yrui
A few words on your questions:
Mathematics is no different from any other field except that its objects of interest are all abstractions. As an engineer you use it, so it appears to be about number and symbol pushing, but the theory of how and where to push the numbers and symbols and why it works was discovered by a mathematician at some point. The proofs are not ultimate but hopefully convincing given certain usually acceptable assumptions or axioms. We like the axiomatic method because axioms are usually not controversial and everything proceeds from them using strict logical reasoning.
Wise words.
""Breathing in long, he discerns, 'I am breathing in long'; or breathing out long, he discerns, 'I am breathing out long.' Or breathing in short, he discerns, 'I am breathing in short'; or breathing out short, he discerns, 'I am breathing out short.' "
https://accesstoinsight.org/tipitaka/mn/mn.010.than.html
Do you do that already with every breath? Great!
I think you are saying you are naturally aware of everything your body does and thinks as it is happening. You use your "third eye", the eye in your brain that looks at yourself as you do what you do, noting everything that is happening. Your mind doesn't attach to what it sees or thinks, but remains ready at all times to notice the next thought, the next breath, the next footstep in the present as it is happening.
Am I understanding what you're saying correctly?
Difficult Conversations by Stone, Patton and Heen
Crucial Conversaions by Patterson et al.
Difficult Conversations is about why difficult conversations are difficult. It's based on research done in the Harvard Negotiation project.
Crucial Conversations is an approach where you learn to recognize early when conversations become difficult, and teaches some techniques to use when they do.
Books that influenced me:
Style, by F.L. Lucas
Simple and Direct, by Jacques Barzun
For technical writing, I recommend four additional disciplines:
1.) Keep the documentation up to date.
2.) Allow and encourage your readers to give you feedback about what's unclear. Then make revisions based on this. Also, re-read what you wrote periodically, and make revisions whereever you think you can improve clarity and usefulness.
3.) Provide copious examples where you show how to accomplish useful things.
4.) Use the tool you're documenting. Find errors, corner cases, and things to be aware of and document them as comprehensively as possible.
There are a few projects working on creating a good root of trust at boot time.
For example, there's Raptor Computing Systems' Talos platform (1) with libre bootware for a desktop computing experience; Bunnie Huang's precursor (2) which is a handheld and mostly solves your problem, and variations on libreboot/coreboot which can be shoe-horned into existing hardware such as Dasharo(3) on to the PC Engines APU2.
(1) https://www.raptorcs.com/blog/08212017001.php (2) https://www.crowdsupply.com/sutajio-kosagi/precursor (3) https://pcengines.github.io/
On the other hand, you may not need to trust your computer if you don't connect it to a network and all information flows only towards it on read-only media.
https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/free-software-wireles...
It uses LibreCMC--a really well supported Libre branch of OpenWRT.
Everything just works, and there are regular updates patching vulnerabilities.
One purpose of having periods of formal meditation is to be able to sustain greater periods of mindfulness throughout the day. Formal meditation gets the mind used to coming back to what's at hand.
To take it a little further, you can practice having a tiny moment of mindful awareness each time before you open your mouth to speak or eat, and each time before you move your body.
For general background for the autodidact there is: https://teachyourselfcs.com/
One area to consider as a happy Debian desktop user is using OpenBSD as a router OS. PC Engines (I have no affiliation to them) makes a very nice router called "Alix" and OpenBSD works well on it. Previously, people were installing it on Soekris routers before they went out of business.
OpenBSD's firewall pf is by far my favorite, and it and OpenBSD have a lot of nice networking features and tools to tinker with. It's free of blobs (in the default install), free of known bugs (in the default install--but generally your router will work well with only the default install), and configured to be reasonably secure by default. The documentation is also frequently praised.
How many other modern, full-fledged, well-maintained and open code OSes run in 32 Mb of RAM?