divyesh

i like to tweet about movies, crypto, product, and idiosyncrasies in life. interested in start-ups and entrepreneurship.

[divyesh @divyeshsharma]

"take care" is such a widely used and rarely followed advice.

[divyesh @divyeshsharma]

@shashank_kr @Razorpay how are ensuring that an intern in your company or junior developer is not breaking exisiting functionality which was already working?
whats the review process like?
i am talking about only new features and bugs only

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Your body replaces 98% of its atoms every year. Within five years, every single one is swapped out. The you from 2021 is physically gone. Not "mostly gone." Gone. The atoms that used to be your face are now part of the air, the ocean, somebody else's lunch.

Oak Ridge National Laboratory proved this in 1953. Your skin right now is about a month old. Your liver, six weeks. Your stomach lining regrows every five days. Your skeleton is completely different from ten years ago. A few atoms do stick around for life, buried in some brain cells, in parts of your heart, and in your tooth enamel. Scientists at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden tracked them using leftover radiation from 1950s nuclear bomb tests. The oldest surviving piece of "you" lives in your brain, your heart, and your teeth.

Your brain is also erasing you. On purpose. A neuroscientist named Ron Davis at Scripps Research found that the brain has cells that release dopamine, the same chemical you feel after a good meal or a win, and use it to dissolve memories. When his team shut these cells off in test animals, they remembered twice as much. The chemical behind your best feelings is the same one shredding your past, and it never stops running.

Ebbinghaus proved this back in 1885. You lose about half of everything you learn within one hour. A 2020 study from Baycrest's Rotman Research Institute had people live through a real experience and then checked how much they kept. At best, about a quarter. 75% of the details of your own life are being actively wiped by the organ that is supposed to be keeping track of it all.

The universe is 13.8 billion years old. Squeeze all of it into one calendar year, with the Big Bang on January 1st, and humans show up at 11:52 PM on New Year's Eve. Your whole life, every birthday and breakup and boring Tuesday, lasts 0.17 seconds on that calendar. Not even long enough to blink.

Stars will keep burning for about a hundred trillion more years, then the fuel runs out and the lights go off everywhere. The last things left will be black holes, places where gravity is so strong not even light can escape. Even those slowly leak away over a number of years so large you would need a hundred zeros to write it. After the last one is gone, nothing is left. No light, no warmth, nothing bumping into anything else, ever again. The universe reaches total stillness and stays there. Forever.

Brian Cox once described the window where life can even exist as one-thousandth of a billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth, billion billion billionth of a percent of the universe's total run time. You are in that window right now. Built from borrowed atoms, running on a brain shredding its own records, here for a fifth of a second on a cosmic calendar that ends in permanent silence. Anyway, hope your Tuesday is going alright.

[Kunal Kamra @kunalkamra88]

“Come at your own risk” should be a tagline for Delhi Tourism.

[kache @yacineMTB]

Just use your software! Open the network tab. Question why the spaces bar isn't rendering 50% of the time! Look at it for 5 seconds! Just read the code! It doesn't matter if you don't own the service. Just go and fix it! Nothing is stopping you

Measure. Graph.
More live viewers

[andi (twocents.com) @Nexuist]

My favorite pet example of this is the follow button architecture (you better read this because it’s an example of what we hide from you to save you time):

Okay, it’s just a fucking button, you click on it and it inserts a row in the follows table and it changes color, right?

Well:

* What does the button do if the user isn’t logged in? Does it redirect to the login page or silently fail? Does the login page have a mechanism to take you back to the same page the user started from when they first clicked follow? Should they have to click follow again or should the app somehow remember and automatically follow them when they’re logged in?

* What if the user is banned? Can they still follow people if their account is disabled?

* Do we notify the other user they just got followed? How? Do we send an email? Do we have an SMTP server? Do we use a mail SaaS? Is our domain blacklisted on spam lists? Do we do push notifications? Are we collecting APNS tokens? Oh, for Android we need a Firebase project. Are we using Firebase? No? Fuck, we need procurement to approve it. I’ll put a ticket in

* What if a user follows someone on one page but they have 7 different tabs of our app open? Should we do some kind of real time updating system to apply it across their tabs and devices? Do we use WebSockets? SSE? How do we scale that up to 100,000 DAU?

* What if you follow a user and they block you? Do we delete their follow relationship (soft block), or do we show you a blocked page if you try to visit their profile?

* What if YOU block them? Does it unfollow them? Or do you still get their content in their feed?

* Do we show any special labels for mutuals? So on every page load we have to retrieve all your follows and then join that table with all of THEIR follows to find intersections. Hopefully that’s a fast query. Maybe we index this? Maybe we have a cron job run every hour to dump your mutuals into a separate table

* Etc etc. I have to go to dinner so I’ll stop typing. But what I would say here is:

“Oh yeah, follow button, should be easy, just a button and another table, should have it ready by tomorrow”

[svs 🇮🇳 @_svs_]

The punishment for corruption in China is execution.

When the money for the people reaches the people, you get cities that work and freedom from fear (not claiming either of these about China, surely there are )

Freedom from fear is a prerequisite for ambitious, long-term thinking. A person worried about survival will not have a long term horizon. A person worried about survival will have compromised ethics. They see that no one is coming to save them and will do whatever is necessary to save themselves.

And when such a person steps out into our cities, they see everything is broken and they accept this brokenness deep into their bones, into their soul. Civilisational pride is born in the daily lived experience of people, not in their mythologies.

Indian administrators are blind to the psychic burden their administrative failures place on our population. Because they have failed themselves too and are now doing the next best thing - looking out for themselves.

When everyone is looking out for themselves we cannot accumulate social capital. We can no longer dream of doing big things together.

If we are to dream and do big things together, we will need a better State, a better daily lived experience, proof that we can do things well, belief in ourselves.

[NanoBaiter @NanoBaiter]

1/ Meet Sushil Chouhan, An Indian national who owns a scam call center in New Delhi, India. He has been scamming thousands of innocent people since November 2023.

[divyesh @divyeshsharma]

paatal lok season 2 is just an amazing refreshing watch after months of drought in cinema and OTT.. what a powerful and moving ending the series had! amazing stuff

[Gergely Orosz @GergelyOrosz]

I see so much FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about the future of sw engineering, mostly from non-devs. Along the lines of “soon anyone can spin off AI agents in bulk that act as hundreds of devs.”

A false premise. Just open your airline app that is built by ~hundreds of devs.

[divyesh @divyeshsharma]

amazing stuff...,

[Rithwik Jayasimha @thel3l]

Last month, a number sent me malware via an APK titled 'Union Bank Aadhar Update' on Whatsapp.

These typically just lamely forward all SMSes received to steal OTPs, but this one turned out to be a significantly more sophisticated op.

Some notes from taking down a scam network:

[divyesh @divyeshsharma]

goa issa vibe

[divyesh @divyeshsharma]

@AmanHasNoName_2 @deepigoyal even when there's no policy, they do give out refunds once you contact their customer support .. this is only applicable if the order hasn't picked up

[divyesh @divyeshsharma]

maybe i should tweet more often.

[divyesh @divyeshsharma]

@AmanHasNoName_2 @deepigoyal good question... the only reason i can understand is zomato wants to get rid of liability of giving refunds to original customers... they will soon tell customer that since no one has repurchased the order, they are giving zero refund

[divyesh @divyeshsharma]

Nobel prize for physics 2024 going to Godfather of AI who specializes in computer science and machine learning is probably the biggest sign that next doomsday is not coming through modern physics principles.. but rather through higher intelligence machines...

[divyesh @divyeshsharma]

be it starbucks for new gen or vistara for upper middle class or putting automobiles within reach to millions of indians through tata nano or the hospitality of Taj Hotel.. the aura of brands which Ratan Tata created is a force that will live forever

[divyesh @divyeshsharma]

leaving aside the humilty and good nature of Ratan Tata for a moment , I would like to celebrate the management brain that went behind in creating world class brands and putting India on world map in delivering excellent quality of service to users...

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

If you want to fix a broken system, you have to pull money OUT, not put more money IN.
If you put more money IN, the system interprets it as a reward and uses the money to become even more broken.
We get this for businesses. We forget it for nonprofits and governments. 🤔

[Kyle Chan @kyleichan]

If you want to understand the depth of China's industrial policy and economic statecraft, look at gallium.

China produces 98% of the world's gallium, which is not mined directly but is a byproduct of aluminum production. China makes 59% of the world's aluminum.

DARPA originally helped to develop gallium nitride (GaN) which is a semiconductor material used for next-gen radar systems, high-speed power charging, 5G base stations, and consumer electronics.

Since as early as 2008, China has poured state resources into developing GaN semiconductors as a way to potentially leapfrog the traditional silicon-based semiconductor industry. Chinese entities have tried to acquire GaN technology from the US and elsewhere.

Chinese state-owned enterprises, such as China Railway Construction Corporation, have invested in bauxite mining in Guinea, which has the world's largest reserves. Bauxite ore is the main ingredient for aluminum and thus gallium production. Chinese policy has required domestic aluminum producers to also extract gallium.

A surge in Chinese gallium production in the 2010s caused volatility in global prices. Most other countries shut down their gallium production, leaving basically just China. Now China is able to use its dominance in gallium production as a leverage point over global supply chains. Last year, China announced new restrictions on the export of gallium in response to US-led semiconductor restrictions on China. Since then, China's gallium exports have dropped by half.

The gallium example shows the breadth and sophistication of policy tools that China uses to dominate a critical industry, from SOE-led foreign mining deals to special requirements for domestic aluminum producers.

Much of this is a summary of an excellent CSIS report from last year by Matthew Funaiole, @BrianTHart, and Aidan Powers-Riggs. Check out the full report:

De-risking Gallium Supply Chains: The National Security Case for Eroding China’s Critical Mineral Dominance
https://t.co/5P6U3qtXHB

Also see this recent FT piece: China’s export curbs on semiconductor materials stoke chip output fears
https://t.co/dWv2xdGMT9

[divyesh @divyeshsharma]

time without a purpose is a prison.