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Weak points

Your greatest vulnerabilities are in things that you need, that you are earnestly looking for.

If you are searching hard for a cure to a disease, it will be easier to fool you with fake medicines.
If you are looking for answers to bigger questions in life, you are an ideal prey for all the religious agendas.

So stay watchful in every step of life, small or big, about what is it that you are looking for at any particular moment. And constantly remind yourself of your vulnerability to anything in that field.

Death justifies everything.

Funny as we are busy looking for the justification of death, when death itself is the justification of everything else.

General Formula for Success

These are some of the most generally applicable techniques and strategies to succeed:

1. Start early. Earlier than most others. In most things where any sort of competition is involved, starting early gives you an unfair advantage.

2. Show persistence. Repetitive trial. If you can't do something in one shot, try it gradually, each time improving the quality a little bit.

3. Be courageous and self confident. It's usually relatively better to overestimate yourself than underestimating.

4. Maintain excellent physique.

Tension

It's hard to progress during a war. It's only harder other times.

How to write a good book

These are the key points you need to keep in mind:

1. Appropriateness of words

2. Each sentence is tightly logically following from the previous set of sentences. (Make it increasingly harder for the reader to disagree with each successive statement )

3. Minimize context switch (only when the next sentence I need to write can’t be derived from previous one.)

4. Concreteness. Minimize ambiguity without losing reach/breadth of expression

5. Shorter without sacrificing lucidity

6. Novelty/ Originality. Each paragraph should have a clear original contribution.

Sand Castle

You can't base something eternal like your soul on things that are subject to change any time - that is your subjective experience or qualia.

Organize your thoughts. The rest will follow.

How to make an argument

If you want to be liked by people even when arguing and without sacrificing your personality, you may want to try the following principles.

1. Avoid using negative connotation, even when you mean it. Always start by appreciating what they said explaining them back that you understood what they said. Whether you agreed or not is not important. Make sure you repeat what they say in a way that clearly proves you heard them.

2. Talk less. The less you do, the higher the chance of being heard. Do not reply immediately.

3. Adapt to the other persons situation and background. Using the same angle of attack to everyone won't work. And accept the fact that the amount of information you can deliver to anyone in a specific time is limited by the receiver's capacity and condition.

4. Avoid being loud. Do not insult.

5. Stay on the point. Avoid logical fallacies (google/wiki it).

How to stay focused

These are the things that you can do to stay focused. The list only includes the points that are not obvious.

1. Take a shower, eat some food and drink a cup of regular hot tea, without milk and with sugar
2. Monitor the progression of your thought or topic of interest. If you are changing context, put a marker so that you can return back to the original context.
3. Do not move your body too much.
4. Stay slightly hungry
5. Breathe deep and easy

How to rent an apartment or house

These are the things you would like to check before making a decision while choosing your next home. The list only includes items that are usually overlooked and not very intuitive at first thought.

1. Is there good reception of cell phone inside the house?
2. Checking sex offender and crime report near the location using crimereport.com or similar website
3. You can look up the names of residents of the nearby houses from the county's tax commissioner's website. The information is really public and free.
4. Traffic report. You can use google map to see traffic pattern during different times of the day
5. Drive by the place once during weekdays and also in weekends to see the local vibes, what kids do, what kind of people hang out, etc.
6. Is there bug problems? Bed bugs? Roaches?

Recipe for Vegetable Soup

Made vegetable soup and it came out very good.

I used:

Vegetable Oil,

Onion,
Baby carrots, 
Zucchini,
Squash
Green Beans
Salsa (that we eat with Tostito)
Chicken Broth (reduced sodium)

Rosemary
Pach foron (Bangladeshi spice mix)
Black pepper
Salt

Cooked in high pressure

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Change

To look for change, to alter direction, to break the status quo, to diversify is one of the most fundamental tendencies of a mind.

What entails Understanding

The argument from reason didn't convince me well.

There is a clear difference between computing an input information to produce a specific output, from understanding it in human way. The difference is not vague, and not complex.

What we meant by understanding or feeling something (concept) is the relation it has to the other concepts and. Evey word has a meaning because of it's context. Rain means something that depends on the concept (and thereby to the feeling) of water, the sound of it, the visual feeling and so on. If a computer program is written that could identify if it is raining by the visual aspect of rain, it will not have understood it, because it has missed the sound quality of it. The argument is inductive. That is, if you augment the program by adding sound detection, it will still miss the sensation it produces on skin, or the capability of us to recognize it by also the touch of raindrops. The crux of this argument is, to be able to say a computer program has "understood" rain, it will have to produce or simulate an impact on it's state that is as vivid as a human could have. The easy and immediate objection to this argument is, such vivid impact in our brain is not very precisely specified and therefore the definition is vague and not very useful. The response is, the fact that we can't satisfactorily define this impact network/context is not a weakness of my argument but rather a lacking in our understanding in how concepts relate in our head - which actually is being made clear this argument. In addition to this, I also argue that no two human beings will also share the exact mapping of a concept. And it is the overall similarity rather, that is shared between humans. In simpler terms, no two human beings understands rain in the exact same way. And therefore if a computer program is sufficiently close to the complexity (how many concepts is influenced by a given concept) of human, it could be accepted as an entity that understands it.

Unknown

There is nothing more unsettling than a complete unknown.

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