Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

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

January 22, 2025

ELIZA Resurrected using original code after 60 years

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

January 21, 2025

Getting my NVIDIA card working after breaking it again with the latest updates

Filed under: Computer Software,Knowledgebase,Linux/Unix Related — Suramya @ 11:10 AM

NVIDIA doesn’t have the best history with Linux as it’s cards historically didn’t work well with Linux. But over the past few years things were changing and at least in my experience they were at a point that the cards worked without major issues. As some of you know I use the unstable version of Debian, primarily because it has the newest versions of software available but the downside of using it is that things break and sometimes they break spectacularly.

This time there was an issue with the NVIDIA driver/configuration which caused my system to stop opening the GUI login interface when I restarted the system. I tried reinstalling the driver as the error messages in the log suggested that the issue was caused by a missing driver. I purged the nvidia drivers by issuing the following command as root:

apt purge *nvidia*

Then reinstalling the drivers using the following command:

apt-get install nvidia-detect nvidia-driver

After this reinstall the driver was being detected correctly but the GUI still wasn’t coming up. A search on the net didn’t return many useful results but on one of the sites, there was a reference to the fact that running nvidia-xconfig recreats the X Configuration file for NVIDIA cards, so I tried that by running the following commands as root

apt-get install nvidia-xconfig 
nvidia-xconfig 

This created the Configuration file and once I rebooted everything started working again. I did have to reconfigure my desktop since one of the things I had tried was to reset all the custom configurations to KDE but that was mostly a minor issue.

This issue was on Kernel 6.12.9-amd64 with Debian Unstable release as of 17th Jan 2025

– Suramya

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

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

January 3, 2025

Playing Doom to solve a CAPTCHA

Filed under: Computer Software,Interesting Sites — Suramya @ 10:48 AM

I guess traditional CAPTCHA’s are getting too easy for LLM’s and humans to solve so Guillermo Rauch decided to create a CAPTCHA that lets you play DOOM® to prove that you’re human.

The project works by leveraging Emscripten to compile a minimal port of Doom to WebAssembly and enable intercommunication between the C-based game runloop (g_game.c) and the JavaScript-based CAPTCHA UI.

Some extensions were made to the game to introduce relevant events needed for its usage in the context of a CAPTCHA.

It is actually a fun implementation of the game and while I doubt it will gain widespread usage it is an interesting proof of concept.

– Suramya

January 2, 2025

Welcoming 2025 and looking back at 2024

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:37 PM

Happy New Year folks! 2024 was a pretty eventful year for me with a lot of things happening. I made some new friends, lost touch with a few, traveled to some pretty cool places and just overall had a blast. This year I thought it would be interesting to do a sort of recap with some numbers and data points.

Books Read

  • Read a total of 275 books in 2024, which is an average of 23 books a month
  • Max books read (32) was October and the least (10) was in May
  • Top 5 authors by no of books read by them was
    • Mercedes Lackey : 49
    • Kelley Armstrong : 30
    • Jim Butcher : 25
    • Elizabeth Moon : 25
    • Timothy Zahn : 18

Travel/Trips

  • Drove 8090 kilometers in India (excluding Cabs etc)
  • 7 Trips, Including 4 International destinations

Others

  • 2349 photos taken (After removing duplicates)
  • 80 Blog posts published

My goal was to read 365 books in a year but am happy with managing to read 275 books. Not that happy about only posting 80 blog posts last year… Will be aiming to post more regularly this year. It would have been interesting to count the number of words published, hours of music listened, the no of calls made and received and the time spent on calls (non-work related) but didn’t see an easy way to extract this data. If I do manage to get the data I will publish it. Maybe by the time the next years rolls up I will have gotten this worked out.

Well, this is all for now will post more later.

– Suramya

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