“In the words of the ancients, one should make his decisions within the space of seven breaths. Lord Takandobu said, “If discrimination is long, it will spoil.” Lord Naoshige said, “When matters are done leisurely, seven out of ten will turn out badly. A warrior is a person who does things quickly.

When your mind is going hither and thither, discrimination will never be brought to a conclusion. With an intense, fresh and undelaying spirit, one will make his judgments within the space of seven breaths. It is a matter of being determined and having the spirit to break right through to the other side.”

Initially from ; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hagakure

But taken from a site [0] I just found in the process that apparently has nothing to do with the OS and informs us that ;

"Ubuntu is a concept that we have in our Bantu languages at home. Ubuntu is the essence of being a person. It means that we are people through other people. We cannot be fully human alone. We are made for interdependence, we are made for family. When you have ubuntu, you embrace others. You are generous, compassionate. If the world had more ubuntu, we would not have war. We would not have this huge gap between the rich and the poor. You are rich so that you can make up what is lacking for others. You are powerful so that you can help the weak, just as a mother or father helps their children. This is God's dream.”

- Ubuntu, as explained by Bishop Desmond Tutu

[0] https://ubuntutheory.blogspot.com/2008/08/7-breaths.html

Ubuntu the operating system takes its name from the concept that you talk about here.

That is also why the logo of Ubuntu the operating system is three people holding hands, which kind of blew my mind when I first heard about it. Prior to that I thought the logo was just some lines and circles in a pretty pattern with no specific meaning.

I believe some of Ubuntu's early marketing materials (from the days of Warty Warthog) actually depicted 3 people holding hands. See link:

https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/geekfeminism/images/9/94/S...

Ubuntu is the distribution. GNU is the operating system. Linux is the kernel.

"GNU is the operating system" only makes sense when speaking about GNU Hurd or Linux-libre. The kernel is part of the OS, so in the case of ubuntu GNU can't be the operating system. But if Linux is the kernel, and GNU is part of the operating system because the OS is more than the kernel, then why is the OS GNU/Linux and not Systemd/GNU/Linux? And on Ubuntu you install most stuff with apt instead of using gcc, and use most software with X.org instead of bash, so the OS is really apt/X.org/systemd/GNU/Linux. Of course that name quickly becomes silly, it's much more practical to just call the OS Ubuntu (as that expresses a specific package selection that includes GNU, linux, and a large number of equally indispensable parts, as well as their update cadence and methodology)

Let's not forget that more than 90% of packages in Ubuntu are taken from Debian without any significant modification.

A GNU/Linux distro can be referred to as an operating system. Not sure if you are memeing or not, but in conversation going into specifics about the GNU/Linux, or GNU plus Linux as you might like to call it, distinction, is not relevant here.

And in fact, I would say that saying that “GNU is the operating system” is even incorrect. GNU plus Linux is the operating system. Neither part by itself is a complete operating system.

So, the distro is the operating system.

Ubuntu is the operating system.

What about when there is a huge length of time between the plan and the final execution? Do you just not let yourself think about it after the 7th breath? In the context of the hagakure, I suppose it would apply to battle strategy?

It applies to the process of taking the decision (to execute), not the executing itself. After the seventh breath, you don't go back to pondering on yes / no, you just proceed as decided.

I suppose one can figure out exactly how you're supposed to handle what you decided you were going to handle afterward.

Disclaimer : I am not a Samurai.

The "Hagakure" literally starts with something like "The art of the samurai lies in a way of dying. A samurai warrior enters battle as if already dead."

It also started 150 years after the last Samurai battle, during a time when the Samurai were a bureaucratic clerical class. A fantasy nostalgia written by a clerk who had never seen battle or a fight of any kind.

Given that Bakumatsu and Meiji restoration happened in the 1850s the “last Samurai fight” happened only much later. The period in question was an attempt to keep fighters in check and prevent Shogun to be overthrown.

Bushido was real, Hagakure was written by a scribe from discussions with a holder of Bushido because before that Bushido was mostly transmitted through oral tradition. That daimyo was one to challenge useless deaths such as junji, so it’s not like he was entirely a fan of the whole thing but he probably lived by Bushido very much to the core.

Put into context that looks suspiciously like an interview for historical records and persistence in writing of an oral tradition. I would not be surprised if it was published only after the daimyo’s death because he made a vow to keep this knowledge secret, which was still common up to last century (Katori Shinto Ryu was probably one of the first schools to officially break with that and share previously secret knowledge about fighting technique and philosophy)

Now, there is romanticisation of Bushido and Samurai, but mostly from 1900s imperialism and WW2 propaganda which taints our glasses very much.

The samurai died out though, where as Japan’s unchanging ancient businesses managed to remain. I wonder if quick thinking isn’t just what leads one to an early end, business, life, or otherwise.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25281164

I'm not an expert, but I've got the impression the dying out of the samurai class was pretty much because they weren't really needed any more, and such a special class wasn't really in line with the modernization and westernization efforts that were being made in Japan at the time.

Of course any endeavour can meet an early end due to carelessness or because of not stopping and considering whether what you're doing is actually a good idea. But carelessness would probably not have been held in high regard by the samurai, and I generally fail to see a simple connection between to the samurai class becoming outdated and a preference for "quick" thinking.

Yet here we are, idolizing them centuries later, while an old shop is a curiosity at best. Living long != living well.

Idolization is rooted in ignorance.

But, oddly, it is also living short != living well.

Almost as if the two are unrelated concepts.

The group under discussion, samurai, absolutely didn’t think they were unrelated.

Modern fascination with samurai is less idolizing and more fetishizing. Plenty of people telling stories. Not a lot practicing the art. And those that do are (rightfully) snickered at for taking seriously something that is supposed to be mere quaint fascination.

I’d suggest that others simply have a different perspective and that your label of “quaint” is merely your own modern bias.

Edit: In other words, many people are dissatisfied with the contemporary world set up by merchants and bureaucrats. I don’t see it as misguided or quaint for them to look to the samurai ethic as a more appealing alternative. Its historical accuracy isn’t really relevant, as all history is story creation.

We don't have life all figured out in modern society either. Especially when it comes to dying (without it just being the end of a period of despair and depression), but also I'd say dealing with risk and difficulty generally.

Eastern cultures didn't really have religions universally promising to provide all the answers/solutions like western culture had, so they developed very interesting alternative ways of addressing these struggles in life.

Keep in mind the expertise required to build that intuition, though. The average person who merely knows how to play Chess should probably think before they move, or else blunder away the whole game by putting their queen on a square threatened by a knight they didn't look at.

That said, most people are probably "experts"--in the sense that their intuitions can often outdo their conscious trains of thought--in more than a few things. I'll bet that drivers in their 40's make better decisions with instinct than conscious thought. The same probably goes for middle aged home cooks. But teenagers should go over their driving lessons in their heads, and stick to the recipes.

Learning something new requires a lot of concentration and deliberate thinking and practice. When I learned chess I remember the friend I was playing with becoming a bit bored waiting for my moves but with time it became more automatic and only certain moves would make me think more and when not being able to evaluate or choose between alternative I'd go to gut feeling, possibly distilled from thousands and thousands of chess games played. At some point the tipping point leaned too much towards gut feeling and after some bluffing I decided to take a break from chess and moved on to something else. I think I got bored and my brain would jump to shortcuts. Then I discovered musical instruments

True, with enough experience you know when to move fast and when to dither, a kinda game sense.

>Alfred Whitehead's observation that 'civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them'.

Reminds me a bit of a quote I heard recently: "Tradition is a set of solutions for which we have forgotten the problems. Throw away the solution and you get the problem back."

It might apply to some traditions. However, for others, this is more accurate:

"Tradition is a set of solutions for problems that don't exist anymore".

An example of the latter that immediately springs to mind is circumcision.

>> Tradition is a set of solutions for problems that don't exist anymore

That'd be reductionist rationalists' position.

Defining a name for something doesn’t make it into a point.

It’s like calling someone conservative for saying that migration is taking away jobs. So what? What is the point you are making here?

Is the point to reframe the idea in such a way that it would be easier to reduce their opinion to the outer group associated with the name?

What problem did it solve before?

Hygiene

That's the modern justification. Surgery "in the middle of a desert in the insanitary conditions and no water" for "hygiene" is a very counter-intuitive practice, don't you think?

Wow, I never thought about this. It would be interesting to do a study to see what lead to more disease, child circumcision during that time, or hygiene complications later in life, not to mention and STDs that might be spread more easily. Fascinating new way to look at it.

What is even more counter-intuitive is to say that ancient wisdom knows more about human health than today’s medicine.

Disorder in society

.. how?

Phimosis, I presume.

Variant of Chesterton's fence?

Of course, sometimes the underlying problem has gone away entirely or been dealt with by a different solution. Then you run into traditionalists defending ridiculous things with arguments that make no sense.

It's actually a very interesting line of thought, but people lose their mind as soon as you start digging in.

> civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them

Interesting take. My first thought was that this relates to societal trust, a cornerstone of civilization. I can buy food from someone I've never met, and keep myself fed, 'without thinking'.

Related:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liars_and_Outliers

* https://www.schneier.com/books/liars-and-outliers/

That’s an interesting point. Makes me think of the loops that are required to be jumped through to enable a trustless digital currency like Bitcoin. The entire network, with transactions of about 1kB in size, can do at most 7 transactions per second (3-4 orders of magnitude lower than Visanet, which itself is lower throughput than all the world’s physical cash transactions could theoretically do if everyone bought one or two things a day on average). That’s the same data throughput of a mid-1990s modem, but with power consumption of about 10GW to secure the transactions.

Pure trustlessness indeed has a massive computational and mental overhead. Some compromise (like the Lightning network, or even a central trusted banking institution) is essential to get anything done. (Even with Bitcoin, you’re trusting open source software, often an actual intermediary like Coinbase, etc... Try to do it without any crypto libraries whatsoever—writing it really from scratch—and it is an enormous project. How many people teach themselves Finite Field theory before doing Bitcoin because they take the trustlessness seriously?)

There are quite a few places in bitcoin where trust is required. For example, the software is developed by a relatively small group of core devs and 99%+ of bitcoin users will never read that code (and its dependencies) to see if it contains backdoors. We just have to trust the devs to "do it right" and not get compromised by either greed or blackmailed by external parties. If you presuppose a sophisticated enough attacker, the distribution methods could be MITMed so that the distributed binaries are not what is in the source code. The various miner pools could be compromised as well so that they run different software than the "main" bitcoin branch (but with a similar interface). If you accept that crypto exchanges are essential to bring down the barrier to entry, they need to be trusted as well. For any transaction also involving an exchange of goods or services not on the blockchain, you need to either trust the counterparty to actually fulfill their obligations, you have to involve a (trusted) clearing house or you have to trust the legal system to enforce the contract.

Tbh, trustlessness in payment systems is pretty much unachievable at scale. And if you are going to need trusted parties anyway, why have a blockchain in the first place? You can get a much better solution with a centralized database managed by the trusted party.

I agree. You have to write your own software (offline, perhaps), not use a mining pool, plus not use an exchange to be trustless. And you’re still having to trust the other end to actually deliver on what they’re paying for, although they don’t necessarily have to trust you. That last sentence is one of the few changes that Bitcoin makes: it moves power from the consumer (who has ability to charge back if the goods are not received) to the one accepting payment (who now cannot be charged back). I’m not convinced this is a good move.

And I agree with your overall point. The only issue is when you end up having unnecessarily high transaction fees, as we do now. Satoshi was trying to fix that part. But unfortunately, Bitcoin isn’t better on that front.

Bitcoin has high transaction fees because of the lack of scalability of the blockchain concept at scale while Visa has high transaction fees (although for most daily transactions, less than Bitcoin) due to network effects allowing them to charge near-monopoly rents.

What we need is government action to enable instant ACH/payments. And to make that common. Visa ought to be unnecessary.

So new taxes to support the infrastructure that allows feeless ACH/payments? Not saying I'm for or against, I'm just trying to understand your argument in full. It seems like the logical way that your idea would be funded.

The Nordic countries have instant payments. It doesn't actually cost anything extra (just the usual flat fee, maybe $0.20 to $1... although for smaller payments like for a candy bar, you could choose a 0.5% to 1% fee which might be cheaper...), except for companies that gain from rents they charge for wire transfers, etc. Here's an example from the Nordic countries: https://nordicpayments.eu/p27-the-payment-gamechanger/

Actual expert on the topic: "For truly "instant" clearing and settlement the main hope is the RTP network, which already has extensive coverage. (FedNow, its rival, is 3 years away). The Fed can also quicken payments by (1) having Fedwire and NSS operate 24/7 and (2) easing FinTech Master Account access." https://twitter.com/GeorgeSelgin/status/1356937488871358465?...

Ahh, so transaction fees fund the infrastructure. Makes sense. I guess what do we do with any excess generated by those fees? Reinvest into the infrastructure? Have it in a safety box for a day when the fees can't cover the cost in the short term? Interesting things to consider I think, but that does flesh that idea out more. I wonder, do they also offer state run accounts instead of private banks holding cash?

But most people are noticeably stronger with longer time than with shorter time. You need merely play a long time control and not give yourself the benefit of using that time and see whether your rating drops.

I’m working on a video game right now and I’m having this problem with the story and dialogue. In the past my game design was in the realm of tabletop rpgs, so you come up with the idea, add some details, and then you run it right away. You see the player responses in person, face to face, learn whether you did well or not, and then move on to do even better the next time. It works great. In a video game, there can be months between conception and a player experiencing it, and you won’t be there to see most of them react, so you can second guess every single detail hundreds of times until it’s hard to judge things clearly. I’ve never been into heavy up front design before, but it might actually be helpful for this specific problem - ie, to just write it and then trust it later on

I was thinking about this the other day. When I was a kid I'd think 1-12 moves ahead, I'd obviously learned to prune bad moves and it worked pretty well for me.

But then thinking about it, this is exactly the wrong way to train your brain. It's job isn't to evaluate every single position, but rather to train it in the form of a "neural network" to institutionally recognize good vs. bad positions, and to expand on that.

Looking at some high ranked players online, this seems to be the way they recognize positions and possibilities.

"civilisation advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them"

Similar concept is applied to programming, we call that concept abstraction.

That's completely different, and not wholely beneficial either. The piper's due is merely deferred until the last of the original abstractor's guard dies, then everyome who relied on it has to rederive the fundamentals, or stagnate.

This is wholly untrue. It is very possible to maintain a subset of the population to guard the knowledge of the fundamentals so that the rest never has to worry about the abstraction failing in any real sense. For example, humanity has abstracted away the vagaries of internal combustion engines for car propulsion through a standardized interface and the "last of the original abstractor's guard" for combustion engines died several decades ago.

> all the people in the rationalist cult never seem to actually be successful at anything other than rationalism

do you have a link? would love to read this, and it probably applies to me :)

Probably https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24803540

But a non-rationalist is also more likely to die. It's pretty hard to get hit by a car if you are a rational person.

I don't think this proves anything other than there are often contradictory idioms in chess, here's one attributed to Larsen: "If you find a good move, look for a better one".

> very good players will ruin positions by rather than playing with their good instinct, over-analyzing a position

I wonder if this is due to errors happening and getting mixed into the search. Computers pretty monotonously improve with thinking time, and the algorithm is pretty simple once you have good intuition to guide it. However, a single memory error down a line will turn the whole thing to mush.

Even disregarding the errors, when "overthinking" is easy t go deeper in some branches than in others, without a very good probability estimation (which something the computer can do more easily: weight the branches). The "intuitive" approach is not that deep, but the depth is more even.

In Dominoes the term is “study long study wrong”

Or in Korea we call this “long time wrong move (장고 뒤에 악수)”

This is true at every level of chess. The thinking optimum is somewhere between "playing without caution" and "over-analysing". Over-analysing is theorically the best but because we're not computers there are mistakes in our resulting assertions.