Personally I am attracted to the simplicity of the I Ching in that I can do a reading for someone very quickly in the field without a lot of explaining (off brand as-a-fox) so I pack an assortment of coins in my tail (ahem… backpack) though I am still looking for a second pocket I Ching so I have something other than Wilhelm.
regarding a 'second pocket' version: You absolutely have to check out Bradford Hatcher (https://hermetica.info/).
He is actually the biggest inspiration behind my development process. His work is incredibly deep, pragmatic, and distinct from the 'Christianized' tone you sometimes get with Wilhelm. He offers his massive 2-volume translation for free on his site.
I am actually considering digitizing his text as an alternative option on my site because his word-by-word matrix is just mind-blowing. Let me know if you find his style fits your 'field reading' vibe.
Yeah, but there are enough passionate anti-AI people out there that reaching out to them could be the killer marketing move of 2026. The poll is 4% Yes, 96% No when I checked it. It's pretty clear that pro-AI marketing falls flat, see "Copilot + PC"
People pushing AI might get investors today, but companies that take a stand against it might get the customers. Pick one.
If you vote Yes AI, you get a link to https://yesai.duckduckgo.com/ which references http://duck.ai/, DDG's AI platform, and the passionate anti-AI people don't like anything AI adjacent which DDG is doing.
What does having both an AI and a non-AI mode have to do with the vote not being a representative sample? Did they promote this vote exclusively to one camp or the other?
Another aspect of internet polls as a marketing technique (and a poor source of representative opinion) is to implicitly encourage voters to brigade a certain option, which just increases visibility to the poll especially if it's a contentious topic.
I used to evangelize pro AI, but these days I am staunchly anti. Not AI specifically, but corporate involvement in any aspect of it's development or rollout. Behavior to date does not inspire confidence in competence or moral/ethical soundness.
The aggressive non-consensual attempts to force it into every aspect of our lives is itself plenty of proof for the fact we cannot trust it.
For personal interest stuff I use my YOShInOn RSS reader which uses k-Means clustering and a BERT + SVM classifier to select articles for me -- and if you look at what I post from HN you will get a good idea of what it shows me.
These are fields where I am an interested outsider: I think biotechnology will be to the 21st century what electronics was to the 20th, I'm just as concerned about growing food in the global south and in Iowa or on Mars, think political science + politics outside the us is better than #uspol, like custom cars and 3-d printing, making the carbon cycle go backwards and think we have solutions for the very hard problems that we face.
Now I do a lot of learning in the areas of my work, but other than reading HN and occasional stuff that turns up on YOShInOn I do not look for "news" on these topics. For instance I have no fear that if I'm not following the most fashionable accounts on AI research on X I will fall behind, in fact, I know that if I did I would have a terrible fear of falling behind.
Instead my learning is focused primarily around projects that I do and I do projects that challenge my abilities. Right now I am working on biofeedback technology, heart-rate variability and stuff and I've rapidly learned about the web Bluetooth API and physiology and all of that. I can go to a lab where people do HRV research and demo something with my tablet and one or more Polar H10s that is light years ahead of what they've got in terms of convenience and clarity -- it's amazing to be able to talk to people about your physiology or their physiology or both in real time and see the phenomena with your own eyes.
I'm reading about research from the 1970s that has been forgotten and that's how you become the kind of person who sees "inevitable" where others see "impossible". Trying to keep up with the pack means you'll always be afraid of getting left behind. I've learned about so many other things the same way.
Right now I am in the middle of accessibility work for a game that students wrote and the hardest thing about the work is managing my emotions which involves a mixture of "unstable footing" and "moral injury".
The unstable footing is working with dull tools, having to find real solutions to real problems that don't break the game but also having to find ways to clear false alarms that SiteImprove finds and hopefully document it enough that the next people to work on the project can keep it accessible. I've found that most screen readers are trash (some lock up my computer) and have to test with a specific configuration that seems to work and just not concern myself with people using other tools. There is a lot of backtracking and asking "is there a different way we can do this?", etc.
The moral injury is that the whole process of WCAG, SiteImprove and all that actually erase the voices and experiences of disabled people. We are ticking boxes but never testing that disabled people can really use something, asking what they think, etc. Sometimes I feel that my values about craftsmanship are violated and that I am being accountable and my organization is being held accountable (our customers require this) but the WCAG standards people are not held accountable, SiteImprove is not being held accountable, vendors of trash screen readers are not being held accountable, the people who make frameworks like MUI aren't being held accountable, etc.
It helps that I believe in accessibility and that I believe in my organization and that it is seen as critical in my organization and that they give me the time and space to do work that feels like working in a collapsed building but on a bad day it feels like I am working very hard and giving my all for nothing.
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As for the "invisible disabilities", I have one, they tried really hard to help me in school before there was a legal framework that enshrined the "students with a disability label can call Albany and Albany can light a fire under the ass of the superintendent and all the rest of the parents and students can just talk to the hand" regime. A good fraction of people who are fashionably autistic and ADHD and even transgender probably have what I have. 47 years after my first psych eval (all the signs and symptoms but no diagnosis) I turned it unequivocally into a superpower.
When I was an undergrad I knew a blind student who studied computer science, wrote C with a screen reader, volunteered for search and rescue and walked up a 13,000 foot mountain at night: he was asked what we could do for him and he said "i need to hold on the shoulder of someone ahead of me" and he was in the fastest group. There are two wheelchair icons in America: one of them suggests that someone is waiting passively for help in a wheelchair, the other one suggests you'd better watch out or you might get run down by someone in a wheelchair -- you know which one I like!
Many people who I would describe as "diss ability" activists would reject my story about my friend and they have a very anti-resilient attitude and what I'll say is that I do everything I can to shut those people out of my life. I feel my accessibility work is meaningless to those people, they are going to complain about everything in life and never recognize my hard work and dedication. But empowering people who will make the most of their abilities -- that gets me fired up and makes it all worth it.
I do see the class injustice. I've seen upper-middle class people with relatively little impairment get disability payments and severely impaired people not being able to get the paperwork started, even when I was personally helping them out.
So I can't accept the position of this article completely but I can't dismiss it either.
I didn't believe the stress numbers on my Garmin watch were very meaningful until I started taking Nebivolol (an atypical beta blocker) because there were so many gaps (even when I was sitting) that I didn't feel I could eyeball them or trust averages over time.
Taking that drug, however, it sees far fewer gaps and I show up in the blue "rest" zone most of the time.
I've been watching my heart rate a lot in the last month part because of health concerns and part because of a new stance I am practicing that has a physical component (e.g. adjusted gaits that are energy efficient) and a mental component, being an oceanic reservoir of calm with close mind-body-environment coupling 95% of the time but disconnecting that connection under peak stress -- like I am standing between two people who are screaming at each other and holding a barrier at my chest that I don't let my breathing cross and glance at my watch and my HR is 52 and it is not just the nebivolol talking because when I lose my shit it would be more like 70.
People taught me conventional Pranayama (diaphragmatic breathing) as a kid and it never helped me in "lose my shit" situations involving unstable environments and moral injury, with the intense practice I was doing recently it was clear to me that I was never going to do it better and I started researching emergency techniques for managing sympathetic overload and that one worked for me and now I feel like one of the people in [1] particularly when I show people my HRV web app [2] and demonstrate that I can turn my Mayer oscillation off
I'm reminded of my polish neighbors when I was growing up where the half-crippled old lady next door had gotten furious with her husband and was moving mattresses around to set up her own bed in the spare room because she couldn't stand to be in the same room as her husband.
I also remember back when I was doing extreme business development and my phone was a portal to the "island of misfit toys" and talking with an inventor who thought he'd cracked the code of managing temperature at sleep and was supposedly a year out from releasing a revolutionary bed that looked like a UFO on Amazon and... it didn't happen.
MAME is such fun code to work with. I remember being in a small apartment in Germany with my wife in Dec 1998 and hacking MESS to get saves working in The Legend of Zelda so she could play it through. That kinda systems work can be initially intimidating but the complexity of something like a 6502 is nothing compared to a middling webapp today.
AI-based product that slips past the defenses of people who think they hate AI, get turned off by branding like Copilot + PC, etc. A lot of people are really hoping it all dries up and blows away the way NFTs did.
Or maybe the honest to God non-dull tool that has nothing to do with AI. Like a Photoshop clone that does everything in linear light, makes gorgeous images, and doesn't crash when you open the font chooser.
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