UnbornTao

The purpose of this journal is to share questions, humor, miscellaneous creative content, and raw reflections on personal empowerment and consciousness. My goals are to deepen my experiential understanding of these topics, improve my communication skills, have fun, and help others see things in a new light.

Do you often code from scratch? Best I can do is *Markdown*.

No

There is, once again, a conflation between listening and gullibility or agreement (or disagreement, for that matter). As usual, we tend to see listening as "saying yes" to things. Anything that takes the form of a straightforward position against a stance comes across as not having heard. Understandable, but wrong. And don't forget that the same position could be taken by the other party: "I'm the one not being listened to - don't be so closed-minded." Listening isn't incompatible with recognizing what something is - deluded, accurate, plainly false, biased, a manipulation, and so on - whatever purpose it may have had when it was invented. This is why questions are asked in the first place, especially basic, common-sense ones that people somehow tend to overlook. Educating people on this would easily take a good hundred hours of work. Why do cult dynamics always implicitly emphasize a certain kind of "open-mindedness"? You can begin to intuit what that's about. So yes, being critical and listening are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they complement each other. Without the former, what you may end up with is a kind of lightweight spiritualism, which is quite common. "The Earth is a rectangle."

It's your job to have it - whatever it turns out to be. For one week, contemplate what listening is and what it requires. Try to set aside your own baggage - especially what you think you already 'know' - and question what this act really is. Other related questions: What is the act of paying attention? Why am I listening (hearing or reading) to this communication - or manipulation? What am I trying to get out of it? How can I step out of my own intellectual world so that I can better hear? Where is this person coming from, and what is their experience? Or simply: What is actually going on in the other person's experience?

Discussing listening while some kind of noise keeps making him pause, like on the other video. The guy knows what questions to ask.

Do you not get scared despite the apparent predictability? I mean, you know it's a horror game, that's its job.

So little commitment to your values.

I'm not familiar with most of those frameworks, to be clear. I taught myself basic CSS and HTML as a teenager and set up a tech site with a friend, but don't remember most of it at this point. If you're serious or genuinely curious about it, taking the tedious path is worthwhile - you can then understand how the wheel works and recreate it any way you want when it comes to CSS.

There were also some Chinese ones and whatnot. But the joke's on you, I'll be the robot wiping your ass.

I call that Tuesday.

Have you heard of our lord and savior Linus Torvalds?

God, the new web app.

I wish we could see some of the past Zen masters and observe how they might contradict our ideals. Words don't necessarily constitute understanding, even if they sound like the same things others say. And making certain impressions on people is relatively easy. Talk has always been cheap, particularly in spiritual pursuits. This is why I like guys like Jiddu Krishnamurti. Among other things, he shattered people's assumptions about these matters. He simply appeared normal and didn't offer a fantasy (which is what most people are looking for). In other words, he was authentic. He also emphasized that intellectual understanding is rather superficial when it comes to existential matters.

It's either blueberries, or you haven't gone deep enough yet. Do you want to leave this here or move it somewhere else? Or perhaps add something else?

Yep. The allure of a convenient path is apparently too hard to resist. What you're describing seems to be happening, to some degree, with Windows PCs now. I'm not even sure Microsoft has beta testers for the OS - or even that they have many developers and coders these days. They just wing it and treat users like guinea pigs.

Anyone can be now! "Code a coffee ordering app now, make no mistakes."

@Joseph Maynor Give the Blowfish template a try: https://github.com/nunocoracao/blowfish. It's fun; needs Hugo, though.

Study some of J. Krishnamurti's work.

Some of the robots I've seen can barely stand upright for more than a few minutes. Others are more impressive. Isn't this more of a hopeful dream or future possibility than a present reality? Again, not saying there can't be some truth to those claims.

We never got closure on who Google is, but solid video.

Yeah. Not making a choice is still a choice.

Just a joke. I agree with your take - for the most part.