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Some will find the desert father John Cassian[0] interesting in this regard. He uses the analogy of a water mill for the mind. You cannot stop a water mill from turning - the water keeps flowing and keeps turning the grindstone - so all you can do is choose what is poured into the grindstone. If you fill it with high quality wheat, you will have high quality flour. If you fill it with or add to it darnel, you will produce something toxic.
You reap what you sow, and if you sow your mind and your attention with filth, filth will sprout and spread and metastasize. Cultivate the garden of your mind wisely. If the mind drifts, pull it back. Let the good crop choke out any weeds in your mind.
This is why there is an ethics of thought and imagination. It is wrong to intentionally think certain things. Stupid or ugly thoughts might enter our minds unintentionally, but we can pull our minds back to good thoughts. Indulging or pursuing bad thoughts corrupts you from the inside, and they prepare the ground for bad actions down the line.
(N.b., there was a link trending on HN a few years ago about a book of selections from Cassian's "Conferences" [1]. I can't find it at the moment, unfortunately.)
Mind precedes all mental states.
Mind is their chief; they are mind-made.
If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts, suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.
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Mind precedes all mental states.
Mind is their chief; they are mind-made.
If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.
"As we think, so we become."
- Buddha
Mind precedes all mental states.
Mind is their chief; they are mind-made.
If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts, suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.
.
Mind precedes all mental states.
Mind is their chief; they are mind-made.
If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts, happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.
- often (incorrectly) attributed to Lao Tzu
Why "move_forward" instead of a shorted world like "forward"? (What does the turtle in Logo use?)
- the action name of move is significant.
the additional typing for a precisely descriptive name is generally worth it for readable code.
fortunately, autocompletion is available in the code editor!
The details are what stops it from working in every form it's been tried.
You cannot escape the details. You must engage with them and solve them directly, meticulously. It's messy, it's extremely complicated and it's just plain hard.
There is no level of abstraction that saves you from this, because the last level is simply things happening in the world in the way you want them to, and it's really really complicated to engineer that to happen.
I think this is evident by looking at the extreme case. There are plenty of companies with software engineers who truly can turn instructions articulated in plain language into software. But you see lots of these not being successful for the simple reason that those providing the instructions are not sufficiently engaged with the detail, or have the detail wrong. Conversely, for the most successful companies the opposite is true.