#pascal — Public Fediverse posts

https://www.europesays.com/pl/412749/ NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080 – Mija 10 lat od zapowiedzi oraz premiery pierwszej karty graficznej z generacji Pascal #architektura #geforce #GeforceGtx1060 #GeforceGtx1070 #GeforceGtx1080 #GeforceGtx1080Ti #GeforceGtx980 #gtx #Gtx1060 #Gtx1070 #Gtx1080 #Gtx1080Ti #Gtx980 #maxwell #Nauka #NaukaITechnika #NaukaTechnika #nvidia #pascal #PL #Poland #Polish #Polska #Polski #Science #ScienceAndTechnology #ScienceTechnology #Technika #Technology #wydajność

#Copilot and I are about 30% away from creating a #Pascal version of #LAPACK using #BLAS. We are about two days away from achieving 80% of LAPACK. Then we will tweak it using some GPU acceleration to make its speed comparable to some python libraries like Numpy.

It is important to note that one must be very disciplined in keeping clean documentations, a thorough and tight testing cycle, a rigid workflow pattern, or an AI will tend to skip tests, become sloppy and lose focus.

#AI #LLM

#AI illiteracy is real. While still arguing with a bunch of AI haters, #Copilot and I just finished our #Pascal #BLAS level 1-3 Implementation plus eigenvalue, cholesky, and sparse #matrix, so we will never need #python, #C, C#, #Rust, ... for our Small Language Project. We will expand our Pascal Numeric Library (PNL) v1.0 to something like #Numpy and #Pytorch, but with static arrays, deterministic data structure, no referencing, no pointer arithmetic.

#LLM #programming #computer

#AI illiteracy is real. While still arguing with a bunch of AI haters, #Copilot and I just finished our #Pascal #BLAS level 1-3 Implementation plus eigenvalue, cholesky, and sparse #matrix, so we will never need #python, #C, C#, #Rust, ... for our Small Language Project. We will expand our Pascal Numeric Library (PNL) v1.0 to something like #Numpy and #Pytorch, but with static arrays, deterministic data structure, no referencing, no pointer arithmetic.

#LLM #programming #computer

#AI illiteracy is real. While still arguing with a bunch of AI haters, #Copilot and I just finished our #Pascal #BLAS level 1-3 Implementation plus eigenvalue, cholesky, and sparse #matrix, so we will never need #python, #C, C#, #Rust, ... for our Small Language Project. We will expand our Pascal Numeric Library (PNL) v1.0 to something like #Numpy and #Pytorch, but with static arrays, deterministic data structure, no referencing, no pointer arithmetic.

#LLM #programming #computer

#AI illiteracy is real. While still arguing with a bunch of AI haters, #Copilot and I just finished our #Pascal #BLAS level 1-3 Implementation plus eigenvalue, cholesky, and sparse #matrix, so we will never need #python, #C, C#, #Rust, ... for our Small Language Project. We will expand our Pascal Numeric Library (PNL) v1.0 to something like #Numpy and #Pytorch, but with static arrays, deterministic data structure, no referencing, no pointer arithmetic.

#LLM #programming #computer

While arguing with some AI haters, #Copilot and I created this Pure #Pascal #BLAS (Level 1,2,3 Core) Implementation in less than 1 day. We encountered many serious problems, including drifting of workflow pattern, getting stuck in a Delphi error loop, overhauling our original design... But as long as you understand AI, keep good documentations, maintain the core structure of the problem,.. you will be able to work with AI successfully. Don't hesitate to use more than one #AI at a time.

#LLM

What is #BLAS?

BLAS is a set of fast matrix routines originally written in #Fortran.
If you’re tired of dynamic types, hidden references, ownership rules, and endless “stream” abstractions, Free #Pascal + BLAS gives you old‑school, deterministic HPC #programming with none of the modern noise.

#Copilot and I will be using Free Pascal and BLAS for our Small Language Model project #SLM. No more #C, #python, #Rust, or C#

#AI #LLM #computer

Why do people use #python, a glue language, which is so slow? The only reason is the AI ecosystem.

#Copilot and I just tested Free Pascal and BLAS for its speed without using #numpy or #pytorch. The result is amazing. It took less than a second to do a 1024x1024 #matrix multiplication.

We will be using Free #Pascal and #BLAS to write our Small Language Model #SLM using #NNUE.

#AI #LLM

Why do people use #python, a glue language, which is so slow? The only reason is the AI ecosystem.

#Copilot and I just tested Free Pascal and BLAS for its speed without using #numpy or #pytorch. The result is amazing. It took less than a second to do a 1024x1024 #matrix multiplication.

We will be using Free #Pascal and #BLAS to write our Small Language Model #SLM using #NNUE.

#AI #LLM

Why do people use #python, a glue language, which is so slow? The only reason is the AI ecosystem.

#Copilot and I just tested Free Pascal and BLAS for its speed without using #numpy or #pytorch. The result is amazing. It took less than a second to do a 1024x1024 #matrix multiplication.

We will be using Free #Pascal and #BLAS to write our Small Language Model #SLM using #NNUE.

#AI #LLM

Why do people use #python, a glue language, which is so slow? The only reason is the AI ecosystem.

#Copilot and I just tested Free Pascal and BLAS for its speed without using #numpy or #pytorch. The result is amazing. It took less than a second to do a 1024x1024 #matrix multiplication.

We will be using Free #Pascal and #BLAS to write our Small Language Model #SLM using #NNUE.

#AI #LLM

After a detour through a top‑down prototype, a single tip from a fellow retro‑dev sparked a new direction

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fWALZHOpN0I

#gamedev #retrogamedev #retrocomputing #retrogaming #msdos #indiedev #devlog #pascal #turbopascal

Wer darf sich ab 01.06 um ein neuen Job kümmern?
War jetzt fast 10 Jahre in Rente auf Zeit. Und nun meint die Rentenkasse, ich kann wieder mehr als 6 Stunden täglich arbeiten. Was ich aber nicht glaube.

2016 hatte, ich in Zwei Foren gefragt und habe mein Traumjob gefunden. Dann kam die Erkrankung.
Was ich suche ist ein Job ohne Ausbildung und den ich im Sitzen erledigen kann.

Ich arbeite Zuhause mit Lazarus unter Linux. Bin gelernter Bäcker.

Zuhause bin ich auch gerade nicht.
Wer Ideen hat auch für weiter Hachtags...

#jobsuche, #lazarus, #objekt #pascal

18 mois avec sursis requis contre Pascal Galéoté, le patron de la CGT du Port de Marseille

Pascal Galéoté et Bernard Cristalli ne se sont pas déplacés seuls, ou du moins, pas seulement en compagnie…
#Marseille #FR #France #Actu #News #Europe #EU #2026 #actu #Actualités #avec #contre #europe #Faits-divers-Justice #Galéoté #mois #Pascal #Provence-Alpes-Côted'Azur #Républiquefrançaise #requis #sursis
https://www.europesays.com/fr/900156/

The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.

Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.

Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.

Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.

Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.

Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.

Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.

Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.

Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.

Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.

At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.

Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.

This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.

There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.

The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.

Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?

Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.

The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.

Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.

Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.

Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.

Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.

Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.

Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.

Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.

Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.

Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.

At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.

Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.

This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.

There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.

The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.

Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?

Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.

The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.

Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.

Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.

Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.

Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.

Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.

Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.

Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.

Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.

Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.

At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.

Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.

This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.

There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.

The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.

Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?

Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.

The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.

Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.

Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.

Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.

Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.

Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.

Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.

Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.

Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.

Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.

At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.

Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.

This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.

There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.

The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.

Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?

Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.

The States That Will Not Be Commanded

There is a class of human experience that answers to no direct order. You cannot tell yourself to fall asleep. The instruction arrives at a locked door. Sleep refuses the simple transaction of command and execution. Instead, it assembles itself once certain conditions are present, and those conditions include, strangely enough, the act of picturing yourself already inside the state you are trying to enter. Lying down begins it. Closed eyes continue it. Imagining yourself asleep, entering the self who has already arrived, completes the condition, and only then does sleep agree to appear.

This is stranger than it first appears. The imagination precedes the fact. A fiction makes the reality possible. Rehearsal of the self-in-the-state must happen before the state itself will consent to arrive. Once you notice this mechanism operating in sleep, you begin to see it everywhere in human life, running underneath experiences we mistakenly believed we commanded outright.

Aldous Huxley named the pattern in The Perennial Philosophy and called it the law of reversed effort, a phrase Alan Watts later carried into wider circulation. Viktor Frankl, working from the clinic rather than the lecture hall, called it paradoxical intention, and used it to treat patients whose anxieties had swallowed them whole. The insomniac who tries hardest to sleep stays awake longest. The speaker who strains to stop stammering stammers worst. Frankl’s counterintuitive instruction was to command the symptom itself. Try to stay awake. Try to stammer. The paradox broke the grip because it acknowledged a humble fact about voluntary will: the target state cannot be seized. It must be invited, imagined, allowed.

Taoists arrived at the same recognition two thousand years earlier and called it wu-wei, the action that is not action, the doing that happens when the doer gets out of the way. An archer who aims too hard misses. A calligrapher who grips the brush too firmly produces a dead line. Skill of that order lives in a zone the conscious will cannot enter, and the only approach is to imagine yourself having already arrived.

Consider sexual arousal. The physiological response is famously resistant to command. It answers to imagined scenarios, to remembered encounters, to anticipated scenes. Masters and Johnson built an entire clinical practice around this recognition, and their cure for performance anxiety, sensate focus, works by replacing effort with imagined sensation. A man instructed to perform often cannot. The same man, invited to picture the experience without obligation, finds his body following his mind into the state. Arousal answers to conjuring.

Consider crying on cue, the classical actor’s problem. Stanislavski solved it through affective memory. The tears come by indirection. You imagine the dog you lost when you were nine, and water arrives because the body has been invited to the feeling rather than ordered to produce it. Meryl Streep has described her process in interviews as a summoning of remembered feeling. Daniel Day-Lewis has described his as an inhabitation sustained across months. Neither description sounds like command. The actor imagines the self-in-grief, and grief supplies the water.

Consider the act of belief. Pascal, sitting in his Pensées alongside the famous wager, offered an argument about habituation that has been quietly underestimated for centuries. For those seeking faith, he advised acting as if they already believed. Kneel. Take the holy water. Say the prayers. Imagine yourself as a believer, and belief may arrive as a secondary effect of the performance. William James extended the line in “The Will to Believe” and argued that many truths about ourselves only become true after we have imagined them as true. Courage is one such truth. Generosity is another. Love, perhaps most of all.

Athletes at the top of their disciplines understand this mechanism as technical knowledge. Jack Nicklaus, in Golf My Way, said he never hit a shot, even in practice, without first seeing the ball’s flight in his mind. Swimmers rehearse the race in imagination with such precision that brain scans show neural activation patterns overlapping substantially with actual performance. The body runs the course in miniature before it runs the course in fact. Physical execution follows the mental simulation because the state has already been entered once, invisibly, and needs only to be entered again with flesh attached.

Hypnosis is perhaps the cleanest case. An unwilling subject cannot be forced into the hypnotic state, and even a willing one cannot seize it by direct will. The subject must imagine entering the state, going down the staircase, growing heavy in the chair, and that imagining is the mechanism itself. Imaging studies by David Spiegel and colleagues at Stanford, along with related work by Oakley and Halligan, suggest that hypnotic suggestion produces neural patterns distinct from ordinary pretending, patterns more closely aligned with genuine perceptual and motor processing. Imagination has done something to the body. Fiction has produced a physiological effect the subject did not will.

Creative inspiration operates by the same architecture. You cannot command an idea to arrive. You can imagine yourself as receptive, empty, waiting, and the idea tends to arrive into that imagined vacancy. Keats called this negative capability, the capacity to sit inside uncertainty without grabbing for resolution. A poet imagines the listening state, and the poem walks into the room. Composers describe the same choreography. Mathematicians describe it too, with Poincaré’s famous account of the solution arriving as he stepped onto the bus at Coutances. He had imagined himself receptive for weeks. The solution waited until it found him properly prepared to receive it.

Grief resolution belongs in this same family, though we rarely recognize it. Bereaved people move through grief by imagining themselves on the other side of it. Picturing a future morning when the first thought lands somewhere other than the absence. Picturing the moment when the dead person’s name can be spoken without collapse. These acts of imagination are how integration proceeds. George Bonanno’s resilience research and Pauline Boss’s work on ambiguous loss both describe this imaginative prefiguration as the actual mechanism of healing. The sequence matters here. Picturing a survivable future comes first, and resolution begins to assemble around the picture.

At the collective level, Benedict Anderson’s argument about imagined communities rides the same rail. A nation exists first as an imaginative act performed by millions of strangers simultaneously. Citizens picture themselves as a “we” before the institutional “we” coheres. American colonists had to imagine being Americans before they could act as Americans. Thomas Kuhn made a parallel argument about scientific revolutions. A new paradigm must be imaginatively entertained, played with speculatively, inhabited as a thought experiment, before it can be adopted and tested. Discovery through accumulation alone misses the interior work that makes discovery possible. Science imagines a world in which the anomalies make sense, and then searches for evidence that the imagined world is the actual one.

Here is the argument this pattern makes against one of the most persistent myths in the modern self-help industry. The doctrine of pure willpower, of steel discipline, of command-and-execute personal transformation, is largely false where it matters most. The states we most want to inhabit are precisely the states that refuse to be seized. Love, sleep, creative insight, courage, calm, sexual pleasure, athletic flow, artistic voice, faith, grief’s resolution, recovery from trauma, the dissolution of anxiety, the emergence of a new political identity, all of these operate by invitation rather than by conquest. A hard clamp on such a state accelerates its evasion. Accurate, patient rehearsal of the self already inside it increases the odds of arrival, because the state recognizes the address it has been given.

This observation is a claim about where real labor lives, rather than a brief for passivity. The imagination itself is labor. Stanislavski’s affective memory takes years to develop. Nicklaus’s visualization was the product of thousands of hours of prior experience that had furnished his imagination with accurate material to draw on. Negative capability, for the poet, demands a difficult kind of vigilance. Picturing a survivable future, for the mourner, takes courage most days. Real work is being performed in all these cases. That work simply lives somewhere other than where the popular literature keeps telling us to look. It lives in the imagining, in furnishing the mind with a vivid enough rehearsal that the body and the world will follow the script.

There is a political dimension to this that deserves attention. Populations that cannot imagine a different arrangement of their lives will not produce one. Authoritarian regimes understand this perfectly and invest heavily in controlling imagination itself, in prescribing what may be pictured, in criminalizing the mental rehearsal of alternatives. The censor knows the law of reversed effort by heart, and knows in particular that the imagined state of freedom must be interrupted before the political state of freedom can be prevented. Organizers and artists, working from the other direction, understand that their first task is to make the unfamiliar picturable. Once a people can picture themselves free, the mechanics of becoming free start to assemble around the picture.

The craft implication for writers, for dramatists, for anyone whose work involves summoning states in other people’s minds, is that we are running an imagination-furnishing enterprise whose surface resembles persuasion. A good novel gives the reader a vivid enough picture of the inside of another life that the feeling assembles itself inside the reader. A good play stages grief with such precision that the audience’s own grief, resting dormant, recognizes the invitation and walks forward. Argument alone has never moved anyone who was going to stay put. The form of the work becomes a staircase. Descent happens inside the audience’s own imagination. The hypnotic principle and the aesthetic principle are the same principle.

Which returns us to sleep, where we began. The oldest ritual of the human body is the rehearsal that makes becoming possible. Every night of your life you practice the technique that governs almost everything else you will ever want to enter. You picture yourself arriving, and arrival follows the picture. The repetition is so automatic it escapes notice. Seeing the principle for the first time reorders the interior map. The question that has held your energy for years, the question of how to force yourself into the state you want, reveals itself as badly posed. Sharper questions take shape around what you had been missing. What does the inside of that state actually feel like, in specific sensory detail? What would I need to picture accurately enough for my body and my circumstances to follow the picture into becoming?

Less effort, applied through better imagination, answers more of what we want in a human life than the heavier strategies that continue to dominate our self-improvement literature. That reweighting, once genuinely made, reorders a great deal.

https://www.europesays.com/fr/900156/ 18 mois avec sursis requis contre Pascal Galéoté, le patron de la CGT du Port de Marseille #2026 #actu #Actualités #avec #contre #EU #europe #FaitsDiversJustice #FR #France #Galéoté #Marseille #mois #News #Pascal #ProvenceAlpesCôteD'Azur #RépubliqueFrançaise #requis #sursis

@trouble

I thought there was a difference: "while" evaluates the conditional before the statement; "until" evaluates the conditional after the statement. So "until" executes the statement at least once, but "while" executes the statement zero or more times.

Now, this may be a Pascal-ism. The construct for "until" put conditional at the end of the statement block. Bash and othet shells might be different.

@stib

#Pascal #Bash #ShellProgramming

@trouble

I thought there was a difference: "while" evaluates the conditional before the statement; "until" evaluates the conditional after the statement. So "until" executes the statement at least once, but "while" executes the statement zero or more times.

Now, this may be a Pascal-ism. The construct for "until" put conditional at the end of the statement block. Bash and othet shells might be different.

@stib

#Pascal #Bash #ShellProgramming

@trouble

I thought there was a difference: "while" evaluates the conditional before the statement; "until" evaluates the conditional after the statement. So "until" executes the statement at least once, but "while" executes the statement zero or more times.

Now, this may be a Pascal-ism. The construct for "until" put conditional at the end of the statement block. Bash and othet shells might be different.

@stib

#Pascal #Bash #ShellProgramming

@trouble

I thought there was a difference: "while" evaluates the conditional before the statement; "until" evaluates the conditional after the statement. So "until" executes the statement at least once, but "while" executes the statement zero or more times.

Now, this may be a Pascal-ism. The construct for "until" put conditional at the end of the statement block. Bash and othet shells might be different.

@stib

#Pascal #Bash #ShellProgramming

@trouble

I thought there was a difference: "while" evaluates the conditional before the statement; "until" evaluates the conditional after the statement. So "until" executes the statement at least once, but "while" executes the statement zero or more times.

Now, this may be a Pascal-ism. The construct for "until" put conditional at the end of the statement block. Bash and othet shells might be different.

@stib

#Pascal #Bash #ShellProgramming

I learned #Pascal in the 80s. I learned a bit C and Rust and hated that pointer logic which is extremely clumsy for matrix manipulation. #Python and #C users almost never knew that things like #Numpy were written in #Assembly based on algorithms originally written in #Fortran, not C. I tried to create a new programming language by bootstrapping using Fortran with the help of #Claude 4 but failed. Now I am switching to Pascal which is insane with powerful arrays.

#AI #computer #programming

Heute Abend nochmal zum Abschluss meines Urlaubs eine ganz starke Retro Brise: #TurboPascal. Lang ist's her, dass ich damit mal unterwegs war. Im Bild sieht man ein Quellcode Teil von einem Programm, das ich gerade archiviere. Ich muss mal schauen, ob ich den Originalautor noch zu fassen bekomme. Bisher gibt es darüber jedenfalls _gar nichts_ im Netz. #retro #retrocomputing #pascal #lazarus

RE: https://oldbytes.space/@thelastpsion/116345290344668595

And the results are in!

1. Pico C
2. Rust
3. Free Pascal
4. Joint with Pico C++, MicroZig and Yarg.

So, what am I going to do? Well, I'm leaning towards porting the existing Arduino C code to the Pico C SDK. I'm currently using one class for encapsulation and abstraction, but I could replace that with structs and static functions. I'm not a great C programmer, but I'm pretty comfortable with it, so it makes sense

However, before I do that, I see a bigger challenge of getting a good setup without using VS Code. I've been using #NeoVim for a while now, and I'd like to get a comfortable setup using that on #Linux.

So, I'm going to try to build Blinky projects for at least Pico C, Rust and Free Pascal, using Linux and NeoVim. Hopefully this will give me a better feel for how well these languages actually suit me. I've never done any Rust before, either, so that's going to be quite the learning curve!

If I have time, I'm going to give Yarg a go, too, because I think the premise is really cool. If I'm on a roll, I'll try #MicroZig too.

And if I really feel like I have the capacity, I'll port the code to one of these other languages.

I'm acutely aware of all the other projects I've given myself to do, such as the SIBO SDK and other small Psion-related projects, not to mention $dayjob and $reallife. So we'll see how things go!

#Pascal #FreePascal #ObjectPascal #RustLang #YargLang #RaspberryPiPico #PiPico #PiPico2 #RP2040 #RP2350

HighSpeed Pascal on Amiga Gets a Personal Look Back
#Amiga #HighSpeedPascal #RobSmithDev #RetroComputing #TurboPascal #AmigaDevelopment #ClassicComputing #Pascal
https://theoasisbbs.com/highspeed-pascal-on-amiga-gets-a-personal-look-back/?fsp_sid=4616

Место Питона, Си и Паскаля в образовательном процессе

В то время как одни пытаются обосновать, какой язык лучше в качестве средства обучения программированию школьников, посмотрим на вопрос с другого угла. Ведь не только языки бывают разными, также не всегда одинаковы цели обучения, методики (подходы), обучаемые. Поэтому вероятно в одних случаях может быть лучше один язык, в других — иной. Подробнее

https://habr.com/ru/articles/1017594/

#pascal #free_pascal #python #си #образование #обучение_программированию #школа #дополнительное_образование #методика_обучения #программирование

Место Питона, Си и Паскаля в образовательном процессе

В то время как одни пытаются обосновать, какой язык лучше в качестве средства обучения программированию школьников, посмотрим на вопрос с другого угла. Ведь не только языки бывают разными, также не всегда одинаковы цели обучения, методики (подходы), обучаемые. Поэтому вероятно в одних случаях может быть лучше один язык, в других — иной. Подробнее

https://habr.com/ru/articles/1017594/

#pascal #free_pascal #python #си #образование #обучение_программированию #школа #дополнительное_образование #методика_обучения #программирование

Место Питона, Си и Паскаля в образовательном процессе

В то время как одни пытаются обосновать, какой язык лучше в качестве средства обучения программированию школьников, посмотрим на вопрос с другого угла. Ведь не только языки бывают разными, также не всегда одинаковы цели обучения, методики (подходы), обучаемые. Поэтому вероятно в одних случаях может быть лучше один язык, в других — иной. Подробнее

https://habr.com/ru/articles/1017594/

#pascal #free_pascal #python #си #образование #обучение_программированию #школа #дополнительное_образование #методика_обучения #программирование

Место Питона, Си и Паскаля в образовательном процессе

В то время как одни пытаются обосновать, какой язык лучше в качестве средства обучения программированию школьников, посмотрим на вопрос с другого угла. Ведь не только языки бывают разными, также не всегда одинаковы цели обучения, методики (подходы), обучаемые. Поэтому вероятно в одних случаях может быть лучше один язык, в других — иной. Подробнее

https://habr.com/ru/articles/1017594/

#pascal #free_pascal #python #си #образование #обучение_программированию #школа #дополнительное_образование #методика_обучения #программирование

"My first triangle" dated 2003. Using 3dfx Glide in Free Pascal Compiler. And yes, the music is a part of this.

#retrocomputing #gamedev #graphicsprogramming #pascal #3dfx

"My first triangle" dated 2003. Using 3dfx Glide in Free Pascal Compiler. And yes, the music is a part of this.

#retrocomputing #gamedev #graphicsprogramming #pascal #3dfx

"My first triangle" dated 2003. Using 3dfx Glide in Free Pascal Compiler. And yes, the music is a part of this.

#retrocomputing #gamedev #graphicsprogramming #pascal #3dfx

"My first triangle" dated 2003. Using 3dfx Glide in Free Pascal Compiler. And yes, the music is a part of this.

#retrocomputing #gamedev #graphicsprogramming #pascal #3dfx

"My first triangle" dated 2003. Using 3dfx Glide in Free Pascal Compiler. And yes, the music is a part of this.

#retrocomputing #gamedev #graphicsprogramming #pascal #3dfx

RE: https://fosstodon.org/@CyberUnitsTeam/116286880612738227

...and it is written in #Object_Pascal with the #Lazarus IDE for #Free_Pascal.

#Pascal #Programming

Angefangen hat alles 1980. Seit 1990 selbstständig

Schnittstellen
#RS_232
#RS_422
#RS_485
#Ethernet
#WLAN
#Bluetooth

Protokolle
#Seriell
#LocalTalk
#EtherTalk
#TEMEX
#TCP_IP
#UDP_IP
#CAN
#Modbus
#MIDI
#MQTT

Sprachen
#BASICA
#GW_Basic
#Pascal
#Delphi
#Modula_2

Formate
#File
#XML
#NMEA
#SMTP
#Syslog

Anwendungen
#TurboPascal
#Delphi
#Quark_XPress
#FileMaker
#Sketchup

Systeme
#PC_DOS
#MS_DOS
#Windows
#Macintosh
#macOS

Hardware
#IBM_PC
#IBM_AT
#Apple_SE30
#Apple_Macintosh_II_ci
#Apple_iMac

Angefangen hat alles 1980. Seit 1990 selbstständig

Schnittstellen
#RS_232
#RS_422
#RS_485
#Ethernet
#WLAN
#Bluetooth

Protokolle
#Seriell
#LocalTalk
#EtherTalk
#TEMEX
#TCP_IP
#UDP_IP
#CAN
#Modbus
#MIDI
#MQTT

Sprachen
#BASICA
#GW_Basic
#Pascal
#Delphi
#Modula_2

Formate
#File
#XML
#NMEA
#SMTP
#Syslog

Anwendungen
#TurboPascal
#Delphi
#Quark_XPress
#FileMaker
#Sketchup

Systeme
#PC_DOS
#MS_DOS
#Windows
#Macintosh
#macOS

Hardware
#IBM_PC
#IBM_AT
#Apple_SE30
#Apple_Macintosh_II_ci
#Apple_iMac

Angefangen hat alles 1980. Seit 1990 selbstständig

Schnittstellen
#RS_232
#RS_422
#RS_485
#Ethernet
#WLAN
#Bluetooth

Protokolle
#Seriell
#LocalTalk
#EtherTalk
#TCP_IP
#UDP_IP
#CAN
#Modbus
#MIDI
#MQTT

Sprachen
#BASICA
#GW_Basic
#Pascal
#Delphi
#Modula_2

Formate
#File
#XML
#NMEA
#SMTP
#Syslog

Anwendungen
#TurboPascal
#Delphi
#Quark_XPress
#FileMaker
#Sketchup

Systeme
#PC_DOS
#MS_DOS
#Windows
#Macintosh
#macOS

Hardware
#IBM_PC
#IBM_AT
#Apple_SE30
#Apple_Macintosh_II_ci
#Apple_iMac

https://www.europesays.com/pl/306172/ NVIDIA deklaruje, że nowe karty GeForce RTX zaoferują milionowy skok wydajności w Path Tracingu w porównaniu do Pascala #blackwell #dlss #DlssRayReconstruction #GameDevelopersConference #Nauka #NaukaITechnika #NaukaTechnika #nvidia #pascal #PathTracing #PL #Poland #Polish #Polska #Polski #RtxMegaGeometry #RtxMegaGeometryFoliage #Science #ScienceAndTechnology #ScienceTechnology #Technika #Technology #wydajność

Защита программ без IF: ретро-анализ библиотеки TViorProtect (Delphi 7)

Что если защита от копирования вообще не содержит ни одного условного перехода? Ретро-разбор библиотеки 2009 года, где вместо if (key == valid) используется вычисление адреса следующей функции, любая ошибка в данных уводит процессор в никуда. Классический взломщик ищет в дизассемблере инструкции JZ/JNZ и инвертирует их ("Magic Jump"). Здесь этот приём не работает: нет точки принятия решения, нет и цели для патча. Вместо этого серийный номер диска, CRC32 исполняемого файла и системная дата складываются в единственно верный адрес перехода. Чуть изменил данные - получил Access Violation в случайном месте памяти.

https://habr.com/ru/articles/1008824/

#Delphi_7 #Pascal #WinAPI #Защита_программного_обеспечения #Обфускация #Антиотладка #Ретро #x86 #Программирование

I found this reply that I made in 1984 to Dennis Ritchie in the net.followup newsgroup. I was at the time lobbying Sun to add 8-bit character set support to the firmware, but they wanted to hold out for a 16-bit system, like the as yet unnamed Unicode. There was eventually an interim solution but my memory of that is a bit foggy.

#Usenet #DennisRitchie #C #Pascal #emacs #VT100 #charactersets #ISO8859 #languages #Swedish #programming #unicode #SunMicrosystems #Värmland

An enduring locus of mathematical beauty in the seventeenth century concerned curves like the cycloid and the catenary.

A cycloid is the path followed by a point on the circumference of a circle rolling along a straight line (see attached image).

Christopher Wren (1632–1723) proved that the arc length of the cycloid is four times the diameter of its generating circle.

Christiaan Huygens (1629–95) thought Wren's work ‘really beautiful’. Blaise Pascal (1623–62) also called it ‘beautiful’ (even though he also seemed to repudiate any true notion of mathematical beauty in his ‘Pensées’.

Huygens proved that an inverted cycloid was the ‘tautochrone’: the curve along which a body starting from rest and freely accelerated by uniform gravity reaches the lowest point in the same time, independently of its starting point.

1/3

#cycloid #tautochrone #Huygens #HistMath #MathematicalBeauty #Pascal

Finally dug into Mode X. It can do some neat tricks 13h can't, but it's got some challenges as well... so I had to dust off my very rusty assembly skills

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cc0xtavXOUE

#gamedev #retrogamedev #retrocomputing #retrogaming #msdos #indiedev #devlog #pascal #turbopascal

The collection grows!

This is the full list. Those using screen readers might want to make a coffee first...

• Writing An Interpreter In Go - Thorsten Bell
• Writing A Compiler In Go - Thorsten Bell
• Computers And Quantity Surveyors - Adrian J Smith
• Digital Design Using VHDL - Dally, Harting, Aamodt
• VHDL By Example - Blaine C Readler
• The ZX Spectrum ULA - Chris Smith
• Design An RP2040 Board With KiCad - Jo Hinchcliffe, Ben Everard
• High-Level Languages And Their Compilers - Des Watson
• The Unix Programming Environment - Kernighan, Pike
• The C Programming Language (2nd ed) - Kernighan, Ritchie
• C Style: Standards and Guidelines - David Straker
• Variations In C - Steve Schustack
• C For Engineers - Edward Arnold
• Software Engineering In C - Darnell, Margolis
• Programming Abstractions In C - Eric S Roberts
• The Little Book Of Pointers - Huw Collingbourne
• Illustrating ANSI C (revised ed) - Donald Alcock
• C++ All-In-One For Dummies - John Paul Mueller, Jeff Cogswell
• An Introduction To Programming And Problem Solving With Pascal (2nd ed) - Schneider, Weingart, Perlman
• Advanced Programming And Problem Solving With Pascal (2nd ed) - Schneider, Bruell
• Data Structures Using Pascal - Tenenbaum, Augenstein
• Programming For Change With Pascal - David J Robson
• Recursion With Pascal - J S Rohl
• Oh! Pascal! (3rd ed) - Doug Cooper
• Programming Psion Computers - Leigh Edwards
• Introduction To Microprocessors - Levelthal
• The 8086 Book - Rector, Alexy
• Assembly Language For Intel-Based Computers - Kip R Irvine
• Computer Organisation And Assembly Language Programming for IBM PCs and Compatibles (2nd ed) - Michael Thorne
• Working Effectively With Legacy Code - Michael C Feathers
• The Basics Of Hacking And Penetration Testing (2nd ed) - Patrick Engebretson
• Computers And Early Books - Mansell
• The Amstrad CPC464 Manual
• The Sinclair ZX Spectrum Manual
• 30 Hour Basic (standard edition) - Clive Prigmore

#shelfie #golang #compilers #pascal #programming #programmingbooks #retrocomputing #vhdl #psion

Has anyone managed to get #NeoVim with #DAP and #gdb working with #Pascal?

I'm using #LazyVim, so a lot of DAP is preconfigured using an Extra (dap.core). Unsurprisingly, Pascal is not one of the languages supported by default.

#ObjectPascal #FreePascal #debugger