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iamshs

1,812 karma · joined February 9, 2013

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iamshs··on I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea
Let me tell of a missionary school and it has left me totally jaded about the cultural wipe-out that is practiced methodically. All the cultural icons are appropriated and a cross plastered on everything, from didgeridoo to the boomerang and placed alongside the holy book. Indigenous knowledge production is low because there frankly it requires audience and artist needs to be rewarded and paid, but this can be taken advantage of by well endowed people. If you search results for that local language on Youtube, all the main results you get are from Christian missions who have translated hymns and set it to indigenous rhythms. It is like you learn keys of the castle from somebody without telling them the end purpose you have in mind from the very beginning, take their knowledge and re-package it. Within the next gen you have new converts actively forgetting what their own parents are teaching them, and think this all is gift of missionaries.
iamshs··on How Trail of Bits helps verify the integrity of Signal chats
Recently a bureaucrat who wanted to make a mass protest out of his criticism of Indian Election Commission's drive to remove voters, was picked up by Indian Police and his Signal metadata was accessible to the Police. What is the solution to this thing?

His interview does not tell us if it was metadata or actual calls that were surveilled which could point to device compromise too.

"What caught him by surprise, he told ThePrint, was the Special Cell officers' access to his calls made via Signal"

https://theprint.in/india/ex-civil-servant-ashish-joshi-reca...

iamshs··on Kimi K3 (2.8T) at 1 token/s on a MacBook Pro, streamed from four SSDs
Good start.
iamshs··on GPS glitched across the US by as much as 33 feet
The story is about GPS errors which end up making life hell for people under monitoring since they end up generating a Police response. If 80% alerts were false, then an error like this can result in a surge of these alerts. It is an important story to tell.
iamshs··on Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
He didn't make the point clear, but the recent OSes are just trying to be Synology DSM copycats.
iamshs··on Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
Server Part Deals is really good since they test the drives themselves. But even the used drives are on the verge of being unaffordable now. They increased the price of their 28TB re-certified drive last month by $120.
iamshs··on Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
If I have CPU power at my disposal, why should I waste it? I love the fact that my NAS can serve my other needs too.
iamshs··on Ten Ways NAS Is Getting Enshitified
Expensive drives have become such a pain. Maybe five years from now, if supply meets demand, I just wish I can afford a 1PB all-flash NAS. I really don't want to hear noise and I wish data centres would release their used supply on market. I will put backup on HDDs.

Soldered RAM and novel format hardware is a pain point. Macbook storage upgrade needs special custom hardware. Synology still doesn't allow third party HDDs in their extension units. NAS devices are truly a fantastic category on its own. My data remains local, while also allowing me to use it as a server for my workloads.

iamshs··on Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey
India is now going after domains too: https://www.reuters.com/world/worlds-biggest-domain-seller-f...

To imagine that US MNCs readily obey these orders. There was a time when Gmail exited China due to Aurora attacks, and Chinese GFW is universally hated, so why is India allowed to create a GFW like censorship on US platforms? Indian courts have even blocked Reuters articles GLOBALLY before. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/19/india-judg...

iamshs··on Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey
India.
iamshs··on SpaceX bond worth 10% less than issue price – heading for junk bond status
Guy was doing Nazi salutes at Trump's inauguration. If he wanted support from normal people, he should have remained within normal political norms, not do Nazi salutes. I don't think it is normal to expect sympathy after that, people will be revolted and would want him to fail. They should not be judged for this opinion, it's pretty vanilla. Normal people still carry conscience, an innate justice system. Otherwise we won't even have justice system if we start giving people an out based on fame, talent etc.
iamshs··on The Second Life of Sanskrit
Let's go a bit back and try to understand what happened with Buddhists of India. A whole religion exterminated from such a vast land.
iamshs··on The Second Life of Sanskrit
Look at the IIT Bombay photo, in the background is the colonial era copy of Lady Britannia - "Bharat Mata". The fact article is hosted on Open Magazine, I was already a bit suspect. So the full context missing from headline is - "Under Hindu Nationalism".

What the article misses is what some of these accounts post. SanskritSparrow channels his followers on stories to some kooky post which claims to have decoded Indus Valley Script as Sanskrit. Learned persons better be careful about the intent here, the rider that is riding the "ancient" horse into the present is as much trying to invade intellectual spaces, as the actual Rishis were trying with the lands. Besides, the appeal is only among upper caste Hindus. What else is a Dalit going to do with Sanskrit? No literature is written for them in Sanskrit. They're not even allowed learning it, it is an exclusive domain of Brahmins. What will Dalits get from reading Vedas and finding out how they are termed as devils and filed under a degraded caste pyramid? It's an article borne out of very rosy lens. A Dalit Ambedkarite writer should research the accounts mentioned and tell us what the subsurface vibe looks like here, is it the same old wine in new glass?

iamshs··on Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era
Soviet books were a boon to the world. I thank Soviet scientists.

https://valeman.medium.com/the-men-who-translated-the-machin...

iamshs··on Streaming services' obnoxiously loud ads become illegal on July 1 in California
Went on Instagram last week for 2-3 days, and found out an annoying pattern where just the beginning 1s or so of a video ad is loud and then the volume is normal. Doesn't occur on all Ads either.
iamshs··on RISC-V Router
Ruckus APs also use OpenWRT. Saw it in a recent update that they pushed to Unleashed software.
iamshs··on How can Apple deal with the memory shortage?
Yes. These units now come with dedicated NVMe slots and they don't accept third party drives.
iamshs··on How can Apple deal with the memory shortage?
Another problem is locked hardware. Newest Synology hardware has lifted the HDD locks but still doesn't allow third party SSD and RAM. Mac Mini storage upgrade is a DIY solution, why not use the standard M.2 2230 slot?
iamshs··on Cloudflare flags archive.today as "C&C/Botnet"; no longer resolves via 1.1.1.2
I hate this. Archive.today provides a useful service for people like us in developing countries; without archive.today we would not even have luxury to read and document a lot of stuff. In our countries, hard disks are expensive and internet is not fast either. We don't have the luxury to just download; and so many useful Youtube video are just made private after one phone call from Police. Why take it away from us...
iamshs··on WD and Seagate confirm: Hard drives sold out for 2026
Repairability, upgradability and standards compliance needs to be minimum in consumer products. No to proprietary connectors. No soldered SSD or RAM. For home use, allow relaxed licensing options for discarded enterprise products like switches, Wifi Access Points etc. (Juniper Mist APs are fantastic, but are a brick without their cloud). Currently, I cannot put in a market bought SSD in my Macbook. I cannot put in a SSD in my Unifi router without buying their $20 SSD tray. I cannot put third party ECC-RAM and SSDs in my Synology NAS because the policy has only been lifted on HDDs but nothing else. I fear opposite will happen. Only leveraged companies have access to DRAM and NAND and hence will use it to lock us into their ecosystem as consumers won't even get access to storage in the open market otherwise.
iamshs··on Kanchipuram Saris and Thinking Machines
lol what even is this article. Embedding a chip into sari so that someone from New York can get whole "biography" of sari, and hence this blockchain adaptation will mitigate economic distress in India by owning the Hermes style of "handcraft" consumerism?
iamshs··on India has surpassed Japan to become the fourth-largest economy
Unfortunately, doesn't mean much. Per capita wise it's among the lowest. GDP of downtown Vancouver surpasses that of richest state of India.
iamshs··on Last Week on My Mac: Losing confidence
Tahoe has been giving spinning wheel on Firefox browser since updating it. You switch from spotlight to Firefox, there's the wheel; leave computer alone for sometime and comeback there's the wheel. I want this mess fixed.

Similarly on iOS, Safari bookmarks don't expose all folder names but only "Bookmarks" and "Favourites" as default. Why do I have to do another extra tap to expose a single folder that I have to save bookmark in? Why cannot at least five folder names be exposed? Another absurdity is while saving a fullpage screenshot after cropping it, you have to click the checkmark "emoji" which is otherwise blank with no description, and then comes a sub-menu to save as pdf or photo; why cannot those four options be presented as is on the main menu?

iamshs··on Janet Yellen Says the US Is Undermining Its Economic Success
"Yellen’s concerns start with the idea that capitalism depends on the consistent application of the law — regardless of individuals’ or businesses’ wealth or political connections. Undermine that, and businesses, both domestic and foreign, will begin to think twice about making investments."

Law upholds capitalism? Can law be bent towards socialism?

iamshs··on X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
After this change, accounts created in US will be sought after. Operate them through a US VPN. Voracious appetite for consuming content will be filled by outsiders. US effs up the world with violence, now world is riling up Americans with similarly worded content of their own politicians.
iamshs··on X's new country-of-origin feature reveals many 'US' accounts to be foreign-run
Why couldn't you get any other news media than the HindustanTimes.com; a plainly unhealthy Indian news blog to be consumed. We Indians have to suffer it because we have few options, it's amazing when these unreliable sites are given SEO boost on here too...
iamshs··on What happened to Apple's legendary attention to detail?
iPhone screenshot and cropping doesn't work. I take a lot of full page screenshots and need to crop them, but sometimes the button is visible and sometimes it isn't. Saving the page as PDF or photo is not intuitive either, you have to click a button that only has a checkmark with no writing on it, and then it says whether to save as photo or PDF. Cropping and saving has become a chore.
iamshs··on Leveling Up My Homelab
Space and energy costs are a factor for me too. My current Mac Mini SMB is really good but DAS consumes lot of power. Ideally, I would really love Mikrotik's RB5009UPr+S+IN next iteration to have antennas and a 4-Bay Rose Data Server merged. Gateway, Switch, Access Point, PoE for CCTV and NAS - all in one.
iamshs··on Delete FROM users WHERE location = 'Iran';
Hit me in the feels. There used to be an amateur Russian beatmaker who I used to follow, it was so sad to see him drop off similarly. His paypal was cut off. I used to watch his IG lives a lot, loved the way he used to develop his beats. Very novel.
iamshs··on Apple Photos app corrupts images
Image Capture did me dirty once. Macbook ran out of space while importing photos but it never stopped and kept on deleting photos from my iPhone. Lost 5K photos of a wedding... submitted a bug and hopefully it has been rectified.
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