From down south of India - the Proto Tamil language is the basis for modern Tamil, Malayalam and others. We still have Sanskrit being used by Temple priests. One of changes in the last decade is - Tamilnadu finally has temples with priests using Tamil for religious rituals. Sanskrit was gate kept by the priestly class. It’s not a colonial reframing.
I feel the same way. One of my client insists it’s amazing as a marketing tool, helps go through notifications, draft personalized emails..etc., He asks for user metrics from Telegram and gets report…etc., But I am very conflicted. How do you trust the numbers it returns, how will you catch issues in emails if each one is customized and there is no draft review? It’s not my domain of expertise. So I don’t say anything. I just rationalise it as startup culture.
Hello everyone. I am really not sure what I was ranting about yesterday. I have some bones to pick with the system. The crux of it is - it’s not a technological miracle. It’s the government’s will that makes the system function. It’s good for what it does. But I was annoyed by the propaganda like manner people seem to talk about it in discussions.
I didn’t channel them properly and got into an argumentative fit. I apologise for wasting all your time.
Well, for starters - not knowing enough to debate net negative or positive is very different from “not knowing anything about the system”.
And I think I have gotten into the situation I try to avoid most of the time. Every reply I get is giving me a counter example that’s nothing to do with the point I am raising. “Costs are far lower than alternative mechanisms”. I am not comparing it to other mechanisms. My point simply was that it’s government subsidies that keep this thing running. Not technical innovation. It’s ubiquitous now and it’s useful and all of that. I never questioned it. At the same time the system organically grew into this magic solution, that cut down cost of producing cash, combated tax evasion …etc., are just propaganda. It doesn’t have a business model that’s sustainable and we just service it as a public good. I am not saying it’s a bad thing. Just don’t market it as this miracle innovation. That’s all.
Thanks for the additional info. But I want to clarify one thing - I didn’t say anything about cash being a better choice. Both the comments to my response are making it out to be a cash vs digital thing. I am not sure why.
Next, NPCI is a PSU. So what? They are taking govt money to function aren’t they? The costs are borne by the banks which get allocations every budget to keep the system running. So whatever “profit” this PSU is making is literally just the government’s money paid through banks as transaction costs.
It helps with GST surveillance? Okay great. What about suitcases of cash that get passed around during land and property transactions?
2FA, velocity checks…etc., are things that came after the fact. For years no-one took responsibility for lost money. There was no redressal mechanism. ~Even today, does NCPI offers nothing as a redressal mechanism for scam transactions, it leaves it to the banks and individuals to sort it out. Which probably involves police complaints and follow up.~
Edit: I learnt that a redressal mechanism was finally introduced in 2025. So the above statement is invalid.
I genuinely have to ask, why is it hard to accept the shortcomings of the system and acknowledge the cost of running the system?
Fair enough. I am not knowledgeable enough to debate if it’s a net negative or positive. But “savings and efficiency” also has a negative side where people have lost life savings and bank accounts emptied in a matter of minutes.
UPI doesn’t help much with tax evasion. The biggest vehicle of tax evasion is property and cash is still the king there. UPI has been a good quality of life improvement for everyone. However there’s been cost involved, that should be considered.
I would guess NPCI being a private body with transaction charges being borne by the Indian government is a net negative in the long run. It costs everyone. NEFT and RTGS on the other hand is RBI regulated with clear pricing and costs only those involved. The cost structure needs to change, but then, it won’t be possible. To pay 5 rupees for a chocolate with your phone and get even 0.5 added on top would make the consumers switch to cash almost immediately.
Thanks for explaining the context. It makes sense in your case where using mouse is a hard constraint. My reaction is more towards people who optimise for productivity.
Keybooard and Mouse. Everytime. I have the same question.
How much do you type in a day that moving the hand to the mouse is a productivity loss? I spend a lot of time staring (thinking, planning) than typing. So, moving my hand to the mouse and back barely has any impact.
By making “upstreaming” the core of OS contribution, we have also failed to build tooling around downstream synchronisation. There are dedicated browser forks (a very highly complex software) that are maintained by a few volunteers. So maintaining 1 or 2 additional features depending on personal choices (or a specific company’s) shouldn’t be that hard. If we have a world where that’s normal, we will have a bigger talent pool in core tech, cloud vendors would have a hard time selling hosted solutions of open source software..etc., I think we left a good chunk of net positive impact on the table by what Mitchell mentions as the “open source project as a product” approach.
Man, these are the kinds of things that I am so happy to read. People who think and care deeply about what they do, take pragmatic decisions that appears right to them and explain why they do things the way they do. Very motivating. Literally moved me from the couch to the work desk .
I am on Doom Emacs, the keyboard shortcuts don't seem to work. Clicking works. I suspect Whichkey (Space) and Evil mode (n/p..etc.,) to be the culprits. I should probably assign some sort of whichkey combo for the actions.
Seriously cool. Thank you.
P.S: The fact that I can ditch a 1+GB browser tab for 68MB mpv playing in the background is just :chef_kiss:
Second this. Just add Starship.rs for prompt and offload tool chain version handling to mise. That covers about 100% of my needs.
If your org doesn’t use mise, just add mise.toml to your global gitignore. Mise tries to be a single tool covering multiple needs, but don’t have to use it that way. I just manage toolchain versions and envvars (replace direnv).
In case of China, the extend to which the central government can set laws and policies far exceeds what’s possible in India. India’s powers are split into Federal, State and “Concurrent” lists. Health and education for example is a state and concurrent list subject respectively, to which the “Indian Government” has only very limited say. So it’s apples to oranges when it comes to comparing investments in those domains.
If the author is reading - China is a single party nation state, India is a union of states. Dive into the metrics of states, you will find everything from Sub-sharan Africa levels of HDI to the ones that compete with European countries.
> WHY javascript code is even allowed to see all these actions of the user? We already loaded the page and rendered it
Nope we haven’t. At least not in a web application. At least not since the days Infinite Scrolling was invented. IIRC Twitter, for eg, only renders a partial list depending on the scroll position.
I once wrote a NER tagger, where implementing custom text selection allowed users to not stress about selecting the exact word boundaries when manually tagging 1000s of words per day.
I can probably find legitimate use cases for almost of these things in the list. While I agree with the broader theme of the article, this idea that the user agent should be a dumb display is not valid.
Oh! No. Please switch to something else. Last pass has had so many breaches, at this point it’s just not worth it.