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Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: August 14th, 2023

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  • It’s been 8+ years since I last used Ubuntu on my laptop. I faced massive issues with staying on the latest version of Firefox because apt had a much older version, and installing using the gui installer wouldn’t replace the apt version etc etc. Probably a PEBKAC issue…

    But, I do want to know- is this not an issue any more? Will apt install the latest (or almost latest) version of Firefox? Can I update it from the inbuilt update tool in Firefox?











  • In a former workplace, we had a process that was close enough to what’s recommended in the blog, and it worked well. Really well even, there were hardly any ego clashes, everyone would negotiate a consensus and we had “spike” tasks in our sprints so that we can take the time to think about and research complex problems.

    And then the fire nation attacked…

    A director left the firm and they hired someone from Amazon. He said that we should have a “bias for action”, and got rid of this process, and a lot of other stuff we had going for ourselves using other such catch phrases.

    Getting him as a director was probably the worst thing to happen as we were under pressure to deliver stuff quickly all the time, and we’d then have to rework most of the shit because of missed requirements, or tools used not being insufficient for the task at hand etc. He was okay with it though, because “we delivered (shit) quickly”, and “our efficiency went up as indicated by the team velocity charts”.

    Pretty much the entire team had left the company in ~1.5 years, and customer satisfaction metrics were in the gutter when I left.

    I don’t know if he misunderstood “bias for action” and implemented it badly or if that’s genuinely how people at Amazon operate, but I won’t even think of joining AWS. Fuck that noise.



  • I live in Toronto, and I don’t have a car. I use buses and subways for most of my commute in winter. Along with these options, I use bikeshare (public bicycle rentals) in every other season. There are people who bike even in winter but I’m nowhere close to that hardcore.

    I’ve spent maybe $250 on uber in urgent/lazy situations in the last one year - that would’ve been a monthly auto insurance payment.

    I waited for a bus for around 20 minutes in -18°C a few weeks back. The biggest problem was that I had overdressed so I started sweating and had to unzip a layer.

    An important fact that people who have only ever lived in suburbs miss is that you don’t have to commute thaaat far thaaat often when you live in walkable cities. My cousin who lives in a suburb, drives for ~20 minutes to get to the closest big box store. I have 5 options for groceries in a 1 km radius and one of them is just one block over. So, I don’t even need a bus for groceries, let alone a car. We have seniors who definitely shouldn’t be driving walking around with grocery carts on the sidewalks. So, reducing car dependency improves mobility - not the opposite.



  • ELI5 of certificates:

    The “s” in “https” in urls like “https://wikipedia.com” stands for “Secure”.

    When you connect to Wikipedia’s computer to read something, how do you know if the content you get back is what they actually sent and wasn’t altered by your friendly neighborhood hacker?

    Wikipedia can “sign” the content before sending it you. They also give you a certificate telling you how they have a particular signature which has been verified by someone else whom you already trust, and how long this particular signature is valid for.

    If a hacker tries to alter the document returned by Wikipedia, they wouldn’t be able to sign the document correctly. If they tried to give a certificate with a different signature too, you would catch it because they wouldn’t be able to fake the verification of the “someone you trust” so you’d catch the fake certificate.

    Browsers handle all this stuff for us. If it detects something fishy, it’ll just show an error along the lines of “could not verify certificate”. In some cases, it’s genuinely an issue where you/the website is under attack and you may get a virus.

    In some other cases though, it’s an issue of the certificate expiring and the guys at Wikipedia not being proactive about getting a new signature and certificate. If you are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that you’re just dealing with a lazy developer and not a malicious hacker, you can tell your browser to ignore whatever issue it detected and show you the content that was returned by Wikipedia.

    Thanks for attending my TEDx talk.


  • ಕನ್ನಡ (Kannada): ಶಂಖದಿಂದ ಬಂದ್ರೇನೇ ತೀರ್ಥ - shankadinda bandrene teertha.

    Literally: it’s holy water only if it comes from a conch.

    Meaning: people are only going to take things seriously if a specific person says it.

    Example scenario: you tell a friend that a cab to go somewhere costs X amount, but they don’t believe you and check with a different friend and then accept that it’s going to cost them X.

    You’d then say this idiom to tease them since you gave them the same water (information) but it wasn’t holy water since you weren’t a conch (someone they trust/have faith in).