girzel

This article is a bit weird in that it goes in to all this stuff about the monks' struggle to focus, but never once talks about the practice of meditation. Reading the first few paragraphs, I was thinking "this is precisely what meditation is for". These are exactly the issues meditation addresses.

"Distraction is an old problem, and so is the fantasy that it can be dodged once and for all."

Except that that's precisely what meditation practice does.

I play the guqin (古琴), a Chinese zither-like instrument which I believe is the oldest instrument in the world for which musical notation exists. Like the Tibetan notation, it doesn't indicate rhythm or duration of notes, just succession. Until a hundred years ago or so, people were just assuming they knew what the melody sounded like, and to this day you will hear different interpretations of the same piece that simply make different assumptions about the duration of notes.

I think info is really only usable inside Emacs. But inside Emacs, it is hands down the best documentation system I've ever used. A properly indexed manual is a joy to use, and beats the pants off anything PDF or HTML-based.

Gnus on Emacs! The only mail client that's bigger on the inside than it is on the outside.

I'm a writer, translator, and literary promoter. Sometimes I think I've never done anything more difficult than reading long works of literature and summarizing them faithfully in one or two paragraphs. It's absolutely brutal mental and compositional work.

The term for this strategy is "collateral freedom":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collateral_freedom

Soft power influence out and defensive action against influence in are two different ball games. Again, I'm not denying that the Chinese gov't is worried about a general miasmic incursion of foreign values, just that that's relatively low on their list of concerns. I think it once was a bigger deal to them, but they've since realized that it's not such a danger.

Thing number one is preventing their own citizens from communicating and organizing among themselves. Thing number two is the international soft-power push, mostly aimed at muddying the waters of public discourse enough that they are no longer the unquestionable bad guy (the goal here is simply to damp down international criticism). Preventing the spread of "Western democratic values" and "universal human rights" in China is a concern, but probably doesn't make third place, or even fourth.

China was worried about Chinese people using those sites to talk to each other, in a way that could not be censored. The Chinese gov't is far more worried about that than "Western values" (though that is occasionally a concern).

That looks absolutely perfect! The MP02 seems to be retailing at $350, which isn't awesome, but on the other hand it sure is nice to see a simple phone that has received some serious design attention.

That's the second Byzantine-related posting I've seen today. I'll chime in with Ghost Empire by Richard Fidler, which I'm reading because I'm organizing some author events for him in China. Seems very well researched and well written; a popular account rather than a historical deep dive, but lots of fun to read.

I should have just tried it first -- seems to work great. 谢谢!

How about fcitx?

I have a yubikey, and this[0] tutorial has been open in a browser tab for I swear four months or more. I just haven't summoned the guts to do it -- a voice in my head keeps whispering "you'll brick your laptop, you'll brick your laptop..."

[0] https://github.com/agherzan/yubikey-full-disk-encryption

What would make most sense is just to have it Lisp all the way down. SBCL, top to bottom!

> Code written in Rust easily interoperates with C. This means we can port to Rust incrementally, and having a working Emacs at each step of the process.

This seems really important, and crucial to preventing the project from getting stuck at the pie-in-the-sky stage. Start it going, and dog-food it as it comes!

but... sublicensable?

> I think OCaml has some fairly fundamental problems that keep it from being a first choice for server-side development.

But what were those problems, Steve?!

I just signed up for a CenturyLink connection in Seattle. CenturyLink feels like they're playing catch-up to Comcast, and thus are sort of on the humble end of the arrogant-to-humble pendulum of monopolies. They are giving me a per-month service that can be cancelled any time, "no price-hikes" (though how can that be possible, am I going to get the same price in perpetuity into the future?), and I clicked the "I will install my own router" option, and there are no extra installation or equipment fees. My Ubiquiti Edgerouter Lite is in the mail.

We'll see if there's another shoe to drop.

I'm not even a programmer (not professionally), but I "run my life" with Emacs and love it. Email with Gnus, writing and project management with Org. I used to use BBDB for contact management, then wrote a replacement package called EBDB. I also wrote a glue-code package for all three called Gnorb, and need very little else out of my computer. Being able to treat nearly everything I do as text, which I manipulate with the same interface, is a joy. As a package author I'm probably running a net deficit of time-spent-writing-Elisp vs time-saved-through-efficiency, but I enjoyed the hell out of it.

The two things I balk at are the terminal, and web browsing. I've tried text-based web browsing off-and-on over the years, but the inconvenience has overcome even my love of Emacs/Stockholm Syndrome. As for the terminal... I just can't help feeling like it's an added layer of buffering, and for what? And there always seemed to be some glitches in screen rendering... So I demure, despite cursing tmux's copy/paste mechanisms at least once a day.

Emacs, Firefox and xterm are usually the only three GUI programs running on my machine.

My PT guy said they're apparently finding real effects for cupping. I don't remember the details, but the outline was that cupping is controlled bruising, and your body reacts to bruising by going into "fix-it mode" (that's the technical medical term) in that area, and that can help speed recovery from other injuries in that area.

So it's not "detoxification", but rather stimulating healing functions.

This was a two-minute conversation, so...

I've heard Chinese people learning Scandinavian languages complain that they're too damn "tonal": they found the sing-songy nature of those languages (at the sentence level, not the word/character) to be very bizarre.

Pretty good introduction! The one thing I found a little off was in the larger phrase constructions: the explanation of how larger "words" are formed from characters isn't quite right. For instance the example of "socialism", 社会主义, which he parses as "common production primary virtue", isn't really four words in a row, it's two "words" made of up two characters each: 社会 meaning society, 主义 typically used as an "-ism" suffix.

义 in isolation might mean "virtue", but most characters have a handful (or more) of meanings, and when it comes after 主, 义 takes on more of its "idea" meaning.

But all in all, pretty good!

I recently decided it was time to get a better understanding of how makefiles work, and after reading a few tutorials, ended up just reading the manual. It's long, but it's very, very well written (a good example of one of the Gnu projects biggest strengths), to the point where just starting at the top and reading gives an almost tutorial-like effect. Just read the manual!

No outages except when I've migrated postfix/dovecot from old to new servers, and misconfigured. Otherwise uptime has been equal to server provider uptime (Rackspace, then AWS).

Email patches!

They are free I think everywhere outside of the US. Except for China, where it's well over $1000 to buy one from a state-owned publisher.

Thanks for that! I thought you were coming at this from an Indian/Yogic tradition, and I guess the confluence is less surprising if it all comes from Daoism.

My teacher is very much about awareness and the way it moves through the body; the interplay of will, qi, and strength. I'm slow mostly because I started out with some pretty gruesome hip immobility issues, and have treated taiji like physical therapy for the past two years. I'm only just coming out of the gross mechanical problems now, and starting to become more aware of the subtler issues at play.

I've been doing taiji for a couple of years -- interestingly, they also talk about a cycle of qi that passes down the front of the body, around the perineum, up the back, and over the head down through the tongue on the roof of the mouth. This is supposed to be going on during standing meditation. I haven't experienced it yet, but it's early days for me.

No. That's like saying "Why go to the trouble of putting seat belts in cars, since so many people survive car crashes?"

Hopefully you'll see where to start.

If we're so good at dealing with things -- which I think it's fairly obvious we aren't -- why don't we just "deal with" carbon emissions and our effects on the environment? Why opt for the more difficult to deal with scenario?