TL;DR: Color is a visual perception. Human eyes can detect a broader range of colors than any devices in the graphics chain. Since each device can generate, capture or reproduce a specific subset of colors and tones, color management controls color conversion and calibration across devices to ensure a more accurate and consistent color representation. We can expose a GPU-accelerated display color management pipeline to support this process and enhance results, and this is what we are doing on Linux to improve color management on Gamescope/SteamDeck. Even with the challenges of being external developers, we have been working on mapping AMD GPU color capabilities to the Linux kernel color management interface, which is a combination of DRM and AMD driver-specific color properties. This more extensive color management pipeline includes pre-defined Transfer Functions, 1-Dimensional LookUp Tables (1D LUTs), and 3D LUTs before and after the plane composition/blending.

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The study of color is well-established and has been explored for many years. Color science and research findings have also guided technology innovations. As a result, color in Computer Graphics is a very complex topic that I m putting a lot of effort into becoming familiar with. I always find myself rereading all the materials I have collected about color space and operations since I started this journey (about one year ago). I also understand how hard it is to find consensus on some color subjects, as exemplified by all explanations around the 2015 online viral phenomenon of The Black and Blue Dress. Have you heard about it? What is the color of the dress for you? So, taking into account my skills with colors and building consensus, this blog post only focuses on GPU hardware capabilities to support color management :-D If you want to learn more about color concepts and color on Linux, you can find useful links at the end of this blog post.

Linux Kernel, show me the colors ;D DRM color management interface only exposes a small set of post-blending color properties. Proposals to enhance the DRM color API from different vendors have landed the subsystem mailing list over the last few years. On one hand, we got some suggestions to extend DRM post-blending/CRTC color API: DRM CRTC 3D LUT for R-Car (2020 version); DRM CRTC 3D LUT for Intel (draft - 2020); DRM CRTC 3D LUT for AMD by Igalia (v2 - 2023); DRM CRTC 3D LUT for R-Car (v2 - 2023). On the other hand, some proposals to extend DRM pre-blending/plane API: DRM plane colors for Intel (v2 - 2021); DRM plane API for AMD (v3 - 2021); DRM plane 3D LUT for AMD - 2021. Finally, Simon Ser sent the latest proposal in May 2023: Plane color pipeline KMS uAPI, from discussions in the 2023 Display/HDR Hackfest, and it is still under evaluation by the Linux Graphics community. All previous proposals seek a generic solution for expanding the API, but many seem to have stalled due to the uncertainty of matching well the hardware capabilities of all vendors. Meanwhile, the use of AMD color capabilities on Linux remained limited by the DRM interface, as the DCN 3.0 family color caps and mapping diagram below shows the Linux/DRM color interface without driver-specific color properties [*]: Bearing in mind that we need to know the variety of color pipelines in the subsystem to be clear about a generic solution, we decided to approach the issue from a different perspective and worked on enabling a set of Driver-Specific Color Properties for AMD Display Drivers. As a result, I recently sent another round of the AMD driver-specific color mgmt API. For those who have been following the AMD driver-specific proposal since the beginning (see [RFC][V1]), the main new features of the latest version [v2] are the addition of pre-blending Color Transformation Matrix (plane CTM) and the differentiation of Pre-defined Transfer Functions (TF) supported by color blocks. For those who just got here, I will recap this work in two blog posts. This one describes the current status of the AMD display driver in the Linux kernel/DRM subsystem and what changes with the driver-specific properties. In the next post, we go deeper to describe the features of each color block and provide a better picture of what is available in terms of color management for Linux.

The Linux kernel color management API and AMD hardware color capabilities Before discussing colors in the Linux kernel with AMD hardware, consider accessing the Linux kernel documentation (version 6.5.0-rc5). In the AMD Display documentation, you will find my previous work documenting AMD hardware color capabilities and the Color Management Properties. It describes how AMD Display Manager (DM) intermediates requests between the AMD Display Core component (DC) and the Linux/DRM kernel interface for color management features. It also describes the relevant function to call the AMD color module in building curves for content space transformations. A subsection also describes hardware color capabilities and how they evolve between versions. This subsection, DC Color Capabilities between DCN generations, is a good starting point to understand what we have been doing on the kernel side to provide a broader color management API with AMD driver-specific properties.

Why do we need more kernel color properties on Linux? Blending is the process of combining multiple planes (framebuffers abstraction) according to their mode settings. Before blending, we can manage the colors of various planes separately; after blending, we have combined those planes in only one output per CRTC. Color conversions after blending would be enough in a single-plane scenario or when dealing with planes in the same color space on the kernel side. Still, it cannot help to handle the blending of multiple planes with different color spaces and luminance levels. With plane color management properties, userspace can get a more accurate representation of colors to deal with the diversity of color profiles of devices in the graphics chain, bring a wide color gamut (WCG), convert High-Dynamic-Range (HDR) content to Standard-Dynamic-Range (SDR) content (and vice-versa). With a GPU-accelerated display color management pipeline, we can use hardware blocks for color conversions and color mapping and support advanced color management. The current DRM color management API enables us to perform some color conversions after blending, but there is no interface to calibrate input space by planes. Note that here I m not considering some workarounds in the AMD display manager mapping of DRM CRTC de-gamma and DRM CRTC CTM property to pre-blending DC de-gamma and gamut remap block, respectively. So, in more detail, it only exposes three post-blending features:

• DRM CRTC de-gamma: used to convert the framebuffer s colors to linear gamma;
• DRM CRTC CTM: used for color space conversion;
• DRM CRTC gamma: used to convert colors to the gamma space of the connected screen.

AMD driver-specific color management interface We can compare the Linux color management API with and without the driver-specific color properties. From now, we denote driver-specific properties with the AMD prefix and generic properties with the DRM prefix. For visual comparison, I bring the DCN 3.0 family color caps and mapping diagram closer and present it here again: Mixing AMD driver-specific color properties with DRM generic color properties, we have a broader Linux color management system with the following features exposed by properties in the plane and CRTC interface, as summarized by this updated diagram: The blocks highlighted by red lines are the new properties in the driver-specific interface developed by me (Igalia) and Joshua (Valve). The red dashed lines are new links between API and AMD driver components implemented by us to connect the Linux/DRM interface to AMD hardware blocks, mapping components accordingly. In short, we have the following color management properties exposed by the DRM/AMD display driver:

• Pre-blending - AMD Display Pipe and Plane (DPP):
  • AMD plane de-gamma: 1D LUT and pre-defined transfer functions; used to linearize the input space of a plane;
  • AMD plane CTM: 3x4 matrix; used to convert plane color space;
  • AMD plane shaper: 1D LUT and pre-defined transfer functions; used to delinearize and/or normalize colors before applying 3D LUT;
  • AMD plane 3D LUT: 17x17x17 size with 12 bit-depth; three dimensional lookup table used for advanced color mapping;
  • AMD plane blend/out gamma: 1D LUT and pre-defined transfer functions; used to linearize back the color space after 3D LUT for blending.
• Post-blending - AMD Multiple Pipe/Plane Combined (MPC):
  • DRM CRTC de-gamma: 1D LUT (can t be set together with plane de-gamma);
  • DRM CRTC CTM: 3x3 matrix (remapped to post-blending matrix);
  • DRM CRTC gamma: 1D LUT + AMD CRTC gamma TF; added to take advantage of driver pre-defined transfer functions;

Note: You can find more about AMD display blocks in the Display Core Next (DCN) - Linux kernel documentation, provided by Rodrigo Siqueira (Linux/AMD display developer) in a 2021-documentation series. In the next post, I ll revisit this topic, explaining display and color blocks in detail.

How did we get a large set of color features from AMD display hardware? So, looking at AMD hardware color capabilities in the first diagram, we can see no post-blending (MPC) de-gamma block in any hardware families. We can also see that the AMD display driver maps CRTC/post-blending CTM to pre-blending (DPP) gamut_remap, but there is post-blending (MPC) gamut_remap (DRM CTM) from newer hardware versions that include SteamDeck hardware. You can find more details about hardware versions in the Linux kernel documentation/AMDGPU Product Information. I needed to rework these two mappings mentioned above to provide pre-blending/plane de-gamma and CTM for SteamDeck. I changed the DC mapping to detach stream gamut remap matrixes from the DPP gamut remap block. That means mapping AMD plane CTM directly to DPP/pre-blending gamut remap block and DRM CRTC CTM to MPC/post-blending gamut remap block. In this sense, I also limited plane CTM properties to those hardware versions with MPC/post-blending gamut_remap capabilities since older versions cannot support this feature without clashes with DRM CRTC CTM. Unfortunately, I couldn t prevent conflict between AMD plane de-gamma and DRM plane de-gamma since post-blending de-gamma isn t available in any AMD hardware versions until now. The fact is that a post-blending de-gamma makes little sense in the AMD color pipeline, where plane blending works better in a linear space, and there are enough color blocks to linearize content before blending. To deal with this conflict, the driver now rejects atomic commits if users try to set both AMD plane de-gamma and DRM CRTC de-gamma simultaneously. Finally, we had no other clashes when enabling other AMD driver-specific color properties for our use case, Gamescope/SteamDeck. Our main work for the remaining properties was understanding the data flow of each property, the hardware capabilities and limitations, and how to shape the data for programming the registers - AMD color block capabilities (and limitations) are the topics of the next blog post. Besides that, we fixed some driver bugs along the way since it was the first Linux use case for most of the new color properties, and some behaviors are only exposed when exercising the engine. Take a look at the Gamescope/Steam Deck Color Pipeline[**], and see how Gamescope uses the new API to manage color space conversions and calibration (please click on the image for a better view): In the next blog post, I ll describe the implementation and technical details of each pre- and post-blending color block/property on the AMD display driver. * Thank Harry Wentland for helping with diagrams, color concepts and AMD capabilities. ** Thank Joshua Ashton for providing and explaining Gamescope/Steam Deck color pipeline. *** Thanks to the Linux Graphics community - explicitly Harry, Joshua, Pekka, Simon, Sebastian, Siqueira, Alex H. and Ville - to all the learning during this Linux DRM/AMD color journey. Also, Carlos and Tomas for organizing the 2023 Display/HDR Hackfest where we have a great and immersive opportunity to discuss Color & HDR on Linux.

Useful Links

1. Cinematic Color - 2012 SIGGRAPH course notes by Jeremy Selan: an introduction to color science, concepts and pipelines.
2. Color management and HDR documentation for FOSS graphics by Pekka Paalanen: documentation and useful links on applying color concepts to the Linux graphics stack.
3. HDR in Linux by Jeremy Cline: a blog post exploring color concepts for HDR support on Linux.
4. Methods for conversion of high dynamic range content to standard dynamic range content and vice-versa by ITU-R: guideline for conversions between HDR and SDR contents.
5. Using Lookup Tables to Accelerate Color Transformations by Jeremy Selan: Nvidia blog post about Lookup Tables on color management.
6. The Importance of Being Linear by Larry Gritz and Eugene d Eon: Nvidia blog post about gamma and color conversions.

Manipur Lot of news from Manipur. Seems the killings haven t stopped. In fact, there was a huge public rally in support of the rapists and murderers as reported by Imphal Free Press. The Ruling Govt. both at the Center and the State being BJP continuing to remain mum. Both the Internet shutdowns have been criticized and seems no effect on the Government. Their own MLA was attacked but they have chosen to also be silent about that. The opposition demanded that the PM come in both the houses and speak but he has chosen to remain silent. In that quite a few bills were passed without any discussions. If it was not for the viral videos nobody would have come to know of anything . Internet shutdowns impact women disproportionately as more videos of assaults show Of course, as shared before that gentleman has been arrested under Section 66A as I shared in the earlier blog post. In any case, in the last few years, this Government has chosen to pass most of its bills without any discussions. Some of the bills I will share below. The attitude of this Govt. can be seen through this cartoon

The above picture shows the disqualified M.P. Rahul Gandhi because he had asked what is the relationship between Adani and Modi. The other is the Mr. Modi, the Prime Minister who refuses to enter and address the Parliament. Prem Panicker shares how we chillingly have come to this stage when even after rapes we are silent

Data Leakage According to most BJP followers this is not a bug but a feature of this Government. Sucheta Dalal of Moneylife shared how the data leakage has been happening at the highest levels in the Government. The leakage is happening at the ministerial level because unless the minister or his subordinate passes a certain startup others cannot come to know. As shared in the article, while the official approval may take 3-4 days, within hours other entities start congratulating. That means they know that the person/s have been approved.While reading this story, the first thought that immediately crossed my mind was data theft and how easily that would have been done. There was a time when people would be shocked by articles such as above and demand action but sadly even if people know and want to do something they feel powerless to do anything

PAN Linking and Aadhar Last month GOI made PAN Linking to Aadhar a thing. This goes against the judgement given by the honored Supreme Court in September 2018. Around the same time, Moneylife had reported on the issue on how the info. on Aadhar cards is available and that has its consequences. But to date nothing has happened except GOI shrugging. In the last month, 13 crore+ users of PAN including me affected by it I had tried to actually delink the two but none of the banks co-operated in the same Aadhar has actually number of downsides, most people know about the AEPS fraud that has been committed time and time again. I have shared in previous blog posts the issue with biometric data as well as master biometric data that can and is being used for fraud. GOI either ignorant or doesn t give a fig as to what happens to you, citizen of India. I could go on and on but it would result in nothing constructive so will stop now

IRCv3 I had been enthused when I heard about IRCV3. While it was founded in 2016, it sorta came on in its own in around 2020. I did try matrix or rather riot-web and went through number of names while finally setting on element. While I do have the latest build 1.11.36 element just hasn t been workable for me. It is too outsized, and occupies much more real estate than other IM s (Instant Messengers and I cannot correct size it like I do say for qbittorrent or any other app. I had filed couple of bugs on it but because it apparently only affects me, nothing happened afterwards But that is not the whole story at all. Because of Debconf happening in India, and that too Kochi, I decided to try out other tools to see how IRC is doing. While the Debian wiki page shares a lot about IRC clients and is also helpful in sharing stats by popcounter ( popularity-contest, thanks to whoever did that), it did help me in trying two of the most popular clients. Pidgin and Hexchat, both of which have shared higher numbers. This might be simply due to the fact that both get downloaded when you install the desktop version or they might be popular in themselves, have no idea one way or the other. But still I wanted to see what sort of experience I could expect from both of them in 2023. One of the other things I noticed is that Pidgin is not a participating organization in ircv3 while hexchat is. Before venturing in, I also decided to take a look at oftc.net. Came to know that for sometime now, oftc has started using web verify. I didn t see much of a difference between hcaptcha and gcaptcha other than that the fact that they looked more like oil paintings rather than anything else. While I could easily figure the odd man out or odd men out to be more accurate, I wonder how a person with low or no vision would pass that ??? Also much of our world is pretty much contextual based, figuring who the odd one is or are could be tricky. I do not have answers to the above other than to say more work needs to be done by oftc in that area. I did get a link that I verified. But am getting ahead of the story. Another thing I understood that for some reason oftc is also not particpating in ircv3, have no clue why not :(I

Account Registration in Pidgin and Hexchat This is the biggest pain point in both. I failed to register via either Pidgin or Hexchat. I couldn t find a way in either client to register my handle. I have had on/off relationships with IRC over the years, the biggest issue being IIRC is that if you stop using your handle for a month or two others can use it. IIRC, every couple of months or so, irc/oftc releases the dormant ones. Matrix/Vector has done quite a lot in that regard but that s a different thing altogether so for the moment will keep that aside. So, how to register for the network. This is where webchat.oftc.net comes in. You get a quaint 1970 s IRC window (probably emulated) where you call Nickserv to help you. As can be seen it one of the half a dozen bots that helps IRC. So the first thing you need to do is /msg nickserv help what you are doing is asking nickserv what services they have and Nickserv shares the numbers of services it offers. After looking into, you are looking for register /msg nickerv register Both the commands tell you what you need to do as can be seen by this

Let s say you are XYZ and your e-mail address is xyz@xyz.com This is just a throwaway id I am taking for the purpose of showing how the process is done. For this, also assume your passowrd is 1234xyz;0x something like this. I have shared about APG (Advanced Password Generator) before so you could use that to generate all sorts of passwords for yourself. So next would be /msg nickserv register 1234xyz;0x xyz@xyz.com Now the thing to remember is you need to be sure that the email is valid and in your control as it would generate a link with hcaptcha. Interestingly, their accessibility signup fails or errors out. I just entered my email and it errors out. Anyway back to it. Even after completing the puzzle, even with the valid username and password neither pidgin or hexchat would let me in. Neither of the clients were helpful in figuring out what was going wrong. At this stage, I decided to see the specs of ircv3 if they would help out in anyway and came across this. One would have thought that this is one of the more urgent things that need to be fixed, but for reasons unknown it s still in draft mode. Maybe they (the participants) are not in consensus, no idea. Unfortunately, it seems that the participants of IRCv3 have chosen a sort of closed working model as the channel is restricted. The only notes of any consequence are being shared by Ilmari Lauhakangas from Finland. Apparently, Mr/Ms/they Ilmari is also a libreoffice hacker. It is possible that their is or has been lot of drama before or something and that s why things are the way they are. In either way, doesn t tell me when this will be fixed, if ever. For people who are on mobiles and whatnot, without element, it would be 10x times harder. Update :- Saw this discussion on github. Don t see a way out It seems I would be unable to unable to be part of Debconf Kochi 2023. Best of luck to all the participants and please share as much as possible of what happens during the event.

Manipur Videos Warning: The text might be mature and will have references to violence so if there are kids or you are sensitive, please excuse. Few days back, saw the videos and I cannot share the rage, shame and many conflicting emotions that were going through me. I almost didn t want to share but couldn t stop myself. The woman in the video were being palmed, fingered, nude, later reportedly raped and murdered. And there have been more than a few cases. The next day saw another video that showed beheaded heads, and Kukis being killed just next to their houses. I couldn t imagine what those people must be feeling as the CM has been making partisan statements against them. One of the husbands of the Kuki women who had been paraded, fondled is an Army Officer in the Indian Army. The Meiteis even tried to burn his home but the Army intervened and didn t let it get burnt. The CM s own statement as shared before tells his inability to bring the situation out of crisis. In fact, his statement was dumb stating that the Internet shutdown was because there were more than 100 such cases. And it s spreading to the nearby Northeast regions. Now Mizoram, the nearest neighbor is going through similar things where the Meitis are not dominant. The Mizos have told the Meitis to get out. To date, the PM has chosen not to visit Manipur. He just made a small 1 minute statement about it saying how the women have shamed India, an approximation of what he said.While it s actually not the women but the men who have shamed India. The Wire has been talking to both the Meitis, the Kukis, the Nagas. A Kuki women sort of bared all. She is right on many counts. The GOI while wanting to paint the Kukis in a negative light have forgotten what has been happening in its own state, especially its own youth as well as in other states while also ignoring the larger geopolitics and business around it. Taliban has been cracking as even they couldn t see young boys, women becoming drug users. I had read somewhere that 1 in 4 or 1 in 5 young person in Afghanistan is now in its grip. So no wonder,the Taliban is trying to eradicate and shutdown drug use among it s own youth. Circling back to Manipur, I was under the wrong impression that the Internet shutdown is now over. After those videos became viral as well as the others I mentioned, again the orders have been given and there is shutdown. It is not fully shut but now only Govt. offices have it. so nobody can share a video that goes against any State or Central Govt. narrative A real sad state of affairs Update: There is conditional reopening whatever that means When I saw the videos, the first thing is I felt was being powerless, powerless to do anything about it. The second was if I do not write about it, amplify it and don t let others know about it then what s the use of being able to blog

Mental Health, Binging on various Webseries Both the videos shocked me and I couldn t sleep that night or the night after. it. Even after doing work and all, they would come in unobtrusively in my nightmares While I felt a bit foolish, I felt it would be nice to binge on some webseries. Little I was to know that both Northshore and Alaska Daily would have stories similar to what is happening here While the story in Alaska Daily is fictional it resembles very closely to a real newspaper called Anchorage Daily news. Even there the Intuit women , one of the marginalized communities in Alaska. The only difference I can see between GOI and the Alaskan Government is that the Alaskan Government was much subtle in doing the same things. There are some differences though. First, the State is and was responsive to the local press and apart from one close call to one of its reporters, most reporters do not have to think about their own life in peril. Here, the press cannot look after either their livelihood or their life. It was a juvenile kid who actually shot the video, uploaded and made it viral. One needs to just remember the case details of Siddique Kappan. Just for sharing the news and the video he was arrested. Bail was denied to him time and time again citing that the Police were investigating . Only after 2 years and 3 months he got bail and that too because none of the charges that the Police had they were able to show any prima facie evidence. One of the better interviews though was of Vrinda Grover. For those who don t know her, her Wikipedia page does tell a bit about her although it is woefully incomplete. For example, most recently she had relentlessly pursued the unconstitutional Internet Shutdown that happened in Kashmir for 5 months. Just like in Manipur, the shutdown was there to bury crimes either committed or being facilitated by the State. For the issues of livelihood, one can take the cases of Bipin Yadav and Rashid Hussain. Both were fired by their employer Dainik Bhaskar because they questioned the BJP MP Smriti Irani what she has done for the state. The problems for Dainik Bhaskar or for any other mainstream media is most of them rely on Government advertisements. Private investment in India has fallen to record lows mostly due to the policies made by the Centre. If any entity or sector grows a bit then either Adani or Ambani will one way or the other take it. So, for most first and second generation entrepreneurs it doesn t make sense to grow and then finally sell it to one of these corporates at a loss GOI on Adani, Ambani side of any deal. The MSME sector that is and used to be the second highest employer hasn t been able to recover from the shocks of demonetization, GST and then the pandemic. Each resulting in more and more closures and shutdowns. Most of the joblessness has gone up tremendously in North India which the Government tries to deny. The most interesting points in all those above examples is within a month or less, whatever the media reports gets scrubbed. Even the firing of the journos that was covered by some of the mainstream media isn t there anymore. I have to use secondary sources instead of primary sources. One can think of the chilling effects on reportage due to the above. The sad fact is even with all the money in the world the PM is unable to come to the Parliament to face questions.

The above poster/question is by Surya Pratap Singh, a retired IAS officer. He asks why the PM is unable to answer in either of the houses. As shared before, the Govt. wants very limited discussion. Even yesterday, the Lok Sabha TV just showed the BJP MP s making statements but silent or mic was off during whatever questions or statements made by the opposition. If this isn t mockery of Indian democracy then I don t know what is Even the media landscape has been altered substantially within the last few years. Both Adani and Ambani have distributed the media pie between themselves. One of the last bastions of the free press, NDTV was bought by Adani in a hostile takeover. Both Ambani and Adani are close to this Goverment. In fact, there is no sector in which one or the other is not present. Media houses like Newsclick, The Wire etc. that are a fraction of mainstream press are where most of the youth have been going to get their news as they are not partisan. Although even there, GOI has time and again interfered. The Wire has had too many 504 Gateway timeouts in the recent months and they had been forced to move most of their journalism from online to video, rather Youtube in order to escape both the censoring and the timeouts as shared above. In such a hostile environment, how both the organizations are somehow able to survive is a miracle. Most local reportage is also going to YouTube as that s the best way for them to not get into Govt. censors. Not an ideal situation, but that s the way it is. The difference between Indian and Israeli media can be seen through this

The above is a Screenshot shared by how the Israeli media has reacted to the Israeli Government s Knesset over the judicial overhaul . Here, the press itself erodes its own by giving into the Government day and night

Binging on Webseries Saw Northshore, Three Pines, Alaska Daily and Doogie Kamealoha M.D. which is based on Doogie Howser M.D. Of the four, enjoyed Doogie Kamealoha M.D. the most but then it might be because it s a copy of Doogie Howser, just updated to the new millenia and there are some good childhood memories associated with that series. The others are also good. I tried to not see European stuff as most of them are twisted and didn t want that space.

EU Digital Operational Resilience Act and impact on FOSS Few days ago, apparently the EU shared the above Act. One can read about it more here. This would have more impact on FOSS as most development of various FOSS distributions happens in EU. Fair bit of Debian s own development happens in Germany and France. While there have been calls to make things more clearer, especially for FOSS given that most developers do foss development either on side or as a hobby while their day job is and would be different. The part about consumer electronics and FOSS is a tricky one as updates can screw up your systems. Microsoft has had a huge history of devices not working after an update or upgrade. And this is not limited to Windows as they would like to believe. Even apple seems to be having its share of issues time and time again. One would have hoped that these companies that make billions of dollars from their hardware and software sales would be doing more testing and Q&A and be more aware about security issues. FOSS, on the other hand while being more responsive doesn t make as much money vis-a-vis the competitors. Let s take the most concrete example. The most successful mobile phone having FOSS is Purism. But it s phone, it has priced itself out of the market. A huge part of that is to do with both economies of scale and trying to get an infrastructure and skills in the States where none or minimally exists. Compared that to say Pinepro that is manufactured in Hong Kong and is priced 1/3rd of the same. For most people it is simply not affordable in these times. Add to that the complexity of these modern cellphones make it harder, not easier for most people to be vigilant and update the phone at all times. Maybe we need more dumphones such as Light and Punkt but then can those be remotely hacked or not, there doesn t seem to be any answers on that one. I haven t even seen anybody even ask those questions. They may have their own chicken and egg issues. For people like me who have lost hearing, while I can navigate smartphones for now but as I become old I don t see anything that would help me. For many an elderly population, both hearing and seeing are the first to fade. There doesn t seem to be any solutions targeted for them even though they are 5-10% of any population at the very least. Probably more so in Europe and the U.S. as well as Japan and China. All of them are clearly under-served markets but dunno a solution for them. At least to me that s an open question.

India Press Freedom Just about a week back, India again slipped in the Freedom index, this time falling to 161 out of 180 countries. The RW again made lot of noise as they cannot fathom why it has been happening so. A recent news story gives some idea. Every year NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) puts out its statistics of crimes happening across the country. The report is in public domain. Now according to report shared, around 40k women from Gujarat alone disappeared in the last five years. This is a state where BJP has been ruling for the last 30 odd years. When this report became viral, almost all national newspapers the news was censored/blacked out. For e.g. check out newindianexpress.com, likewise TOI and other newspapers, the news has been 404. The only place that you can get that news is in minority papers like siasat. But the story didn t remain till there. While the NCW (National Commission of Women) pointed out similar stuff happening in J&K, Gujarat Police claimed they got almost 39k women back. Now ideally, it should have been in NCRB data as an addendum as the report can be challenged. But as this news was made viral, nobody knows the truth or false in the above. What BJP has been doing is whenever they get questioned, they try to muddy the waters like that. And most of the time, such news doesn t make to court so the party gets a freebie in a sort as they are not legally challenged. Even if somebody asks why didn t Gujarat Police do it as NCRB report is jointly made with the help of all states, and especially with BJP both in Center and States, they cannot give any excuse. The only excuse you see or hear is whataboutism unfortunately

Profiteering on I.T. Hardware I was chatting with a friend yesterday who is an enthusiast like me but has been more alert about what has been happening in the CPU, motherboard, RAM world. I was simply shocked to hear the prices of motherboards which are three years old, even a middling motherboard. For e.g. the last time I bought a mobo, I spent about 6k but that was for an ATX motherboard. Most ITX motherboards usually sold for around INR 4k/- or even lower. I remember Via especially as their mobos were even cheaper around INR 1.5-2k/-. Even before pandemic, many motherboard manufacturers had closed down shop leaving only a few in the market. As only a few remained, prices started going higher. The pandemic turned it to a seller s market overnight as most people were stuck at home and needed good rigs for either work or leisure or both. The manufacturers of CPU, motherboards, GPU s, Powersupply (SMPS) named their prices and people bought it. So in 2023, high prices remained while warranty periods started coming down. Governments also upped customs and various other duties. So all are in hand in glove in the situation. So as shared before, what I have been offered is a 4 year motherboard with a CPU of that time. I haven t bought it nor do I intend to in short-term future but extremely disappointed with the state of affairs

AMD Issues It s just been couple of hard weeks apparently for AMD. The first has been the TPM (Trusted Platform Module) issue that was shown by couple of security researchers. From what is known, apparently with $200 worth of tools and with sometime you can hack into somebody machine if you have physical access. Ironically, MS made a huge show about TPM and also made it sort of a requirement if a person wanted to have Windows 11. I remember Matthew Garett sharing about TPM and issues with Lenovo laptops. While AMD has acknowledged the issue, its response has been somewhat wishy-washy. But this is not the only issue that has been plaguing AMD. There have been reports of AMD chips literally exploding and again AMD issuing a somewhat wishy-washy response. Asus though made some changes but is it for Zen4 or only 5 parts, not known. Most people are expecting a recession in I.T. hardware this year as well as next year due to high prices. No idea if things will change, if ever

Review: Shutdown, by Adam Tooze

Publisher:	Viking
Copyright:	September 2021
ISBN:	0-593-29756-3
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	305

Shutdown is a history of the world macroeconomic response to COVID-19, covering 2020 and the very beginning of 2021. But wait, you might be saying. It's only the end of 2022 right now, and this book was published in September of 2021. That's not history, that's journalism. And yes, I think that's a valid critique. Shutdown is doing something rather odd, and I'm not certain it was a good idea, but I do think it has a (somewhat narrow) audience. Descriptions first. After an awkward introduction (more on that later), Tooze launches into an essentially chronological history in four parts: the initial viral spread and early political and public health response, the economic hard stop and macroeconomic response, the summer fallout and political complications, and the more-organized aftershocks of the fall. The early chapters are closer to a history, with a clear timeline and the tracery of cause and effect. The closer the narrative comes to the time Tooze was writing it, the more that clarity drops away. The last few chapters feel like a collection of simultaneous events that may or may not be related or have long-term significance. Everyone reading this lived through those events, and if you're at all like me, consumed far more news coverage of them than was healthy. The obvious question, then, is why read a book that rehashes all of that? For me, there are two answers: Tooze pays attention to more of the world than makes it into the local headlines and tries to synthesize a larger picture, and the focus of this book is the macroeconomic facilities used in the response. I remember the fights over school closures in the US. I didn't know about the impact of unprecedented Federal Reserve action on the bond market for emerging market government debt. If you're the sort of person who reads The Economist religiously (which I am not), you may not learn anything new here. If you're not, and you have a general interest in international finance, there were probably some wrinkles you missed. Even if you stay up-to-date on the more technical news, Shutdown provides an intermediate consolidation and restructuring. It's not ready to be a history in the traditional sense, but it's a first pass at putting events in order and tracing the implications for the global financial system. Read in that sense, Shutdown felt like a continuation of Tooze's Crashed, following the same themes of a hegemonic but unstable dollar system and a Federal Reserve that has increasingly taken on the role of backstop to the entire world (and how the only tools it has available tend to increase wealth inequality). If you've not read Crashed, read it first. I think it's the stronger and more thorough book (not the least because it had more time and data to construct a coherent history), and it's the best introduction to the international macroeconomic risks that Tooze traces in Shutdown. This book was, for me, an update of the Tooze's thinking in Crashed for the COVID era. Tooze is very good at clearly describing macroeconomic shocks. I recently read Lev Menand's The Fed Unbound, which is in part about the same intervention during the COVID shock that Tooze describes here, and yet it wasn't until I read Shutdown that I grasped that the Treasury purchases by the Fed had arguably crossed the political red line of monetizing government debt, even though the Fed probably had no choice and few people noticed in the middle of the crisis. This is where Tooze's background as a historian is helpful. Most people writing on this topic are either economists, who seem to take inferences like that for granted and dive into the technical debate, or journalists, who rarely understand the nuance and often jump to facile conclusions. Tooze is a historian with an extensive economics background; he can explain the mechanics while still focusing on the limitations of politics, which is the sort of analysis that I want to read. The problem with this book as a history is that it necessarily raises more questions than it answers. In the conclusion, Tooze writes:

A severe tightening in U.S. monetary policy or even a full-fledged taper tantrum would put global resilience to a stern test. So too would a violent escalation of geopolitical tension in one of the major regions of the world economy.

Both of those events have subsequently happened, which throws any tentative conclusions Tooze can offer into question. For another example, when Tooze wrote Shutdown, China's zero COVID policy was widely celebrated inside China and had enabled a fast economic recovery while the rest of the world was still in serious difficulty. Before Omicron, it was conceivable (if extremely risky) that China could continue to avoid a major COVID surge. In December of 2022, it's obvious they only managed to delay, and while delay meant vaccination and the price in deaths may well be smaller than was paid for the route taken by most of the rest of the world, the trade-offs are now even harder to analyze. There are, of course, other examples, the most obvious of which is the rise of global inflation simultaneous with a strengthening dollar. A history written from a distance of several decades would have included that aftermath. A snap history with a distance of only a few months cannot. The other problem with this book is that it's not as polished. Viking did an amazing job turning publication around in roughly six months, dramatically faster than publishing normally works, but there are parts that could have used more editing. The introduction, in particular, reads more like a blog post than an edited book, and while I'm a happy reader of Tooze's Chartbook, the recap of COVID's impact was a bit trite and Tooze's abstract musings on polycrisis could have used tightening and clarity. The meat of the book is better, but there is a messy stream-of-consciousness feel that is inherent in a book written to this tight of a timeline. I think the audience of this book is, narrowly, people who have read Crashed and want to follow that line of reasoning into the COVID era. Crashed is one of the better books on macroeconomic history that I've read, and I did indeed want to follow that train of thought, so I am part of that audience. This is not the sort of book that I would widely recommend, however. If you want to read it, you probably know that already; if you are new to Tooze's analysis, Crashed is the place to start. Rating: 7 out of 10

Shantaram I know I have been quite behind in review of books but then that s life. First up is actually not as much as a shocker but somewhat of a pleasant surprise. So, a bit of background before I share the news. If you have been living under a rock, then about 10-12 years ago a book called Shantaram was released. While the book is said to have been released in 2003/4 I got it in my hand around 2008/09 or somewhere around that. The book is like a good meal, a buffet. To share the synopsis, Lin a 20 something Australian guy gets involved with a girl, she encourages him to get into heroin, he becomes a heroin user. And drugs, especially hard drugs need constant replenishment, it is a chemical thing. So, to fund those cravings, he starts to steal, rising to rob a bank and while getting away shoots a cop who becomes dead. Now either he surrenders or is caught is unclear, but he is tortured in the jail. So one day, he escapes from prison, lands up at home of somebody who owes him a favor, gets some money, gets a fake passport and lands up in Mumbai/Bombay as it was then known. This is from where the actual story starts. And how a 6 foot something Australian guy relying on his street smartness and know how the transformation happens from Lin to Shantaram. Now what I have shared is perhaps just 5% of the synopsis, as shared the real story starts here. Now the good news, last week 4 episodes of Shantaram were screened by Apple TV. Interestingly, I have seen quite a number people turning up to buy or get this book and also sharing it on Goodreads. Now there seems to have been some differences from the book to TV. Now I m relying on 10-12 year back memory but IIRC Khaderbhai, one of the main characters who sort of takes Lin/Shantaram under his wing is an Indian. In the series, he is a western or at least looks western/Middle Eastern to me. Also, they have tried to reproduce 1980s in Mumbai/Bombay but dunno how accurate they were My impression of that city from couple of visits at that point in time where they were still more tongas (horse-ridden carriages), an occasional two wheelers and not many three wheelers. Although, it was one of the more turbulent times as lot of agitation for worker rights were happening around that time and a lot of industrial action. Later that led to lot of closure of manufacturing in Bombay and it became more commercial. It would be interesting to know whether they shot it in actual India or just made a set somewhere in Australia, where it possibly might have been shot. The chawl of the book needs a bit of arid land and Australia has lots of it. It is also interesting as this was a project that had who s who interested in it for a long time but somehow none of them was able to bring the project to fruition, the project seems to largely have an Australian cast as well as second generations of Indians growing in Australia. To take names, Amitabh Bacchan, Johnny Depp, Russel Crowe each of them wanted to make it into a feature film. In retrospect, it is good it was not into a movie, otherwise they would have to cut a lot of material and that perhaps wouldn t have been sufficient. Making it into a web series made sure they could have it in multiple seasons if people like it. There is a lot between now and 12 episodes to even guess till where it would leave you then. So, if you have not read the book and have some holidays coming up, can recommend it. The writing IIRC is easy and just flows. There is a bit of action but much more nuance in the book while in the web series they are naturally more about action. There is also quite a bit of philosophy between him and Kaderbhai and while the series touches upon it, it doesn t do justice but then again it is being commercially made. Read the book, see the series and share your thoughts on what you think. It is possible that the series might go up or down but am sharing from where I see it, may do another at the end of the season, depending on where they leave it and my impressions. Update A slight update from the last blog post. Seems Rishi Sunak seems would be made PM of UK. With Hunt as chancellor and Rishi Sunak, Austerity 2.0 seems complete. There have been numerous articles which share how austerity gives rises to fascism and vice-versa. History gives lot of lessons about the same. In Germany, when the economy was not good, it was all blamed on the Jews for number of years. This was the reason for rise of Hitler, and while it did go up by a bit, propaganda by him and his loyalists did the rest. And we know and have read about the Holocaust. Today quite a few Germans deny it or deny parts of it but that s how misinformation spreads. Also Hitler is looked now more as an aberration rather than something to do with the German soul. I am not gonna talk more as there is still lots to share and that actually perhaps requires its own blog post to do justice for the same.

The Pyramid by Henning Mankell I had actually wanted to review this book but then the bomb called Shantaram appeared and I had to post it above. I had read two-three books before it, but most of them were about multiple beheadings and serial killers. Enough to put anybody into depression. I do not know if modern crime needs to show crime and desperation of and to such a level. Why I and most loved and continue to love Sherlock Holmes as most stories were not about gross violence but rather a homage to the art of deduction, which pretty much seems to be missing in modern crime thrillers rather than grotesque stuff. In that, like a sort of fresh air I read/am reading the Pyramid by Henning Mankell. The book is about a character made by Monsieur Henning Mankell named Kurt Wallender. I am aware of the series called Wallender but haven t yet seen it. The book starts with Wallender as a beat cop around age 20 and on his first case. He is ambitious, wants to become a detective and has a narrow escape with death. I wouldn t go much into it as it basically gives you an idea of the character and how he thinks and what he does. He is more intuitive by nature and somewhat of a loner. Probably most detectives IRL are, dunno, have no clue. At least in the literary world it makes sense, in real world think there would be much irony for sure. This is speculation on my part, who knows. Back to the book though. The book has 5 stories a sort of prequel one could say but also not entirely true. The first case starts when he is a beat cop in 1969 and he is just a beat cop. It is a kind of a prequel and a kind of an anthology as he covers from the first case to the 1990s where he is ending his career sort of. Before I start sharing about the stories in the book, I found the foreword also quite interesting. It asks questions about the interplay of the role of welfare state and the Swedish democracy. Incidentally did watch couple of videos about a sort of mixed sort of political representation that happens in Sweden. It uses what is known as proportional representation. Ironically, Sweden made a turn to the far right this election season. The book was originally in Swedish and were translated to English by Ebba Segerberg and Laurie Thompson. While all the stories are interesting, would share the last three or at least ask the questions of intrigue. Of course, to answer them you would need to read the book So the last three stories I found the most intriguing. The first one is titled Man on the Beach. Apparently, a gentleman goes to one of the beaches, a sort of lonely beach, hails a taxi and while returning suddenly dies. The Taxi driver showing good presence of mind takes it to hospital where the gentleman is declared dead on arrival. Unlike in India, he doesn t run away but goes to the cafeteria and waits there for the cops to arrive and take his statement. Now the man is in his early 40s and looks to be fit. Upon searching his pockets he is found to relatively well-off and later it turns out he owns a couple of shops. So then here are the questions ? What was the man doing on a beach, in summer that beach is somewhat popular but other times not so much, so what was he doing there? How did he die, was it a simple heart attack or something more? If he had been drugged or something then when and how? These and more questions can be answered by reading the story Man on the Beach . 2. The death of a photographer Apparently, Kurt lives in a small town where almost all the residents have been served one way or the other by the town photographer. The man was polite and had worked for something like 40 odd years before he is killed/murdered. Apparently, he is murdered late at night. So here come the questions a. The shop doesn t even stock any cameras and his cash box has cash. Further investigation reveals it is approximate to his average takeout for the day. So if it s not for cash, then what is the motive ? b. The body was discovered by his cleaning staff who has worked for almost 20 years, 3 days a week. She has her own set of keys to come and clean the office? Did she give the keys to someone, if yes why? c. Even after investigation, there is no scandal about the man, no other woman or any vices like gambling etc. that could rack up loans. Also, nobody seems to know him and yet take him for granted till he dies. The whole thing appears to be quite strange. Again, the answers lie in the book. 3. The Pyramid Kurt is sleeping one night when the telephone rings. The scene starts with a Piper Cherokee, a single piston aircraft flying low and dropping something somewhere or getting somebody from/on the coast of Sweden. It turns and after a while crashes. Kurt is called to investigate it. Turns out, the plane was supposed to be destroyed. On crash, both the pilot and the passenger are into pieces so only dental records can prove who they are. Same day or a day or two later, two seemingly ordinary somewhat elderly women, spinsters, by all accounts, live above the shop where they sell buttons and all kinds of sewing needs of the town. They seem middle-class. Later the charred bodies of the two sisters are found :(. So here come the questions a.Did the plane drop something or pick something somebody up ? The Cherokee is a small plane so any plane field or something it could have landed up or if a place was somehow marked then could be dropped or picked up without actually landing. b. The firefighter suspects arson started at multiple places with the use of petrol? The question is why would somebody wanna do that? The sisters don t seem to be wealthy and practically everybody has bought stuff from them. They weren t popular but weren t also unpopular. c. Are the two crimes connected or unconnected? If connected, then how? d. Most important question, why the title Pyramid is given to the story. Why does the author share the name Pyramid. Does he mean the same or the original thing? He could have named it triangle. Again, answers to all the above can be found in the book. One thing I also became very aware of during reading the book that it is difficult to understand people s behavior and what they do. And this is without even any criminality involved in. Let s say for e.g. I die in some mysterious circumstances, the possibility of the police finding my actions in last days would be limited and this is when I have hearing loss. And this probably is more to do with how our minds are wired. And most people I know are much more privacy conscious/aware than I am.

Japan s Hikikomori Japan has been a curious country. It was more or less a colonizer and somewhat of a feared power till it dragged the U.S. unnecessarily in World War 2. The result of the two atom bombs and the restitution meant that Japan had to build again from the ground up. It is also in a seismically unstable place as they have frequent earthquakes although the buildings are hardened/balanced to make sure that vibrations don t tear buildings apart. Had seen years ago on Natgeo a documentary that explains all that. Apart from that, Japan was helped by the Americans and there was good kinship between them till the 1980s till it signed the Plaza Accord which enhanced asset price bubbles that eventually burst. Something from which they are smarting even today. Japan has a constitutional monarchy. A somewhat history lesson or why it exists even today can be found here. Asset price bubbles of the 1980s, more than 50 percent of the population on zero hour contracts and the rest tend to suffer from overwork. There is a term called Karoshi that explains all. An Indian pig-pen would be two, two and a half times larger than a typical Japanese home. Most Japanese live in micro-apartments called konbachiku . All of the above stresses meant that lately many young Japanese people have become Hikikomori. Bloomberg featured about the same a couple of years back. I came to know about it as many Indians are given the idea of Japan being a successful country without knowing the ills and issues it faces. Even in that most women get the wrong end of the short stick i.e. even it they manage to find jobs, it would be most back-breaking menial work. The employment statistics of Japan s internal ministry tells its own story.

If you look at the data above, it seems that the between 2002 and 2019, the share of zero hour contracts has increased while regular work has decreased. This also means that those on the bottom of the ladder can no longer afford a home. There is and was a viral video called Lost in Manboo that went viral few years ago. It is a perfect set of storms. Add to that the Fukushima nuclear incident about which I had shared a few years ago. While the workers are blamed but all design decisions are taken by the management. And as was shown in numerous movies, documentaries etc. Interestingly, and somewhat ironically, the line workers knew the correct things to do and correct decisions to take unlike the management. The shut-ins story is almost a decade or two decades old. It is similar story in South Korea but not as depressive as the in Japan. It is somewhat depressive story but needed to be shared. The stories shared in the bloomberg article makes your heart ache

Backpacks In and around 2015, I had bought a Targus backpack, very much similar to the Targus TSB194US-70 Motor 16-inch Backpack. That bag has given me a lot of comfort over the years but now has become frayed the zip sometimes work and sometimes doesn t. Unlike those days there are a bunch of companies now operating in India. There are eight different companies that I came to know about, Aircase, Harrisons Sirius, HP Oddyssey, Mokobara, Artic Hunter, Dell Pro Hybrid, Dell Roller Backpack and lastly the Decathlon Quechua Hiking backpack 32L NH Escape 500 . Now of all the above, two backpacks seem the best, the first one is Harrisons Sirius, with 45L capacity, I don t think I would need another bag at all. The runner-up is the Decathlon Quecha Hiking Backpack 32L. One of the better things in all the bags is that all have hidden pockets for easy taking in and out of passport while having being ant-theft. I do not have to stress how stressful it is to take out the passport and put it back in. Almost all the vendors have made sure that it is not a stress point anymore. The good thing about the Quecha is that they are giving 10 years warranty, the point to be asked is if that is does the warranty cover the zip. Zips are the first thing that goes out in bags.That actually has what happened to my current bag. Decathlon has a store in Wakad, Pune while I have reached out to the gentleman in charge of Harrisons India to see if they have a reseller in Pune. So hopefully, in next one week I should have a backpack that isn t spilling with things all over the place, whichever I m able to figure out.

Review: I Didn't Do the Thing Today, by Madeleine Dore

Publisher:	Avery
Copyright:	2022
ISBN:	0-593-41914-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	291

At least from my narrow view of it, the world of productivity self-help literature is a fascinating place right now. The pandemic overturned normal work patterns and exacerbated schedule inequality, creating vastly different experiences for the people whose work continued to be in-person and the people whose work could become mostly or entirely remote. Self-help literature, which is primarily aimed at the more affluent white-collar class, primarily tracked the latter disruption: newly-remote work, endless Zoom meetings, the impossibility of child care, the breakdown of boundaries between work and home, and the dawning realization that much of the mechanics of day-to-day office work are neither productive nor defensible. My primary exposure these days to the more traditional self-help productivity literature is via Cal Newport. The stereotype of the productivity self-help book is a collection of life hacks and list-making techniques that will help you become a more efficient capitalist cog, but Newport has been moving away from that dead end for as long as I've been reading him, and his recent work focuses more on structural issues with the organization of knowledge work. He also shares with the newer productivity writers a willingness to tell people to use the free time they recover via improved efficiency on some life goal other than improved job productivity. But he's still prickly and defensive about the importance of personal productivity and accomplishing things. He gives lip service on his podcast to the value of the critique of productivity, but then usually reverts to characterizing anti-productivity arguments as saying that productivity is a capitalist invention to control workers. (Someone has doubtless said this on Twitter, but I've never seen a serious critique of productivity make this simplistic of an argument.) On the anti-productivity side, as it's commonly called, I've seen a lot of new writing in the past couple of years that tries to break the connection between productivity and human worth so endemic to US society. This is not a new analysis; disabled writers have been making this point for decades, it's present in both Keynes and in Galbraith's The Affluent Society, and Kathi Weeks's The Problem with Work traces some of its history in Marxist thought. But what does feel new to me is its widespread mainstream appearance in newspaper articles, viral blog posts, and books such as Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing and Devon Price's Laziness Does Not Exist. The pushback against defining life around productivity is having a moment. Entering this discussion is Madeleine Dore's I Didn't Do the Thing Today. Dore is the author of the Extraordinary Routines blog and host of the Routines and Ruts podcast. Extraordinary Routines began as a survey of how various people organize their daily lives. I Didn't Do the Thing Today is, according to the preface, a summary of the thoughts Dore has had about her own life and routines as a result of those interviews. As you might guess from the subtitle (Letting Go of Productivity Guilt), Dore's book is superficially on the anti-productivity side. Its chapters are organized around gentle critiques of productivity concepts, with titles like "The Hopeless Search for the Ideal Routine," "The Myth of Balance," or "The Harsh Rules of Discipline." But I think anti-productivity is a poor name for this critique; its writers are not opposed to being productive, only to its position as an all-consuming focus and guilt-generating measure of personal worth. Dore structures most chapters by naming an aspect, goal, or concern of a life defined by productivity, such as wasted time, ambition, busyness, distraction, comparison, or indecision. Each chapter sketches the impact of that idea and then attempts to gently dismantle the grip that it may have on the reader's life. All of these discussions are nuanced; it's rare for Dore to say that one of these aspects has no value, and she anticipates numerous objections. But her overarching goal is to help the reader be more comfortable with imperfection, more willing to live in the moment, and less frustrated with the limitations of life and the human brain. If striving for productivity is like lifting weights, Dore's diagnosis is that we've tried too hard for too long, and have overworked that muscle until it is cramping. This book is a gentle massage to induce the muscle to relax and let go. Whether this will work is, as with all self-help books, individual. I found it was best read in small quantities, perhaps a chapter per day, since it otherwise began feeling too much the same. I'm also not the ideal audience; Dore is a creative freelancer and primarily interviewed other creative people, which I think has a different sort of productivity rhythm than the work that I do. She's also not a planner to the degree that I am; more on that below. And yet, I found this book worked on me anyway. I can't say that I was captivated all the way through, but I found myself mentally relaxing while I was reading it, and I may re-read some chapters from time to time. How does this relate to the genre of productivity self-help? With less conflict than I think productivity writers believe, although there seems to be one foundational difference of perspective. Dore is not opposed to accomplishing things, or even to systems that help people accomplish things. She is more attuned than the typical productivity writer to the guilt and frustration that can accumulate when one has a day in which one does not do the thing, but her goal is not to talk you out of attempting things. It is, instead, to convince you to hold those attempts and goals more lightly, to allow them to move and shift and change, and to not treat a failure to do the thing today as a reason for guilt. This is wholly compatible with standard productivity advice. It's adding nuance at one level of abstraction higher: how tightly to cling to productivity goals, and what to do when they don't work out. Cramping muscles are not strong muscles capable of lifting heavy things. If one can massage out the cramp, one's productivity by even the strict economic definition may improve. Where I do see a conflict is that most productivity writers are planners, and Dore is not. This is, I think, a significant blind spot in productivity self-help writing. Cal Newport, for example, advocates time-block planning, where every hour of the working day has a job. David Allen advocates a complex set of comprehensive lists and well-defined next actions. Mark Forster builds a flurry of small systems for working through lists. The standard in productivity writing is to to add structure to your day and cultivate the self-discipline required to stick to that structure. For many people, including me, this largely works. I'm mostly a planner, and when my life gets chaotic, adding more structure and focusing on that structure helps me. But the productivity writers I've read are quite insistent that their style of structure will work for everyone, and on that point I am dubious. Newport, for example, advocates time-block planning for everyone without exception, insisting that it is the best way to structure a day. Dore, in contrast, describes spending years trying to perfect a routine before realizing that elastic possibilities work better for her than routines. For those who are more like Dore than Newport, I Didn't Do the Thing Today is more likely to be helpful than Newport's instructions. This doesn't make Newport's ideas wrong; it simply makes them not universal, something that the productivity self-help genre seems to have trouble acknowledging. Even for readers like myself who prefer structure, I Didn't Do the Thing Today is a valuable corrective to the emphasis on every-better systems. For those who never got along with too much structure, I think it may strike a chord. The standard self-help caveat still applies: Dore has the most to say to people who are in a similar social class and line of work as her. I'm not sure this book will be of much help to someone who has to juggle two jobs with shift work and child care, where the problem is more sharp external constraints than internalized productivity guilt. But for its target audience, I think it's a valuable, calming message. Dore doesn't have a recipe to sort out your life, but may help you feel better about the merits of life unsorted. Rating: 7 out of 10

As a follow on to a previous blog entry of mine, Free and Open, I feel it worthwhile to do my bit to dismantle the pseudo-science and over simplification in the idea that gender is binary at a biological level.

TL;DR: Science simply does not support binary sexes or binary genders. Truth is a bit more complicated.

There is certainty and there are binary answers in mathematics. Things get less definitive in physics, certainly as soon as quantum is broached. Processes become more of an equilibrium between states in chemistry, never wholly one or the other. Yes, there is the oddity of absolute zero but no experiment has yet achieved that fully. It is accurate to describe physics as a development of applied mathematics and to view chemistry as applied physics. Biology, at the biochemical level, is applied chemistry. The sciences build on each other, "on the shoulders of giants", but at each level, some certainty is lost, some amount of uncertainty is expanded and measurements become probabilities, proportions and percentages. Biology is dependent on biochemistry - chemistry is how a biological change results in a different organism. Physics is how that chemical change occurs - temperature, pressure and physical states are inherent to all chemical changes. Outside laboratory constraints, few chemical reactions, especially in organic chemistry, produce one and only one result from two or more known reagents. In biology, everyone is familiar with genetic mutations but a genetic mutation only happens because a biochemical reaction (hydrogen bonding of nucleobases) does not always produce the expected result. Every cell division, every viral infection, there is a finite probability that a change will occur. It might be a small number but it is never zero and can never be dismissed. This is obvious in the current Covid pandemic - genetic mutations result in new variants. Some variants are inviable, some variants produce no net change in the way that the viral particles infect adjacent cells. Sometimes, a mutation happens that changes everything. These mutations are not mistakes - these are simply changes with undetermined outcomes. Genetic changes are the foundation of biodiversity and variety is what allows lifeforms of all kinds to survive changes in environmental factors and/or changes in prevalent diseases. It is precisely the same in humans, particularly in one of the principle spheres of human life that involves replicating genetic material - the creation of gametes for sexual reproduction. Every single time any DNA is copied, there is a finite chance that a different base will be put in place compared to the original. Copying genetic material is therefore non-binary. Given precisely the same initial conditions, the result is not always predictable and the range of how the results vary from one to another increases with every iteration. Let me stress that - at the molecular level, no genetic operation in any biological lifeform has a truly binary result. Repeat that operation sufficiently often and an unexpected result WILL inevitably occur. It is a mathematical certainty that genetic changes will arise by attempting precisely the same genetic operation enough times. Genetic changes are fundamental to how lifeforms survive changing conditions. Life would likely have died out a long time ago on this planet if every genetic operation was perfect. Diversity is life. Similarity leads to extinction. Viral load is interesting at this point. Someone can be infected with a virus, including coronavirus, by encountering a small number of viral particles. Some viruses, it may be a few hundred, some viruses may need a few thousand particles to infect a vulnerable host. But here's the thing, for that host to be at risk of infecting another host, the virus needs the host to produce billions upon billions of copies of the virus by taking over the genetic machinery within a huge number of cells in the host. This, as is accepted with Covid, is before the virus has been copied enough times to produce symptoms in the host. Before those symptoms become serious, billions more copies will be made. The numbers become unimaginable - and that is within a single host, let alone the 265 million (and counting) hosts in the current Covid19 pandemic. It's also no wonder that viral infections cause tiredness, the infection is diverting huge resources to propagating itself - before even considering the activity of the immune system. It is idiocy of the highest order to expect all those copies to be identical. The rise of variants is inevitable - indeed essential - in all spheres of biology. A single viral particle is absolutely no threat of any kind - it must first get inside and then copy the genetic information in a host cell. This is where the complexity lies in the definition of life itself. A virus can be considered a lifeform but it is only able to reproduce using another, more complex, lifeform. In truth, a viral particle does not and cannot mutate. The infected host mutates the virus. The longer it takes that host to clear the infection, the more mutations that host will create and then potentially spread to others. Now apply this to the creation of gametes in humans. With seven billion humans, the amount of copying of genetic material is not as large as the pandemic but it is still easy for everyone to understand that children do not merely combine the DNA of both parents. Changes happen. Human sexual reproduction is not as simple as 1 + 1 = 2. Sometimes, the copying of the genetic material produces an unexpected result. Sexual reproduction itself is non-binary. Sexual reproduction is not easy or simple for lifeforms to adopt - the diversity which results from the non-binary operations are exactly why so many lifeforms invest so much energy in reproducing in this way. Whilst many genetic changes in humans will be benign or beneficial, I d like to take an example of a genetic disorder that results from the non-binary nature of sex. Humans can be born with the XY phenotype - i.e. at a genetic level, the individual has the same combination of chromosomes as another XY individual but there are changes within the genes in those chromosomes. We accept this, some children of blonde parents do not have blonde hair, etc. There are also genetic changes where an XY phenotype is not binary. Some people, who at a genetic level would be almost identical to another person who is genetically male, have a genetic mutation which makes it impossible for the cells of that individual to respond to androgens (testosterone). (See Androgen insensitivity syndrome). Genetically, that individual has an X and a Y chromosome, just like many other individuals. However, due to a change in how the genes on those chromosomes were copied, that individual is biologically incapable of constructing the secondary sexual characteristics of a male. At a genetic level, the individual has the XY phenotype of a male. At the physical level, the individual has all the sexual characteristics of a female and none of the sexual characteristics of a male. The gender of that individual is not binary. Treatment is centred on supporting the individual and minimising some risks from the inactive genes on the Y chromosome. Human sexual reproduction is non-binary. The results of any sexual reproduction in humans will not always produce the binary option of male or female. It is a lie to claim that human gender is binary. The science is in plain view and cannot be ignored. Identifying as non-binary is not a "cop out" - it can be a biological, genetic, scientific fact. Human sexuality and gender are malleable. Where genetic changes result in symptoms, these can be ameliorated by treatment with human sex hormones, like oestrogen and testosterone. There are valid medical uses for anabolic steroids and hormone replacement therapies to help individuals who, at a genetic level, have non-binary gender. These treatments can help align the physical outer signs with the personality and identity of the individual, whether with or without surgery. It is unacceptable to abandon such people to suffer life long discrimination and harassment by imposing a binary definition that has no basis in science. When a human being has an XY phenotype, that human being is not necessarily male. That individual will be on a spectrum from female (left unaffected by sex hormones in the womb, the foetus will be female, even with an X and a Y chromosome), to various degrees of male. So, at a genetic, biological level, it is a scientific fact that human beings do not have binary gender. There is no evidence that this is new to the modern era, there is no scientific basis for thinking that copying of genetic material was somehow perfectly reliable in earlier history, or that such mutations are specific to homo sapiens. Changes in genetic material provide the diversity to fight infections and adapt to changing environmental factors. Species have and will continue to go extinct if this diversity is absent. With that out of the way, it is no longer a stretch to encompass other aspects of human non-binary genders beyond the known genetic syndromes based on changes in the XY phenotype. Science has not uncovered all of the ways that genes affect personality, behaviour, or identity. How other, less studied, genetic changes affect the much more subtle human facets, especially anything to do with consciousness, identity, personality, sexuality and behaviour, is guesswork. All of these facets can and likely are being affected by genetic factors as well as environmental factors in an endless range of permutations. Personality traits are a beautiful and largely unknowable blend of genes and environment. Genetic information has a finite probability of changes at each and every iteration. Environmental factors are more akin to chaos theory. The idea that the results will fit into binary constructs is laughable. Human society puts huge emphasis on societal norms. Individuals who do not fit into those norms suffer discrimination. The norms themselves have evolved over time as a response to various influences on human civilisation but most are not based on science. It is up to all humans in that society to call out discrimination, to call for changes in the accepted norms and support those who are marginalised. It is a precarious balance, one that humans rarely get right, but it must be based on an acceptance that variation is the natural state. Artificial constraints, like binary genders, must be dismantled because human beings and human sexual reproduction are not binary. To those who think, "well it is for 99%", think again about Covid. 99% (or closer to 98%) of infected humans recover without notable after effects. That has still crippled the nations of the globe and humbled all those who tried to deny it. Five million human beings are dead because "most infected people recover". Just because something only affects a proportion of human beings does not invalidate the suffering of those humans and the discrimination that those humans will face. Societal norms are not necessarily correct. Religious and other influences typically obscure and ignore scientific fact and undermine human kindness. The scientific truth of life on this planet is that gender is not binary. The more complex the lifeform, the more factors will affect where on the spectrum any one individual will appear. Just because we do not yet fully understand how genes affect human personality and sexuality, does not invalidate the science that variation is the natural order. My previous blog about diversity is not just about male vs female, one nationality vs another, one ethnicity compared to another. Diversity is diverse. Diversity requires accepting that every facet of humanity is subject to variation. That leads to tension at times, it is inevitable. Tension against societal norms, tension against discrimination, tension around those individuals who would abuse the tolerance of others for their own gratification or from their own ignorance. None of us are perfect, none of us have any of this fully sorted and all of us will make mistakes. Personally, I try to respect those around me. I will use whatever pronouns and other conventions that the person requests, from their perspective and not mine. To do otherwise is to deny the natural order and to deny the science. Celebrate all diversity, it is the very stuff of life.

• Final comments:

The discussions around (typically female) bathroom facilities often miss the point. The concern is not about individuals who describe themselves as non-binary. The concern is about individuals who are fully certain of their own sexuality and who act as sexual predators for their own gratification. These people are acting out a lie for their own ends. The problem people are the predators, so stop blaming the victims who are just as at risk as anyone else who identifies as female. Maybe the best people to spot such predators are those who are non-binary, who have had to pretend to fit into societal norms. Just as travel can be a good antidote to racism, openness and discussion can be a tool to undermine the lies of sexual predators and reassure those who are justifiably fearful. There can never be a biological binary test of gender, there can never be any scientific justification for binary division of facilities. Humanity itself is not binary, even life itself has blurry borders around comas, suspended animation and locked-in syndrome. Legal definitions of human death vary around the world. The only common thread I have ever found is: Be kind to each other. If you find anything above objectionable, then I can only suggest that you reconsider the science and learn to be kind to your fellow humans. None of us are getting out of this alive.

• Useful sources and further reading:

I Think You ll Find It s a Bit More Complicated Than That - Ben Goldacre ISBN 978-0-00-750514-2 https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00HATQA8K/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgen_insensitivity_syndrome https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-51235105 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nucleobase

• About me:

My degree is in pharmaceutical sciences and I practised community and hospital pharmacy for 20 years before moving into programming. I have direct experience of supporting people who were prescribed hormones to transition their physical characteristics to match their personal identity. I had a Christian upbringing but my work showed me that those religious norms were incompatible with being kind to others, so I rejected religion and I now consider myself a secular humanist.

Farmer on-going protests Before I start with the education system in India which I have talked about many times in the past, first let me share couple of pieces about the farmer movement which is still at Sanghu Delhi border. The above picture became somewhat viral as it showed Manjeet Kaur, who drove down from Patiala, Punjab to Sanghu border along with her friends to take part in the on-going protests. The picture not only shares how the women are part and parcel of this protest but also they are independently taking part in the protest. The other were two articles I read today, first was an article in tribune which questions that if the policy worked, why it didn t work in the state of Bihar. The other by a young law student who had to go from Chandigarh to Delhi with family for some work and her experience with the ongoing protest. In fact, an interesting observation was made by the CJI in the many suits against farmer protests in the SC. This makes for much more interesting read when you see an RTI query filed by Saket Gokhale to NHAI , a Central Govt. agency which is supposed to be independent and asks if they had filed an FIR and asked compensation from Haryana State and Haryana State Police which had dug up National Highway 44 and if any permission was asked for the same from NHAI. And NHAI unable to take any action for the same. If this isn t shameful, I dunno what is

NHAI response to Saket Gokhale s query.

Sadly, the way the response has been worded makes it impossible for NHAI to discharge its own responsibilities and this becomes a precedent for other states now that know that NHAI is vulnerable. A pretty sad turn on events. Indian Education can t go online There was a recent article on scroll which shared how Indian education can t go online as only a few have computers with decent netlink speeds as well as other factors which are needed for online education. But there are also many things that the article doesn t take into account which actually make the task more difficult and raise the boundary more. Now in most schools and colleges, the number of students to teacher ratio could be anywhere between 70-150 or even more. In the last few years, a lot of schools have been closed down by various Governments, including and not limited to the ruling Govt. They have in fact intensified closures of public schools wherever their Govt. has been in power. Closing to 5000+ schools in one state in a year is a dramatic shift and such has been happening time and again. In fact, the rising costs of Indian education has made many to leave Indian shores and do studies abroad. And once they do their masters or whatever, the chances of them coming back to India become more and more remote. In India the costs have been becoming so bad that NBFC s have started products targeting the same. How NBFC and Banks have (both public and private) have fared with respect to Indian consumers needs its own blog post but one word to describe it is bad . But as shared above, needs its own blog post. Coming to the Indian context though, what has not been captured in that article is that the responsibility of making new content also raises huge barriers for teachers. My own experience in teacher s trainings for ICT usage has shown that most teachers do not know and use internet effectively both to sustain their own curiosity as well as their students. Part of which is whether you are private employee or a public school teacher, the teacher is not paid enough. I have had multiple conversations with friends over the years who are teachers who shared that they get 50% salary in-hand while they sign for 100%. This is more in the case or private schools though. In Govt. schools, the teachers apart from their regular administrative duties apart from teaching duties are also unpaid labor for Govt. policy. Take the recent covid crisis, it was the teachers who for months together went from door-to-door asking if they had a covid patient. This was all over India. Even for voter registration, census, polio and various other immunization efforts, the teachers are roped in. So apart from that, they somehow have to figure out how to make ends meet and also boost student morale. Hence the attention is only limited to the first couple of benches rather than the whole as a 45-minute to an hr. session is just not enough to go through a class of 70-150 school students giving individual attention. And this is when for most teachers, teaching is a means to an end and not the end itself. I am going to take one example of science and sort of break-it-down in multiple steps and how I would have approached that topic for say the 5th-6th standard students in say a public school in Pune and especially if Covid would not have been an issue so you have face-to-face meetup. There was recent news about a mysterious radio signal which came from one of our closest galactic neighbors Proxima Centauri. Now let s say there was a class I was teaching/sharing which I had shared before and there already is trust formed. So before coming to the news, I would tell the students about frequency and more generally the notation of why we like to measure things and how we measure things. There is so much beautiful history which could be acted and enacted which can show and remains in mind why measurement is needed. Once that is understood, discussed and an underpinning is established, we could move to human perception or the lack of it. We know that humans have lots of limits in almost everything, whether it is talking, touching, hearing, all of our five senses are pretty limited with what we know of spectrum available in the immediate family kingdom as well as in the Universe. I would start with how far can a person throw his voice and be heard without using any other means. There does come a point where they need to use anything from a megaphone to a loudspeaker and what it actually does. The other thing I would then talk is about the radio and ask the students to find more about the internals of a radio. If possible to bring an old radio to school where it could be disassembled. After they are familiar with some names of the electronic components and what they do, take them to the electronics market where they try to source all the things needed to make a radio and whatever they encounter. This would allow the students to try and do bargain shopping as well as learn from where to source things. Some might even get a copy or two of electronic projects where the shop themselves sell blueprints to hobbyists so that they can tinker. If there is a place in the school where soldering can be done, then all can try and sooner or later we come to know if something works or not. There is also possibility of talking about noise cancellation and then the topic of ITU can also be bought up and how they do frequency allocation. Last but not the least then the topic can be approached about an alien civilization and an unknown radio signal and what it means and what it can mean. Now if just one topic can give such a wide range of things to do and develop an understanding about not the subject itself but surrounding subjects as well I see no reason why teachers can t do this except they are handcuffed to lot of policy as well as real-life constraints. For e.g. I remember in my school days, we used to go out once or twice a year and that used to be either a school picnic or something similar. The only other I know is going to Mumbai for Nehru planetarium and Nehru science Centre. Unfortunately, I didn t go at that time because the school was taking students via air and the tickets were super costly at the time and that too for a 10 minute journey between the two cities. Those were different days, today you can t have a direct flight between the two cities as it doesn t make an economic sense. It makes more sense to go to Mumbai via train or bus as you will reach Mumbai in about couple of hrs. Of course, Pune does have its own planetarium at New English school and there are a few amateur astronomy clubs in Pune but nothing on the scale that what Mumbai has, but then this is getting off-topic. Now, again in an online world could this be done? Not without both the teacher and the student both spending lot of resources online and even then will be a lower understanding as both the hands-on experience as well as interacting with other students and learning from other students (aping) would be hugely limited. Even the social skills that students develop in a school setting will be rusted. My own social skills probably have weakened and rusted as I have very limited interaction with people over the past few months due to Covid fears and would be at least for the next few years till a large enough population is not vaccinated.

The people who are pro-Government and in this case pro-Corporate do not have any success stories that they can share. Hence, most of the time the arguments are that the other are bad. For e.g. quite a few people argue that we don t need farmers, we can just order from restaurant. They have completely disassociated the idea that even then you need farmers as unless the farmers put the seed in, till the soil and wait for the rains or have irrigation you won t get ripe vegetables which then has to be taken out, and somehow sold to the wholesaler from where it comes to the restaurant and then to your plate. Sadly, even the farm-to-fork infographics are so depressingly sad, you want to look away. If you see the infographic you see it is just not non-veg but also vegetarian food grains which go under lot of questionable practices. Even, with such scenarios that is done by corporations our people want to go ahead. I will share stories from other countries which tell how they are doing more. The Soldier-Farmer Another sad part of these protests have been soldiers who have been returning their medals. The ones who oppose have the gall to say they should return the cash rewards they got. So just like farmers, seems soldiers also do not need money to survive. They are supposed to live only on air and water. This is after the present Govt. has reduced their pensions after retirement and that too without any discussion

GOI pensions to ex-servicemen

Now I nor anybody else would have minded if these conditions were shared going forward rather than doing it retrospectively. People who usually go to the army are not in it for money but for the adventure and glory they bring. But they do also have a family and have a family responsibility. In most other countries, the soldier and his families are well-looked after. If you know that even after you die, the Government would look after your family, you will do your best. Unfortunately, many veterans in India themselves are asked to help by many war widows as the widows don t get family pensions. The proposal naturally has left many miffed. In fact many of the veterans who used to advise people to join the armed forces now advise young people to pursue civilian life and careers. This is when Indian Army has been ironically having shortage of officers from well over a decade and stresses felt by Army personnel also known for a long time. Even under this nationalistic Government, if it cannot take care of its soldiers, then forget about others. Now it is nobody s argument that India needs to improve its tooth-to-tail ratio but this is the wrong way to go about it. I would probably talk about that some other time as that totally needs its whole place. Even OROP, which was the mandate of this Government hasn t had been done in full as there are quite a few cases in the Supreme Court. Almost all the cases have been heard and only decisions have to be given which the SC for whatever reason doesn t want to give. They just keep changing the date of the hearing. Nowadays, in many suits/cases, the SC asks for fresh hearings even though all the old records are there. This is a newish phenomena which is being observed in SC. Why is it being done? Your guess is as good as mine. One thing for sure has changed, the SC which used to be citizen-focussed or enabler of human rights and used to be held as a beacon for judicial activism has changed but these are other topics which need their own space. Update 16/12/2020 The SC recommends setting up a committee to discuss farmer issues. And this is nothing new. This is called death by committee. When there is already so much literature on the subject, including the works done by Swaminathan Commission. There has been 6 reports which do look at farmer issues in a holistic manner. This is the Supreme Court giving an escape route to GOI. They also have abstained from having a whole session citing Covid. This is when the ruling Govt. is putting a massive 1000 crore on a new building on which the SC has put on hold. And even then the GOI went ahead and did a Bhoomi-Pujan (traditional ceremony when making a new construction from scratch.) Naturally due to the double whammy of both the pension reforms and now the laws to make corporate farming more aggressive has left a deep impact on the soldier-farmer that the state does not think or feel for him. Even the United States farm-aid eloquently describes how corporate farming has made independent farmers suffer. You read that, and it seems it is as the state of our farmers here in India. Even their average land-holding has dropped a bit. I have shared about the state of farmers in India, in two blog posts previously. And it is not just farm owners who have had it bad, even farm workers in U.S. The issue may look to be about the pandemic but goes far deeper. The Israeli Model The Israelis have always used collective farming and do have a large share in farming there. The old model called Kibbutz is what made Israelis self-sufficient in food and water and actually are world-leaders where they export their services to other nations on the same thing. France Just like many other countries, France also seems to have favored farmer co-operatives. Almost 75% of all farmers are in co-operatives. Italy The country world-famous for its wines and cheese are made by its co-operatives. In fact co-ops are the buzzword it seems in Italy, more so in Northern Italy. Asian economies Even Asian economies, especially East Asian economies by and large have been turning to co-operatives. Brazil Now Brazil is almost 40% more than India. In fact, in most of the indices, Brazil beats India handsomely. So one would be forgiven to think that Brazil must have corporate farming. But nothing could be further from the truth. The only downer is that they have high crime in some areas. Otherwise, they are in many ways better than India. In fact, I was surprised a few years ago to learn about Mercsour. I would have to admit though I learned much about Brazil when Debian was holding a debconf about a year back. Otherwise, I had known about the country for number of years but apart from its carnival and samba, hadn t known much about it. I did come to know that most of Latin America also loves spices as much as Indians do. They show that love by using hot sauces. I do one day wanna try one of their sauces to see what makes it tick. I do know they like to barbecue vegetables as much as barbecuing non-veg food. This is going a bit OT but then that s the foodie in me Conclusion I could have shared more countries which have chosen the co-operative way rather than corporate farming and that is simply because they know what is best for their people and what is best even politically. The new farm laws are neither grounded in farmer s welfare nor anything else. The Govt. has been trying to undermine the farmers for years together. In fact, Madhya Pradesh has openly said that they will not allow farmers from other states to sell in their state. Although, even before these laws there was nothing to restrict the farmer from selling his produce anywhere in the country. Angering the farmers is not good politics as was found sometime back but guessing some lessons need to be re-learned. One comment though, on social media I have seen many people especially youngsters having no real understanding of what inflation is all about. For e.g. if you ask them how come we are having a sort of record inflation in a technical recession (there has been a contraction, actually) and you see them putting themselves into bigger and bigger ditches. This does explain in part why the BJP wins in elections. If you do more rhetoric, which BJP is good as, rather than educating people than you are bound to win. You don t need plans, you don t need a vision, just rhetoric will do. What more evidence is needed when the economy is and was in a worse shape even before the pandemic and BJP won. I would probably write about that as that again needs lot of background and understanding as well as related terms.

Review: Can't Even, by Anne Helen Petersen

Publisher:	Houghton Mifflin
Copyright:	2020
ISBN:	0-358-31659-6
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	230

Like many other people, I first became aware of Anne Helen Petersen's journalism when her Buzzfeed article "How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation" went viral. Can't Even is the much-awaited (at least by me) book-length expansion of that thesis: The United States is, as a society, burning out, and that burnout is falling on millennials the hardest. We're not recognizing the symptoms because we think burnout looks like something dramatic and flashy. But for most people burnout looks less like a nervous breakdown and more like constant background anxiety and lack of energy.

Laura, who lives in Chicago and works as a special ed teacher, never wants to see her friends, or date, or cook she's so tired, she just wants to melt into the couch. "But then I can't focus on what I'm watching, and end up unfocused again, and not completely relaxing," she explained. "Here I am telling you I don't even relax right! I feel bad about feeling bad! But by the time I have leisure time, I just want to be alone!"

Petersen explores this idea across childhood, education, work, family, and parenting, but the core of her thesis is the precise opposite of the pervasive myth that millennials are entitled and lazy (a persistent generational critique that Petersen points out was also leveled at their Baby Boomer parents in the 1960s and 1970s). Millennials aren't slackers; they're workaholics from childhood, for whom everything has become a hustle and a second (or third or fourth) job. The struggle with "adulting" is a symptom of the burnout on the other side of exhaustion, the mental failures that happen when you've forced yourself to keep going on empty so many times that it's left lingering damage. Petersen is a synthesizing writer who draws together the threads of other books rather than going deep on a novel concept, so if you've been reading about work, psychology, stress, and productivity, many of the ideas here will be familiar. But she's been reading the same authors that I've been reading (Tressie McMillan Cottom, Emily Guendelsberger, Brigid Schulte, and even Cal Newport), and this was the book that helped me pull those analyses together into a coherent picture. That picture starts with the shift of risk in the 1970s and 1980s from previously stable corporations with long-lasting jobs and retirement pensions onto individual employees. The corresponding rise in precarity and therefore fear led to a concerted effort to re-establish a feeling of control. Baby Boomers doubled down on personal responsibility and personal capability, replacing unstructured childhood for their kids with planned activities and academic achievement. That generation, in turn, internalized the need for constant improvement, constant grading, and constant achievement, accepting an implied bargain that if they worked very hard, got good grades, got into good schools, and got a good degree, it would pay off in a good life and financial security. They were betrayed. The payoff never happened; many millennials graduated into the Great Recession and the worst economy since World War II. In response, millennials doubled down on the only path to success they were taught. They took on more debt, got more education, moved back in with their parents to cut expenses, and tried even harder.

Even after watching our parents get shut out, fall from, or simply struggle anxiously to maintain the American Dream, we didn't reject it. We tried to work harder, and better, more efficiently, with more credentials, to achieve it.

Once one has this framework in mind, it's startling how pervasive the "just try harder" message is and how deeply we've internalized it. It is at the center of the time management literature: Getting Things Done focuses almost entirely on individual efficiency. Later time management work has become more aware of the importance of pruning the to-do list and doing fewer things, but addresses that through techniques for individual prioritization. Cal Newport is more aware than most that constant busyness and multitasking interacts poorly with the human brain, and has taken a few tentative steps towards treating the problem as systemic rather than individual, but his focus is still primarily on individual choices. Even when tackling a problem that is clearly societal, such as the monetization of fear and outrage on social media, the solutions are all individual: recognize that those platforms are bad for you, make an individual determination that your attention is being exploited, and quit social media through your personal force of will. And this isn't just productivity systems. Most of public discussion of environmentalism in the United States is about personal energy consumption, your individual carbon footprint, household recycling, and whether you personally should eat meat. Discussions of monopoly and monopsony become debates over whether you personally should buy from Amazon. Concerns about personal privacy turn into advocacy for using an ad blocker or shaming people for using Google products. Articles about the growth of right-wing extremism become exhortations to take responsibility for the right-wing extremist in your life and argue them out of their beliefs over the dinner table. Every major systemic issue facing society becomes yet another personal obligation, another place we are failing as individuals, something else that requires trying harder, learning more, caring more, doing more. This advice is well-meaning (mostly; sometimes it is an intentional and cynical diversion), and can even be effective with specific problems. But it's also a trap. If you're feeling miserable, you just haven't found the right combination of time-block scheduling, kanban, and bullet journaling yet. If you're upset at corporate greed and the destruction of the environment, the change starts with you and your household. The solution is in your personal hands; you just have try a little harder, work a little harder, make better decisions, and spend money more ethically (generally by buying more expensive products). And therefore, when we're already burned out, every topic becomes another failure, increasing our already excessive guilt and anxiety. Believing that we're in control, even when we're not, does have psychological value. That's part of what makes it such a beguiling trap. While drafting this review, I listened to Ezra Klein's interview with Robert Sapolsky on poverty and stress, and one of the points he made is that, when mildly or moderately bad things happen, believing you have control is empowering. It lets you recast the setback as a larger disaster that you were able to prevent and avoid a sense of futility. But when something major goes wrong, believing you have control is actively harmful to your mental health. The tragedy is now also a personal failure, leading to guilt and internal recrimination on top of the effects of the tragedy itself. This is why often the most comforting thing we can say to someone else after a personal disaster is "there's nothing you could have done." Believing we can improve our lives if we just try a little harder does work, until it doesn't. And because it does work for smaller things, it's hard to abandon; in the short term, believing we're at the mercy of forces outside our control feels even worse. So we double down on self-improvement, giving ourselves even more things to attempt to do and thus burning out even more. Petersen is having none of this, and her anger is both satisfying and clarifying.

In writing that article, and this book, I haven't cured anyone's burnout, including my own. But one thing did become incredibly clear. This isn't a personal problem. It's a societal one and it will not be cured by productivity apps, or a bullet journal, or face mask skin treatments, or overnight fucking oats. We gravitate toward those personal cures because they seem tenable, and promise that our lives can be recentered, and regrounded, with just a bit more discipline, a new app, a better email organization strategy, or a new approach to meal planning. But these are all merely Band-Aids on an open wound. They might temporarily stop the bleeding, but when they fall off, and we fail at our new-found discipline, we just feel worse.

Structurally, Can't Even is half summaries of other books and essays put into this overall structure and half short profiles and quotes from millennials that illustrate her point. This is Petersen's typical journalistic style if you're familiar with her other work. It gains a lot from the voices of individuals, but it can also feel like argument from anecdote. If there's a epistemic flaw in this book, it's that Petersen defends her arguments more with examples than with scientific study. I've read enough of the other books she cites, many of which do go into the underlying studies and statistics, to know that her argument is well-grounded, but I think Can't Even works better as a roadmap and synthesis than as a primary source of convincing data. The other flaw that I'll mention is that although Petersen tries very hard to incorporate poorer and non-white millennials, I don't think the effort was successful, and I'm not sure it was possible within the structure of this book. She frequently makes a statement that's accurate and insightful for millennials from white, middle-class families, acknowledges that it doesn't entirely apply to, for example, racial minorities, and then moves on without truly reconciling those two perspectives. I think this is a deep structural problem: One's experience of American life is very different depending on race and class, and the phenomenon that Petersen is speaking to is to an extent specific to those social classes who had a more comfortable and relaxing life and are losing it. One way to see the story of the modern economy is that white people are becoming as precarious as everyone else already was, and are reacting by making the lives of non-white people yet more miserable. Petersen is accurately pointing to significant changes in relationships with employers, productivity, family, and the ideology of individualism, but experiencing that as a change is more applicable to white people than non-white people. That means there are, in a way, two books here: one about the slow collapse of the white middle class into constant burnout, and a different book about the much longer-standing burnout of being non-white in the United States and our systemic failure to address the causes of it. Petersen tries to gesture at the second book, but she's not the person to write it and those two books cannot comfortably live between the same covers. The gestures therefore feel awkward and forced, and while the discomfort itself serves some purpose, it lacks the insight that Petersen brings to the rest of the book. Those critiques aside, I found Can't Even immensely clarifying. It's the first book that explained to me in a way I understood what's so demoralizing and harmful about Instagram and its allure of cosplaying as a successful person. It helped me understand how productivity and individual political choices fit into a system that emphasizes individual action as an excuse to not address collective problems. And it also gave me a strange form of hope, because if something can't go on forever, it will, at some point, stop.

Millennials have been denigrated and mischaracterized, blamed for struggling in situations that set us up to fail. But if we have the endurance and aptitude and wherewithal to work ourselves this deeply into the ground, we also have the strength to fight. We have little savings and less stability. Our anger is barely contained. We're a pile of ashes smoldering, a bad memory of our best selves. Underestimate us at your peril: We have so little left to lose.

Nothing will change without individual people making different decisions and taking different actions than they are today. But we have gone much too far down the path of individual, atomized actions that may produce feelings of personal virtue but that are a path to ineffectiveness and burnout when faced with systemic problems. We need to make different choices, yes, but choices towards solidarity and movement politics rather than personal optimization. There is a backlash coming. If we let it ground itself in personal grievance, it could turn ugly and take a racist and nationalist direction. But that's not, by in large, what millennials have done, and that makes me optimistic. If we embrace the energy of that backlash and help shape it to be more inclusive, just, and fair, we can rediscover the effectiveness of collective solutions for collective problems. Rating: 8 out of 10

Issues with Farm Laws While I have written about the farm laws a bit sometime back. The issue is still in the nation s eye and that is due to the policies which have been done. I have been reading up on it quite a bit and also have been seeing what has been happening in here and now. The problems are with the three bills themselves which I have shared as below Click to access farmers-produce-trade-and-commerce-promotion-and-facilation-bill.pdf Click to access farmers-empowerment-and-protection-bill.pdf Click to access essential-commodities-bill-2020.pdf Biggest issue with the laws While there are many issues with the laws themselves but for me the biggest issue is that the fundamental right of the farmer to get justice via civil courts has been railroaded. From the laws itself. Standard disclaimer not a lawyer, please consult one for any issues per-se.

Farmers-produce-trade-and-commerce (promotion and facilitation-bill) 2020 Page 4 Chapter 3 Section 8 (1)8. (1) In case of any dispute arising out of a transaction between the farmer and a trader under section 4, the parties may seek a mutually acceptable solution through conciliation by filing an application to the Sub-Divisional Magistrate who shall refer such dispute to a Conciliation Board to be appointed by him for facilitating the binding settlement of the dispute. (2) Every Board of Conciliation appointed by the Sub-Divisional Magistrate under sub-section (1), shall consist of a chairperson and such members not less than two and not more than four, as the Sub-Divisional Magistrate may deem fit.10 (5) If the parties to the transaction under sub-section (1) are unable to resolve the dispute within thirty days in the manner set out under this section, they may approach the Sub-Divisional Magistrate concerned who shall be the Sub-Divisional Authority for settlement of such dispute. (8) Any party aggrieved by the order of the Sub-Divisional Authority may prefer an appeal before the Appellate Authority (Collector or Additional Collector nominated by the Collector) within thirty days of such order who shall dispose of the appeal within thirty days from the date of filing of such appeal. 10. (1) Any person aggrieved by an order under section 9 may, prefer an appeal within sixty days from the date of such order, to an officer not below the rank of Joint Secretary to the Government of India to be nominated by the Central Government for this purpose: Page 6 of the bill. 13. No suit, prosecution or other legal proceedings shall lie against the Central Government or the State Government, or any officer of the Central Government or the State Government or any other person in respect of anything which is in good faith done or intended to be done under this Act or of any rules or orders made thereunder. Page 7 of the bill, 15. No civil court shall have jurisdiction to entertain any suit or proceedings in respect of any matter, the cognizance of which can be taken and disposed of by any authority empowered by or under this Act or the rules made thereunder. Now the same laws have been reiterated for the farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill, 2020. The problem is that too much power is being put into the hands of the executive. All the three, whether it is SDM (Sub-Divisional Magistrate) , the Appellate Authority or the Government Secretary directly are subservient to the whims and fancies of the Central Govt. They after all get their salaries from the Govt. itself. So there will be no independent oversight to any injustices done to the farmer. The third bill i.e. the Essential Commodities Bill, 2020 does away with stock limits on traders and big players like Adani and Ambani. This means that both these players can take and keep produce at their end thereby forcing consumers like you and me who at the retail end would have to pay higher prices for fruits and vegetables while from the producer they will take at the lowest price possible. While I have shared is just one of the points. That is the reason why even the Supreme Court bar association which almost never takes part in politics has been forced to take sides with the farmers. In many ways, one is forced to remember the Emergency Update 11/12/20 Came across this article on the wire which tells how everybody s rights, not just the farmer s rights are being shod over. I think it depicts correctly the signs of time to come. While arguing on SM, also came to know about Article 300 (1), thanks to Sachin Kumar which shows multiple instances where Government was sued because somebody was working in official capacity and did mistakes, malafide or otherwise and it was the state who was made to pay. FWIW, today farmers from Maharashtra, my state arrived at Delhi border where they were also kept at bay. I did come across an infographic which shows how the various states have fared. Most tellingly, is the state of Bihar. It was in 2006 (one of the most backward states) where APMC was taken off. While others have tried to paint a flattering picture of Bihar, they have failed to share that in the interim 15 odd years, there hasn t been any sort of infrastructure created for farmers which is the reason it is still the lowest earner. These are the last available figures we have about the farmer s income. From 2014 to 2020 there hasn t been any update.

Situation Assessment Survey of Agricultural Household 2013 Copyright GOI,

This concludes just one portion of the bill. I will take other parts of the bill. I may dwell on some other parts as and when I have the time. A cartoon which depicts the current issue

I stand with farmers Copyright Sanitary Panels

Too much democracy Amitabh Kant Yesterday, the Niti Aayog chief Amitabh Kant remarked that we are too much of a democracy at an event called for Atmanirbhar Bharat which is basically a coinage for import substitution. Whether this is desirable or not I have argued and if needed will re-argue the same later as well. What is and was interesting were the gentleman s context, the media reactions and our overall Democracy Index which has been going downhill for quite some years. Now the gentleman who is the Niti Aayog chief and who is supposed to have the ear of the Prime Minister had opined it in an event organized by Swarajya Magazine (a far-right magazine) known to be Islamophobic and all things undemocratic. It has been a target of defundthehate campaign and with good reason. But that s a different story altogether. His full statement was as below

Tough reforms are very difficult in the Indian context, as we are too much of a democracy but the government has shown courage and determination in pushing such reforms across sectors, including mining, coal, labour and agriculture. Niti Aayog chief. The upper quotation remarks and the statement has been from the article in Indian Express which I have linked to. I have archived it as a pdf just in case the link goes dead. Yesterday, after the statement became viraled, tweets of media houses which shared the tweet suddenly become unavailable. Seems too much democracy, became too little democracy all of a sudden. I think Mr. Amitabh Kant didn t visualize as the opposition as well as most people who are on Twitter to share their opinion on the same. Few examples

Too much Democracy copyright Satish Acharya

Too much democracy Illustration and Copyright Alok

Sterlite protest 13 dead, 100 injured Copyright Business Standard too much democracy

Erosion of Democracy V-dem institute Copyright The Hindu Web Team

The last one requires a bit more information. This comes from V-Dem Institute which is an independent research institute based out of Department of Political Science, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. I am gonna leave the methods they use for another day as the blog post itself has become rather big/large. Apart from that is the Economists own Democracy Index -2019 Click to access democracy-index-2019.pdf Now for many people, both the V-Dem report and the Economist Index are some sort of attack against India. Doesn t matter that in V-Dem 200+ countries have been taken a variety of indicators and data or the Economist which has data from 150+- countries. Somehow India is supposed to be bigger than all these countries, they do think that other countries data specifically our neighbor China or any other neighbor, those are all accurate. How the dissonance is, has to be gauged from statements of various people. Update 11/12/20 Sadly, the newest V-Dem report marks India as getting into authoritarianism. Gag on Press and Media owners I had shared about the gag on the press especially with respect to western media or reports or anything. This news made its way to straitstimes which normally covers a wide-range of stories covering East Asia vis-a-vis India/South-East Asia. What has also been a big worry that most of the media has been in the hands of a few people. Caravan ran a story on the same in 2016, it has been four years, god only knows what the current situation might be. Any wonder that there is dearth of investigative journalism in India.

India media ownership 2016 Copyright Caravan

Incidentally, a reporter called Akarshan Uppal, who is a reporter on a channel called IBN24 had showecased just few days back how Adani has got land which was shot down for land change use in 2017 to 2020 around 100 acres. There seem to be very less details as to how the land was acquired, whose land it was etc. etc. The reporter was supposedly following a story on drugs on which he was attacked and is now lying in hospital.

Akarshan Uppal Reporter, IBN24 Copyright IBN24

While it would take a whole article/blog post to talk about either Adani or Ambani, in the recent case, the land that has been taken over by Adani is 100 acres and there are private rail lines. And all of this was secret till few days back. The place where these massive godowns/silos have been made are Panipat s Jondhan Kalan and Naultha villages in Haryana. This is Adani AgiLogistics. Almost 7 odd companies have registered and come up in the last couple of years. As can be seen, almost all have come up within the last 2-3 years. Seems to be a lot of coincidence, isn t it?

Personal Anecdote on Data Collection and child marriages in India.

Around 1995 -96 when Internet had started to become a thing in India, there had been quite a few non-profits which were working on various issues. One of those which I initially came in contact with and which I found to be a bit absurd was non-profit which was working in the field of women against Violence. Now it is and was not the concept or the idea which was absurd to me, it was what these women were doing. Instead of the traditional ways in which you counsel women and try and figure out issues, these women were collecting data points from newspapers and magazines. This was way way before data science became a thing in India. They had their own structure where a story about violence against women which would be above the fold would be 5 points, the one below 2.5 points, in inner pages, it would be less and less. Patriarchy at that time was so strong, even today is but at that time it was such, that it felt a waste of time. I did consult them but never said that but did privately feel the above. In hindsight, they were doing the right thing and yet even today crimes against women goes unreported and is suppressed by both State and Central Governments as well as NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau). Interestingly, just few days back, the case against M.J. Akbar by Priya Ramani had taken a back seat and the defamation case by M.J. Akbar was taken forward. Even then, Priya Ramani s counsel s arguments were such that the court wound up in half an hour when they were expecting to do a whole day hearing. The next hearing would be happening today which I will look at in few hours from now. Why Priya Ramani was singled out rather than other tweets may probably be because she is an NRI and most NRI s usually do not want to be part of the bureaucratic Indian court system. This is also the reason that most companies from outside India especially those who are into startups prefer to change ownership, IPR etc. to their own or any country outside India which does make a loss to the exchequer. But this again is a story for another day. At the end, while I did not want to end on a negative note, it seems in many ways status-quo remains. For e.g. 2 years back, a BJP candidate (part of the ruling dispensation) had made a controversy saying that if they win the police won t interfere in child marriages. This is and was in Rajasthan where they have been trying to eradicate it forever. Till date, neither the NHRC (National Human Rights Commission) nor NCW (National Commission for Women) has taken cognizance of the statement. This is our state of democracy.

Gradle and Kotlin in Debian Few months back, I was looking at where Gradle and Kotlin were in Debian. They still seem to be a work in progress. I found the Android-tools salsa repo which tells me the state of things. While there has been movement on both, a bit more on Kotlin, it still seems it would take a while. For kotlin, the wiki page is most helpful as well as the android-tool salsa kotlin board page . Ironically, some of the more important info. is shared in a blog post which ideally should also have been reflected in kotlin board page . I did see some of the bugs so know it s pretty much dependency hell. I can only congratulate and encourage Samyak Jain and Raman Sarda. I also played a bit with the google-android-emulator-installer which is basically a hook which downloads the binary from google. I do not know what the plans are, but perhaps in the future they also might be build locally, who knows. Just sharing/stating here so it s part of my notes whenever I wanna see what s happening

Women in India I am sure some of you might remember my blog post from last year. It is almost close to a year 2020 now and the question to be asked is, has much changed ? After a lot or hue and cry the Government of India shared the NCRB data of crimes against women and caste crimes. The report shared that crimes against women had risen by 7.3% in a year, similarly crimes against lower castes also went by similar percentage . With the 2020 pandemic, I am sure the number has gone up more. And there is a possibility that just like last year, next year the Government would cite the pandemic and say no data. This year they have done it for migrant deaths during lockdown , for job losses due to the pandemic and so on and so forth. So, it will be no surprise if the Govt. says about NCRB data next year as well. Although media has been showing some in spite of the regular threats to the journalists as shared in the last blog post. There is also data that shows that women participation in labor force has fallen sharply especially in the last few years and the Government seems to have no neither idea nor do they seem to care for the same. There aren t any concrete plans to bring back the balance even a little bit.

Few Court judgements But all hope is not lost. There have been a couple of good judgements, one from the CIC (Chief Information Commissioner) wherein in specific cases a wife can know salary details of her husband, especially if there is some kind of maintenance due from the husband. There was so much of hue and cry against this order that it was taken down from the livelaw RTI corner. Luckily, I had downloaded it, hence could upload and share it. Another one was a case/suit about a legally matured women who had decided to marry without parental consent. In this case, the Delhi High Court had taken women s side and stated she can marry whom she wants. Interestingly, about a week back Uttar Pradesh (most notorious about crime against women) had made laws called Love Jihad and 2 -3 states have followed them. The idea being to create an atmosphere of hate against Muslims and women have no autonomy about what they want. This is when in a separate suit/case against Sudharshan TV (a far-right leaning channel promoting hate against Muslims) , the Government of India itself put an affidavit stating that Tablighis (a sect of Muslims who came from Malaysia to India for religious discourse and assembly) were not responsible for dissemination of the virus and some media has correctly portrayed the same. Of course, those who are on the side of the Govt. on this topic think a traitor has written. They also thought that the Govt. had taken a wrong approach but couldn t tell of a better approach to the matter. There are too many matters in the Supreme Court of women asking for justice to tell all here but two instances share how the SC has been buckling under the stress of late, one is a webinar which was chaired by Justice Subramaniam where he shared how the executive is using judicial appointments to do what it wants. The gulf between the executive and the SC has been since Indira Gandhi days, especially the judicial orders which declared that the Emergency is valid by large, it has fallen much more recently and the executive has been muscling in which have resulted in more regressive decisions than progressive.

This observation is also in tune with another study which came to the same result although using data. The raw data from the study could give so much more than what has been shared. For e.g. as an idea for the study, of the ones cited, how many have been in civil law, personal law, criminal or constitutional law. This would give a better understanding of things. Also what is shocking is none of our court orders have been cited in the west in the recent past, when there used to be a time when the west used to take guidance from Indian jurisprudence sometimes and cite the orders to reach similar conclusion or if not conclusion at least be used as a precedent. I guess those days are over.

Government giving Corporate ownership to Private Sector Banks There was an Internal Working Group report to review extant ownership guidelines and Corporate Structure for Indian Private Sector Banks. This is the actual title of the report. Now there were and are concerns about the move which were put forth by Dr. Raghuram Rajan and Viral Acharya. While Dr. Rajan had been the 23rd Governor of RBI from 4th September 2013 to 4th September 2016. His most commendable work which largely is unknown to most people was the report A hundred small steps which you buy from sage publications. Viral Acharya was the deputy governor from 23rd January 2017 23rd July 2019. Mr. Acharya just recently published his book Quest for Restoring Financial Stability in India which can be bought from the same publication house as well. They also wrote a three page article stating that does India need corporates in banking? More interestingly, he shares two points from history both world war 1 and world war 2. In both cases, the allies had to cut down the businesses who had owned banks. In Germany, it was the same and in Japan, the zaibatsu s dissolution, both of which were needed to make the world safe again. Now, if we don t learn lessons from history it is our fault, not history s. What was also shared that this idea was taken up in 2013 but was put into cold-storage. He also commented on the pressure on RBI as all co-operative banks have come under its ambit in the last few months. RBI has had a patchy record, especially in the last couple of years, with big scams like ILFS, Yes Bank, PMC Bank, Laxmi Vilas Bank among others. The LVB Bank being the most recent one. If new banking licenses have to be given they can be given to good NBFC s who have been in the market for a long time and have shown maturity while dealing with public money. What is the hurry for giving it to Corporate/business houses ? There are many other good points in the report with which both Mr. Rajan and Mr. Acharya are in agreement and do hope the other points/suggestions/proposals are implemented. There was and is an interesting report by Reserve Bank of India called financial sector legislative reforms commission report volume 1 . If and when it gets deleted from RBI, I have put up a copy at my WordPress account, so we shall always have one. Interestingly, while looking through the people who were part of the committee was a somewhat familiar name Murmu . This is perhaps the first time you see people from a sort of political background being in what should be a cut and dry review which have people normally from careers in finance or Accounts. It also turns out that only one person was in favor of banks going to corporates, all the rest were against. It seems that the specific person hadn t heard the terms self-lending , connected-lending and conflict of interest. One of the more interesting comments in the report is if a corporate has a bank, then why would he go to Switzerland, he would just wash the money in his own bank. And if banks were to become to big to fail like it happened in the United States, it would be again private gains, public losses. There was also a Washington Post article which shares some of the reasons that Indian banks fail. I think we need to remind ourselves once again, how things can become
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gK3s5j7PgA

Positive News at end At the end I do not want to end on a sour notes, hence sharing a YouTube channel of Films Division India where you can see of the very classic works and interviews of some of the greats in Indian art cinema.

https://www.youtube.com/user/FilmsDivision/videos Also sharing a bit of funny story I came to know about youtube-dl, apparently it was taken off from github but thanks to efforts from EFF, Hackernews and others, it is now back in action.

I had been thinking of doing a blog post on RCEP which China signed with 14 countries a week and a day back but this new story has broken and is being viraled a bit on the interwebs, especially twitter and is pretty much in our domain so thought would be better to do a blog post about it. Also, there is quite a lot packed so quite a bit of unpacking to do.

Whitehat, Greyhat and Blackhat For those of you who may not, there are actually three terms especially in computer science that one comes across. Those are white hats, grey hats and black hats. Now clinically white hats are like the fiery angels or the good guys who basically take permissions to try and find out weakness in an application, program, website, organization and so on and so forth. A somewhat dated reference to hacker could be Sandra Bullock (The Net 1995) , Sneakers (1992), Live Free or Die Hard (2007) . Of the three one could argue that Sandra was actually into viruses which are part of computer security but still she showed some bad-ass skills, but then that is what actors are paid to do Sneakers was much more interesting for me because in that you got the best key which can unlock any lock, something like quantum computing is supposed to do. One could equate both the first movies in either as a White hat or a Grey hat . A Grey hat is more flexible in his/her moral values, and they are plenty of such people. For e.g. Julius Assange could be described as a Grey hat, but as you can see and understand those are moral issues.

A black hat on the other hand is one who does things for profit even if it harms the others. The easiest fictitious examples are all Die Hard series, all of them except the 4th one, all had bad guys or black hats. The 4th also had but is the odd one out as it had Matthew Farell (Justin Long) as a Grey hat hacker. In real life Kevin Mitnick, Kevin Poulsen, Robert Tappan Morris, George Hotz, Gary McKinnon are some examples of hackers, most of whom were black hats, most of them reformed into white hats and security specialists. There are many other groups and names but that perhaps is best for another day altogether. Now why am I sharing this. Because in all of the above, the people who are using and working with the systems have better than average understanding of systems and they arguably would be better than most people at securing their networks, systems etc. but as we shall see in this case there has been lots of issues in the company.

WhiteHat Jr. and 300 Million Dollars Before I start this, I would like to share that for me this suit in many ways seems to be similar to the suit filed against Krishnaraj Rao . Although the difference is that Krishnaraj Rao s case/suit is that it was in real estate while this one is in education although many things are similar to those cases but also differ in some obvious ways. For e.g. in the suit against Krishnaraj Rao, the plaintiff s first approached the High Court and then the Supreme Court. Of course Krishnaraj Rao won in the High Court and then in the SC plaintiff s agreed to Krishnaraj Rao s demands as they knew they could not win in SC. In that case, a compromise was reached by the plaintiff just before judgement was to be delivered. In this case, the plaintiff have directly approached the Delhi High Court. The charges against Mr. Poonia (the defendant in this case) are very much similar to those which were made in Krishnaraj Rao s suit hence won t be going into those details. They have claimed defamation and filed a 20 crore suit. The idea is basically to silence any whistle-blowers.

Fictional Character Wolf Gupta The first issue in this case or perhaps one of the most famous or infamous character is an unknown. While he has been reportedly hired by Google India, BJYU, Chandigarh. This has been reported by Yahoo News. I did a cursory search on LinkedIn to see if there indeed is a wolf gupta but wasn t able to find any person with such a name. I am not even talking the amount of money/salary the fictitious gentleman is supposed to have got and the various variations on the salary figures at different times and the different ads.

If I wanted to, I could have asked few of the kind souls whom I know are working in Google to see if they can find such a person using their own credentials but it probably would have been a waste of time. When you show a LinkedIn profile in your social media, it should come up in the results, in this case it doesn t. I also tried to find out if somehow BJYU was a partner to Google and came up empty there as well. There is another story done by Kan India but as I m not a subscriber, I don t know what they have written but the beginning of the story itself does not bode well. While I can understand marketing, there is a line between marketing something and being misleading. At least to me, all of the references shared seems misleading at least to me.

Taking down dissent One of the big no-nos at least from what I perceive, you cannot and should not take down dissent or critique. Indians, like most people elsewhere around the world, critique and criticize day and night. Social media like twitter, mastodon and many others would not exist in the place if criticisms are not there. In fact, one could argue that Twitter and most social media is used to drive engagements to a person, brand etc. It is even an official policy in Twitter. Now you can t drive engagements without also being open to critique and this is true of all the web, including of WordPress and me . What has been happening is that whitehatjr with help of bjyu have been taking out content of people citing copyright violation which seems laughable. When citizens critique anything, we are obviously going to take the name of the product otherwise people would have to start using new names similar to how Tom Riddle was known as Dark Lord , Voldemort and He who shall not be named . There have been quite a few takedowns, I just provide one for reference, the rest of the takedowns would probably come in the ongoing suit/case.

Whitehat Jr. ad showing investors fighting

Now a brief synopsis of what the ad. is about. The ad is about a kid named Chintu who makes an app. The app. Is so good that investors come to his house and right in the lawn and start fighting each other. The parents are enjoying looking at the fight and to add to the whole thing there is also a nosy neighbor who has his own observations. Simply speaking, it is a juvenile ad but it works as most parents in India, as elsewhere are insecure.

Jihan critiquing the whitehatjr ad

Before starting, let me assure that I asked Jihan s parents if it s ok to share his ad on my blog and they agreed. What he has done is broken down the ad and showed how juvenile the ad is and using logic and humor as a template for the same. He does make sure to state that he does not know how the product is as he hasn t used it. His critique was about the ad and not the product as he hasn t used that.

The Website If you look at the website, sadly, most of the site only talks about itself rather than giving examples that people can look in detail. For e.g. they say they have few apps. on Google play-store but no link to confirm the same. The same is true of quite a few other things. In another ad a Paralympic star says don t get into sports and get into coding. Which athlete in their right mind would say that? And it isn t that we (India) are brimming with athletes at the international level. In the last outing which was had in 2016, India sent a stunning 117 athletes but that was an exception as we had the women s hockey squad which was of 16 women, and even then they were overshadowed in numbers by the bureaucratic and support staff. There was criticism about the staff bit but that is probably a story for another date. Most of the site doesn t really give much value and the point seems to be driving sales to their courses. This is pressurizing small kids as well as teenagers and better who are in the second and third year science-engineering whose parents don t get that it is advertising and it is fake and think that their kids are incompetent. So this pressurizes both small kids as well as those who are learning, doing in whatever college or educational institution . The teenagers more often than not are unable to tell/share with them that this is advertising and fake. Also most of us have been on a a good diet of ads. Fair and lovely still sells even though we know it doesn t work. This does remind me of a similar fake academy which used very much similar symptoms and now nobody remembers them today. There used to be an academy called Wings Academy or some similar name. They used to advertise that you come to us and we will make you into a pilot or an airhostess and it was only much later that it was found out that most kids were doing laundry work in hotels and other such work. Many had taken loans, went bankrupt and even committed suicide because they were unable to pay off the loans due to the dreams given by the company and the harsh realities that awaited them. They were sued in court but dunno what happened but soon they were off the radar so we never came to know what happened to those million of kids whose life dreams were shattered.

Security Now comes the security part. They have alleged that Mr. Poonia broke into their systems. While this may be true, what I find funny is that with the name Whitehat, how can they justify it? If you are saying you are white hat you are supposed to be much better than this. And while I have not tried to penetrate their systems, I did find it laughable that the site is using an expired https:// certificate. I could have tried further to figure out the systems but I chose not to. How they could not have an automated script to get the certificate fixed is beyond me, this is known as certificate outage and is very well understood in the industry. There are tools like Let s Encrypt and Certbot (both EFF) and many others. But that is their concern, not mine.

Comparison A similar offering would be unacademy but as can be seen they neither try to push you in any way and nor do they make any ridiculous claims. In fact how genuine unacademy is can be gauged from the fact that many of its learning resources are available to people to see on YT and if they have tools they can also download it. Now, does this mean that every educational website should have their content for free, of course not. But when a channel has 80% 90% of it YT content as ads and testimonials then they surely should give a reason to pause both for parents and students alike. But if parents had done that much research, then things would not be where they are now.

Allegations Just to complete, there are allegations by Mr. Poonia with some screenshots which show the company has been doing a lot of bad things. For e.g. they were harassing an employee at night 2 a.m. who was frustrated and working in the company at the time. Many of the company staff routinely made sexist and offensive, sexual abusive remarks privately between themselves for prospective women who came to interview via webcam (due to the pandemic). There also seems to be a bit of porn on the web/mobile server of the company as well. There also have been allegations that while the company says refund is done next day, many parents who have demanded those refunds have not got it. Now while Mr. Poonia has shared some quotations of the staff while hiding the identities of both the victims and the perpetrators, the language being used in itself tells a lot. I am in two minds whether to share those photos or not hence atm choosing not to. Poonia has also contended that all teachers do not know programming, and they are given scripts to share. There have been some people who did share that experience with him

Suruchi Sethi

From the company s side they are alleging he has hacked the company servers and would probably be using the Fruit of the poisonous tree argument which we have seen have been used in many arguments.

Conclusion Now that lies in the eyes of the Court whether the single bench chooses the literal meaning or use the spirit of the law or the genuine concerns of the people concerned. While in today s hearing while the company asked for a complete sweeping injunction they were unable to get it. Whatever may happen, we may hope to see some fireworks in the second hearing which is slated to be on 6.01.2021 where all of this plays out. Till later.

Review: Hand to Mouth, by Linda Tirado

Publisher:	G.P. Putnam's Sons
Copyright:	October 2014
ISBN:	0-698-17528-X
Format:	Kindle
Pages:	194

The first time Linda Tirado came to the viral attention of the Internet was in 2013 when she responded to a forum question: "Why do poor people do things that seem so self-destructive?" Here are some excerpts from her virally popular five-page response, which is included in the first chapter:

I know how to cook. I had to take Home Ec. to graduate high school. Most people on my level didn't. Broccoli is intimidating. You have to have a working stove, and pots, and spices, and you'll have to do the dishes no matter how tired you are or they'll attract bugs. It is a huge new skill for a lot of people. That's not great, but it's true. And if you fuck it up, you could make your family sick. We have learned not to try too hard to be middle class. It never works out well and always makes you feel worse for having tried and failed yet again. Better not to try. It makes more sense to get food that you know will be palatable and cheap and that keeps well. Junk food is a pleasure that we are allowed to have; why would we give that up? We have very few of them.

and

I smoke. It's expensive. It's also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It's a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and I feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed. It is not a good decision, but it is the only one that I have access to. It is the only thing I have found that keeps me from collapsing or exploding.

This book is an expansion on that essay. It's an entry in a growing genre of examinations of what it means to be poor in the United States in the 21st century. Unlike most of those examinations, it isn't written by an outsider performing essentially anthropological field work. It's one of the rare books written by someone who is herself poor and had the combination of skill and viral fame required to get an opportunity to talk about it in her own words.

I haven't had it worse than anyone else, and actually, that's kind of the point. This is just what life is for roughly a third of the country. We all handle it in our own ways, but we all work in the same jobs, live in the same places, feel the same sense of never quite catching up. We're not any happier about the exploding welfare rolls than anyone else is, believe me. It's not like everyone grows up and dreams of working two essentially meaningless part-time jobs while collecting food stamps. It's just that there aren't many other options for a lot of people.

I didn't find this book back in 2014 when it was published. I found it in 2020 during Tirado's second round of Internet fame: when the police shot out her eye with "non-lethal" rounds while she was covering the George Floyd protests as a photojournalist. In characteristic fashion, she subsequently reached out to the other people who had been blinded by the police, used her temporary fame to organize crowdfunded support for others, and is planning on having "try again" tattooed over the scar. That will give you a feel for the style of this book. Tirado is blunt, opinionated, honest, and full speed ahead. It feels weird to call this book delightful since it's fundamentally about the degree to which the United States is failing a huge group of its citizens and making their lives miserable, but there is something so refreshing and clear-headed about Tirado's willingness to tell you the straight truth about her life. It's empathy delivered with the subtlety of a brick, but also with about as much self-pity as a brick. Tirado is not interested in making you feel sorry for her; she's interested in you paying attention.

I don't get much of my own time, and I am vicious about protecting it. For the most part, I am paid to pretend that I am inhuman, paid to cater to both the reasonable and unreasonable demands of the general public. So when I'm off work, feel free to go fuck yourself. The times that I am off work, awake, and not taking care of life's details are few and far between. It's the only time I have any autonomy. I do not choose to waste that precious time worrying about how you feel. Worrying about you is something they pay me for; I don't work for free.

If you've read other books on this topic (Emily Guendelsberger's On the Clock is still the best of those I've read), you probably won't get many new facts from Hand to Mouth. I think this book is less important for the policy specifics than it is for who is writing it (someone who is living that life and can be honest about it) and the depth of emotional specifics that Tirado brings to the description. If you have never been poor, you will learn the details of what life is like, but more significantly you'll get a feel for how Tirado feels about it, and while this is one individual perspective (as Tirado stresses, including the fact that, as a white person, there are other aspects of poverty she's not experienced), I think that perspective is incredibly valuable. That said, Hand to Mouth provides even more reinforcement of the importance of universal medical care, the absurdity of not including dental care in even some of the more progressive policy proposals, and the difficulties in the way of universal medical care even if we solve the basic coverage problem. Tirado has significant dental problems due to unrepaired damage from a car accident, and her account reinforces my belief that we woefully underestimate how important good dental care is to quality of life. But providing universal insurance or access is only the start of the problem.

There is a price point for good health in America, and I have rarely been able to meet it. I choose not to pursue treatment if it will cost me more than it will gain me, and my cost-benefit is done in more than dollars. I have to think of whether I can afford any potential treatment emotionally, financially, and timewise. I have to sort out whether I can afford to change my life enough to make any treatment worth it I've been told by more than one therapist that I'd be fine if I simply reduced the amount of stress in my life. It's true, albeit unhelpful. Doctors are fans of telling you to sleep and eat properly, as though that were a thing one can simply do.

That excerpt also illustrates one of the best qualities of this book. So much writing about "the poor" treats them as an abstract problem that the implicitly not-poor audience needs to solve, and this leads rather directly to the endless moralizing as "we" attempt to solve that problem by telling poor people what they need to do. Tirado is unremitting in fighting for her own agency. She has a shitty set of options, but within those options she makes her own decisions. She wants better options and more space in which to choose them, which I think is a much more productive way to frame the moral argument than the endless hand-wringing over how to help "those poor people." This is so much of why I support universal basic income. Just give people money. It's not all of the solution UBI doesn't solve the problem of universal medical care, and we desperately need to find a way to make work less awful but it's the most effective thing we can do immediately. Poor people are, if anything, much better at making consequential financial decisions than rich people because they have so much more practice. Bad decisions are less often due to bad decision-making than bad options and the balancing of objectives that those of us who are not poor don't understand. Hand to Mouth is short, clear, refreshing, bracing, and, as you might have noticed, very quotable. I think there are other books in this genre that offer more breadth or policy insight, but none that have the same feel of someone cutting through the bullshit of lazy beliefs and laying down some truth. If any of the above excerpts sound like the sort of book you would enjoy reading, pick this one up. Rating: 8 out of 10

Those of you who watch a lot of Hollywood movies may have noticed a certain trend that has consumed the industry in the last few years. It ...

Video Essay Catalog No. 91 by Kevin B. Lee. Featured on the New York Times and other outlets. Originally published December 13, 2011 on Fandor. https://carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/19/staring-in-awe-its-the-spielberg-face/?_r=0

The Korowai cannibals live on top of trees. But is it true?

Bandicoot Cabbagepatch, Bandersnatch Cumberbund, and even Wimbledon Tennismatch: there seem to be endless variations on the name of Benedict Cumberbatch. [...] But how is a normal internet citizen supposed to know, when they hear someone say I just can t stop looking at gifs of Bombadil Rivendell that this person isn t talking about some other actor with a name and a voice and cheekbones? Or in other words, what makes for a reasonable variation of the name Bendandsnap Calldispatch?

I ve been trying both Amazon Prime and Netflix. I signed up for the month free of Amazon Prime to watch Good Omens and Picard . Good Omens is definitely worth the effort of setting up the month free of Amazon Prime and is worth the month s subscription if you have used your free month in the past and Picard is ok. Content Amazon Prime has a medium amount of other content, I m now paying for a month of Amazon Prime mainly because there s enough documentaries to take a month. For reference there are plenty of good ones about war and about space exploration. There are also some really rubbish documentaries, for example a 2 part documentary about the Magna Carta where the second part starts with Grover Norquist claiming that the Magna Carta is justification for not having any taxes (the first part seemed ok). Netflix has a lot of great content. A big problem with Netflix is that there aren t good ways of searching and organising the content you want to watch. It would be really nice if Netflix could use some machine learning for recommendations and recommend shows based on what I ve liked and also what I ve disliked. On both Netflix and Amazon when you view the details of a show it gives a short list of similar shows which is nice. With Amazon I have no complaints about that. But with Netflix the content library is so great that you get lost in a maze of links. On the Android tablet interface for Netflix it shows 12 similar shows in a grid and on the web interface it s a row of 20 shows with looped scrolling. Then as you click a different show you get another list of 12/20 shows which will usually have some overlap with the previous one. It would be nice if you could easily swipe left on shows you don t like to avoid having them repeatedly presented to you. On Netflix I ve really enjoyed the Altered Carbon series (which is significantly more violent than I anticipated), Black Mirror (the episode written by Trent Reznor and starring Miley Cyrus is particularly good), and Love Death and Robots . Overall I currently rate Love Death and Robots as in many ways the best series I ve ever watched because the episodes are all short and get straight to the point. One advantage of online video is that they don t need to pad episodes out or cut them short to fit a TV time slot, they can use as much time as necessary to tell the story. Watch List Having a single row of shows to watch is fine for the amount of content that Amazon has, but for the Netflix content you can easily get 100 shows on your watch list and it would be good to be able to search my watch list by genre (it s a drag to flick through dozens of icons of war documentaries when I m in the mood for an action movie as the icons are somewhat similar). As well as a list of shows you selected to watch Netflix has a list of shows that have been recently watched with no way to edit it which is separate from the list of shows selected to watch. So if you watch 5 minutes of a show and decide that it sucks then it stays on the list until you have partially watched 10 other shows recently. For my usage the recently watched list is the most important thing as I m watching some serial shows and wouldn t want to go through the 100 shows on my watch list to find them. If I ve decided that a movie sucked after watching a bit of it I don t want to be reminded of it by seeing the icon every time I use Netflix for the next month. Amazon has only a single watch next list for shows that you have watched recently and shows that you selected as worth watching. It allows editing the list which is nice, but then Amazon also often keeps shows on the list when you have finished watching them and removed them from the to watch setting. Amazon s watch list is also generally buggy, at one time it decided that a movie was no longer available in my region but didn t let me remove it from the list. Quality Apparently the Netflix web interface on Linux only allows 720p video while the Amazon web interface on all platforms is limited to 720p. In any case my Internet connection is probably only good enough for 1080p at most. I haven t noticed any quality differences between Netflix and Amazon Prime. Multiple Users Netflix allows you to create profiles for multiple users with separate watch lists which is very handy. They also don t have IP address restrictions so it s a common practice for people to share a Netflix account with relatives. If you try to use Netflix when the maximum number of sessions for your account is in use it will show a list of what the other people on your account are watching (so if you share with your parents be careful about that). Amazon doesn t allow creating multiple profiles, but the content isn t that great. The trend in video streaming is for proprietary content to force users to subscribe to a service. So sharing an Amazon Prime account with a few people so you want watch the proprietary content would make sense. Watching Patterns Sometimes when I m particularly distracted I can t focus on one show for any length of time. Both Amazon and Netflix (and probably all other online streaming services) allow me to skip between shows easily. That s always been a feature of YouTube, but with YouTube you get recommended increasingly viral content until you find yourself watching utter rubbish. At least with Amazon and Netflix there is a minimum quality level even if that is reality TV. Conclusion Amazon Prime has a smaller range of content and some really rubbish documentaries. I don t mind the documentaries about UFOs and other fringe stuff as it s obvious what it is and you can avoid it. A documentary that has me watching for an hour before it s revealed to be a promo for Grover Norquist is really bad, did the hour of it that I watched have good content or just rubbish too? Netflix has a huge range of content and the quality level is generally very high. If you are going to watch TV then subscribing to Netflix is probably a good idea. It s reasonably cheap, has a good (not great) interface, and has a lot of content including some great original content. For Amazon maybe subscribe for 1 month every second year to binge watch the Amazon proprietary content that interests you.

Many voices arise now and then against risks linked to the Github use by Free Software projects. Yet the infatuation for the collaborative forge of the Octocat Californian start-ups doesn t seem to fade away.

These recent years, Github and its services take an important role in software engineering as they are seen as easy to use, efficient for a daily workload with interesting functions in enterprise collaborative workflow or amid a Free Software project. What are the arguments against using its services and are they valid? We will list them first, then we ll examine their validity.

1. Critical points

1.1 Centralization

The Github application belongs to a single entity, Github Inc, a US company which manage it alone. So, a unique company under US legislation manages the access to most of Free Software application code sources, which may be a problem with groups using it when a code source is no longer available, for political or technical reason.

The Octocat, the Github mascot

This centralization leads to another trouble: as it obtained critical mass, it becomes more and more difficult not having a Github account. People who don t use Github, by choice or not, are becoming a silent minority. It is now fashionable to use Github, and not doing so is seen as out of date . The same phenomenon is a classic, and even the norm, for proprietary social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram).

1.2 A Proprietary Software

When you interact with Github, you are using a proprietary software, with no access to its source code and which may not work the way you think it is. It is a problem at different levels. First, ideologically, but foremost in practice. In the Github case, we send them code we can control outside of their interface. We also send them personal information (profile, Github interactions). And mostly, Github forces any project which goes through the US platform to use a crucial proprietary tools: its bug tracking system.

Windows, the epitome of proprietary software, even if others took the same path

1.3 The Uniformization

Working with Github interface seems easy and intuitive to most. Lots of companies now use it as a source repository, and many developers leaving a company find the same Github working environment in the next one. This pervasive presence of Github in free software development environment is a part of the uniformization of said developers working space.

Uniforms always bring Army in my mind, here the Clone army

2 Critical points cross-examination

2.1 Regarding the centralization

2.1.1 Service availability rate

As said above, nowadays, Github is the main repository of Free Software source code. As such it is a favorite target for cyberattacks. DDOS hit it in March and August 2015. On December 15, 2015, an outage led to the inaccessibility of 5% of the repositories. The same occurred on November 15. And these are only the incident reported by Github itself. One can imagine that the mean outage rate of the platform is underestimated.

2.1.2 Chain reaction could block Free Software development

Today many dependency maintenance tools, as npm for javascript, Bundler for Ruby or even pip for Python can access an application source code directly from Github. Free Software projects getting more and more linked and codependents, if one component is down, all the developing process stop.

One of the best examples is the npmgate. Any company could legally demand that Github take down some source code from its repository, which could create a chain reaction and blocking the development of many Free Software projects, as suffered the Node.js community from the decisions of Npm, Inc, the company managing npm.

2.2 A historical precedent: SourceForge

Github didn t appear out of the blue. In his time, its predecessor, SourceForge, was also extremely popular.

Heavily centralized, based on strong interaction with the community, SourceForge is now seen as an aging SAAS (Software As A Service) and sees most of its customers fleeing to Github. Which creates lots of hurdles for those who stayed. The Gimp project suffered from spams and terrible advertising, which led to the departure of the VLC project, then from installers corrupted with adwares instead of the official Gimp installer for Windows. And finally, the Project Gimp s SourceForge account was hacked by SourceForge team itself!

These are very recent examples of what can do a commercial entity when it is under its stakeholders pressure. It is vital to really understand what it means to trust them with data and exchange centralization, where it could have tremendous repercussion on the day-to-day life and the habits of the Free Software and open source community.

2.3. Regarding proprietary software

2.3.1 One community, several opinions on proprietary software

Mostly based on ideology, this point deals with the definition every member of the community gives to Free Software and open source. Mostly about one thing: is it viral or not? Or GPL vs MIT/BSD.

Those on the side of the viral Free Software will have trouble to use a proprietary software as this last one shouldn t even exist. It must be assimilated, to quote Star Trek, as it is a connected black box, endangering privacy, corrupting for profit our uses and restrain our freedom to use as we re pleased what we own, etc.

Those on the side of complete freedom have no qualms using proprietary software as their very existence is a consequence of freedom without restriction. They even agree that code they developed may be a part of proprietary software, which is quite a common occurrence. This part of the Free Software community has no qualm using Github, which is well within their ideology parameters. Just take a look at the Janson amphitheater during Fosdem and check how many Apple laptops running on macOS are around.

FreeBSD, the main BSD project under the BSD license

2.3.2 Data loss and data restrictions linked to proprietary software use

Even without ideological consideration, and just focusing on Github infrastructure, the bug tracking system is a major problem by itself.

Bug report builds the memory of Free Software projects. It is the entrance point for new contributors, the place to find bug reporting, requests for new functions, etc. The project history can t be limited only to the code. It s very common to find bug reports when you copy and paste an error message in a search engine. Not their historical importance is precious for the project itself, but also for its present and future users.

Github gives the ability to extract bug reports through its API. What would happen if Github is down or if the platform doesn t support this feature anymore? In my opinion, not that many projects ever thought of this outcome. How could they move all the data generated by Github into a new bug tracking system? One old example now is Astrid, a TODO list bought by Yahoo a few years ago. Very popular, it grew fast until it was closed overnight, with only a few weeks for its users to extract their data. It was only a to-do list. The same situation with Github would be tremendously difficult to manage for several projects if they even have the ability to deal with it. Code would still be available and could still live somewhere else, but the project memory would be lost. A project like Debian has today more than 800,000 bug reports, which are a data treasure trove about problems solved, function requests and where the development stand on each. The developers of the Cpython project have anticipated the problem and decided not to use Github bug tracking systems.

Issues, the Github proprietary bug tracking system

Another thing we could lose if Github suddenly disappear: all the work currently done regarding the push requests (aka PRs). This Github function gives the ability to clone one project s Github repository, to modify it to fit your needs, then to offer your own modification to the original repository. The original repository s owner will then review said modification, and if he or she agrees with them will fuse them into the original repository. As such, it s one of the main advantages of Github, since it can be done easily through its graphic interface.

However reviewing all the PRs may be quite long, and most of the successful projects have several ongoing PRs. And this PRs and/or the proprietary bug tracking system are commonly used as a platform for comment and discussion between developers.

Code itself is not lost if Github is down (except one specific situation as seen below), but the peer review works materialized in the PRs and the bug tracking system is lost. Let s remember than the PR mechanism let you clone and modify projects and then generate PRs directly from its proprietary web interface without downloading a single code line on your computer. In this particular case, if Github is down, all the code and the work in progress is lost. Some also use Github as a bookmark place. They follow their favorite projects activity through the Watch function. This technological watch style of data collection would also be lost if Github is down.

Debian, one of the main Free Software projects with at least a thousand official contributors

2.4 Uniformization

The Free Software community is walking a thigh rope between normalization needed for an easier interoperability between its products and an attraction for novelty led by a strong need for differentiation from what is already there.

Github popularized the use of Git, a great tool now used through various sectors far away from its original programming field. Step by step, Git is now so prominent it s almost impossible to even think to another source control manager, even if awesome alternate solutions, unfortunately not as popular, exist as Mercurial.

A new Free Software project is now a Git repository on Github with README.md added as a quick description. All the other solutions are ostracized? How? None or very few potential contributors would notice said projects. It seems very difficult now to encourage potential contributors into learning a new source control manager AND a new forge for every project they want to contribute. Which was a basic requirement a few years ago. It s quite sad because Github, offering an original experience to its users, cut them out of a whole possibility realm. Maybe Github is one of the best web versioning control systems. But being the main one doesn t let room for a new competitor to grow. And it let Github initiate development newcomers into a narrow function set, totally unrelated to the strength of the Git tool itself.

3. Centralization, uniformization, proprietary software What s next? Laziness?

Fight against centralization is a main part of the Free Software ideology as centralization strengthens the power of those who manage it and who through it control those who are managed by it. Uniformization allergies born against main software companies and their wishes to impose a closed commercial software world was for a long time the main fuel for innovation thirst and intelligent alternative development. As we said above, part of the Free Software community was built as a reaction to proprietary software and their threat. The other part, without hoping for their disappearance, still chose a development model opposite to proprietary software, at least in the beginning, as now there s more and more bridges between the two.

The Github effect is a morbid one because of its consequences: at least centralization, uniformization, proprietary software usage as their bug tracking system. But some years ago the Dear Github buzz showed one more side effect, one I ve never thought about: laziness. For those who don t know what it is about, this letter is a complaint from several spokespersons from several Free Software projects which demand to Github team to finally implement, after years of polite asking, new functions. Since when Free Software project facing a roadblock request for clemency and don t build themselves the path they need? When Torvalds was involved in the Bitkeeper problem and the Linux kernel development team couldn t use anymore their revision control software, he developed Git. The mere fact of not being able to use one tool or functions lacking is the main motivation to seek alternative solutions and, as such, of the Free Software movement. Every Free Software community member able to code should have this reflex. You don t like what Github offers? Switch to Gitlab. You don t like it Gitlab? Improve it or make your own solution.

The Gitlab logo

Let s be crystal clear. I ve never said that every Free Software developers blocked should code his or her own alternative. We all have our own priorities, and some of us even like their beauty sleep, including me. But, to see that this open letter to Github has 1340 names attached to it, among them some spokespersons for major Free Software project showed me that need, willpower and strength to code a replacement are here. Maybe said replacement will be born from this letter, it would be the best outcome of this buzz.

In the end, Github usage is just another example of Internet usage massification. As Internet users are bound to go to massively centralized social network as Facebook or Twitter, developers are following the same path with Github. Even if a large fraction of developers realize the threat linked this centralized and proprietary organization, the whole community is following this centralization and uniformization trend. Github service is useful, free or with a reasonable price (depending on the functions you need) easy to use and up most of the time. Why would we try something else? Maybe because others are using us while we are savoring the convenience? The Free Software community seems to be quite sleepy to me.

The lion enjoying the hearth warm

About Me Carl Chenet, Free Software Indie Hacker, founder of the French-speaking Hacker News-like Journal du hacker. Follow me on social networks

• My Mastodon account : @carlchenet
• My Diaspora* account : @carlchenet
• My Twitter account : @carl_chenet

Translated from French by St phanie Chaptal. Original article written in 2015.

Around 2 decades back and a bit more I was introduced to computers. The top-line was 386DX which was mainly used as fat servers and some lucky institutions had the 386SX where IF we were lucky we could be able to play some games on it. I was pretty bad at Prince of Persia or most of the games of the era as most of the games depended on lightning reflexes which I didn t possess. Then 1997 happened and I was introduced to GNU/Linux but my love of/for games still continued even though I was bad at most of them. The only saving grace was turn-based RPG s (role-playing games) which didn t have permadeath, so you could plan your next move. Sometimes a wrong decision would lead to getting a place from where it was impossible to move further. As the decision was taken far far break which lead to the tangent, the only recourse was to replay the game which eventually lead to giving most of those kind of games. Then in/around 2000 Maxis came out with Sims. This was the time where I bought my first Pentium. I had never played a game which had you building stuff, designing stuff, no violence and the whole idea used to be about balancing priorities of trying to get new stuff, go to work, maintain relationships and still make sure you are eating, sleeping, have a good time. While I might have spent probably something close to 500 odd hours in the game or even more so, I spent the least amount of time in building the house. It used to be 4 4 when starting (you don t have much of in-game money and other stuff you wanted to buy as well) to 8 8 or at the very grand 12 12. It was only the first time I spent time trying to figure out where the bathroom should be, where the kitchen should, where the bedroom should be and after that I could do that blind-folded. The idea behind my house-design used to be simplicity, efficient (for my character). I used to see other people s grand creations of their houses and couldn t understand why they made such big houses. Now few days back, I saw few episodes of a game called Stranded Deep . The story, plot is simple. You, the player are going in a chartered plane and suddenly lightning strikes ( game trope as today s aircrafts are much better able to deal with lightning strikes) and our hero or heroine washes up on a beach with raft with the barest of possessions. Now the whole game is based upon him/her trying to survive, once you get the hang of the basic mechanics and you know what is to be done, you can do it. The only thing the game doesn t have is farming but as the game has unlimited procedural world, you just paddle or with boat motor go island hopping and take all that what you need. What was interesting to me was seeing a gamer putting so much time and passion in making a house. When I was looking at that video, I realized that maybe because I live in a dense environment, even the designs we make either of houses or anything else is more to try to get more and more people rather than making sure that people are happy which leads to my next sharing. Couple of days back, I read Virali Modi s account of how she was molested three times when trying to use Indian Railways. She made a petition on change.org While I do condemn the molestation as it s an affront against individual rights, freedom, liberty, free movement, dignity. Few of the root causes as pointed out by her, for instance the inability or non-preference to give differently-abled people the right to board first as well as awaiting to see that everybody s boarded properly before starting the train are the most minimum steps that Indian Railways could take without spending even a paise. The same could be told/shared about sensitizing people, although I have an idea of why does Indian Railway not employ women porters or women attendants for precisely this job. I accompanied a blind gentleman friend few times on Indian Railways and let me tell you, it was one of the most unpleasant experiences. The bogies which is given to them is similar or even less than what you see in unreserved compartments. The toilets were/are smelly, the gap between the station and the train was/is considerable for everybody from blind people, differently-abled people, elderly people as well. This is one of the causes of accidents which happen almost every day on Indian Railways. I also learnt that especially for blind people they are looking for a sort of low-frequency whistle/noise which tells them the disabled coupe/bogie/coach will come at a specific spot in the Station. In a platform which could have anything between 1500-2000 people navigating it wouldn t be easy. I don t know about other places but Indian Railway Stations need to learn a lot to make it a space for differently abled to navigate by themselves. Pune Station operates (originating or passing through) around 200 odd trains, with exceptions of all the specials and weekly trains that ply through, adding those would probably another 5-10 trains to the mix. Each train carries anywhere between 750-1000 odd people so roughly anywhere between 15-20 million pass through Pune Railway Station daily. Even if we take conservative estimates of around 5% of the public commuting from Pune, it would mean around 750,000 people travelling daily. Pune Railway Station has 6 stations and if I spread them equally it would come to around 100,000 people on one platform in 24 hours. Divide that equally by 24 hours and it comes to 4,160 people per hour. Now you take those figures and you see the Pune platforms are under severe pressure. I have normalized many figures. For instance, just like airports, even in railways, there are specific timings where more trains come and go. From morning 0500 hrs to late night 2300 hrs. there would be lot many trains, whereas the graveyard shifts would have windows where maintenance of tracks and personnel takes place. I dunno if people can comprehend 4000 odd people on the platform. Add to that you usually arrive at least an hour or two before a train departs even if you are a healthy person as Indian Railways has a habit of changing platforms of trains at the last minute. So if you a differently abled person with some luggage for a long-distance train, the problems just multiply. See drag accidents because of gap between railway bogies and platforms. The width of the entrance to the bogie is probably between 30-40 inches but the design is such that 5-10 inches are taken on each side. I remembered the last year, our current Prime Minister, Mr. Narendra Modi had launched Accessible Campaign with great fanfare and we didn t hear anything much after that. Unfortunately, the site itself has latency and accessibility issues, besides not giving any real advice even if a person wants to know what building norms should one follow if one wants to make an area accessible. This was easily seen by last year s audit in Delhi as well as other places. A couple of web-searches later, I landed up at a Canadian site to have some idea about the width of the wheelchair itself as well as additional room to manoeuvre. Unfortunately, the best or the most modern coaches/bogies that Indian Railways has to offer are the LHB Bogies/Coaches. Now while the Coaches/Bogies by themselves are a big improvement from the ICF Coaches which we still have and use, if you read the advice and directions shared on the Canadian site, the coaches are far from satisfactory for people who are wheel-chair bound. According to Government s own census records, 0.6% of the population have movement issues. Getting all the differently-abled people together, it comes between 2, 2.5% of the population which is quite a bit. If 2-3 people out of every 100 people are differently-abled then we need to figure out something for them.While I don t have any ideas as to how we could improve the surroundings, it is clear that we need the change. While I was thinking,dreaming,understanding some of the nuances inadvertently, my attention/memories shifted to my toilet experiences at both Mumbai and the Doha Airport. As had shared then, had been pleasantly surprised to see that both in Mumbai Airport as well as the Doha Airport, the toilets were pretty wide, a part of me was happy and a part of me was seeing the added space as wastefulness. With the understanding of needs of differently-abled people it started to make whole lot of sense. I don t remember if I had shared then or not. Although am left wondering where they go for loo in the aircraft. The regular toilets are a tight fit for obese people, I am guessing aircrafts have toilets for differently-abled people as well. Looking back at last year s conference, we had 2-3 differently-abled people. I am just guessing that it wouldn t have been a pleasant experience for them. For instance, where we were staying, at UCT it had stairs, no lifts so by default they probably were on ground-floor. Then where we were staying and where most of the talks were about a few hundred metres away and the shortest distance were by stairs, the round-about way was by road but had vehicles around so probably not safe that way as well. I am guessing they had to be dependant on other people to figure out things. There were so many places where there were stairs and no ramps and even if there were ramps they were probably a bit more than the 1:12 which is the advice given. I have heard that this year s venue is also a bit challenging in terms of accessibility for differently-abled people. I am clueless as to did differently-able find debconf16 in terms of accessibility or not ? A related query to that one, if a Debconf s final report mentions issues with accessibility, do the venues make any changes so that at some future date, differently-abled people would have a better time. I know of Indian institutions reluctance to change, to do expenditure, dunno how western countries do it. Any ideas, comments are welcome.
Filed under: Miscellenous Tagged: #386, #accessibility, #air-travel, #Computers, #differently-abled, #Railways, gaming