That said, he was writing biography, not history: his concern is with the individuals he is profiling and their place within events. His main purpose is to show how an individual's character affected his ultimate fate, and he usually ends each Life with a moral assessment of the subject.

It should be stated that the tradition of biography in the ancient world wasn't quite as strictly factual as we would like to think. Specific details were often filled in entirely with whatever the biographer felt could have happened, or what the people might have said.

A man ought to know which of these pay better than others, and which pay best in particular places, for some do better in one place and some in another. Secondly, husbandry, which may be either tillage or planting, and the keeping of bees and of fish, or fowl, or of any animals which may be useful to man. These are the divisions of the true or proper art of wealth-getting and come first.

The discussion of such matters is not unworthy of philosophy, but to be engaged in them practically is illiberal and irksome. The useful parts of wealth-getting are, first, the knowledge of livestock- which are most profitable, and where, and how- as, for example, what sort of horses or sheep or oxen or any other animals are most likely to give a return.

Thus, then, we have considered the art of wealth-getting which is unnecessary, and why men want it; and also the necessary art of wealth-getting, which we have seen to be different from the other, and to be a natural part of the art of managing a household, concerned with the provision of food, not, however, like the former kind, unlimited, but having a limit.

There are two sorts of wealth-getting, as I have said; one is a part of household management, the other is retail trade: the former necessary and honorable, while that which consists in exchange is justly censured; for it is unnatural, and a mode by which men gain from one another.

At this stage begins the duty of the manager of a household, who has to order the things which nature supplies; he may be compared to the weaver who has not to make but to use wool, and to know, too, what sort of wool is good and serviceable or bad and unserviceable. Were this otherwise, it would be difficult to see why the art of getting wealth is a part of the management of a household and the art of medicine not;

The origin of this disposition in men is that they are intent upon living only, and not upon living well; and, as their desires are unlimited they also desire that the means of gratifying them should be without limit. Those who do aim at a good life seek the means of obtaining bodily pleasures; and, since the enjoyment of these appears to depend on property, they are absorbed in getting wealth: and so there arises the second species of wealth-getting.

But the art of wealth-getting which consists in household management, on the other hand, has a limit; the unlimited acquisition of wealth is not its business. And, therefore, in one point of view, all riches must have a limit; nevertheless, as a matter of fact, we find the opposite to be the case; for all getters of wealth increase their hoard of coin without limit.

Of this the value was at first measured simply by size and weight, but in process of time they put a stamp upon it, to save the trouble of weighing and to mark the value. When the use of coin had once been discovered, out of the barter of necessary articles arose the other art of wealth getting, namely, retail trade; which was at first probably a simple matter, but became more complicated as soon as men learned by experience whence and by what exchanges the greatest profit might be made.

The same may be said of all possessions, for the art of exchange extends to all of them, and it arises at first from what is natural, from the circumstance that some have too little, others too much.

way that the casting of bronze is instrumental to the art of the statuary

The abuse of this authority is injurious to both; for the interests of part and whole, of body and soul, are the same, and the slave is a part of the master, a living but separated part of his bodily frame. Hence, where the relation of master and slave between them is natural they are friends and have a common interest, but where it rests merely on law and force the reverse is true.

The origin of the dispute, and what makes the views invade each other's territory, is as follows: in some sense virtue, when furnished with means, has actually the greatest power of exercising force; and as superior power is only found where there is superior excellence of some kind, power seems to imply virtue, and the dispute to be simply one about justice (for it is due to one party identifying justice with goodwill while the other identifies it with the mere rule of the stronger).

Part V

At all events we may firstly observe in living creatures both a despotical and a constitutional rule; for the soul rules the body with a despotical rule, whereas the intellect rules the appetites with a constitutional and royal rule. And it is clear that the rule of the soul over the body, and of the mind and the rational element over the passionate, is natural and expedient; whereas the equality of the two or the rule of the inferior is always hurtful. The same holds good of animals in relation to men; for tame animals have a better nature than wild, and all tame animals are better off when they are ruled by man; for then they are preserved.

Such a duality exists in living creatures, but not in them only; it originates in the constitution of the universe; even in things which have no life there is a ruling principle, as in a musical mode. But we are wandering from the subject. We will therefore restrict ourselves to the living creature, which, in the first place, consists of soul and body: and of these two, the one is by nature the ruler, and the other the subject.

But is there any one thus intended by nature to be a slave, and for whom such a condition is expedient and right, or rather is not all slavery a violation of nature? There is no difficulty in answering this question, on grounds both of reason and of fact. For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule.

Here, however, another distinction must be drawn; the instruments commonly so called are instruments of production, whilst a possession is an instrument of action. The shuttle, for example, is not only of use; but something else is made by it, whereas of a garment or of a bed there is only the use.

Property is a part of the household, and the art of acquiring property is a part of the art of managing the household; for no man can live well, or indeed live at all, unless he be provided with necessaries. And as in the arts which have a definite sphere the workers must have their own proper instruments for the accomplishment of their work, so it is in the management of a household.

For some are of opinion that the rule of a master is a science, and that the management of a household, and the mastership of slaves, and the political and royal rule, as I was saying at the outset, are all the same. Others affirm that the rule of a master over slaves is contrary to nature, and that the distinction between slave and freeman exists by law only, and not by nature; and being an interference with nature is therefore unjust.

But he who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient for himself, must be either a beast or a god: he is no part of a state. A social instinct is implanted in all men by nature, and yet he who first founded the state was the greatest of benefactors. For man, when perfected, is the best of animals, but, when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all;

Further, the state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual, since the whole is of necessity prior to the part; for example, if the whole body be destroyed, there will be no foot or hand, except in an equivocal sense, as we might speak of a stone hand; for when destroyed the hand will be no better than that.

Besides, the final cause and end of a thing is the best, and to be self-sufficing is the end and the best.

The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men's everyday wants, and the members of it are called by Charondas 'companions of the cupboard,' and by Epimenides the Cretan, 'companions of the manger.'

Now nature has distinguished between the female and the slave. For she is not niggardly, like the smith who fashions the Delphian knife for many uses; she makes each thing for a single use, and every instrument is best made when intended for one and not for many uses. But among barbarians no distinction is made between women and slaves, because there is no natural ruler among them: they are a community of slaves, male and female.

In the first place there must be a union of those who cannot exist without each other; namely, of male and female, that the race may continue (and this is a union which is formed, not of deliberate purpose, but because, in common with other animals and with plants, mankind have a natural desire to leave behind them an image of themselves), and of natural ruler and subject, that both may be preserved. For that which can foresee by the exercise of mind is by nature intended to be lord and master, and that which can with its body give effect to such foresight is a subject, and by nature a slave; hence master and slave have the same interest.

As in other departments of science, so in politics, the compound should always be resolved into the simple elements or least parts of the whole. We must therefore look at the elements of which the state is composed, in order that we may see in what the different kinds of rule differ from one another, and whether any scientific result can be attained about each one of them.

Every state is a community of some kind, and every community is established with a view to some good; for mankind always act in order to obtain that which they think good. But, if all communities aim at some good, the state or political community, which is the highest of all, and which embraces all the rest, aims at good in a greater degree than any other, and at the highest good.

Acceptance of the conjecture should have revolutionary educational implications . In particular, it undermines the legitimacy of requiring higher mathematics of all students. Such mathematics is actually needed by only a minute fraction of the workforce.

Math Myth Conjecture: If one restricts one’s attention to the hardest cases, namely, graduates of top engineering schools such as MIT,  RPI,  Cal. Tech., Georgia Tech., etc., then the percent of such individuals holding engineering as opposed to management, financial or other positions, and using more than Excel and eighth grade level mathematics (arithmetic, a little bit of algebra, a little bit of statistics, and a little bit of programming) is less than 25% and possibly less than 10%.

I find that the vast majority of scientists, engineers and actuaries only use Excel and eighth grade level mathematics. This suggests that most jobs that currently require advanced technical degrees are using that requirement simply as a filter.

and all the more since politics is more prized and better than medicine; but even among doctors the best educated spend much labour on acquiring knowledge of the body. The student of politics, then, must study the soul, and must study it with these objects in view, and do so just to the extent which is sufficient for the questions we are discussing; for further precision is perhaps something more laborious than our purposes require.

And if this inquiry belongs to political science, clearly the pursuit of it will be in accordance with our original plan. But clearly the virtue we must study is human virtue; for the good we were seeking was human good and the happiness human happiness. By human virtue we mean not that of the body but that of the soul; and happiness also we call an activity of soul.

Since happiness is an activity of soul in accordance with perfect virtue, we must consider the nature of virtue; for perhaps we shall thus see better the nature of happiness. The true student of politics, too, is thought to have studied virtue above all things; for he wishes to make his fellow citizens good and obedient to the laws.

For it seems, from these considerations, that even if anything whether good or evil penetrates to them, it must be something weak and negligible, either in itself or for them, or if not, at least it must be such in degree and kind as not to make happy those who are not happy nor to take away their blessedness from those who are. The good or bad fortunes of friends, then, seem to have some effects on the dead, but effects of such a kind and degree as neither to make the happy unhappy nor to produce any other change of the kind.

for the man who is very ugly in appearance or ill-born or solitary and childless is not very likely to be happy, and perhaps a man would be still less likely if he had thoroughly bad children or friends or had lost good children or friends by death. As we said, then, happiness seems to need this sort of prosperity in addition;

Their life is also in itself pleasant. For pleasure is a state of soul, and to each man that which he is said to be a lover of is pleasant; e.g. not only is a horse pleasant to the lover of horses, and a spectacle to the lover of sights, but also in the same way just acts are pleasant to the lover of justice and in general virtuous acts to the lover of virtue.

We must consider it, however, in the light not only of our conclusion and our premisses, but also of what is commonly said about it; for with a true view all the data harmonize, but with a false one the facts soon clash.

Let us examine this question, however, on another occasion; the self-sufficient we now define as that which when isolated makes life desirable and lacking in nothing; and such we think happiness to be; and further we think it most desirable of all things, without being counted as one good thing among others- if it were so counted it would clearly be made more desirable by the addition of even the least of goods; for that which is added becomes an excess of goods, and of goods the greater is always more desirable. Happiness, then, is something final and self-sufficient, and is the end of action.

Since there are evidently more than one end, and we choose some of these (e.g. wealth, flutes, and in general instruments) for the sake of something else, clearly not all ends are final ends; but the chief good is evidently something final. Therefore, if there is only one final end, this will be what we are seeking, and if there are more than one, the most final of these will be what we are seeking.

But if the things we have named are also things good in themselves, the account of the good will have to appear as something identical in them all, as that of whiteness is identical in snow and in white lead. But of honour, wisdom, and pleasure, just in respect of their goodness, the accounts are distinct and diverse. The good, therefore, is not some common element answering to one Idea.

We had perhaps better consider the universal good and discuss thoroughly what is meant by it, although such an inquiry is made an uphill one by the fact that the Forms have been introduced by friends of our own. Yet it would perhaps be thought to be better, indeed to be our duty, for the sake of maintaining the truth even to destroy what touches us closely, especially as we are philosophers or lovers of wisdom; for, while both are dear, piety requires us to honour truth above our friends.

The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else. And so one might rather take the aforenamed objects to be ends; for they are loved for themselves.

But it seems too superficial to be what we are looking for, since it is thought to depend on those who bestow honour rather than on him who receives it, but the good we divine to be something proper to a man and not easily taken from him.

To judge from the lives that men lead, most men, and men of the most vulgar type, seem (not without some ground) to identify the good, or happiness, with pleasure; which is the reason why they love the life of enjoyment. For there are, we may say, three prominent types of life- that just mentioned, the political, and thirdly the contemplative life.

And as for him who neither has nor can get them, let him hear the words of Hesiod: Far best is he who knows all things himself; Good, he that hearkens when men counsel right; But he who neither knows, nor lays to heart Another's wisdom, is a useless wight.

Hence any one who is to listen intelligently to lectures about what is noble and just, and generally, about the subjects of political science must have been brought up in good habits. For the fact is the starting-point, and if this is sufficiently plain to him, he will not at the start need the reason as well; and the man who has been well brought up has or can easily get startingpoints.

For the former think it is some plain and obvious thing, like pleasure, wealth, or honour; they differ, however, from one another- and often even the same man identifies it with different things, with health when he is ill, with wealth when he is poor; but, conscious of their ignorance, they admire those who proclaim some great ideal that is above their comprehension.

And it makes no difference whether he is young in years or youthful in character; the defect does not depend on time, but on his living, and pursuing each successive object, as passion directs. For to such persons, as to the incontinent, knowledge brings no profit; but to those who desire and act in accordance with a rational principle knowledge about such matters will be of great benefit.

Now each man judges well the things he knows, and of these he is a good judge. And so the man who has been educated in a subject is a good judge of that subject, and the man who has received an all-round education is a good judge in general.

In the same spirit, therefore, should each type of statement be received; for it is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician scientific proofs.

And goods also give rise to a similar fluctuation because they bring harm to many people; for before now men have been undone by reason of their wealth, and others by reason of their courage. We must be content, then, in speaking of such subjects and with such premisses to indicate the truth roughly and in outline, and in speaking about things which are only for the most part true and with premisses of the same kind to reach conclusions that are no better.

Our discussion will be adequate if it has as much clearness as the subject-matter admits of, for precision is not to be sought for alike in all discussions, any more than in all the products of the crafts. Now fine and just actions, which political science investigates, admit of much variety and fluctuation of opinion, so that they may be thought to exist only by convention, and not by nature.

Now, as there are many actions, arts, and sciences, their ends also are many; the end of the medical art is health, that of shipbuilding a vessel, that of strategy victory, that of economics wealth. But where such arts fall under a single capacity- as bridle-making and the other arts concerned with the equipment of horses fall under the art of riding, and this and every military action under strategy, in the same way other arts fall under yet others- in all of these the ends of the master arts are to be preferred to all the subordinate ends; for it is for the sake of the former that the latter are pursued. It makes no difference whether the activities themselves are the ends of the actions, or something else apart from the activities, as in the case of the sciences just mentioned.

Soc. Are we to say that we are never intentionally to do wrong, or that in one way we ought and in another way we ought not to do wrong, or is doing wrong always evil and dishonorable, as I was just now saying, and as has been already acknowledged by us? Are all our former admissions which were made within a few days to be thrown away? And have we, at our age, been earnestly discoursing with one another all our life long only to discover that we are no better than children? Or are we to rest assured, in spite of the opinion of the many, and in spite of consequences whether better or worse, of the truth of what was then said, that injustice is always an evil and dishonor to him who acts unjustly? Shall we affirm that? Cr. Yes. Soc. Then we must do no wrong? Cr. Certainly not. Soc. Nor when injured injure in return, as the many imagine; for we must injure no one at all? Cr. Clearly not. Soc. Again, Crito, may we do evil? Cr. Surely not, Socrates.

Soc. But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the many? Good men, and they are the only persons who are worth considering, will think of these things truly as they happened.

Each signed variant can store numbers from -(2n - 1) to 2n - 1 - 1 inclusive, where n is the number of bits that variant uses. So an i8 can store numbers from -(27) to 27 - 1, which equals -128 to 127. Unsigned variants can store numbers from 0 to 2n - 1, so a u8 can store numbers from 0 to 28 - 1, which equals 0 to 255.

Meanwhile, Olympus, a protocol I wrote about more recently, has an insanely inflationary printing schedule with huge amounts of new OHM tokens being printed every day. So theoretically you should expect holding OHM to be a bad bet. But as we’ll see shortly, Supply alone is not enough to understand whether holding a token is worthwhile. 

Note: I only write about successes here. For more than half of my “I asked them if they’d like to get a coffee” or “I DMd them” the person either wrote that they would not like to get a coffee with me or didn’t reply at all. Following up helps but won’t change the fact that most people don’t find you or me interesting enough to be even worth replying to.

as of this writing Merge Freeze is the first (and only) of its kind on the GitHub Apps Marketplace, and the entire marketplace has only 521 applications. i can’t help but feel deja vu when comparing this statistic to Fomo.com, our 2016 acquisition that’s netted over $3m on the Shopify Apps marketplace alone.

There’s a fun conspiracy theory that popped up recently called the Dead Internet Theory. The claim is basically that most of the internet is bots. There aren’t real people here anymore.

Then we must not listen to Homer or to any other poet who is guilty of the folly of saying that two casks Lie at the threshold of Zeus, full of lots, one of good, the other of evil lots, and that he to whom Zeus gives a mixture of the two Sometimes meets with evil fortune, at other times with good;

Why, yes, said he, those stories are extremely objectionable. Yes, Adeimantus, they are stories not to be repeated in our State; the young man should not be told that in committing the worst of crimes he is far from doing anything outrageous; and that even if he chastises his father when does wrong, in whatever manner, he will only be following the example of the first and greatest among the gods.

Then the first thing will be to establish a censorship of the writers of fiction, and let the censors receive any tale of fiction which is good, and reject the bad; and we will desire mothers and nurses to tell their children the authorised ones only. Let them fashion the mind with such tales, even more fondly than they mould the body with their hands; but most of those which are now in use must be discarded.

You know also that the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing; for that is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken. Quite true. And shall we just carelessly allow children to hear any casual tales which may be devised by casual persons, and to receive into their minds ideas for the most part the very opposite of those which we should wish them to have when they are grown up?

And literature may be either true or false? Yes.

they ought to be dangerous to their enemies, and gentle to their friends; if not, they will destroy themselves without waiting for their enemies to destroy them. True, he said. What is to be done then? I said; how shall we find a gentle nature which has also a great spirit, for the one is the contradiction of the other?

No tools will make a man a skilled workman, or master of defence, nor be of any use to him who has not learned how to handle them, and has never bestowed any attention upon them.

And if so, we must infer that all things are produced more plentifully and easily and of a better quality when one man does one thing which is natural to him and does it at the right time, and leaves other things.

Let him be the best of men, and let him be thought the worst; then he will have been put to the proof; and we shall see whether he will be affected by the fear of infamy and its consequences. And let him continue thus to the hour of death; being just and seeming to be unjust. When both have reached the uttermost extreme, the one of justice and the other of injustice, let judgment be given which of them is the happier of the two.

No man would keep his hands off what was not his own when he could safely take what he liked out of the market, or go into houses and lie with any one at his pleasure, or kill or release from prison whom he would, and in all respects be like a God among men. Then the actions of the just would be as the actions of the unjust; they would both come at last to the same point. And this we may truly affirm to be a great proof that a man is just, not willingly or because he thinks that justice is any good to him individually, but of necessity, for wherever any one thinks that he can safely be unjust, there he is unjust. For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another's, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another's faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.

They say that to do injustice is, by nature, good; to suffer injustice, evil; but that the evil is greater than the good. And so when men have both done and suffered injustice and have had experience of both, not being able to avoid the one and obtain the other, they think that they had better agree among themselves to have neither; hence there arise laws and mutual covenants; and that which is ordained by law is termed by them lawful and just.

How would you arrange goods --are there not some which we welcome for their own sakes, and independently of their consequences, as, for example, harmless pleasures and enjoyments, which delight us at the time, although nothing follows from them?

You can read all the self-help books in the world. You can read all the blog posts in the world. It’s not enough. Good thinking doesn’t happen by passive osmosis of other people’s good thinking. You have to actually write essays and journals to debug yourself and your ideas.

while preparing for the conversation with me, they ended up writing a lot of their thoughts and concerns down in a readable, essay-like form for the first time and this very act helped them to understand what is going on much better and to fix a lot of problems even prior our conversation

I built so many random projects over the last year, most of them going nowhere, but it gave me the foundation to work on all the Crypto Raiders stuff.

And the result of the whole discussion has been that I know nothing at all. For I know not what justice is, and therefore I am not likely to know whether it is or is not a virtue, nor can I say whether the just man is happy or unhappy.

But happiness and not misery is profitable. Of course. Then, my blessed Thrasymachus, injustice can never be more profitable than justice.

And this is because injustice creates divisions and hatreds and fighting, and justice imparts harmony and friendship; is not that true, Thrasymachus?

And you suppose that I ask these questions with any design of injuring you in the argument? Nay, he replied, 'suppose' is not the word --I know it; but you will be found out, and by sheer force of argument you will never prevail.

I say that if you want really to know what justice is, you should not only ask but answer, and you should not seek honour to yourself from the refutation of an opponent, but have your own answer; for there is many a one who can ask and cannot answer.

Then what is that joint use of silver or gold in which the just man is to be preferred? When you want a deposit to be kept safely. You mean when money is not wanted, but allowed to lie? Precisely. That is to say, justice is useful when money is useless? That is the inference.

justice is the art which gives good to friends and evil to enemies

Now to this peace of mind the possession of wealth greatly contributes; and therefore I say, that, setting one thing against another, of the many advantages which wealth has to give, to a man of sense this is in my opinion the greatest.

The truth is, Socrates, that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men's characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

And now, if I don’t mess anything up, I can live like this indefinitely. Pretty awesome. This is a big milestone for me—the culmination of a plan I hatched up almost five years ago. It feels like I’m entering a new chapter of my life. Life after financial freedom.

Let us reflect in another way, and we shall see that there is great reason to hope that death is a good, for one of two things: - either death is a state of nothingness and utter unconsciousness, or, as men say, there is a change and migration of the soul from this world to another.

For if you think that by killing men you can avoid the accuser censuring your lives, you are mistaken; that is not a way of escape which is either possible or honorable; the easiest and noblest way is not to be crushing others, but to be improving yourselves.

Socrates, but cannot you hold your tongue, and then you may go into a foreign city, and no one will interfere with you? Now I have great difficulty in making you understand my answer to this. For if I tell you that this would be a disobedience to a divine command, and therefore that I cannot hold my tongue, you will not believe that I am serious; and if I say again that the greatest good of man is daily to converse about virtue, and all that concerning which you hear me examining myself and others, and that the life which is unexamined is not worth living - that you are still less likely to believe.

he who will really fight for the right, if he would live even for a little while, must have a private station and not a public one. I can give you as proofs of this, not words only, but deeds, which you value more than words. Let me tell you a passage of my own life, which will prove to you that I should never have yielded to injustice from any fear of death, and that if I had not yielded I should have died at once. I will tell you a story - tasteless, perhaps, and commonplace, but nevertheless true. The only office of state which I ever held, O men of Athens, was that of senator; the tribe Antiochis, which is my tribe, had the presidency at the trial of the generals who had not taken up the bodies of the slain after the battle of Arginusae; and you proposed to try them all together, which was illegal, as you all thought afterwards; but at the time I was the only one of the Prytanes who was opposed to the illegality, and I gave my vote against you; and when the orators threatened to impeach and arrest me, and have me taken away, and you called and shouted, I made up my mind that I would run the risk, having law and justice with me, rather than take part in your injustice because I feared imprisonment and death. This happened in the days of the democracy. But when the oligarchy of the Thirty was in power, they sent for me and four others into the rotunda, and bade us bring Leon the Salaminian from Salamis, as they wanted to execute him. This was a specimen of the sort of commands which they were always giving with the view of implicating as many as possible in their crimes; and then I showed, not in words only, but in deed, that, if I may be allowed to use such an expression, I cared not a straw for death, and that my only fear was the fear of doing an unrighteous or unholy thing. For the strong arm of that oppressive power did not frighten me into doing wrong; and when we came out of the rotunda the other four went to Salamis and fetched Leon, but I went quietly home. For which I might have lost my life, had not the power of the Thirty shortly afterwards come to an end. And to this many will witness. Now do you really imagine that I could have survived all these years, if I had led a public life, supposing that like a good man I had always supported the right and had made justice, as I ought, the first thing? No, indeed, men of Athens, neither I nor any other.

For this fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good.

a man who is good for anything ought not to calculate the chance of living or dying; he ought only to consider whether in doing anything he is doing right or wrong - acting the part of a good man or of a bad

Come hither, Meletus, and let me ask a question of you. You think a great deal about the improvement of youth? Yes, I do. Tell the judges, then, who is their improver; for you must know, as you have taken the pains to discover their corrupter, and are citing and accusing me before them. Speak, then, and tell the judges who their improver is. Observe, Meletus, that you are silent, and have nothing to say. But is not this rather disgraceful, and a very considerable proof of what I was saying, that you have no interest in the matter? Speak up, friend, and tell us who their improver is. The laws. But that, my good sir, is not my meaning. I want to know who the person is, who, in the first place, knows the laws. The judges, Socrates, who are present in court. What do you mean to say, Meletus, that they are able to instruct and improve youth? Certainly they are. What, all of them, or some only and not others? All of them. By the goddess Here, that is good news! There are plenty of improvers, then. And what do you say of the audience, - do they improve them? Yes, they do. And the senators? Yes, the senators improve them. But perhaps the members of the citizen assembly corrupt them? - or do they too improve them? They improve them. Then every Athenian improves and elevates them; all with the exception of myself; and I alone am their corrupter? Is that what you affirm? That is what I stoutly affirm.

and if he is not wise, then in vindication of the oracle I show him that he is not wise;

I must say that there is hardly a person present who would not have talked better about their poetry than they did themselves. That showed me in an instant that not by wisdom do poets write poetry, but by a sort of genius and inspiration; they are like diviners or soothsayers who also say many fine things, but do not understand the meaning of them.

So I left him, saying to myself, as I went away: Well, although I do not suppose that either of us knows anything really beautiful and good, I am better off than he is - for he knows nothing, and thinks that he knows. I neither know nor think that I know. In this latter particular, then, I seem to have slightly the advantage of him.

"Greedy capitalist formula": max(current value of assets).We know life is very multidimensional, but to some extent, we all end up using that formula to estimate what's better.

Add a markdown file in your knowledge base for every repo at your org. If you use Github, download the Github cli. From there you can generate a json file of the top n repos at your org... if you can, maybe just get all of them. They are ordered by most recent commit. $ gh repo list [yourorgname] --limit 1000 --json name,description

In an attempt to dispel the idea that if you have to google stuff you’re not a proper engineer,

This is why I am happy to report that Of Dollars And Data is now a full-fledged business (mostly from ads and partnerships). And here’s the best part—all this occurred despite me doing so many things incorrectly. I’ve made just about every mistake that you can make as a blogger. For example, I didn’t have an email list until 18 months after I started the blog, I didn’t promote my work outside of Twitter (until recently), and I didn’t do any SEO for my first three years.

Brock Pierce, co-founder of Tether.

His explanation doesn’t make much sense if you still think of Bitcoin as a peer-to-peer currency, an ingenious way to transfer value without an intermediary. But most people aren’t using cryptocurrencies to buy stuff. They’re trading them on exchanges and betting on their value, hoping to make a real money score by picking the next Dogecoin, which spiked 4,191% this year after Elon Musk started tweeting about it, or Solana, up 9,801% in 2021 for seemingly no reason at all.Think of crypto exchanges as giant casinos.

But when I asked where Tether was keeping its money, he declined to say. Nor was I reassured when he told me the company had more than enough cash to cover the most money it had ever had to pay out in a single day.

He called Tether’s critics “jihadists” set on the company’s destruction.

CNBC host Jim Cramer told viewers to sell their crypto. “If Tether collapsed, well then, it’s going to gut the whole crypto ecosystem,” he warned.

That means the company supposedly holds a corresponding $69 billion in real money

Once they have Tethers, people can send them to cryptocurrency exchanges and use them to bet on the price of Bitcoin, Ether, or any of the thousands of other coins.

discuss Tether

The exploitation and centralization of user data is core to how the web as we know and use it today is engineered to function.

At first, many software companies do not worry about monetization. They strictly focus on growth and on locking in new users – but eventually they have to start turning a profit.

Hello, Stranger. By Will Buckingham. Granta; 336 pages; £16.99The Power of Strangers. By Joe Keohane. Random House; 352 pages; $28. Viking; £16.99Fractured. By Jon Yates. Harper North; 348 pages; $28.99 and £20

“If you have 1,000 fans willing to support you, that can be a really meaningful way to build a career.”

But by 2017 it had become apparent that “making it” on Twitch required more than a 9-to-5 commitment. Streamers had to be on all the time to grind out followers across game genres, across time zones. With no division between work and play, free time and work time, online and offline, streamers’ precious free moments became defined by missed opportunities (something many freelancers can probably relate to). In 2018, when the Fortnite boom really catapulted Twitch into the mainstream, Ninja figured that in the hour he spent talking to The New York Times about burnout, he lost 200 or 300 subscribers. When he went to E3, he said, he lost 100,000 subscribers, or $500,000. Even his six-day honeymoon, he says, was “a calculated risk.”

In 2012, Twitch hosted 2,200 average concurrent livestreams to 102,000 average concurrent viewers—or, to put it another way, that’s 46 times as many concurrent viewers as channels. Since then, that ratio has shrunk to 25 times as many viewers as live channels in 2021. (Recently, Twitch watchdog Zach Bussey pointed out that, in the spring of 2021, if a streamer attracted more than six viewers they were in the top 6.7 percent of Twitch streamers.)

Justin Kan, Twitch’s cofounder, just wants his favorite chess streamers to notice him. “I’m in the chat, like, giving them donations, hoping they say my name and shit,” he tells WIRED. He’s terrible at chess, but he can’t stop watching Andrea and Alexandra Botez play it on Twitch. They haven’t acknowledged him yet. He hopes they will soon.

peonies are native to China and mischievous nymphs were said to hide in their petals.

Many authors hope that securing a contract with a Big Four publishing house will provide more marketing and sell more copies of the book, but the reality is that traditional publishers are looking for a sure thing. They want an author who already has an existing platform and can guarantee an audience. And if the author has that, they might be better off going it alone.

Be sure you can tell a simple story about who you are, what you do, and the value you can provide.

Get clear on the value you provide and get comfortable communicating it

Make it a habit to save interesting people, companies, and opportunities you come across to come back to later.

The problem is, the same technology that makes it easy for you to reach out makes it easy for everyone else to reach out too. How do you stand out in crowded inboxes and noisy timelines?

There is No Right Way to Work

The issue isn’t how you earn your income, but what you do with it.

I’m fed up with entrepreneurship Twitter.  I’m tired of hearing about side hustles, the 4-hour work week, and escaping the rat race.  Not because I am against any of these pursuits in and of themselves, but because of the culture projected by many of those who pursue them.  I call this the entrepreneurship superiority complex.

Recommendation: After every game, take just a few moments to review your Game Report and analyze or retry your mistakes. It doesn’t take long, but it makes a significant difference when you learn from your actual mistakes in your own games.

Recommendation: Aim for about 10 quick games on most days if you want to improve as quickly as possible. Or just play a game or two more than you are playing now to steadily improve at a more moderate rate. The key is to play, play, play.

Finishing times spike around notable goals, such as 3:00, 3:30, and 4:00. Humans are driven by goals, so we kick up our effort when the next one is in sight.

As Planck wrote: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. . . An important scientific innovation rarely makes its way by gradually winning over and converting its opponents: it rarely happens that Saul becomes Paul. What does happen is that its opponents gradually die out, and that the growing generation is familiarized with the ideas from the beginning: another instance of the fact that the future lies with the youth.”

“For I have a single definition of success: you look in the mirror every evening, and wonder if you disappoint the person you were at 18, right before the age when people start getting corrupted by life. Let him or her be the only judge; not your reputation, not your wealth, not your standing in the community, not the decorations on your lapel. If you do not feel ashamed, you are successful. All other definitions of success are modern constructions; fragile modern constructions.”

get curious, not critical

, ‘Are my choices helping me live the life I want to live?

Pornhub is owned by Mindgeek, a private pornography conglomerate with more than 100 websites, production companies and brands. Its sites include Redtube, Youporn, XTube, SpankWire, ExtremeTube, Men.com, My Dirty Hobby, Thumbzilla, PornMD, Brazzers and GayTube. There are other major players in porn outside the Mindgeek umbrella, most notably XHamster and XVideos, but Mindgeek is a porn titan. If it operated in another industry, the Justice Department could be discussing an antitrust case against it.

Do you often find yourself not making a recipe because it calls for a blender, or, if you already have a blender, being disappointed by the results?

I’ve come to the realization that you don’t have to convince someone of something. This will only worsen your relationship. The best you can do is to steer him towards the right direction where he can (potentially) learn about this himself.

A nasty side effect of a regular reading habit, except probably spending a fortune on books, is a growing resentfulness towards vanity and stupidity. You become idiot intolerable.

Reading is just part of the equation. You should also make time for doing.

We don’t hop online with clear goals in mind. We surf the net hoping to find “something” that will entertain us.

But these elaborate creations full of complicated phrases are what you need to level up your thinking.

I use the spaced-repetition app Anki for this. My cards are just positions drawn from computer analysis of my own games: I put blunders and mistakes from my games here (front side of the card is the position before my move, reverse shows the correct move.) I also put many positions from the openings that I play here.

All in all, I left Twitter with an incredible breadth and depth of experience– having worked up and down the stack, in both existing codebases and greenfield projects, on my own and under the watchful eye of staff engineers.

The bottom line is, you need to be strategic with the company you choose to join. Your time is valuable!

As you connect, you will learn, understand, and thus expand yourself in two ways: (a) Your knowledge will increase and (b) you will be a better observer. By being a better observer, you will be able to draw more insights from observation. More universal patterns arise and become more apparent to you. A fundamental aspect of working like this is that it allows you to access the general patterns of reality.

Credit card hacking is a prime example of doing $10/hour work. It feels productive (free money!). It releases dopamine (A free flight upgrade!) And it makes you feel like you’re outfoxing a competitor (I got away with THIS!). But it fails to move the needle.

When you get to the gym, perform each exercise in the list above with a heaviness that isn’t overly challenging but also isn’t so light that you can barely feel it. Once you've found a weight that satisfies this, do 7 reps with it. Then take a 3 minute break and increase the weight to the next heaviness level to see if you can do 7 reps again. Keep incrementing the weight and taking 3 minute breaks until you get to a heaviness you cannot lift the full 7 reps with. When you get to this level, make a note of the level that came before it. This second-to-last level will be your starting weight when you begin working out next week.

Start mentioning that you're looking for clients.

if you think you want to do consulting at some point... you need to get to know people.

aCtioN #2: Make SLeep NoN-NeGotiaBLe 9 JaSoN LeNGStorf — LeNGStorf.CoMDaily Action#2ACTUALLY MAKE SLEEP AS IMPORTANT AS WE ALWAYS PRETEND IT IS.

When we write things down, they become less stressful and easier to prioritize.

aCtioN #1: Make a daiLy LiSt 5 JaSoN LeNGStorf — LeNGStorf.CoMDaily Action#1WRITE A DAILY LIST OF THINGS THAT MATTER

Big Fish, Little Pond effects show that your self-concept depends on your peers. If you’re a good student in a mediocre class, you feel smarter than if you’re merely a good student in an elite school.[2]

Each of us has work that energizes us and work that drains us. Writing energizes me. Sales drains me. A good test to figure this out is: how do you feel when you see a type of work on your tasks for the day?

This is the ultimate goal for any blog. You want to build up a base of people who love what you write, and who will consider reading anything new you put out. It's where the true value of the blog comes in, because it means you're on people's minds for certain kinds of opportunities or questions they might encounter.

Way too many people obsess over launching with a perfect site and never go live.

I knew getting some kind of marketing work was my best way to avoid my worst nightmare: having to slink back to the corporate consulting career track. 

The best way to think is by writing. It compels your brain to connect the dots.

Finally, a good test for an idea is if you can articulate why most people think it’s a bad idea, but you understand what makes it good.

Another way to do this is to think about the most important tectonic shifts happening right now. How is the world changing in fundamental ways? Can you identify a leading edge of change and an opportunity that it unlocks? The mobile phone explosion from 2008-2012 is the most recent significant example of this—we are overdue for another

All of this works because I spent years and years honing my craft and producing software that is truly useful.

Measure your success by engagement not the number of followers.

Don’t be blown away but you should be commenting about 10x - 15x a day on other people's timelines vs only tweeting 2 - 3x a day on your own to start with.

The key was the content strategy. I won't lie: it requires a lot of work. But it can be replicated in any niche. So we thought we'd share the tactic with the IH community.🎉 The technique is called "R.L.L." (Really Long List). It was invented by Brian Dean from Backlinko. He describes the RLL technique in detail in his latest course. I'll give you a quick overview in 6 steps: 🕵 Research ✨ Quality 🧠 Value 🏡 Structure 📝 Create 📬 Convert

MarriageI've noticed a weird pattern: In most of the best marriages I see, one person is an early-bird, and the other is a night-owl. They have opposite circadian rhythms.I think this is healthy. The two partners get the benefits of time together and time alone, which helps the marriage.

Также я бы не рекомендовал брать домен в зоне .ru как основной: российские регистраторы у меня не вызывают доверия, да и вдруг однажды покинешь Россию.

note