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mavidser

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https://sidverma.io

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/mavidser; my proof: https://keybase.io/mavidser/sigs/SCabG8KongZrwy60lW18Rw0d0JLJst6kYDlBZFmutfo ]

contact - me [at] [my domain name above]

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    Location: Goa, India (UTC +05:30)
    Remote: Yes
    Willing to relocate: No. Intermittent travel is possible though.
    Technologies: Python, Go, JavaScript, C++ - Backend, Frontend, SysAdmin, DevOps, Microcontrollers
    Résumé/CV: https://sidverma.io/resume
    Email: me[@]sidverma.io
10+ years being a full-stack generalist. More of a developer/product specialist than a team manager.

Most of my recent work has been working on Django and Flask based systems, upgrading them and improving resilience and cost-efficiency. Also have extensive experience building Go and Nodejs-based-servers, and a ton of frontend frameworks from jQuery -> Meteor -> Angular -> Vue -> React -> Svelte. Big fan of automated pipelines that work well.

Also, slightly tangential – I have been having fun working in media-adjacent contracts recently (GLSL, TouchDesigner, ESP32s), so if you're looking for solutions to for generative art or installations, feel free to email me too.

Hi, OP here - your country is amazing and I'd love to visit beyond the major cities.

This was mostly a ski trip and my first time here, so I barely got a chance to get out of town - but I do intend to come back next winter and go visit some friends in the western region :)

Haha that's fair. Though I wouldn't say I need to, but I like to. These are the few times I get to work with my hands, and having some accountability of an exchange helps with consistency and discipline. But YMMV of course.

Tbf that was exactly my point. An adult might use 'inference' and 'reasoning' to ask clarification, or go with an internal logic of their choosing.

ChatGPT here went with a lexigraphical order in Python for some reason, and then proceeded to make false statements from false observations, while also defying its own internal logic.

    "six" > "ten" is true because "six" comes after "ten" alphabetically.
No.
    "ten" > "seven" is false because "ten" comes before "seven" alphabetically.
No.

From what I understand of LLMs (which - I admit - is not very much), logical reasoning isn't a property of LLMs, unlike information retrieval. I'm sure this problem can be solved at some point, but a good solution would need development of many more kinds of inference and logic engines than there are today.

http://weather.sidverma.io/

https://github.com/weather-viz/data-generator/

It started with me trying to get weather stats for my city, to give proof to the nagging thought 'Has it really gotten this hotter in the last X years?'

Now its aiming to be a project where one can visualize historical weather data for any place with a lot of stats and trendlines

Still in active development - right now the visualization only has my town in it.

That'd be 'ProRes RAW', which I don't think an iPhone can shoot in. Log is still processed video, just graded in a flatter profile so you can do more degrees of adjustments in different dimensions like color and exposure.

RAW footage, can barely be called video. Those files don't even have any White Balance and ISO data baked in, just raw data from the sensor, providing even more amount of control in post production, at the expense of working with extremely large files.

I can't agree that "global public square don't work for humans" - but even if that were the case, it's still too late to just reverse course. As long it's possible, viable and largely desired, the market will spit out a solution to this need.

It feels like I have no laptop to choose form right now in the market, but here's what I'd like:

1. WiFi+Bluetooth and graphic cards which don't suck on Linux. No Broadcom or Nvidea.

2. Good body without any deck flex, and no flex in the trackpad either. Love the taptic keypads on macbooks.

3. Good power management. Since I expect to lose some battery performance running Linux, I'd prefer to have the laptop be slightly thicker rather than have a tiny battery backup. Also, S3 suspend.

3. Both USB-C and USB-A ports. Preferabel HDMI, full-size SD card reader too.

4. Upgradable RAM and SSD. This is a major one, as I've often doubled the life of my devices by increasing the memory a couple of years into the machine.

5. No 16:9 displays. Nope. Too tiny. At least 16:10. Never used 3:2 but shouldn't be too bad. And they should be able to get bright enough.

Just to clarify this further - most good recipe writers would use actual prep times, but they start from the state of listed ingredients. If the ingredients mention '3 whole onions' and the steps list chopping them, the recipe would include chopping time. However if the recipe lists 250g chopped onions, then the recipe time won't factor into that part.

Of course, this is usually true for publications which have an editorial processes (eg - Cook's Illustrated), and not more casual blogs/YT videos

This isn't sitting well with me at all. Of course it had to be done, but I also think it's a scary precedent.

    First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a socialist.

    Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a trade unionist.

    Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
         Because I was not a Jew.

    Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
I realize that the banned groups and people were really into extremism (to say it lightly), but there's also the fact that the Pandora's box has been opened, where huge private companies can remove figures and communities of an entire political spectrum - leaving them voiceless. And given the way political democracy swings, I am quite afraid of the time this starts happening to us.

Also, just to clarify: I'm thinking this from the POV of the non-violent conservatives who are seeing this as an attack on their politics, and who can then use this as a justification to block BLM/"antifa" protests for "peace" if they come back in power.

I started self-hosting most of my stuff for a while and had been putting off moving to MP3s and AirSonic for a while because Spotify seemed pretty good, and it always had the escape route.

Looks like this is what forces my move now :(

Tangential for folks with more bluetooth knowledge than me - is there any bluetooth profile (or plans for a future high-bandwidth bluetooth version) which can support high quality audio while also supporting microphones?

HFS/HSP is one of the major reasons why I'm still reluctant to use wireless headphones as my default playback device.

Color blindness 6 years ago

A color-blind poster here - this month has been the first time that I've noticed colors in stars (or planet, specifically).

Mars is very close and red these days, which I hadn't noticed before. I got quite giddy when I first saw a "colored dot" in the sky a few days ago and now most of my evening runs are motivated by getting a glimpse of the bright red planet. :)

A few weeks more until it starts rising early and isn't distinguishable anymore.

These consulting companies are often referred to as "mass recruiters" in most engineering colleges. I went to one such school too, and the the qualifying test/interview was a couple of CS101 questions, and was the default option of employment for anyone who wasn't joining any other organization (this also included good mechanical, chemical and civil engineers with little to no CS background, but the market had slowed down at the time, and they had to resort to IT jobs).

This might not be the case for every firm or client, but I hear a lot of my friends complaining about there not being very little work, and if you're someone competent enough, you can complete a day's work in an hour and play Fortnite for the rest of the day.

New iPhone SE 6 years ago

I am apparently in the minority here who prefers faceID, mostly because how transparent it is UX-wise. I don't have to do an additional 'Authenticate' press when opening protected apps, instead I pass through the security while the app loading animation completes.

Though, it has been hell now with using face masks for the past few weeks, where I have to spend 5 seconds on every auth-screen, where it tries faceID twice and then gives the option of PIN authentication.

Remote server's a 20USD/month DigitalOcean droplet with 4GB memory. Though even half of that would also have specified for these services.

Home server's a Raspberry Pi 4.

I reworked my servers a while ago to host literally everything through docker, managed via terraform.

All web-services are reverse-proxied through traefik

At home:

    loki + cadvisor + node-exporter + grafana + prometheus
    syncthing
    tinc vpn server
    jackett + radarr + sonarr + transmission
    jellyfin
    samba server
    calibre server
On a remote server:
    loki + cadvisor + node-exporter + grafana + prometheus
    syncthing
    tinc vpn server
    dokuwiki
    firefox-sync
    firefox-send
    vscode server
    bitwarden
    freshrss
    znc bouncer + lounge irc client + bitlbee
    an httptunnel server (like ngrok)
    firefly iii
    monicahq
    kanboard
    radicale
    syncthing
    wallabag
    tmate-server