Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

August 14, 2023

Little known HTML UI elements that work without JavaScript/CSS

Filed under: Interesting Sites,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 9:24 PM

The current iteration of the Internet is extremely GUI focused and if you don’t have Javascript enabled a lot of sites just stop working even though that shouldn’t be the case because they don’t really need Javascript (JS) to be rendered. Unfortunately, thanks to the profusion of JS Frameworks more and more sites are incorporating it to the point where it is just getting silly.

A simple site that would be a few hundred KB in the old HTML/CSS world is now multi MB in size. A few days ago I encountered a site that was downloading ~95MB every time it was loaded and all the site did was display a few thousand rows in a table. I figured that out because it was taking a few mins at high load for the site to load and I was shocked to see the amount of data being transferred for no good reason.

If you ask website developers they will tell you that JS is needed because it allows them to create fancy sites with interactive controls etc, but as I recently found out, this is not the case. HTML has a bunch of UI elements that most people don’t know about that allow us to create interactive sites or generate beautiful sites. The I’m betting on HTML site has examples of many such elements that I am going to start using in my sites going forward. Some of the examples I really liked from the site:

<datalist>: The HTML Data List element

Is that a typeahead I see? 🧐 Doesn’t seem to have built in validation, but the UI is there at least. Note that Safari requires option tags to be closed, or it just gives up. 😮‍💨


<details>: The Details disclosure element

A little dropdown thing for disclosoures and stuff. Can by styled quite aggressively.

PRIVACY DISCLOSURE

You are being watched.

There is a Dialog element as well, but it doesn’t work when embedded in a WP Blog post. Check out the site linked above to see it in action.

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

– Suramya

August 13, 2023

Blaming your parents for being born poor is not acceptable behavior and you should be ashamed of yourself

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:32 PM

I see that it is that time again where a lot of people complaining about their parents and blaming them for the fact that they were born poor. This is absolutely not something that is acceptable. Your parents did the best that they could for you and being an entitles brat is an insult for all the hardwork and suffering they went through to ensure you had a good life. You usually see this around the holiday season where ungrateful brats are complaining about their parents not gifting them with expensive things. I saw the below image the other day and it really resonated with me, it is such an awesome sentiment and I wish more people thought this way:

My father is not the reason why I was born poor. He is the reason I'm going to die rich
My father is not the reason why I was born poor. He is the reason I’m going to die rich

If you are blaming your parents for not keeping you in the level of luxury that you feel you deserve, nothing is stopping you from getting a job and earning the money yourselves. The parents are not there to pamper you for your whole life. You want a better car/house/phone etc work for it. No one is stopping you. Interestingly this behavior is not there in the really poor people (at least not that I saw) but more in the middle class households.

It is not always the kids fault either, there are parents who don’t teach their kids the value of money and explain the struggle they go through to keep the house running. Those are the kids who are usually complaining about not having enough money to show-off because they never realize how hard their parents work to make it. I have a friend who’s doing well but has a lot of expenses and things are tight at home but their kid is least bothered about it because he likes showing off and splurges a lot. In contrast I have another friend who’s daughter is the other extreme of the spectrum, she is working double internships so that she can help support the house as she wanted to help her mother.

The below image perfectly captures what parents sacrifice to ensure their kids had a good life.


It really pisses me off when I hear these folks abuse their parents for not having enough money to pamper / support in the luxury they feel they deserve.

– Suramya

August 2, 2023

A perfect example of a bad interview process

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 1:16 AM

This person thinks that they have a great interview process designed to get them great candidates but each step is a massive red flag.

They are basically telling us that they don’t care about the candidate’s life or existing commitments, such companies will expect you to be in office or working from home 24/7 for no good reason other than it is expected. From personal experience I have seen that such companies don’t hire enough resources because they expect the work of 10 to be done by 5 people as they are putting in double the hours.

Putting in a ton of hours for a deadline or in an emergency is fine and you should absolutely be willing to do so when required. However, that shouldn’t become a standard thing that you are consistently putting in insane hours. It is not sustainable and can cause serious health issues and burnout. It is not cool and it doesn’t show commitment if you are in the office constantly.

It is better to step away for a while when stuck on a problem. To give an example, I was trying to get some data from a system at work yesterday and spent a few hours trying to get my program to work but it just refused to work. So I decided to take a break and after a good nights sleep again looked at the code, within 15 minutes I figured out the problem and got the program working.

I tend to be on the workaholic side and can get caught up in work to the point where I don’t realize that I have been working for hours without a break. This is not a healthy habit and I have had some great managers who would scold me for being up late night when I didn’t need to. In one of my previous companies we actually implemented a policy in our team to counter this habit, where if a person was on vacation and they replied to a non-critical email or sent any emails they had to put $10 in the Jar. Once enough money was collected it was used to sponsor a treat for the team.

“Work is a rubber ball. If you drop it, it will bounce back. The other four balls—family, health, friends, and integrity—are made of glass. If you drop one of these, it will be irrevocably scuffed, nicked, perhaps even shattered.” —Gary Keller, Real Estate Entrepreneur

No one lies at their deathbed and remembers all the long hours they worked. They remember the time they spent with friends and family and if they didn’t spend enough time they regret it. No one regrets not spending more hours at work.

As Dolly Parton said ““Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.”.

– Suramya

August 1, 2023

Its a bad idea to lie on your resume in spite of Twitter ‘experts’ telling you it is ok

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 12:11 PM

There is a thread going on on Twitter where a scammer who sells courses for 8k USD is giving advice to people on Job hunting. The following screenshot from the same thread was shared on Mastodon and came up in my feed and I honestly was shocked to see this kind of advice being given out.


Just put that you have a degree in your resume. Literally no one checks. Your degree doesn’t apply to your job anyway.

Just by reading this ‘advice’ I immediately know that this person has not ever worked in a large organization or is lying through their teeth. One of the first things that happens after you accept a job offer from a large company is that you go through a background check where everything that you put in the Resume and in your application for the role is verified. Depending on the company they might check X years of your professional work experience (some companies check your entire work history) but all of them verify the education details provided and require you to submit supporting documentation.

If you lied on your resume about having a degree you *will* be caught and in most cases your job offer will be rescinded due to fraud. Yes, Fraud as lying on the resume about your qualifications is considered fraud. You are better off leaving out your education and if your skills are good enough most companies have an exception process that can be utilized for hiring someone who doesn’t have a degree. In other places they sometimes consider your work experience in lieu of a degree.

The following LinkedIn post talks about the consequences some of the people who were caught lying on their resume faced:

3. Marilee Jones

Jones, who was dean of admissions from 1997 to 2007 at the ultra-prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology, perpetuated for 28 years the lie that she had three degrees. In reality, she had none. As the head of admissions, ironically, Jones cut the amount of space candidates would have to describe extracurriculars on applications, saying more space would mean more fluff. The school learned through an anonymous tip in 2007 that Jones had puffed up her own credentials, and she was forced to quit. The cost to replace Jones is estimated to be over $100,000

As per Law Depot, lying on your resume can have serious legal consequences. In addition to getting fired (if the lie was caught after you joined) you can also be sued, fined or jailed (or all three).

In a 2019 case outside of North America, an Australian woman was sentenced to 25 months in prison and fined the Australian equivalent of $22,500 USD after she was discovered to have faked references and lied about her education to obtain a high-paying government position.

All said and done, asking someone to lie on their resume is terrible advice and should never be followed. This guy should be ashamed of themselves and stop giving such bad advice.

Regards,

Suramya

July 31, 2023

What people think I do when I say I work in Cybersecurity

Filed under: Humor,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 9:17 PM

It is great to have siblings because they make sure that you are grounded and don’t get too full of yourselves. My sister Surabhi sent me this image to ensure I know what they think of my specialization.

Picture of a guy with lots of monitors and the image of a security guard for what my family thinks I do
What Professionals think I do when I say I work in Cybersecurity and what my Family thinks I do

Well, in all fairness when Gaurang became a ships captain we told him he was a driver of a ship (instead of a bus). So, I can’t really complain…

– Suramya

July 27, 2023

GPS Data Could potentially be used to Detect Large Earthquakes in advance

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:31 PM

Earthquakes are extremely devastating and because we don’t have a way to predict them in advance they end up taking a huge toll on lives. The existing systems for earthquake prediction are fraught with false positives to the point of being useless. However, that hasn’t stopped people from trying to predict them, and in a new paper researchers Quentin Bletery and Jean-Mathieu Nocquet claim to have found a unique way to predict them up to 2 hours in advance using GPS data.

They analyzed high-rate GPS time series before 90 different earthquakes that were magnitude 7 and above to find a precursor signal and they observed a subtle signal that rose from the noise about 2 hours before these major earthquakes occurred. This looks extremely promising and if validated can change how we approach disaster management of earthquakes. However, the study still needs to be validated and we don’t yet know if the precursor signal could ever be measured for individual events with the accuracy needed to provide a useful warning.

The existence of an observable precursory phase of slip on the fault before large earthquakes has been debated for decades. Although observations preceding several large earthquakes have been proposed as possible indicators of precursory slip, these observations do not directly precede earthquakes, are not seen before most events, and are also commonly observed without being followed by earthquakes. We conducted a global search for short-term precursory slip in GPS data. We summed the displacements measured by 3026 high-rate GPS time series—projected onto the directions expected from precursory slip at the hypocenter—during 48 hours before 90 (moment magnitude ≥7) earthquakes. Our approach reveals a ≈2-hour-long exponential acceleration of slip before the ruptures, suggesting that large earthquakes start with a precursory phase of slip, which improvements in measurement precision and density could more effectively detect and possibly monitor.

This is an area where Machine Learning might prove to be useful to extrapolate and predict but that being said we still need to validate and verify before implementing it or depending on it. The paper with their findings was published in Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.adg2565)

Source: Hacker News: Early Warning: GPS Data Could Detect Large Earthquakes Hours Before They Happen

– Suramya

July 26, 2023

New Double sided solar panels nearly double the power production per panel

Filed under: Emerging Tech,Science Related — Suramya @ 11:12 PM

Solar Panels have come a long way in the last few decades and their efficiency has been consistently increasing over the time as well. We have gone from an efficiency of ~10% on an average to more than 25% today. Now researchers from US Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) have created a new double sided solar panel that generates electricity from both sides of the panel. Basically it uses reflected light on the back side of the panel to generate power. Even though the amount of power generated by the backside of the panel is only ~90% of the power generated by the front end adding them both together means that a single panel is generating almost double the power than traditional panels.

Bifacial photovoltaics (PV) harvest solar irradiance from both their front and rear surfaces, boosting energy conversion efficiency to maximize their electrical power production. For single-junction perovskite solar cells (PSCs), the performance of bifacial configurations is still far behind that of their state-of-the-art monofacial counterparts. Here, we report on highly efficient, bifacial, single-junction PSCs based on the p-i-n (or inverted) architecture. We used optical and electrical modeling to design a transparent conducting rear electrode for bifacial PSCs to enable optimized efficiency under a variety of albedo illumination conditions. The bifaciality of the PSCs was about 91%–93%. Under concurrent bifacial measurement conditions, we obtained equivalent, stabilized bifacial power output densities of 26.9, 28.5, and 30.1 mW/cm2 under albedos of 0.2, 0.3, and 0.5, respectively. We further showed that bifacial perovskite PV technology has the potential to outperform its monofacial counterparts with higher energy yields and lower levelized cost of energy (LCOE).

This is a significant breakthrough and the research was published in the journal Joule titled “Highly efficient bifacial single-junction perovskite solar cells”.

I love the fact that renewable energy is getting so much more push nowadays. I have been exploring putting solar at my place, but since I am in an apartment I don’t have much options available that would make financial sense. The panels I could put up would barely supply enough power making the whole thing not cost effective. Parents have put solar at our house in Delhi and my cousin has done the same at their farm where most of their power consumption is managed by their solar setup.

– Suramya

July 25, 2023

Suramya’s Blog is now (hopefully) its own Federated Instance on Fediverse

Filed under: Website Updates — Suramya @ 5:45 PM

Unless I have managed to mess up something really bad, this Blog should now be a part of the Fediverse and all posts here should get published to the Fediverse automatically. If all is well, then searching for @suramya@suramya.com on a Mastodon instance should allow you to add me there and all posts (with their full text) made here should get published there automatically.

Once the ActivityPub plugin is installed, each author’s page on your WordPress blog will become its own federated instance. In other words, if you have two authors, Jane and Bob, on your website, example.com, then your authors would have their own author pages at example.com/author/jane and example.com/author/bob. Each of those author pages would now be available to Mastodon users (and all other federated platform users) as a profile that can be followed. Let’s break that down further. Let’s say you have a friend on Mastodon who tells you to follow them and they give you their profile name @janelivesheresomeofthetime. You search for her name, see her profile, and click the follow button, right? From then on, everything Jane posts on her profile shows up in your Home feed. Okay, similarly, now that Jane has installed the ActivityPub plugin on her example.com site, her friends can also follow her on Mastodon by searching for @jane@example.com and clicking the Follow button on that profile.

– Suramya

June 29, 2023

There is no such thing as micro-cheating and these are not examples of it

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 12:17 PM

I am constantly surprised at how insecure these some of the men are. The following screenshot came up in my Mastodon feed (unfortunately I didn’t save the link to the post, just the image and I can’t find it now) and I was flabbergasted. This is a screenshot from a ‘romance’ guide that is explaining how addressing a man by their name instead of calling them hey you is an example of Micro-cheating…


34 Ways Your Girlfriend Is Micro- Cheating (And Totally Getting Away With It) 29. Addressing a man by his name unexpectedly (e.g. “Hey, Doug” instead of just “Hey”), which breeds a strangely powerful sense of intimacy.

What on earth is wrong with people? Calling folks by their name is basic curtsy. I admit I am bad at it because I have a hard time remembering names but that is not something I am proud of and I try to go the extra mile to ensure that I memorize names.

A quick search gave me the site, and the examples they use in this ‘article’ are beyond idiotic. Search for the text from the example above and you will find it. I am not linking to it because I don’t want to send them more traffic. For example, #25 claims that “giggling“, yes you read that right is an example of Micro-cheating… Some more gems from the site:

9. Letting a guy she interacts with ever so briefly on the bus or in an elevator believe that he’s got a shot for a few precious seconds before getting on with her day.
Just because someone smiled at you doesn’t mean they are interested in dating you.

30. Addressing a man by his full name instead of the nickname he goes by (e.g. “Hello, Douglas”), which is secretly one of the most subtle but impactful ways to flirt.
I don’t like calling folks by their nicknames unless I know them well enough to use it (not talking about examples where Christian is shortened to Chris) and that doesn’t mean I am flirting with them.

34. Sending texts to a guy that are laced with more emojis than she typically uses when communicating with her besties.

These folks need to talk to a psychiatrist because they need help. They are being trained from a young age to only think about women a certain way and to expect every lady they meet to fall at their feet to fulfill their every desire. This is obviously not what happens in the real world and then these folks grow more & more militant and misogynistic causing huge problems for everyone around them. Some of them have actually killed people because they didn’t get what they thought was their right.

– Suramya

June 28, 2023

Please stop shoving ChatGPT Integration into products that don’t need it

I am getting really tired of folks shoving ChatGPT integration into everything whether it makes sense or not. The latest silliness is an electric bike with ChatGPT integration. I understand the desire to integrate GPS/Maps etc in a bike, although personally I would rather use an independent device which would get updates more frequently than the built in GPS where the maps might get updated a few times a year. Unless the maps are getting downloaded live using 3G/4G/whatever. I even understand the desire to integrate voice recognition in the setup so that the user can talk to it. But why on earth do I want/need to have ChatGPT shoved in there?

Based on ChatGPT’s well known tendency to hallucinate there is a good probability that it might decide that you should take a path that is not safe or even dump you into the ocean because it hallucinated that it was the way to go. This is the same thing we saw with Blockchain a few years ago, everything was suddenly on the Blockchain whether it needed to be or not. The sad part is that these folks are going to make a ton of money because of the hype behind ChatGPT and then bail leaving the consumers with a sub-par bike that hallucinates.

Source: Urtopia Unveils the World’s First Smart E-Bike with ChatGPT Integration at EUROBIKE 2023

– Suramya

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