This is your opinion. I do not share your opinion. The occult is a wide range of topics and practices, generally split (but not cleanly) into theurgic and thaumaturgic activities. That is, manifestation of the three common desires (wealth, power, love / sex etc.), and then deification and approaching and sometimes joining with / uniting with God. Occult meaning, hidden.
If you read many of the grimoires, there is very little NLP of any kind. The Papyri Graecae Magicae is one of the oldest explicitly magical documents we have from Greek Egypt, and it does have some manipulation spells (as most magical documents do) but none of this has to do with coersion to join a religion or join in a war, or to "do bad stuff". It's largely "technology" used by a practicing magician (a moonlighting Egyptian priest) to help the laity deal with their daily lives regarding helping their crops grow, animals not get sick, healing sick children, getting revenge on their neighbors and former lovers etc.
Magic is always a tool in the hands of the oppressed as a response to tyrannical hierarchy.
From the very beginning of my tenure at my current "start-up" I wrote a Rust bespoke implementation using the base OpenTelemetry library with lots of opinionated defaults and company specifics. We integrated this early on in our microservice development, and it's been an absolute game changer. All of our services include the library and use a simple boilerplate macro to include metrics and tracing into our Actix and Tonic servers, Tonic client, etc. Logs are slurped off Kubernetes pods using promtail.
It was easy enough that I, as a single SRE (at the time) could write and implement across dozens of services in a few months of part-time work while handling all my other normal duties. OpenTelemetry has proved to be worth the investment, and we have stayed within the Grafana ecosystem, now paying for Grafana Cloud (to save our time on maintaining the stack in our Kubernetes clusters).
I would absolutely recommend it. I would recommend it and hopefully use it at any new future positions.
I adore Justin Sledge, despite putting me to sleep quite a few times. If you want to learn a bit about the religious side of the esoteric (mysticism) I highly recommend Filip Holm https://www.youtube.com/@LetsTalkReligion
There are actually some fairly high quality translations of things nowadays. Much better than even 20 years ago. If you are still inclined to the occult, now is a better time than pretty much ever.
Science doesn't negate an interest in the arcane, esoteric, or occult. You can still find this stuff fascinating, and in fact there are practitioners who are actively involved in scientific circles simultaneously. It is not always mutually exclusive.
I’d say it goes beyond not being mutually exclusive. They complement each other, sometimes in surprising ways. Sacred geometry, concepts of frequency and vibrational rates, extracting signal from noise, if you are well versed in math and science you’ll find a lot of synchronicities. Fourier analysis dovetails with the concept of unity.
Pythagoras was what we might call an occultist. Newton was an alchemist (which isn’t about lead to gold, it’s about the transmutation of the Self), Jack Parsons was a Thelemite. Ramanujan credited his genius to visions.
Science and math can’t (yet) answer the big questions. There are things it doesn’t even try and touch. In my experience, curious minds are often interested in trying to attain a broader understanding of the universe and our place in it.
"Newton was an alchemist (which isn’t about lead to gold, it’s about the transmutation of the Self)"
Well, maybe not so much. That's kind of a 19th-20th century interpretation. We didn't want to believe that all these smart people really were into stupidity like turning lead into gold. Surely it must be much deeper than that! It must have been metaphors! But maybe not. Maybe they literally were into what they said they were into. It's not unlike how people want to claim that various religious stories weren't "really" about what they claim to be.
> We didn't want to believe that all these smart people really were into stupidity like turning lead into gold.
Alchemy was not stupid in the 17th century. You have the benefit of three centuries of subsequent scientific advances, to which geniuses like Isaac Newton, and those other smart people, contributed significantly.
Besides alchemy, Newton was deeply immersed in various occult studies. He was also a heretic, being a Unitarian, keeping his religious beliefs secret. Scientific research occupied only a part of his time. The seventeenth century was a time of religious and political turmoil, millenarianism and apocalyptic prophecy abounded. Newton was a man of his time.
Respectfully, Zosimus is one of the earliest Hellenistic writers on alchemy and he speaks of chemistry as a symbol:
“There are two sciences and two wisdoms, that of the Egyptians and that of the Hebrews, which latter is confirmed by divine justice. The science and wisdom of the most excellent dominate the one and the other. Both originate in olden times. Their origin is without a king, autonomous and immaterial; it is not concerned with material and corruptible bodies, it operates, without submitting to strange influences, supported by prayer and divine grace.
The symbol of chemistry is drawn from the creation by its adepts, who cleanse and save the divine soul bound in the elements, and who free the divine spirit from its mixture with the flesh.“
On the other hand we really can understand the chemistry that alchemists were fiddling with -- it wasn't metaphorical -- they really were messing around with chemicals and not souls. We still call some things by the names alchemists called them like "aqua regia" (literally "royal water") which is a nixture of nitric and hydrochloric acid that can dissolve gold and platinum. And which they hoped could therefore make more of it.
That to me is one of the most interesting aspects. Somehow, these people who were deeply spiritual, also were adepts of science, and while we can’t say any of them got it exactly right, the paths intersected enough that their contributions were in some ways foundational.
Psychology and psychiatry are two other fields that traveled the path of spirituality and occultism before becoming what we now term modern.
I grow heirloom tomatoes in the United States, and they are spectacular. The tomatoes available in the grocery store pale in comparison to anything grown in your own garden.
This probably has more to do with the fact that supermarket tomatoes are picked before they fully ripen on the vine (often green). I also enjoy growing my own (Brandywine is a favorite), and letting it ripen on-vine to the point where it's probably hours away from falling off or starting to rot results in a much better tasting tomato than jumping the gun.
I have to completely disagree. Application level metrics can also be emitted at the log level, but are much easier to work with as a metric. We have total request count, average request latency per route, and per HTTP response. This is extremely useful for finding performance regressions when new code is released.
I hope that it will work. I loved the forum days---there was a real sense of community there that does not exist on Reddit except for some very small subs.
I did have a quick play with Grafana Cloud using the default dashboards for their linux agent were so incredibly slow when trying to navigate simple metrics.
That has not been my experience whatsoever. At work we run our own self-hosted Grafana open-source and it's been fantastic. I've also run it on my own Raspberry Pi 4B at home and it's worked very well.
Yeah, that's not great. The interface seems snappier for me, but I may just be partial. I dunno. There is no perfect solution, but Grafana has been pretty amazing in my experiences.
I have improved my handwriting. It took a few months of consistent journaling with a fountain pen to find the "font" that worked for me. Now, I have different writing styles depending on how much time I can take. I use a broad nib for quick note taking because I don't have time to make it look "good", and a fine flex nib for when I'm journaling which I use to flourish things a bit.
In my next life I think I will do this. I decided to get married and have kids, so this one is mostly spoken for---but next time round I am doing the sabbatical thing.
It’s different when you have people depending on you! Not OP but I’d love to spend a sabbatical with my family… if I could afford it. I’d need a much bigger cushion.
I'm currently on long term parental leave, and my perspective differs. Sabbaticals are for changing your perspective and developing in different ways from full time work. I feel like I properly have time for my kids because they're the whole focus, so it doesn't feel like a list of chores at all, or something that is preventing from living life. Instead, it feels like the most fulfilling experience of my life so far.
Daily duties are still going to be there during a sabbatical. You still have to cook and wash your clothes, your teeth and upkeep your environment, but you have full flexibility of when and how and where.
Sounds like you haven't had children. It's pretty universal. It's incredibly draining literally every minute that they're awake. You have no time nor mental power left at the end of the day. For years.
I think it's very indivildual. My daughter is 9 months old now and only first 1-2 months were pretty draining. But then you just get used to it. Note that I'm working from home (for 4 years now). So it's not like I was rushing to an office asap every day.
This may be different if you have more that one kid or a different family situation of course.
My first was daughter was very quiet and I thought I somehow had got something right on first try. The next four of my kids has not been even though they share both parents.
I think I should be happy for this: If they'd all been as harmonic as my first one I could easily ended up giving well meant parenting advice telling others "just do as I did, be kind and careful and encouraging and it will sort itself out".
Exactly my thought. A well-sleeping kid who stays where you put them is not that much work for now. But when they start being mobile and explore the world on their own, you will need to keep an eye on them forever.
No judgement here - I’m a parent who continues to make mistakes.
But it doesn’t matter if you’re building software or raising a family - it doesn’t have to be draining. In fact your best work will never show up when it is.
We have two kids under 4, and among our friends, what amazes me is how different children are - and, therefore, the parenthood experience can be.
One of my girls is the sweetest, calmest, most peaceful bundle of hugs. The other is a low-sleep, hyper-energetic, demanding chatterbox. She is unyielding and relentless from 5am, every day, and raising her is draining.
I don’t mean “resentful” - we chose this experience and chose not to outsource them to childcare. But some kids are absolutely more work: if your every day is packed 5am-7pm with sales, negotiating, customer service, and all-team workshops, if you get little sleep and no weekends or half-days, year after year, you will be tired. I bootstrapped a software business to 7 figures ARR solo, and raising her is more draining. And more rewarding.
I never cease to be amazed at how many people aren't aware that there are difficult children to raise. They seem to think that how you feel about life is determined entirely by how well you Jedi mind trick your attitude into always being positive.
Life is hard for some people! Sorry you have to hear about it in public, but if it's that annoying for you to just hear it, imagine living it!
Many people (in fact more than 50% even in the US according to cnbc [1]) live paycheck to paycheck.
Not to mention that spending structure change over time. Back when I was 20 - I only needed that much money to buy myself some food and drinks, a pair of sneakers or boots once a few years + some here and there spending. Nothing big.
Now I need to provide for my kid, wife who is on maternalily leave and I need to save some money for my mother (call it her additional pension) and my family because you can really have a family and no savings. God knows what will happen.
And if you have a kid (even one) - you need to spend a ton of money on clothes alone. They grew really fast, they get dirty when they eat or shit (in case diaper was put in a wrong way at night for example) etc.
Unless you are really rich - you won't be able to leave your job for long. I can imaginge 3-6 months leave if you are a Senior Developer or higher and you live in a country with stable economy\political situation.
In any other case - I doubt anyone will take such risks unless they are literally about to go insane or something.
The fact that most people do it doesn't mean that _you_ as an individual have to do the same. Source: 40, 2 kids, single earner, could retire anytime I want.
"Could" is not the question here. The question is quality of life and for many people in many countries simply access to rather basic goods.
It's great that you can just retire anytime I you want, hopefull without any downgrade for family's well being. I'm just saying this is not always on option.
Maybe that's true up until you have a kid. Once you have a kid, spending expands as the kid does.
Baby require nothing but clothes, cheap food and love.
Teenagers require all sorts of things for school and activities. I mean, technically you don't have to provide them, I guess, but if you want a well developed kid who will have their own success, you have to do some investing.
I'm currently taking a sabbatical for a year. My son is still young enough that he finishes school in the early afternoon and we get to spend most of the day together. It is bliss. The projects that I'm working on still get time in the morning, and in the evening.
If you read many of the grimoires, there is very little NLP of any kind. The Papyri Graecae Magicae is one of the oldest explicitly magical documents we have from Greek Egypt, and it does have some manipulation spells (as most magical documents do) but none of this has to do with coersion to join a religion or join in a war, or to "do bad stuff". It's largely "technology" used by a practicing magician (a moonlighting Egyptian priest) to help the laity deal with their daily lives regarding helping their crops grow, animals not get sick, healing sick children, getting revenge on their neighbors and former lovers etc.
Magic is always a tool in the hands of the oppressed as a response to tyrannical hierarchy.