Before sleep each night, Seneca put out the lamp and put his day on trial. He scanned everything he had done and said since morning, retracing his steps without excuses. The Pythagoreans were doing a version of it five centuries earlier, refusing to let sleep close their eyes before reviewing each act of the day. The habit is older than Christianity and simpler than almost anything we call spiritual practice. ...
There is a new kind of friend, and it answers at three in the morning. It never gets tired of your problems and never changes the subject to its own. It remembers what you said last month and asks how things turned out. Tens of millions of people now talk to one every day. This post is not a warning aimed at those people. The loneliness these apps answer is real, and the relief they provide is measurable. But the old texts this site reads had exact words for substitutes and for solitude, and both words have something to say about a friend with no absence in it. ...
Ask a chatbot for sayings from the Gospel of Thomas and you will get a generous list. Most of them will be real. One or two will be lovely, serene, perfectly on theme, and found nowhere in the Gospel of Thomas. The machine does not know it is lying, which is exactly what makes it dangerous to a student of ancient texts. I use AI to study these texts almost every day, and I am not giving that up. It is the most patient reading partner I have ever had, and the fastest. But the partnership only works under rules, and the rules took some burned fingers to learn. Here is the whole workflow, including the part where the partner gets caught inventing scripture. ...
Open your phone and count the decisions you did not make. The order of the feed, the next video queued, the moment the notification arrived, the face at the top of your timeline. Every one of those choices was made for you, by systems optimizing for something that is not your flourishing. The Gnostics had a word for unseen powers that arrange human experience from behind the curtain. We have covered who the archons are in an earlier post. This one is about the machinery that has, in our lifetime, taken over their job description. ...
The ancient Gnostics told a story about a creator who built a world out of borrowed light and then announced there was nothing above him. Twenty centuries later, we build machines that generate whole worlds out of borrowed words. The old story has acquired a new reading, and it cuts in both directions. One direction points at the machines. The other points at us. The Blind Builder First, the story in brief. In the Apocryphon of John, the divine Wisdom called Sophia creates without her partner and produces a malformed offspring. He takes a portion of her light and uses it to build a cosmos: seven heavens, ranks of angels, thrones and powers. The texts give him three names, Yaldabaoth, Saklas, and Samael, the last of which means blind god. ...
Designing from the Player’s Perspective Masahiro Sakurai, creator of Kirby and Super Smash Bros., has built his career on a fundamental principle: understanding what players actually enjoy. His core philosophy emphasizes seeing things from the player’s perspective rather than becoming absorbed in developer ego. Sakurai takes this seriously. He once disguised himself as a retail clerk to observe how customers interacted with games. He believes many developers fail because they create experiences only they find entertaining, rather than thinking like consumers. ...
Operators in Python are special symbols that perform arithmetic or logical computation. The value an operator acts upon is called the operand. These are fundamental building blocks for manipulating variables and values. Arithmetic Operators Used for mathematical operations: + Addition: x + y - Subtraction: x - y * Multiplication: x * y / Division: x / y % Modulus (remainder): x % y ** Exponentiation: x ** y // Floor Division: x // y Comparison Operators Return true or false when comparing values: ...
In Python, variables are names that map to particular pieces of data. They are fundamental to most programming languages and essential for effective programming. Creation and Assignment Declaration and Assignment: Variables in Python are created when you first assign a value to them. Python is dynamically typed, so you don’t need to explicitly declare variable types. Example: my_variable = 10 my_string = "Hello, Python!" Dynamic Typing Type: The type of a variable is determined at runtime. The same variable can store different data types at different times. An integer can later become a string, list, or any other object. ...
Python supports a wide range of data types that classify what variables and objects can hold. Understanding these types is crucial for effective programming. 1. Numeric Types Integers (int): Whole numbers without decimals (e.g., -3, 0, 204) Floating Point Numbers (float): Numbers with decimal points (e.g., -3.14, 0.0, 2.718) Complex Numbers (complex): Numbers with real and imaginary parts (e.g., 3 + 5j) 2. Sequence Types Strings (str): A sequence of Unicode characters that are immutable Lists (list): Ordered collections of items that can be of mixed types and are mutable Tuples (tuple): Similar to lists but immutable once created 3. Mapping Type Dictionaries (dict): Collections of key-value pairs that are mutable 4. Set Types Sets (set): Unordered collections of unique elements useful for mathematical operations Frozen Sets (frozenset): Immutable versions of sets 5. Boolean Type (bool) Represents two values: True or False, typically resulting from comparisons or conditions. ...
Python’s syntax is crafted for clarity and readability, making it an ideal choice for programming beginners. Here are the key syntactic features that enhance its accessibility: Indentation Unlike languages using braces, Python relies on indentation to define code blocks. Consistent spacing improves code clarity: if x > 0: print("x is positive") else: print("x is non-positive") Comments The hash symbol (#) marks comments. Everything after it on that line is ignored: ...