"In Buddhism this is karma, while for the stoics it is Providence, the same concept of Providence that Christianity later borrowed, which argues that everything in the world which seems bad is actually good in a way we cannot fully understand because of our limited perspective."
> Tesla is done in Europe for political/cultural reasons
I don’t know anything about Tesla or EVs or Europe. But is there a precedence to this? That a good product went extinct because of political/cultural reasons?
Not quite the same, but in the UK there was a chain of high street jewellers called Ratners. In the early ‘90s Gerald Ratner, the founder, made some jokes about the low quality of the products at a talk for the Institute of Directors, including famously comparing them negatively to a prawn sandwich from Marks and Spencer. Unfortunately the talk was videotaped, and was all over the news shortly after. It killed the brand, and lost Ratner his job, although it didn’t kill the company as they owned other brands like H Samuel that they pivoted to.
Tesla car’s don’t have a great reputation for quality or service.
They were among the first and the cars were good enough to persuade people, but there are many alternatives now. People are less likely to pay a premium for Tesla.
And the brand is irremediably damaged by Elon’s polarising politics.
Being off-putting to a large part of your market is bound to have negative effects on your sales.
Tesla is in a very peculiar position as an automaker, P/E ratio (price of the stock compared to earnings) is extremely optimist regarding the potential, with self-driving, robots and overall market dominance.
But all of that is not real, it is, at best speculative, and the cars themselves are not great, especially when compared to other EVs.
The huge valuation of Tesla will crumble dramatically as soon as investors stop believing the promises. And having poor/declining or even stagnating sales is very likely to trigger some close scrutiny and doubts.
While on this topic, one book I really enjoyed is "Beautiful Code"[1]. It is not preachy or prescriptive but a diverse set of programmers showing the code they enjoyed writing.
An spoken English sentence is a finite string of phonemes. The set of allowable phonemes is finite. Given a finite set X, the set of all finite strings of elements of X is countable.
(The latter statement holds because for any given n, the set X_n of all strings of length n is finite. So you can count the members of X_0, then count the members of X_1, and so on, and by continuing on in that way you'll eventually count out all members of X. You never run out of numbers to assign to the next set because at each point the set of numbers you've already assigned is finite (it's smaller in size than X_0, ..., X_n combined, for some n).
In fact, even if you allow countably infinitely many phonemes to be used, the X_n sets will still be countable, if not finite, and in that case their union is still countable: to see that, you can take enumerations of each set put them together as columns an a matrix. Even though the matrix is infinite in both dimensions, it has finite diagonals, so you can enumerate its cells by going a diagonal at a time, like this (the numbers reflect the cells' order in the numeration):
1 3 6 10 15
2 5 9 14
4 8 13
7 12
11
However if you allow sentences to be countably infinitely long, then even when you only have finitely many phonemes, the set of all sentences will be uncountable, because in that case each countably infinitely long sentence can be mapped to a real number represented as an expansion in some base, and you can apply Cantor's diagonal argument. The "just count out each X_n separately" argument doesn't work in this case because it only applies to the sentences of finite length.)
The set of text files is clearly countable because it's made of binary. Do you think you can make an English sentence that can't be written into a text file?
If humanity lives forever, it will keep on inventing new words and therefore new sentences. So the question of whether or not language is finite is really the same question as whether or not the universe is.
> If humanity lives forever, it will keep on inventing new words and therefore new sentences.
That just increases the fraction of text files that count as "English". Which doesn't affect the argument.
> the question of whether or not language is finite
does not need to be answered. If English has a thousand words and never gains another one, the list of English sentences is countably infinite. If English gains 10% more words every year forever, the list of English sentences is still countably infinite.
You are right because you can recursively add clauses.
'Buffalo buffalo...' or 'This was my dad's dad's dad's...'
If you think you have a full set you can always add one more
In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Theoden king expresses his grief to Gandalf, “one should not have to bury their children”. I was in college then, unmarried and didn’t appreciate the meaning of it or could appreciate his grief.
Now that I have kids of my own I can’t get myself to read the posts such as OPs. And if I end up reading it their grief stays when me for a long time. Exactly what they have written, all those years not spent, not lived, it’s just too much to handle for me.
I read somewhere that grief is unspent love. I only wish OP more courage and continued grace as the burden only gets heavier each day.
There are so many things that hit differently with age and stage of life.
I really liked What Dreams May Come back in high school. Dante's Inferno, kind of, trip to Hell, Robin Williams, trippy paint scene.
I watched it again as a married adult with children, and barely made it through intact. That movie, based around the sudden loss of both children without a chance to say goodbye, and then the sudden loss of a spouse, and the descent into a mental hell and cage of ones own making... I missed all of that watching it in high school. I knew it was there, but it meant nothing, I'd not experienced any of that. It was a radically different movie to me, 20 years later. And I've not watched it since.
Great post here, and yea, things hit so much harder after kids. I remember seeing a photo of a man in India carrying his daughter killed by the tsunami. My daughter was about the same age and I cried for an hour in front of my computer.
> Great post here, and yea, things hit so much harder after kids ... remember seeing a photo of a man in India carrying his daughter killed by the tsunami
Also from India, a bereaved mother is barely able to speak to the loss of her 2 children, right after having spoke about 6 other deaths in her family: https://youtu.be/XLl2qAprU8w?t=312
I've seen that clip before, but after having kids, it hits like a truck. That said, children or not, there's no shortage of people who mock or deny or won't sympathise with "others" (outgroup).
Speaking of tsunami, I remember watching on TV a mother when was shown the bodies of both her husband and son. She was unable to show emotion at all. Just empty look and silence
Stories like this hit me harder after having children, too.
But they also provoke thankfulness for all I have. For a little while after I read such tragic stories, I try to enjoy the everyday life a bit more, enjoy the presence of the loved ones.
I agree entirely. I have two wonderful daughters, and stories like this hit hard.
There is a fiction short-story called CHICXULUB By T. Coraghessan Boyle. It is one of the hardest hitting stories I have read as a parent. Still brings tears to my eyes. Recommended.
Three months after my son was born, I made the mistake of following the news about the 2023 Turkey-Syria earthquakes[0], especially in the Hatay region. I thought I was tough, as I had lived through the chaos and death of a disaster before, in 1999[1]. This time, I was far away in Germany, so not actually where it happened. But no.
Back then, as a teenager, I could somehow handle seeing people take their last breath on a sidewalk (don't get me wrong: It was absolutely horrible, but I could keep functioning, eat, sleep, even help people carry first aid kits). I remember being outside our building and asking my father where all those buildings went, in some of which my friends lived. He had chosen not to lie to me, and I still didn't break.
But one photo from 2023, a child's grave with a toy helicopter on top, his name written on the toy, the same name as my son, completely broke me. Two years later, I still haven't recovered from that single image.
And yet, today, we were in the emergency room because my son was struggling to breathe. I was calm and functioning. If I had seen something like this on the news or in a movie, I wouldn't have been able to keep watching.
Sometimes it's easy to keep it together when you have to focus on something critical and hard to keep it together when you're safe and can drop your guard. Hope he's doing well.
Herodotus, in ancient Greece, had already said: "After all, no one is stupid enough to prefer war to peace; in peace sons bury their fathers and in war fathers bury their sons."
PhD is a really big investment. You are spending 4-6 years of your prime earning years chasing a dream or in the hope of making a dent in your domain’s problems.
All that while your age mates from school/college/town are progressing in their life and career.
Also if you get into non-academic job then those early years foregone usually have disproportionately bigger impact on your career progression and your accumulated wealth.
The decision is really big one and it’s only natural to consider money angle. I’ve known quite a few get into it because of interest and then getting disillusioned as they watch the world pass them by.
Well, he’s an associate and we’ve always been on good terms, diverging politics notwithstanding (I lean more dead center with a healthy distaste for authority and as I said, he’s MAGA), and he knows exactly why I don’t like DJT (I see right through him, because I’ve watched people exactly like him my whole life). Having grown up adjacent to, but not part of, the elite, his type is not uncommon. The ones that had family money, but never actually put any effort in to learn anything or do anything on their own. Or worse, pretending that they were doing big things by talking loudly and showing off, but actually failing at everything they did try. It’s not uncommon. Plus having worked in gaming, I would be downright ashamed if I went bankrupt not just once, but twice running a casino. That’s like an easy-mode business. I mean, come on.
Anyway, I know deep down he got it. But it’s always that moment of realization that I find satisfying.
I did it to eff with his head. It’s that moment when the cognitive dissonance pulls apart and the lucid thought makes a connection, but before the dissonance sets back in. It’s like watching someone melt for a split second.
I think I somewhat understand what you mean. I used to either debate or argue with such folks. But over the years I’ve realized it’s not a useful exercise. Funnily some of them toned down their hard stance and began to see for themselves how the system works and what’s going on.
This is exactly it. Feature flags sounds really good until one realizes that they have all the requirements of a version control. So much that it was even a running joke at Uber that one starts building feature flag and ends up with a version control.
The cruft of feature flag also makes it really hard to understand while reading a code, there’s a combinatorial explosion.
I don’t think this is unique to Christianity. A similar key concept in Hinduism is “karma”.