Posts

by on

Recently even the paid media I have been using were having ads. It seems there is no running away from this; data collection/targeting is going to be the norm. It is quite annoying because in one of the sites I had my phone number for 2 factor authentication, another site had my contact number to reach out to me and both of these shared the numbers and activities with each other.

It took a while to figure out how is this psychic behaviour happening. Need to connect various dots. It will also be impossible to sign up for anything digital if you have to go through the terms and conditions to understand what are you losing as a private individual.

A thought experiment I had was to bring a law like the “Do not disturb” registry for telemarketers. This is something like “Know your advertiser law”. Each ad should have a link saying how did the advertiser decide to show an ad to us. With the link we will be able to identify what private items have been breached and how, then have a handle to reset the identifiers or invoke the right to forget button.

Why I am worried right now is, I thought if I pay for digital services then I would be safe from prying eyes, but increasingly corporations are getting greedier and breaching trust. Without some laws that protect individuals and privacy through some powerful tools, it is not going to be easy to stop this non sense going on even if you start paying for their services.

by on

I never consciously thought about sleep until I started working. During the days I was growing up, I had never felt sleep deprived ever. I also slept early, well into the mornings and there were too less of distractions to keep me out of bed.

Things started to change as screen time started to conquer the lives. My grandfather used to call the TV as the idiot box, even though there was only 2 hours of watchable programs every day. He said that this makes people lazy consumers and not able to do anything productive. He said that entertainment should only be used like medicine not like food.

The screen addiction was very evident even without smart phones, I have played snake game for hours together on the old Nokia phones often postponing sleep. It is very hard to limit screen time, often those endless titbits we read/watch is not of so much use and the games we play does not relax us but bait us into playing more.

If I look back, many of my bad days were due to having a bad sleep the previous night. Sleeplessness increases the fatigue, turns it into a chronic cycle of yawning, lethargy and sleepiness. Often this impairs judgement because a sound body is a higher priority in hierarchy of one’s needs.

How to sleep well, it is very hard to find a rhythm that works for a person as each person is unique. The ones which has always worked for me very well are; social media off at least an hour before bed, reading a light book to switch off the buzz in the head, keeping the room cool, a cozy bed, dim lights from an hour before bed, enough physical activity during the day to make me tired but not fatigued. This setting worked like clock work for me for years. I used to go to bed same time everyday and wake up at the same time every day.

If I succumb to the temptations of sleeping late for a few days, then things go out of gear which takes a few weeks to get back into rhythm. For me a good night always meant a good day next day.

by on

Someone I met last year mentioned that the reason the 737Max planes went down was because it was coded by developers from a country where there was no aviation engineering experience. This person also went on to say “What else can you expect from people who are paid less than 9$ an hour wage”.

What is evident from this person’s thought is, irrespective of all the experience in aviation, expensive engineers, highly paid directors this crash was a result of a developer who coded as per the specification given not because of the carelessness of the others, in spite of airline industry being one of the hallmarks of safety standards.

Why this kind of thought irritates me is that a lot of people equate cost to quality. If something is not expensive, it is of poor quality. Expensive flights like concorde ran into losses, nobody eats at michelin star restaurants every day even though they are the best in the business.

It is very much possible to reduce cost without cutting quality, recent example I could think of is SpaceX that too in space technologies which is “Rocket science”. If something has failed, it is not necessary that the component of poor quality always costs the lowest.