notes by druchan
Re:Paper is a pet project where I get to read interesting papers from the past and share my thoughts/impressions. It's not too dissimilar to book reviews, except for papers. Or paper-like things (a talk that gets published, an essay from an academic etc.) For 002, we have Carlo Ravolli's Physics Needs Philosophy. Philosophy Needs Physics . When the ancients on the Indian subcontinent asked and…
Re:Paper is a pet project where I get to read interesting papers from the past and share my thoughts/impressions. It's not too dissimilar to book reviews, except for papers or talks that get published as papers. For 001, we have Can Programming be Liberated from von Neumann Style by John Backus . I have no idea how I landed on this paper or from where. But I'm certain that it must've come about…
Years ago, I used to work as a tech blogger covering iOS how-tos for the iPhone 4 series. Apple iOS was a very restrictive system unlike Android, and the only way you could customize your iPhone beyond the limited native options was to "jailbreak" the phone, install something like Cydia (a marketplace for apps that can only be installed on a jailbroken iPhone), and download the apps that made it…
My colleague and I were to meet at the court complex for my initiation into how courtrooms work. As a joke-quip, I said to my colleague, "See you in court!" And so, for the next handful of hours, for every query of mine regarding a legal process, her example would begin: "So let's say you and I are involved in a dispute." For the entire day spent there, we were constantly up against each other in…
Linear has this hierarchy of layers to track, say, a feature. Not too dissimilar from all this "epic, story, task, sub-task" kind of nonsense that goes around. Linear calls it "project -> issue -> sub-issue" etc. I am going through a project I am working on and someone has set up projects for each feature, and each project has similar-looking issues: <feature> frontend implementation , <feature>…
This is hopefully the first of a regular frequency of journal entries / updates during the course of studies in power. Power cuts across multiple dimensions and levels. There's a lot of power dynamics in nature, within species, across species. In humans (sociologically), there's individual power, there's collective power, there's power of nations -- all acted out in relation to other parties.…
rdigest is a small CLI-based tool I made in late 2024. It began as a way to manage my daily reading (online digital consumption) because YouTube's UI was distracting, RSS feed readers and their infinitely-scrolling pages were overwhelming and I had cut out social media from life eons ago. TL;DR, digital content consumption was at some unmanageable crossroads in life and I had to find a way to deal…
Recently, Current RSS reader hit the headlines and I had a gander at what it is, how it's designed and what the underlying philosophy is. It's a beautiful-looking app. But the fundamentals are problematic and repeat the same mistakes that lead to different kinds of problems you and I face w.r.t. digital content overwhelm as we try to grapple with, catch up on, and manage our digital consumption.…
I. "I've taken down your complaint, Mr. Henson, and I'll dispatch a new team immediately to have a look and fix the cameras. Really sorry for the inconvenience, Mr. Henson." The voice was so soft, so wispy. Henson thought he could hear this voice all his life. Then, he thought about what Barbara had said in the cafe about a week back. "They tweak the frequencies to calm you... some word called…
Some time back, in a routine cleanup of my many drafts, I found one where I "introduced" vāk , the blogging script/tool I use to run my blog. I never quite finished that draft. I am certain I must've dissuaded myself from writing it by thinking, "no one's going to read it anyway." About a couple of days back, I introduced a new feature to vāk: collections. Collections is just "tags" in some other…