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> Khemarato Bhikkhu (Chief Librarian)

...well then, it would make more sense to me, that he call his collection of very likeable, commendable Dhamma resources a "library", rather than a "university".

>What does "authority" mean in a Buddhist context?

That's a fantastic question, and the short answer is: "given my expertise is in the Theravada world... how authority works is complicated". An overly simplistic answer is: the number of years of a monk's seniority is the easy and fairly-reliable gauge of a monk's authority.

It would take a good 1-hour Dhamma Talk for me to explain what I know. Most people would be bored, and possibly even uninspired after hearing the non-tldr answer. Do you really want the non-tldr answer?

Who's decision was it to call the website a "university"? Was that my decision, or his? The decision to call it a "university" is what makes me want to clarify what peer-perceived credentials he might have to that extent.

If you were considering enrolling in a university, would you look into the reputation of that university? I'll bet you would. You'd want to know what it's reputation is like. Well, I'm offering insights into that, and yes his seniority got pulled into that description. He's quite a junior monk to be running his own website. In the Theravada world, this would be almost universally discouraged (it isn't just me who feels this way): trying to run a website while still quite a junior monk. There's no way my own teacher would have approved of it. Theravada culture is conservative - guilty as charged there.

As to his wisdom: I've never actually lived with him, so I can't comment on what he's like. He seems astute enough from my dealings with him. No complaints from me, other than that choice of the word "university". These sorts of things - someone's wisdom - can only be seen with time. As to his choices of what he curates on his website: I agree there's a lot of great resources listed there. My tastes and his are a little different - which is to be expected - and I wouldn't say there are any "red flags" to speak of. It's a solid website. Please don't be discouraged from checking it out. I'm not trying to stop anyone from going explore it. Thanks for taking the time to check out Theravada Buddhism. :)

PS: I have a personal little indie website here: https://bhikkhu.ca/ ...but I don't go so far as to call it a "university". It's a personal website, which doesn't make itself out to be anything more than that.

Actual Buddhist monk here (Ajahn Subharo), in the Theravada Thai forest lineage. Khemarato Bhikkhu - who is much more junior a monk than me, and is not formally any sort of Ajahn (teacher) yet - and myself both have Computer Science degrees, which are rare things for Buddhist monks to have.

So take his authority to run a "university" with a huge grain of salt. He would get roundly mocked in subtle ways by senior Buddhist monks if he thinks he has the seniority to be the "dean" of a "university". It's only once you have 10 years seniority that one, as a Theravada monk, earns the title of "Elder" ("Thera", an ancient Pali word in the Pali Canon), or an "Ajahn" (a Thai word simply meaning teacher, roughly corresponding to that same 10 years seniority).

I've never met him in person, but have cordially chatted with him a few times in the internet. We're both on Mastodon:

Him: https://digipres.club/@obu

Myself: https://mstdn.ca/@sbb

I'll take a look at in 10 years, if it's still for sale. Not sooner!

"Dear ChatGPT, please submit perfectly acceptable and politely worded PR's which elegantly fix all the software bugs in Debian's bug database: https://www.debian.org/Bugs/ I'm referring to all bugs for the upcoming "bookworm" release. The PR's should fulfill all of the Debian project's policies and guidelines. For the AMD64 and ARM64 architectures. Much appreciated.

By Monday March 27th, 5:00pm +08, 2023. Thanks!"

https://mstdn.ca/@sbb/110083097733267112

I'll get roasted for saying this, but now that modern terminals like kitty can handle a huge number of colors, why not set the bar at requiring that many colors - which any decently modern PC can handle? Like throw out 16-color mode completely, along with 486 CPUs, PCMCIA cards, and floppy disks.

Then have sane, pleasant color schemes that aren't all harsh and glaring - which 16-color mode often looks like.

Whatever dev is great at logic, but is bad at picking colors, should humble themselves when someone with taste in colors comes along and offers a PR to make the default color schemes better (keeping in mind the higher-contrast needs of the visually impaired, favoring "dark mode").

Take a look at the color schemes which can be chosen from within "theme.sh -i" for great examples of such color schemes. Many are in poor taste, but there are also some great ones - which usability experts would agree are functionally the best, from a legibility perspective.

I have a mastodon user, and my own blog self-hosted using Jekyll (a static-content generator).

I followed this tutorial to set up my own "well-known-webfinger" for my domain, which works: https://philna.sh/blog/2022/11/23/alias-your-mastodon-userna...

There's also a verification feature in a Mastodon user's profile, where you can put a custom html anchor (involving something like 'a rel="me"') in the footer of your website. Then you earn a checkmark, with green highlighting for your website when people look at your Mastodon profile.

I've done this, as well.

Looking at human nature - the psychology of it - in these highly technical environments is very refreshing. It has to be faced sooner or later, I say.

Further recommended reading material (which I read and loved) - Will Stor's "The Status Game".

"Dollhouse mangers’ purpose is recognition from higher-ups."

Yup, that's "The Status Game" right there.

Several types of status game are played:

- "Virtue" Status Games (conforming to a framework, no matter how ill-fitting to the real world)

- "Prestige" status games - designing an elegant system, and being respected for the elegance and cleverness

- "Dominance" status games - for HR and management types, who control and unnecessarily oppress everything, striking fear into employees to conform.

That's straight-up "god-level" indeed.

"Elite" is a suitable name for the game, when the coding prowess is considered as the truly "Elite" thing about it.

But will it run on a PicoMiteVGA? (RP2040-based computer with 16 colors, 320x240 graphics, in "mode 2")?

"PicoMiteVGA: Raspberry Pi Pico Boot-to-BASIC Microcomputer": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kZaWYgIYgd8

I did a 3-part video series talking about setting up "Parental controls" (using a mixture of OpenWRT and PiHole), which can flexibly dial back access to certain websites - especially Social Media ones - on a given home LAN. This denial can be on a timed basis, and/or on a MAC-address basis.

Even when fully restricted, LAN access is still granted to a convenient library (served up by calibre-web) of edifying, much-more-wholesome ebooks on a Raspberry Pi, self-hosted. This flexible approach always leaves something to be accessed for those who still feel the need for an "out" of some sort (instead of total denial of all internet access).

Here's part 3, where I showed the setup and operation of OpenWRT and Pihole: https://bhikkhu.ca/buddhism/video/2022/12/19/Dhamma_Talk_098...

Part 2 talked about Calibre-web the most, which is linked to there.

gpg -b detached_signature_of_the.mp4.sig needs_signing.mp4

I use this for all the livestream videos I create. I also post an sha256sum of the videos, for good measure. These are mentioned last of all, at the bottom of each webpage for a video.

Excellent books explaining the need for face-to-face communication are "The Village Effect" by Susan Pinker (humans need face-to-face socializing to enhance mental health, and feel all the happy juices like endorphins, oxytocin, etc), and "The Master and his Emmisary", by Iain McGilchrist. Basically, all the techy geek work a dev does makes them very left-hemisphere (predominant brain region). And the left hemisphere is "sticky": once you over-use it, it's hard to stop using it predominantly. In the right hemisphere is where the empathy is, ability to catch nuance, metaphor, and facial micro-expressions, and the ability to use "Theory of Mind" - appreciating the unique individual perspectives of others.

*Too much left-brain, and communication is doomed to suck!!*

I'm using Linux Mint Debian Edition 5, and recommend it. It has the deep sensibility of Linux Mint, but it's _not_ based off Ubuntu. The Cinnamon desktop in LMDE5 has much more polish than Debian 11's Cinnamon desktop, which I also tried and hated within 2 hours (the user management - namely adding additional users who don't inherit the group memberships they sensibly should - is hot garbage).

Meditation. The more wisdom one gains over which avenues of pursuit in life are unwise, and cuts them out entirely through better decision making, that's a giant gain in productivity. It's a giant gain in productivity to have the mindfulness, and emotional and spiritual maturity to nip in the bud bad choices before they turn into a big waste of time.

I have a Seeed mini-router with a Raspberry Pi 4 compute module, 4GB RAM, 32GB eMMC flash. *This is a more rare router which comes with OpenWRT pre-installed*, for those who don't like the idea of reflashing a router from stock firmware, to alternative firmware (and super-frustrating minor hardware revisions *not stated on the product packaging* can trip you up, potentially-bricking the router).

Be warned that the wifi onboard the CM4 is weak (like the usable range is only 9ish feet, or 3ish metres), but the CM4 does have a tiny connector to attach a better antenna (not included). There are also 2 USB3 ports, so some sort of better Linux-compatible wifi dongle could be attached there. OpenWRT makes it easy to graphically add such a new network device into a quickly-usable network interface.

The linux kernel version at present is 5.4, if you were wondering how recent the driver support would be. And remember, that's aarch64 drivers, not amd64.

Great answer. I agree getting out of one's comfort zone can go a long way to bringing new perspective, and adapting, and developing new skills. Especially social ones.

To that I would add listening to Mark Farina Mushroom Jazz, Vol. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIuW-OJY2uY

This is to get in touch with your inner mojo. Also Vol. 8 is awesome.

Not sure if it's helpful to mention this, but just saying... one of my favourite things about the Raspberry Pi is how quickly a MicroSD card can be reformatted from scratch with an OS which can get it up and running quickly again. Even from another Raspberry Pi.

As to a book recommendation, the Buddha's "Early Buddhist Texts" (of the Pali Canon) are highly recommended. There's a lot of material there, but well worth reading, IMHO.

Meditation, of course. The Brahmavihara of Karuna (compassion) is exactly what you are looking for here.

I do some fun things with Wireguard on a few VPS servers.

Firstly, respect to Thich Nhat Hanh, and his legacy! I've done 7 10-day Vipassana foundation retreats (AKA "Goenka retreats"). I was so inspired that I went on to become a Buddhist monk. Now I'm a meditation teacher in my own right, with 13 years seniority, fully-ordained. My website: https://bhikkhu.ca The place I give weekend meditation retreats (in Calgary, Canada): https://ehipassikocalgary.org/ The cost is by-donation, and no donation is also acceptable. My tradition is Theravada Buddhism, or "Early Buddhism".

An ad-free, privacy-friendly blog with video, audio and text postings, has RSS feed. It uses Jekyll, clappr, nginx, Mattermost Team server, Debian Linux, OBS, etc. All Open Source top to bottom. Hosted on a few cheap $5 US/month VPS'. Not much dev work, but lots of devops! Took thousands of hours to set up and configure, by one person - me. My longer-term Covid lockdown project! I have a 4-yr B.Sc. in Comp. Sci. BTW, which helped a lot.