Excursions

Written languages based on alphabets are one of the great human accomplishments. (…) when I write the word “human” you can fill in what you imagine a human to look like. The word itself carries some fundamental attributes of being a human but the rest is intentionally underspecified. This allows us to use a single word that applies independent of gender, nationality, race, clothing, etc. That is the power of language based on alphabets, because the letters themselves carry no meaning. Even the meaning of a word can evolve over time. For example, the word “couple” at one point might have meant a male-female couple but is now used to describe any two people who are paired.

A thoughtful essay, but I completely disagree. There is an innate assumption here that everyone can read and write English alphabet. It is, in reality, not the case. There are tons of alphabets across nations and regions. In India itself, there are 11 alphabets. My mom can fluently read and write Devanagari, but that is not the case with English alphabets.

Emoji cross the confines of regions - primarily because it is visual. Is it perfect? Of course, not — we have managed to mess up the standards in implementation across platforms.

However, at least, I can send my mom a “smile” emoji without spelling it out in Devanagari. It was the first thing that lent her confidence to start using smartphones, way before Devanagari support was even introduced.

A couple of my colleagues have been debating on since how long the dinosaurs have been extinct — one claims it was 200 years. Another says 2000 years. And am wondering who should I correct first? Or should I even correct anyone? Because I think it is completely meaningless.

Given a choice, would you prefer a prepaid unlimited plan for something or pay as you use? More things I review recently — mobile data plans, cable, broadband — I realize pay-as-you-use end up being costlier. I do not understand the business sense behind this.

I came across an interesting project - rwtxt - which is now serving the ideas subdomain of my website. I was, since long, in search of a simple writing pad to capture quick thoughts - light enough to be accessible from mobile. This fits the bill, so in trial mode now. (h/t @eli)

It has been pouring down incessantly since yesterday. The sound of stillness such that cloudburst spreads is both soothing and annoying at the same time. The wall of water stirs the emotions, but also keeps them lingering within without an outlet. Nothing, other than words.

I realized FaceId does not recognize me while am yawning. I doubt it may not even be a bug - may be it’s a feature. “If you are yawning such that your face is distorted, may be you aren’t awake enough to be allowed to work the device?”

A fascinating read — instance when ML application is generally positive.

The goal is to better understand these ancient games and their role in human societies, to reconstruct their rules and to determine how they fit into the evolutionary tree of games that has led to the games we play today. They call this discipline archaeoludology.

The researchers have ambitious plans for their incipient science. They say the new techniques of machine vision, artificial intelligence, and data mining provide an entirely new way to study ancient games and to build a better understanding of the way they have evolved.

Cursive writing is fun. Cursive writing is difficult - not everybody’s cup of tea. I was to learn cursive writing.

These statements are mutually exclusive.

And the journey begins! 🤞🏽

A really great article summarizing the perils of files and writes and file systems. And also on why exactly consumers should care. Especially, the below excerpt on cost of data corruption is bang on.

(…) if we look at how consumer software works, it’s usually quite unsafe with respect to handling data. IMO, the key difference here is that when a huge tech company loses data, whether that’s data on who’s likely to click on which ads or user emails, the company pays the cost, directly or indirectly and the cost is large enough that it’s obviously correct to spend a lot of effort to avoid data loss. But when consumers have data corruption on their own machines, they’re mostly not sophisticated enough to know who’s at fault, so the company can avoid taking the brunt of the blame. If we have a global optimization function, the math is the same — of course we should put more effort into protecting data on consumer machines. But if we’re a company that’s locally optimizing for our own benefit, the math works out differently and maybe it’s not worth it to spend a lot of effort on avoiding data corruption.