Soham Chakraborty

Linux consultant for a job, good movies, good music and good books for food of soul

[Mitchell Hashimoto @mitchellh]

I can’t stress enough how little an idea matters compared to the agency of the people executing the idea.

I have had the privilege of knowing and sometimes even working with some of the most successful people (by various metrics).

The difference between mediocre and excellent work and outcomes is predominantly one of agency.

In practice this means: they dont wait for things to happen to them they go out and make things happen for them.

They don’t wait for someone else to do something, for someone to teach them, for someone to give them the path, etc. They just go out and find a way to do it.

I think the single biggest superpower these people have is the realization/belief that the world around them is completely mutable. Most everything that happens is because a person made it happen.

I used to tell people to look around the room you’re sitting in. Look at everything. Every noun. It almost all exists because a person willed it into existence. Nothing is stopping you from doing the same.

I see people online all the time dismissing someone else’s success because “I had that idea first” or whatever. I mean… yeah? If so then the difference is… you. So a bit of a self own whenever I hear that.

Number one tip: act with agency.

[Soham Chakraborty @Soham_tweet]

@prukalpa Hi there, we are trying to do a vendor neutral conference in Kolkata, India on 5th of December and would love to see you there. Is there a way I can reach out to you to share details? Thanks.

[Nikhil Pahwa @nixxin]

A company called eka care messaged us out of the blue, with a copy of our childs doctors prescription.

We checked the website, and they're an "AI Native Ambient Healthcare platform" for "patient context".

So our childs data is being collected in an ambient manner and used for AI? without verifiable consent by the doctor.

We certainly don’t want patient context to be developed around our child by this platform. Eka’s privacy policy explicitly says that they retain the right to: “programmatically use Your data to give You contextual Services.” The DPDP Act also says and despite parental consent, there should be no behavioral monitoring of the child. health data over time is behavioral data.

Their privacy policy was written for the IT Act, not DPDPA.

It doesn’t have purpose limitation, which means that they claim that they can use the data for any purpose, which could include AI training.

Their website also doesn’t mention any Data Protection Officer. They also disclaim any liability for data breaches, which is a red flag.

They also say that withdrawal of consent will not be retroactive. DPDP gives us the right to erasure.

the website points towards their terms of use, which on their website point to the privacy policy which points towards terms of use (which don't exist).

I've drafted and sent a withdrawal of consent notice to the doctor and told him that he's the data fiduciary, and hence responsible for taking parental consent, and what they do with the data... the liability will fall on him and he's dealing with childrens data.

[IT Unprofessional @it_unprofession]

We had a compliance auditor from a Big 4 accounting firm in the office last week.

He was 26 years old, wore a branded fleece vest, and had the nervous energy of someone who just drank three cold brews.

He sat in my office, opened his spreadsheet, and asked to see our disaster recovery redundancy logs.

We don't have redundancy logs.

Our entire backup strategy consists of an external hard drive I keep in my bottom desk drawer and update whenever I feel like it.

I haven't felt like it since October of 2021.

I couldn't tell him that, so I offered him a sparkling water and calmly closed my office door.

I told him we abandoned traditional sequential logging because it was hopelessly vulnerable to chronometric spoofing.

He stopped typing on his laptop and just stared at me.

I explained that our backups exist in a state of continuous quantum flux across a decentralized hybrid-mesh network.

I said we don't take snapshots of the data, we take temporal impressions of the server state.

He asked to see the physical documentation for the temporal impressions.

I told him that observing the data fundamentally alters the encryption hash, triggering a localized collapse of the security perimeter.

I leaned in, looked him dead in the eyes, and whispered the phrase "Schrödinger's data packet."

He started sweating profusely.

He knew that if he asked me to clarify, he would expose the fact that he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

In corporate consulting, admitting ignorance to a senior executive is a career death sentence.

So he just nodded vigorously, swallowed hard, and typed the words "Quantum Mesh Validation" into his spreadsheet.

He didn't ask to see a single file after that.

Instead, he spent the next 4 hours auditing the physical locks on the server room doors because it was the only thing his brain could comprehend.

He meticulously tested every RFID scanner while I watched an entire season of a true-crime documentary on my second monitor.

Before he left for the day, he shook my hand and thanked me for running such a forward-thinking infrastructure.

He told his managing partner that our proprietary architecture was lightyears ahead of industry standards.

He certified our compliance framework for another two full years.

I celebrated by taking a 3-hour nap on a pile of uninstalled ethernet cables in the sub-basement.

The entire cybersecurity industry is just a massive LARP where everyone is terrified that the other person is smarter than them.

If you speak with conviction and use enough multi-syllabic buzzwords, you can convince a professional auditor that a USB drive is a military-grade cloud array.

I'm untouchable as long as I can invent new ways to combine adjectives with networking terms.

Next year, I'm going to tell them we use kinetic blockchain virtualization.

It doesn't mean anything, but it's going to save me at least 10 hours of paperwork.

[Aaditya Aanand @biased_human]

I live in Bengaluru. I leave for badminton every day at 6:40 am on my bike. But I booked an auto to the court today. It is Indiranagar, auto arrived within minutes but I was still getting ready. To my surprise, driver neither called me nor he was angry when I went downstairs. He was busy scrolling reels.

I gave my OTP and the ride started. There is a signal near to my house. It was green but only 4 seconds were left. Driver accelerated but the timer ran out. We were stuck at the signal for next 90 seconds. To my left stopped a Tata Nexon. The lady driving must be in her early 30s. She turned off her engine, picked her phone and started scrolling reels.

I reached court on time but my friend was yet to come. I went to reception to ask about the court number. An old uncle who was of my father's age was sitting there. He didn't respond in the first time. He had held his phone to his eye level and was busy scrolling reels.

My court number was 3. It was 6:55 am. This court was probably booked by 5 people from 6 to 7 am. 4 were playing doubles and the 5th guy was waiting. He wasn't bothered about watching the game, he was busy scrolling reels.

Reels have quietly taken over the world.

[Aaditya Aanand @biased_human]

30 years from now India will be an example of how social media ruined a country.

If everyone is sick, we no longer call it a disease. One such disease that is widespread in India today is watching reels for hours and hours. India has cheap and fast data. People have a lot of time and there are millions of unemployed youth so what are they doing? Doom scrolling.

You see around, every single person is scrolling reels. People are scrolling while commuting in bus, train, cabs. They scroll just after waking up and just before sleeping, while eating and even during traffic signal. You'll see people scrolling in office and even when they are with friends and family.

Even children today are scrolling. They won't have food without reels or shorts. Imagine how are we raising our upcoming generation? Adults and children both are spending 3-4 hours on social media everyday. That's 25% of waking hours. Everyone's brain is rotten, foggy and fried so how we as a nation will be productive?

This should be treated as an epidemic and the least our government can do is to ban social media for kids just like Australia did a while ago. Maybe, ban for adults also.

[Soham Chakraborty @Soham_tweet]

Fighters like Royval are a treat to watch. Gives everything for the sport he loves. #ufc329

[Jasveer Singh @jasveer10]

One thing India seriously lacks is dignity of labour. Watched something at my office gate today that stayed with me.

A security guard asked a man in a car for his ID. Standard procedure. The man ignored him and kept moving.

The guard stopped the car anyway. Did his job.

The man rolled down his window and spent the next two minutes announcing who he was, his name and that he owns property here. etc..

He wasn’t explaining. He was trying to establish hierarchy.

Because a man doing a 15,000/month job had the audacity to do it properly.

What struck me wasn’t the shouting. It was the choice of target.

People rarely intimidate those with more power. They save that energy for waiters, drivers, security guards, anyone who can’t answer back.

We’ve built a society where the same person touches the feet of someone powerful, then speaks rudely to the one serving them food five minutes later.

If your ego only works on people who can’t push back, it’s not confidence. It’s insecurity disguised as status.

Every honest job deserves dignity. A person’s profession shouldn’t determine the respect they receive.

[Soham Chakraborty @Soham_tweet]

@Wise Hi there, I am trying to setup a business acount from India and I am unable to capture the details of a document. Is there an option to get help from a fellow human?

[Soham Chakraborty @Soham_tweet]

The Boys is peak television.

[Parimal @Fintech03]

Imagine a man standing on a rooftop in Calcutta at midnight. The city is asleep, but he is awake, watching an invisible pulse of energy bounce off the edge of the world & come back home. He was the 1st Indian to realize that the Void above us is actually a bridge. In 1935, while the British Raj dismissed Indian science as theoretical & primitive, a man in a quiet corner of Calcutta was aiming a radio beam at the heavens like a silver spear. He was not looking for God; he was looking for a mirror in the sky that everyone said did not exist & when he found it, he realized he had discovered the secret Electric Skin of the planet.

Before Sisir Kumar Mitra, the world knew of the Ionosphere, but they thought it was a simple, single layer. Mitra was the 1st to prove the existence of the E-Layer & the complexity of the F-Layer specifically over the tropics. Using a primitive, hand-built radio transmitter, he sent signals upward & timed their return. He discovered that the air 100km above Calcutta was ringing like a bell.

He proved that the Sun does not just give us light; it strips the air of its electrons, creating a celestial mirror. This is why we can hear a radio station from a 1000 KMs away at night. Mitra was the 1st man to map the Radio-Geography of the Indian sky.

In the 1920s, the British were very protective of Broadcasting. They did not want Indians having the power to transmit information wirelessly. Sisir Kumar Mitra did not care. He set up the 1st amateur radio station in India at the University College of Science in Calcutta.

He was essentially a pirate for science. He began broadcasting a call-sign that could be heard across the city, proving that an Indian could master the most advanced tech of the era. The British were furious but could not stop him because he was doing research. He paved the way for All India Radio using a rebel transmitter.

In 1947, he published his magnum opus, The Upper Atmosphere. When the book arrived in the United States & the USSR, the scientists there were stunned. They thought a colonial scientist would only have outdated data. Instead, Mitra’s book was so advanced that it became the "Holy Book of Space Science" for the 1st decade of the Space Age.

When the Soviets launched Sputnik in 1957, the engineers tracking its signal were using the atmospheric models created by a man in a humid room in Calcutta. The 1st satellite in space was talking through a sky that Sisir Kumar Mitra had already mapped.

Near the end of his life, Mitra turned his eyes toward the Moon. He was one of the 1st to mathematically suggest that the Moon might have a plasma envelope/a very thin atmosphere of ions. For decades, this was dismissed. It was not until the Chandrayaan-1 mission & modern probes that the Lunar Ionosphere was confirmed. Mitra was right about the Moon half a century before India actually went there.

Sisir Kumar Mitra was the man who turned the sky into a lab, proving that even under the weight of an Empire, an Indian mind could reach 300 kilometers straight up & touch the edge of space with nothing but a radio wave & a dream.

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

"I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted and behold, service was joy."

Literature laureate Rabindranath Tagore dedicated his life to poetry, art and music, composing the Indian national anthem and the national anthem of Bangladesh.

[The Nobel Prize @NobelPrize]

We're celebrating the 165th anniversary of the birth of a true great: Rabindranath Tagore, who was born #onthisday 7 May, in 1861 in Calcutta, India.

The first non-European literature laureate, he was awarded the #NobelPrize "because of his profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse, by which, with consummate skill, he has made his poetic thought, expressed in his own English words, a part of the literature of the West."

Read more: https://t.co/cglURuTyvy

#Tagore165

[Arnab Ray @greatbong]

https://t.co/fKjBxzllIt

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Roald Dahl told kids that good thoughts shine out of your face like sunbeams. Forty-five years later, neuroscientists ran the experiments. He was basically right.

Charles Darwin had a version of this idea in 1872. He wrote a whole book about it called The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. He thought that showing a feeling makes you feel it more, and that the expressions you wear every day eventually settle into your face.

A 2011 study at USC and Duke tested the first part on real people. They compared patients who got Botox to patients who got a different filler that doesn't paralyze the muscles. Then they showed both groups photos of strangers and asked them to guess the emotion on each face. The Botox group did worse. Your face and your brain are wired in a loop. Freeze one side and the other goes quiet too.

There's a body version of the same effect. Years of stress flood the body with cortisol. Cortisol breaks down the collagen and elastin that hold your skin together. A 2024 paper in the Journal of Cosmetic Dermatology measured this on actual people. Subjects with sustained moderate stress had visibly more wrinkles, thinner skin, and slower healing than the mild-stress group.

Years of furrowed brows etch the lines in. Years of clenched jaws change the shape of your cheek.

There's also a longevity study from the University of Kentucky, published in 2001. Researchers scored 180 women's handwritten autobiographies that they wrote at age 22. Sixty years later, the ones with the most positive emotion in their writing were dying at less than half the rate of the ones with the least. By age 80, 60% of the unhappy group had died. Only 25% of the happy group had.

And total strangers actually pick up on it. People can judge personality traits from a neutral photo of someone they've never met, with accuracy better than random guessing. The judgments aren't always fair. The face you've practiced for years still broadcasts something to a stranger in under a second.

Dahl called it sunbeams. The technical version is uglier but it's the same idea. The expressions you wear most often reshape the muscles you use to make them. Cortisol from chronic stress breaks down the skin around those muscles. And you partly read other people's emotions by mirroring their expressions on your own face, so a face that can't move can't mirror well either. Your face is a thirty-year diary of what you've been thinking about.

[Sanjeev Sanyal @sanjeevsanyal]

The Dark One, Goddess of Time, turns the Wheel of Epochs, slows but surely.

[Parimal @Fintech03]

He worked in a lab so small & hot that his sweat would often ruin his notes. He did not build a bomb/a satellite, but he solved a puzzle that was killing millions. In 1959, from a Silo in Calcutta, Sambhunath De discovered the secret pump that drains human life. He is the father of ORS: the ghost behind the most successful medical intervention in history. He was nominated for the Nobel by the world’s greatest giants, yet he died in 1985 traveling by local bus, unrecognized by the very people whose children he had saved.

Born in 1915 in a small village in West Bengal, S.N. De did not come from a family of elite scientists. He worked at the Nil Ratan Sircar (NRS) Medical College, Calcutta. While elite scientists were building rockets, De was working in a tiny, cramped lab with barely any ventilation. He did not have high-end sensors. He used his own intuition & rudimentary tools to study how certain invisible forces acted on human cells.

S.N. De solved the mystery of Cholera, but in a way that was pure Fluid Physics & Biophysics. For a century, the world thought Cholera was a blood infection. In 1959, in his tiny lab, De proved it was a toxin that attacked the fluid-transport mechanisms of the gut. He discovered the Cholera Toxin (CT). He demonstrated how the toxin created a pump that sucked water out of cells, a masterclass in osmotic pressure & molecular transport.

This discovery is the direct reason why ORS (Oral Rehydration Salt) exists. If we/anyone we know has ever been saved by a packet of ORS, we owe our life to S.N. De.

In 1954, Nobel Laureate Joshua Lederberg wrote to the Nobel Committee saying that S.N. De’s work was worthy of the prize. He was nominated multiple times, but like many Indian scientists, he was a Ghost in a colony. The prize never came.

In 1978, the Nobel Foundation organized a symposium on Cholera. They realized the man who started it all, S.N. De, was still alive in Calcutta. They invited him, & he arrived at the high-end gala in a simple suit, looking like a retired clerk.

He was a man of aggressive humility. He lived in a small house, traveled by local buses, & never sought patents for his discovery. He wanted the Signal (the cure) to be free for the world. His own family knew him as a dedicated doc who went to the lab every day. They had no idea that Nobel Prize winners in Europe & America were referencing his 1959 paper as 1 of the most important scientific documents of the 20th century.

[Soham Chakraborty @Soham_tweet]

@CRED_support Did you take "LONGER" now? Probably time to change your name to Cred Scam?

[Soham Chakraborty @Soham_tweet]

@CRED_club I got a completely wrong product from store order. I had ordered a music player and received a mobile phone holder. Can you look into it?

[Soham Chakraborty @Soham_tweet]

@amazonIN Customer support is so horrible that I a piano piece of 15 minutes seem refreshing compared to the pile of shit the support guy spits out.

[Soham Chakraborty @Soham_tweet]

Jiri snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. #ufc327