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Determinism and Stoicism

Billiards

Man can indeed do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wants.
Arthur Schopenhauer

It is very likely that the outcome of most things in the world, including the desires1 and mental states2 of ourselves3 and others, are already predetermined4 by events in the distant past. A criminal or good Samaritan, for example, can be viewed as a person whose antecedent moral, social and genetic factors have resulted in them being bound, so to speak, to have either the desire to help others or a lack of self control resulting in the criminal act. This is not to say that they should not be punished or praised, for we know that such interventions can be beneficial. Rather, we should view their acts with the same amount of significance as we would to our expectations of a faulty program running smoothly or a mouse outrunning a cheetah, because we know that the outcome could not have been otherwise, given the antecedent factors.

Setup SSH with Certificates on Windows (and a bit of Linux)

The Secure Shell Protocol (SSH) allows one to remotely access a terminal interface on a remote machine. In addition, it allows for capabilities such as port tunneling1, file transfers and screen forwarding.

The main reasons for setting up SSH access on my machine were to allow me to:

On Deep Work

Girl Studying

I believe that useful work, of lasting value to oneself and others, comes from uninterrupted concentration. Intuitively it makes sense - imaging working on a complex task, requiring you to hold many pieces of information in your mind simultaneously in order to produce a result, something common in knowledge fields. When you are interrupted, such as by an instant message or some other notification, your attention on the main task is lost, some new context is loaded into your memory as necessary to deal with processing the distraction, and by the time you resume the main task, it becomes harder to recall the pieces of information you were holding in your memory earlier.