958 karma · joined January 25, 2015
The reliability and simplicity of my own music library can't come back soon enough. I'll still keep AM and Spotify for discovering new music though.
It is generally fast except between 10am-12pm every day (i.e. when the tatkal systems open) and that is what frustrates most people. When called out on these issues, IRCTC has consistently refused to add capacity to deal with the demand between 10am-12pm. You are correct that this could be solved by using quotas and reservations but they haven't done that. My only guess is that it is for political/bureaucratic reasons. It's easier to blame capacity issues than tell the reality.
>reserved a certain proportion of the tickets for rural users
This already happens. There are quotas of different kinds.
P.S. You know what? You are actually right. There's no technical reason for this to be the way it is. They are using that explanation as a cover for a political or legal problem or by occam's razor, they probably have a fixed budget (and not allowed to use on-demand services like AWS) and the govt won't approve the budget necessary to solve the capacity issues between 10am-12pm.
Second, fake IDs are easy to make.
Third, it's impractical to enforce on the ground. Indian Railways is relatively open access compared to airlines. On average, trains begin boarding 15-30 mins prior to departure and have a very high number of passengers. With an avg of 16 coaches per rake, with each coach having 60-100 passengers, each train is carrying 960-1600 passengers. Some trains are even longer and most trains are over capacity because 2nd sitting has no reservation and people just pile on as far as there is room in the coach. It's pretty impractical to verify tickets of 1000+ people along with their ids. If you are departing out of a major city, its usual for TTEs to verify tickets after 2-3 hours (and after smaller stations have been crossed.)
Tickets have been hogged and scalped for a long time in India. I'm the first in my family who has no concept of bribing or buying scalped tickets or engaging an "agent." Everyone of the previous generation has plenty of stories about their experiences before. There is still a long way to go to improve access but I will also not deny that there has been a significant improvement compared to my parents experience.
I am not sure if you know the history of IRCTC and why it is slow (at times. Things have vastly improved in the last decade). People have asked this many a times and their explanation does make some sense, that if IRCTC is super fast and efficient, then people with cash to spare/with computers and good internet access will hog all the tickets, denying people in rural areas a fair opportunity to purchase tickets. That is still probably true in 2020, because a good chunk of Indians in rural areas either do not have good internet connectivity, lack digital means of payment or are simply flummoxed by the online process.
From your perspective, IRCTC is not fair access because the servers slow down but from the govt perspective, fair access is not limited to only IRCTC users. There might be an argument that railways has a low capacity overall and that there is a long way to go for efficiency improvements etc but given my experience over last 12 years, the experience has improved drastically. Wait times have gone down considerably on a lot of trains, you no longer have to plan your travel 6 months in advance, you can buy tatkal tickets without paying scalpers etc. In 2018 I could even book tickets (from home) on a train which had already departed from its source station (my departure point was halfway between the origin and destination) and people around me did not believe that this was possible.
Your best bet is to run external displays at the MBPs resolutions and because that is not possible/ideal you are left with choices of running at 1080p/4k/5k. macOS no longer renders crisp on 1080p so 3840x2160 is the last remaining widely available and affordable choice while 5K is still very expensive.
This has driven me insane in 10.15.7. If my ISP has intermittent connectivity, macOS starts beach balling. To prevent this I have to shut off internet.
The catch?
Shutting down the network requires suffering through multiple beach balls. Every single mouse click or key press invokes a beach ball. Everything goes away the moment internet is connected.
If you want to force system wide view settings in finder, delete all DS_Store files and then do the thing with cmd+j
So it's more of background/instincts things than language. C# technically has nothing which makes it a bad choice for startups.
We'll probably still have 4-5 years before the Intel Macs are completely abandoned but then this is Apple we are talking about. For all intents and purposes, they might cut the umbilical cord in 6 months.
Adobe is probably the only company which can delay the complete transition for some time.
Edit - removed the line about electron. As others have pointed out, electron already runs on ARM.
The economic costs are not the only costs in a capitalist society. The other costs just don’t show up on the paper.
P.S and I’ll argue that smartphones are necessary in today’s world. They are the primary form of computing, communication and fulfilling bureaucratic work for large sections of the population on the planet. In India, you’ll have a tough time in life if you don’t have a smartphone. You can survive? Yes. But it will be a PITA to communicate with others, deal with govt, banking or utilities etc
Can't emphasize this enough. College is still necessary for something like 95% of the planet's population. If you are not born into wealth or have well connected parents, a college degree is your only way to a better life. You may not learn anything in college but you need that fuckin' piece of paper just for the bureaucratic formalities. A very talented friend of mine was denied the US visa probably because of lack of a bachelor degree.
I do remember reading a twitter thread of creator who sold books and earned a six figure income when a youtube creator chimed in and reported earning less than $300 for more than million views. Not an apples to apples comparison but you quickly see how youtube/spotify would actually create market pressures which discourage people from creating works of cultural and social significance.
In such a world, books like GEB and Piketty’s Capital would never see the light of the day.
IBM/TCS/Infosys/Wipro/Cognizant are consultancy shops which are some examples of MRCs. They generally hire at scale - like 10,000 people in one go or scooping up a whole college’s batch. Thats how they have also been able to keep a freshers salary static at 3-5 LPA (~4k-6.5k USD) for 13 years now.
Want to use your own email server? Not going to be a piece of cake and good luck if gmail decides against you. Want to use firefox? Gmail and youtube really will move heaven and earth to make you use chrome. Want to preserve your privacy in any meaningful way? Good luck because rest of the society decided to hand over everything to Google and its free counterparts.
These companies gravity wells are so strong that they reduce meaningful choices to a consumer. In fact, give them enough time and they’ll coerce the market to behave in a particular way.
As of now, to operate as a business on the internet, you can ignore Apple, Amazon or even Facebook. You’ll have a tough time ignoring Google. Across the entire planet.
There’s no doubt that Google’s work has a lot of benefits to humanity. But that is not a license to ignore the dark side of the coin.
Just why? What’s the history here?
It does not work for literally everyone from the country but the people I'm talking about can definitely travel on this path.
That's why I said, if you are willing to let go of the traditional path. If you have to compete against a pile of resume, you are near or on the traditional path.
Employment doesn't necessarily mean you have to be working for a company.
I never said they had trouble finding jobs. You jumped the gun. I said they were not happy with choosing computer science as a career.