At one point I kept a Twitter account where I tweeted random thoughts about the world only in Japanese. Even though it hardly had any followers, there was something really freeing about this. It forced me to choose my words precisely (lacking a deep abstract vocabulary, it required careful perusal of the Japanese dictionary), and I also didn't feel subject to the cultural burdens of English (as for the burdens of Japanese, I wasn't yet aware of what they were). I definitely recommend to language learners keeping a little diary in their second language, once they get to a point where they are able to.

Eroticism being a core component of art going all the way back to literal cave paintings, I am sometimes frustrated at the prudishness of the platforms we use in the contemporary age.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/curator/34059662-Uncensor-Pat...

The privatization of the expressways was pretty much enabled by the viability of the rail networks, which are also mostly privatized, mostly profitable, and extremely well-built.

My biggest issue with Stoicism is that it is, at its best, basically therapy. Most of the advice in Meditations revolves around putting things into various perspectives that make a challenging situation not feel so bad. This can be quite valuable! However I think there's only so much therapy a person can do before they want to start actively changing their situation. I think the essay wants to go beyond Stoicism, to illustrate a radical path one can take to hopefully alter the circumstance of their existence positively.

I have absolutely no qualms with anyone who takes the "boring" path to provide for themselves or their family (to say otherwise would make me a hypocrite). However I think we tend to vastly overestimate what our needs are. The average yearly median in the US in 2019 was $35,977 according to the Census. This is the median, so 50% of the population lives on less than that! Probably most of the people at that wage want to make more (don't we all?) but I think the author is making the case for giving up on the luxury of tech pay in exchange for finding some actual purpose in our lives. I don't think that's disrespectful, it's just another option.

There is plenty of prior art in Western (and other traditions of) philosophy in the spirit of this essay. Nietzsche and Bataille talked about work in a similar way. Cioran pretty explicitly embraced failure (or the risk of failure) as virtue, as this work does. This essay seems to be saying something like: take a big risk, quite possibly fail, live your principles even if it means being an "outcast", commit to it, and who cares what other people think, because in doing so you will find your people. The response in here seems to be "look at this guy taking big risks and failing, what an outcast." Of course, that is surely the point.

I have, as I'm sure many on here have, found success in grinding away at boring problems, suppressing any kind of "call of God" or desire to do something larger, so we could build a nest egg and stable future for ourselves with MAGMA money. This essay is sort of a direct assault on the aesthetics of that approach. As for me, I have grown quite tired of it, so this piece does resonate with me.

For example in the States, in matching tools like group dating events and dating apps, men typically outnumber women by a sizeable margin. One could ascribe this to biology (with women as the choosing sex, like we see in a lot of primates and other species). I had to reconsider this when I saw some pictures from a group dating event among Chinese international students at my university, in which the women outnumbered the men! I was told by a Chinese person this wasn't uncommon for such events in China. I found out later that group dating events in Japan are similar in terms of gender balance as well.

I would very much like to hear some hypotheses for the reasons for what seems to be a pretty big cultural difference. To me it casts a bit of doubt on the author's narrative of "women have it and men want it" -- in some cultures, it seems like women want it too.

There is some data to back this up: https://hiddentribes.us/pdf/hidden_tribes_report.pdf

In my view, no license can enforce being a good citizen of the open source community. In the embedded space, I've seen vendors bound by the GPL follow it in letter but not in spirit (ie, delivering unusable code with a ridiculous toolchain), or just straight up ignore it (what are we going to do, sue?). On the flipside, good citizen vendors frequently contribute upstream even when they don't have to.