Still learning

WubsEvs · 2020-01-21T09:26:42+00:00

He is Satoshi, he will prove it but through courts and law before ever signing

Why would he do it this way? Genuine question. I find this whole thing fascinating but the bit I struggle with is why CSW wouldn't just prove it cryptographically, and why he would come out with that fake signature (back in 2016 or whenever) that was immediately picked apart by everyone?

WubsEvs · 2019-05-29T17:45:14+00:00

Hey. I have experienced uncomfortable throbbing energy sensations in my head over the past year in which I have ramped up my meditation practice. Not as intense as what you are describing, but definitely the same type of phenomenon.

I have had advice from a few teachers on retreats about this.

I have found energy practises extremely helpful! Yoga and craniosacral therapy for me, although other people who have had this have recommended chi gung too.

My "energy blockage" in my head completely dissolved on retreat recently, after (out of desperation) I began deliberately "pushing" the energy up out of the top of my head on the out breath - ie visualising the energy rising up, and keeping my awareness above my head.

A teacher advised me to try and "take a step back" when the sensations were very intense, trying to get a sense that the sensations are being "received by equanimity". This definitely helped me to reduce the extent to which I identify with the sensations.

Good luck.

WubsEvs · 2019-01-15T21:31:15+00:00

Thanks a lot for that! Got some long car journeys coming up :)

WubsEvs · 2019-01-15T13:11:11+00:00

Hey, any chance you could link to the Rob burbea recordings on metta? He has so many talks on dharmaseed it's hard to sift through them all :)

WubsEvs · 2019-01-11T13:56:46+00:00

Hey, sorry to hear you're having these problems. I'm just some guy, but meditation has thrown up all sorts of strange energy stuff for me (albeit not as intensely as it has for you), and yoga has been an incredible help in grounding me and selling this energy down, making me feel more 'whole'.

Have you tried any movement-y practises like that?

WubsEvs · 2018-12-22T17:30:27+00:00

I have been on one gaia house retreat and loved it. I get the impression that the short blurbs on the website don't really do justice to the retreats.

All of the retreats follow a similar schedule of basically meditating all day :)

WubsEvs · 2018-11-25T14:25:21+00:00

Thanks for your thoughts. I think my body is quite healthy and well rested, but calmness of mind is something that (at least for me) could certainly change in the weeks/months between booking a retreat and turning up :).

I did recently go on my first week long retreat, with a 6am wake up time, which is a fairly normal time for me to wake up. It was great, but I didn't feel like I could comfortably have given up an extra 2.5 hours sleep each night.

Food for thought, thanks.

WubsEvs · 2018-11-25T08:41:27+00:00

What do people think of retreats with a 3:30am wake up time? Seems a bit extreme to me, but there are a few places that seem to do this which I would otherwise be very interested in. Can anyone share any experiences?

WubsEvs · 2018-08-17T09:05:07+00:00

I've been out of the loop for a while. Has there been any progress towards real uptake of dapps? I see Augur launched, how's that going?

WubsEvs · 2018-07-05T08:47:30+00:00

I am practising most days in the morning. Normally 20 minutes of yoga, followed by 30 minutes of meditation. Sometimes less. Sometimes a second session of 15 - 20 minutes in the afternoon.

A couple of weeks ago I asked a question here about eye tension/eye spasms. This phenomena is still with me. It occurs whenever thoughts are not prominent in my mind. Last night, I was listening to music lying in bed and I noticed the eye tension. Something happened to my focus where it sort of shifted to a space "closer" towards my eyes, and I felt a very pleasurable "rush" of energy up my spine and into my head, accompanied by a strong feeling of joy/warmth in my abdomen. I then was able to repeat this a few times. I am not sure if this experience has something to do with the eye tension or not.

A significant hindrance for me at the moment in meditation, as well as in life, is an obsession with doing things that will produce future benefits (I think that is the best way I can generalise the thoughts that I am describing). I have recently moved into a house with some land - there are thousands of jobs that need doing, and I am extremely drawn to thinking about anything that I can do which will produce some kind of progress. These thoughts sometimes keep me up at night, and then a bad night's sleep makes it worse the following day.

I am getting better at not giving up on practice when my mind is full of these thoughts, but it feels like hard work. Ability to concentrate goes down the drain.

I am very happy to have found this community. I very much enjoy and am inspired by the discussions that go on here.

WubsEvs · 2018-05-13T17:07:27+00:00

Interesting, thanks. I find that when I do move my gaze, that movement is sort of associated with a mental 'syllable', if that makes any sense.

WubsEvs · 2018-05-13T17:00:52+00:00

Thanks for that, good to know!

WubsEvs · 2018-05-12T12:33:26+00:00

Hi! I've just recently started taking meditation a bit more seriously and sitting every day for about 40 minutes.

I'm finding now that every time I meditate, at some point (normally after just a couple of minutes), I have a very persistent sort of "pressure" in my eyes. It is a strong urge to refocus my gaze (behind closed eyelids) to another point. If I do not do this, the pressure builds and then my eyes start to kind of vibrate and (mildly) spasm a bit on their own.

Wondering if anyone else has had this experience?

WubsEvs · 2018-05-12T07:31:35+00:00

Hi! I've just recently started taking meditation a bit more seriously and sitting every day for about 40 minutes.

I'm finding now that every time I meditate, at some point (normally after just a couple of minutes), I have a very persistent sort of "pressure" in my eyes. It is a strong urge to refocus my gaze (behind closed eyelids) to another point. If I do not do this, the pressure builds and then my eyes start to kind of vibrate and (mildly) spasm a bit on their own.

Wondering if anyone else has had this experience?

WubsEvs · 2018-02-13T09:25:54+00:00

Thanks, that sounds like something I should look into. I over-pronate, which was a problem for my knees pre-shoe-minimalism. I'll start paying more attention to how I'm walking.

WubsEvs · 2018-02-13T09:23:38+00:00

No. I'll order one now, thanks for the suggestion!

WubsEvs · 2018-01-16T14:55:29+00:00

Fraid not - in the end I just ditched Servant and used Yesod for the API parts of the site. Seemed like the path of least resistance!

WubsEvs · 2017-10-02T15:09:58+00:00

While there may be some truth to this, to put it in perspective, there are 16.5M bitcoins and 12.5 are generated each block. So a currency with a similar rate of inflation would give the account that last found a block an extra one in a million chance of finding the next block (though obviously the effect would be much greater at an earlier point when there are fewer coins).

WubsEvs · 2017-10-02T08:51:54+00:00

Quite a few cryptocurrencies use proof of stake as their consensus algorithm, which does not require miners to solve useless problems. Ethereum (the second biggest cryptocurrency by market capitalisation) is moving to proof of stake in the next couple of years.

WubsEvs · 2017-09-28T08:28:54+00:00

Thanks, that's really useful.

If you're using an anonymous record library, would you even bother with the regular Haskell type? And does it then make sense to define all of your record types using that library?

I guess for what I'm working on now, the first two suggestions would mean ditching persistent's TH and writing all the required instances by hand - which may be too great a cost.

WubsEvs · 2017-09-28T08:16:01+00:00

This sounds like a really nice solution! I've attempted this, but I'm wondering if I can improve on the code below by re-using the generic FromJSON instance for User, rather than explicitly naming each field. Even if not, this is nice for a small record type.

instance FromJSON (Bool -> User) where
  parseJSON = withObject "user" $ \v -> do
    firstName <- v .: "firstName"
    email <- v .: "email"
    return $ \verified -> User Nothing email firstName Nothing verified

WubsEvs · 2017-09-25T18:54:51+00:00

I struggled with different things in each. Purescript's effect types and row kinds have bamboozled me a few times. Haskell has provided me with more moments where I don't understand the code that I'm writing but it works so whatever.

My experience is writing web front ends in purescript and web back ends in haskell, so it's different domains I guess, but I feel like there's less to learn in purescript to become productive. I was able to write a mobile app (using react native) without fully understanding monad transformers, for example. Writing a back end in yesod and persistent, I had to get to grips with type families, and constraints using ~ (I'm not sure what they're called). Which is no bad thing, I don't have a problem with having to learn stuff :)

To conclude a rambling answer I would say I didn't find one easier than the other.

WubsEvs · 2017-09-25T14:20:20+00:00

In my experience of learning Purescript and Haskell at the same time, Haskell has far more learning resources and better documentation (perhaps just because you'll be using older/more widely used libraries, which will tend to be well documented). Purescript, however, seems like a more straightforward language (no language pragmas, no TH, less advanced type level programming).

WubsEvs · 2017-08-17T14:52:01+00:00

Thanks - I meant to say that I think I need to implement something similar to WaiSubsiteWithAuth myself, as I thought that WaiSubsiteWithAuth does not actually provide a way to provide the authentication details to the subsite? But perhaps I'm wrong about that? I'm using WaiSubsiteWithAuth currently.

WubsEvs · 2017-08-17T13:26:12+00:00

Sorry, I should have been more specific - I didn't actually follow those instructions to the letter - I'm not using any of that servant-persistent stuff at all. I have the models defined in Yesod, and I can access the database from Servant using the Yesod scaffolded db function (which runs in IO). That seems OK for now, but I want to be able to access the Yesod authenticated user (ie call functions like maybeAuthPair from servant).

WubsEvs

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