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gamekathu

69 karma · joined October 10, 2014

questioning everything
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gamekathu··on Users Stuck in YubiKey Re-Enrollment Loop on X (Twitter)
Same - this should be a major SEV
gamekathu··on Google doesn’t want employees working remotely anymore
I'm in a tough spot with this new RTO guidelines (similar ones issues by my company). I live ~2-2.5 hours from my assigned office due to two-body problem. I travel to the office once/twice a week, but thats the max I can do - 3 days per week is impossible. I'm more productive WFH, however I utilize my office time to meet as many people in-person I can. However recently that has reduced to mostly VC time in-office as most of my team are from a different coast altogether. To me, going forward Remote works best, but these blanket rules really doesn't work for all edge cases like mine.
gamekathu··on Building a Virtual Machine Inside ChatGPT
With all my recent ML PhD knowledge I cannot even explain how the model is able to do this. Surely the data distribution doesn’t have all possible responses to all possible linux commands? a full python repl? I’m stumped!
gamekathu··on GitHub Copi­lot inves­ti­ga­tion
A bit of a controversial opinion: to those who are defending CoPilot saying it "boosted my productivity" and would miss it if it is discontinued, maybe you are not a productive developer to begin with. I fail to see how searching the same snippets on Google or saving commonly used macros in your favorite editor would not yield the same amount of productivity. I have used CoPilot for several months and I actively stopped using it, because I was afraid I will be dependent on it, and it would actually reduce my ability to do critical code-building. I'm happy without it - sure it takes some micro seconds more to type out my code instead of autogenerating it, but I feel much more self confident in my own coding skills.

CoPilot is a great research work - it is indeed spectacular to see how pre-training can achieve such impressive code completion results. However, in my honest opinion, it should not be a tool for a serious developer.

gamekathu··on Emacs Timeline
Not great, but I think it is an acquired taste. TRAMP makes it _feel_ as if you are working locally, with some caveats. I like the fact that I can use dired to quickly navigate my projects on the cluster, open a vterm session and run my scripts, open my python files and save which automatically syncs them in the remote; magit works seamlessly (with a slight lag). What I wish is for better LSP support (lsp-mode/Eglot) for remote development - its kind of a miss for me. lsp-mode straight up does not work, and Eglot keeps me waiting until it can connect, leading to decreased editing experience. I have kind of given up on LSP for remote, nowadays I just use dumb-jump for quick navigation and local editing for more serious development.
gamekathu··on Emacs Timeline
Yes, it is my second year running with Emacs after ditching VSCode. While I miss the remote editing capability of VSCode, working on a shared HPC cluster made me finally use Emacs. Nowadays, I have shifted most of my workflows in Emacs, especially using Org mode, and I believe it should stick for the next several years.
gamekathu··on Mullvad is now available on Amazon
If you are like me who subscribes to Jim Browning’s channel you know this technology would eventually be misused by scammers. Does Mullvad has any plans to counter it?
gamekathu··on Show HN: Supernotes 2 – a fast, Markdown notes app for journalling and sharing
Because note-taking experience is subjective, and there are no solution which fits everyones taste and purpose.
gamekathu··on Show HN: Full text search on 630M US court cases
I'm always amazed at the rampant patent trolling that happens with deep learning papers/ideas. In this dump, if you search with the names of famous researchers in ML (such as Yoshua Bengio [1] or Yann Lecun [2]) you will find 100s of troll patents citing their work. Not all of them are troll though. Maybe this corpus can be used to automatically identify them, perhaps by merging data from arxiv?

[1] https://www.judyrecords.com/record/vibvgc4w4e2bc [2] https://www.judyrecords.com/record/v9kbckceib0c9

gamekathu··on FarPlay: Low-Latency Audio over the Internet
“FarPlay has been successfully tested with upload speeds as low as 8 mbps.” that doesn’t sound low to me! Anyone tested this in poor 4G connections?
gamekathu··on Second Citizenships, Residencies, and/or Temporary Relocation
For some people the choice is governed by the educational institution. Sure, I could have applied to UofT but my research led me to McGill (and I’m frankly glad that happened).
gamekathu··on Second Citizenships, Residencies, and/or Temporary Relocation
While being a student, I can’t. Also, if your intention is to move to Quebec you are technically not eligible for PR in Ontario. However, many folks these days opt of this path though - apply for PR in Ontario from outside Canada using Express Entry, land in Ontario and stay for 6 months and then move to Quebec.
gamekathu··on Second Citizenships, Residencies, and/or Temporary Relocation
My point was mainly directed at both PR and naturalization aspects of Canada that was mentioned in this post. Even if you are not a student, the road to PR in Quebec is long if you do not have meet the language requirement. Typically you apply for Quebec Selection Certificate (CSQ) which is a pre-requirement for PR. This pre-requirement also has a pre-requirement nowadays, which is getting an invitation to apply for CSQ through ARRIMA (which has a yearly cap). In total,even if you are not a student, if you do not meet language requirement, it can take 3-4 years just to get the PR, and 3 more for citizenship. Thus, my point was against the classic misconception of “easy path to citizenship” of Canada made by this post (and frankly by a lot of people in general, as they tend to overlook Quebec).
gamekathu··on Second Citizenships, Residencies, and/or Temporary Relocation
The post glosses over Canada by not mentioning Quebec. If you are in Quebec, chances of your getting a Permanent Residency is close to slim if you do not have French language proficiency. Thus, while living in Quebec for 5 years now, being a grad student, I neither qualify for PR nor citizenship by naturalization.
gamekathu··on Starlink is now Accepting General Pre-orders
Curious about this as well. The portal shows target delivery by 2022 when I apply to pre-order for an address in Kolkata. They will probably have to revisit the pricing model based on the local economy. But yeah, I'm worried whether the current govt will even allow such devices to be imported given they want a tighter control over the internet.

On the other hand, I believe this kind of connectivity will be extremely beneficial for cities such as Kolkata which suffer due to lack of proper infrastructure (and of course, lack of political will). I would love to see a future when I can move back to Kolkata and work with the same latency to servers in NorAM.

gamekathu··on ReMarkable 2.0 – A digital notebook that feels like paper
Which screen protector do you recommend? Also, does using such paper-textured protector decrease the life of Apple pencil?
gamekathu··on MiniConf: A Virtual Conference in a Box
The conference was amazing, and the portal was very usable! I really liked the page where you can find similar papers from a clustering map. Thank you and the team for the hard work, top stuff!
gamekathu··on Ciao, Chrome: Firefox Quantum Is the Browser Built for 2017
Probably irrelevant but I found default Bengali font rendering is broken on FF Quantum.
gamekathu··on My wonderful world of macOS
Is there a Vim equivalent of Snippets lab? I recently switched to using vim-wiki which I think could be used in this way to store snippets, but I do not know yet how to configure quick search.
gamekathu··on The New Firefox and Ridiculous Numbers of Tabs
I just downloaded 55.x beta to see whats such hype about, but opening more tabs are still chewing memory on Mac. maybe it is not mac optimized yet?
gamekathu··on Toronto is poised to become a producer of tech startups
future? any new policies taking shape to attract more companies?

I read somewhere that due to French clause in Quebec companies stay away from the city. Is it true?

gamekathu··on Toronto is poised to become a producer of tech startups
how is the tech scene at Montreal?
gamekathu··on India bans discriminatory pricing based on source/destination/app/content
full regulation paper from TRAI : http://trai.gov.in/WriteReadData/WhatsNew/Documents/Regulati...
gamekathu··on Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
heck they have even started Youtube adverts now! http://imgur.com/FqrQQm4 How can we face such a force who has every means of media communication to dupe people?
gamekathu··on Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
they were even suppressing a popular Indian youtube comedy channel's take on this issue when it was released. And yes, fb does internally censor things which they dont like, for eg they were actively blocking tsu.co, a rival social network url in their platform until it hit the media and they had to backtrack
gamekathu··on Indian Regulator Temporarily Suspends Facebook’s Free Basics
you have a good point.

India desperately needs faster internet rather than free internet. If we assume even the cheapest hardware, say a laptop costing less than 300$, the internet costs in a range of 7$ to 45$ a month (inr to usd conversion estimates, might vary). The faster connection u want, the more u have to pay. Sadly, the avg internet speed of our country is at the very bottom of global rankings. If they really are altruistic, they should provide faster internet in cheaper deals.

gamekathu··on Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
The company might be super slimy, but their engineering team has made huge improvements to the modern web / app development and had gifted us with the awesome open source tools. Only because of them I had a positive outlook of the company
gamekathu··on Facebook is misleading Indians with its full-page ads about Free Basics
finally more people are speaking about it. its sad to see facebook revert to cheap publicity stunt tactics to get their way around. I always had a good impression of FB specially for their open source tools which I use a lot, and I really hope they can put this murky event behind them and go back to the way they were.

n.b : link to the full page ads : http://imgur.com/a/hb3nt

gamekathu··on Indian Regulator Temporarily Suspends Facebook’s Free Basics
seriously, todays front page of a leading Kolkata newspaper had a large two page advertisements of free basics, citing "What Net neutrality activists wont tell you" : http://imgur.com/a/hb3nt.
gamekathu··on Beijing smog ‘red alert’ issued
its crazy Anand Vihar Delhi is clocking more score than Beijing! maybe because of the temperature Beijing's condition is worse
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