abhiyerra

The last couple of years I have felt like we are converging on a Brave New World, meets 1984, meets Children of Men, meets cyberpunk...

Chromebooks…

Your experience sounds exactly like mine. I downloaded Linux 2.6 which took 2 days to compile. Then when I installed it on my Slackware system completely hosed it. But learned so much…

I don’t think people consider the negative ramifications for this on the other side. Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft have a ton of H1B. Take India, as an example, since that is where a majority of H1Bs come from. It has been pretty lenient in allowing American tech into the country. Everyone uses Google, YouTube, Windows, WhatsApp and Amazon. All of those are profits that go to America.

If H1Bs are dropped or Indian workers are tariffed I believe you will start seeing a reciprocal tariffs, fines or calls for domestication.

H1B started off with the right idea, but has essentially become gamed to hell. It has created a new white collar slave class that companies exploit.

The Irish too… though they were given things like prisons.

Scots legacy of the empire can still be seen in the bank HSBC. Unfortunately, history sort of forgets that the Scots were involved in some of the more egregious aspects such as slavery and opium.

(Studied British Empire/Indian History)

That I have a DevOps company working entirely on Linux can be directly attributed to realizing as a kid that Unix was a real thing and I needed to install it on my own computer. Interesting it was soon after this movie came out that FreeBSD and Linux were becoming popular.

Never worked at Dropbox, but I absolutely loved Paper.

The problem at Dropbox seems to have been that there was no cohesiveness to all the products. Paper, Passwords, Sign, all seem to have never been truly integrated into a single experience. Each one felt like it was trying to have its own identity.

If you read their annual report they bet the farm on RedHat and Kubernetes. They spun off their legacy services business and have basically have monopoly power over the Federal government, banks and defense contractors. They have been buying out other Kubernetes vendors such as Kubecost. They are are pretty focused now, we will see how well they will do long term.

Heh. Got a customer recently around this. Entire infrastructure and CI/CD vibecoded. They half implemented Kubernetes in Github Actions that were several thousand lines long and impossible to understand.

I think the problem will get worst. I dislike the marketing around AI, but I do think it is a useful tool to help those who have experience move faster. If you are not an expert, AI seems to create a complex solution to whatever it is you were trying to do.

Oh man infrasearch. With Gene Kan right? Was trying to revive xcf at Berkeley with some friends.

The type of oil that the US produces (light and sweet) can't be handled by US refineries which need (heavy sours). Why we are still a major importer of oil.

All oil is global commodity and the US refineries can’t take the oil that the US produces. So they mix it with heavy sours from Canada so the refineries can handle them. So a lot of the oil in the US is dependent on foreign oil as you said.

California is more reliant on foreign oil. https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

And seems about 23% comes from the Middle East. https://www.energy.ca.gov/data-reports/energy-almanac/califo...

The real problem I see is the one child policy. If China decides to go to war and say they have 1000 deaths. How many bloodline die? I feel like there would be a hesitation to fight on the Chinese side if they were to take any losses.

It is one of the reasons I don’t believe China would take on Taiwan.

Anecdotally, I heard some Indians in the USA working at Big Tech are moving back to India to take the skills they developed in the USA to train and organize teams in India.

I’d say what India struggles a lot with is organizational skills so it will be interesting if this is true and to see what results in a couple of years. Will Indians continue on the services path or will they move to the R&D path.

I’ve been wondering if the showdown in Iran if it leads to a conflict will bifurcate the oil prices, the US vs rest of the world. If the Middle East is in smokes then the US can dictate oil prices with its control of the supplies in Guyana and Venezuela.

I have the same problem. It wants to launch iPhone apps instead of the Mac apps. Super frustrating.

I have a lot of contacts in Hyderabad, India and it doesn’t seem like any of them are really worried about their jobs. Haven’t heard of any layoffs there. With additional GCCs being built out I do think there will be more offshoring.

Also found https://crowci.dev/4.5/ which seems to have better docs.

I have been converting a lot of my makefiles to pyinvoke and fabric and it makes things so much easier to manage than bash or make. Don't know why I held on for so long.

I remember it being a part of the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley and thought it couldn’t be true. But apparently it was.

https://youtu.be/VyQEbLx6AEY?si=CwhqHQEdFGCsE33l

I do have a degree in History with a focus on India and British Empire from Berkeley. So no I don’t think I am being baseless. Hindutva is complex, the 20s were a difficult time in India as all the revolutionaries from the different factions were trying to imagine a future independent India. The Islam/Hindu divide was a creation of the British for divide and rule. And while Gandhi imagined a nonviolent basically traditional hierarchical Hindu society, Hedgewar wanted an organization that removed the bonds of caste and creed so that Hindus can function as a single unified front.

I do think Hedgewar won and Gandhi lost. Also please do understand all sources have biases including Wikipedia.

Like Azure. 90% in the UX and the one feature that you need that is only accessible on the cli…

I loved how consistent it was. Just peak Microsoft UI for me. Don’t know what happened after that but it all went to hell.

I do wonder if a lot of the stuff that Google has worked on Google Docs, Chromebook were inspired by Sun. Eric Schmidt was a VP at Sun and Novell before joining Google.

I have nickname@berkeley.edu as my alumni email address and I get a lot of interesting emails directed towards more important people…

I worked at two crowdsourcing companies built on MTurk. Humanoid and CloudCrowd. Had millions of tasks go through from transcriptions to labeling.

I’ve been an Emacs user for more than a decade and I would recommend just using Doom especially if you are coming from a Vim background.

I started before Doom existed but ended up in a configuration similar to Doom but more brittle. I ended up just declaring .emacs bankruptcy and started over with Doom and was pleasantly surprised that my over 2000 line configuration became less than 30 customized lines.

If you want to do it the hard way I’d start with figuring out elpa and going from there installing the specific plugins that you want. Likely, evil being a first.

"Plunge into the world, and then, after a time, when you have suffered and enjoyed all that is in it, will renunciation come; then will calmness come. So fulfil your desire for power and everything else, and after you have fulfilled the desire, will come the time when you will know that they are all very little things; but until you have fulfilled this desire, until you have passed through that activity, it is impossible for you to come to the state of calmness, serenity, and self-surrender." -Swami Vivekananda

When I was in my 20s and early 30s I read that and scoffed because I was hustling, building my career and company. But over the last few years, I realize all that hustling just leads to an empty shell of a life. I just want a simple life where I spend a lot of time with my wife, son and family.