Got up and breathed in winter today.
With my hands holding the warm cup of ginger flavored tea, I stood in my balcony this morning. My gaze running through the horizon (unconsciously searching for what changed today).
There’s a time before winter when you could feel winter is about to come.
Cold air starts breezing through, partial fog starts to glide through the fields early morning…and you witness nature preparing itself for Winter.
As a kid, I grew up in parts of Rajasthan (a state in northern part of India), it gets really cold here in Winter. …
Satire on human life
I have come across it A LOT.
Scene 1:
Person A: “What’s up?”
Me: “I am reading a great book on marketing psychology.”
Person A: “Oh is it? But why? How will it help?”
Scene 2:
Me writing about the cause I believe in
“But how does it help? What does it change?”
Such questions are just SO sickening. I don’t know if it’s something about being Indian or not. But in general, I don’t understand why do you need to “define” profits or “create an impact” at every turn? …
Reality and trickery of the Instagram image
Years back, I was invited to a party I did not want to attend but got dragged along. I was bored to heights. I was with a friend of mine and a friend of hers. Her friend did not know anything about me and hence wanted to strike a conversation. The bored state of my mind suddenly popped up this idea in my head to play a little prank. He asked me so what do you do on weekends? What are your hobbies? Do you drink? Do you play sports? Bla bla bla. I picked up a personality very different from mine on purpose and replied back with answers that will come from a person of that type and also which he will find dull. So I painted an image that I don't drink, I don’t play any sports, I visit temples on weekends and I really don’t get the concept of social gatherings. The guy was totally shocked and started mocking “Dude, how do you survive? What do you do to enjoy? etc etc”. …
What causes tech addictions?
I love this page on Instagram, full of humorous memes, from cats to satire, expressions to jokes it has it all. Daily dose of happiness. I often share them with my friends and family, what a better way to cheer them up and simultaneously keep in touch. In fact, there’s a friend of mine with whom I just share memes, can you imagine that? A meme friend, there’s no other conversation at all (yea, apart from Birthday Wishes).
So, if I look back and see what this platform has to offer to me, honestly it is mostly memes. I’m no more a big fan of regularly broadcasting my life events, nor am I good at updating myself with the life events broadcasted by other people, but memes: they are irreplacable. The thing I’ll miss the most seeing and sharing, if I happen to disconnect from the platform altogether. …
Android Security
[Disclaimer: Only for educational purposes]
Hola,
In this post we are going to talk about an interesting vulnerability that exists on present day android devices and can be exploited by hackers.
The vulnerability is called Strandhogg and was released by Promon in December first week. What all a hacker can do using this vulnerability?
Be ready to be amazed, here’s the list:
- They can listen to the user through the microphone
- Take photos through the camera
- Read and send SMS messages
- Make and/or record phone conversations
- Phish login credentials/ hijack social media accounts
- Get access to all private photos and files on the…
You are so much a part of the system that it’s impossible to see beyond it
As a kid I had a difficult time understanding the meaning of “indifference”, especially because I could not relate it to anything I remotely felt myself or saw around. How can it possibly happen that something happened and you just don’t respond to it, you nullify it, ignore it’s existence and just carry forward with whatever you were doing. As a kid, I was puzzled.
It’s funny how things have turned around the other way as I stepped into adulthood. People are indifferent to things or other people around to unbelievable extents. Everyone is consumed in their own little world, mostly centered around themselves. They believe they are having their own lives in their own ways, as if they control them (independently). We often forget that we are living as a part of a huge system. A system containing subsystems within it. A system that decides what is right , what is wrong, what is allowed and what is not. Pondering? …
Instagram and self-validation
Hello, hi, hola, how you folks doing today? Welcome to this brand new post (written again in odd timings).
So what’s this post about? Well, has Instagram “likes” functionality changed for you recently? If yes, congrats, you are in the selected set of people on whom Instagram is testing out this feature. For those who don’t know, Instagram recently rolled out a patch for selected users that hides the count of likes.
Check this out:
In short, instead of 120287 people liked your pic, you and others would see, <someName> and others like your pic. Basically, hiding the count of likes. One can still tap and see who all liked it but you won’t be getting the count, unless of course you are dedicated enough to count all the way through the list. …
Hola! It has been a significant time since my last medium post, ah, life as we know it. But hey, here I am, back with this post. And no wonders that me being sleep deprived while writing is just one blog-post away from becoming a ritual. (Also, on a side note, stumbled on this track by Camila and the beats are so darn addictive.)
Anyway, so what’s this post about? I recently traveled to Kochi for C0C0N conference, and post that I had some free days so I decided to explore the beautifully green city of Kochi. Kochi is so green that even the woods are not woody, leaves all over branches and trunk (I named them “bearded” trees in my head). It was humid as well. If you see the map of Kochi, it has backwaters, so land and water keep playing with their presences across the city. So much so that when I booked an Uber, the driver asked, “Ma’am, will you prefer to go by road or water?” and I was confused. I told him, it’s an Uber, it has four wheels, so I think road should be fine. …
Internet behaves in unnatural way
What we are going to discuss in this post is rather a very relevant trend, most of us would have encountered some time or the other. We will be talking about three generic cases (hopefully resonating with your internal me too voices) as we move along.
(1) It’s O(1) to like a page and O(n) to remove it effectively
We mean liking a page or following content is made so much easier, it’s just a click away. You would argue that removing it also a click away, yes? But guess what, in majority of cases this doesn’t happen. Some pages you might unfollow if they come to your attention, but what about hundreds of other that never make it to your feed, thanks to all the personalized filtering. How do you unfollow them? Well, the typical way is to go to the list of liked pages and unfollow them one by one as deemed fit, in the worst case you have to go through ’n’ pages in order to unfollow the one page, hence the increased complexity. It’s only by design that the filtered newsfeed and exploding content makes us retain and exposed to a lot of uninteresting crap. While Gmail and Instagram have made it relatively easy to unsubscribe irrelevant content, other mediums should also adopt it, the “one click to unfollow” approach. …
Can we be emotionally attached to bots?
This post brings out a perspective, a perspective on human-robot relationships should look like. Though robocists and researchers around the world are striving hard to blur the line differentiating robots from humans in terms of looks and functionality, is this the right direction for us to head in?
Wondering? No, don’t imagine the movie terminator, we won’t be talking about that reality, what we want to talk in this post is something much complex, it’s about the psychological aspects that start getting involved in all the interactions we have with machines.
For building context, let’s start with Jibo!
Jibo was one of the first social robots. Unlike Alexa or Siri, the robot didnot have a lot of functionalities, however it was designed as a friend to human in the way it interacts or looks around. This advertising video elaborates on how a normal conversation with Jibo looked…
