I didn't encounter the Dao de Jing until later in life, but the opening bit has always seemed straightforward to me. I first saw it as "the way that can be described is not the Way", but also "the way that can be traveled is not the eternal Way". That is, the eternal (spiritual) Way cannot be concretized, just as a name is not the real thing. Or, given that this is HN, "the software development methodology that can be executed like a program is not software development methodology". ("The Agile that can be PM'd is not Agile.")
However, I think it might require some life maturity to recognize that. Certainly a recovery from Englightenment rationalism. My person experience is that an understanding that "the name that can be named/identified is not the eternal Name" and "the way that can be walked is not the eternal Way" took me until around my 40s to appreciate.
Daoism also appears to have taken a literalist turn (ironically). The book "Taoism: the Parting of the Ways" [1], by (former) Harvard Professor Holmes Welch, interprets the text as being a guide to a mystical way of living, similar to St. John of the Cross (minus the Christian part), which is fascinating. Then he describes how the two main factions took the text literally, and how that evolved.
> but the opening bit has always seemed straightforward to me
the a/symmetry of the opening bits in Chinese, visually echoes a taiji:
> 道可道，
> 非恆道；
> 名可名，
> 非恆名。
given the diversity of translations available for those bits, I think it's fair to say that there's room for debate regarding their exact meaning − dare I say
amusingly, by being certain one understand what it means, somehow one really does not. Lao-Tseu may have been way, way wiser than average.
> Daoism also appears to have taken a literalist turn (ironically).
It's incredibly ironic. To those who wonder where the irony is, imagine writing a book of poems on "freesbeing", which you describe as an ineffable experience that one gets when they play the freesbee. In your book, most passages allude to subtleties that escape any reader who isn't a freesbee enthousiast. And so, only those who pick up a freesbee and start throwing it unlock the meaning in your book. Then thousands of years later, intellectuals try to explain "freesbeing" without knowing what even is the freesbee.
Daoism is a practical guide to a mystical way of life. Similar to the teachings of Buddhist mystics, Advaitist mystics, Christian mystics, Sufi mystics, and so forth. Most such teachings are very practical and somewhat point in the same (inner) direction. A shared core tenet is that experiences are infinitely more valid (i.e. true) than the content of thoughts (i.e. concepts, philosophy, beliefs, labels, words, etc) used to describe them. Said more commonly, the mind -- the craddle of thoughts, the mother of all concepts, explanations, and philosophies -- is a liar. This is peppered everywhere in the Tao Te Ching, starting from the very first line. Yet, most interpretations of it are conceptual, trying to make it into some kind of a philosophy.
This is straight-up Baudrillard simulacra/simulation.
The moment you say "Dao" (or "Agile", or "methodology"), you've already moved from the thing-in-itself to a sign living inside a sign system. That sign can be useful, but it can't be identical to what it points at.
> “The Agile that can be PM’d is not Agile.”
That’s exactly the stages of simulacra in miniature:
- Faithful copy: "Agile" names a set of lived practices that correspond to reality.
- Masks/denatures: cargo-cult rituals distort it (standups-as-status-reporting).
- Masks absence: the org performs Agile theater to hide that genuine agility is gone.
- Pure simulacrum: "Agile" becomes a self-referential brand/signifier (certs, metrics, tooling) that relates primarily to other signs ("Agile maturity model", "story points velocity"), not to any actual working output.
For a reductionist, it might be better understood as - step outside of your usual mode of thinking. Remember that you don't know everything. Or just - take time to stop and smell the flowers. Try to spend more time noticing and less time analyzing.
There are things that are difficult to communicate directly in the reductionist mode of thought - and are intended to have meaning at multiple levels of abstraction. You have to think a bit more laterally.
Jean Baudrillard is a fraud/charlatan. Semiotics is a fake field. Him and all his friends (i.e. Foucualt, Derrida, DnG, Althussar, etc) are at Chiropractors/ Homeopaths for the mind and at worst actual useful idiots for western intelligence agencies.
To clarify, that sentence is not from a Spanish translation of the Tao Te Ching; it is a fragment of Antonio Machado's poem 'Caminante no hay camino':
Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.
One reading I came across claimed the author of `art of war' had his foot amputated in a form of punishment. You had to be careful with your language at court in those times.
It is possible to associate passages from the Tao Te Ching to memes that just pop up in your social media feeds. A native speaker and writer will have rich associations in the language you can get a sense of in the language used to cover Chinese philosophy at the SEP entries.
Interesting. Your comparison reminds me of something from Lacanian psychoanalysis: the idea that people often mistake themselves for the symbolic labels they occupy, their title for instance. Like a doctor who would praise himself for being a doctor, a president a president.
From that perspective, both versions of the Tao Te Ching line point to the same thing: what can be named, praised, or socially recognized isn’t the true underlying reality.
Different phrasing, but the same structural idea.
More generalized, any kind of symbol representing something is not the something. The social labelling is very accessible, true now and true then.
There’s a Zen koan about that (with Zen coming from Chang which came from a meeting of Buddhism and Taoism in China) — about the finger pointing to the moon, and how all but one student looked at the finger.
In a different example, there is the distinction of virtue signaling and virtue (the “Te” in “Tao Te Ching”)
It's a text about non-duality, among other things. Like the Heart Sutra, or the Diamond Sutra, or 101 Zen Stories, it's not supposed to make sense in an ordinary way. A successful translation is, like the original, intended to catalyze a shift in awareness.
EDIT: For those with a nerdy or scholarly bent, I suggest Red Pine's translation[0], which includes translation of historically relevant commentaries.
Thank you, this there is the first version I see that feels like it's got solid cultural context. I like Ursula's version and have read her books over the years, but for example when she write "mystery" in there I always felt she was dropping the ball a bit.
How can something translate into both of those things? The second translation doesn't have the concept of "saying" anything and the first translation says nothing about "wealth".
I would add "The Tao is silent" by Raymond Smullyan to this list. It's not a translation, or even a rendition, but I should guess anyone with a real interest in the Tao will find that book interesting as well.
Government contractor's estimation is based on what number is politically acceptable, not how much the project would realistically take. 90% of public projects were overbudget [0].
But you're pretty spot on, as 'professionally acceptable' indeed means politically acceptable most of the time. Being honest and admitting one's limit is often unacceptable.
Yes, my claim is absolutely not that they're good at it haha.
Estimation is a real problem in a lot of industries, including ours, and I think that's probably common ground here -- I suppose my differing position is that I think the solution is to get better at it, not to refuse to do it.
I've been on projects where I've seen the budget explode and projects where I've seen the budget kept tight and on track. The latter is very hard and requires effort from ALL sides to work, but it's almost always achievable.
I actually empathize a little bit more with megaprojects because generally the larger the budget the harder it will be to keep on track in my experience. Most estimates we're asked to give in our day jobs are not even multi-million dollar estimates.
Also I'm using budget and estimate interchangeably but these are of course different things -- that's one of my nitpicks is that we often treat these as the same thing when we talk about estimating being hard. A lot of individual estimates can be very wrong without affecting the ultimate budget.
For something as widely adopted as Windows, the only sensible alternative is to not encrypt the disk by default.
The default behavior will never ever be to "encrypt the disk by a key and encrypt the key with the user's password." It just doesn't work in real life. You'll have thousands of users who lost access to their disks every week.
It works for macOS. Filevault key is encrypted by user password. User login screen is shown early in boot process, so that Filevault is able to decrypt data and continue boot process. It sure works fine for a about a decade. No TPM nonsense required. Imo, the TPM based key only makes sense for unattended systems such as servers.
While this is true, why even bother turning on encryption and making it harder on disk data recovery services in that case?
Inform, and Empower with real choices. Make it easy for end users to select an alternate key backup method. Some potential alternatives: Allow their bank to offer such a service. Allow friends and family to self host such a service. Etc.
Stolen laptops would be my one idea here to always encrypt, even if MS / Apple has your key and can easily give it to the government? This way you have to know a user's password / login info to steal their information if you steal their computer (for the average theif). You still get their laptop, but you don't get their personal information without their login information.
> I think, when you are building a system, restricting all (human language) input to be UTF-8 is a fair and reasonable design decision, and then you can use strlen to your hearts content.
It makes no sense. If you only need the byte count then you can use strlen no matter what the encoding is. If you need any other kind of counting then you don't use strlen no matter what the encoding is (except in ASCII only environment).
"Whether I should use strlen or not" is a completely independent question to "whether my input is all UTF-8."
TIL they allowed that before. It sounds a bit crazy. Like Google is inviting people to repackage google search itself and sell it / serve with their own ads.
I tried it and contributed to searx. It didn't give the same result as Google, and it also have 10k request rate limit (per month I believe). More than that you'll have to "contact us"
> Building all the software you use yourself, whether by hand or by vibe coding, cuts you off from the world.
No one is doing that. In foreseeable future I don't see people making their own OSs, browsers and drivers. Workplaces never ditched Offices and Windows for the open source counterparts and they are certainly not going to do that for vibe coded solutions.
> In the pre-LLM days people with resolve to make 1-user version were likely to polish it for 100-users and somewhat likely to get it to a stable place when it can satisfy thousands of user
And then put it on an app store and put all the vital features behind $15/mo subscription.
Which is totally justified! I understand the time and energy needed to get a product polished for 10,000 users. But thanks, I will take my vibe coded one.
> First of all, I’m skeptical about these being free. Time isn’t free, and the tokens to make these projects certainly weren’t free.
Yes, but it's almost one time payment. Your own personal use case is usually narrow enough, and you don't need to support different OS/browsers. You can vibe code it and just forget the fact it's coded.
Actually it's the best use case for vibe coding (the strict meaning of this word) - when you don't plan to maintain the codebase anyway.
Hell, it's hard to translate it into Chinese. Even the first paragraph is controversial. For example this rendition says:
> The name you can say
> isn’t the real name.
However, in a 5th century interpretation[0], it's more akin to:
> The fame and wealth the mortals praise are not a natural state.
(My extremely simplified paraphrasing)
[0]: https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=gb&chapter=491818
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