I used Ubuntu for many years. It was the most compatible operating system for the computers that I had at the time. I had heard about Debian. However, the Debian webpage is hardly the gold standard for making it easy to install an operating system, when someone is new to the whole process. 1 Ubuntu made it easy to understand how to install Linux. Once installed, it was easy to figure out how to do…
I started using OpenCode at work recently. It is a very usable tool and its capabilities are remarkable! Its biggest feature is something that can be understood only by those who experience it once: It has the best user experience out of every single AI tool that I have used before. It is easy to understand conceptually as well. It starts as a Terminal UI program. It runs completely locally 1 and…
Everything on the internet is an ad for something today. Short videos send people where they can buy clothes, cosmetics, accessories, or install mobile apps. Longer videos try to get people to buy outdated technology. Now, that this is the norm, it may be difficult to remember a time when content was not like this. Casey Neistat’s work on YouTube is a prime example: He started a vlog to sell the…
Once all your finances are tracked digitally, the logical next step is to ask questions of the data. If you invest regularly, the most common question would be: What is the return on those investments? There are two kinds of returns: nominal return and real return. Nominal return is easy to calculate: ((Current value) - (Original value)) / (Original value) . Converting this number into a fictional…
In the past week, I tried Metabase, an open-source data analysis tool, which can be started as a single Docker container and used in the browser. My final goal is to turn it into a setup where I can upload the CSV export of my GnuCash file and have preconfigured dashboards show me data that I am interested in; maybe even a Sankey chart of my cash flow report, so I don’t have to manually go through…
I have been spending a few minutes every week playing the Civilization 6 game. It is a lot of fun. I am about 300 turns into a 500 turn game; the shape and size of the game world is clear to me, the major civilizations have taken shape, and now, it appears to be a race to getting the right technologies, and units, to defend territory and also, “make” it seem well-defended to the game. The game…
For the past few years, I had to use a Macbook laptop at my workplace. The corporate policy to only use Apple computers never made much sense to me: The excuse to not support anything except Mac or Windows was the usual “Mobile Device Management requirement” strawman. There are very good MDM solutions for Linux as well now; these solutions, unlike the expensive ones for Mac and Windows, happen to…
I hope you have not been following the news. I have not been following it at all, nevertheless, it is very hard to completely shut off the influx of daily happenings from everywhere. One such daily happening is the back-and-forth about a strange thing called “tariffs.” Let’s assume that you know very little about what it is. The only thing that you could take away from the breathless coverage of…
I started using Emacs around 2020. At the beginning, I really only wanted to use it for its superior support of LSP and Org-mode, which in my opinion, is a far more complete mark-up language compared to Markdown. It is simple to use, but it can be used to do complex things too, if that’s your preference. I am able to have a directory with multiple Org files, TODO items in various files, and all of…
Science fiction is a great genre. Within science fiction, the subgenre that manipulates time is my favorite. Movies based on the warping of time, the invention of a time machine, or the strange effects of a single episode of time travel are some of the best. (The other subgenre that I really like is the investigation of fictional accidents, such as the one that is conducted in Airframe, by…
“You know, I watched a great movie yesterday; it was called The Movie That Can Never Be Watched.” “Oh, cinema-in-cinema. That sounds interesting. Where did you watch it, was it on Netflix?” “No, I think it was on BagelsForLife.tv.” “Oh, I don’t have an account on that one.” “Tough luck! You’ll have to wait until the streaming contract for this movie expires in 4 years and it moves to yet another…
Early in 2024, I bought a gaming console. This was the first time I was in possession of hardware that was meant primarily to run games. Before this, I had played a few car racing games (using CDs on a Windows desktop). More recently, I played the indie favorite, Papers, Please , on my laptop and thoroughly enjoyed the game’s concept and the implementation. I had never played any other type of…
Late last year, and earlier this year, I started thinking about whether I could continue using Debian Stable as my primary Linux distribution. Another thought which had been in my mind for a while was that I should try a rolling update distribution, such as Arch Linux. I never made the switch because Debian Stable works pretty well: It is extremely stable because all the packages are at least 3…
The software industry is moving towards a world where every engineer is expected to use LLMs more; the practice of keeping track of LLM usage frequencies and advocating for more usage will probably become the norm in a few years. 1 I don’t believe the hype; I think we’re in a fairly early state. If one looks at what is possible today, and the historical practice in this area to over-promise and…
Using open source software can be a fair bit of work. I emphasize that this is a choice, as it is entirely possible to install Ubuntu on your computer and use it for all your daily activities, without thinking about customization. Say you want to open multiple windows, and have them all take up equal space on your screen automatically. This is possible: You can use a tiling window manager. There…
Over the past 10 years, I have tried off and on to stick to a single tiling window manager, i3wm . It has never really stuck on with my workflow: One of the biggest problems that I have faced is that while i3 solves one major problem (efficient screen space usage), it introduces several small ones (audio input/output selection, display selection, and many others). Others who are more proficient…
Ansible is one of those technologies that most SREs have come across at some point or the other. Despite the mindnumbing increase in abstraction layers in the past few years, trusty old Ansible does not go anywhere. 1 Ansible is based on a very simple idea: declarative management of the state of a computer. The implementation of this idea, and its final use-cases are fairly complex. Ansible is…
This past weekend, I wanted to set up Miniflux, a browser-based RSS 1 reader. I have been using it locally for the past two weeks and it has been extremely worthwhile. It has the dual advantage of always being online and the ability to categorize feeds, which helps me group the feeds that I want to read (blogs) from those that I want to skim (news). I did not want to set up a Miniflux instance…
I bought an iPhone 5 years ago. Admittedly, it was a strange choice: I don’t like proprietary software that one can not customize. I knew that iPhones work well only if one was willing to pay for subscription services like iCloud and Apple Music. The fights that Epic Games and Spotify have started in court over Apple’s attempts to block their native integration into iOS is well-known. But I bought…
Rating: 5/5 What if a novel was very funny? If every single sentence that came out of the protagonist’s mouth, only served to make him look progressively less important and more foolish than you thought? What if it was the author mocking the protagonist privately to the reader, without letting the protagonist in on the joke? That would be a great novel, and White Noise fits the bill. The…
After moving to a new apartment recently, I made a contract with an ISP offering a best effort 1 Gigabit connection. At both apartments I lived in previously in Japan, an Internet connection was bundled with the rental agreement. As these connections had a maximum bandwidth of 100 Megabit, I never looked at my peripherals to see whether they were capable of Gigabit. When I bought a computer, I…
“Look up,” “Take it easy,” and “Keep it real.” What do these phrases mean? Their literal meaning is easy enough to grasp. But they are never used in the literal sense. They are touted as cures to our collective ills; metaphors for the actual processes which would make everyone less cynical and more attentive. I heard these phrases in the coda of an inane Hindi movie recently. The movie contained…
A large number of articles, opinion pieces, blog posts, video essays, podcasts, television dramas, and movies saturate the information landscape. It is bad form to say that there is more out there than can be read by any one person. The dreaded information overload has arrived. A few acknowledge the existence of this swarm of multimedia. The majority beckon an Algorithm, entrusting it with the…
Rating: 5/5 I wanted to read a book which would delve into the philosophical underpinnings of the ongoing AI hype: What was the root of the idea that humans, with all their confusions and complexities, can ever be replaced by computers? O’Gieblyn’s column in the Wired magazine, Dear Cloud Support , is my favorite part of the magazine. Her writing is lucid and her references come from far and wide.…
Rating: 4/5 What would happen if all the free services that you use on the Internet, which are powered by advertisements, stop being free one day? This is the premise of the Subprime Attention Crisis. If you ask yourself this, you might realize that many of the services that we think of as free are powered by advertising. For me, the most frequently used services that are ostensible free are…
I have been using Wireguard for about 4 years now . I started with the basic Wireguard setup, where I did everything manually and used the ip link and ip addr commands to create new links and assign addresses to them. The wg-quick utility is open-source and has built-in SystemD support. So, I switched to using the configuration file that wg-quick requires. With an ad-blocking DNS server, I was…
Recently, I have taken to reading magazine articles and long newsletter posts on my Kindle by converting them to the ePub format, rather than reading them on the computer, where the process of making highlights and taking notes differs from the process that I use for all the e-books that I read. As I started doing this for some long articles (such as this one ), I realized that the best online…
Rating: 5/5 This novel starts off with an imprisoned protagonist thinking of the past where the prisoner was part of the very Revolution that has now imprisoned them. As the story progresses, philosophical ramblings come at increasingly frequent intervals and the novel reveals the most valuable plot point: watching the protagonist go back and forth between the belief that the “Revolution” was a…
I switched from Ubuntu 22.04 to Debian 11 earlier this year. I was using Ubuntu’s LTS OS versions for nearly 9 years before that, since 2014. The switch to Debian was because I stopped liking what Ubuntu had done with the OS: The GUI has become a strange mix of Ubuntu’s old desktop environment (Unity) and the Gnome Desktop Environment, which is standard and popular. I generally use the i3 window…
Rating: 4/5 Ozeki’s novel is good at the beginning and good at the end. The middle drags on for a little too long; I had at least a mild interest in figuring out how the characters end up. However, the interest levels get pretty low. It is a book about books, art, culture, the decline of reading, the increase of consumerism, capitalism, and the incredibly high number of things that are now a…
Rating: 5/5 One should never arrive in an unknown place at night, everything is undefined, every object is easily exaggerated. This is a beautiful line. Every time I am booking a ticket to some new place, I remember this line. I remember the dread and uncertainty of arriving at night. Despite knowing that arriving at night is unwise, I arrived in Italy late one night in 2019. It was a timely…
Every conversation that I have been in over the past 3 weeks outside the home has been about generative AI, and the vein of all these conversations is quite similar. Most of the people I met are optimistic about this new “technological advancement.” 1 I met a few skeptics who believe that generative AI is adept at generating only a summary of what’s already out there and incapable of coming up…
There has been a lot of media theory talk over the past year in the mainstream (newspapers, news websites, television) and on the intellectual sidelines (podcasts and blogs). The discourse is heavy on the origins and consequences of the continuing, effectively unstoppable, decay of communication over traditional media. (Savvy authors might use terms like “signal to noise ratio.”) However, all this…
This novel is humorous. The characters and their interactions, the presumptions that they make about each other based on trivial details, the protagonist’s (His name is K.) strange obsession over every single alphabet in the letters that he receives, characters that have a job which they do only when they want to. Everything in the novel is humorous. On the surface. Just underneath the surface,…
The newspaper represents the canonical form of media. This medium is devoid of the strangeness inherent in 24-hour TV 1 , and has been around long enough for its form to reach a state of equilibrium; a state that can be understood. Of all the pages in a newspaper, I want to talk about the entertainment pages. What is the point of the entertainment supplement that accompanies newspapers? These…
The primary source for this list is Dalrymple’s account of his visits to 5 Communist countries as described in his book The Wilder Shores of Marx (Dalrymple) . Dalrymple visited these countries in the late 1980s, and several of these countries have since turned to democracy. The 2 other major sources that have influenced me would be movies about life in Eastern Europe during or right after the 2nd…
After nearly a decade of using the internet daily, it is clear that users have little control over what is displayed on their screen. The control has been ceded to capitalists wishing to sell you something . I am not just talking about the algorithmic social media that is the rage these days. ( TL;DR Tik Tok is becoming more popular than Instagram because their algorithm is better and Instagram is…
I have been experimenting with keyboards for the past several years and in February this year, I switched to a keyboard which I hope will be the last keyboard I ever buy. The whole point of switching keyboards all this while was to buy the right version of this keyboard, the Ergodox EZ . It is a split keyboard with an ortholinear layout. It is an expensive keyboard and can be customized to an…
Allen’s Global Economic History: A Very Short Introduction is a 200-page masterpiece. It packs a huge amount of history. It looks far enough into the past to set the scene for the Industrial Revolution and the economic gains seen as a result of it. Then, Allen retreats into the fundamentals of economic development and goes over the main reasons some countries are perennially stuck in the “middle…
TikTok is the most talked about social media platform now. Articles about the impact it is having are published regularly in mainstream publications. People are constantly writing editorials about what it is, how it became popular, how it is owned by a Chinese company (and thus, controlled by the Chinese government), etc. I had read enough of it that I wanted to give it a try. I wanted to be a…
I understand the economics behind advertising. Advertising can be used to subsidize content. However, I refuse to accept that Bloomberg.com needs to show advertisements to a paying subscriber. 1 This comes down to personal preference: If you believe that advertisements are a net good and support the work that you are viewing “for free”, so be it. I do not believe that. If I must pay for content…
A Burning is ostensibly about 3 people. Their lives are entwined in rather banal ways: teacher, a former student, a young woman helping a slum dweller learn English, a transgender beggar who is learning acting, an acting teacher who has never had a real audience. Their hopes and dreams are conventional: The young woman gets into a good school and manages to escape her past and moves solidly into…
Gaslighting is a catch-all term. I understand it as the act of relentlessly bombarding a consumer of information with a large amount of irrelevant statistics and facts to such an extent that the victim can no longer convincingly explain (even to themselves) their fundamental beliefs. There is a lot of talk of “gaslighting” in media environments where there is a single source of news. In India,…
I am not one to balk when it comes to writing rants and leaving it at that. However, when publishing rants, I think it is worthwhile to also think about the problems and try to figure out whether there is some solution to the problems that one is ranting about. Often, there is no such solution. If an easy solution did exist, there would be no need to find catharsis through the process of writing a…
Over a series of several occasions last year, I experienced the absurdity rife in modern customer service. I don’t think that things have always been like this. Customer service was a pain and you would often by stuck on 30 minute phone calls trying to explain your situation to the other person. But there was a person at the other end. And after those grueling 30 minutes, they would understand…
Everyone agrees that Facebook makes them feel worse. It accelerates the “Fear Of Missing Out” anxiety that is quite strong even when you don’t know exactly what your peers are doing on a Friday evening. But people continue to flock to Facebook. Yes, Facebook is losing teen users 1 , but this is not a precipitous drop. In any case, these teenagers are going to other platforms which are arguably…
The month of February is before the end of the financial year and the month that many governments release their budgets for the next financial year. They also talk (at length) about the policies that they are going to implement. To commemorate this annual exercise in long-term decision making, this month’s list of recommendations is about politics and government policy. We see examples of…
Ted Chiang is a path breaking philosopher and fiction writer. I started saying that after reading his short story “Story of Your Life.” His second book, “Exhalation”, is a collection of short stories from 2019. It covers an even wider range of topics than his first collection. Chiang has the ability to zoom out of the present moment and write about human nature without providing solutions or…
I found out about the Beatles documentary from a podcast episode . The host was talking about a clip showing the Beatles legend, Paul McCartney, composing the song “Get Back.” The stunning part of this video was that he had started from nothing. He was idly strumming chords on his guitar, early in the morning. Ringo Starr and George Harrison were sitting across from him; they appeared disheveled,…
For the first recommendations post of the year, I have picked out some of the best New Yorker stories that I read as I worked through my issue backlog from early 2020. I have given up on reading the New Yorker at the pace at which it is published. However, the articles that are included in each issue are rarely “current affairs” related and can basically be read and re-read years into the future.…