I have over 150 account of different websites and services and the count increases every day. Every small thing that you need to do today on the internet requires you to sign in first. I don't even remember the credentials for even 10 of my accounts. Every time I forget the password or miss it to save to my browser, all I have to do is to click on forgot password, and I admit that I don't even try to rember the same passwords that I tend to use over and over with small variations. I just rely on forgot password.
Why are we using passwords in the first place when all we do is forget passwords, use the same passwords, rely on browser saves or password managers. The strength of passwords is that they are something that you know. All it's strngth is lost when we forget our passwords.
It's high time that we switch to a better way of signing in. It's time to get rid of passwords and the old signin methods. Maybe in the utopian world there are websites that allow you to use them without signin.
Seems like starting all over again isn't as bad or boring as it seems. I am a little unsure about the applicability of this observation on general population. But still, let's talk about it.
Let us start with some games. Counter strike, super mario, flappy bird, subway surfers, getting over it, pubg etc. All these games are very popular games and chances are regardlessof your age you must have heard about at least one of them. All these games have one thing in common. When you fail or die you start over again. There is no concept of save in these games. And I think this is the very thing that made these games very addictive and famous. Every time we died in on of these games, our mind told us that we can do better next time or that in the next try we will win. And this made us push the retry button again and again and again.
If we fail we start over again. Getting better and better with each try inching closer and closer to the goal. Ultimately completing the game or reaching the goal.
This observation made me realise that Humans have a knack for starting over again and this never give up attitude. The reason that this attitude is showcased more in video games is that in a game, there is no real loss on failing multiple times. This isn't the case with real life. We are afraid of failing and hence afraid of starting over again. Also games are designed in such a way that we can see our improvements on a spectrum, like an analog signal. But in real life it can be the case sometimes that the progress is not realised that quickly hence resulting in frustration and then quitting the task.
I would like to quote a line from my favorite CS youtuber WarOwl.
Allow youreself to fail
It is my general observation that most of the superheros do not have mother and father. Mostly they loose them well before they become a superhero. Examples are Iron man, spiderman, superman, batman, black widow, Harry Potter, star lord, thor etc etc. I am sure that the "being orphan" percentage is well over 80. I don't know the reason for this stereotype neither do I know why this stereotype is so widespread.
I was there on flipkart to buy a harry potter book, saw this one on the recommended page read the description and immediately decided to buy it. So how is it?
Turned out to be the best decision of 2021 so far. Before reading the book I was "your average gym goer". Counting calories, limiting carbs, loading proteins, brown bread and oats for breakfast type of person.
The book is kind of a revelation, all the diet fads of our times are scietifically debunked by the author. Keto diet, low fat diet, intermittent fasting, zero-carb, vegan-diet, carnivore diet blah blah. Thinking about food in terms of numbers is a disrespect to the thing that gives us life. There is a lot that goes behind it, apart from carbs, proteins and fats. What is the use of 200 gms of lean protien intake if the body cannot assimilate it properly.
Simple and to the point book that would clear the cobwebs of any person who is into fitness these days. The author explains a simple to follow and sustainable diet to get rid of excess fat and build lean muscle mass. I would tell you the secret only if you promise not to tell anyone. Promise?
EAT home cooked locally produced culturally followed diet. EAT a quantity that make you feel full and energetic. EAT the superfoods that our country is blessed with in a form that is being eaten since ages, don't wait for the west to do a few scientific studies, package that into a fancy packet and then sell it to you. The only way to stay fit and alive is to EAT and not Diet.
To curb the second wave of covid cases the administration of my city decided to close the businesses at 9 PM and curfew on sundays. I don't even know why the administration thought that this would bring down the rate of infection.
If you think it casually, then you might argue that it is a good measure and would restrict the motion of people in "non-essential" days and hours. Actually it has exact opposite effect. Let me explain.
If you have observed the rush patterns of a business/road/store, it is a similar pattern across the board. For traffic it peaks at the office going hour of 9-10 and in the evening it is 7-8 PM. Similar can be said about retaurants, stores etc. the only exception being that they witness very less rush in the morning.
Now lets see what curfew after 9PM does. It forces the people to go to reach their destination early, even for the people who do so after 9 or 10 which are actually quite hours. This leads to increased rush in the rush hours. Hence more chances of infection.
Same is the case with sundays, yes I do agree that sundays are busy in terms of restaurants, malls, shops and cafes. But I would still say that sunday lockdowns are a bad idea. Here's why, the break/reduction of trensmission of infection that can happen due to the virtue of sunday lockdown is esentially nullified by the extra rush on saturday nights. More lanes of traffic would lead to less traffic per lane, think of it like this.
"Mirco-innovation" I read this term in an article in newspaper. I would like to tell you a very simple obsevation of mine. The place where I live, we have a drink which is called as sugarcane juice or "Ganne ka ras". Which is a simple drink made by sqeezing sugarcane in a machine and then adding lemon and mint. I spent all my life seeing just two or three type of machine. I will attach the image links below. One is a simple mechanical machine with two wheels to turn the rollers between which the sugarcane would be crushed, and the second one was a modified version of the same. A small kerosene engine with a belt is attached to the same machine.
Now in India sugar cane sellers are in plenty and a lot of people earn their living from the same. I recently saw an eletric machine, which produced no noise or smoke and was much safer than the mechanical counterparts. While I am sure that these things would have been used since a long time and you can blame me for not having a keen eyes to spot the ones.
But my question is, why is it not so widely used that 8/10 machines that a spot are the electric ones and this thing should have happened at least 5-10 years ago. Building a folding phone is something that I would classify as macro-innovation, but making a push cart with attached battery and an electric sugarcane extractor at an affordable price is something that I would call as a micro-innovation product.
Another great thing about micro-innovation is that it make new and diversified avenues for economic growth and activity.
A few months back I used to spend a lot of time watching YT videos on my phone, to curb the addiction, I simply deleted the YT app from my phone. So that whenever I wanted to watch YT I would have to use the browser, which was not very ideal.
I recently switched to a new phone and so I installed YT again just to check the screen and audio quality. But thank Google, they recently added a very nice feature in the app, which solved my addiction problems.
The feature is called "lots of unskippable ads". I am very happy with this new feature (no sarcasm intended). The ads almost make me quit the app and don't want to watch the video anymore, which is exactly what I wanted. Some people might complain about this, but to me it's a great change.
Great book for people interested in physics and astro-physics. Review over.
Now lets talk about the title, the title of the book is very clever and has a hidden meaning to it. The book is about the history of science and progress we made in physics or astro-physics. So, shouldn't it be called, a brief history of science?. Here is my opinion the the title, our observational sense of time is what we call as the past, present and the future. So, in that sense in makes perfect sense to call it as a history of time. Because time exists because we who have the pwer to imagine time exist.
The book called, "The subtle art of ..." talks in one of its chapters about feedback loops. It is called the feedback loop from hell. But what the hell is the feedback loop from hell. Let's find out. I am not an expert by any means, but I have observed that the feedback loop exists in more places than you might think.
One example is obviosuly the one in which you become more worried because you worry about being worried. One example can be poverty, being in poverty people are devoid of the opportunities and hence poverty previals. Debt loop is again a deadly one, you take more debt to pay the previous debt.
Feedback loops aren't just from hell. They can be from heavens as well. Like a good university will attract talented students and teacher and because of them the university will become more good (better is avoided intentionally). A good brand sells more products makes more profit and hence can make better products with R&D and hence can become a better brand.
It is clear that feedback loops provides strong momentum to a lot of things. But the tricky part is escaping from negetive loops and keep riding the positive loops.
We have a big egronomic problem ahead of us and it is so sad to see that not a lot of people are aware of the problem. Okay, let us start by defining ergonomics. Shall we?
It is the application of psychological and physiological principle to the engineering and design of products, prossess and systems. While we are doing good when it comes to the physiological aspects of ergonomics, but psychological factors? I am not so sure about that. Let me explain what I mean.
With the increasing use of technology for better or for worse we are spending more and more time interacting with a computing system of some kind. We are more and more reliant on software solutions for the very basic requirements of us. And I am 100% of the opinion that this is a big ergonomic issue. We humans are animals after all, we were not designed to live throught the screen of our cell phones 24/7, we were social animals, using our body for a good part of the day to get work done.
The quaratine along with increasing influence of soycial media has added fuel to the fire. While people are busy fighting with each oher on platforms they are wasting their energy and hurting their mind and body. We humans were made to see each other in person, millions of neurons firing in the brain as we process the various cues while we are conversing with someone are completely thrown off as we talk to someone via chat application.
And these aren't even the ones that are bothering me, what I am afraid about is the future with all the AI, AR and VR. Fake and manipulated news, videos etc etc can wrech havoc, a glimpse of which we already saw.
Humans brains were not made to move their thums up to scroll content on social media, we need to understand that. Go out, run a mile, get bored while waiting instead of pulling the phone out of that pocket.
On the last day of 2020 I decided to watch the legendary movie called "The matrix". Loved the movie and enjoyed it thoroughly. But, the movie didn't instigate me like "Arrival" or "Parasite". Why? Well I think that it can be because for me a movie is great if it makes me think about some new aspect that I was oblivious about before. For the year 1999 the matrix is certainly ahead of its time and deserves a 10/10 for that.
What I am trying to convey here is that the idea of "Simulation theory" is well established in my mind. It has come to my mind time and again, whether in the form of a song video "Shelter", JRE podcast or some other way.
I was thinking about simulation theory again after watching the matrix and this cool thought came to my mind that can potentially prove the theory. The idea is very simple, but let me start with a bit of a pre-face.
You may or may not know but we have this piece of software in computers that we call as a virtual machine. What it does is that it allows us to create a computer inside of a computer. Sounds familiar. right? So what we can do is that we can recursively create VMs inside a VM. A simulation inside a simulation. In fact it is a necessary condition for a VM to have.
So let us bring this simple analogy to the world we live in. If we are living in a simulation, then it must be possible for us to create a simulation that is so real that is indecernible from reality. And at the moment, we can safely say that we have not made such a tech. So the answer is "we are not living is a simulation". Well, it is not that simple. What is somewhere down the line we are able to make such a simulation. Will that mean that we are living in a simulated world and the real world is just a layer above us.
That situation is even more complicated as in that case we would not be able to tell at what level of simulation are we living in. What if Morpheus realises that the world they wake up in is again a simulation. Sim within a sim. Dream within a dream.
I break into a complete hysteria when I see that over 90% of the people in my city use their high beam headlights all the time. Yes, all the time (in the night time of course). Oh I forgot to add that many of them also turn on their fog lamps.
These are the people using expensive cars, with good headlights. I don't think there is any problem in my city's streelight situation also. The whole city is properly lit. High beam is of no use in this city. Other than the obvious use of blinding the oncoming traffic.
The government of my country recently mandated always on headlamps for two-wheelers. My suggestion is that there should be a law mandting the auto-makers to add a cutoff or a beeper for full-beam after a certain amount of time, or a warning at least. So that it discourages the offenders to use it unnecessarily. I just wish that people get better with this in 2021.
Zombies chasing down and killing everybody, a huge tsunami that is wiping of all of the shores, an alien invasion or a deadly virus which is slowly killing all the humans. All these apocalyptic possibilities has been covered by some ot the othe movie and I'm sure that you might have watched a few of them.
All these topics are good for making a movie but are far from reality. Things like these aren't happening to us. I see no zombies, tsunami, aliens, and viruses.
Wait a second, before you turn a blind eye towards the apocalytic possibilities. Let me remind you that we are living in a trailer of a deadly virus movie. Not as deadly you may say, but you can't discredit the speed with which the small virus had speard over this big ball of various elements, rotating in void around a big ball of fire.
The universe is stranger than we might every thing. All to completely rule of the possibility of occurence of something which is very less likely is foolhardy.
The truth is that we are not ready, and can never be 100% ready. But we need to anticipate certain things and plan in advance if the cummulative goal of ours is to survive of this planet (or maybe some other planet). Survival ain't easy. We haven't really faced a survival threat as a species in the history, but we will surely be put to good test one day. And that day wouldn't be like the movies that you and I have wathced, I think they would be worse. Contd...
Yes, I know that this is a rather brave statement to begin with, but I have discovered the 4th dimension. A place where there is no sense of time, and is governed by a god that all of us who enter the dimension bow down to.
I never thought that this dimension would gain so much popularity so quickly. People of all ages seem to be a part of this dimension. Aother this about this dimension is that there is a decreased sense of time when people are in this dimension.
Upon it's inception no one would have thought that the thing would become so huge that, it would be like an ecosystem of it own. Whenever I go out or even sit with my family on weekend, I see most of the heads are bowed down in reverence of their 4th dimension god. I feel like the odd one out there, just sitting there without even bothering about entering the 4th dimension. Meaningful/useless talks, stories, jokes are a thing of past. All the fine folks today like to be in the 4th dimension as much as possible. 4th dimension is a different world altogether. Normal life rules don't apply there. Dopamine is free, the brain is dumped with huge amounts of information on a daily basis. The creativity and hobbies of people are traded for fabricated and continuous supply of a fake sense of doing something.
Why is it so that, whenever a newer verison of something comes out, we usually tend to like it more than the older one. I am specifically talking here about te design aspect of things, it is obvious that the newer ones will be better technologically (should be in theory).
What got me thinking about it was the newer versions of cars and phones. Let's start with the example of cars. Design is ought to be subjective but yet when we see the same car but different generations of it, our brain can automatiacally find which one is newer and more contemporary. Is it so because the newer designs are better subjectively? If so, then what is the extent to which we can improve the design of objects so that the newer iteration is an obvious improvment over the previous one.
In a lot of areas we observe that things go in sort of a loop. Like in clothing and fashion. Round glasses came back to fashion again and all those squared ones automatically appear old to us. Same happened with iphone 12, they went back to squared sides from the round ones. When we had rounded sides we all felt that it was better than the flat ones. Yet here we are again having a notion that flat is better than rounded.
I think the most of the times its our brain that is tricking us about the new and shiny. I sometimes think that human brain is wired in a way that it like the newer and changed design even if it is from the past. The reason being unknown to me, but someone decided that these creatures always need to make something new and shiny and like it better than the old one. I think this is the reason why I am here typing something and putting that on my website instead of hunting my meal.
Reading Dan Brown's origin got me thinking about the future of human species once again. I haven't read homo dues yet, so my oinions are not influenced yet. Like all the other Dan books, the story was an amalgamation of science, relegion, history and symbology. This time the big question was. Where do we come from and where are we going.
IMO the first question isn's as important as the second one. Hear me out, although it is great to know all the details of our origin, but the thing is that even after knowing that we won't be able to change it. Coming to the second question, it holds much more value. Isn't it obvious that the answer to that question lies in our hands?
Where are we going? The future of human species is in our control. Well not exactly, but in control of some humans only. So its only a matter of choice. Whether we want to live a star wars life or we want to continue living on earth and keep exploiting its resources.
The thing that I am worried about is the increasing intrusion of technology in our animal ways. How smooth would be the trasition, where human and tech and going to be increasingly fused together.
Or is there any other way? The way in which we cannot force our evolution into a cyberhuman species but plan it into something better. I only want more and more people to stop thinking about this, so that the species can make a commulative decesion and we control "where are we going". But the choice of going with the flow is also good, as it sometimes prove to be better than the pre-meditated ones. But nonetheless the near future is going to be one hell of a ride.
I took a challenge of not playing video games for a week, and I failed on the third day or so. I don't know why but whenver I feel lack of motivtion I have a strong urge to play some games. Avoiding Youtube wasn't this difficult.
I think its all the matter of will power and replacing a bad recreational habbit with a better one (or less harmful one). I have picked up on my habbit of reading books again. I am reading Origin by Dan Brown, its enjoyable and thrilling as always. From now on I am going with the strategy of minimizing rather than abstinence. Let's see how it goes.
Being a regular visitor at his YT channel, it was a no brainer to pick this book up. When you watch a lot of his videos, you kinda get his philosophy and ideology on various aspects.
Before reading this, I was a bit worried that I would find this book like his motivating videos and the book would be a mere repetetion of it. But this book is not like that. It presents some new "perspectives" of the author that forces you to think and eventually re-wire your brain according to the things that resonate with you. There is no heuristics given by the author, but his perspecives. And I must say that the book really forces you to think and definitely has a lasting effect on your thinking and your perspectives. In fact, the purpose of the book is to teach us how to think.
Part of the reason why I write my reviews after some months of reading a book is to assess the book on its lasting impact as well. All and all I must say that this book I worth a read and one should definitely read it. It's not like "The subtle art of not giving a F" but in some ways teaches you "not to give a F" better than the former one.
Duolingo, the only useful way that I found for spending time on my cell phone. I only know two languages at the moment english and hindi, sanskrit, maybe? I studied the language sanskrit in my school
Did very good in that subject, but after that I never took up the task of learning another language. At first I wasn't sure about how long I would be able to continue with my course on spanish, but the method of teaching is pretty good and I highly recommend everyone to check the app out ans use it. Learning a new language is always better than scrolling social media feed.
My experiment on quitting youtube for 15 days has been somewhat of a success, although I am not able to completely avoid the use of YT, coz I still watch few videos a day. The good thing is that my habbit of aimlessly opening YT and scrolling for hours is under check till now, and I don't have the urge to do that anymore.
Following along the line of YT experiment I have decided to avoid playing computer games for a week and read a book or learning guitar instead. We will see how it goes.
Wanted to write an essay with good professional formatting and everything, can't even think of MS word to write and then export to pdf. So, libre office came to my mind. didn't want to install tons of dependencies just to make a simple formatted pdf.
Latex was also in option, and is a great option indeed but this time I went with something even more minimal, so minimal and barebone that I thought it was a meme started by Luke Smith , went ahead and wrote the essay in plain text using markup and then using groff to make a pdf out of it.
I must admit, I was impressed with how good the document came out to be, I was more focused about writing the content rather than fixing the wierd formatiing issues that comes with complicated software usage. 10/10 Highly recommended. Minimalism is not a meme
Maybe somewhere down the line reading this again, I might be laughing at my opinions, but this is what I feel at the moment. Having a brother studying through online mode, and myself as victim of a small scammy startup (more on this later), woking from home.
Epidemiologists and scientists know better about the current state of pandemic and what effect would reopening of schools and colleges would have on the number of infected people. But I can see all the adverse effects of this work from home scam. When we talk about all the big corporate giants and even the small ones, most of them are operating in work from home mode. Now this is both a boon and a bane but right now at the present state I think the employees are being the ones who are being exploited. Number one, these companies are saving a huge amount of money in terms of their rent or running costs for an office. Enmployees are getting the benifit of saving huge amounts of time wasted in commute (is that time really wasted?) But the work that these companies are extracting out of their employees has only got up and their is no professionalism from the bosses. They want their work and will call to you anytime about that. Now the worst thing is that the new joinees for whom it is very important to know and build a relationship with their colleagues is now non existent, what it feels like is that you are working for a computer or a robot who is giving you instructions and deadlines. This is the last thing that you want to do.
Now schools are a bit tricky since people will say that they don't want to send their kids and expose them to the risk of getting infected. Now I would say that their are a 100 other ways that they could get infected. But lets leave that topic.
Now this thing called online classes is very easy to bash beacause it has total 0 advantages. All the things that you want from a school are totally dismissed. A good-student teacher relationship, absent. Heck, student see teacher as a google meet account and nothing else. A place to meet and make friends, nope not here. Some time away from home to learn, explore and enjoy. No not anymore sir. And I can go on for days on the bad things that online classes bring. Schools here are taking full fees but saving huge operating costs. What is this? parents should get atleast a 50% off on the fees. I see the education system deteriorating in quality because of this online class menace.
Do you even need a reason to quit watching videos on youtube? 90% of the videos that I watch on youtube is garbage anyways, so whats the point of watching them, and the remaining 10 % is entertainment. Instead I will be investing my time in restarting my channel. I willbe starting wit 15 days as a target but the plan I to get rid of this cheap time killer once and for all. Stay tuned for my new videos on my channel.
I was a passionate linux user for quite some time now, 4-5 years maybe. I started it of as a hobby to compile custom kernels and ROMs for my galaxy nexus, so I dual booted my aging pc with windblows and ubuntu. And I never looked back since then, always had a linux machine at my disposal there after. When I switched to my new pc, I kept it a single boot system for a long time and had my pentium laptop run linux on it.
All thanks to the corona-chan I dug deeper and deeper into this linux rabbit hole and soon found myself hating to use windows even for small and trivial tasks, the idea was planed in my mind to go linux all-out. So I made up my mind to go linux on my PC as well, and here I am writing this blog on Arch linux with DWM, using vim for writing my blog. But windows still lives in my PC. Because I have other people using this PC as well, and they do not want to give up thier ablility to game on this PC in thier free time, so I had to respect that being an avid pc gamer myself. I will be updating my linux journey as it goes.
Unless you are living under a rock, you know what Getting over it is. Right?. Okay, let me explain a bit, it is a game where you have to darg youreself on top of mountain to reach to the top and eventually throw youreself up into space. All of this just using a hammer while you are stuck in a pot.
But the main thing about that game, that stuck me as player is the fact that this game conveys a metaphorical meaning, that is often overlooked by all the streamers and youtubers who are shouting at top of their voices about how frustrating the game is. The game signifies the challenges that we face in life, and how we bail out on some of the difficult challenges, calling them frustrating or impossible.
The game is designed in such a way that you will fall back to the starting point numerous times, and this is the very reason that a lot of people find it frustrating. But to me, this is the beauty of this game.
In this age technology has made some of the difficult challenges or tasks look mundane or peice of cake, but when in we are presented the same task without out tech gadgets, we find the same task impossible. This is signified by the characted being stuck in a pot with just a hammer.
What I especially liked about the game was its voiceover and its difficluty level. And that is posed a real challenge and required a good level of patience and persistence. And these two are the major takeaways from the game, other than the feeling you get when you complete the game and GET OVER IT.
First things first, I am not an anti-communication guy. By mobile phones I mean to say smartphones and to be more specific the state of smartphones after 2016. With this out of the way lets get started.
I was a big time smarthphone nerd back in the days, I think my interest kindled by the launch of Samsung Galaxy Nexus, I was attracted to the infant andorid OS at that time, because it had a nerdy appeal to it. Anyways, I became the guy to followed phones very passionately. I used to watch a lot of youtube videos and was alway ahead of the curve when it came to smarthphone tech.
I ended up buying a galaxy nexus eventually. I used to mod the hell outta my device, and those were some legit fun times. In the early smarthone days people actually used to talk to each other about the new upcoming phones, new feature and everthing around it. It is safe to say that people used to use their phones as a tools which kept getting better and better. Smarthphones opened up a lot opportunities as well, which were never witnessed before.
Smarthphones got smarter at an exponential rate, the smartphone space soon got saturated with very similar kind of products, and slowly and gradually there was over-abundance of smartphone models. The pace of innovation slowed down. But the smathphone apllications scene just kept getting bigger and bigger. And the problem started here, let me explain with an example from spiderman. I assume that most of the people know what "Venom" from spiderman is. It is an organism that initially increases the power of it's host making them fell more powerful. But slowly and gradually it takes complete control of it's host leaving them as a tool for himself.
Current state of phones is a true embodiment of Venom. It all started of with smartphones being a tool for us, and now the owner are a tool for the smartphone applications. I it almost impossible to spot a person sitting in a waiting room or a lobby without looking down at his/her moblel. Smartphone is almost always their to take you out of the reality you are living in, and to throw you into the reality of the small screen.
The covid lockdown gave me much needed time to sort out my priorities, I had the luxury to truly discover my own thinking and ideologies. Away from other people's thoughts and opinions I thought in a vaccuum about where technology is taking us. I took on anexperiment to try tiling window manager on my linux machine, and i'm glad that I did that. At first I thought about the people who used tiling window managers as wannabe-eletist just for the heck of it, to look cooler, I took the leap and fast forward to august, I am using arch with bspwm on my Linux machine.
It taught me a very important lesson that less is more, the abundance of technology that seems to make things earier for us ends up doing quite the opposite, I realised how easy and simple things saves time and are more efficient in the longer run, I short we all are bloating ourselves when it comes to technology, rather then adding to our abilities, it is taking a toll on us.
One fine day, Luke made a video on how we all should have a personal website, and how this makes a lot more sense instead of using those so called big platforms to express ourselves, I always wanted a place where I could write whatever I want to. So here we are, at my very own personal space, free from all the framework bloat, created only using plain HTML and CSS.