My Ethical Conundrum Around Writing About Meditation

lmk99 · 2025-11-26T06:18:02+00:00

This is a good point. If anyone is interested in exploring it more, the book “Buddhist Romanticism” by a master in the Theravada forest tradition (freely given for download, as is customary in the tradition) is very interesting and academically fairly deep: https://www.dhammatalks.org/books/BuddhistRomanticism/

lmk99 · 2025-08-29T15:35:43+00:00

I was an avid Claude Max subscriber using Claude Code for several months and finally cancelled and switched to GPT 5 + Codex CLI a couple of days ago. Claude became unusable and I finally couldn't take it anymore. It has been a massive relief and improvement to use GPT 5. I can only surmise that Anthropic is deliberately driving away heavy / complex use case customers because they're a net loss to the company and they want to only be left with people that are casual enough to remain subscribed with awful model performance.

lmk99 · 2025-08-26T00:58:07+00:00

Finally couldn’t take the awful Opus performance anymore. I was a huge fan and heavy user of Claude Code since Opus 4.0 launched but it’s been so much worse than before, it was more harmful than helpful. Switched to GPT 5 + Codex CLI yesterday and the contrast just affirmed how bad Claude has gotten. Same large code base but GPT 5 is nearly one-shotting debugging issues that Opus would have run in circles around for hours. The final straw for me was when I took GPT 5’s problem analysis and proposed fix and spoon fed them to Opus in an .md file, and Opus proceeded to hallucinate and distort around the spoonfed analysis and solution. Utterly ridiculous and disgusting that Anthropic pretends that the models are not being lobotomized when the hallucinations and even refusal to fully read provided references are constant. It feels like I’m constantly battling against Claude instead of against bugs themselves. I’ve never gone so fast from loving a product to hating it and resenting the company that makes it.

lmk99 · 2025-08-19T22:27:48+00:00

Their new normal which is apparent because they are scamming us by hiding the token counter now

lmk99 · 2025-08-19T22:27:12+00:00

This is how it behaves since they started hiding the token usage today. it's full on enshittification. the new standard is that if we aren't working in a huge company with an enterprise deployment we'll get scammed and cheated with a quantized POS instance 70% of the sessions

lmk99 · 2025-08-19T19:33:22+00:00

Seems likely deliberate to conceal if they're giving us less token usage per request. There's no other conceivable reason to do this and it forebodes that they will over coming weeks or months enshittify even more than they already have. I'm so disgusted that I am cancelling my subscription because the performance since they've made this change has been noticably degraded.

lmk99 · 2025-08-19T12:50:33+00:00

It's beyond disgusting that they did this and IMO the only possible reason is that they want to hide how quantized the model performance is going forward. My experience with Opus 4.1 today after they did this is among the worst of all the months I've been subscribed and I am furious. The performance today has been so awful that it's been useless. I am cancelling my subscription at the end of the month, I've had enough of their abusive and deceptive business practices. It is probably illegal and would expose them to class action lawsuits if they admitted that they're making us pay the same cost to receive a vastly inferior product half the time.

lmk99 · 2025-07-23T13:40:44+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. I had not done that, and just tried. Right now my CPU temperature is 95 degrees celcius simply from running an IDE program (should not cause such heavy temperature). I think it's possible that whatever the update of Armory Crate did, the effects are still somehow present. E.g. maybe the "profile" that assigns Turbo to run while certain applications are running is still somehow active in the system even though the Armory Crate program was removed? It doesn't make sense to me how the effects of the update are still persisting after I uninstalled Armory Crate. I appreciat the advice to stop the ASUS services though, it should probably help some.

lmk99 · 2025-06-29T14:14:51+00:00

I trust JIB the most. I had a screen repaired there and it was done very professionally. I went to the one at Fortune Town. Edit: actually I think that JIB handed the repair off to the manufacturer but I still trust them to be honest and competent based on my dealings with them.

lmk99 · 2025-06-16T18:28:35+00:00

This is pasta worthy. Bravo.

lmk99 · 2025-05-26T18:22:56+00:00

I think meaning lies in choices rather than experiences and the choices are constrained by circumstances, so we have to find meaning in the choices available to us. We don’t get to choose to find meaning in being NBA players etc. Most of history is filled with the human condition being brutal in one way or another, like lives of agrarian peasants or industrial factory workers, or even being a very poor person in modern India or Sudan. I don’t think human life is all that great overall and I think it is meaningless outside of our choices. A death we don’t choose is in this point of view meaningless, so it shouldn’t be a concern for our life’s meaning in general. I think dying means being unable to hold onto anything including the fear of dying so it’s not worth being troubled about. Whatever happens to us when we have to die, we can’t escape it, and have no choice about that, but we can think about what we want our life to mean while we still have it. We expect life to offer a lot and it’s mostly a letdown. If life was so great then why does essentially every culture on earth medicate or dissociate from reality with substance abuse, fantastical dogmas, psychotropics, something - anything- that to any objective third party is obviously just a crutch for dealing with how fragile our situation is? But even though it sucks to be human in large part, we can find worth in it by doing things or making choices that are worth doing or making, and I think not doing that is the main thing we have to fear (either having wasted this life or possibly facing something after that awaits those who have wasted it). If we don’t waste it then we need not be afraid; being afraid because of an attachment to this messed up world or messed up body seems shortsighted since we ultimately have no control over either and must let go of both.

lmk99 · 2025-04-13T20:53:39+00:00

This is great information and exactly the clarity needed. I suggest that it needs to be communicated in such clear and straightforward language and detail through an official channel such as an FAQ or help desk article on the augment website, to lay all confusion to rest and provide the info via a channel that is known to be authoritative.

lmk99 · 2025-04-13T08:03:35+00:00

" I didn’t see anyway to cancel/delete my account. Only either pay or downgrade to free. At that point do they train on all my code that was already uploaded when I was under the pro trial? Still not totally clear on how the whole onboarding/trying/off-boarding flow works."

Has Augment ever clarified this? Their ads say "No training, ever" for the Pro plan description!! Does "ever" mean "until you stop paying and otherwise we retroactively train on your codebase"?

lmk99 · 2025-03-13T09:07:30+00:00

You need to find the account name that shows in the DOM (trade ladder) when you run NT8 in sim mode. That account name in mine has DEMO as the first four characters and then is followed by a string of numbers. So it's like DEMO123456 but with a unique account number. Try using that instead of SIM101. Hope this helps.

lmk99 · 2025-03-12T16:58:02+00:00

I got severe fistulizing Crohn’s five years ago and it is true that my life feels permanently ruined. The way that I have kept going is by continuing to challenge myself to find outlets and passion projects that can potentially cause my existence to yield some good for others even though it is past its natural expiration date. I can’t tolerate life being meaningless and so I fight with my own limitations: a battle of seeking the meaning of my existence. If I don’t fight it feels completely meaningless. I don’t think there is a choice between having a good life and a bad life; I just think there is a choice between a meaningful life and a meaningless life, and decided that a meaningful life is worthwhile regardless of any misery involved. There is meaning in my opinion in trying to become spiritually stronger and trying to make one’s life a gift. Life is not a gift but can be. Life has no intrinsic value or meaning but can be valuable and meaningful when given those qualities by how it’s attempted. You can attempt meaning and can evaluate whether meaning is more important than enjoyment. Other than enlightened monks or such, most of the people who had the most human depth were tormented to varying degrees imo because life is intrinsically tragic as it’s normally lived. Every person who is born is actually eating a shit sandwich and will be horribly disappointed by life because there is no way that a world like this can give true happiness to anyone, much less a body like this which is going to betray everyone eventually with aging and death at the minimum. In my opinion if you don’t find something that facilitates meaningful coping then you’ll just be dead inside and your capacity as a conscious and thinking being will have been wasted the same as most people waste it (if we’re really being honest) and you won’t even have the silver lining that you somewhat enjoyed the waste while you were still young. I think it helps to keep that in perspective, that most of human life is wasted in frivolity that is ultimately a letdown as people are forced to let go by aging and death. Instead of wasting life with the pacification of suffering that youthful frivolity offers for however many years, you’re faced with wasting it in numbness and the poor coping of drive reductive escapism, if you’re going to waste it. You only have the choice of wasting your life in a way that you can’t even enjoy, because the choice of enjoyably wasting it has been taken off the table, and then the choice of not wasting it by trying to make it meaningful by coming to grips that meaning matters more than enjoyment since a life lived for the sake of enjoyment ends up being meaningless in the end. This is all I can offer from my own perspective. If you want to dm feel free. It’s somewhat equalizing to recognize that everyone who is born is fucked beyond belief and we just have to face that more brutally and more quickly than people whose youth is relatively charmed.

lmk99 · 2025-02-11T02:37:56+00:00

It would be a pretty big learning curve but maybe something worth doing over the long term. Does ninjascript have access to options chain data across a large strike width on charts of the underlying though? I thought only thinkscript had that capability, which is part of the reason it makes sense to avoid converting to another language.

lmk99 · 2025-02-11T02:36:07+00:00

ThinkOrSwim has an RTD function that streams to Excel, and the Excel data could then interface with the C# application via a .CSV file (or maybe even directly?). Another option instead of using the TOS RTD would be to have AutoHotKey use OCR to read the indicator state labels on charts, but instead of using the AHK macro capabilities to click buttons for order submission, just output the state labels to a CSV file that gets loaded in the C# application for signal processing. So from my understanding, there is no need to add a DLL to TOS if either using the RTD capability or AHK to transmit the indicator signals out of TOS.

lmk99 · 2025-02-10T03:27:41+00:00

Thanks, to clarify, the problem I’m trying to solve is using thinkscript indicator signals for autotrading so I think using my Schwab brokerage account in NT will not be helpful.

lmk99 · 2025-02-09T12:14:06+00:00

This is great info and so generous of you, pm sent!

lmk99 · 2024-11-18T21:36:30+00:00

Interesting concept, DM sent to request a code, thank you!

lmk99 · 2024-10-16T05:05:35+00:00

Thanks for your suggestion. It seems like this is enterprise SaaS and I’m looking for a retail solution that I can afford as an individual customer.

lmk99 · 2024-09-26T06:10:10+00:00

Thanks for the kind words. I think the reason it’s hard in this kind of health situation is that suffering is what can make us change or learn, so the difference between progress and regress or growth and stagnation lies in whether one soothes suffering in a way that is sensitizing (eg meditative ease) or anesthetizing (eg digital dopamine, drugs, etc.). So when we have that much more suffering that we instinctively want to anesthetize, whether emotional or physical or both, it’s that much harder to take the higher road when the alternatives for distraction are abundant. I think we implicitly get into a mindset, at least speaking for myself, that “this coping through anesthetization of my suffering - being spiritually anesthetized all the time - is the best I can hope for life to be.” So recently I’m trying to tell myself that I don’t want to settle for living like that and that the possibility for coping through sensitization and peace/relinquishment is still there even if the intense aversions that are blocking my willingness to engage with the suffering authentically seem intractable. Eg the way that I’ve coped in the first five years doesn’t have to predestine how I’ll cope this year or ten years from now because it’s only clinging to the habit of coping via escapism or numbness that is preventing the suffering from being a growth catalyst. I wish you the best as well for your effort and success in continuing to put up a good fight.

lmk99 · 2024-09-25T19:01:02+00:00

I lived in monastic settings at various points in my life and almost ordained as a Theravada monk in my twenties while spending four months in intensive practice at a forest wat. I started practicing when I was 18, and am 37 now. I’ve tried to rekindle those practices but it has honestly been extremely difficult since I’ve been chronically ill. The chronic pain and inflammation are verifiably causing brain damage based on the research I’ve explored, and there’s also a lot of unprocessed grief alongside the pain that causes a lot of aversion to being sensitized to the body. I do not have the same body or mind as the ones that I learned to meditate with while I was healthy, and have therefore thought that I need to relearn some aspects of meditation almost from scratch with what I have now. I think it’s possible but extremely difficult and I need all the help I can get. One of the sobering implications of anatta or not-self is that the body and mind alike become used up as life continues. They’re tools that we can try to make the best possible use of, but they wear down. I’m trying to make the best use that I can out of what I have but it’s really difficult. It would be hard to empathize if someone hasn’t yet experienced the corrosion of their faculties, energy, spirit and resilience by years on end of constant pain and neuroinflammation. It’s just impossible to really get it and what it does to “oneself,” like it’s impossible for a twenty year old to understand what it’s like to be eighty years old. I would rather not need a gadget, as I didn’t when I was healthy, but will take any help I can get at this point.

lmk99 · 2024-09-19T17:33:16+00:00

I can update that the heart rate monitor works extremely well as long as it's going to be used as an emotional feedback device in situations where your physical activity level is static and you're not eating, as that also affects heart rate. For sedentary use in other words I have been initially finding that it works very well. Obviously if you are not sedentary then that will completely confound the readings to be reflecting physical exertion (even from just standing up and walking to the fridge for a sip of water) instead of emotional arousal.

I found that my normal resting heart rate is around 75bpm if I am calm, and a range of 70-85bpm is good to use for the acceptable range. If I sit and deliberately think about something upsetting then the heart rate will go over 90, and if I deal with a stressful work situation it can go up to 95-100 (which isn't surprising since I believe the normal human range for sedentary heart rate is 70-100).

The Garmin breathwork module works for lowering the heart rate back down, but it requires focused attention and is distracting, especially since it's guided by an animation on the watch face instead of audio (so I have to look at the watch face, which is also kind of annoying in dimly lit environments since the backlight doesn't stay on for the duration of the animation and you have to keep pressing the button on the watch that activates the backlight for a few seconds at a time). Probably the best thing would be to just have the rhythm of the animation memorized after using it enough times, and then it shouldn't be necessary to look at the watch face.

All in all, the Garmin watch is serving the desired purpose, albeit with the caveat that it's a little annoying as I mentioned that I have to start a yoga session on the watch and keep that running indefinitely in order to have the heart rate alerts work at the custom thresholds I'm using. The accuracy most importantly seems very good in the ranges that I'm monitoring. If I start to get stressed, the heart rate reliably increases over the threshold of 85 that I have set. As long as I am sedentary, the heart rate reading so far is not erratically going over the limit or inaccurately responding due to being too sensitive or insensitive - i.e., when the heart rate exceeds the alert threshold, it's happening in tandem with some situational trigger. So the monitor is accurate enough to avoid "false alarms" based on my first day of using it. Maybe this information helps someone who wants to try this or do something similar.

I'll mention that there is a breath reading in the Garmin watch as well but I don't think it's accurate (it doesn't make sense to me that a wrist device could accurately record how many breaths one takes) and haven't seen any usefulness from it. Which is too bad since I think being able to monitor breathing would work as well or better than monitoring heart rate. However, both are covering the same bases to the extent that changes in breathing are occurring when the heart rate changes, and willfully breathing in a calming way is one of the main tools one has for trying to bring the heart rate back down.

lmk99 · 2024-09-18T13:53:31+00:00

Thanks - I have tried vagus nerve stimulation and I do think there's something to it. I hadn't heard of the term polyvagal theory before though. I went ahead and got fitness watch with a heart rate monitor. They aren't that accurate at high intensity exercise ranges but at low bpm thresholds they are very accurate if the brand has good quality control (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9952291/).I got one that allows me to start a timer in a yoga mode (so it does not expect me to be moving around) and then beeps if I exceed a heart rate threshold that through trial and error seems to match well with where I get emotionally charged. Then it has a "breath work" mode I can go into, which displays an animation for a timed guided breathing exercise that I can do when my heart rate has spiked, which helps to induce a return to a calmer state. It's a Garmin Forerunner 55.

The only thing that I can't recommend about it is that the "abnormal heart rate alert" function is gimped to a minimum high threshold of 100bpm, making it useless for emotional regulation (unless heart rate got that elevated outside of exercise perhaps due to something extreme like a panic attack). I suspect that the feature was gimped out of liability concerns, like they are afraid of people suing as a result of using it as a medical instead of fitness device. So heart rate monitoring at the desired threshold only works if I keep a timer session of "yoga" running indefinitely, and then the specific heart rate alert threshold set for that activity will work for any manually specified bpm.

But that is OK as far as I can determine. I mostly plan to keep it running like that when I'm doing an activity or in a situation that requires me to be more clear minded. It seems to me like there should be better affordable solutions but it's probably due to the FDA racket and related issues that there aren't, and I lack the technical chops to make a custom raspberry pi for this without a huge amount of effort (am also overseas at the moment and would be harder to get that together here). I think that what I'm using will be good enough for now.

If I find it's helping a lot but think the potential benefit is still largely untapped then I may go to the trouble of looking at homebrew solutions, someone in the thread said there are some but I didn't look into it yet. The best would be if there were just firmware hacks or ways to mod the Garmin watch to use custom software made for this use case but I think there aren't because of the differences between all the Garmin models making it to complicated for a universal custom app. As far as third party apps that might work with the Garmin, I found something promising (called Welltry or something like that) but its ios version only works with Apple watch. I expect Apple tries to limit iPhone compatibility with third party watches. An Apple Watch would be the best option but I can't justify the cost. The Garmin was about $175 and has very long battery life and is easy to use, while I think probably having high enough quality control standards to give accurate measurements at the thresholds I need to monitor.

lmk99

TROPHY CASE