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wadkar

328 karma · joined January 25, 2017

I like building highly scalable systems with awesome and fun loving people. If I am not inside my terminal, I am probably out in the mountains. [ my public key: https://keybase.io/wadkar; my proof: https://keybase.io/wadkar/sigs/JqjhxfScwy2oPCo5alN1pfIztJViH2zaNyysmjlGfi4 ] (Always interested in hearing about exciting Architect/senior SRE/infra opportunities - for a friend, of course :).
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wadkar··on Extracting video and audio from used police body cam
I wouldn’t be surprised if they counted those as well. I don’t think they’ll go so far as installing cctv inside the bathrooms lol
wadkar··on Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing
Would you say it's an editor lock-in?

I can make pretty much the same argument for say, vim or emacs, and say that plain markdown + fugitive/magit hits the sweet spot.

I am just trying to understand where's the vendor lock-in thing coming into the picture here.

wadkar··on Zettlr – FOSS markdown editor for personal knowledge management and publishing
Wait until you start doing email ... oh wait, mu4e ... never mind.

Wait until you start reading news ... oh wait, elfeed ... never mind.

Well, you get the point ;-)

Just don't install a kernel - emacs already comes with an OS :P

wadkar··on Extracting video and audio from used police body cam
Well, my understanding is that there is no expectation of privacy if you’re using your employers equipment or network. I think it’s pretty clearly written on that offer letter when you sign the contract - or at least the ones I sampled. Not to mention the proliferation of CCTVs in almost all work places.

So to answer your question, yeah, I fully expect my employer to record what I am doing all the time and it’s a price that unfortunately I have to pay to survive in this digital world.

wadkar··on How Did Vim Become So Popular?
I have seen nano to be the default for most debian and fedora derived distributions from early 2000s. Not sure if things changed in late teens. Or maybe I am misremembering things.
wadkar··on India bans TikTok, WeChat, and dozens of other Chinese apps
I think the point that GP made doesn’t have any equivalence in US two party system.

The person in question really did start a new party that was not coupled with any of the existing parties and won the capital state with crushing majority.

That is a sign of a working democracy in my book. I am not sure if US is one of the better version of a well functioning democracy given its two party system. I recall that it was one of the things that the founding fathers were afraid of when they were debating the constitution.

wadkar··on Foam – A Roam Research alternative with VSCode, Markdown and GitHub
I am surprised you didn’t mention syncthing!

Is it because you’re assuming a cloud backup is necessary component of syncing solution? In that case, you can just designate one of your synced devices to keep backups to S3/B2 :D

wadkar··on Why Birds Can Fly over Mount Everest
Nope, it’s endothermic as sibling pointed out!

<side>must resist the username checks out comment</aside>

wadkar··on Why Birds Can Fly over Mount Everest
Bingo! You beat me to it.

This trivia about Nitrogen used to be my favorite when I was studying chemistry in the school. Like there’s lot of nitrogen in the atmosphere and oxygen but they don’t “burn” because (almost all?) nitrogen oxidation is endothermic!

wadkar··on Ask HN: Thoughts on new GitHub layout?
Agreed, I gave feedback but no use. I am not wasting my time when they’re not going to even bother listening to my feedback. I am out of the previews, not doing your QA for free.
wadkar··on What adolescents think of mindfulness in schools
Couldn’t have phrased it better myself!

Mindfulness should focus first on observing and not judging/labeling things as good/bad. That just leads to more misery!!

The instructors should certainly realize that mindfulness and it’s experiences are very subjective and each individual has different experiences. One must be careful not to compare two students and say one is a better example of mindfulness than the other.

wadkar··on Flow browser passes the Acid tests
Re: large number of tabs

Use the great suspender extension; my friend in academia thanks me every single time we meet. And now I see them have 4 chrome windows open with each having ~20+ tabs in it!!!

For them everything happens in browser, its synced and the great suspender lets them run that monstrosity without choking their MacBook Airs

wadkar··on Saying “All Lives Matter” to Siri Now Redirects You to Blacklivesmatter.com
It makes doing research using the search giant mostly useless.
wadkar··on Apple Plans to Announce Move to Its Own Mac Chips at WWDC
I think it’s about time we relegate x86 only codebase to VMs.
wadkar··on macOS in QEMU in Docker
I would say docker is primarily used as an artifact delivery mechanism where artifact presupposes inclusion of required runtime.

I an not saying it’s right or wrong. I think it’s the most practical and thus most pervasive use of docker.

The company and the project provided a great service by creating lot of shipping/container related metaphors though. That’s very much invaluable in my book. Providing thousands of developers means to talk about objects that are static and dynamic from an architectural perspective.

wadkar··on macOS in QEMU in Docker
I don’t see any requirement for Apple to provide such functionality. This is simply because all Apple devices come with an OS preinstalled.

And you have tools like Jamf for any enterprise fleet management needs

wadkar··on Ask HN: How does your company manage its encryption keys?
+1 for vault. You can setup your own instance if you like. IMHO, initial ramp up time will be worth the long term benefits.
wadkar··on Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS
Thanks a lot! I haven’t been bugged yet, but hope it works!! Would be a life saver when I need to watch full screen videos on VLC
wadkar··on Apple Mail randomly becomes the frontmost application in macOS
Ugh! It’s most annoying when you’re in a full screen app and presenting. Suddenly, Mail.app decides to take half the screen and spurts all my inbox for everyone to see. You can’t watch full time videos either due to this annoyance.
wadkar··on Why is Kubernetes getting so popular?
I think kubernetes is to Infra what RoR was to Web. Not necessarily in terms of architectural style of MVC, but more towards standardization of similar enough problems that can be put into a mutually agreed convention.
wadkar··on How does the Gmail unsubscribe button work?
I am not sure I understand, can you please explain (or link me?)
wadkar··on GPT-3: Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners
Thanks a lot.

If I may ask one more question, would you happen to know if the authors or other researchers who are entertaining any theoretical work on the experimental design and training methodologies of GPT/BERT? As in why does it work? What is the significance of training via the "fill-in-the-blanks" method?

Don't get me wrong - the work is great and the SOTAs are amazing, I would be just happy to have a chat to discuss and bounce some ideas what all this means and why do these methods seem to be working so well. Papers/articles/blog-posts are always a pleasure to read!

wadkar··on GPT-3: Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners
Thank you. It is quite a labor to even skim through the 50+ page paper. Your poignant reply was quite helpful to draw my attention to the issue of contamination. After reading the section carefully, I think my understanding of over fitting is very much improved at least in so far as models like GPT-3 are concerned.

Clearly, the authors have given careful considerations to the issue of contamination and have provided reasonable analysis and a careful argument regarding over fitting the existing benchmarks.

On the other I was wondering if the authors would like to consider purposefully creating a type of "out of sample data" for "creative evaluation"? Of course, GPT is no stranger to creativity, so it would be a fascinating challenge to come up with methods to create such datasets that are truly creative and challenge GPT-{N} to prove its mettle.

For example, would it be possible to engage a really good creative writer* along with a highly experienced school teacher to take on the Reading Comprehension task and create few "tricky" evaluation samples that not only go above and beyond the contamination objections but also challenge the human intelligence to be careful not to fall into common traps?

This way lies a different evaluation metric - a subjective one perhaps, but it's a start. Just a thought experiment - that's all.

* so that they can come up with new ways to trick GPT/humans a teacher knows the common mistakes the average student makes

Edit: Duh, my head immediately screamed GANs the moment I pressed submit, lol. But I am not sure if GANs make sense for NLP tasks. Like do they make sense if humans/domain experts try to solve them?

wadkar··on GPT-3: Language Models Are Few-Shot Learners
They say there are no stupid questions, so here is mine:

If there are Billions of parameters in the SOTA models, how do we argue that they are not over fitting?

wadkar··on Siri, What Time Is It in London?
It’s the typical example of the meaning problem. Any token derives its meaning from a context. Think of the context as requirement of setting up a careful experiment to measure the spin of an electron. Without the context, we have reasonable confidence that it’s an electron but don’t have any clue if it’s spin up or spin down.

Similarly in this case, we’re reasonably confident that London is a place on earth with a property of time that is being asked. But without the additional context (or supplementary logic) we can’t know for sure which London it is: Canadian, American, or English.

Until we provide such context, London is in a superposition of all the possible meaningful state.

wadkar··on Security Flaws in Adobe Acrobat Reader Allow Gaining Root on macOS Silently
Is that a rhetorical question?

I mean you can try to uninstall it. But apparently it comes back.

wadkar··on Let's guess what Google requires in 14 days or they kill our extension
Is it reasonable to assume that bing will be more than happy to become the default should google leave any space on the table?
wadkar··on Hello, World – Zerodha, India's largest stock broker
Recently came across Zerodha and had to set it up for a friend. Really good UX, and they've done a good job maintaining with the rapid tech progression.

Also, thanks for the ERPNext.org suggestion - sometimes I wonder how many open source gems I have yet to see. (No, please don't link me to one more awesome-X list :P)

wadkar··on Zoom Acquires Keybase
Congratulations to the keybase team.

Most people here seem to be making a self fulfilling prophecy of keybase's death.

But I like to think that Zoom intends to reuse large parts of keybase codebase:

> Logged-in users will generate public cryptographic identities that are stored in a repository on Zoom’s network and can be used to establish trust relationships between meeting attendees. An ephemeral per-meeting symmetric key will be generated by the meeting host. This key will be distributed between clients, enveloped with the asymmetric keypairs and rotated when there are significant changes to the list of attendees. The cryptographic secrets will be under the control of the host, and the host’s client software will decide what devices are allowed to receive meeting keys, and thereby join the meeting. We are also investigating mechanisms that would allow enterprise users to provide additional levels of authentication.

Will the founders be interested in releasing parts if not all of the server code to the public? I believe the founders' mission is still achievable and can be carried out, should they be willing to release the code in public.

wadkar··on Bill Joy's greatest gift to man – the vi editor (2003)
Try something like spacemacs[1] maybe and use it only for one specific task like org-mode[2]. That way, vim is still your daily driver, but you get to play with lisp/emacs on something very cool like org-mode!

Then, you can slowly try to switch one thing at a time, for example start editing all Dockerfiles in spacemacs, or maybe do that one hello-world project/app in clojure/phoenix using spacemacs. See how you like it, tweak it a bit.

Finally, decide on using it as a daily driver for a new project and stick with it. It will grow on you.

[1] https://www.spacemacs.org/ [2] https://orgmode.org/

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