I think that’s more a critique of the modern caricature of stoicism than of Stoicism itself. Classical Stoicism isn’t about suppressing emotions. It’s about understanding your emotions, examining where they come from, and choosing how you respond rather than being ruled by them.
Also it's about learning to distinguish between stuff we can influence vs stuff we cannot. Like I cannot influence if the sun rises tomorrow or not, so there's not point in worrying about it
understanding, examining and choosing are all thinking based. and that's why stoicism isn't really working well for humans. emotions are neuropsychologically lower level than thoughts/logic/ratio. having said that, lectures about stoicism might well be excellent instructions for language models on how to handle communication with humans.
Part of practicing Stoicism is to bring emotions up to the understanding, examining, and choosing level. You still have emotions, but you don't let them control you.
I love JiuJitsu because many parts of it are like microcosms of life. The first time someone lays on you and you feel like you can't breath, you panic. That's an emotion. After a few times you realize you can breath and eventually you will feel the panic and instead of succumbing, it'll wash past you. By practicing feeling emotions, especially negative ones like being uncomfortable over and over, eventually they move into your higher level thinking and no longer control you. You absolutely still have them, but your reaction to them has changed.
I would actually argue that the sensation from experiencing asphyxiation is not really an emotion but instead one of the most fundamental sensations any life form will experience. Just saying as I already argued that ratio is a layer above emotions. Having said that, Jujutsu (as well as all forms of martial arts and sports) are intertwined with emotional experience and needs. Jujutsu for example is probably one of the best physical therapies for adults to overcome fear of non-sexual physical contact. Also the whole idea around fighting other people in your spare time draws its inspiration from a desire to externalize negative emotions which are either too abstract or too challenging to address in a mental reflection process.
Keep in mind, you’re not actually asphyxiating in this case. It’s just uncomfortable to have someone in your space, feeling closed in, etc… it’s all emotion.
Thats different from actually being choked and tapping to end the fight.
Also, BJJ has been one of the biggest unlocks in my personal growth and stoicism journey. Things that used to make me uncomfortable or annoy me in daily simply don’t. I’m not externalizing my negative emotions, I’ve just become better at dealing with them through repeated challenges. Early on my teacher told me that everyone loses, but the difference between white and black belts is the black will be calm thinking how to escape until the very end. Contrast the white belt who loses control and flails around accomplishing nothing.
It's more to separate the feeling from the reaction to the feeling by a layer of understanding & examination. Feel first, understand the feeling, examine whether the feeling is appropriate for the situation that caused it, determine how to react, react. It's an OODA loop applied to one's own emotions: Observe the feeling, Orient on the situation, Decide on a response, Act as decided. If you pre-decide to always suppress any reaction you're missing the point. Stoicism is quite similar to modern Cognitive Behavior Therapy. If you just react without thinking you'll often react to your learned habits rather than the actual situation at hand.
The realization of emerging emotions by cultivating mindfulness. I mean this is basically also what various practices/exercises in (Zen) Buddhism aim at. But I'd argue that the practical methodology advertised by Stoicism is too ratio based to be effective beyond a basic . I would rather put my money on more indirect approaches like classic mindfulness exercises and meditation. They are less goal oriented by design, but the axiom (which I accept from experience and observation) is that a healthy mind will be expressing stoic virtues naturally without knowing how to call it.
And now that I've read that the second time, this is very close to various kinds of therapy.
For example, anxiety exists and sometimes occurs, and it means parts of me are trying to be very careful and precise about something. This can be a problem at times if it overcomes you, but it can also be leveraged into a strength once you figure why it's flaring up at the moment.
Another example, travel used to be a nuisance, but now I've setup and continue refining some packing and preparation checklists for trips of varying length. Now it's a big no-brainer to be well-prepared for a short work-trip and I'm usually very calm about it.
The durability guarantees are similar--each workflow step is checkpointed, so if a workflow fails, it can recover from the last completed step.
The big difference, like that blog post (https://www.dbos.dev/blog/durable-execution-coding-compariso...) describes, is the operational model. DBOS is a library you can install into your app, whereas Temporal et al. require you to rearchitect your app to run on their workers and external orchestrator.
I for one think that Gemini 2.5 pro has become much more stupid than before. This isn’t for coding, just simple business type support. It keeps forgetting queries, making really obviously bad suggestions, simple mistakes etc etc.
It’s kind of funny, because they keep talking about how close we are to AGI, and in reality they keep making the models dumber (uh, I mean more efficient).
> Presteign did not care for the artists, musicians, and fops Olivia kept about her, but he was pleased to see a scattering of society notables this morning.
> There was a Sears-Roebuck, a Gillet, young Sidney Kodak who would one day be Kodak of Kodak, a Houbigant, Buick of Buick, and R. H. Macy XVI, head of the powerful Saks-Gimbel clan.
ChatGPT 5> Without adding third-party dependencies, how can I compress a Data stream with zstd in Swift on an iPhone?
(It auto-routed to its thinking model, took 25s)
> Short answer: you can’t. iOS doesn’t ship a public zstd encoder/decoder. The system Compression and AppleArchive frameworks only expose lzfse, lz4, zlib/deflate, and lzma. So with only Apple SDKs, there’s no way to produce zstd-compressed bytes.
>
> Two practical paths:
> 1. If zstd isn’t mandatory, use a built-in codec (lzfse or lz4 are fastest) via Compression’s streaming API. Example (pure Swift, no deps) that compresses an arbitrary byte stream:
>
> <code example>
> 2. If zstd is mandatory, you must embed zstd yourself. That can mean:
> - Vendoring the official C sources (libzstd) directly into your project and calling them via a tiny Swift wrapper/bridging header
> - Statically linking a prebuilt libzstd.a you compile for iOS
I think the useful takeaway here is that Top 1 operation is generally not a good idea, especially not for making judgements. This doesn't address the main points of the blog though.
It is especially stupid because there is nothing analogous to Tiananmen Square in the west.
On the other hand, have it write a dirty joke. It just wrote me a few jokes that silicon value wouldn't touch with a 10 foot pole.
Not sure about the utility overall though. The chain of thought seems incredibly slow on things that Sonnet would have done in a few seconds from my limited testing.
Actually there is, fire up OpenAI or Claude and ask it for crime statistics.
I did and it lectured me on why it was inappropriate to ask such a wrongthink question. At least the Chinese models will politely refuse instead of gaslighting the user.
No, you've got it wrong. If US models are suddenly required to praise their monarch, or hide his past affiliations or whatever, that warrants them more critique.
Chinese models aren't don't become exempt "because the US is also bad", they both rightfully become targets of criticism.
Other than that, testing the boundaries of the model with a well-established case is very common when evaluating models, and not only with regards to censorship.
It also perhaps tries to preserve some moat around their product/service.
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