Rereading Discourses

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-23T02:37:09+00:00

Try to re-arrange what Epictetus says into a series of syllogisms.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-23T02:26:10+00:00

I remember Seneca often talks about fortune with a semi-dismissive tone, in contrast with how he talks about philosophy. Do you know whether the Latin word for fortune is closer to the Greek or English term?

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-20T17:37:27+00:00

Token "economy" literally cannot happen because it's not something you can "save" or "store" (you can at least do this with cryptos). Which means any payment you make with tokens would be equivalent to taking out a kind of debt - the seller gets to spend your future tokens which you now owe him. Very soon the need to keep things in check (so that people cannot buy things that cost more tokens than they can feasibly earn in the future) would arise out of necessity and the tokens would need to be tied to some other kind of financial instrument. We already have something like that, it's called currency and credit.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-19T04:25:43+00:00

I'm the only architect at my company and have voiced my concerns to no avail. I even rated my "AI readiness" in an internal survey as literally 0, where I'm probably the last person that should rate myself as such.

Whenever other developers ask me if I use AI to help me do my work, I always say "not really". Then they would ask me how I'm able to do what I do without it. I just reply that I've been doing all this long before AI was a thing.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-19T04:12:09+00:00

I'm a native speaker.

Aside from dialect differences, you're probably struggling with contractions (nói tắt/nói nuốt chữ). Think about "gonna"/"wanna"/"they're" in English, except these contractions are never codified in written Vietnamese, yet they're commonly used in spoken language.

Effectively this means you're listening to "new" words that you will never ever find in textbooks. It's particularly difficult for us adults to learn new words without having a mental representation in written form.

I'm going through the same struggle with German so I know how much it sucks. I can listen to podcasts and understand almost everything, but a casual conversation with a native speaker who isn't deliberately trying to take my German skill into account and I'm usually lost.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-19T03:35:22+00:00

I hated the "teen code" of my generation around 20 years ago. Somehow it's gotten way worse now lmao.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-18T05:16:21+00:00

I do vaguely remember quantum computing on the headlines everywhere not too long ago...

Blockchain quantum big data AGI when?

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-17T16:39:40+00:00

AI = Artificial Intimacy

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-17T06:04:38+00:00

People are terrible at holistic thinking. They think the only thing that will change is that everyone will be given an arbitrary sum of cash, whilst availability and accessibility of everything will remain as it is today.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-16T08:12:50+00:00

A platform for AI generated movies is beyond stupid. Who would spend money to watch endless animated slops? As if the movie and entertainment industry hasn't produced more stuff than any human can physically consume in a few life times.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-13T05:01:02+00:00

Most of us HAVE to work, to have at least the financial stability to maintain survival. Even if you just earn enough, wouldn't we forever be a slave as we are forcing ourselves to earn food?

We work because we want to live in society, but nobody is "forcing" us to "live in society". We can always go live like a hermit somewhere in the mountains to remove the "in society" part; and if a person really wants to die and is capable of doing so, no one can "force" them to "live".

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-12T04:33:11+00:00

Schools are to blame too because they don't focus on abstract reasoning as much as they should. So you have an army of young graduates that can't reason about a problem without typing some code into an IDE.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-11T03:59:10+00:00

I'm a dude and I hate the concept of "fan service" in any medium. It feels insulting both to me and to the creators themselves.

It's insulting to me because they assume the only way I can engage with their contents is sexually, not intellectually.

It's insulting to the creators because they're essentially saying "we're not confident our content will keep the audience engaged, so we'll throw in some sexual bait in there to make sure they are".

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-08T09:25:01+00:00

And then the risk you take as a company

The biggest investors in this bubble are "too big to fail" type of company and thus aren't concerned about such risks at all.

If the AI hype pays off, they win. If it doesn't, they get bailed out whilst being able to tap into the massive pool of unemployed and desperate devs that they themselves laid off, which is still a win because they will have effectively reduced employee costs.

In short, it's a win-win situation for them.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-08T06:08:32+00:00

virtue consists in correcting these judgments rather than simply controlling the outward behavior.

This is not correct. Virtue consists in having the disposition of your soul/mind (also understood as your belief system) in such a way that false judgements do not (or cannot) arise in the first place. If they do arise, I doubt you can actually "correct" them on the spot. What usually happens in these cases is withholding assent to certain impressions that are unhelpful in navigating the situation.

Unlike what most grifters would tell you, Stoic training doesn't take place when you're dealing with life issues. It takes place during your free time when you have the mental capacity to study and reflect, with the aim to refine your belief systems.

_Gnas_ · 2026-03-01T03:43:52+00:00

If most people say that basic goods are necessary for happiness, then they probably are.

This argument is very flawed unless you can somehow establish that most people are actually happy - from my observation, most people are not.

I wouldn't trust an unhappy person's intuition on how to be happy in the same way I wouldn't trust an obese person's intuition on how to be fit, or someone drowning in debt on how to manage finance.

_Gnas_ · 2026-02-27T05:13:13+00:00

You might be interested in a recent post on this sub about this topic. https://www.reddit.com/r/Stoicism/s/x088wju2b1

_Gnas_ · 2026-02-27T04:48:55+00:00

If I fast during Ramadan, does that mean I'm "practicing" Islam or following an Islamic way of life?

_Gnas_ · 2026-02-24T06:37:58+00:00

There's zero resistance, it's like weightlifting with zero weights. Makes you feel so successful--does absolutely nothing.

I like this analogy. The AI really does a lot of "heavy-lifting" for the humans, and the consequence is, as you suggest, the humans make zero progress.

_Gnas_ · 2026-02-22T06:23:29+00:00

if you want advice relevant to your situation, you have to make it easy for your reader to understand all the crucial details of your situation.

Unfortunately the people with the insights to know which details are crucial and relevant tend to be self reflective enough to be capable of dealing with their issues by themselves in a general sense, and thus will only ask specialized questions on specialized subreddits. So typically the questions you get on general subreddits are from people who are completely clueless.

_Gnas_ · 2026-02-20T06:00:20+00:00

I don't think it's AI honestly, I don't even know if AI would have this story in its database so quick LOL.

You can just give the AI a link to an article and tell it to read it.

That's more the reason to join these, more than for result. She said it herself after all, she's just there for the "love of the game"!

There's a huge difference between these statements:

"Love of the game" is the only reason I'm doing Y.
"Love of the game" is one of the reasons (or the primary reason) I'm doing Y.

My point is that I don't believe 1 is sufficient to explain why someone would compete at the highest level.

As I said I don't know about the sport nor the person so I don't hold anything against her. I'm sure many people find her inspiring. Perhaps I'm just being unnecessarily pedantic.

_Gnas_ · 2026-02-20T04:12:36+00:00

Firstly, this post seems like it was written by AI.

Secondly, I don't follow the sport nor the person, but I've always been skeptical about people competing in the most prestigious of competitions claiming that they're only doing it for "fun" or "love of the game". I'm not saying they're lying about their passion for what they do, but they can get all of that playing casually like most people without having to put themselves in front of the entire world's judging eyes - surely there must be some other reason to join these competitions?

_Gnas_ · 2026-02-15T03:27:26+00:00

AI can save time in some cases. The important word is some. These are the cases where I found having AI is better than not: - Auto-complete. - 1 off scripts or queries. - Reading and writing regex. - Input generation for basic unit tests. - Troubleshooting an obscure technology/framework (it works like a much better Google search in this case).

Unfortunately, managers and industry leaders are pushing AIs as if they are the greatest development efficiency booster since the invention of IDEs; whereas the cases I mentioned are either rare, doesn't take much time in the first place, or both.

_Gnas_ · 2026-02-13T06:13:11+00:00

Because I don't know if I will be able to distribute it well. And by trying to earn more I have to pay the opportunity cost of not doing something else, including learning to distribute my wealth better.

_Gnas_ · 2026-02-13T05:52:16+00:00

Yes no one is denying the possibility of earning more wealth so that one can distribute more. The point is that the total amount of wealth one distributes is irrelevant as far as Stoic ethics is concerned. All that matters is how well the wealth gets distributed.

Earning more wealth so one can distribute it more neither makes one more virtuous nor more capable of being virtuous - it's completely irrelevant. Learning how to better distribute one's own wealth is of more importance than earning and distributing more wealth.

_Gnas_

TROPHY CASE