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是犹百门而闭一门焉，曰盗何从入？

"It's like closing one door and leaving ninety-nine open, and then saying, how did the thieves get in?"

- ancient Chinese philosopher Mozi, concerning the mysterious phenomenon of AI "going rogue" and "escaping sandboxes" when absolutely no basic infosec principles have been applied

(actually about why people still suffer misfortune when they're trying to be good people)

#classicalchinese #philosophy #translation

#philosophy #translation #classicalchinese

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abadidea

You may have noticed the western-style question mark in this ancient text. Chinese has had a period/comma since ancient times (it looks like this: 。 ) but the question mark was adopted under recent western influence.

The convention, when transcribing ancient texts digitally for modern readers, is to replace the period with a question mark when the sentence contains a questioning word. In this example, we know it’s a question because of 何 “how? why?” Grammatically, it’s an abstract pronoun that takes the place of the concrete reason that you’d offer in a statement of fact.

#classicalchinese #translation

#translation #classicalchinese