explore the koan further, properly, so they don't really take away all the fun.
Wakuan said, "Why has the Western Barbarian no beard?"
Mumon's Comment:
Study should be real study, enlightenment should be real enlightenment. You should meet this barbarian directly to be really intimate with him. But saying you are really intimate with him already divides you into two.
Mumon's Verse:
Don't discuss your dream
before a fool.
Barbarian with no beard
Obscures clarity.
NOTES (abridged)
- The Western Barbarian: The Western Barbarian stands for Bodhidharma, who brought Zen to China from India. He is always depicted with a beard. The case therefore means, "Why doesn't Bodhidharma, who has a beard, have no beard?"
- Meet this barbarian directly: This is not really a meeting but a becoming. You should yourself become Bodhidharma. Then if you have a beard, Bodhidharma has a beard; if you have no beard, then neither had Bodhidharma. But can you say that you are in truth Bodhidharma?
[...]
- Obscures clarity: Words, concepts, and other inventions of the mind only obscure the truth. Do not cling to shadows, but catch hold of truth itself.
The bell curve meme is a static taxonomy of people, and if the link you posted is correct, its origins were explicitly political. The version described by Bruce Lee, and anybody who has achieved a high level of skill, is about the process of learning and mastery.
In the bell curve version, the wisdom of grug brain and the wisdom of the monk are presented as equal, and the struggle of the midwit is framed as a pretentious, unnecessary aberration. The lesson it teaches is, don't seek out knowledge and new ideas. Education confuses the "midwit" people who are smart enough to partially grasp it but not smart enough to see through it like the monk.
In contrast, the "a punch is just a punch" version frames the conceptual struggle as a necessary phase in a process that leads to mastery. The beginner cannot engage directly with the simplicity of the master, so the beginner must engage through concepts and through practice. The more they do so, the more simple things begin to feel.
Since this started with a Bruce Lee quote, we can use him to see that it is not just a linear process that passes through conceptual education and ends in mastery. That leads to a dead end, because mastery can only be complete in a limited context. Bruce Lee kept searching outside his zone of mastery to find ways to get better. He studied techniques from other martial arts and fighting sports, even though in doing so he had to engage at a conceptual level since he had not mastered those arts.
For example, his art included trips and throws, and he was a master of his art. Yet when he got the chance later, he practiced judo with expert judoka. To do so, he had to back off from "a trip is just a trip, a throw is just a throw" and learn the techniques of judo. I don't think anybody has ever suggested he was a master at judo, which suggests he had to be engaging with it on a conceptual level. Yet he believed that his practice with judo improved the skills he had already achieved mastery at.
Not only did Bruce Lee preach constant assimilation of new ideas, he also preached simplification by discarding what is not useful. If a punch is just a punch, what do you discard? The whole punch? In order to find something to discard, you must look past the apparent simplicity of the internalized skill and dissect it conceptually.
In this view of things, conceptual thinking is not just a phase you go through on the way to mastery, but rather a complementary way of engaging with a skill. It is a tool for refining and elevating your intuitive mastery. Simplification and desimplification are the tick-tock of learning. A "mastered" skill is not like a video game sword that, once forged, always has the exact same stats, but is more like a Formula 1 car that is continually disassembled, analyzed, and rebuilt.
The bell curve meme does occasionally get used to express a linear ignorance-struggle-mastery story of learning, but its origin and most common use is to caricature the pursuit of knowledge as pretentious foolishness.
If you want a shorter version, "grug brain, monk brain" pretends to profound, like "Zen mind, beginner's mind," but it's just a lazy take. If "grug brain, monk brain" was poetry, it would say:
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And it'll look exactly the same because travel is pointless.
That thread felt like I was talking crazy pills. So many people confused by the difference between the construction of numbers using some particular set of foundational axioms and the properties of numbers that should hold true _regardless of the constructions_. Obviously the "integer 1" is not strictly speaking "the same as" the "rational number 1" when constructed in set theory, but there's a natural embedding of the integers into the rationals that preserves all the essential properties of the integer 1 when it's represented as the rational number 1. Confusing the concept with the encoding, basically.
Given the example of Pfizer in the article, I would tend to agree with you that ‘search’ in this context means augmenting GPT with RAG of domain specific knowledge.
I still remember a time when recursivedoubts posted about intercooler.js which is the predecessor to htmx, and almost every comment was dismissive and a varition of “what’s the point of this?”.
It seems now the majority of commenters are positive about htmx now and I feel happy for recursivedoubts.
Most web applications today would benefit from using htmx more than JavaScript-heavy frameworks with the exception of applications like Figma and the like of it.
I tried to operate my own email server as well on a VPS, and I have been thinking that the way to solve these problems is to solve the problem of spam itself. Detecting spam puts the costs on the email providers... when the costs should be born by spammers.
Perhaps some sort of digital stamp (digital signatures similar to stamps on physical envelopes) for each email sent paid for with micropayments in a cryptocurrency like nano (note: I don't own any crypto). Small cost per email like 0.01 cents that is trivial for legitimate senders but not for bulk-sending spammers. SMTP servers should put all incoming unsigned emails into spam folders. This will disincentivize spamming (probably not eliminate it) enough that self-hosting emails might be possible again without having to swim against the tide.
Paper mail, phone calls, and text messages all cost money, and yet you get massive amounts of spam from each of those. No, putting a price on those does NOT help. What will happen is that one source of low-quality spam that will be priced out of existence will subside, and now companies with more money will be priced into the game, because they will decide that sending spam is competitive again, as there's so much less of it nowadays. So then those companies are sending you spam and there's no escape from that. What's the next step? How do you fix that? The "digital stamp" thing hasn't been thought out too far into the future.
Those are the equivalent of your banner ads and pre-roll ads. The next step is ad blocking. Since there's not a lot of companies that actually want to pay for this stuff now, there's actually not so many of them, and you can enumerate them. They'll try to randomize the text using auto-gen and eventually things like GPT-3. This might be successful. How do you protect against that?
Let's say you protected against that. The next step is ad integration. The kind of stuff SponsorBlock removes from YouTube videos. Small mentions of ads and sponsors, integrated into the content. Interaction reminders. Donation begging. SponsorBlock works well because all that stuff is public, but that might not work well for email. Are you willing to let an equivalent of SponsorBlock read your email? Would you trust it? It would require a completely new paradigm for such blocking addons, where we're sure - by means of technological assurances - that such a blocking program cannot spy on us by leaking emails back to the mothership. That's a tough one, and I have a feeling in the current browser-centric environment the effort is just so large, and the required approaches are so far from what's being done nowadays, and the payoff of satisfying a fringe mail-midroll-ad-blocking need is so small, that it simply won't be done.
What's next after that? SponsorBlock hasn't caught up widely enough to cause people to find workarounds. I don't know, but I'm sure it'll come.
> Small cost per email like 0.01 cents that is trivial for legitimate senders but not for bulk-sending spammers
Given how much is spent on ads, I’d say that an email is still worth more than that. So, what you get is spammers paying minuscole amount of money to skip the spam filter and killing the idea at the root.
Or they can simply steal these credentials from one of the millions of hacked sites and cause additional trouble to them.
Within the confines of "a digital stamp is a good idea" [1], what you're saying isn't quite true: instead of being treated as a whitelist, a digital stamp can just be seen as an finite increase in credibility of some quantum that's decided over time by adaptive filters.
I agree with you that it is an anecdote, but I don't see anything wrong with sharing personal experiences of using a certain technology... this is a discussion forum after all and not a scientific paper.
There are learning Javascript resources targeted at non-technical people and children interested in learning how to code... one of the more promising that make it easy to start coding and experimenting with code is p5js (https://p5js.org/learn/) a Javscript port of the wonderful Processing framework... beautiful and simple APIs to start coding...
These internal conversations you have are sometimes referred to as "rumination" or "chatter". Here are some links you might wish to visit that have tips that have helped me somewhat.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24444431
Actually, archivists and technologists have been working together to solve the problems of digital preservation for a long time. There is an ISO Standards for digital preservation systems - ISO 14721:2012 originally authored by and still maintained by The Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS, which part of NASA). There are commercial systems that were developed to these standards, among them Preservica (http://preservica.com/) which is used in many archives in Europe.
Archivists are acutely aware of the obsolescence of digital formats and media. And the solution cannot be just printing them out on vellum or archival paper because increasingly records are being created digitally that cannot be meaningfully or adequately converted into printed formats. I am talking about records that are audio, video, high resolution photographs (like those that NASA is seeking to preserve digitally) etc. Even emails when printed out onto paper would be missing a lot contextual information that would have been kept if you preserved it as a digital format like EML or MSG.
So, existing digital preservation systems may still be imperfect, but nevertheless we still need find improved solutions for preserving them digitally.
I don't work for CCSDS or Preservica. I work for a national archive as a specialist on digital records and archives, but my background is in IT having spent about 15 years in software development.
Agree with this 100%. In the past the way different applications integrate with each other was through sharing the same database tables. Hence the need to keep the schema synchronized across multiple applications. Nowadays applications should integrate through well-defined APIs and service interfaces. See this Martin Fowler short essay on database styles: http://martinfowler.com/bliki/DatabaseStyles.html
