The phrase "Tibiwangzi" (Character amnesia) was popular long before the digital age. Back when I was a child in the 90s, middle-aged and old people often found themselves unable to recall specific characters.
I somehow kept the habit of handwriting for years. But as a guy in my early 30s, I do notice characters fade away from my brain from time to time, which wasn't a thing at all in the 20s. And to my surprise, some of the characters are fairly frequently used - I was just completely stuck when I was trying to recall them.
Probably that's how brains and organs peaked and will slowly break down over the following decades just like hard drives.
That's not gonna work for real-world projects. Real-world apps often have larger edits than locking individual cells/cards e.g. Move columns or replace large chunks of spreadsheets in Google Sheets, or Ctrl-A to select all and then drag to move.
Also, if you consider latency, locking does not work well because client B might do operations before he/she even acknowledges the lock from client A because of latency.
Solved problem in Scandinavia. I've lived in Sweden and Finland for a while. Both are countries with slightly better birth rates than other modern economies. And a big part of the reason is that things like child care, parental leave (paid and unpaid) are taken care of. So, you see a lot of women have kids and then resume their career a year or so later. In some extreme cases it can be longer. When I started there, our secretary came back from nine (!) years of a mix of paid and unpaid leave after having three kids.
However, what I noticed in Finland was a relatively high proportion of women in tech and leadership roles. That's what happens when people can combine a career and a family instead of having to choose. Most women are basically full time employed.
The Netherlands where I'm from has a lot less of this. Result: a lot of women are working part time (something that is relatively rare in other countries) so they can take care of their kids or pausing their career entirely for until their kids are old enough to go to school. Labor participation of women is lower and working part time means the career perspectives are also a bit limited. Companies don't put part time people in important roles. And of course it means less money as well. Child care is expensive to the point that working barely covers that cost. So, many women just quit their jobs. That's a form of hidden unemployment. It's not counted in the statistics but it has a cost.
I currently live in Germany which has a bit better system going more towards the Scandinavian direction. People moan a lot about availability of child care but it is pretty affordable and mostly people seem to manage to get some in the end. Likewise, parental leave is a bit more generous.
The demographics in a lot of places are not great. Populations are shrinking. And that's also going to have an economic impact. There are two ways to fix that: make it more affordable for people to have kids or just get a lot of immigrants. The irony is that the same people blocking the first are also not that keen on the latter happening.
>> I've lived in Sweden and Finland for a while. Both are countries with slightly better birth rates than other modern economies
According to the most recent data from the United Nations Population Fund, Finland has a birth rate of 1.4 which is lower than both Germany (1.5) and the Netherlands (1.6). Sweden is only slightly higher at 1.7, which is the same as the U.S.
> It's a good thing to take care your own children
If you want to, yes.
If you are forced to because you can't afford childcare I would say that's a bad thing
There is economic efficiency in specialisation, it's economically better to have specialist childcarers while other people work in different specialties. The economy should be structured so that people can choose to leave work to take care of their kids if they want, but not be forced to
The problem is that if the economy is structured in a way that maximizes efficiency (as most economists/politicians generally argue it should be), then everyone should be forced to use specialist childcare, even if they don't want to, because they could produce more money/value for society by specializing in literally anything else.
I think that the ruthless pursuit of efficiency destroys a lot of what makes us human.
I've seen Tao Te Ching's translation on the HN front page for several times. It seems people are interested in it.
The thing with Tao Te Ching is it's too ambiguous because: 1) The Chinese language is very overloaded and thus very ambiguous. 2) Classical Chinese is even more so. 3) Tao Te Ching is intentionally filled with clever puns which makes it more ambiguous.
The problem with translations is the translator has to interpret source texts into specific meanings in the target languages. It's like opening Schrödinger's cat box, or unwrapping monads in Haskell and Rust, which essentially deduct multiple possibilities into a single deterministic value.
If you're really into it, you probably want to learn some basic Chinese and classical Chinese (lucky they're not so different from each other), and figure out how to look up in the dictionaries. It's probably not as difficult as it sounds - all you need to do is decrypt with dictionaries.
Maybe there should be a new form of digital translation, just like hovering texts on Duolingo and it will display all the possible meanings of the word/expression.
The ambiguity of the Dao is just the Dao being the Dao. You can not explain something which has no duality with direct words so to try
to translate the meaning of “Dao” will always need puns and metaphors.
Writings at point to the Dow are meant to get you to stop thinking, not to think for. They’re supposed to get you to contemplate life.
But I agree, the language and cultural barriers to understanding Daoist writings as an English speaking American makes it more of a challenge.
Derek Lin has done a translation which might be helpful.
> Maybe there should be a new form of digital translation, just like hovering texts on Duolingo and it will display all the possible meanings of the word/expression.
If anyone's interested, I've already self-promoted on a previous Tao Te Ching thread a tool/website[0] which precisely does that. I've still haven't had the time to add the Tao Te Ching though (and I've just observed one or two bugs. Oh well.)
Same thing with the Bible - to me reading it as a single translation seems making little sense. Reading every verse in multiple versions in multiple languages, looking up multiple meanings of every word feels a whole different story. Luckily reading Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, Latin and Old English is much easier than reading Chinese. I still feel like learning Chinese to read Taoist texts though, because they are so cool, Alan Watts inspired me to the point I can't imagine giving up this idea.
For people who aren't Christian or aren't as familiar with the various translations:
English translations of the Bible tend to be a tradeoff between making the text easy to read for modern English speakers (at the risk of inserting the translator's own interpretation of the text) versus translating the text literally. The tradeoff is particularly important since some sects of Christianity believe that the specific words of the Bible as originally written were inspired by God. As you might expect, most translations fall somewhere in the middle between literal and readable.
The existence of the King James Version (KJV) further complicates things. As I understand it, most scholars would consider it an accurate translation but not necessarily an extremely literal translation. Being written in the 1600s, it doesn't incorporate the most recent scholarship and archeology; e.g. certain verses that scholars no longer think were in the original text[1]. However, because of how culturally influential the KJV is there can be significant resistance to using other versions. The extreme being the King James Only Movement which believes that the KJV is the only acceptable version of the Bible.
Wikipedia has pretty good articles on a lot of these subjects:
[1] I want to emphasize here: These range from relatively minor differences in wording, to stories that appear to be original but may be in the wrong chronological place in the narrative, to passages (notably the story of "The Woman Caught in Adultery") that may not be original. Although personally I don't think these differences call the reliability of the Bible into question, it's a nuanced subject and you definitely shouldn't just take my word for it.
Regarding the Bible, you should read Young’s literal translation. It blew me away how much liberties that king James version took in their interpretation.
Is there a difference between '-th' and '-s' suffixes in English? I thought 'seeth' was just an old fashioned way of saying 'sees' but now I'm wondering if this is saying something about tenses that I'm missing.
-(e)th was the Middle English ending for 3rd person singular and plural present tense. It has mostly been replaced by -s in Modern English, except for a few fixed expressions (e.g. my mum used to say "quoth he" which is subtly different from the modern "he quoted" or "he quotes" which is normally followed by an object that is being quoted as well as the quote itself).
It's also interesting to look at the case system for ME nouns too, as it makes some things easier to understand. For instance the 's in Modern English for possessive is really just an abbreviation for the -es genitive case, which probably occurred when spoken forms had changed from -es to -s, which in turn was probably due to the shift to drop terminal -e from words which had started even by Chaucer's day (some places in Canterbury Tales you need to treat the -e as its own syllable to hear the rhyme, in other places it needs to be silent).
saith is to says as says is to sez, in the sense that each spelling is an attempt to represent English pronunciation in writing and their progression tells us something about how the pronunciation changed over time, but not everyone who uses a certain spelling necessarily also pronounces the word the way one might naïvely expect based on the spelling.
I got to read, shortly after the Tao, a book that compiled for part of the texts something like 4 of the 'best'[0] translations. It was very enlightening to see how different yet similar they could be. If you think of it as semantic vectors, I would say the meaning is probably the common part between all translations. It is definitely a recommended exercise to read different ones.
It's not unique to taoist texts either, as I recommend to check different translations of works such as Dante's Comedy, Beowulf, or Goethe's Faust. When there is meaning, style, sub-meanings and connotations, a translation can only convey some parts accurately. Different translations will usually make different trade-offs.
[0] Note that 'best' is a term that markedly changed meaning these last two centuries, for anyone who would read more in-depth about the subject. For instance some of the earliest translators dismissed more modern taoist authors as having strayed too far from the Tradition, but the attitude changed in a few generations.
There was a period in my life in my early 20s when I dabbled heavily in taoism. The book was a staple read for me and I tried to adjust my Outlook accordingly for a long time.
Finally though, i dropped it and went back to who I was. Your comment makes me wonder if the specific translation of the book I read was a big factor.
I can relate to this comment. The Tao Te Ching had a profound influence on me. Reading it was the first time I engaged on a "spiritual" level with life (I'm a fairly pragmatic and reductionist guy, perhaps to a fault). But this also wore off for me and I returned to being my usual mostly unspiritual self after a couple of years boring my friends trying to tell my friends about the Tao... Without describing it.
I do feel like I have a respect for such things where before I just considered it all manipulative woo or self-delusion. I also think it paved the way to my being able to appreciate Wittgenstein's ideas (the ones I can grasp anyway).
I read through a few different translations of the TTC, two of which had commentaries. Both the text and the translations had somewhat different takes. So it's definitely worth trying a few versions.
Two I recommend: DC Lau's translation and Philip Ivanhoe's.
Interesting. I have always been a religious person but wandered from my own traditions for a while. Those days, my main attraction was taoism. But, like I mentioned, i dropped it.
Traditionally Taoism was a path for the old, for those who had completed their duty. Confucianism is the path for the young, for those who must fulfill their duty. One might say that fulfilling your duty without resistance is in fact following the Tao.
No, I mean, I'm native in Chinese and reasonably literate in classical Chinese, and my assessment is that ChatGPT's understanding and generation of classical Chinese leaves much to be desired.
As an aside, if your reading of the Tao Te Ching does not include possibility of transcription errors, borrowed homophones (words with same sounds at the time of writing), etc. you're probably not exploring the full extent of the intended meanings of the original author(s). ChatGPT does none of that.
It's possible that ChatGPT's training data includes a couple translations of Tao Te Ching, in which case I'm not sure whether that better or worse in terms of results.
ctext.org is great though, no question about that. I've been using it for decades..
It's essentially creating states/variables then garbage collect it upon completing. There are several things you can do:
Remember it in your brain: It's like let the state occupying one of the 16 registers in your brain. Later it will automatically offloads in the hard disk in your brain but there's a chance it gets lost or cannot be recalled reliably. Not recommend. But I do this more recently because I realised I don't have to do everything.
The stateless approach: Do it immediately so you don't need to bear the state/variable. Even though sometime it disrupts my current tasks, I find this approach is surprisingly relieving - less debts. Just like software engineering - minimise states because they're evil.
External storage approach: Write it down on paper or an app. There are trade offs between the tool you're using, but the key is to minimise the cost of your moves.
For pen and paper I tried different configurations until I can always comfortably carry them in my pocket.
For digital approaches I'm currently shovel things to Linear. Make sure you're fluent with shortcuts so you can create tasks and jump around like a breeze. I also use Arc browser and pin it in the third slot so I can jump to Linear with <Cmd-3> without even thinking about it.
The last time I attempted to run at full speed after not running for years, I struggled to keep up and lost my balance. I started tilting forward slowly and eventually fell then slide on the ground for a while, resulting in multiple scratches on my face, front pelvis, etc.
The problem is that the industry has't figured out how to properly pricing LLM applications yet.
Before LLM, it's perfectly possible to spin up a SaaS on 5$ Digital Ocean VM and charge $4.99 per seat monthly. If you're using low overhead techs like Go and SQLite you might get away pretty far with a decent user base.
But LLM is inheirently costly compared to those traditional apps. No matter if you're calling OpenAI or DIY your own GPU cluster it's gonna be way more expensive. Spin your own GPU might ended to be more expensive because utilization problems and upfront costs.
The subscription model was kind of the silver-bullet for SaaS but it's probably not going to work well in the AI era.
OpenAI, Elevenlabs, Runway, and Midjourney: they have subscription model but the quota is strict and tight. The "unlimited" plan is simply pay-as-you-go.
Early wave of LLM products with unlimited subscription models like Github Copilot and Notion AI are probably pricing way too low. $7 or $10 is way too low to support heavy usage.
But charging $50 might scare most user away because it exceeded people's expectation for SaaS. And probably still end up losing money. And hobby users may ended up paying too much for the core users - that will lead us back to sophisticated pricing tiers like Elevenlabs and Runway.
Are there alternatives? I dunno. Maybe implement bring-your-own-key properly? Like OAuth but for LLMs? It's definitely interesting to see how things will turn out eventually.
I somehow kept the habit of handwriting for years. But as a guy in my early 30s, I do notice characters fade away from my brain from time to time, which wasn't a thing at all in the 20s. And to my surprise, some of the characters are fairly frequently used - I was just completely stuck when I was trying to recall them.
Probably that's how brains and organs peaked and will slowly break down over the following decades just like hard drives.