> Also, Git's CLI aggressively obscures those core concepts, so any learner is in an uphill battle even if their mind does happen to work the right way

Thank you, that resonates

Ah, that's great, sounds like we are allies, for example when arguing for "let it crash" and other take aways from the Erlang error reporting philosophy in the Julia community.

And thus we who transitioned to Julia from R and know a bit about martingales and less about programming have long been trying to degrade the core of the language and its principles by making `mean` a Base function.

> more than the typical "the code auto-differentiates" or "it's faster" or whatever it is that people have said in the past

Why are you asking to be convinced if you don't want to be convinced?

La mayoría de humans ist gewohnt avoir mehr letters que clés de toute façon.

I would never put in 45s by pressing buttons, it seems we are alike there. But I would put 45 sec in with a (rotary) time control knob though, maybe you want to reevaluate.

That’s an amazingly modern take.

Stoicism in general has aged very well. When I read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, I was amazed at how relevant the thing still is, even though it’s 1.8K+ years old at this point.

It’s funny, I’ve always heard great things about Meditations but I found it to be one of the least approachable books on stoicism. Perhaps I didn’t like the terse note format. On the other hand Seneca’s letters are extraordinary

Hum... It didn't age any well before it got a chance to age well.

It's coherent with modernity because we have are in a time where that mindset is popular, and since there are only a few alternatives, we are prone into cycling between them at random and revisit each one from time to time.

Eventually, it will pass, and it will become old and unfit again.

It's often claimed that the Meditations are actually Marcus Aurelius's own words. When I traced the lineage of the text, the best I could find was something like several hundred years back with the primary text being possessed by the church. None of this takes away from the relevance of the text—it stands on its own.

Does anyone know of an accounting of the primary text which shows that it wasn't written by a monk or priest of the Catholic church?

I'm definitely no textual criticism expert, but I do have a book recommendation.

The Inner Citadel by Hadot is a great analysis of the Meditations. It explains extracts from the Meditations – such as references to certain people in Marcus's life – with facts we know about Marcus from other sources.

For me personally... While it could be an elaborate imitation, it would raise the question why Marcus espouses views that don't necessarily tie with Christian doctrine. Obviously something about the Meditations appealed to Christians of the time, but if they were inventing it whole cloth, they probably wouldn't have included only one reference to Christianity, which is arguably negative. (Book 2, chp3)

Just because you were of the cloth didn't mean you were a raving fundamentalist. Who else was going to house, feed, and protect you and allow you to read and think all day?

Both have roots in Platonism so makes sense they would have significant overlap.

And what is Platonism but Christianity for people who have read a certain preface from Nietzche

It gives you a really solid framework for not worrying about why things happen and who they happen to. A very valuable skill indeed in our world where everywhere you look there is preventable misery. Modern indeed! It's no wonder it's so popular with tech workers.

He has some Epicurean influence as well. In the early days they were both popular, then changes in religious sentiment and denunciation of Epicureanism as sensualism changed that. Stoicism is ingrained with comparatively more spirituality and austerity.

Epictetus is very good in general.

If you find a good modern translation (Robin Hard is good), I emphatically recommend reading the discourses. Don't cheap out and suffer through some stuffy 19th century translation.

Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius and Seneca are all excellent reads.

At the other end of the spectrum, I've suffered through some overly-simplified/modernized translations of fiction (e.g. Dostoevsky's the Gambler) that was complete butchery, but I guess this is less likely to occur with non-fiction.

Would it not be better at this point to move on?

The notions first index, current index, previous index, next index and last index and each index are all invariant under shifts of the index set... yet this is the hill people choose to die on.

Some abstractions are costly if the compiler doesn't optimize them away, so one use is to check if that happens. So one iterates changing the Julia code, not the machine code mostly.