Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

June 28, 2024

Multiple interviews are not just a formality

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 7:57 PM

Interviews are stressful no matter which side of the table you are sitting. But till you join no interaction you do with anyone from the company should be done lightly, you need to behave in an absolute professional manner throughout the process. I saw the following screenshot in my feed and just had to comment on it as this is a really bad take.

Well, yes. Yes I do. Typically, if I get past interview 2 I assume the rest of the interviews are just dilly dallying. You shouldn't need 7 interviews to decide between candidates. If you can't discern the best candidate within 2 or 3 interviews tops, you can't interview. So it makes sense to assume that i you made it to interview 4, 5, or 6 let alone 7 you are indeed the top candidate and all interviews past 3 are just a time-lengthening, budget and paperwork approval exercise.

Well, yes. Yes I do. Typically, if I get past interview 2 I assume the rest of the interviews are just dilly dallying. You shouldn’t need 7 interviews to decide between candidates. If you can’t discern the best candidate within 2 or 3 interviews tops, you can’t interview. So it makes sense to assume that i you made it to interview 4, 5, or 6 let alone 7 you are indeed the top candidate and all interviews past 3 are just a time-lengthening, budget and paperwork approval exercise.

– Elisa from BrainDrip

I assure you that no interviewer wants to be taking interviews just for the fun of it. We have enough work that needs to be done that if we can save time by not having another interview that would be perfect from my perspective. The max no of interviews I have given for a single position was 7 even though 4 of them were done in the same day. In this case the first two rounds were technical. Then the next round was by the local manager and then another one with the global manager. Then we had the FIT interview with the unit head and another with their Indian counterpart. Finally we had the HR round and then we closed the interview. Each of them covered different skillsets and yes theoretically speaking we could have merged some of the interviews but that doesn’t necessarily mean that it was possible or even desired.

Thinking that you don’t need to expend effort because its the 3rd or 4th round is an almost sure shot way to ensure that you don’t move to the next round. Like I said earlier every interaction you have with anyone from the company needs to be with full focus and courtesy. I remember reading about a company where the owner would take feedback from the receptionist on how the candidates behaved with her to screen out unfit candidates. So if someone was rude or insulting in the interactions with the receptionist they would get rejected. I have had candidates rejected in the last round because information came up in that round that made us decide not to go ahead with the candidate.

I am not saying that the process can’t be optimized but until that happens the worst thing you can do is become complacent.

– Suramya

June 27, 2024

What’s the Difference Between Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads?

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:39 PM

When Twitter was taken over by Musk a lot of us folks moved to alternatives because of the change in the quality and tone of Twitter. In the early days many alternatives were created but now the field has narrowed down quite a bit and the main alternatives are: Mastodon, Bluesky, and Threads. I have accounts on both Mastodon and Bluesky but primarily use Mastodon as most of the security and Tech experts migrated to Mastodon. Some interesting folks are there on Bluesky as well but for some reason I don’t find it as interesting to scroll the feed over there.

If you are not aware of the apps you might wonder what is the difference between them, EFF (Electronic Freedom Foundation) did a great write up on the various alternatives to Twitter and you can check out the article here.

– Suramya

June 20, 2024

Some thoughts on the current AI hype market

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:22 PM

Found this hilarious but accurate write up on AI and how the current Hype is spoiling the industry: I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. It is a little rude, filled with profanity but accurately covers the current state of AI. It is filled with gems such as:

So it is with great regret that I announce that the next person to talk about rolling out AI is going to receive a complimentary chiropractic adjustment in the style of Dr. Bourne, i.e, I am going to fucking break your neck. I am truly, deeply, sorry.
…
…
Unless you are one of a tiny handful of businesses who know exactly what they’re going to use AI for, you do not need AI for anything – or rather, you do not need to do anything to reap the benefits. Artificial intelligence, as it exists and is useful now, is probably already baked into your businesses software supply chain. Your managed security provider is probably using some algorithms baked up in a lab software to detect anomalous traffic, and here’s a secret, they didn’t do much AI work either, they bought software from the tiny sector of the market that actually does need to do employ data scientists. I know you want to be the next Steve Jobs, and this requires you to get on stages and talk about your innovative prowess, but none of this will allow you to pull off a turtle neck, and even if it did, you would need to replace your sweaters with fullplate to survive my onslaught.

Consider the fact that most companies are unable to successfully develop and deploy the simplest of CRUD applications on time and under budget. This is a solved problem – with smart people who can collaborate and provide reasonable requirements, a competent team will knock this out of the park every single time, admittedly with some amount of frustration.

Most organizations cannot ship the most basic applications imaginable with any consistency, and you’re out here saying that the best way to remain competitive is to roll out experimental technology that is an order of magnitude more sophisticated than anything else your I.T department runs, which you have no experience hiring for, when the organization has never used a GPU for anything other than junior engineers playing video games with their camera off during standup

The current hype and insistence by companies to insert AI capabilities in everything whether it is needed or not is getting to the point where it is actively annoying and in some cases dangerous. The recent attempted release of Recall + Copilot by Microsoft is a good example of dangerous. Then we have companies releasing AI powered BIOS , that “interpret the PC user’s request, analyze their specific hardware, and parse through the LLM’s extensive knowledge base of BIOS and computer terminology to make the appropriate changes to the BIOS Setup. This breakthrough technology helps address a major hurdle for PC users that require or desire changes to their BIOS Setup for their personal computers but do not fully understand the meaning of the settings available to them.”

I really don’t need AI in my mouse or use AI to create a perfect smoothie or the thousand other things folks are shoving AI into. ChatGPT can’t do simple addition or multipications and keeps making up stuff. Google’s AI Gemini recommends that people add glue to their pizza’s, it misidentified a poisonous mushroom as an edible one and there are many many more such cases out there (I have posted some examples earlier).

The problem is that folks (grifters to be honest) are selling AI as the cure all for all problems a company wants to solve. This is overshadowing the actual work being done in the field which is solving actual problems and use cases.

What we have right now is Machine Learning that has a good track record in predicting responses, but it is nothing close to being intelligent. A cat has more intelligence in it than the current ‘AI’. This is not to say that we won’t have AI systems in the future. I have been hearing the claim that AI is just around the corner for about 25 years now but we are not there yet.

June 19, 2024

Yet another example of why strict data privacy controls are needed everywhere

Filed under: My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:35 PM

Here is yet another example of why we need data privacy and rules to protect the data that is collected about us. In this case a person snooped on the mobile data history of potential dates before going out with them.

I work for one of the most popular mobile providers in the country. Back when I was dating a few months ago, I'd check the lad's mobile data history at work to see what sort of porn they watch on their phones. Helped me to weed out and ghost a couple of freaks

I work for one of the most popular mobile providers in the country. Back when I was dating a few months ago, I’d check the lad’s mobile data history at work to see what sort of porn they watch on their phones. Helped me to weed out and ghost a couple of freaks

This is absolutely an invasion of privacy but still something a lot of us would do if we had the access to a system that gives us this information. I mean it is human nature to be curious and if we could most people would end up doing something like this and that is why Banks have strict policies and controls around looking up data that you shouldn’t be looking into like financial transactions or bank balances.

It would have expected the ‘most popular’ mobile provider to have controls around who can access such data. But even if the controls limit who can access the data it doesn’t solve the full problem because it doesn’t stop the people authorized to view the data from misusing it. The latin phrase ‘Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?‘ (Who will watch the watchmen?) highlights this problem. People who have official access can (and do) misuse that access and we have seen this misuse multiple times, folks in law enforcement have used their access to track and research their significant others, other folks have stalked celebrities and there are many more such examples..

That is why in addition to restricting access there needs to be a regular audit of the access requests made into the system and sign off to ensure people are not misusing the data. In my previous companies, we had to review audit logs for production access and sign off on the access (for the systems we were responsible for). For obvious reasons people couldn’t signoff on their own access requests.

Data Privacy is very important and because of the amount of data that companies collect about us it is a dangerous situation. In the ideal world they would not be storing this data in the first place but since that is not going to happen anytime soon we need to ensure that we build legal/technical frameworks around the systems so that the potential for misuse is reduced.

– Suramya

June 18, 2024

Indian Startup Agnikul successfully launched worlds first fully 3D printed engine

Filed under: Astronomy / Space,Emerging Tech,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 5:27 PM

3D Printing is one of the few technologies from the last decade that has come close to accomplishing what it promised, some of the more Sci-fi style stuff is still in the works (Like 3D printing food) but for the most part it does what it promised unlike some of the other ‘ground-breaking’ tech like blockchain, NFT etc. etc. Folks have used 3D printing to print houses, sculptures, prosthetic eye and more.

On 30th May another major milestone was achieved proving the technology’s usefulness. An Indian Company called Agnikul tested its 3D printed Rocket by successfully launching it from the Satish Dhawan Space Center. The launch was a test of the engine block which was the world’s first rocket engine 3D printed as a single piece. The engine took just 72 hours to print and another two weeks to integrate with other systems. The rocket generated 6 kilonewtons of thrust during the test and flew 6.5 Kms into the air.

Now that the technology has been proven, the company is starting work on their commercial implementation of the engine called Agnibaan (Fire Arrow). Agnibaan will feature eight rockets and will be capable of carrying a 300-kilogram payload to an altitude of around 700 km. The configuration of the rocket will be modular allowing the team to configure it according to need.

In addition to being the worlds first 3D printed engine, Agnibaan was also India’s first launch from a privately owned launch pad. Thus far, all space launches were carried out from one of the two ISRO launch pads at Sriharikota. Agniaan on the other hand launched from a custom built launch pad called Dhanush (Bow). Dhanush is designed to support full mobility across all configurations of Agnibaan and is meant to be reusable.

With more private companies entering the market the Space Age has truly started in India.

Source: IEEE: Indian Startup 3D Prints Rocket Engine in Just 72 Hours

-Suramya

June 13, 2024

Denmark recalls Instant ramen noodles because they are ‘too spicy’

Filed under: Humor,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 7:18 PM

I have always thought that the food in most western countries was insufficiently spicy and in some places felt like they just boiled the food before serving it. This was a great problem for me during my years in the US till I discovered Mexican food and I have similar issues in other western countries as well.

I was surfing the web earlier today and found this news article that talks about how Denmark is recalling three flavors of instant ramen noodles because they were too spicy and it made me laugh. Even better was the response from the company (emphasis added by me):

We understand that the Danish food authority recalled the products, not because of a problem in their quality but because they were too spicy,” Samyang told the BBC News. “The products are being exported globally. But this is the first time they have been recalled for the above reason.”

The recall note states:

The Danish Veterinary and Food Administration says that the amount of the chili pepper extract in one pack of 3x Spicy & Hot Chicken, 2x Spicy & Hot Chicken, or Hot Chicken Stew “is so high that they pose a risk of the consumer developing acute poisoning.”

“If you have the products, you should discard them or return them to the store where they were purchased,” the agency implores

Considering the folks there think a dish spiced with just pepper is too spicy this is not too surprising but is funny. I wonder how the MTR Ready to Eat Meals would fare over there. My guess is that it would face similar issues unless the spice level was reduced drastically.

Source: Boingboing.net: Instant ramen recalled for being too spicy

– Suramya

June 6, 2024

IndiGo Launches Female Friendly Seat Selections

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 12:01 PM

Travel can be a pain for women because there are enough idiots in the world who will take the opportunity of a woman seated next to them to make them miserable for the entire flight by making unwelcome advances etc. IndiGo recently launched a program to try to address this issue. If the ticket is being booked for a female passenger then the system will show them the seats that are already occupied by women. This allows the passenger to book a seat that is next to a lady passenger. I first noticed this when I was checking in Jani for her flight. The below screenshot shows what it looks like:


Female Friendly seat selection option

I think this is a good move but as with all things there is an easy way to game the system so men can ensure they are seated next to a lady. Basically, I need to open two windows. In one window I would search for a flight ticket pretending to be a lady passenger. Since the payment is not required till after we do a seat selection I get to see which seats are occupied by women. Then I cancel the process and start a fresh one with the actual passenger details picking a seat next to a lady.

There is no easy way to detect and block this. One option would be to allow the seat selection only after making the payment for the ticket but that would mean folks would have to make a second payment for the seat selection as most of the options are paid ones, which would not be a user friendly experience.

Even with that, this is a good move and should help make the flights more comfortable for women.

Source: NDTV: IndiGo Launches Female-Friendly Seat Selection Option. Here’s What It Means

– Suramya

June 5, 2024

New transparent film lets in more light than glass while preserving privacy by blurring the view

Filed under: Science Related — Suramya @ 10:14 AM

In the ancient days we constructed our homes out of natural material such as clay, mud, wood etc and it had the advantage of keeping the house cool during the summer and warm during the winters. Unfortunately, due to the lack of appropriate materials these houses either had very small windows or used material that wasn’t clear making the insides of the houses a dark & gloomy place. This all changed once we had the technology to make glass windows cheaply and quickly. All of a sudden we could put in windows that allowed sunlight into the house without letting the wind inside. It was a game changer for housing.

Now all our houses have glass windows, some even have glass doors etc. Now we have a few different problems. Namely that glass is transparent and having large windows creates a privacy issue where folks can see inside the house. Hence we use curtains, frosted glass, window tinting etc to address this issue. Secondly, Allowing in ambient sunlight raises a room’s temperature requiring additional cooling for the room. This is a big enough problem that there is a thriving market for reflective glass, and window tinting. But there is still a lot of room for improvement.

Researchers at Germany’s Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have designed an ultrathin film that when stuck over a regular pane of glass diffuses 73% of incident sunlight, creating a more comfortable and private indoor environment while simultaneously blurring the view through the window. In tests it was found that the film cooled ambient temperatures by as much as 6-degrees Celsius.

The team has successfully tested the film in outdoor tests in the KIT campus and their research has been published in the journal Nature Communications. The technology is still in early stages and it remains to be seen if it can be commercially produced but it does look quite promising. I am looking forward to more developments in this field.

Source: HackerNews: New material looks like frosted glass but lets in more light than a window

– Suramya

June 4, 2024

Thoughts on Book Clubs and reading

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 8:43 PM

As folks who know me know I read a lot of books. To give you an idea of what I mean by that, I read 209 books in 2023 and my goal is to read 365 books in a year. In 2024 I have read 99 books so far. (I am way behind in my reading this year due to various reasons)

A little while ago folks in my apartment complex started a book club and I was invited to join since I read a lot. Book clubs are interesting but I never saw the appeal because of multiple reasons. First, I read fast enough that by the time others in the club would finish a book I would be in my 4th or 5th one. The second issue is that I don’t particularly like dissecting a book and look for hidden meanings or life lessons etc in it. Lastly, in a lot of these clubs they seem to be more interested in hanging out/gossiping rather than book readings.

I have no issues discussing books but doing it in a structured way takes the fun out of it. Also not a lot of folks read the kind of books I do so that’s another issue I face. In the next meeting over here someone is actually preparing a presentation on the 3 Body problem and that just sounds like work to me. Personally when I meet with like minded folks I exchange book recommendations rather than the content of the books. That could also be because I mostly read fiction whereas a large majority of folks who are part of these clubs seem to prefer non-fiction books that can actually be dissected and have a lot of data to discuss.

As I mentioned in a previous post I have never been a part of any of the fandoms and I am glad that I didn’t. The issue with discussing books is that folks get too invested in it and that just takes the fun out of it.

However, all that being said I am glad book clubs exist as they give a way for people to connect and learn about books they might find interesting. Anything that gets people more interested in reading is great in my mind.

– Suramya

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