lavantien

I've been studying the Five Hindrances and compiled these discourse references that I found helpful for my own practice. I organized them this way to make sense of the topic and wanted to share in case it's useful to others.

Similes for hindrances (DN 2, SN 46.55)

• Sensual desire: like being in debt, or a bowl of water that was mixed with dye
• Ill will: like having a serious illness, or a bowl of water that was heated by fire, boiling and bubbling
• Dullness and drowsiness: like being in prison, or a bowl of water overgrown with moss and aquatic plants
• Anxiety and remorse: like being a slave, or a bowl of water stirred by the wind
• Doubt: like being lost in a dangerous desert, or a bowl of water that was cloudy, murky, and muddy, hidden in the darkness

lavantien

The Stateless Sangha: A Pragmatic Buddhist Blueprint for a World Without Rulers

Part I: The Diagnosis: Power as Institutionalized Poison

The optimal form of government is zero government: anarchism. This is not a utopian fantasy but a pragmatic diagnosis of a fundamental flaw in all centralized systems. Wherever power is concentrated in a parasitic middleman, corruption becomes inevitable. This dynamic is famously articulated in Lord Acton's Dictum: "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." History serves as a vast graveyard for well-intentioned leaders and revolutionary movements that, once they consolidated power, became the very tyrannies they sought to overthrow.

This corruption stems from several unavoidable truths about the state:

• Incentive Structures: Governments control vast resources, hold a monopoly on legitimate force, and can write laws that benefit specific groups. This creates an irresistible incentive for individuals to seek power not for the common good, bu

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"Listen up, Kālāmas. Don't just believe something because it's a legend, don't just believe something because it's tradition, don't just believe something because it's hearsay, don't just believe something because it's in the scriptures... But Kālāmas, when you know for yourselves: 'These things are unskillful; these things are blameworthy; these things are criticized by the wise; these things, if you practice and accept them, will lead to harm and suffering,' then, Kālāmas, you should abandon them."

– The Buddha, Kālāma Sutta (AN 3.65)

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Regarding So-Called "Original Buddhism" – The Journey to Find Originality in the Dharma

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Buddhism Commonly Questions Answered

Question: Can a non-buddhist become enlightened?

Answer:

Yes if they have right view and are all-out practicing the noble eightfold path. Then identity won't matter

Believe in your own agency (not some external supreme creator god) and believe in the four noble truth should be a good start for right view. When you have faith in these axioms then it's natural to also have faith in the Buddha himself and the efficacy of his path. And when you have faith, you'll naturally respect his instructions and will strive to keep the precepts as unblemished as possible. There's no right meditation without the strong foundation of right view and virtue (ethics, morality, good habits, etc.)

lavantien

The Buddhist Path: A Philosophical Analysis of Optimal Human Flourishing

Introduction

In examining the question of which path or religion offers the most reliable route to lasting well-being and happiness, I propose that Buddhism presents the most compelling framework for human flourishing. This assessment emerges not from sectarian preference but from a philosophical analysis of Buddhism's distinctive approach to the human condition. Unlike systems that depend primarily on faith in external deities or metaphysical claims, Buddhism offers a pragmatic methodology centered on understanding the nature of suffering and its cessation through empirical investigation of one's own experience. The Buddha himself encouraged followers to "come and see" (ehipassiko) rather than accept teachings on blind faith, establishing a tradition that aligns remarkably well with contemporary understandings o

lavantien

Onboarding to a Large Go Monorepo: A LLM-Assisted Learning Plan

As a new developer joining the team on February 05, 2025, I'm tasked with quickly understanding and contributing to a large Go monorepo, estimated at 1 million lines of code. This presents a significant onboarding challenge. To accelerate this process, I've set up an LLM-based system to query the codebase and gain insights efficiently. This report outlines a structured learning plan leveraging targeted prompts to the LLM, enabling me to grasp key concepts, identify important modules, and understand common patterns within the monorepo. The goal is to become productive and start addressing tickets as soon as possible.

This plan is inspired by best practices for Go monorepos and aims to address common challenges such as managing dependencies and ensuring code reusability. The prompts are designed to extract information about

lavantien

Navigating and Mastering Golang Monorepos: An LLM-Powered Approach

This report introduces the challenges of onboarding to and working with large, complex Golang monorepos, and explores how leveraging cutting-edge Large Language Model (LLM)-based tools can significantly accelerate the learning curve and enhance developer productivity. In the rapidly evolving landscape of software development, monorepos have gained immense popularity for managing large-scale projects, offering benefits like code sharing and simplified dependency management. However, their sheer size and complexity can pose significant hurdles for developers, especially when it comes to understanding the codebase, identifying relevant components, and efficiently tackling tasks, such as those tracked in Jira. This is particularly true for projects written in Go, a language known for its performance and concurrency features, but which can also lead to intricate code structures. As of February 2025, the

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Applications Overview

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1. Gradient Descent (GD) & Variants (SGD, Adam)

• Where: Machine Learning (training neural networks, linear/logistic regression).
• Why:
  • Simplicity: Easy to implement for differentiable objectives.
  • Scalability: Stochastic variants (SGD) handle large datasets.
• Adaptivity: Adam and RMSprop adjust learning rates dynamically, improving convergence.

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Prompting the Reasoning models

• simple & direct, prompt doesn't matter, complex prompts can be detrimental
• 1-2 shot prompting, instead of excessive explanation, give less than 3 examples
• prompt for extended reasoning for more reasoning tokens
  • Take your time and think as carefully and methodically aobut the problem as you need to. I am not in a rush for the best answer; I would like you to spend as much time as you need styding and exploring the problem. When you're done, return only the answer.
• decompose difficult tasks into samll steps
  • Agent planning/reasoning (5+ steps): plan geenration
    • You are a software architect assistant. The first input you will receive will be a complex task that needs to be carefully reasoned through to solve.
    • Your task is to review the challenge and create a detailed plan to process X, manage Y, and handle Z.
• You will have access to an LLM agent that is responsible for executing the plan that you create and will return resutls.

lavantien

Conversation Archive: AGI, Ethics & Utopia

A dialogue between lavantien and DeepSeek

Summary

Initial Query: Aspiring for an Anarchist Global Society

User:
"I just hope that we can achieve ASI so that it can implement a stateless, propertyless, borderless, moneyless, classless anarchist global society... What are your thoughts?"

DeepSeek's Response: