mandlebro @mandlebro@qoto.org

"Buddhist meditation has two aspects - shamatha and vipashyana. We tend to stress the importance of vipashyana ('looking deeply') because it can bring us insight and liberate us from suffering and afflictions. But the practice of shamatha ('stopping') is fundamental."

This made me think of the well tempered clavier. I had always wondered at the structural reason for the preludes, given that they are followed only by a single fugue. It never felt like enough of a contrast for it to be a logic vs passion sort of thing, like in the chromatic fantasy and fugue. So maybe it's more to allow the listener to "stop" and settle into the tonality before diving into in depth of the fugue.

Are there any runners on here that carry while running? What gun do you carry and how do you carry it? I’ve been thinking about coming up with a set up for myself.

I've been reading Elemnts of Statistical Learning by Hastie et. al. And I'm pretty sure the following ingredients is just wrong: "Note that the actual maximizer of the likelihood occurs when e put a spike of infinite height at any one dara point..." pg 274 par 4. They are talking about gaussian mixtures. But if you interpret this literally then the likelihood is 0 since all the other points have likelihood 0. If you interpret it in the limit the same occurs. The limit goes to zero, since one point in the product goes to 1 and the rest go to zero. Am I missing something? The book's been good so far.

I think I just realized what bothered me thematically about Squid Game. Early on (first two episodes), it seemed like the thesis was that the games were better than capitalism because they are more fair. They were more like the ideal that capitalism is sold as, as opposed to the hopeless reality of most of the characters' lives. But as the show went on and the games got more random and arbitrary, that really breaks down and it seems like the games are supposed to be more of a direct metaphor for capitalist society, which is just the author saying "Look! Capitalist society is cruel and unfair just like the contrived metaphor I've come up with! " It's also just a boring take that's been done over and over.