muddi [he/him]

Sounds like you might enjoy people being honest to you rather than enjoying compliments or criticism. Criticism is more blunt when said to someone’s face, but compliments can seem disingenuous, so maybe you don’t believe the compliments subconsciously

Lucifer’s Hebrew name is Helel!

I once tripped hard and believed I died. When I came out from the trip, I still had no evidence I hadn’t finished tripping, and am actually still dying as my mind fires its dying circuits in my deathbed.

But that doubt interferes with my ability to live a normal live which I am used to and strive for, so I ignore the doubt, mostly. I check myself with little tests now and then.

Same with other existential doubts in general. If you want some official names of philosophies, Nagel’s absurdism, Buddhism, Vedanta, and maybe pragmatism would be applicable. Basically: don’t kill yourself with doubt, keep on living with some sensibility in your senses, though keep a curious mind to keep yourself in check now and then.

Nitpicking can be automated by a linter, then reviews can actually sit back and review more important things like high-level design and scalability

as if peer reviews could actually spot bugs that tests can’t catch

There can’t be bugs if there are no tests to catch them! Ofc you can also automate test coverage standards. But PRs are sometimes the only way to catch bugs, even and especially with senior devs in my experience bc they are lazy and will skip writing tests, or write useless or bare minimum tests just to check off code standards and merge on ahead

Ah yep that triggered the full memory for me…it was a book called Tikki Tikki Tempo: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tikki_Tikki_Tembo

Oh man this is stirring up some memories from early grade school about an English version of this that we used to sing about a boy with a long name and his younger brother.

I always wondered if that was just the moral of the story: don’t give your children long names. Which my parents did to me 😡

I’ll check it out! Thanks for the rec

And about the Indian stories, I think you’ll find a rhythmic pattern. Maybe the translations can ruin it, I can’t confirm or deny this.

I think you’re right, I’m probably missing out on certain contexts and linguistic play reading the English translations. It adds to the melancholy in a way though, knowing there’s more beneath the surface of the words I can only barely grasp

I’m reading the Kathasaritsagara now! Reading those kind of collections of tales makes me feel like I’m living among the ancient/medieval villagers of India, an interesting perspective shift to say the least

There is a baggage associated with the word “cult” now.

It used to mean pretty much a specific practice of a religion. For example, in a polytheistic religion, you can choose a favorite god and perhaps even worship that figure exclusively, even while believing in all the others eg. later Hindu ishtadevata practices

This kind of cult evolved into those around mysteries or mysterious figures (eg. Eleusinia, Mithraism) and real-world figures like monarchs like the Roman emperor. Eventually you have the death cults of the last few decades which cemented the pejorative sense of “cult” and also inspired the sociology around the same. I should also mention, there is a chauvinism in this as well eg. cargo cults

To answer your question, there is this historical context to it. But also the perspective: one can look back through history or across the world to identify “cults” but not recognize that one lives in a culture or participates in cultish behavior themselves

Any biography about some liberal political leader, like that Obama one. I think people buy them just because they trend on the top 10 books to read list. But everyone I’ve met who has it just keeps it on their coffee table to make it seem like they’re into reading now. The only one I know who finishes those biographies is my grandpa who is a little senile and bored now.

Marx didn’t consider human nature so he’s totally wrong

The series is good, idk about the first few books in themselves though

The new feature being demoed vs the legacy code it depends on

Others have mentioned, everything is moving away from each other, like the surface of an expanding balloon. But that is what we observe, and there is more beyond the observable universe.

There is an idea that our universe might actually be in a black hole in a higher universe. To expand on the balloon simile (pun intended), this would be like a balloon expanding uniformly except in a spot, a bubble appears and expands faster. A bubble within a bubble. Kind of a tumor, an outgrowth universe. Hope I’ve been illustrative enough.

It’s not exactly what you asked, but a higher level black hole is kind of something pulling all matter in our universe instead of pushing.

If you are out somewhere dark enough and look up long enough, you usually see several shooting stars.

Also interesting: some cultures recognize images in nebulae and dark spots in the sky instead of or alongside constellations (eg. Australian indigenous Emu in the Sky)

Voice messages are good for those who speak a language which doesn’t get focused on by transcription services or are too old to read tiny text

Yeah there are those machines that like instantly cool your soda can or make ice cream instantly supposedly. They just bathe it in ice and salt water for some time basically

Fair point but I think then it just expands the consideration from linguistic (which is already more than spoken or written, it also covers signed, whistled, drummed, danced, in one case I heard about – eye movement) to semiotic.

I think that is a linguistic question ultimately. You could take potentially utter a new sentence never before uttered even with the top 10 most used words in a language.

That is one of the most significant things about the human being. Actually I am quite surprised when people come with definitions for human nature eg. fundamentally good, fundamentally evil, homo sapiens, homo faber, etc. that the linguistic potential to turn a small set of things into infinity is often ignored. No other animal can think and speak like we do.

I guess if getting new data is not allowed, then interpolation or extrapolation would be the next best option. Interpolation would be connecting existing thoughts to form or find new ones in between. Extrapolation would be following a train of thought to its ultimate end. This could be done in either the diffused or focused mental states. I like to draw up diagrams for this so I can see the blank spots to fill or direction things seem to be going.

There is also the semantics of the question. It’s actually quite an ancient topic, where our thoughts come from. What does “original” mean? The thought originating in our mind, or from some higher realm? I won’t go too deep into this, just bringing it up to think about it. The only thing I wanted to say is that maybe our mind is not entirely free and agentive, but actually there is a “darkness that comes before” to reference The Second Apocalypse which we can’t conquer, but are conquered by.

On a lighter note, and from my own experience, it is definitely possible to generate new thoughts outside of that diffuse cloud of repeated thoughts formed on the storehouse of experience accumulated so far in our lives. Following practices of mindfulness, we can learn to recognize the noise of our mind and separate those “thoughts” from what we might call more agentive thoughts that we can control over, wherever they come from. I do meditations in these styles and achieve a mental state beyond the diffuse and focused, kind of inverse to dreaming (cf. turiya for this kind of formulation of a fourth state of mind). In this state, you can come to understand things which you could probably never do in the other mental states. Those thoughts feel “cleaner” as if coming from a true origin rather than bounced around a cloud of repeated thoughts like you mention.

But I feel like maybe these thoughts are not exactly the ones you are looking for. They are removed from our everyday sense of living, and not really invested in disciplines we have come up with socially as humans. It would be like asking if a caveman 500,000 years ago would have come up with the solution to how to fix a bug in the code I just wrote. It would have been an original thought for him sure, but kind of besides the point.

Edit: as an example for the interpolation/extrapolation, consider sentences like “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” or actual usages of this sort of thing in literature:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirātārjunīya#Linguistic_ingenuity

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den

The interesting part is that constrained thinking is what produces this