This has broadly been my experience of secular meditation also, I haven’t explored any other schools.
What did help me though was a book called “Constructive Living” by David K Reynolds. It talks a lot about what you mention. The importance of “doing what needs to be done”.
I got quite into meditating, but I found it just made me go far too inside my own head. It’s easy to feel compassion inside your own house.
Yes, something about living in the moment and responding skillfully and helpfully naturally. Doing those things naturally is what takes practice, you just don't get practice exercising those compassion-action responses if you only do mantras in your own home and it remains entirely theoretical.
I suppose it's fair that in some senses "enlightenment" is orthogonal to "being good" if you use some systems of analysis. By that logic monks sequestered in a monastery are doing something important (?) even if there's little measurable impact of their work on the world around them. I have issues with that logic, I think "to whom" is important and if the answer is "to the person doing it" I'm not sure compassion is really the right adjective anymore.
Of course, translation challenges abound in this area of discussion.
> Another cool thing about LTI systems is that when you chain multiple of them together, the order does not matter. Reverb, delay, EQ, and wah are all LTI.
Delay and reverb may be LTI in your definition, but they very much do matter what order they are in, every time.
Delay before reverb is going to give a more staccato sound, whereas the reverb before delay is probably just going to wash the whole thing out if you’re not careful on your settings.
I suspect you are right when it comes to analog circuits, but they are definitely LTI in a typical digital implementation. I checked this by adding reverb+delay and delay+reverb to two copies of a track in REAPER. I inverted the phase of one, played them together, and they cancelled out.
I forget where I’ve heard this so sorry in advance for the unsourced claim, but I think white noise is much better for humans to place in space. Higher frequency beeps can bounce around much more than a broad spectrum white noise blast.
Anecdotally they tend to travel much less, and generally be less annoying too. I can hear a beeping truck from ages away in my flat, but not once have I thought “god I wish that kssh kssh would stop”.
I think there’s some benefits to guided meditation in general. Different techniques (body scanning, breath counting, etc) aren’t necessarily obvious to people looking to meditate.
People also come to meditation for different reasons. Some want to chill out, others want to be more present in every day life.
I assume you’re well practiced so you’ll know that ultimately apps aren’t what you need for “real” meditation. I think they’re a good starting point for many though.
I'd just save the ones I didn't want to see somewhere else not on the phone. That way, the ones that are good memories can stay, and the ones that aren't can just go.
Ofcom (the UK’s coms regulator) has just announced a review of net neutrality [1]. Which will have some big companies aiming to give themselves more “flexibility”.
Currently however, providers are bound by EU mandates to treat every packet the same (roughly speaking).
Unicode reflects a reality about human writing systems. They are very complicated. This is more or less guaranteed to result in Unicode being contentious.
After all, it's obvious features my native language has are important and need to be first class APIs in the standard library, while any features that language doesn't use has aren't important and the standard library shouldn't be clogged up with anything so useless. Also things that are easy to do for my preferred writing system must be supported, if the easy way to implement them doesn't work for some other widely used languages, just ignore that, those people don't matter anyway.
Basically because there's 2 major ways to do it: the Windows way and the Unix way (UTF-8). Unicode has the concept of encodings and it doesn't tell you which one to use.
The Unix way is winning on the web, and I think Microsoft has made some moves toward UTF-8, but I don't understand what they are exactly:
JavaScript and Java inherited the Windows way. Go and Rust use the Unix way (and apparently OCaml too). Python supports both which some say is a needless source of complexity, but it is flexible if you know how to use it.
