stoicShell

I presumed wrong, sorry, it seems I was guessing or rather projecting.

I think I see. You come from a different place than me, surely. Our initial make-up I mean, whether innate or acquired.

The thing is, I speak of a "struggle" to really put down the "get-X-quick" approach versus actual compounded effort (tiny bits but long term).

People want to eat some psychedelic or read magical incantations and get-woke-quick but the reality of becoming a well-rounded individual is closer to cooking a nice meal every day (you just need to find and learn recipes that work for you, I guess that's what you found eventually? This emotional clarity, alignement, simplicity even? That's super-zen, you should know!)

I was also speaking of another bigger and clearly 'darker' thing (as in "opaque", non-conscious, that can't be seen but rather felt). I hate the term but you'll read "quantum change" in the mainstream, the idea of a "core" or "essential" change of personality / behavior (same thing here). It happens to some "survivors" notably (of any kind, it's what the person experienced that matters). There's a before and an after — the meaning of life, what bothers you (or not), what (now) inspires you, etc. It's all so much clearer on the other side of pain.

This surely isn't zen and roses, although for me it took going down that dark path and back to really smell the roses (for what they are, and not what I wanted them to be). The terseness of comments and my will to pack too much probably blurred the line between these two experiences — daily routines versus one-off life-changing internal event and its aftermath.

I'm afraid you misread my intentions.

I can plead guilty of seeking attention (I figure 'commenting' is the first such step), but I thought the very length of that post is already by far its most salient aspect. I don't think a foreword changes anything to the big picture. ;-)

Also, on HN of all places, I resent doing that (long pieces), I must delete 4 out of 5 such write ups before posting — self-restrain to keep the place neat, once done it must meet high enough standards for me to actually post, i.e. "would I learn something from this?". So there's structure, and an 'abstract' naturally emerges from that.

Now the "TL;DR" up top is really practical, I care not for sensationalism, not the slightest. I just want to inform people so they can quickly decide whether to dive or skip. I like that myself as a reader (call it anti-click-bait, honest-to-god synthesis).

You're welcome and I'm glad my intention quite perfectly matches your expectations.

I'm pro 'reader's choice' indeed! An informed 'skip' button up top is really just good hospitality while someone reads my post, me thinks. Like those "get started"-quick pages when hesitating to RTFM.

Well, that's a +1 for my list! Thank you for the recommendation. Love the title and fourth already — it seems that Mr Miller gets it in a way that would speak to me. I've seen the same objects multiple times now, they seem close to 'invariants' to me — compassion, attention, gratitude.

In particular this counter-intuitive idea that you should strive not to "do what you love" but rather adamantly to "love what you do". Understanding that relieved me of so, so much emotional burden, like dead weight I was carrying for who-knows-what reasons. It changes people in ways that make others say "maturity" or "wisdom" about it.

If you want to add more books, please feel free!

OK, I get it.

I totally agree with everything you said. What you are rightfully criticizing goes under different names — "positive thought", "creative thought", "the secret". It's all the same woowoo indeed, you described it perfectly.

For some reason you haven't grasped or recognized the 'correct' mechanism or technique in that book (or I guess many others in the domain), but you got it otherwise so it's likely just a matter of cultural / personal fit — language that speaks to you. Martial arts certainly is one way, not fit for everyone either, though.

The actual 'magic' IME is the discovery of that "third-eye" skill i.e. 'controlled' introspection (to look into oneself). That's why I recommend Covey because he's got some of the best paragraphs on the topic, and this one thing is literally a game-changer for people who never explored for themselves the immensely vast space (and time) that exists, when trained, between "input" (things outside, things inside too) and "output" (a response, both external and internal). This quote: (emphasis mine)

“Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

It really is a superpower from a cognitive standpoint (actually trained in cognitive therapy too, immensely, but sadly for now psychology is mostly focused like medicine on curing the ill, not improving the 'normal').

The Stoics saw that space —explicitly so, all of them. In Tao too I hear, though I have yet to read the Tao Te Chin myself.

It's a skill-with-no-name (probably had/has a Greek word for it) that pervaded cultures to this day obviously. But it is the actual key to what you referred as "magically make negative beliefs positive", except it's not magic, not by a long shot: it's work, it's hard on yourself, it requires effort and time, training, lots of failure. But there's only benefits and zero side effects so...

It's a trained skill. At first, you fail miserably, like anything. After about a year, it's become second nature (still de-trainable though, one must remain self-aware on occasion). At first it's conscious effort, spent willpower, it's tiring and you want to just stop, let it go. But it gets better. Effortless eventually, like riding a bike. It's certainly closer to Zen than any form of first-degree 'blind' emotional 'management' (I mean, all therapies and such help, but they merely pave the way to a deeper understanding and meaning that only one can create for oneself).

I really started changing when I stopped trying to change myself so much.

This, to my ears, is when you began actually doing the work for yourself, by yourself, stopped believing in some shortcut-magic trick in any one book however classic or popular. Each 'real' skill is actually just the opener to a whole other level, bigger problem space. You became the creator of your own solutions, and that, if I may, is the Graal. Like literally I think it's what a lot of 'magical' metaphors (enlightenment, elevation, etc) quite physically or biologically refer to.

There is a fuckton of self-power to be released when you get serious about that path.

I'll tell you that in my anecdotal experience, most people run the other way (back to outside gratification / validation) upon discovery that "the enemy within" generally consists of getting what feels like mentally naked (vulnerable, opened, honest-to-Self) to your deepest oldest layers, and the battle is about healing the child in you left alone for so long, and welcoming him/her back into your life, in its right place.

I profoundly think that you heed those words, wherever they come from and in whatever shape or form however imperfect and partial, when you are ready to hear them, i.e. when you need them.

It's a survival thing, I don't know of going so deep otherwise (it's not like "deep inside" has an "up" or "left"; you need a pulling force like proverbial 'gravity', gravitas, i.e. emotions that run deep, to make sense of that inner space). You eventually find your way through the maze, if it's on your path, I suppose.

But honestly, taking education seriously in that regard (I argue starting with children, as important as managing physical health; and to boot with most adults thinking of this as a health matter, like exercising or nutrition) would do a huge service to society. We can and should train people massively. IMH opinion, experience, research.

So yeah, thinking back on it, I agree self-help sucks. A century later it's nowhere near realizing the social benefits it could claim because it's been too busy giving itself a bad name.

Disclaimer / TL;DR: This got out of hand. Too much time on my hands that I didn't have, today. Anyway.

The gist is: yes, there's crap in "self-help", but it's the current name for "the practical, applied branch of philosophy", i.e. methods and principles to live well, to cope, to grow, to grieve, to become. A rather ancient human tradition... There's no other name for that, as we speak. I don't think it's helpful nor relevant to blanket-judge an entire domain in such strong terms.

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[Long version]

Wait, what?

What an impeccable way to grossly reduce an entire aspect of life —becoming, getting 'better', knowing oneself— to just about the shallowest, most commercial tip of the iceberg.

But then, how shall we call the "better methods"? See, there's a tension in vocabulary here that I'm not sure one perceives when criticizing "self-help" (been there myself, before I learned better).

Philosophy at the turn of the 20th century became a purely abstract object of academic study (doing away almost completely with the millennial tradition of "philosophy as life recipes, simple practices and principles to live well and better cope with things"). The real-world / "applied" branch of philosophy has now been excised the confines of universities and professors, and has been termed "self-help". Most people no longer know (forgotten recently, a century ago) that philosophy had forever been practical first and foremost, theoretical maybe as a distant secondary / academic concern; also that it was actually taught and practiced by every day people (life was harsher, and admittedly required a little bit more psycho-maintenance given the brutality of both nature and men). Montaigne, things like that. But we somehow took offense at the apparent "simplicity" or "narrow-mindedness" of simple, "common sense" maxims and principles — the 20th century was to be positively analytical to a fault, or it wouldn't be.

Self-help, what little actual widespread practice remains of ancestral philosophy today, is just a word. Just like putting spiritual or sci-fi terms on the same concepts doesn't in any way change their value (or lack thereof).

So self-help literally designates "the oldest, practical branch of philosophy" (as opposed to the theoretical studies taught for the obtention of degrees: see the rift between a random student working to get some 3-year degree and get on to journalism or politics or whatever versus someone— you, me —facing trials in life, searching for the deeper answers inside themselves...) Theory for the student seeking good grades, but a much more "physical" experience for all of us eventually.

Self-help as we find it today is quite literally the remnants of a battle-tested accumulation of thousands of years of learning to "deal with it" (in the very words of e.g. Ancient Stoics). If you read texts from 2,500 years ago or today's good flavor of the month, the similarities are striking — people remain people and that doesn't change at all in less than 10 or 100,000 years.

So if you mean that the good parts of "methods" should be called philosophy I agree, but again the term has now long been confiscated by academia (and to think philosophy is not science, it shouldn't be gated as such). Thus the term has become a turn-down for most people (like they perceive e.g. math: too abstract, analytical, boring, and absolutely not "educating" or "self-elevating" in any useful sense of the term unless it's for your job).

2,500 years since Pythagoras and Aristotle and here we are, by all accounts not much better at educating children and adults alike (just many more, that is a victory in economic terms). But I digress.

So we're left with "self-help". It's an umbrella word, an alley name for stores, who cares that there's poop in-between diamonds in there — the former's existence doesn't make the latter any less valuable. Actually, diamonds grow in poop at the end of the day — maybe some books are great precisely because the author was appalled like you today and me yesterday, and perhaps what stands between you and me today is just the read of one such 'great' book, profound enough to change you like great philosophy does¹.

I mean, not all programming books and courses are great either, and yet... we doubled the developer population every N months for 70 years quite steadily... 'Perfect' can sometimes be the enemy of 'good', especially on hard problems like the general becoming of human beings.

The problem we face is that any 'general' account of 'how to live well' must go through so many fields (some sciences, some not really, some cultural...) that it's virtually impossible to find a good name without emphasizing one too much over the rest — psycho-something, philo-stuff, evolutionary biology (i.e. social theory of information aka genes and behaviors), etc.

I see your problem, but I don't see a solution — change the name and the iceberg will follow, like the xkcd on standards. Gate it behind a "scientific" framework and suddenly half your objects are AWOL, N/A, no can do. Great to publish as a scholar but you just lost 99% of the effectiveness generally — as Joseph Campbell showed us so eloquently, culture matters to the making of mature beings.

Besides, there's this truth: the only one who will ever really "see" you is you. "Looking inside" is an exercise that only ever has one subject-object in life, your own self, and no one else, not in nor out. "Self-help", or "self-whatever", is a rather straightforward way to convey the idea: only you can help yourself.

In many ways, the word is much closer to its object than ‘philosophy’ ever was as an ontology².

Note that I personally opted to say "self-growth" for myself, partly inspired by this very book, and to differentiate my general synthesis from the trash you decry; but you should know also that I chose a different term precisely to avoid having to defend the value of my "principles" (by having to explain association by name with otherwise trashy content). Do you see the conundrum here? What good I found is hard to share because of the stigma perpetuated by such views/comments as yours, because the source is somehow lesser. But the blanket judgment is no more valid than saying "all Americans are..." or "all women are..."

The real trick is to brucelee through life: “take the best, leave the rest”. If one only intends to learn from Shakespeare-Plato level of execution, a lot will be missed. Most notably everything that science will not or cannot consider as an object for good reasons, that might yet "work" for you. The dirty (I think wonderful) secret in philosophy as in medicine is that a good two thirds of positive results are placebo effects. The art is about becoming a master writer of such effects for oneself —which requires intricate knowledge of the subject. In that sense, even bad books teach you about yourself — that's when anything external ceases to be an excuse but becomes a welcome obstacle, a worthy trial, XP to gain if you will.

As for blue-pill / red-ill, I don't have the faintest idea how it's related to this topic. I haven't looked for years at what these people are saying, but the core take-away³ applied to a rather limited subset of philosophy; so sure learning about RP/BP dynamics is part of self-growth⁴, but it's like hard drives vs computers, different level of objects.

Sorry for a long, but hopefully informative, rambling / post.

____

[1]: If I had to pick one, I personally recommend Stephen Covey's famous "7 habits" — as one of the best philosophy manuscripts I've ever read, it's just as good as the best Hellenist/Roman stuff.

[2]: Ontology = how linguists call a "namespace". (not the other meaning, related to metaphysical philo-stuff blabla). Notice that "philo sophia" (the love or pursuit of wisdom) is the general goal / process, whereas "self help" ("help yourself and the sky will help you") is already embedding a practical lesson in its very name: knowing the name is already enough to spread this one idea. It's very powerful, I think, sociologically.

[3]: That we should teach and learn "purple pill" or some higher-third way, not that you would hear it much but really it's the synthesis of this whole 'movement' IMHO.

[4]: My advice: skip RP/BP and move directly to evolutionary biology. The Moral Animal by R. Wright is a fantastic book.

It's actually much more than that, it's failing 99 times to get that one break; rinse and repeat 1,000 times to build something meaningful in 1~10 years.

Failure is the mother of all learning.

The more you fail, the more experienced you are (it's almost an equivalence relationship that grows in time with effort, attempts), the more you become likely to 'succeed' at that thing. I don't know of any other way.

There is one word missing from this post that contains a whole lot of the argument on the environment side: chaos.

Those who learn to thrive in chaos are most dangerous out there, for they have this contrarian impulse to rise when there's blood in the streets. If you recall a history lesson or two, that's how the most egregious powers are made —in wealth or might or legacy.

Right now, some of us are down —the situation is draining, energy-wise— whereas others feel invigorated, a drive to take action, make a move.

How we respond to chaos thus creates a big divide among us in times of major perturbation. There's this shift of potentials in the system, and kinetics go crazy, and some flee/freeze (seek security, refuge, maintaining the status quo, conservatively preserve what's left, etc) while others feel compelled to fight (to defend, protect, help; but also attack, kick in the disruptive nuts, solve problem, seek victory). For those, it could be the perfect storm to attempt a moonshot — I find there's a really unusual proportion of such stories among famous successful figures in virtually all fields, but I wonder if it's not survivorship bias + myth building + my own filters.

I've always known I should have been born some 420-490 millions years in the future¹. Now it's science fact!

[1]: A good day for me is more like 27-28 hours, on average. Don't ask. Yes, I'll donate my hypothalamus to science.

The useful gist:

"To fully compromise EPID, hackers would need to extract the hardware key used to encrypt the Chipset Key, which resides in Secure Key Storage (SKS)," explained Positive's Mark Ermolov.

"However, this key is not platform-specific. A single key is used for an entire generation of Intel chipsets. And since the ROM vulnerability allows seizing control of code execution before the hardware key generation mechanism in the SKS is locked, and the ROM vulnerability cannot be fixed, we believe that extracting this key is only a matter of time.

"When this happens, utter chaos will reign. Hardware IDs will be forged, digital content will be extracted, and data from encrypted hard disks will be decrypted."

And this formidable response as usual:

Intel says folks should install the firmware-level mitigations, "maintain physical possession of their platform," and "adopt best security practices by installing updates as soon as they become available and being continually vigilant to detect and prevent intrusions and exploitations."

When will it stop? How deep run the flaws in Intel's platform? Is AMD equally exposed?

I, for one, as a human being whose root ancestors¹ infected planet Earth² which eventually produced me³, am will to use a definition that qualifies viruses as very much alive. ;-)

____

Tangentially related, I sympathize with Earth parasite Musk who wishes for us to infect another cell— err, I mean, planet. Shoosh, Earth, back to sleep, nothing to see here...

____

[1]: I wonder who's the chicken, here. Certainly, the virus is the egg, right? It's all a plan to engineer the actual masters of this universe?

[2]: A long, long time ago...

[3]: Well, the 10% of my weight with my DNA. I feel more like an ecosystem, I am a legion of species, a myriad DNAs, we are millions in those guts. "I" is not even the same "I" when travelling to a different biome: you are what you eat, quite literally, however you want to spin that idea.

That's true and I'm certainly not advocating for dictatorship. There is a vast space of possible regimes and political systems in between total freedom and total slavery, though... ;-)

Look, I won't pretend having "the" solution because it doesn't exist until we actually implement something, then iterate our way into a more-or-less final form that works. That's how we went from absolute monarchy to representative democracy, but if you trace the roots of that process, you've got a solid century of experimentation and much, much thinking (pretty much all the great names you know from 15th-16th-17th century were on some side of that equation, informed the discussion and ultimate "object", regime, that appeared).

So what will it be? Well I could write some anticipation sci-fi to suggest possibilities that are non-dystopian (well, not so much that it's unbearable) and come with a ton of benefits, and obviously some drawbacks / limits / undesirable side effects to be managed, adjusted.

The question is what the political will of the People actually wants— it's a question we each have to answer for ourselves —and what is possible, without breaking the machine, what will be desired, refused or simply ignored by 'elites' who, like it or not, have the fuel to make-or-break such 'evolution'. Now add an 'r' to the word and you increase the range of possibilities, but risk as well.

Here is my personal feeling: I think such events as COVID-19 will spark the kind of seed that eventually grows to fundamental political change; I however think we're still half a generation away from that — give time for Millenials 1982-1999 to rise to power, as they have the right mix of "values" (philosophy, circumstantial world experience / view, etc) to move beyond the systems that govern us today — and have for 70 ±10 years already!

I had a hunch post 9/11 that this century would see regimes evolve either towards more political freedom (towards more direct democracy) or towards a more authoritarian form of society (wherein social peace is obtained at the cost of some freedoms). It turns out that I was wrong, it wasn't either/or but both combined in a weird way: political freedom was gained but used to promote clowns to power (#all.over.the.world.the.2010s.are.insane.historically) instead of e.g. tackling massive, pressing or idealistic projects (people be lazy, rite). Whereas actual sovereignty (the one you learn in constitutional law, the real kind of political power) definitely shifted towards authoritarianism under various disguises — populism is one form, China's and Russia's "restoration" of authoritarian federal powers is another, and some self-proclaimed SWJs may not be far either, in their own "inclusive" way (kinda like dictatures are all "Democratic Republic").

What this tells me (I've long studied that evolution but again it's really just my personal view) is that societies are simply not mature for the new "space of possibilities" (think positive variables, opportunities e.g. via tech, think also negative variables, constrains of climate and viruses for instance). It's just too much power, too early, so we basically just F it up like kids with a problem a tad too big for them.

But that's history. We do things and then we figure out how to deal with them, there's no reversing that causality. Hopefully we won't ravage ourselves and this Earth in the 20-60 years it'll take to adapt to this rather sudden paradigm change — think 1980-today, that's just 40 years ffs, and think of the mindset then and now... And you kinda need "natives" of an era to meaningfully internalize its reality, process the whole damn thing in "system 1" like human beings do, and eventually sometime between 20 and 80 figure out ways to make life better. Rinse and repeat with their newborn grand-children to solve the new thing that's arrived by then.

As for what that will actually look like, your guess is as good as mine. I'm partial to freedom personally, but I think it's worth choosing your battles, too. That's when it becomes political thus where we stop: a good regime doesn't favor "opinions" but rather the expression thereof, in a healthy and productive manner (able to reach decision; ideally promoting some degree of consensus, kept in check by some other legitimated power, etc).

Just know that, when we want to, it's relatively doable to write a rather good constitution (and we have, many times throughout the last century). The real tricky issue is not to technically implement the ideas, the hard part is what ideas, what system you actually want to create. Again, many possibilities, some of which were abandoned by history but are now possible because modern tech (notably complex voting systems that yield much better representation of opinions and hierarchies in complex, multi-dimensional systems, e.g. to distribute might and resources between cities, or agencies, or any such module. There's about 1 century of great science that we're barely using for the benefit of the public, troves of innovation in the political realm. Just so much apathy for change in those who man these offices).

(It's honestly a fascinating topic of inquiry if you like systems, puzzles, cybernetics (different name for systems theory), all things mechanical in nature that must work with a "real-world" chaotic human environment.)

The saddest truth is perhaps that functionally, we have the leaders we deserve.

It's a simple projection from voter space to elected space. As a former pol.sci. student/researcher, I've grown disillusioned by the fact that representative democracy, in our day and age, quite evidently no longer works as intended — the projection is flawed with regards to the conduct of affairs.

I don't know why:

- might be that voting is skewed by marketing (permanent campaign) money, government is too corrupt and establishment too entrenched, the "conspiracy hidden in plain sight / normalcy" idea;

- could be that democracy simply doesn't work as a system, or maybe not anymore, because the "average" is somehow not good enough — that was certainly not my belief, not for a decade, but I had to come to terms: it's a question worth asking, I assure you. Just considering the quality of information and the noise/signal ratio throws a huge wrench in the mechanics of any sane decision-making process...

- ... (many more hypotheses)

Regardless, this may help us craft the next-new-better political system, which might or might not be a regime of increased freedom compared to now (my guess: much more in some domains, much less in others, and not everyone will like the distribution).

I mean, look where we are. We had 15 years to get ready for such an event since coronavirus of the 2000's — tons of reports and words of good will. “Guys, we're not ready for a massive outbreak!” — everybody and their Bill Gates said so! But alas, the political fantasy kept going and it's all been just words. It wasn't that hard to stockpile masks and various supplies for when the day comes...

It's a sad day in history when we must face the consequences of our choices, but it's like a cycle... We get too complacent and something slams us, again and again and again (give it 3-4 generations apart to "forget", it's as if written language doesn't exist).

I'm jaded at the irony of our collective behavior, and sad for all those who will suffer and leave. Hopefully this will be a painful but learning experience that will last. I'm sad to report that it almost exclusively takes real pain, real hurt for societies to learn anything meaningfully in the face of history, of evolution. So, here we are, destiny.

Joe Rogan has had such an ad hoc expert just this week, highly recommended. A sobering cold and factual shower.

Screening mammography aims to identify breast cancer at earlier stages of the disease, when treatment can be more successful. Despite the existence of screening programmes worldwide, the interpretation of mammograms is affected by high rates of false positives and false negatives. Here we present an artificial intelligence (AI) system that is capable of surpassing human experts in breast cancer prediction. [...]

In an independent study of six radiologists, the AI system outperformed all of the human readers: the area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC-ROC) for the AI system was greater than the AUC-ROC for the average radiologist by an absolute margin of 11.5%. We ran a simulation in which the AI system participated in the double-reading process that is used in the UK, and found that the AI system maintained non-inferior performance and reduced the workload of the second reader by 88%. This robust assessment of the AI system paves the way for clinical trials to improve the accuracy and efficiency of breast cancer screening.

So, there you have it: AI not "either/or" humans, but both, in conjunction, as a composition of the best of both worlds.

At the very least, that's how civilization will massively and intimately introduce true assistant AI.

It's also somewhat counter-intuitive to think that the most specialized tasks are the low hanging fruits; i.e. that the "difficult" to us, culminating years of training and experience for humans (e.g. how to read a medical scan) may be, per its natural advantages (like speed and parallelism), "easy" to the machine.

That space (where machine expertise is cheaper than human) roughly maps to the immense value attributed to the rise of industrial-age narrow AI; therein lies not a way to replace humans — we never did that in history, merely destroyed jobs to create ever more — but rather to augment ourselves once more to whole new levels of performance.

Anything more than this is AGI-level, science-fiction so far — and there's not even a shred of evidence that it's theoretically a sure thing, possible in the first place. Which is not to say that AI safety research isn't extremely important even for the narrow kind (manipulation comes to mind), but we shouldn't go as far as to bet future economic growth on its existence. Like fusion or interstellar travel, we just don't know. Yet, and for the foreseeable future, because scale.

Here we have a strong move towards what is possibly the next phase in the seemingly eternal tension between concentration/core convergence of resources versus distribution/meshing.

The last swing was strongly in favor of concentration, with a new word: "datacenters" became "clouds", though the distinction seems more marketing than ontology, if we stretch it more CS (abstract) than actual specs.

Now we're seeing a move back towards "on-prems", "self-hosted", "distributed"; towards the "edge" as we call it now, away from whatever passes for a "core" (the means is always somewhere in the middle, but as any pendulum, we probably cross it too fast to stop there given the momentum; such is the way of cyclic phenomenon driven and bound by natural objects such as human beings, or computers).

This ping-pong goes back to the first Turing machine and what came immediately thereafter; we saw big incarnations of each extreme which became popular names, iconic hallmarks of their era — the "mainframe", the "micro computer", the "super computer", the "handheld". Cue IoT (the extreme form of distribution, as far as we can conceive it), or holistic notions of "noosphere" (information "biome" so to speak, the whole of computers seen as a ecosystem, which you may describe as a "species" like we would gases, biological beings or... technological things. It might seem crazy then again internet displays some very biological properties).

The unambiguous conclusion that one should make, after observing this cycle first-hand for at least 1.5-ish period's (when you realize it's a cycle), is that we need both to make a world, and probably many variations thereof; and that we will "refresh" all of it, probably upon each half-cycle (these are, what, 30 years approx? so each 15 years give or take, like it too that from "the web" and cell phones to reach the smartphone era; or from then to now, the next few years, 2023-ish, as we cross into this next stage of the pendulum story?)

Lots of things are this way in technology, cycles from one extreme to the next, ultimately impossible to fix in a "happy medium" because there's no such thing; rather there are "happy trends" which fit their time, and as many such "trends" as there are "times" — how we moved from mainframes+terminals to the almost equally capable sever-client paradigm will be a vastly different story than the move from clouds to whatever's next.

I think HPE is poised to win huge rewards by grabbing this market first, and hopefully their execution is good enough.

I think it's cultural, acquired indeed.

I've pondered on dates and how to divide the year down to how long weeks should be — for way longer than I care to admit.

The thing is, we basically need there characters to map dates (it would be easier with a duodecimal/dozenal system for months, but 1-9,A,B works too).

Using weeks, we could say that e.g. "23-2" is the second day of week 23, from 01-1 to 52-2 (or 52-3 on leap years).

This seems like a good business approach to me.

I'd go one step further and map these to Q's, it's 13 weeks for each (13×4 = 52). Which neatly maps to 12 weeks of work + 1 week transition (debrief, brief) between each Q.

What's interesting is that we count hours, projects, deadlines usually in week units — e.g. most labor regulations speak of weekly work hours, whereas months are sketchy depending where weekends fall, 28-31 days, etc.

So it's easy to think e.g.: we got 3 weeks for this, team of 5, that's 3×5×40 = 600 man-hours.

Finally, considering a 5 workdays week (Mon-Fri), you can easily use .2 increments for days: 24.0 for Monday, 24.2 for Tuesday, 24.4 for Wednesday, 24.6 Thursday and 24.8 Friday of the 24th week. What's the use? Well, between e.g. 24.6 and 28.2 you can quickly do the math and get 4.4 = 4 workweeks + 3 days.

It may seem like nothing but math on dates has always been hard when it doesn't have to be. We shouldn't need Excel or Google to quickly calculate date differences, number of days since/until, etc.

Already speaking English is a massive advantage in understanding and working with all of that.

I think we're past that, it's become a de facto prerequisite now. You just can't become a programmer without at least written comprehension. You'll learn English anyway as you learn programming; but you'd do yourself a favor to double down — my suggestion: immerse yourself as much as possible, switch all your systems to English, watch only English TV, video, music, books, articles, etc. After 3-6 months, most people reported to me a "huge" leap forward, and within 2 years they can watch most TV un-subtitled (live shows are harder because less scripted, less grammatically formal I suppose, more idiomatic).

In terms of programming and tech in general, a keen understanding of English helps understanding much of the subtext, the intent, the "between the lines" meaning of techs, concepts, namespaces.

The same is true in some martial arts: in some countries, they have you learn only the original (say, Japanese) name of a technique. The problem is that it's hard to remember, it means nothing, it's just a burden; whereas it literally usually means simply what it does: "wrist torsion", "quick stun hit", etc. It may seem nothing but taking the time to translate all of it (at least), understand the language (at best), tells you a lot that you never hear because, well, it's obvious to those who speak it, and oblivious to those who don't. Cultural barriers are most confounding when they are invisible, unbeknownst to us.

TL;DR; English is almost necessary to be autonomous in programming and tech in general, even if you can learn without you just won't be able to navigate such a fast moving landscape and make deep sense of it.

It's no wonder why the latin alphabet got chosen, the same reason why it became popular in the first place, thousands of years ago. It's just efficient to use 26-ish letters, like numeral systems are easier to manipulate with 8~12 base digits.

Oh my, don't get me started about Excel localization.

It played a big part in my decision 20+ years ago to switch all my computers (any electronics actually) to US/English locale. Years later when I began programming seriously, I switched to a US-ANSI QWERTY layout — never looked back.

The premise is simple and just works:

- remove all friction (cognitive bloat) with foreign knowledge (blogs, docs, books, vids, courses, etc) because I don't have the additional step of translating, or rather guessing which snowflake word some engineer of my country thought was a good idea.

- avoid waiting for translations, which may never come (been there, done that, burned by JP/US video games in the 1990's never making it to the EU, thank you very much... not). Currently this usually means a lag of anything between 3 days and 3 months to get features from US app stores to EU ones. Some features never make it past the English world (Amazon is very bad in this regard, the whole Alexa offer is much lesser outside the US in my experience).

- I'll go one step further thus, and submit that even documentation, while written in local language usually, should at least retain English terms for fixed, known things — do not translate already formalized concepts like "reverse proxy", acronyms like DNS, cultural concepts like Agile or devops. It just makes it much, much harder for everyone to know what we're talking about, and to relate to the English world (makes your country, locale, a silo, which is bad-bad). Ideally, you'd write documentation fully in English, and optionally have a localized translation when it can't be avoided (regulation, compliance comes to mind).

I love that there is a common language in our industry; which one is a distant concern (although I love English more than my mother tongue, so there's that for me).

Wow, that is everything I asked for and more; thanks a lot for taking the time and effort to summarize all this. Now I feel like I can get started with this tomorrow.

Couple remarks:

CORS

Oh, that may save me lots of time... Seems related to http headers at first Googlance? These bit me in the past (in middleware and backend apps) and I still don't have a solid grasp of when I should use which.

dynamodb

I'll probably do the same as you then.

I've got hobbyist hardware at home (behind 1G fiber) so I usually use that as a lab — I still have to make a 'serverless' platform though — so anything too expensive I can balance back 'on-prem'.

I need to learn AWS anyway (who doesn't, I figure, if you intend to CI/CD as small/one-man team). Glad I can go the serverless path to get my feet wet!

Thanks again.

A few questions, as I don't know AWS much beyond basic VMs.

- Is all this easy to do following their docs, are we talking 1 h setup or 1 day?

- Cost: how much are we talking per week/month? (assuming no traffic but yours)

You're right about cathedrals, and it applies to several such big architecture projects (temples, etc). It's also how science operates when you think about it — that quest so far has always been far bigger than anyone, you know you'll die trying from the beginning, that you won't see where it all leads eventually.

There's a collection of vids by Isaac Arthur that might interest you: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2f0Wd3zNj0&list=PLIIOUpOge0... The first one is called "generational ships" and talks exactly about that.

A few interesting points:

- such ships are likely to be orders of magnitude more 'modern', comfortable, heaven compared to anything we know in terms of habitat even on Earth — a very basic promise of space habitats is that you can make them much, much better than any planet can do 'randomly'; and that would happen far before we even think of physically going to another star.

- assuming generations on a ship, it's entirely possible that colonizing a planet feels "ancient", "backwards" to these people now born and raised in space; such "spatians" might just choose to remain so (bummer for the founders of the mission, but a decently good move for evolution too).

- there are several ways to "colonize" a distant world. One is to go there and breed on the way. Another is to send a genetic "boot" (think a few million distinct human DNAs that machines would grow in vitro just prior to arrival, AI to teach them whatever it is they need, etc). This is within known science, but maybe cryogenics are also possible (that's a third option then).

These questions become incredibly complex (and fascinating) the deeper you dig. I think we can rely on 'truths' that were valid for 'enough' generations as being 'plausibly also true' in the near future (symmetrically in time: so if something's been true for human beings for ~5000 years, then it stands to reason that it won't change before, on average, at least as long).

It should thus be observed that culturally, we are currently have an extremely short-term view in the Western world; there's a huge contrast with Asia in that regard — where it's not uncommon for businesses to plan for 2030-2040, and 2050-2060 looking at 2100 in politics. Think about it, that's only 3 generations away at the current rate. It's really not that far. It will be vastly different because tech, but also vastly the same because human beings.

Do watch that video, he talks about these things very astutely! :)

You're right that "startups" are harder statistically I'd suppose, more moonshots.

Still these numbers are general, not tech specific.

The mindset in entrepreneur circles:

- failing is ok. Happens to most. Those who eventually succeed try again, and again.

- you have about 2 years of surviving hell to overcome first

- going alone (by design) lowers your chances of success; hiring gets you in the right growth mindset, strategy (eg most people don't charge enough in the beginning)

Honestly, it's almost masochistic when you've failed twice yet keep trying. Obsessive. You could but just won't fold, get a regular job. This is what it takes.

That's why I said the money is far from the first goal of those who succeed. At best that kind of money is 10 years later when you first try. You'll suffer so much and statistically would probably do better at a regular job. You'll be broke often. Stressed and uncertain. Unable to make promises in your personal life to a certain extent. So why?.. Doesn't make sense from a utility standpoint. You do it because that's what you do, like artists or athletes. This is the general profile of entrepreneurs who make it, and age of success is 45-55 on average.

Haha I wish

The gist of it, according to experts, is that fusion is so cheap and powerful that it's like sailing on Earth: didn't take "that long" (few thousand years) before we circled all of it. So give us fusion, and given enough time, and few enough aliens (so far so good we've seen none), and they say we'll be all over the Galaxy, eventually even beyond.

Cool perspective if you ask me! Wish it were my time. BTW, check out "Isaac Arthur" on YouTube if you like this sorta topic, he's as hard as science-fiction gets. Awesome dude.

Here's to one more step on the road to a Kardashiev type 1 civilization.

If we harness the power of fusion, we basically remove the biggest roadblock to a space-faring, galaxy-spanning civilization.

And we'd solve so many pressing problems right here within a few decades.

As I see it, if it comes down to such criteria to decide which path you'll take — i.e. you're in tech for the money — then it makes no sense to dabble in startups. Statistics clearly don't lie in this regard.

What I meant however was a bit meta: those who are deeply cut for entrepreneurship and startups are not motivated by money first or even at all; they thus don't and shouldn't care about statistics aiming at maximizing personal benefit... to a founder, "personal benefit" is more about getting things done, creating the dream. They'd rather optimize for long-term success (the kind that's much harder to take away from you, that creates real value).

Wealth, personal or collective, is but a consequence of a successful economic endeavor. As an employee, you'd choose to work for a startup because there's something in it that corporations money can't buy for you. There's no bet if you already believe in the work, you will get what you want every single day on the job. Different values, different goals, different rewards for different people I guess.

So the exact statistic is indeed about "entrepreneurs who make it", those who eventually create a successful business, how many time did they have to try?

Average is ~3 times, and your typical successful business (across sectors) takes ~2 years in "survival mode" (most don't make it past that mark), then 3 more (~5Y total) before things may feel "sustainable", cruising.

So indeed, we are not all considering those who don't make it in this picture. Creating a business is hard, very hard.

I wish. We live in a rented flat downtown a mid-size (100K pop) city. It falls down to city management, putting chargers on every street corner or just about... Suffice it to say it's not happening right now. :(

Agreed, it's insane. I don't know about most countries, but in France, some brands (Japanese iirc?) would have you go to their branded car dealership to charge. How crazy does that sound? (I couldn't believe it when he told me that, sorry I can't recall which brand it was)

The whole thing sounded mind-boggling, really. Anecdotally, my partner is seeking to buy a new car for a 1h commute so I wanted to get her a small EV — but the charging options make it totally impossible (short of getting a Tesla but that's way above our budget for this 2nd, smaller car). Consider that we live in France 30 km away from Luxembourg, a major financial/tech/political hub in the EU. What gives? I honestly don't get it.

If Tesla ever makes a sub-20K €/$ small EV suited for hourly commutes, they can just take my money.