If I was French I'd end all my badly-written comments with a little French lesson, and that would make the readers forgive my errors and make me look intelligent and cultured. A beau mentir qui vient de loin, as we say in French. Le lémurien têtu porte des cache-oreilles.
But happiness wasn't mentioned. There was "fun", "I can't imagine what I would have done without them", and "preferable". If happiness is not the goal, your point about being happy with garbage is irrelevant.
And yes, base 4 does have distinct names in this system — and they're all in Unicode (though HN may not render them):
Two digits give you the Four Symbols: Old Yang (U+268C ), Young Yang (U+268F ), Young Yin (U+268D ), and Old Yin (U+268E ). Add a third digit and you get the Eight Trigrams (U+2630–2637 ), a core symbol of Daoism. Double that to six digits and you arrive at the 64 hexagrams — the I Ching, the Book of Changes, which many Chinese have believed could be used to divine the future.
Actually, Taiji, Yin-Yang, and Daoism are deeply related. Dividing Taiji gives you Yin and Yang — humanity recognizing something out of nothing, order emerging from chaos, duality arising from the void. You learn what "good" is, then you know "not good"; we coined "LLM," and we also invented "not LLM." They always come in pairs — that's the fundamental rule. We're essentially dividing iteratively, building our culture and recognition by inventing new names, mappings, and combinations to carve distinctions from some "embedding space." And we humans, including LLMs, learn from those names.
So the progression is: Void/Chaos/Taiji/(Singularity?) → 2 (Yin / Yang ) → 4 (Four Symbols) → 8 (Trigrams) → 64 (Hexagrams). At its core, it's philosophical thinking — and personally, I believe there's great wisdom in it. For example, we should never be trapped by names and should always think beyond it.
(Shameless plug: I came to know about this about a year ago and still find it fascinating. I even built a site about all this — https://ichingdao.love)
Kind of. And as a guy with a solid science background, I just don't buy into that kind of interpretation.
But if it is numerology, I believe I CHING divination is more like a commit-and-reveal scheme — you can't infer the future from the proof alone. You might only get to verify it once the future actually plays out. Kind of like a zero-knowledge proof — it gives you a proof/advice based on a possible future, but you gain nothing from it since the underlying computation is NP-hard. So better to treat it as a kind of thinking framework — like SWOT or scenario planning, but from a different cultural tradition.
The inefficiency of the bureaucracy of limiting welfare (or charity) to the poor and needy. I don't know, though, maybe giving everybody's money to everybody cancels itself out.
You're giving money to everybody but then anyone who isn't poor and needy has to pay taxes on their income that more than offset the money. It's taking "the bureaucracy of limiting welfare (or charity)" and folding it in with the IRS and the local Department of Revenue.
Yes, although we do measure it in square meters (or acres, or tatami mats).
Is there such a thing as "partially zero-sum"? I mean, to express how, unless you get really creative in difficult ways, the supply of land is under pressure due to other people taking all the currently useful parts of it, such as the parts on your island and not underwater.
reply