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I see so many comments about taking notes while reading. I didn't even know that was a thing. I'm not even sure if I would want to do it, because it would interrupt the reading. My own personal belief (which I came up with just now) is that reading novels should be a smooth relatively easy affair. Because I read simply for the fun of it. This may not be the case with academic books however. I just, start reading.

I have in fact stalled on books before though off the top of my head only SICP and Anna Karenina come to mind. I'll reattempt both of them in the near future. Stalling on SICP was probably due to me not having the sufficient math background, which I'm slowly working on fixing. The post you wrote gives me hope.

There's a possibility that I've been doing things the wrong way all these years.

> But does anyone think they can be dethroned? İs it possible?

Yes and yes.

Lookup RuPay of India.

While you're at it, also lookup UPI, also from India.

Some details I just read on its Wikipedia page[0]:

> NPCI conceived RuPay as an alternative to Mastercard and Visa, while consolidating and integrating various payment systems in India.

> ...causing Indian banks to bear the high cost for affiliation and the connection with international card associations schemes like Visa and Mastercard. This results in the need for routing transactions of which domestic account for more than 90%, through a switch located outside the country.

And, of course:

> Mastercard and Visa have raised concerns with the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) over India promoting the use of RuPay.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/RuPay

I kinda chuckled that you left out most of Asia.

Most global companies (at least the US-based ones) have deployed in India, where I'm at right now. I suppose a billion people online is too big of a market to ignore (or not; I really don't know). Or there are services that I'm completely unaware of that's not in India.

Internet's pretty fast as well. Much faster than a certain conspicuous European country you'd expect to have fast internet ;)

When I was studying in the US, my roommate was studying to become a "physician assistant" — a concept I think is brilliant. I don't think there's anything similar in my own country.

But I was wondering if more physician assistants would help the doctors. Maybe they could take care of the paperwork and all those things as well.

What's happening to biology today?

Not the same. The key is weather it captivates the reader/viewer/audience.

If the 90 min film gets hopelessly boring, I wouldn't hesitate to stop watching. Heck I've abandoned 10 minute YouTube videos because it got boring.

I have abandoned novels halfway because it was boring. Perhaps it may have been the greatest novel ever and I'm missing out by not completing it, but it's okay for me. Now I'm not saying it should be interesting right from page 1. But if it's not reached any major plot point by page 200, I'm skipping.

Relevant discussion about this from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35340083

In that page there's a picture of a signboard with distances to other places around the world.

Interesting that Pitcairn-South Pole distance is twice that of Pitcairn-New York distance. Unintuitive to me.

On a tangent, I like the idea of living in tiny somewhat isolated but reasonably developed islands (ie., not the rainforest type islands — personal preference) and sometimes think about moving to some place like that for a year or so. Might help that I'm an introvert. Probably not Pitcairn though.

Has any of you lived in places like Svalbard, Faroe Islands etc? What is it like?

Please tell us more!

[Off topic] I'm unable to tell if this was written by a human or was generated by LLM (or a mix of both).

So many words.

If this was infact written by a human, I didn't mean any offense.

Yep. Buy what's available.

I wasn't commenting from a US perspective.

Whenever a car company sets up shop in a new market (country) it's initially going to be difficult. Particular when it's a large country like USA, although conversely the manufacturer gets access to a large market.

Anyway, I don't have much knowledge regarding these things.

And not being in the US doesn't imply it's a bad car. Manufacturers choose to enter or not enter certain markets. Business decisions. For example I believe the new Toyota Land Cruiser isn't sold in the US. Nor is any model from Skoda. Doesn't mean they're objectively bad cars.

> still lack good reputation in terms of durability, repairability or reliability

Are Western cars particularly better in these areas? I have a Mercedes E class (W212) bought new several years ago which I've always serviced at Mercedes authorized workshop. It's a money pit. Reliability — something or the other snaps every other month these days. Repairability — even simple things require taking apart the whole car. Durability — you mean the strength of the body? Yeah that seems good, actually.

And I know mine is not a one-off case.

Maybe the Chinese cars might actually get these things right. We don't know yet.

The European cars' redeemable aspect is that they drive well.

> As far as I know they also are full of needles software stuff prone to fail

Go sit in a new Mercedes BMW, or even Volkswagen and enjoy all those screens. Decide for yourself if they're needed or not.

> for the Asians it heaven finally on Earth so they just cheer more and more of it

Fascinating how you caricatured away billions of people with a simple flippant thoughtless remark.

Is there anything fundamentally wrong with Chinese cars as opposed to Western cars?

I mean, non-western brands such as Honda, Toyota, Hyundai, Kia, Mazda, Tata, Mahindra, Proton etc exist, so what's the big deal with Chinese cars?

And by the way, I sincerely hope this new subscription-heavy Audi A3 flops.

Reposting this because this bit stood out:

> One of the biggest headaches will be for the Foreign Office, dealing with all the dignitaries who descend from all corners of the earth.

> European royal families will be put up at the palace; the rest will stay at Claridge’s hotel.

> Then again, it also boggles my mind how car makers in the US continue to use flashing red lights as the turn signal instead of yellow lights.

This is probably a US government regulation thing. Because those same cars sold elsewhere in the world does have flashing yellow lights as indicators.

- There was this book I read long ago whose name and author I forgot about. I knew googling wouldn't be useful. And it definitely wasn't useful. I wasn't that hopeful about chatgpt either but after I gave it a brief summary it correctly guessed the book!

- Helped me a couple of times with complex regexp. It didn't go all the way, but gave me enough for me to fine-tune things.

- Helped me once with a complicated SQL query.

- I sucked at physics in high school. I like physics, but I found it hard to learn back in high school, a million years ago. Recently, because I literally had nothing better to do (boring life lol) I brushed the dust off a widely acclaimed physics textbook lying around and started reading it. Electromagnetism. Eventually I reached the point where things stopped making sense; missing premises for certain conclusions. I was able to clarify things with chatgpt. I was able to confidently ask it the stupid questions I had in my mind. Note that I come from a country where teachers shame you publicly for asking what they consider idiotic questions. "Me: Why does the glass rod acquire positive charge instead of the silk cloth? Teacher: Don't ask such stupid questions". I now wonder if this sort of thing has scarred me for life.

The ics trick — thanks!

Although I'm of the opinion that in most places where they put up a schedule they ought to provide an ics file or a link or something like that.

> To contrast, the owner of molex at one point heard my dad needed a surgery. He came down on the shop floor, called him over and sent my dad (and our family) to the Mayo Clinic for 2 weeks to have the surgery done (all expenses paid).

I don't know how often this happens in Western mega corporations (which is probably why you're surprised).

And you obviously haven't been to Japan. Yes, long hours, but your employer takes care of most aspects of your life. Healthcare, apartment, marriage, your kids education, everything. See this article by patio11: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2014/11/07/doing-business-in-japan...

In the non-crappy businesses in India other people — coworkers, bosses, etc — taking care of you is routine. And — okay this is a terrible example — in the unfortunate situation that somebody dies, for instance, trust me, random people just help the family with funeral and stuff like that.

What I'm trying to say is this: the rest of the world isn't filled with morons and cattle.

Oh and by the way, across the world people want quality products. Even people from — gasp — the global South. We too want our fridges and washing machines and TVs and cars and everything else to last forever.

TIL Option+Fn+Delete can forward-delete a word! Thanks!

> Don't mention the war!

Oh okay!

(Unaware of Tucker Carlson).

It's sort of like, when a British person lives in America they're an "expatriate", but if an Indian lives in America they're an "immigrant".

Just the way the world spins.

(Off-topic non-relevant story follows)

I once flew Air India from New Delhi to Chicago. 15 hour non-stop run. At O'Hare, as we were exiting the airplane the airport (airline?) staff waiting to pick up the wheelchair passengers were saying random words loudly in mock Indian accent and laughing.

I wonder how they greet passengers disembarking a Lufthansa.

Not sure if this is the sort of thing that you're looking for, but the book I used during my critical thinking class might be useful:

Critical Thinking: An Introduction to the Basic Skills, written by William Hughes, Jonathan Lavery, and Katheryn Doran.

It may also depend on whether you also have an iPhone/ipad.

I don't. Hence I never bothered to sign into Apple. Works for what I do (coding, web browsing).

Try not to fight the thing.

And congrats on the new Mac! Which one is it?

> The Nordic readers amongst you are probably looking at your screens as though I’m explaining that ice is cold and the sun is hot. But to this rest of you, and my past self, this is unheard of.

We've one-upped them all, because over here duvets are unheard of, let alone duvet covers :D

But seriously, I (unfortunately?) live in a hot and humid part of the world and I suppose because of that duvets and its covers are unnecessary here. We've just got bedsheets, blankets, pillow-covers.

This reminds me. I went to university in America. From a Walmart nearby I bought one of those packaged set of things you put on a bed — "comforter", "bedspread", bedsheet, something with an elastic around it, pillow covers etc. I know it was these things because the cover had them written on it.

I unpacked them, and I have no idea which one is a comforter, which one is a bedspread etc. Nor did I know the order of how I put these onto the bed, what one goes on top of what other thing etc. And I didn't know in between which layers I should be sleeping in.

My not-very-friendly roommate and his girlfriend probably thought I was a moron for not knowing this.

> he offered me money to come to his place and sort it out myself

This reminds me of a personal experience I had.

Many years ago I was a graduate student at a US university (I'm not from the US).

There's this study room that I used to study from. There was this much older (??) woman who sometimes studied from there. One day out of the blue she asked me if I was good with statistics. I was, and clarified a couple of quick questions that she had.

Then she started trying to set up an appointment with me for a specific day, for two hours, and asked me how much she would have to pay me to teach her statistics.

Wtf?! I was so taken aback I didn't even know what to say. I declined, and just left.

It was weird to me for several reasons: this was the first time somebody straight up offered me money to teach them something. The way she asked me was uncomfortably formal, and if my statistics tutoring doesn't satisfy her then who knows she might sue me. And I'm not even sure if it would have been legal for me to accept money in exchange for this ad hoc service, as I'm not a US citizen.

In my home country (relatively big country in south Asia), if a fellow student has difficulties with certain topics, people (well, friends or friend of a friend) who have a better idea with the subject try to help them out, for free. There is not even a question, or even a thought about monetary reward, from any of the parties involved.

Maybe that's why there's a lot of entrepreneurship in America? If so, then this particular exchange just felt so odd.

I don't know what to conclude from all this.

This seems technically impressive, and I wish you good luck.

I personally prefer apps that do one thing well. I don't like "super" apps that does everything. I like separate tools, and not a Swiss army knife.

This is kind of why I detest apps like WeChat; even before taking into account the privacy considerations, from a user perspective it does chat, social media, payments etc, and I dislike it for that reason. WhatsApp too seems to be headed in that direction (atleast where I'm from).

And I also prefer tools that allow seamless data exchange with other tools. Sort of like the Unix philosophy.

> This means we won't do integrations with other services, unless they are under the hood

Not sure how I feel about that.

> your team can eventually conduct all work on Nino

Great! Another walled garden.

I hope this doesn't happen, but what if you go bust? Will the user lose all their data? Or what if, for whatever reason a team decides to move off your platform? Is there data export capabilities? You better have export capabilities if you want commercial entities to even consider your product.

Also, I feel the Free tier has slightly more features than your Pro tier (the former has unlimited members, for example).

Nevertheless, I wish you good luck.

The experiences of people who meet a wide range of customers are always interesting.

I had read a similar story of a man who worked at car showrooms of various brands (such as Honda, Toyota).

> Look it's important that if you see Oprah, you act normally, please don't ask her for an autograph or a photo

I never understood why people drool when they see celebrities.

Movie actors, musicians, sportspersons etc — I like watching them when they're in a movie, or when have sung a song, or when they're on the field playing, but I never really had any inclination to actually meet them. Even if I did meet them, I wouldn't have anything useful to say.

> Me and my friends tend toward 1000+ songs in a playlist, but most other playlists I've found are rarely over 250 songs.

Oh it's bad with small playlists as well.

This problem exists even with a smaller playlist. My playlists have about 150 songs each. And every time it plays a certain subset of songs a lot more frequently than others.

Go stay at those big name hotels, such as Sheraton, Mariott, Hilton, Le Meridian, Obero, Ritz-Carlton, Taj, Leela etc.

Most of these are present in major cities across India. They're a little on the expensive side though.

(I'm NOT affiliated in any way with any of the hotels mentioned in this post).

> don’t bother with a computer science bachelors degree unless you are dead set about getting a masters

I disagree.

At least in the United States (I'm not even from the United States, but I studied there), a master's in Computer Science (CS) does not add that much more value than a bachelor's. Infact, as far as coursework go in some schools there's quite a bit of overlap between senior undergrad and grad school classes for CS.

Go for masters only if you want to go for PhD immediately afterwards. And trust me, PhD is NOT the correct path for everyone. Infact, I know a lot who join the PhD program after bachelors, realize it's not for them after a couple of years, and then exit with a masters.

As for bachelors study whatever you find interesting. Maybe that's CS. You'll also probably be just fine taking math, EE etc.

A few resources which you may want to check out, in roughly increasing order of difficulty:

- Free Code Camp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/

- CS50: https://cs50.harvard.edu/x/2023/

- How to Design Programs (HTDP): https://htdp.org/

- Nand2Tetris: https://www.nand2tetris.org/

These are geared towards making you a better programmer in general, though it won't necessarily bring you closer to an AI/ML career.

Also, math is pretty important if you want to get into AI and similar things. Even otherwise math is important; don't listen to people who say you can get by without the math! So, try to get a head start on probability, calculus, linear algebra etc.

Good luck!

Gosh, I'm embarrassed about what I was up to when I was 16.