Living, in Limbo
hintjens.com
hintjens.com
I want to simply declare that the iMatix state machine generator (Libero) and cross-platform library(ies) (SMT/SFL) saved my project/company from certain destruction in 1996. And I never had the opportunity to thank you/him/them for that.
I'm a C guy, so admittedly old-fashioned, but I still use that FSM generator language more than twice/year. FSMs rock (I came from circuits) and this is the best business-language-to-compiled-software-description thing I have ever met.
Thank you.
She said: "Can we do nothing?".
My theory about this universe is that: we can do nothing - but that we can best serve by making sure that these pioneers are never forgotten.
That may well be wrong. But, from a little point example, out here in the universe, I and my mother, appreciate you and love you and .... I don't know what to say.
[edit] Found it.
https://github.com/imatix/openamq in the "./tooling/base1" dir of the historic openamq distribution.
[ update ]
Oops -- these end-points are dead too :) Back to the scavenger hunt.
q: Is there a logical successor to libero? A few of my searches took me to references to GSL...
[ second update ]
The guy who regrets working too hard at the end of life might be reflecting on some projects he put too much effort into, thinking he should have relaxed instead.
Yet with 50 more years, he might get a jump on a dozen more projects, or reach for that next promotion.
Hindsight, thou art a heartless bitch.
;)
Humans are not actually very good at remembering their past selves. Memories are reconstructed on the fly, we 'remember' by projecting our present selves into past situations.
Why, only on the edge of dying, people suddenly becomes "philosophical" and aware of their life and surroundings? Yet, it's obvious for all of us, that everyone now living will be dead after several decades. And no one seems to be really caring.
For whatever reason people express strong grief about dead or soon-to-be-dead in the manner, that they by themselves will never ever die, and it's so tragic and unexpected, that someone dies.
I just don't get it, how it happens, that we have world based on the cult of death and yet just everyone living in the illusion, that their existence will never end?
But when we are living in the thick of it we live much more within each other and the greater whole of society because we have to. That's how we survive. We give up some of our brainspace to ideas and systems that are built communally, both on a local/familial level and on an entire social level.
In other words, we spend a lot of our time going with the flow and allowing our opinions to be shaped by those we trust or love. Or at least I think that's part of it.
Edit: And in that sense we see individuals dying, but as we live we don't necessarily ponder ourselves dying as an individual because much of what we do and care about on a day to day basis will outlive us e.g. our families and ideals.
I do not see much difference in dying in the next 12 month or next 40 years.
There's also the difficulty in forming any real plans, which often take a few years, if you don't have some belief that you'll live to see them through.
So telling ourselves "I'm going to live forever" (or at least 20 years more) is a basis for making long term plans like buying a house, having children, planting a garden...
Think it's all about where your attention is. We've made a world full of noise and distractions to occupy our attention, keep us from getting bored. As a result we pay no attention to our selves.
At least not until you get older and learn to filter out the noise. Priorities.
I guess nearness of death brings the attention to where it needs to be - priorities suddenly and radically altered
In death, clarity comes from limited options.
Time-wise, no.
Because when you expect to live indefinitely (as most of us are until old age) your priorities are different. A lot of what we do is insurance against being alive tomorrow. If you want a roof over your head and food on the table, you need to spend some of the present NOT thinking about the big questions. You might even lower your quality of life, just because you expect it to be long, for instance by taking a job you don't like.
If philosophical means questioning things, yes. It also hints at being in the moment. Too often life is seen from auto-pilot. Death, being near it, seeing it, makes this change obvious. We'll all experience death in our on way. @PieterH does us all a favour here writing about this. Take a moment to reflect about this post and what it means to you. Thx @PieterH.
The red blood cells being wiped over and over when the Chemo destroys everything probably leads to a worse oxygenation.
Wish you a good holiday, enjoy some good wine over there while you're at it!
Glad to see another update from Pieter, I hope he finds his way out of limbo, preferably healthy.
We were planning to have kids in the next year or so. Now we're doing fertility preservation in case the chemo makes her infertile. I'm wondering if I can cope as a single dad if things come to that. I have a good paying tech job but everything in the Bay Area is so expensive, especially with kids.
I'm wishing you both all the best, and some times of simple joy together to balance the rest of what you're going through.
I personally find it hard accepting things I'm told to do or that most people have been doing for ages (i.e I don't use shampoo, I sleep on the floor, no commercial toothpaste etc..). I'm not a naturalism fanatic too, it's just things I researched and resonated with me, I tried them, and I liked it.
I wish you tranquility either way.
First time I read something of the guy and his blog made an entrance in my quick dial.
I take he lives in Germany. That is one of the best and free healthcare systems in Europe (if not the world). Timely and hassle-free access to medication and care is hugely important when you race against time. Kudos to the system there.
One of my uncle had throat cancer, and I feel that rather than the disease its the Chemo that was doing harm to him. As I can see him transform from a healthy person to a weak and slim one.
I really appreciate the courage @PeterH is showing, and motivating the people around the world.
Thank you.
A friend of mine had brain-cancer and got chemo every month or so.
While the chemo was running he looked like he would die any moment.
When it was done he looked like he wasn't even sick.
This went on for years till he died two years ago.
"Lots of time, mostly at home, no long term plans. And yet it has been hard. It's taken me a month to start on this article. In limbo, it is so much easier to just switch off, become passive. It doesn't matter anyhow, does it."
I know the feeling from a brain injury that cost most of my memory, learning, and analytical capabilities. I've been wanting to do some deep analysis and coding for high-assurance systems but chunks of knowledge, motivation, or mental capacity for some analysis just aren't there. Easier to take a mental break, too, than tackle the stuff. I've gotten quite a bit done over the years with specific strategies, though, that might help you. Not sure if it will or won't as your situation is clearly a bit different but does have similarities. Worth a try.
To start with, keep it simple and incremental. Even my thoughts & non-coding projects I do almost Niklaus Wirth style where each piece, from how I describe it to how it do it, is individually pretty simple. Also helps to reuse ideas & work as much as possible in new thoughts to reduce brain drain. Doing it incrementally is most important, though. This applies to both code, writing, and planning. (Sound like programming/engineering yet?) You can tackle almost nothing or a lot but you at least see pieces of it forming that both motivate and act as leverage for next pieces. Also, opposite of decomposition in software, gradually refactor the simple ideas or jobs into more complex ones maintaining simple interfaces or ways of putting them together. Idea being that complex stuff is hard to make with brain trying to turn off whereas small changes merging simple pieces is easier (not easy).
I do an example with book you want to work on. Writing a book is a lot of work that your brain won't let you do it seems. So, screw writing a book. Instead, keep two files or sets of them: one an outline-in-progress to structure your ideas; one a list of them in terms of techniques, explanations, code examples, and so on. Just keep adding stuff... little by little or a lot if a burst of mental energy... to the category on the right gradually refactoring the left (directory) with labels or pointers to stuff on right (content). For specific stuff, start simple while refactoring into complex. You might describe a problematic situation with an English description or solution with little text... just enough to remember what you were thinking. Another day add some specifics and/or code to it. Another day a little more or a footnote. Eventually, you end up with what can be turned straightforward into a book (SUCCESS) or a collection of useful information (LESS SUCCESS) others can build on. This approach has no failure mode since some wisdom is better than none. Peer review helps, though, to catch little inaccuracies bound to sneak in. That's normal, though.
So, outline, simplify, maximal reuse in ideas/code/explanations/structuring, refactor to add complexity later if too much now, and just accept work might be more wiki than book at least for now. These are how a semi-brain-dead individual like myself musters on despite it not wanting to cooperate something like 50-80% of the time. Hopefully, yours has more steam than that and similarly good results. :)
I have the utmost sympathy for the plight of the chronically ill, but to decree a referendum result as "madness" is slightly egotistical.
Perhaps those who are outraged by world events merely don't see the full picture? Perhaps their protective shells work too well, and they are insulated from the reality with which the masses must contend?
Worth pondering.
I'm guessing you don't agree with his thinking. When you are on your deathbed, I'll give your opinion equal credence.
Otherwise, ... do you have anything substantive to offer beyond being rude?
And as no one meaningfully important has put forward a plan about what sort of exit Brexit is going to take, that unknown is very uncertain indeed. Long-term things like real estate investment and corporate mergers are on hold, EU students going to British colleges are wondering if they'll be allowed to complete their university education (probably? but still) and vice versa...
On this side of the pond there's a mindset where people say the US Constitution is not a suicide pact. There is an analogy to EU membership. There's no glory or honor in riding a sinking ship to the bottom. Better to be the first guy out than the last.
There is something I've recently realized. Hospitals are optimized to receive patients, control the situation, prevent pain & death, and then hope for the best. In other words, traditional medicine doesn't actually heal you. It only controls the situation, and trusts that your body will heal itself.
This was a strange realization to make. My whole life I've always associated medicine with healing. But now I see that, although very useful, medicine only serves as a band-aid. It doesn't solve the underlying problem.
I think we as a society need to realize this. Not because traditional medicine is bad (it has helped save countless lives, for sure), but because we need to start looking into alternative medicine that could potentially provide actual healing. There's currently a stigma of anything that isn't a traditional drug / pill... we need to progress past this mindset.
Edit: Sorry for being overly broad. I have more in mind physical and mental health conditions. Regardless, instead of downvotes, how about we have an enlightening discussion?
Edit 2: I misspoke "traditional medicine"; but what I meant was "western medicine", as I was kindly corrected by maxerickson. I apologize for the confusion.
It's cured all sorts of things. Vaccines, antibiotics, joint reconstruction, etc, etc.
Vaccines are interesting, since they don't directly solve the problem, but aid your body in helping itself.
I concede antibiotics and joint reconstruction. However, we've only begun to scratch the surface of what's possible. As a society, we shouldn't limit ourselves to only what is taught in a medical degree.
http://apps.who.int/iris/bitstream/10665/66783/1/WHO_EDM_TRM...
Things like herbal therapies and acupuncture and so on.
In my opinion, taking things from your perspective is going to be very hit-and-miss. Combined with the replication issues that seem to crop up in these fields, a great deal of money and energy might be spent on a non-drug remedy that is simply a more effective placebo. It could take years to figure out whether a treatment provides life-lasting effects.
If any company, today, cured major depression with a drug, it would be making essentially monopoly profits for at least five, while analogs were found, at at most until 2036.
I come from a cognitive/social psychology background; it is mostly social psychology that has a replication crisis. Double-blind drug trials, even with psychiatric drugs, are usually fairly well done. (That doesn't mean the theory behind these drugs is necessarily sound, and in fact we're learning that a large class of drugs, SSRIs, may only provide a primary effect along a previously though auxiliary axis).
It seems hard to argue that any alternative medicine field is as productive or as effective, empirically speaking, as the drug companies. They have huge incentive to win big and they go for it all the time. In the US they can sway things a little with ads, but only after they get past our admittedly corrupt regulatory gatekeepers, and only in that market. A cure for major depression alone would be 7-20 years of guaranteed monopoly profits. There is not a drug company in the world that would keep pressing SSRIs if that sort of treatment was available. The brand loyalty alone would be well worth it.
This isn't to argue against anything, really, except that psychiatric drug manufacturers have incentive not to produce cures. They assuredly do.
Have you heard of sound therapy? Laser therapy? NLP? These are therapies you probably would never hear at a traditional doctor's office.
[1] https://www.quora.com/Why-are-chiropractors-not-considered-r... [2] http://www.quackwatch.com/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/altmed.htm...
Just using penicillin as an example:
Imagine you have an incurable infection and I told you that there's this mysterious blue mold that, when crushed up and consumed, will cure you. That sounds a lot like alternative medicine, but when you extract the active component and put it in a certain delivery system (i.e., a pill/capsule/tablet) it's "traditional," modern medicine.
> ... traditional medicine doesn't actually heal you.
And penicillin has saved millions [1] of lives.
[1] estimates ranging from "several" to "hundreds" of millions.
My point is that generalising both traditional medicine and "western" modern medicine misses the mark. Treat everything on balance, specific to the medicine in question, not the class it came from, in my opinion.
Well if only! Much of modern medicine unfortunately are "symptom-suppressors" (pain-killers, antihistamines, fever prevention, blood-pressure/blood-sugar 'regulators', cholesterol-lowering agents, anti-fungals etc) of deeper underlying health issues --- true "band-aid" medicine is/would be a step forward if you think about it: if we get wounded or break a bone, real band-aids don't "heal" but assist and speed the body's built-in healing capabilities. And as the alternative folks say, nothing can heal any ailment but the body itself: the "best"/most proven medicine does seem to "merely" improve the milieu/environment in which the body attempts to self-heal: that's true for antibiotics (kill off most of the bad guys so ideally the good guys are now in better balance to "self-heal": finish off the rest), vaccines (prime the immune system for "self-healing": fighting off a future infection), antiseptics etc. --- many of which were 'evolved' from traditional (herbal etc) treatments/insights over centuries isolated into "works for most with the least side-effects" pharmaceuticals.