Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

October 2, 2025

Celebrating 21 Years of my Blog

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

Today marks the 21st year since I made the first blog post on this site on 2nd Oct 2004. So it’s been 21 years that I have been posting random thoughts online and life is a lot different from when I started posting here. Since I first posted on the blog, I have moved to a different continent (and multiple cities), switched jobs multiple times, got married. (Interestingly my wedding anniversary is coming up as well in little over a weeks time as well).

During this time the site has:

Total Published posts : 1,607
Total Published Comments : 793
Most popular post is: “Trip of a Lifetime: Antarctica!” with 47,249 views
The top 3 Countries of blog visitors are: US, India and Russia (Definitely wasn’t expecting Russia to make it to the top 3).

I like having a blog because I control what goes on it and how it is presented. No one can force me to remove a post or penalize me for posting something that the algorithm didn’t like and now that the blog is federated posts here are autoshared and publicly searchable on Mastodon, LinkedIn and Facebook (mostly as FB gives so much trouble trying to autopost). This is in accordance to POSSE (Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere), which is the practice of posting content on your own site first, then publishing copies or sharing links to third parties (like social media silos) with original post links to provide viewers a path to directly interacting with your content.

Thank you all for reading my ramblings over the years and letting me know that you actually like the stuff I post. 🙂

Well this is all for now. Will post more later.

– Suramya

September 24, 2025

No pets for employees because it distracts them from customers

Filed under: My Thoughts,Tech Related — Tags: — Suramya @ 10:20 PM

If you listen to companies online you will hear this common refrain that people don’t want to work or that it is so hard to find good resources. Then you read posts from companies which will make you think “What on earth did I read? and is this guy serious?”. The latest example of this kind of post is from Raymond Guo at Noon AI who posted the following gem on LinkedIn:

At Noon Al, we don't believe employees should own pets Pets demand time and emotional energy that belong to our customers. We once had an employee who had a pet. No surprise, he had a terrible work ethic. Our team's focus is singular: building the world's best Al recruiting platform. Since enforcing this policy, we've cut distractions and boosted productivity by 25%. Dogs, cats, or fish.. they're liabilities when global clients expect instant support. Commitment means no divided loyalties, even to a pet This is the Noon Al mentality. If you disagree, I'd love to see what your revenue is!
No pets for employees because it distracts them from our customers

At Noon Al, we don’t believe employees should own pets
Pets demand time and emotional energy that belong to our customers.
We once had an employee who had a pet.
No surprise, he had a terrible work ethic.
Our team’s focus is singular: building the world’s best AI recruiting platform.
Since enforcing this policy, we’ve cut distractions and boosted productivity by 25%.
Dogs, cats, or fish.. they’re liabilities when global clients expect instant support.
Commitment means no divided loyalties, even to a pet
This is the Noon Al mentality.
If you disagree, I’d love to see what your revenue is!

Or put it another way, we want to suck all remaining joy out of your life because it will allow us to exploit you a little bit more and earn a few extra dollars. If I was told this in an interview or after I was hired I would immediately resign/start looking for another job even though I don’t have a pet and am not planning to get one. If the company is exploitive enough that they are restricting you from getting a pet (which is a personal choice and frankly none of their business) then there is no way they will allow you to have a personal life… The company might make some money in the short term by squeezing their employees but in the long term they will loose talent, and money because people will not want to work in such conditions if they have any other options.

Unfortunately this is not an uncommon way of thinking. Multiple people post daily on LinkedIn (and other forums) expecting employees to be virtual slaves and have no other interests and work other than to slave away in the office making them money. Take the following post as an example:

Full text below the image
If you take vacations or self-care holidays then you should be fired

About half a dozen times in the past six months, I’ve emailed with a junior person
at a firm who has said blithely “sorry, I can’t meet or talk that week” or “I didn’t
read my email last week” because … wait for it … “I was / will be on vacation.

Look, you can say whatever you want about vacation and time off. You can have
whatever opinion you want about work/life balance. There are a thousand fields in
which to work, a million jobs to have in life.

But if your job title is venture CAPITALIST — if you are looking to invest in high-
velocity, high-octane startups — if you are a junior person at your VENTURE
CAPITAL firm that is seeking to match up with hardcore entrepreneurs — if you’re a
junior person whose job it is to hunt deals and find treasures and make
connections to other VCs and to the startups they fund — and if you are treating
yourself to “phones down” vacations and “self care holidays” — you should just be
fired. That’s it. No exceptions. Just fired

This is one of the more ridiculous ways of looking at things that I have seen and trust me I have seen a lot of them in the past 25 years in the industry. If you are a fresher or junior person this might seem normal to you but trust me it isn’t. You need to have time for yourself to recharge/reset else you are on fast track to burnout. It might not happen immediately but the long term impacts are there (and I am telling you this from personal experience).

My suggestion to my team and juniors is that they should get a hobby that takes them away from the computer for a little while and set reasonable expectations on their work. That is not to say in an emergency they will be required to be there till the issue gets resolved but for most days I tell them to decide what time is the latest they would like to take calls (we work very closely a lot with US teams) and then ask their counterparts to schedule calls before that time.

Expecting folks to work the same hours as a founder/owner for a fraction of the pay & benefits doesn’t make sense (as an employee), Give overtime pay for extra hours worked and then you will see folks put in extra hours if they want to. You can’t get something for nothing remember.

– Suramya

September 22, 2025

9 Upcoming Astronomy Events to watch out for

Filed under: Astronomy / Space — Suramya @ 1:41 PM

9 Upcoming Astronomy Events to watch out for:

9 Upcoming Astronomy Events (Details below in body of post)
9 Upcoming Astronomy Events

  • Sep 21: Solar Eclipse (Not visible in India)
  • Sep 21: Saturn at Opposition
    • Saturn reaches opposition on Sunday, September 21st, passing closest to the Earth at just over 8.5 Astronomical Units (AU) or 1.3 billion kilometers distant, and rising opposite to the setting Sun. This marks the best time to view the ringed world, as it dominates the night sky from sunset until sunrise.
  • Sep 22: Autumn Equinox
  • Oct 02: Best Night to See Andromeda Galaxy
  • Oct 07: First Supermoon
  • Oct 21-22: Orionid Meteor Shower Peak
  • Nov 05: Biggest and Brightest Moon of the Year
  • Dec 13-14: Geminid Meteor Shower Peak
  • Dec 21: Winter Solstice

I am putting this as a post so that I remember the dates. Although, thanks to the rains in Bangalore not sure how many of these I will be able to see.

– Suramya

September 19, 2025

Swiss cheese font

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:48 AM

The Swiss cheese has a very unique look and from the first time I saw it in a Tom & Jerry cartoon, I have loved it. Designer Rob apparently loves it as well because he has created a font he calls Swiss Cheese Mono which is a typeface full of holes inspired by the Swiss cheese look.

Introducing Swiss Cheese Mono Font
Introducing Swiss Cheese Mono Font

The font is current in uppercase only and is available for sale at Swiss Cheese Mono font (uppercase only) for $2.99. From the description.

Swiss Cheese Mono is a chunky, sans-serif, monospaced display font created primarily from squares with circular “holes” in them. Currently available in uppercase only.

When Rob posted some images of the work-in-progress font on Threads, many of the nearly 33,000 people who liked the images said the font looked like Swiss cheese. After taking some photos of real cheese, playing around with Adobe Firefly’s generative AI image tools, and finishing the font, Swiss Cheese Mono was born.

I find the font a little hard to read as they are sort of like the images with perspective views that require you to squint in a particular way to see them correctly. So I doubt anyone is going to use it for anything professional (unless it is for food related posts/presentations) but it is still cool to see.

Source: mastodon.social/@cmconseils.

– Suramya

September 18, 2025

Creating a Phishy URL

Filed under: Humor,Interesting Sites,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 9:21 PM

Url shortners have been used for a while now to to reduce the length of a URL to something that can be easily shared online. It became extra popular at sites like Twitter which counted the URL length into the character count for the post (though that was later changed to a fixed number, 23 if I remember correctly). The disadvantage of such shortner’s was that they converted phishing links into a shorter URL that looked legit and the only way to figure out if the link was valid was to access it which could be risky due to Zero day exploits etc. This made life ‘interesting’ from a security controls perspective as it makes it harder to control/restrict such urls.

So someone decided to take it the other way and create a re-director that converts regular URL’s into a really fishy looking URL

This is a tool that takes any link and makes it look malicious. It works on the idea of a redirect. Much like https://tinyurl.com/ for example. Where tinyurl makes an url shorter, this site makes it look malicious.

Place any link in the below input, press the button and get back a fishy(phishy, heh…get, it?) looking link. The fishy link doesn’t actually do anything, it will just redirect you to the original link you provided.

You can try them out at https://phishyurl.com/. I asked the site to create a link to suramya.com/blog and it generated the following URL:

https://cheap-bitcoin.online/evil-hunter/exploit-jacker/fake_launcher_tool.exe?content=overwrite&id=824e35fe&origin=spoof&payload=%28function%28%29%7Blet+a%3D5%2Cb%3D3%3Blet+sum%3Da%2Bb%3B%7D%29%28%29%3B&portscan=scan&referer=tamper

If you visit the above link, it will take you to the blog homepage.

Source: chaos.social/@FlohEinstein

– Suramya

September 15, 2025

(Not a) Travel Hack: Spending on Credit card

Filed under: My Thoughts,Travel/Trips — Suramya @ 11:50 AM

I am an avid traveler to the point where I have traveled to all seven continents and have a goal of traveling to every country in the world. Obviously this requires money and some of these countries can be expensive to travel to and others are a lot cheaper. So when I saw a screenshot of a so called travel hack, I immediately checked it out and wow this is a bad take. You can see it in full below:

Little travel hack I've learned. You can spend A LOT of money on credit cards but you only need to pay back a very small minimum per month. I literally almost spent $30k this month already and I only need to pay back $80 for the month.
Little travel hack I’ve learned. You can spend A LOT of money on credit cards but you only need to pay back a very small minimum per month.
I literally almost spent $30k this month already and I only need to pay back $80 for the month.

This person doesn’t seem to understand how interest works so even though you only ‘have’ to pay $80 per month, you have to pay interest on the remaining amount. As per google, the average monthly interest on credit cards is 23.9% (as of Aug 2025) so that means that for a 30k debt you would incur an interest of $7,170 per month, reduce the $80 you paid and your outstanding debt comes to $37,090 at the end of the first month. The next month (assuming no further charges) you will owe an additional $8,864.51 in interest and so on. You see where I am going with this?

Instead of taking such a massive debt and end up paying multiple times the money it is better for you to save money (as much as you can) and when you have enough for a vacation/trip take it. Rinse and repeat.

When I first got a credit card my dad sat me down and explained how interest works. His guideline (which I still follow) is to spend as much as you want on the Credit card, as long as you can pay the balance in full at the end of the month.

Travel can be a lot cheaper than you think as long as you are careful and plan for it. Things like taking advantages of sales and traveling just before the season starts (or just as it is ending) can save you a lot of money. You don’t have to stay in the top 5 Star places… In fact Jani and me usually prefer cheaper places because for the most part we only come to the room to sleep. As long as it is clean and hygienic we are happy with it. This doesn’t include the trips where every once in a while we go all out and stay at fancy resorts, but even with them we try to do a package and get any discounts we can.

The other reason we can spend a lot of money on travel is that we don’t have many other expenses and thus can afford to spend a lot of our savings on travel related expenses (and my books and Gadgets & Jani’s Perfume collection 😉 )

Hope that some of you find this useful.

– Suramya

September 14, 2025

There is now a SQL port of Doom on CedarDB

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:06 AM

There is an ongoing joke that if a device can perform calculations and has a display it will be used to run Doom. The same way a programming language is considered successful if Doom has been ported to it. Lukas Vogel, has added one more language to the list of languages that were used to write a port of Doom entirely in SQL with CedarDB doing all the heavy lifting. His blog post (Building a DOOM-like multiplayer shooter in pure SQL) has a full writeup on the technical nuts and bolts of the implementation.


DOOMQL in action

Due to the limitations of the language and backend engine the implementation looks like an ASCII display instead of the the more familiar 3D art & sprites. That said this is an impressive achievement. I think this would be a good way to stress/load test a DB server. Atleast that is how I am going to pitch it, the next time I am involved in the setup and testing of a Database server.

Source :The Register: Just because you can render a Doom-like in SQL doesn’t mean you should

– Suramya

September 13, 2025

Flashmob of over 30 artists performing Bohemian Rhapsody in Paris

Filed under: Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 11:54 PM

Over 30 artists got together as a flash mob in the streets of Paris to perform Bohemian Rhapsody and it is an awesome performance! Check it out below:


The most INSANE Bohemian Rhapsody Flashmob you will ever see!!

Thanks @Privacymatters for sharing it.

– Suramya

September 11, 2025

Thinking about SciFi Voice command Interfaces from a usability perspective

Filed under: My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:08 AM

Saw the following post by @tante where they talk about how voice commands have been embedded in our consciousness for years as a really advanced user interface but practically speaking they would be a terrible interface.

Voice commands have been embedded into our vision of computing for a long time: Star Trek did it and it does the whole anthropomorphization thing that tech loves. But from a practical standpoint it's a bad interface: Think of a handful of people sitting in an office yelling at their computers, it would be like working next to people having loud phone calls all day. And who exactly wants every thing they do with their computer broadcasted around them?

“Voice commands” have been embedded into our vision of computing for a long time: Star Trek did it and it does the whole anthropomorphization thing that tech loves.

But from a practical standpoint it’s a bad interface: Think of a handful of people sitting in an office yelling at their computers, it would be like working next to people having loud phone calls all day.

And who exactly wants every thing they do with their computer broadcasted around them?

This is something that has bothered me pretty much since I first watched Star Trek (and how they interfaced with computers) and started working on computers myself. So it was good to see someone else share my point of view on this topic.

From usability perspective, a voice interface is one of the worst ways to interact with the computer, as it is imprecise. The caveat being that it is a good interface from an accessibility perspective but from a general purpose, everyday use I don’t think I would use voice to interact with a computer as it is a very limiting and insecure way to interact with a computer in my opinion.

The way Star Trek thinks about it is that the computer is advanced enough to understand what you are trying to do based on a single line command and then do it for you but we are nowhere near close to achieving that right now and even if the tech existed, imagine sitting in an open office setup where already it is annoying to work because you get to listen into random zoom calls & discussions happening around you. Now think about how bad it would be if we also had to listen to every command that people around you are issuing to their computer (followed by the numerous corrections), I would go mad if I had to listen to it for any period of time.

Another issue to think about when multiple people are working in a small area and trying to interact with their computer: How do you ensure that you are commands don’t accidentally run on your neighbor’s computer? Imagine sitting next to someone logged into a production database while you are connected to a dev database and you tell the computer to wipe all the data in the database. But in addition to the command running on your machine the machine next to you also heard the command and wipes out the entire production database.

In addition there is the whole security aspect of the technology to think about. Do you really want everyone around you to hear what you are working on? (Especially if it is something confidential). Plus authenticating verbally like how they do it on Star Trek is really insecure. In Star Trek when they are issuing a command that requires authentication the person actually just states their authentication code loudly for everyone around them to hear. That is absolutely insecure and easy to bypass. We already have technology that can imitate anyone’s voice really well, so this authentication code could easily be bypassed using similar tech. For example, they could create a Hologram version of the person and have that issue the command or use any of the other similar technology to achieve the same thing. In the non-fiction world, voice modifiers are already good enough to fool most if not all voice verification systems so having a verbal authentication code is not really a very secure way of doing things.

So, while it is cool and looks really futuristic I wouldn’t recommend a voice interface as the only way to work with a computer.

– Suramya

September 10, 2025

AI Darwin Awards nominations are now open

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,Humor — Suramya @ 3:35 AM

The original Darwin Awards celebrated those who “improved the gene pool by removing themselves from it” through spectacularly stupid acts and reading through the candidate list would make you seriously doubt the ability of humans to survive. Now thanks to evolution we have evolved beyond having to make bad decisions ourselves and now have the ability to let machines make bad decisions on our behalf. To celebrate this achievement, Nominations are now open for the first AI Darwin Awards (2025). From the AI Darwin Awards website:

Nomination Criteria

Your nominee must demonstrate a breathtaking commitment to ignoring obvious risks:

  • AI Involvement Required: Must involve cutting-edge artificial intelligence (or what they confidently called “AI” in their investor pitch deck).
  • Catastrophic Potential: The decision must be so magnificently short-sighted that future historians will use it as a cautionary tale (assuming there are any historians left).
  • Hubris Bonus Points: Extra credit for statements like “What’s the worst that could happen?” or “The AI knows what it’s doing!”
  • Ethical Blind Spots: Demonstrated ability to completely ignore every red flag raised by ethicists, safety researchers, and that one intern who keeps asking uncomfortable questions.
  • Scale of Ambition: Why endanger just yourself when you can endanger everyone? We particularly appreciate nominees who aimed for global impact on their first try.

Winning Criteria

Our distinguished panel of judges (and the occasional rogue AI) evaluates nominees based on:

  • Measurable Impact: Bonus points if your AI mishap made international headlines, crashed markets, or required new legislation named after you.
  • Creative Destruction: We appreciate innovative approaches to endangering humanity. Cookie-cutter robot uprisings need not apply.
  • Viral Stupidity: Did your AI blunder become a meme? Did it spawn a thousand think pieces? Did it make AI safety researchers weep openly?
  • Unintended Consequences: The best nominees never saw it coming. “But the AI was supposed to help!” is music to our ears.
  • Doubling Down: Extra recognition for those who, when confronted with evidence of their mistake, decided to deploy even more AI to fix it.

Current nominees are listed at 2025 Nominees and are hilarious. I mean it is better to laugh about this stuff than cry (or scream) so…

Be sure to submit your candidates for the AI Darwin Awards 2025 at the link above.

Source: The Register: AI Darwin Awards launch to celebrate spectacularly bad deployments

– Suramya

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