If you have anger issues, this one is a great tool (h/t mindyourbusiness)
This week’s book:
Discourses and Selected Writings
Disclaimer: I’m not your Supervisor. These are my opinions after reading through these books a few times.
Epictetus was born a slave around 50 ad. His owner was Epaphroditus, a rich freedman who was once a slave of Nero. Though he was a slave Epictetus was sent to study philosophy under Musonius Rufus.
Epictetus was lame and there are some stories it was caused by his master and others that it was caused by disease.
He was a freedman when all philosophers were banished from Rome in 89 by the Emperor Domitian. He then started his school in Greece, and had many students. He did not leave any writings from his lessons, but one of his students, Flavius Arrian, took notes and wrote the Discourses.
Epictetus did not marry, had no children, and lived to be around 80-85. In retirement, he adopted a child that would have been abandoned and raised him with a woman.
He died sometime around AD 135.
He might be my favorite Stoic teacher. I love his bare bones and very straight forward approach.
Following is a paragraph-by-paragraph discussion of one of his lessons. Epictetus’s text appears in bold, my replies are in normal text.
Of friendship
Whatever a man is interested in he naturally loves. Now do men take an interest in things evil? Not at all. Well, and do they take an interest in things which in no respect concern them? No, not in these, either. It remains, therefore, that men take an interest in good things only; and if they take an interest in them, they love them. Whoever, then, has knowledge of good things, would know how to love them too; but when a man is unable to distinguish things good from things evil, and what is neither good nor evil from both the others, how could he take the next step and have the power to love? Accordingly, the power to love belongs to the wise man and to him alone.
What am I interested in? I enjoy reading, both fiction and non-fiction. Running and working out make me happier then when I am sedentary. I also enjoy working on my truck and playing mechanic on my Saab and my wife’s Corolla. I believe these are all good pursuits and good ways to spend my time and money. If I didn’t have a grasp on what is good, I might have day drinking as a hobby. I try to imagine how it would be to have negative pursuits in place of the ones I listed, and I don’t see how I could enjoy them the same way.
How so? says someone; for I am foolish myself, but yet I love my child.5—By the gods, I am surprised at you; at the very outset you have admitted that you are foolish. For something is lacking in you; what is it? Do you not use sense perception, do you not distinguish between external impressions, do you not supply the nourishment for your body that is suitable to it, and shelter, and a dwelling? How comes it, then, that you admit you are foolish? Because, by Zeus, you are frequently bewildered and disturbed by your external impressions, and overcome by their persuasive character; and at one moment you consider these things good, and then again you consider them, though the very same, evil, and later on as neither good nor evil; and, in a word, you are subject to pain, fear, envy, turmoil, and change; that is why you are foolish, as you admit you are. And in loving are you not changeable? But as for wealth, and pleasure, and, in a word, material things, do you not consider them at one moment good, at another bad? And do you not consider the same persons at one moment good, and at another bad, and do you not at one moment feel friendly towards them, and at another unfriendly, and at one moment praise them, while at another you blame them?—Yes, I am subject to exactly these emotions.—What then? Do you think that the man who has been deceived about someone can be his friend?—No, indeed.—And can the man whose choice of a friend is subject to change show good will to that friend?—No, neither can he.—And the man who now reviles someone, and later on admires him?—No, neither can he.—What then? Did you never see dogs fawning on one another and playing with one another, so that you say, “Nothing could be more friendly”? But to see what their friendship amounts to, throw a piece of meat between them and you will find out.
I try to be steady in my opinions about the world and the people I encounter. While I don’t have any friends I interact with on a daily basis, I do know many people and I have not had reasons to change my opinion on them. Being principled in my interactions also helps to avoid deceptive people and not let them steal my time or affect my mood. My brothers, the closest I have to friends are definitely not the type I would have to worry about if a piece of meat came between us.
10Throw likewise between yourself and your son a small piece of land, and you will find out how much your son wants to bury you, the sooner the better, and how earnestly you pray for your son’s death. Then you will change your mind again and say, “What a child I have brought up! All this time he has been ready to carry me to my grave.” Throw between you a pretty wench, and the old man as well as the young one falls in love with her; or, again, a bit of glory. And if you have to risk your life you will say what the father of Admetus did:
“Thou joyest seeing daylight: dost suppose
Thy father joys not too?”[1][† 1]
I know that I would sacrifice myself to save my kids or wife, but I am certain my father would not do the same. I believe my step-dad would however. Blood relations are no guarantee of character. While I do not control the types of people my brothers and kids are, I am unusually fortunate on that side of my life.
Do you imagine that he did not love his own child when it was small, and that he was not in agony when it had the fever, and that he did not say over and over again, “If only I had the fever instead”? And then, when the test comes and is upon him, just see what words he utters! Were not Eteocles and Polyneices born of the same mother and the same father? Had they not been brought up together, lived together, played together, slept together, many a time kissed one another? So that I fancy if anyone had seen them, he would have laughed at the philosophers for their paradoxical views on friendship. But when the throne was cast between them, like a piece of meat between the dogs, see what they say:
Eteo. Where before the wall dost mean to stand?
Poly. Why asked thou this of me?
Eteo. I shall range myself against thee.
Poly. Mine is also that desire![2]
Such also are the prayers they utter.[3]
We will soon be dealing with how my step dad splits his assets when he passes. His lawyer has told him that no matter what he decides we will end up fighting, I’m sure he has seen it many times. I really don’t think we would have that issue because we all have fairly successful lives and none of us seem greedy. I might be naive, but I think we will be fine with however it turns out.
15It is a general rule—be not deceived—that every living thing is to nothing so devoted as to its own interest. Whatever, then, appears to it to stand in the way of this interest, be it a brother, or father, or child, or loved one, or lover, the being hates, accuses, and curses it. For its nature is to love nothing so much as its own interest; this to it is father and brother and kinsmen and country and God. When, for instance, we think that the gods stand in the way of our attainment of this, we revile even them, cast their statues to the ground, and burn their temples, as Alexander ordered the temples of Asclepius to be burned when his loved one died.[4] For this reason, if a man puts together in one scale his interest and righteousness and what is honourable and country and parents and friends, they are all safe; but if he puts his interest in one scale, and in the other friends and country and kinsmen and justice itself, all these latter are lost because they are outweighed by his interest. For where one can say “I” and “mine,” to that side must the creature perforce incline; if they[5] are in the flesh, there must the ruling power be; if they are in the moral purpose, there must it be; if they are in externals, there must it be. 20If, therefore, I am where my moral purpose is, then, and then only, will I be the friend and son and the father that I should be. For then this will be my interest—to keep my good faith, my self-respect, my forbearance, my abstinence, and my co-operation, and to maintain my relations with other men. But if I put what is mine in one scale, and what is honorable in the other, then the statement of Epicurus assumes strength, in which he declares that “the honorable is either nothing at all, or at best only what people hold in esteem.”
This is true, but I believe it is in my best interest to be an honest man that does not covet what other people have, even when they are my family. Especially when they are my family. It is more important to be a good husband, father, and brother than to be rich or gratify myself however I felt like.
It was through ignorance of this that the Athenians and Lacedaemonians quarrelled, and the Thebans with both of them, and the Great King with Greece, and the Macedonians with both of them, and in our days the Romans with the Getae, and yet earlier than any of these, what happened at Ilium was due to this. Alexander was a guest of Menelaus, and if anyone had seen their friendly treatment of one another, he would have disbelieved any man who said they were not friends. But there was thrown in between them a morsel, a pretty woman, and to win her war arose. So now, when you see friends, or brothers, who seem to be of one mind, do not instantly make pronouncement about their friendship, not even if they swear to it, nor even if they say that they cannot be separated from one another.
It is hard to trust others when money or women is involved. I found out that I am not immune to jealousy at our last gift giving event at work. We did the white elephant thing where you could keep your gift or snag one that was given out earlier. I originally grabbed a batch of lottery tickets and my boss swapped a Bluetooth speaker for them. After we finished he started scratching them off. I was really disappointed in my reaction. I was really hoping that he didn’t win anything and I think I would have been irritated if he did. He only won $5, but I was angry at myself for feeling that way. I honestly thought I was better than that. It’s good to have a more realistic appraisal of my own shortcomings.
Of course not. I’d be a fool to trust someone so lazy and prone to procrastination.
Depends on the person and what I’m trusting them with/to do.
That’s the problem, it’s hard to trust myself because I know myself too well.
trust is not binary
^
|
kinnath has gone woke!
It’s the end of the worlds as we know
And I feel fine
I identify as trustworthy.
*squints*
Now I don’t trust you…
Probably a wise move.
In one of his less senile moments, Ronald Reagan was quoted as saying, “We trust, but we also verify.”
Sounds good to me.
Speaking of trust… Biden goes on the Stern show and makes up another story about his imaginary civil rights days.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2024/04/biden-claims-he-got-arrested-standing-porch-black/
Imagine how a Stern interview with a President would have gone 30 years ago?
Was the story about beating a real bad dude named Corn Pop with a chain?
The Stern of 30 years ago wouldn’t have been a sycophantic cunt tripping over himself to slurp on Biden’s wrinkled old cock.
That was pre-Hampton’s Howie. Pre the super model girlfriend who demands they hang in the right social circles.
“super model”
Que? She was a barely-employed model, hardly a “super model”.
I’m not so disappointed in Biden as much as Stern, that zucchini nosed poodle haired germaphobic sycophant to power used to be funny (actually Artie Lange was the funny one but y’all get the gist).
“Canadian military to destroy 11,000 Second World War-era pistols”
https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/canadian-military-to-destroy-11-000-second-world-war-era-pistols/ar-AA1nyZ2o
All their Hi-Powers, going to scrap them rather than sell whole or even for parts-hard to be stoic with stories like this.
It takes stoicism to hear about the disastrous Blinken trip to China. Can’t disagree with anything these guys say about it and liked the historical references.
We’re headed towards sanctions with China because they won’t stop trading with Russia (as if we’d stop trading with Canada if they told us to). The sanctions will do the opposite.
Amazingly stupid after snatching TikTok, giving Taiwan weapons aid, and being just generally bellicose as hell towards China. If they had any sense they’d call it off.
Obligatory.
The Future’s So Bright
Eh, fuck China.
And there won’t be sanctions. Too many politicians bought off, to include the Biden’s. Too much money is made there.
America’s Abrams Tanks Are Failing the Ukraine Test
The U.S. is withdrawing its Abrams main tanks from Ukrainian battlefields after the platforms proved unable to deal with the threat of Russian drones, according to two unnamed U.S. military officials who spoke with the Associated Press.
Five of the 31 American Abrams sent to Ukraine since January 2023 have already been lost to Russian action, the AP said. Their delivery came after months of intense lobbying on Kyiv’s part, but the armored platforms—along with others supplied by NATO allies—failed to make the decisive battlefield impact that Ukraine had hoped for.
The Abrams—the unit cost of which is around $10 million each—have fallen victim to the mass use of drones over Ukrainian battlefields, with both sides employing surveillance and strike platforms in the attritional fighting that has come to characterize Russia’s invasion.
Their constant presence in the air has made it difficult to amass and move high-value weapons systems like the Abrams close to the front.
“There isn’t open ground that you can just drive across without fear of detection,” a senior defense official told reporters Thursday, as quoted by the AP.
Gee, a vehicle designed in the 1970s to fight a war against 1980s tech isn’t good against 2010s tech?
Who’da thunkit.
I think the notion that 31 Abrams were going to tilt the field in Ukraine’s favor were asinine in the first place.
Armored vehicles have a place on the battlefield still. But in the West, they’ve developed all these technology systems that are too complex. Too expensive. Too valuable to lose. And our concept of warfare has evolved to where we are horrified of taking personnel losses. It’s about keeping those numbers down to sell the war to the public.
5 tanks lost over months of fighting is….to be expected. Or should be, if we were a rational people.
Not even months. A year. 5 tanks lost in a year.
In a real war, attrition is a big factor. In this war in Ukraine, it will probably be the determining factor that forces Ukraine to give up this ludicrous charade.
I’m getting the impression that the commanders are viewing them as too valuable to lose, thus too valuable to use, so they keep them parked well away from the fighting, making them entirely useless.
The propaganda is more important than reality on the battlefield. They don’t want to see more Telegram videos of burning NATO tanks.
^Yeah this, too valuable to use. They were for a time holding them back for decisive situations but on this battlefield they aren’t any more worthy than old Soviet designs and aren’t worth the political hassle when they get wrecked.
Given the maintenance on the beasts that could be simple mechanical attrition, not even results of enemy action.
Taking any model tank and driving it towards the Russian lines without air-cover, artillery support (or at least suppression), and an infantry screen simply will not work. When the Iraqi Army would send T-62s at us, it was fish in a barrel, but we think an Abrams is so much better that a guided missile or artillery shell won’t kill it. They will see it coming and chose one of a dozen ways to kill it.
The look at the FRAM chip led me down a bit of a rabbit hole of TT Logic.
It started with wondering how I’d get any logged data from the chip to someplace it could be reviewed. Then I started looking at methods of writing to SD cards, and went “these and the thermocouple driver I got all use the same four pin serial standard with a chip select line” and started thinking about addressing and how I would avoid using even more ins on the microcontroller. I got to a poorly designed four device address selector before asking “what if I add a third digit to allow for eight devices?”
That’s where my brain decided it wasn’t going to work no more.
After I looked up the solution for TTL binary decoders, I became retroactively embarassed for the mess I’d been coming up with. Turns out if I’d remembered there was such a thing as a three input AND gate, I’d have been golden…
For anyone who can read logic diagrams – Here’s the solution I failed to come up with
https://www.ti.com/lit/ds/symlink/cd4028b.pdf?ts=1714152127205
That’s not the point.
I know the hardware to natively do everything I’m doing already exists.
I’m trying to work my way down to lower levels and figure out how to do it. It’s about the learning and the figuring it out.
In a way it has a point. If you look at the complexity of that circuit (from TI) you see that it is mostly NAND, NOR and inverter logic.
You create the input and output matrix table, and then you build the Karnaugh map
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karnaugh_map
Finally you simplify the solution and build the gate arrays.
https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/digital/chpt-8/logic-simplification-karnaugh-maps/
You can build large solutions of AND/OR arrays, when for many problems a few well placed inverters and NAND/ NOR logic is much more efficient. I did exactly that before I was introduced to Karnaugh maps and how to simply the logic, first by my father, and then in digital circuits class.
Back when you programmed in assembler, or unoptimized languages you could do the same with your if/and/or logic. Today the compiler will do that optimization in the background for you.
As an engineer building a circuit, if there was a chip for that, you used the chip.. If you needed one more AND gate, you might route it all over the board.. Those were the Z80/8080 1Mhz days. These days with the high clock rates you can’t do that. Part of your skillset was knowing the solution was in the TI book, and you just had to look for it.
It sounds like, In your case, the finished product is the point.
I want the chips broken down into masses of ever simpler components. It might make the board larger and more complex than could otherwise be attained. Otherwise, I’d spend $5.99 on a portable clock instead of spending months picking through the mitutiae and solving the issues that come.
I have no real need for the end product. I am working my way towards the transistor.
*minutiae
You might be making your own logic using single devices like Tiny Logic by ON or Little Logic by TI.
I guess I would have started with the transistor/gate.. get a feel for how they work, build the various forms of gate logic. hook a couple together, but see that we no longer want to do 1000 of them, and go up the chain.. IC’s.. FPGA. etc.
If you don’t have an oscilloscope, you should look at how the logic is really analog, and how load and capacitance limits the systems. Just watching simple R/C circuits charge and decay is part of the pre semiconductor work.
I think it’s a case of “I started as a Software Engineer and worked towards bare metal.”
I do own an oscilliscope, but I don’t know how to use it properly.
On my commute, I was thinking of doing a whole interlude within the series to see how many types of logic gate I cam make from just the stack of NAND gates I have. Someone once told me you can make them all with just NAND gates, but I don’t want to look up the solution, I’m trying to figure it out.
I never got the bug to learn how to build circuits.
The Abrams—the unit cost of which is around $10 million each—have fallen victim to the mass use of drones over Ukrainian battlefields, with both sides employing surveillance and strike platforms in the attritional fighting that has come to characterize Russia’s invasion.
I saw that earlier. There seems to be a notable lack of specificity on exactly what the methodology is. I guess they don’t want to spill the beans and give anti government Americans an edge in the coming civil war.
The vids are out there. It seems they mostly separate the surveillance and strike functions, so a drone unit has “eye in the sky” overwatch able to observe the big picture and choose targets, and also anti-armor (maybe like RPG warheads on one-way FPV drones) to make the actual strikes. Smaller ones with grenades for antipersonnel.
Looks like they have the equivalents of our copperhead artillery and hellfire missiles. Fire the arty or launch the missile over the horizon in search mode while the drone keeps a laser on the tank – it will eventually lock on and make a direct hit.
There’s no armor that you can’t crack with enough explosive, applied the right way.
For every measure there’s a countermeasure.
I’m trying to work my way down to lower levels and figure out how to do it. It’s about the learning and the figuring it out.
You can just go buy a hunting knife anywhere. Why go to all the trouble of pounding on red hot metal with a hammer?
https://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/judge-young-adults-can-get-a-carry-permit-in-pennsylvania/
Excellent! So when are yunz gettin’ around to accepting my Virginia and Maryland permits?
*looks around*
Uh, that’s a different department.
Looks like they have the equivalents of our copperhead artillery and hellfire missiles. Fire the arty or launch the missile over the horizon in search mode while the drone keeps a laser on the tank – it will eventually lock on and make a direct hit.
For some reason, I came away from that article thinking there was some specific vulnerable spot on the tank being targetted. Keeping lots of eyes in the sky makes it difficult for the other side to go anywhere without you knowing.
I hope our military strategists are taking note how the battle field has changed. The future of warfare is lots of CHEAP disposable drones and smart but small weapon systems. Quantity has a quality all its own.
Sure the drones they are using on both sides are mostly junk, but as was said many times already, if you can destroy a $20M vehicle with 1K drones that cost $1K, then you are eventually going to win. I also think this the Chinese are salivating over the data they are getting on NATO gear.
This all has a Spanish Civil War feel to it.
CHEAP
I just heard the cries of a million military contractors and acquisition punks.
There are tank modifications being developed that would give some active top protection to those kinds of weapons. Which, of course, would make the next generation of tanks even more expensive and heavier.
I thought the Marine Corps was crazy when they decided to deactivate all of their tanks units a couple of years ago. Not any more.
back pack UAVs baby!
Biden Delays Ban on Menthol Cigarettes
The proposal had been years in the making, in an effort to curb death rates of Black smokers targeted by Big Tobacco. In an election year, the president’s weak support among Black voters may have influenced the postponement.
Can’t piss off the homeys until after the election.
Mpls City Council is looking at $15 @ pack ciggies, up from $10
Glad I got my smoking in early
Wow.
I thought the Marine Corps was crazy when they decided to deactivate all of their tanks units a couple of years ago. Not any more.
In the late ’80s, just before the wall came down, I wrote a paper in business school (the class was partly to do with NATO and European defense) about how the Russian Hind helicopter was the flying tank of the future. My opinion has not changed.
Those helicopters were no match for Rambo with an RPG.
“If I didn’t have a grasp on what is good, I might have day drinking as a hobby.”
Hobby? Hobby, Hell! that’s a vocation. I spent years in training.
Sure the drones they are using on both sides are mostly junk, but as was said many times already, if you can destroy a $20M vehicle with 1K drones that cost $1K, then you are eventually going to win.
How many A-10s can you buy for the price of one F-35?
How many A-10s can you buy for the price of one F-35?
None.
Out of production in 1984