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quirmian

84 karma · joined May 23, 2019

Leonardo is my hero.
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quirmian··on Bird of the Day: Using Azure Computer Vision to count birds in my yard
Probably hosted on Azure :p
quirmian··on Piano Practice Software Progress
I’ve played piano for the last 20 years, starting off initially with a teacher and going through the usual sheet music pieces. I used to think as you do for the longest time - “The important thing is to have fun!”

I still believe that, but I find that I learn new techniques every time I read, learn and play an existing piece - this makes my improvisation and jam sessions all that much better! So would highly recommend learning to read sheet music.

quirmian··on Hundreds of Google Employees Unionize, Culminating Years of Activism
“Hundreds” = 225 in an organization of around 100k employees. smh
quirmian··on The Multi-Path Career
I have a similar day job, and would love to start consulting on the side. Legal and worries that it could be seen as “conflict of interest” prevent me from starting however. How do you manage that?
quirmian··on One Guy Ruined Hacktoberfest 2020
I would compare population numbers and percentages. India has 1B people. Uk is less than 10% of that.
quirmian··on Why is Snowflake so Valuable?
I believe this is exactly what slot reservations in BigQuery achieve. Instead of paying on-demand pricing that is determined by data read, you purchase a fixed number of “slots” that are shared by queries running within that particular project.
quirmian··on Amnesty International India Halts Its Work in India Due to Government Reprisal
That twitter handle is far from an unbiased source.

Again, my question here is - Who decides that the reason someone has chosen for their conversion is “wrong”, for what is essentially an individual’s choice. I for one trust nobody but myself to make those judgements, within the framework of the law. I do not want the state to infringe on my personal freedom. Anti-conversion laws are a dangerous step in the direction of the state telling people what to believe and what not to.

quirmian··on Amnesty International India Halts Its Work in India Due to Government Reprisal
The slow judicial system is the biggest weapon that the government and other large entities with money have. Not everyone can afford to put their lives on hold for 3 years while a court case slowly winds its way up to a judge.
quirmian··on Amnesty International India Halts Its Work in India Due to Government Reprisal
Re. conversion - nilsocket, do you believe that every individual has agency in choosing their religion? Or do you believe that these choices should be made for them by “those that know better”? An analogy, do you think that your occupation should be something you can choose? Or should that choice be made for you by “those that know better”?

If the conversion is “forced” or “fake”, nothing changes on the ground anyway, and it doesn’t matter. If the conversion is genuine, why should society have a say on an individual’s belief?

quirmian··on Investigating TLS Blocking in India
And this statement here (one I’ve heard before from others as well) demonstrates one of our biggest problems (speaking as someone who grew up in India) - and makes my blood boil.

Without respect for the individual and individual rights, Indian society will not progress. Sitting on your high horse and making judgements about how the poor and uneducated (or any other group) aren’t ready for free speech is not the way.

quirmian··on Degoogle: Cutting Google out of your life
GSuite is not just gmail - it also includes docs, sheets, slides, meet etc.
quirmian··on Linux kernel lockdown, integrity, and confidentiality
I can see how Secure boot solves real security problems. And I am definitely not blaming Ubuntu here.

However, it’s unfortunate that the Secure Boot technology (or maybe this is a licensing thing) by default does not make prescriptions, and that we’re reliant on the device manufacturer’s good will to see it implemented correctly.

quirmian··on Linux kernel lockdown, integrity, and confidentiality
I see arguments (like one of replies to your comment here), that you can turn off Secureboot - so simple, much wow.

Not all firmware allow you to turn off secureboot or enroll your own keys. You’ll see plenty of this on bios-mods.com if you want to know what that looks like. It also really throws into sharp relief questions around things like device ownership.

Let me tell you about my experience with an Amazon DeepLens device (x86-64) that I’ve been trying to get stock Ubuntu installed on. The only keys on this device are Amazon ones. This means I cannot install any OS other than the one they supply (a modified Ubuntu 16.04 install). If I own the device, shouldn’t I be free to install my own OS? If I own the device, and have physical control of it, I should be able to bypass secureboot, period - but not always the case today.

quirmian··on $800M to support small businesses and crisis response
Of course you can. Does your website get the kind of traffic google does?
quirmian··on Show HN: Prophecy.io – Cloud Native Data Engineering
This looks very similar to products like Apache Nifi, Apache CDAP and Google Data Fusion. When would I pick prophecy.io over the others?
quirmian··on I've reproduced 130 research papers about “predicting the stock market”
Where can I get good quality forex data from?
quirmian··on The reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework [pdf]
My point is that stating “out of model risks is what kills you” is a tautology. For systems where known risks are modelled, it’s highly likely that any “fatality” or equivalent events are controlled for. If you were to then look at the “fatalities” that occur after that, I would expect them to arise due to risks not currently known or modelled in the system.

I make no comment around acceptance of risk, “fatal” or otherwise. :)

quirmian··on The reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework [pdf]
> For example, in AWS, a webapp with a single Region approach using multiple AZs will give you higher availablility, but similar costs to a single AZ approach.

Whether your costs are similar or not depends on the amount of inter-AZ traffic, which is charged for.

quirmian··on The reliability pillar of the AWS Well-Architected Framework [pdf]
This is a tautology, because if the risk was successfully modelled, it would not be able to kill you.
quirmian··on Seattle Faces Backlash After Easing on Crimes Involving Mental Illness
Lack of strong family ties. People blame lack of public facilities and health care, but at the root of it all, it’s the missing safety net that family provides. This is the number one difference between some of those incredibly poor places and America.
quirmian··on Amazon expands its air cargo fleet
Interestingly, I think we saw (seeing?) a version of the same playbook being used at AWS - see the debacle around the AWS managed Elasticsearch service.
quirmian··on Google to Acquire Looker
> Dropping their original paying customers

When a Cloud company acquired a product/service for integration into their platform, I would hope that that includes transitioning to a Cloud friendly consumption based model. If that means including a free tier, or paying peanuts for low usage, that’s a good thing!

Finally, Google’s (GCP’s really) enterprise SaaS (mostly) acquisitions that I can think of are - StackDriver, Firebase, Apigee, Velostrata, Alooma and Cask. The venerable ones like StackDriver and Firebase are IMHO well integrated into the platform. The others are too relatively new? Curious which ones you had in mind that dropped enterprise customers?

quirmian··on Google to Acquire Looker
Two intellectually low quality points that get made for almost every google related news item -

1. “When will Google deprecate this feature/product/service?”

2. “None of Google’s acquisitions have done well”.

quirmian··on Terry Pratchett warns Bill Gates about fake news (1995)
> children’s comedy novelist

Do you also consider HHGTTG to be a toddler’s bedtime story?

- A butthurt Discworld fan in his mid 30s.