mdani

I am wondering what the 'sub-processor' means here. Am I right in assuming that the Persona architecture uses Kafka, S3 data lake in AWS and GCP, Elastic Search, MongoDB for configuration or user metadata, and Snowflake for analytics, thus all these end up on sub-processle list as the data physically touches these company's products or infra hosted outside Persona? I hope all these aren't providing their own identity services and all of them aren't seeing my passport for further validation.

There were several great famines during the Mughal reign in India, for example, Peter Mundy, the English merchant and traveller, describes the great famine of Deccan and Gujrat. The Mughal rule was brutal. The European travellers have written about the plight of the farmers who rebelled due to excessive taxation despite the fear of punishment. The Mughals built towers of severed heads outside each village and even they were not able to quell the rebellion, such was the state of affairs. So I'd say the assumption you're making isn't true.

Same here. I'd add that viewing the lava fountain at night was a mesmerizing experience. You get to see the full extent of red, glowing lava lake and the fountain. There were thousands of people and yet they appeared so small in front of the volcano. We did experience some ash and Pele's hair on the way to the park, near the black sand beach. I do recommend carrying a torch though at night, since it is pitch black at night. The lava illuminated the park with the red glow, but there were some parts where you do need a torch esp. if you park far away and walk.

I write about Indian history as my side project.

https://a.co/d/guvUxgq

https://a.co/d/iSg4jKZ

I don't, but I can upload a sample tomorrow in case you're interested in taking a look.

The article mentions a code breaking software - any idea what that is? I have a coded letter that is about 250 years old, but it is written in Devanagari script so letter frequency isn't straightforward. Please do suggest any tools that can help in decoding.

If I can make a guess, I'd say that the reporters engaged with them as a potential customer and demanded a sample of the data so they can indeed verify the accuracy. That's how they obtained the sample records, not via a s3 leak.

The MVNOs such as MobileX mentioned above do not have their own towers or the cellular backbone i.e. the core network. They'll merely use the MNO such as Verizon or T-Mobile and have a commercial arrangement in which MVNO just handles the marketing and the customer support. So the MVNOs may not have the right tools or data or incentives to catch these sim farms.

I couldn't comprehend the content of the linked article, so I sought out the original piece from Reuters. Here's a concise summary:

- Appin, an Indian firm, is accused by Reuters of functioning as the e-commerce platform for hacking (similar to Amazon but for hacking). Users log in to a covert portal, place orders to hack into target mailboxes, make payments, and receive the delivered data.

- Appin received requests globally, including from RAW, IB, and the Indian military. However, when the Indian government detected financial irregularities, government contracts ceased. In desperation, Appin took on any available work, but it didn't survive.

- Despite Appin's demise, its former employees initiated similar ventures that are still active today.

Considering the involvement of the Indian government, I anticipated Appin and its founders to dispute the allegations, and they did. The article was subsequently removed, raising allegations of censorship.

The linked article discusses the backlash against this alleged censorship.

The timing of this article is intriguing, coinciding with the recent Pannun affair and now presenting another accusation, this time in the cyberspace. Reuters mentions that "The National Security Agency (NSA), which spies on foreigners for the U.S. government, began surveilling the company after watching it hack “high value” Pakistani officials around 2009, one of the sources said. An NSA spokesperson declined to comment." This may lead Indians to question: if the NSA can hack, why can't we?

Does anyone know what languages Apple supports? The docs don't have a list. Tesseract might be "meh" but it is probably the best open source option available for devnagari scripts or Persian, for example.

The name of the province - it's pronounced pun-jab, not poon-jab. (pun intended)

The article seems to suggest that the SG cell is also getting regenerated. See

The new cells contained transduction channels that relay sound signals and the ability to form connections with auditory neurons — processes essential to hearing.

The previous RBI governor is entering politics and joining the opposition, so his current opinions should be taken as political rather than purely academic.

Not a native reader, using my acquired reading knolwdge. It takes a lot of processing for me, no idea where to start, had to look for each letter and still couldn't find a few. So great as a design, quite poor for readability.

I hope someone builds a chatGPT equivalent that would answer the spam calls. That would be a neat use case with lot of potential.

I started reading but couldn't get my sleepy brain around how Adani manipulated the stocks. Sure, the valuations are astronomical but doesn't indicate that Adanis themselves are behind the rise? Can someone please post a TLDR?

Puffed rice is made differently in India. They use a hot pan and black sand with no pressure release. Example: https://youtu.be/36GKVfo5PUA

I would probably reroute the end of the rain sprout on the left side of the shed away from the shed, since it would put lots of water at the base of the shed whenever it rains, weakening the base of the shed.

If you have done any typesetting, say for a book, you'd realize that there is a sweet spot between the font size and the number of characters in a line. This has changed little over the hundreds of years. I think some of that effect is what we're seeing on the screen here in this post. There is a lower limit though, if you set the line too small, you'll be scrolling very often as the other comments have pointed out.

https://baymard.com/blog/line-length-readability

Is this in some way connected to the Facebook data leak of 1.5 billion users? The timing seems quite odd that both these things happen around the same time.

Does anyone know any OCR (including closed source) that can handle nastaliq script for Urdu, Farsi etc? Tesseract can't do this today due to complex ligatures I think.

SWE turned into a non-fiction author here. I published my first book six months ago. [1]

Surprisingly, my biggest obstacle was digital advertising. It is impossible to advertise a print book on Amazon as an independent seller. Facebook banned my ads (guessing it's the cover?) and when I got past it, the ads had pretty good CTRs but very low conversions.

The thing that did work for me was the YouTube videos, interviews and other short pieces I did for publicity, that helped me to sell half of the total print.

Any ideas on how to tackle the advertising?

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Battle-Panipat-light-rediscovered-pai...

A very interesting video on PFCs and liquid breathing.

https://youtu.be/TIGCdA2YLyY

I visited India in Dec 2020, so here's my personal take on this based on what I saw. The first lockdown in India was very severe and it basically made the second lockdown pretty unpopular in the business community, at least initially. The dithering contributed to even bigger second wave.

The reasons behind the lull between the first and the second waves were not entirely clear, and some people assumed that the herd immunity is being reached. Combined with the desire to return to normalcy after a harsh lockdown, it falsely assured people that the worst was behind them. This created the perfect conditions for a bigger second wave.

Finally, the state and every petty official was intoxicated by the powers they weilded during the first lockdown, and they forgot that with great power comes the great responsibility. They unnecessarily focused on tiny things such as fining people Rs. 500 at the traffic lights, while not really understanding the new information on how virus spreads, what are the best ways to tackle transmission and so on. People should have been given the liberty to be outdoors with proper face covering when there was good airflow. They shpuld have known that meeting indoors with poor airflow was the biggest threat. This wasn't communicated properly.

Some government officials did take decisions proactively to save their own district. For example, see here

https://youtu.be/Sa4vCG1oY6M

But unfortunately, this was the exception rather than the norm.

Another case of ML based moderation. This ML based judging with no appeal must end. I was only mildly disturbed so far, but when it started affecting me personally, it really hit home. I wrote a book on third battle of Panipat and when I tried to advertise it on Facebook, the ML banned me because it thought that I am violating their guidelines and promoting violence. Alas, it can't differentiate between a 260 year old battle and today! And there is no way to talk to a human. If this is the way we continue, then no history books can be advertised since invariably our past has been filled with violence.

I had the misfortune of eating one of these bitter Zucchini flowers. It was extremely bitter and I could not even swallow the single bite I took. But it was enough to make me sick for two days. I couldn't even drink plain water since it caused instant vomit and/or diarrhea. Those were some of the worst days I had ever been through.

The plant was from my own backyard, but it was stressed due to some insect / squirrel eating many leaves and buds. Possibly that triggered the plant to make the toxins that keep predators away.

A transmission of the pilot’s final exchange with air traffic control, posted on the website LiveATC.net, indicated he had failed to land and was circling around to make another attempt, reported AP.

“We are proceeding direct, sir — we have lost engine,” a pilot can be heard saying.

“Confirm your attempt on belly,” the air traffic controller said, offering a runway.

“Sir - mayday, mayday, mayday, mayday Pakistan 8303,” the pilot said before the transmission ended.

source: https://www.dawn.com/news/1558944/at-least-80-killed-as-plan...

Yes, it has been exploited exactly like you described. An example that I remember - Foodpanda in India. I guess fraud costs are massive for all the food delivery startups.

source: http://www.livemint.com/Companies/rYKC6HjnShogjE62jO5lpK/The...

Goa was declared COVID-free when the last cases recovered and there were no new cases. That is probably the reason - the situation in other parts of India is quite different.

Source: https://m.timesofindia.com/india/goa-covid-free-but-risks-lo...

Wondering if direct sunlight would be as effective as UV light?