srinathkrishna

This!

As someone who moved 6 times in 8 years (admittedly, some of those were for work), and every time, I relied on moving things myself/with friends, I was just tired any more!

For the last move, I hired movers since I was already married by then and our stuff tripled (yes, mine was a very small portion).

The fact that I don't have to move for a while now gives me a lot of peace!

I couldn't help but resonate with a lot of what Kyle says here.

If not already, we will soon lose the ability to think if AI is helping humans (an overwhelming majority of them, not a handful), considering how we are steaming ahead in this path!

This is where knowing how to break things down and general analytical skills will come in handy.

Riak was one of the OG k/v stores by [basho](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basho_Technologies). They were kind of early to the world of distributed k/v stores and flourished quite a lot but ultimately got usurped by the cloud giants.

I've been to Cloudflare's SF office many times for meetups and even for an interview and their lava lamp wall is one of the coolest stuff I've seen in an office.

So cool to see that they've built something similar in their Portugal office.

Given the fact that multi-modal LLMs are getting so good at OCR these days, is it a shame that we can't do local OCR with high accuracy in the near-term?

Congrats and inspiring to hear your journey! :)

Wow! That was amazing!

mostly written by junior engineers or even students (because there are so many publicly-accessible Java school-project personal GitHub repos.)

I used to work at a Java shop a few years ago. Hated my time there since a. I was coming from a more pragmatic way of writing software in C and Java and its ecosystem made me pull my hair out and b. came across several very senior engineers who insisted on writing code with factories and builders and obscure design patterns which made no sense to me. They were all straight from praying at the altar of Design Patterns and always found a way to give comments about a future scenario where this would be refactored.

I was fairly convinced that design patterns in OOP languages were conceived by relatively senior folks as a form of gate keeping.

Does Norway allow Chinese car makers into the market? Skoda is popular but I wish the article also mentioned the median value of an EV in Norway.

At least in the US, the cost of acquiring an EV is the major deterrent from what I can see. If you live in a city and you want to just get a cheap EV for under $25k for your typical commute, there's just no option in the US!

For the most part, one should also likely get a compatible phone and Samsung phones that support DEX are not cheap!

I have a Pixel and have owned Pixel phones for a while and it's a shame that Google is only just opening up HDMI external display on the Pixel 8!

It's a neat idea but I find it hard to succeed at scale.

I'm glad someone asked this question and one of my often quipped quotes is - if you squint hard, every software project is some kind of a migration. And there are some excellent suggestions by others.

Having led my fair share of migrations in the past and going through one right now, here are my tips.

- Understand your stakeholders and the teams that are impacted. Spend enough time understanding how the system is being used today. Proxying and abstractions are you friend here. Just get as much data as possible.

- Once you get enough data, make sure to crunch and very importantly, have a means to surface this to the users. More often than not, for systems that have organically grown, you'll be surprised that users themselves don't know how they use an API.

- As much as possible, try to move things seamlessly. You can always do some portion of the migration without users knowing it. This can be as simple as introducing a translation layer or even you making code changes for the users to review them.

- If you're working on a timeline here owing to external factors like vendor contracts, cert expiry dates etc., make sure to buffer in at least a quarter (or possibly more). There will be new discoveries along the way.

- There will always be teams/stakeholders who will oppose to you asking them to do this work. I can't stress this enough - make sure to get your leadership on board. If you have a Program Management Office, make them your best friends. For anything that escalates and gets political, you as an engineer are better served to get the job done and an aligned leadership that backs you will help you fight these stragglers.

- Ultimately, love what you're doing. There's a mistaken understanding that migration work is not as sexy as greenfield work. I truly believe greenfield work is manifold simpler than migration. A migration is more like changing the wheels and the engine of a car as its running. There will be a lot of tradeoffs that have to be made and this is where engineering skills come into the picture!

All the best! :)

They mention in the faq that they use Stripe - https://www.terminal.shop/faq. Stripe does offer integrations that are not natively using their widgets. Ultimately, the PII data is stored at Stripe.

PS: I work at Stripe but I don't really work on the PCI compliant part of the company.

How has fastmail helped you?

Doesn't work on phone. Especially if you're on the road. If you're at home and use YouTube on multiple devices, of course you can use a pihole or something.

I have a long commute (which is not very unreasonable). YouTube Premium also lets you download videos on your phone and have it background play. I usually record talks/lectures the previous night before my commute the following day. Has definitely help me keep my sanity!

My kid watches YouTube sometimes and I'm sure she'll appreciate getting this when she was younger so much so that she will naturally develop the aversion to ads when she grows up! :D

The Top Down book by Kurose and Ross is hands-down one of the best books for Networking and is very relevant even today to understand the patterns.

Things like retries, backoffs, checksumming, error detection etc. can be done in multiple layers of the networking stack and often is done in multiple layers.

At my previous job, I ran a small-ish library at my desk. Just brought up all my books and had them under my desk for people to peruse and take.

At current job, I do have a good enough library - but I hardly go into the office ;D

You cannot expect that from people! People will be people. Anything that is open to abuse, it will be abused!

Are we seeing the case where AI is now suffering from multiple personality disorder? As much as fascinating this is, I think the fact that an LLM cannot _really_ think for itself opens it up to abuse from humans.

Fascinating read. I still remember using decorators when writing OpenMP code in python. Instant parallelism without having to fiddle with pthreads and the like.

The best new software that I picked up and used this year was Alfred, the spotlight replacement on macOS.

I spent a few hours spread across the initial few weeks focusing on defining workflows and it has been such a breeze. It has been a huge productivity boost overall.

Another software I’d add is syncthing for syncing files between my devices. 2022 was also the year I completely removed my reliance on Dropbox for inter-syncing between all my devices and syncthing has been instrumental for that.

I'd recommend reading content by copyconstruct on their medium blog and also content by Honeycomb and it's CEO/CTO. Lots of first principles content that you can learn and apply to any system.

Once you're familiar with the basics, you can pickup some docs/videos around OpenTelemetry to read about how it is done in the real world. Pretty much all obs systems today have otel support.

I've been a huge fan of B&N since I stepped foot in the US and was one of the first people to rush to buy the nook color. Admittedly I haven't been visiting the stores since there's none that's close by to where I live but this post was refreshing to read. And I did learn about James Daunt in the process too.

Definitely earmarking to visit a store before the end of the year to grab a couple of good books.

This was quite hard hitting. I mean, if you're a consumer in the US where even a simple piece of fruit comes packaged often in plastic, you know the piece of plastic isn't going to be completely recycled. I always thought this ends up in a landfill which is bad in itself!

There have been a few other outlets that have focused on this problem in the past. John Oliver did a segment too.

Are there any startups working in this space? Incineration is quite bad if the fumes aren't contained - is there research happening in controlling/eliminating toxins even if incineration is done?

This was a nice read and resonated with me a lot especially around how productivity gurus shill every single app out there.

I’ve always felt processes > tools and whatever tool(s) work for you, you ought to stick with it rather than get into a FOMO wheel and try every app out there. Peddlers of these apps are innumerable and YouTube definitely doesn’t shy away from recommending this sort of content.

Even simple text files in a reasonably defined file organization scheme is more than sufficient. This post also gave a name for this - collection management, which I’ve been thinking for a while. More often than not, there are these collections of items/lists that I end up having to track and the ideal bit missing is some process and a low friction tool to get there.

Another thing is the fetish for using a _single_ tool which is self-hostable which plagues the world today. While a younger me would’ve been onboard for this thinking, at this point in my life, the only thing probably matters is local-first and I’ve long given up the hope for a single tool, taking inspiration from the world of Unix tools.

The way I look at it is it is an excellent companion that will help me automate a lot of tasks

1. Send this quick email to my team telling I'll be late. 2. Adding boilerplate stuff that I keep doing again and again. 3. Writing very quick and dirty poc stuff 4. Do simple usage analysis of logs/metrics for learning some patterns

After these, the onus would be on me to focus on what needs to be done.

The only major downside I see to this is preserving and quick retrieval of knowledge. It's a well known fact that many luminaries over the course of several centuries had systems similar to a Zettlekasten, most notably, Niklas Luhmann, the prolific sociologist apparently had several thousand index cards preserving info.

While it's commendable, it should also be noted that all this was done prior to the information age we're living in. These are physical objects that at the end of the day take up sizeable space in your house, gather dust, need cleaning/dusting etc. And you can't throw a computer at the problem of search and retrieval, at least yet.

I wish there was more research into active learning by typing as well. Typing does force you to think, especially if you don't type something you learn verbatim but actively try to process info and possibly summarize it in your own words.

Thanks for sharing the `window.location.href`. I had attempted to do something like this in the past and gave up when I hit the HTTP issue you are referring to, specifically in the websites (mostly news sites) that I predominantly spent time with.

Katapayadi is heavily employed in the nomenclature of melakarta ragas in carnatic (south Indian classical) music. One of the most fascinating mnemonic schemes ever.

This is fascinating! I've been meaning to set something up on a spare rpi for this and I hadn't heard of yacy before. Thanks!