A small story on digitalization

I had spent an hour in the bank with my dad, as he had to transfer some money. I couldn't resist myself & asked:

Dad, why don't we activate your internet banking?

''Why would I do that?'' He asked, ''Well, then you wont have to spend an hour here for things like transfer.

You can even do your shopping online. Everything will be so easy!

I was so excited about initiating him into the world of Net banking.

He asked, If I do that, I wont have to step out of the house?

''Yes, yes''! I said. I told him how even grocery can be delivered at door now and how amazon delivers everything!

His answer left me tongue-tied.

He said ''Since I entered this bank today, I have met four of my friends, I have chatted a while with the staff who know me very well by now.

Two years back I got sick, The store owner from whom I buy fruits, came to see me and sat by my bedside and cried.

When u r Mom fell down few days back while on her morning walk. Our local grocer saw her and immediately got his car to rush her home as he knows where I live.

Would I have that 'human' touch if everything became online?

I like to know the person that I'm dealing with and not just the 'seller'. It creates bonds. Relationships.

Does "online" deliver all this as well?

Technology isn't life #BeHuman

For those who are not getting the context, this things happen in India. It is truth not a fact.

My mom got cancer and passed away two years later. I had made several videos to document her life. All of that, plus photos and video of our family, lived on a backup drive that got dropped on the floor a few months after she passed away. Head crash that wasn’t discovered until it was turned on again and forever destroyed the platter. It was the largest set of photos and video I had of her. All forever gone.

DXB (airport)'s WiFi doesn't let you call through whatsapp or telegram or even discord. It also does not let you send a whatsapp voice message, which has me very puzzled.

And all I wanted to do was to call my mom. ☹️
(I might also be running a slight fever, which makes me very emotional and sensitive)

I got the booster shot yesterday but I'm pretty sure they injected me some psychoactive drug. I had the weirdest dreams - I was have in-depth arguments with my post-doc about complexity and deep learning, and I came up with 3 different directions for my research. Also my mom was singing Despacito in the background.
My arm is dead and I can't even connect cables on my beloved robot :(

Alright, this is a rant about me and how much I suck at living.

After a little over a year of living alone thousands of kilometers away from home, I realised I suck at it. I'm home for the holidays now. Arrived here a couple of weeks ago. Christmas week was just the worst. I fell ill and thought I was going to perish in the cold. For the past year, I was working full throttle and didn't make time to take care of myself and cook and eat regularly. I'm sick of all the take out food. Ugh. Didn't even leave time for socialising, may have even broken a few existing connections. I built some good reputation at my company but it was not at all worth what I went through. Not one bit.

It didn't help that some important devs left the company and their code mess was down to me to handle. Don't even want to mention more about the family mess at home. But home is home still.

So this year, once I go back, I've decided I'm going to take control and make time for all the important things in life. I've gained new cooking skills from mom too. I've already started the job change process and if everything goes alright, I should be in a much better place before I see 2023.

What does PFA MOM stand for?

We're an international company, we all use English while working. That's all fine and good.

But there's one project manager that throws in really obscure acronyms that even I, a native English speaker, struggle with.

It's "please find attached minutes of meeting". Is it really that hard to type?

My mom told me to take the spider out instead of killing it..
So i did. We had a few drinks, pretty cool guy, said he works as a web developer.

Grandad showing me a commodore 64 that he had gotten for my uncles. shit was legit, had a bunch of games and cool shit in it. He also showed me BASIC (not programming or anything, but that it was a thing in it and the booklet explaining how to do games and stuff)

Mind you, the commodore was way beyond my years, I am a 91 baby, but he had it and kept it working and in good shape, the booklet was pristine (none of my uncles wanted to fk with that, neither did my dad).

He only showed me the machine because my mother had more vision that a lot of my family members at the time, asking him to let me use the computers that he had because she was sure (just as he) that computers were the future and a good educational tool for me.

Mom played a big ass role in me getting my comp sci degree, she was the one that celebrated it the most with my wife (wife pushed me through that degree to be honest) and my gdad is dead now, but he would have thought it would be cool to have another engineer in the family (he was an industrial engineer)

Women on Tinder:
30% transgender
20% single mom
40% overweight
10% decent

social media is becoming such a virus. everyone is like, roaming with a big gun on someone else's head with 100s of "likes" and "supports" on their posts. being a rebel, revolutionary is the new norm while sharing everything personal is so much okay.

case 1 : some girl joking about how her friend got engaged to her bumble match in 30 days of match and got duped

case 2 : some guy sharing his tinder profile listing 10 points of his "ideology and principles that he can't change for anyone" .note that the social media platform in this situation is LinkedIn and this guy is trying to be "motivational"

case 3 : a movie worthy tussle going on between 2 PMs , one from byjus and other from google. the byju PM seems to be some tinder-swindler kind of asshole, while the google pm seems to be a single mom of 2, getting exploited for affection

case 4 : some asshole HR publically calling out a candidate that accepted the offer but later went with another company

case 5 : this 2nd year student sadly calling out microsoft for rejecting him even though he did 1500 leet code questions and they did not asked him from there . guy could not digest the fact that questions could come from dev or somewhere else too. and the height of hypocrisy is the fact that his profile headline read "2x offers from DE Shaw, Adobe..."

case 6 : news of little teenagers commiting suicides because of less no. of likes on their posts.

me: mom I want metaverse
mom: we have metaverse at home
metaverse at home:

i was probably 4 or 5, my mom brought some educational games from school and I'd often play them. I don't remember a time before computers though

On a lighter note:

Mom: How do I delete messages on my phone? I want to delete some pictures of coupons that I sent you.

Me: Why? Mom, that’s not really necessary. The messages aren’t taking up that much space on your phone. And those coupons have expired anyway.

Mom: But they’re old and I want to delete them.

Me: Ok. Get your phone.

My family STILL doesn't know what I do to this day. I graduated 3 years ago and have been in the industry since. They think I'm a designer. 🙄 No, mom and dad. I CODE. 😂

It’s all a blur but in 5th grade I was using a TRS-80 with a cassette player for storage at the library where my mom worked. Also an Apple IIe at school in the computer lab. My first personal computer was an IBM XT clone with an 8086 processor and dot matrix printer. I bought it after having fun with my cousin’s Commodore 64 and wanting one, but his uncle sold me on the IBM platform as something that I could upgrade over time. I was 13 when I first learned Assembler and BASIC. Big Blue Disk was my favorite subscription software with all the games and other shareware stuff that came every month in the mail.

I love my compiler.

the environment in my home is very depressing (socially) . How can i change it?

this is not about being living in a small room with smells or something. this is about my family's social life and how it is impacting me.

living with mom and dad as a single child with extreme morals, moralist ideology and no/bitter relations is impacting me a lot.

i will try to cover some points that make us different from other people:

1. i come from a very nuclear family with my parents and me and no siblings. we have 2 cats though

2. we have always been poor and are still struggling. we don't a 4 wheeler, my dad closed his job to be a salesman and he doesn't earn enough for current expenses. we pay our bills from rents from shop and a room for rent on terrace. i am earning 5x my family now, so we are stable but being poor has always been a major impact for me

3. we follow this spritual philosopher/guru as our religion who preach good morals, various currently non existent ("but will be ruling the globe" ) practises and procedures . i am not much into them so i might explain them wrong, but from my 23 yo brain's understanding, some examples will be : extreme vegetarianism (no onion/garlic/egg) , no drinks/smoking , yoga, fasting, some communism/socialism philosophy, meditation , kirtana, etc

4. there is no love amongst my parents or their relatives. i don't know how we are living a loveless life. afaik , the relatives from both sides were bad and treacherous , they were the reasons for our struggles and now we hate them and they don't visit us.
among mom and dad :dad was never someone that mom loved, they just went with the family pressures, and since there was no way for mom to take a stand, she went with the hateful marriage, had me, they jointly struggled to keep me alive while hating each other and never even sleeping together, until i was a decent 23 yo earning by myself. they don't even have friends afaik.

5. cut to today, our lives revolve around not the love for one another but towards this stupid religion dictating the rules of our lives. there are 3 seperate rooms in which we 3 sleep, and mom dad gets into vicious fights on smallest of the things. i then jump in, trying to extinguish the fire by being even the louder voice. and end up hurting them and myself. at the same time , their bodies are now taking a toll : mom has some uterus/liver problems, dad is diabetic and one of our cat's legs don't work.

i just want to run away. i never had friends because they couldn't never relate with me, i didn't go to school picnics, didn't talked with girls, never got into discussions that people would find interesting.

i feel so seperated out from the world. i am an engineer by profession, i have a good number of people that knows me and respects me for my knowledge, but they end up mocking me for my social skills and different life rules when i try to be with them. and they are not at fault. i am the person that is the result of such a big messed up life.

their can't be another person on this planet that will be having a similar life situation, being loveless for so long. i don't see myself having a future at all : i am earning decent but what's the point?

i recently went to a trip with my friends. it was a fun little trip of 3 days. the people were : me, my friend of 9 years of friendship , my friend of 8 years of friendship, gf of the 9 yr friend and 2 stranger girls.
this was such an amazing environment for my brain : i never had a conversation with a girl for more than 10 mins. i envy my friends with gf kissing, going on trips , etc , but this.. this was awesome. the girls were chill , my 8 yof guy was a chick magnet and the setting was that he would woo the slimer girl while i would go with the short one. although nothing happened, i just observed how the guys and girls would talk and relate and how i am different.

it's my 2nd trip with friends, and its completely the same: i goto a trip, enjoy the best 6-7 days of my life, learn that i am very different from the world, that the world perceive of me as a very simple , naive person with limited social exposure, and that i have a very conservative beta male , moralist mamma's boy personna.

when i come home with these thoughts, i end up being angry , blaming them for this, because they are the ones who made me like this, weather due to their struggling life or just morals. and i end up being rude to them and being a sad regretful person.

i just broke my dad's phone because they were again fighting, being very loud and i wanted to end all this.

what should i do? can i change something? is it always going to be like this? who in this home can be happy with a shitty environment like this? will their be a girl that wants to see this mess by marrying me?

“Lazy mom lazy wow” presented by Gail Swanlund was probably the most impactful piece of art to me.

Through simplistic form, this art piece presents the idea of caring about oneself and quit the eternal rat race for money. But somehow for its metaphor, Lazy mom lazy wow chooses the notion and aesthetics of death and decay. The closest analogy I can think of is the music of American Football. Some kind of liminal, eerie aesthetics. Also, the movie Gummo and the game Life is Strange, part one.

The piece deliberately avoids being aggressive and celebrating its notion. It’s not “quit the rat race and celebrate because life is so good”, it’s “quit the rat race by putting yourself into coma so nothing matters anymore”. The descent into eternal comfort of realization that you don’t have to do anything anymore, but also sorrow of losing meaning.

It feels like launching Counter-Strike Source in the year 2051, only to walk around cs_office and realize there are no players anymore, and they will not return ever again. The sense of watching an old VHS tape of you having a conversation with your mom in the hospital as she’s counting her last days because of cancer. The sense of comfort of coming back to your hometown. You remember your childhood and your high school crush, only to realize that those moments won’t happen ever again.

i swear to god, my year end journey is taking the best kick out of me.

its less than 48 hours left now and shits that have happened since now are :

1. my mom cancelled our home to destination tickets once out of fear of omicron and then i had to rebook. that's INR 15000 down the drain with 0 returns and additional INR 6000 of re booking ( the ticket had 5 of my relatives and my mom's ticket. they are now reaching the place by train only)

2. just yesterday i found out that the bag that we are supposed to take had its zips rusted and i got to get it replaced. i also bought an additional trolley bag and kinda showed mg miser mindset and bought a 2 wheel large trolley instead of 4 or 8 wheeler and now the second trolley is a bitch to be carried on.

3.on friday , i ran a little extra , got exhausted , didn't had much food since diet, then ran some more in evening , then umm.., <exercised> some more in night . guess what ? the night was the chilliest in india , and my body caught cold, my sinus kicked in and i was on the verge of catching a fever which any stupid airport staff would directly declare as "omicron-coivd positive" . i didn't though, but this all could still happen , since i have not fully recovered from a runny nose.

4. its 48 hours left and i have just now caught this worst hiccups because i had to eat rice while watching standup comedies on a bed in a shitty posture .

this period of shitty happenings is not coming to an end. i just want a break for damn's sake. just yesterday i was on the verge of a heart attack when our dear old santa claus pm came on the television and started announcing .that guy has been known to fuck the whole country in his sudden announcements but thankfully he or omicron hasn't affected my journey plans........ yet

got kicked out of a contract today because the owner felt I wasn't moving at the pace he wanted, there were no milestones but even i knew I was slow.

this happened when I started talking to a therapist because I was beginning to have suicidal thoughts and anxiety issues.

I had to run work errands for my everly screaming mom and manipulative dad.

these same people who I begged with no success for money to buy a used core 2 duo laptop for programming projects.

I was in the bus in the afternoon sun trying to get three books from a publisher that ended up being a waste of time because she didn't follow instructions and insisted on screaming over the phone at the attendant. the client requested a meeting and I couldn't respond positively,

I get home and my dad wants me to travel down to our village home to meet with some kid he kept giving money because they wanted to have a meeting. I'm so annoyed because I told him I wanted this week off to face this already dead contract and he just ignores all of that and fixes a meeting.

I pay for electricity and gas for these people and they still treat me like shit. fuck this !

A system to build note-taking systems. tatatap dot com.

It’s the most successful for a few reasons: it got launched, people find it useful, but most importantly it’s been fun and continues to be fun to work on.

I think the fun-to-make factor is massively underestimated as a success indicator. Working on the right product (whatever that means) that is unenjoyable is like using an amazing computer with a broken keyboard. It’s never going to work.

Sure, with any project there’s annoying stuff, but it’s the trend overall. Is the core functionality fun to work on?

In the case of Tap the core component is a notation parser, open sourced called sowhat, github dot com/tatatap-com/sowhat

That was super fun to make and learn about lexing and parsing. It’s pretty far along but there’s still a lot I’m planning to add.