Suramya's Blog

February 9, 2025

Taking calls on Speaker in a French station will get you a €150 fine

Filed under: General/News — Suramya @ 10:05 AM

I find people who watch videos, listen to music or have phone conversations with their phone on speaker mode to be quite annoying but unfortunately it is a fairly common behavior across the world. I have read online that some folks have started carrying cheap disposable headsets that they hand out to folks who are doing this. I personally just ask them to put on a headset if they are next to me. (Had to do that in a flight where a guy next to me was watching a movie on speaker). The french have a different way of handling it which I quite like: they just fine the person. 🙂

A few days ago a passenger on the French rail network SNCF was issued a €150 fine for using his phone on loud speaker within a train station. He was asked to switch-off the speaker but instead argued with the official so was issued a fine.

The passenger, named only as David, told French TV channel BFM that he was on the phone to his sister while waiting at Nantes station when the SNCF staff member told him to switch his phone’s loud speaker off, or risk being fined.

When he argued, he was served with the €150 fine, which has been increased to €200 because he did not pay it immediately. David says he intends to hire a lawyer to contest the fine.

SNCF confirmed the fine, although its version said that David had been in a waiting room of the station.

A company spokesman told Le Parisien that he was issued with the fine for disturbing other passengers, saying: “If he had played music at a high volume, it would have been the same thing.”

It would be awesome if we can have the same thing in India as well. I doubt it will get implemented in trains but I definitely want it for Airports and flights.

Source: Slashdot: French Train Passenger Fined $155 For Using Phone on Speaker

– Suramya

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February 8, 2025

Reserve Bank of India launches exclusive domains ‘bank.in’ and ‘fin.in’ for Indian Banks to reduce cyber fraud

Filed under: Computer Security,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:49 PM

A big problem in online security is verifying that the site you are accessing is the authentic version. As techies we have a bunch of ways to check if the site is valid but for regular users it can be a hard problem to solve. I personally know a few folks who have been scammed out of a lot of money so it is a pretty prevalent problem in the industry.

One of the ways people get scammed is that they are sent a link to a site that looks like the official bank site but is instead a cloned version of the site that hijacks the entered password and OTP to steal money. To combat this issue and the problem of banking sites not having a verifiable URL / Domain name, the Government of India has announced the launch an exclusive “.bank.in” domain for banks starting from April 2025.

Similar to how the .gov address is a known domain name for US Government and .gov.in for official Indian Government sites this new domain will be for verified/validated banks only. The Institute for Development and Research in Banking Technology (IDRBT) will be the exclusive registrar for the new domain and will start rolling out in April.

In addition, the RBI is also planning to launch a “.fin.in” domain for non-bank entities in the financial sector. This will cover entities like paypal/PhonePe and other Fintech firms in India.

I think that this is a great idea and it would be awesome if we have have a global official .bank domain. But something like that would take a lot of time and coordination to implement so for now we will just have the India specific domains.

Source: Times of India: RBI announces exclusive domains ‘bank.in’ and ‘fin.in’ to enhance cyber security in Indian banking

– Suramya

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February 6, 2025

A Linux Distribution which runs directly within a PDF file

Filed under: Computer Software,Interesting Sites,Linux/Unix Related,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:01 PM

There is a semi-serious joke in the IT industry that anything that can compute is eventually used to play Doom and then run Linux. Now you can do both from inside a PDF file. Since the PDF specification supports Javascript a highschool student who goes by the handle ‘ading2210’ has implemented a RISC-V emulator in it which can run a barebones Linux distribution within the PDF file itself. This builds on top of the work done to get Doom to run inside the PDF file.

The full specfication for the JS in PDFs was only ever implemented by Adobe Acrobat, and it contains some ridiculous things like the ability to do 3D rendering, make HTTP requests, and detect every monitor connected to the user’s system. However, on Chromium and other browsers, only a tiny subset of this API was ever implemented, due to obvious security concerns. With this, we can do whatever computation we want, just with some very limited IO.

C code can be compiled to run within a PDF using an old version of Emscripten that targets asm.js instead of WebAssembly. With this, I can compile a modified version of the TinyEMU RISC-V emulator to asm.js, which can be run within the PDF. For the input and output, I reused the same display code that I used for DoomPDF. It works by using a separate text field for each row of pixels in the screen, whose contents are set to various ASCII characters. For inputs, there is a virtual keyboard implemented with a bunch of buttons, and a text box you can type in to send keystrokes to the VM.

The largest problem here is with the emulator’s performance. For example, the Linux kernel takes about 30-60 seconds to boot up within the PDF, which over 100x slower than normal. Unfortunately, there’s no way to fix this, since the version of V8 that Chrome’s PDF engine uses has its JIT compiler disabled, destroying its performance.

For the root filesystem, there are both 64 and 32 bit versions possible. The default is a 32 bit buildroot system (which was prebuilt and taken from the original TinyEMU examples), and also a 64 bit Alpine Linux system. The 64 bit emulator is about twice as slow however, so it’s normally not used.

You can try out the implementation of LinuxPDF here. More details of the project and the code used to create it is available on the project’s GitHub page.

– Suramya

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February 4, 2025

India’s tiger population has grown by 30% in the last two decades

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 5:56 PM

India’s national animal is the Tiger, which made it even more unfortunate that the population of Tigers in India was at an all time low a couple of decades ago. To counter this the government of India started multiple programs to encourage the tiger population to grow. Now after two decades of effort India’s tiger population has grown by 30%, which is a pretty big deal.

Recovery of large yet ecologically important carnivores poses a formidable global challenge. Tiger (Panthera tigris) recovery in India, the world’s most populated region, offers a distinct opportunity to evaluate the socio-ecological drivers of megafauna recovery. Tiger occupancy increased by 30% (at 2929 square kilometers per year) over the past two decades, leading to the largest global population occupying ~138,200 square kilometers. Tigers persistently occupied human-free, prey-rich protected areas (35,255 square kilometers) but also colonized proximal connected habitats that were shared with ~60 million people. Tiger absence and extinction were characterized by armed conflict, poverty, and extensive land-use changes. Sparing land for tigers enabled land sharing, provided that socioeconomic prosperity and political stability prevailed. India’s tiger recovery offers cautious optimism for megafauna recovery, particularly in the Global South.

In a research paper published in Science last week researchers discuss how “Tigers persistently occupied human-free, prey-rich protected areas (35,255 square kilometers) but also colonized proximal connected habitats that were shared with ~60 million people. Tiger absence and extinction were characterized by armed conflict, poverty, and extensive land-use changes. Sparing land for tigers enabled land sharing, provided that socioeconomic prosperity and political stability prevailed. India’s tiger recovery offers cautious optimism for megafauna recovery, particularly in the Global South.”

Assuming this trend keeps up, we can look forward to having a stable Tiger population in India once again.

Source: bsky.app: samillingworth.com

– Suramya

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February 3, 2025

Road Trip to Kanyakumari for a wedding

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:49 PM

Jani’s cousin got married last week in Kanyakumari (which is the southernmost tip of India) and Jani flew there on Saturday (25th Jan) for the event. Since I couldn’t take the whole week off I got there later by driving down from Bangalore to Kanyakumari. (Basically it was an excuse to do a solo road trip).

In total I drove 1640 kms in 4 days with ~22 hours of driving in total over 4 days. I started from Bangalore at 6:15am on Wednesday and reached the venue at ~5:30pm. The road was well maintained throughout as I took NH-44 most of the way. There is construction ongoing in places for flyovers which required minor detours/bad roads but other than that I could consistently drive at 100 without having to worry about random obstructions. This was the first trip where I drove for such a long time alone and before I started I was a little worried that I would get bored on the way but once I started it was really zen to just listen to music and drive.

One annoying aspect of the trip was Google Maps. It used to be really good but slowly Google has been removing functionality from the app and that gets annoying. Cory Doctorow calls this process Enshittification and this was a prime example of it. Earlier when you searched for directions between two points the app would allow you to drag and change the route. In addition it would also show all routes we could take everytime but now it will randomly select a path without the option to change or even see how long other routes would take. This time Google decided for some reason that NH-44 was closed for all traffic and kept insisting I take another route that would add ~3-4 hours to the travel time. As first I was able to force it to show the NH-44 path by putting the phone in Airplane mode before asking for directions (I had downloaded the maps locally) but even that stopped working after a while. Thankfully by then I was on NH-44 only so I just ignored the instructions to turn off into random directions and forced the map to update. Not a super critical issue in this instance because it was a straight route and I knew the way but could have been a big issue if I was going to a new place. I think I am going to explore openmaps in the near future to see if they give a better experience.

Jani and me at the Engagement

Jani and me posing in Traditional clothes

I reached Kanyakumari just in time to go change and head out to the Engagement which was a simple event. Usually I end up wearing suit’s for weddings but this time I wanted to wear more traditional clothes so I wore a Kurta instead of Jeans which had an added benefit of being a lot more cooler & comfortable than a suit. I was pretty zonked out during the event as it was in Tamil but still managed to stay awake for all of it.

The wedding party in pure white

The next day was an early start for the actual wedding. It was an interesting experience since it was the first Christian wedding I attended. My expectations were based on what I have seen in the movies but as both bride and groom are Pentecostal Christians the wedding was quite different than what I was expecting. It was an extremely simple wedding with no jewellery or bright color clothes. In-fact the entire wedding party was dressed in White on the day of the wedding. I had initially planned to wear a Sherwani for the wedding but decided to wear a golden kurta instead as it was just too hot to wear a Sherwani. Even then I was one of the few spots of color in the wedding.

Wedding selfie with cousins, niece and grand-daughter

After the wedding during which they didn’t allow any photos to be taken we all changed to more casual clothes and then drove from the venue to Tuticorin which is where the boy’s side of the family is based. We ended up starting quite late due to the various events/ceremonies and reached Tuticorin really late night after 11pm. After another photoshoot I went and crashed while the rest of the folks stayed up really late to chat and hang out.

Posing in traditional Vesti & shirt combo

Next morning we had a relaxed start of the day as the reception was scheduled for 11am. For this event I wore a traditional vesti and short combination. We had planned this as a surprise for the rest of the family. I was a bit worried that the Vesti would fall off but the new versions have velcro so it was safe and I didn’t flash anyone 🙂 . Funnily enough I was the only one wearing a vesti because for the rest of the folks it was daily-wear so they all were wearing suit-tie combo while I was in a Vesti. I think I was a lot more comfortable because a vesti is as per the local climate and quite well ventilated. I was feeling sorry for the folks in full suits.

Group pic on the way to the reception

After lunch and getting our pics taken we and Jani’s cousins decided to step out for a bit because by then it was just folks coming on stage for pics with the couple and that got boring after a while. Thankfully for the reception folks were dressed in colors other than white. The beach was nice but I couldn’t go in the water as I still had to go back to the reception afterwards. We spent about a hour at the beach and then headed back to the event by which time the newly weds were more than ready to head back home.

Jani and me at the Beach

We dropped them at home and changed into more comfortable clothes. At this time all the functions were done so a few of us stepped out for a bit of shopping followed by dinner. Post dinner I again crashed early because I had an early start planned while Jani hung out with the rest of the family.

The next day started really early and I left by 6:15am which was a good thing as I avoided most of the inner city traffic. The drive back was uneventful and I reached home by 3:10pm which was a pretty good time and had lunch after which I crashed and only woke up the next day morning.

– Suramya

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January 24, 2025

Buying a Rolex for status when you can’t afford it is a bad idea

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 12:49 PM

There are folks who give advise on Twitter/X/Social Media who don’t seem to have the first clue about the real world and how it works. A lot of it is from folks who have a lot of money from inheritance/trust fund etc and are trying to pretend that they bootstrapped themselves into fame and money. I find their advice to be very amusing to read but there are times when it can be really bad advice (in my opinion).

Recently a tweet by Steven went viral (screenshot below) enough that it showed up in my Mastodon feed. Before I post my thoughts on it do read the tweet below (the text version is listed below the image).

Steven @StevenPulteFam
If you’re a guy in your early 20s, buy a Rolex.
Go into debt if you have to

Steven @StevenPulteFam
Replying to @StevenPulteFam
This is not satire. You can get a Rolex for 4 grand
Having a nice watch communicates status to women and business relationships
And if you buy it right it will hold its value if not appreciate

My first thought on reading this was that this guy is nuts, going into a 4 figure debt just to ‘communicate status’ is insane. Yes you are judged on the clothes you wear, the watch you have and the car you drive but getting a watch that you clearly can’t afford is not going to make you look successful, it is making you look like someone who doesn’t know how to prioritize. This is especially true for a person in their early 20’s who would be someone who has just finished college (or is still in one) and is working at a junior level job. I get that folks want to impress others and usually it is a good idea but as with everything else in life this is also a balance you need to maintain. If you are wearing a Rolex and still working as a low level intern or junior developer you will not show the image you think you are projecting.

If you have the excess money then go for it if you want, but taking a loan just for status makes no sense. According to Business Insider the average interest rates for someone with excellent credit score is 20.53% where as the maximum APR can go up to 275.85%. so keep that in mind as well when you are taking a loan just to look ‘cool’. This advice is very similar to the ones from the pick-artists who claim to know the secret to getting laid (which is to pay these guys insane amount of money).

Long story short, my advice to you is that you should spend within your budget. Stretch the budget as far as possible to get nice things but try not to go overboard. This doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take any loans ever (if that is possible then it is the best option) but rather take loans for stuff that matters like a house, a car (not a fancy one) etc. Once you start earning AND have a good amount saved for a rainy day then you can splurge. But all cases are different so your mileage may vary and you should take this advice with a pinch of salt.

– Suramya

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January 22, 2025

ELIZA Resurrected using original code after 60 years

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,Computer Software,My Thoughts,Science Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:41 AM

If you have been following the AI chat bot news/world then you would have heard the name ELIZA come up. Eliza was the world’s first chatbot created over 60 years ago by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum and was the first language model which a user could interact with. It had a significant impact on the AI world (Actual AI research not the LLM wanna be AI we have right now) and was the first to attempt the Turing test. It was originally written in a programming language invented by Weizenbaum called the Michigan Algorithm Decoder Symmetric List Processor (MAD-SLIP) and the pattern matching directives were provided as separate scripts. Shortly after the initial release it was rewritten in LISP which went viral. Unfortunately the original code in MAD-SLIP went missing till recently soon after that.

One of the most famous ELIZA scripts was called Doctor that emulated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school (in which the therapist often reflects back the patient’s words to the patient). Much to his surprise Weizenbaum found that folks attributed human-like feelings to the computer program. Wikipedia explains how the software worked:

ELIZA starts its process of responding to an input by a user by first examining the text input for a “keyword”.[5] A “keyword” is a word designated as important by the acting ELIZA script, which assigns to each keyword a precedence number, or a RANK, designed by the programmer.[15] If such words are found, they are put into a “keystack”, with the keyword of the highest RANK at the top. The input sentence is then manipulated and transformed as the rule associated with the keyword of the highest RANK directs.[20] For example, when the DOCTOR script encounters words such as “alike” or “same”, it would output a message pertaining to similarity, in this case “In what way?”,[4] as these words had high precedence number. This also demonstrates how certain words, as dictated by the script, can be manipulated regardless of contextual considerations, such as switching first-person pronouns and second-person pronouns and vice versa, as these too had high precedence numbers. Such words with high precedence numbers are deemed superior to conversational patterns and are treated independently of contextual patterns.[citation needed]

Following the first examination, the next step of the process is to apply an appropriate transformation rule, which includes two parts: the “decomposition rule” and the “reassembly rule”.[20] First, the input is reviewed for syntactical patterns in order to establish the minimal context necessary to respond. Using the keywords and other nearby words from the input, different disassembly rules are tested until an appropriate pattern is found. Using the script’s rules, the sentence is then “dismantled” and arranged into sections of the component parts as the “decomposition rule for the highest-ranking keyword” dictates. The example that Weizenbaum gives is the input “You are very helpful”, which is transformed to “I are very helpful”. This is then broken into (1) empty (2) “I” (3) “are” (4) “very helpful”. The decomposition rule has broken the phrase into four small segments that contain both the keywords and the information in the sentence.[20]

The decomposition rule then designates a particular reassembly rule, or set of reassembly rules, to follow when reconstructing the sentence.[5] The reassembly rule takes the fragments of the input that the decomposition rule had created, rearranges them, and adds in programmed words to create a response. Using Weizenbaum’s example previously stated, such a reassembly rule would take the fragments and apply them to the phrase “What makes you think I am (4)”, which would result in “What makes you think I am very helpful?”. This example is rather simple, since depending upon the disassembly rule, the output could be significantly more complex and use more of the input from the user. However, from this reassembly, ELIZA then sends the constructed sentence to the user in the form of text on the screen

Now after over 60 years the original code written in MAD-SLIP has been resurrected by Jeff Shrager, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, and Myles Crowley,an MIT archivist, who found it among Weizenbaum’s papers back in 2021. Which is when they started working on getting the code to run, which was a significant effort. They first created an emulator that approximated the computers available in the 1960’s and then cleaned up the original 420-line ELIZA code to get it to work. They published a paper: ELIZA Reanimated: The world’s first chatbot restored on the world’s first time sharing system on 12th Jan where they explain the whole process.

ELIZA, created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s, is usually considered the world’s first chatbot. It was developed in MAD-SLIP on MIT’s CTSS, the world’s first time-sharing system, on an IBM 7094. We discovered an original ELIZA printout in Prof. Weizenbaum’s archives at MIT, including an early version of the famous DOCTOR script, a nearly complete version of the MAD-SLIP code, and various support functions in MAD and FAP. Here we describe the reanimation of this original ELIZA on a restored CTSS, itself running on an emulated IBM 7094. The entire stack is open source, so that any user of a unix-like OS can run the world’s first chatbot on the world’s first time-sharing system.

You can try it out: here.

Source:

– Suramya

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January 21, 2025

January 20, 2025

ISRO successfully docks two satellites with each other

Filed under: Astronomy / Space,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:25 AM

If you have been following my blog you know I love ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation), they have been doing fantastic work at a fraction of the budget available to NASA and ESA. 3 days ago they made history again by becoming the 4th nation (after US, China and Russia) to successfully dock two satellites with each other. The mission was a Technology Demonstrator/Poof of Concept essential for India’s future space missions (which are quite ambitious). The mission parameters and Objectives were as follows:

SpaDeX mission is a cost-effective technology demonstrator mission for the demonstration of in-space docking using two small spacecraft launched by PSLV. This technology is essential for India’s space ambitions such as Indian on Moon, sample return from the Moon, the building and operation of Bharatiya Antariksh Station (BAS), etc. In-space docking technology is essential when multiple rocket launches are required to achieve common mission objectives. Through this mission, India is marching towards becoming the fourth country in the world to have space docking technology.

Objectives:

The primary objective of the SpaDeX mission is to develop and demonstrate the technology needed for rendezvous, docking, and undocking of two small spacecraft (SDX01, which is the Chaser, and SDX02, the Target, nominally) in a low-Earth circular orbit. Secondary objectives include:

Demonstration of the transfer of electric power between the docked spacecraft, which is essential for future applications such as in-space robotics,

Composite spacecraft control, and

Payload operations after undocking.

ISRO is also doing good marketing and publicizing of its mission to get get more kids interested in Space and ISRO’s missions and towards that aim they released a video of the successful docking of the twin SpaDeX (Space Docking Experiment) spacecraft on YouTube:

SPADEX Successful Docking Video

Congrats again on a successful mission ISRO, we are all proud of you.

– Suramya

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January 19, 2025

A Marriage Proposal Spoken Entirely in Corporate Jargon

Filed under: Humor — Suramya @ 9:53 PM

We all have heard about Corporate Jargon and some of us have used it (willingly or unwilling) as well. If you haven’t then Wikipedia defines Corporate Jargon as:

Corporate jargon (variously known as corporate speak, corporate lingo, business speak, business jargon, management speak, workplace jargon, corpospeak, corporatese, or commercialese) is the jargon often used in large corporations, bureaucracies, and similar workplaces. The language register of the term is generally being presented in a negative light or disapprovingly. It is often considered to be needlessly obscure or, alternatively, used to disguise an absence of information. Its use in corporations and other large organisations has been widely noted in media

A marriage proposal can be quite stressful and people go out of their way to make their proposal unique. Evan Barber from McSweeney’s decided to explore what

a marriage proposal spoken entirely in office jargon would look like and it is hilarious.

GARY: Me too. You said you wanted to see hockey-stick growth. Well, I’ve realized that I want to see hockey-stick growth too—in our relationship.
CINDY: Unpack that for me.
GARY: This relationship has been such a value-add. Some of my friends were worried that it would take too long for us to get into alignment. But you have been an absolute rockstar.
CINDY: I feel the same way, Gary. The ROI on this relationship has been unbelievable. You’ve really given 110 percent.

I understood all of the words and terms in the proposal and that is a little scary to think about.

– Suramya

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