Shell for online activity in browser.

While my guitar gently weeps,
while my coffee slowly brews, and
while my code obediently runs

let's try and whip up a dig[1]

Shell to self-activity

This is to present an idea and hopefully incorporate some feedback about whether it sounds cool or not. We all know we spend an inordinate amount of time online which is probably far better spent traveling, listening to music, meeting new people or far better drinking. But personal rant aside - I've always been curious to analyze my own activity online (and be depressed by it). But how about an intuitive interactive way to play with it.

so let's say on our facebook/quora page, we have a shell. yes, you heard it - a shell that let's you type commands in - geek stuff. And this shell lets you control what you see and presents you with information you might want to query.

for instance, let's say i'm casually browsing facebook,

and I want to see all the posts by my very best friend Bill Waterson. (Heck yes, this is my world, and in this world, Bill Waterson is my friend.) So since I find my friend Bill to be very interesting, I just type

posts.fetch_all_by(bill)          // Obviously this has autocomplete all the way through to bill.

By default, this brings up only the top 10-20 posts, say. But since I'm feeling adventurous, I might do something more. I vaguely remember him sharing something insightful about painting a few months back.

posts.fetch_all_by(bill).between("today").and("march 2013");
or
posts.fetch_all_by(bill).within("last_2_months");

// Side note to Chomsky ninjas. Yes I know this isn't proper grammar for the language. I'll fix the interface later. stay with me.

In fact I can do this for photos I'm tagged in, by venue/location. You get the idea.

photos.fetch_of_self.within_months(2).tagged_with("Bill").near("Skibo");

I can also say. filter my current set of posts.

posts.filter_remove("Hunger Games");  // Cos I'm tired of looking at those topics.

I could query how much time I've spent over the last 2 days - how many posts I've liked etc. It would make for something very insightful about myself.

This same shell could run across websites. FB, Quora, Google. Tell you about all your browsing activity etc. Plot graphs for you in d3.js (because you know d3 is awesome).

Just a thought.

Though some of the negatives I can see with this are -
1. facebook is already kinda trying this with the graph query language and API etc. Though their smart bar is worse than shit.
2. Bad stalkers can use this for perpetrating all kinds of shit. Though this could be plugged into facebook's privacy mechanism - for what it's worth. (NSA can see shit anyway).

Blog over.

quips

that's the price of exploration - you leave things behind.

life is weird - it'll give you treasures and then make you long for it your entire life.

i shall try, mother

as i miss out on the stars sparkling above, they tell me
as i miss out on feeling the cold stone of the cathedral, the sounds wither out
as i miss the touch of your palms, the sounds almost drown out
and even the waves are silent



as i imagine your hair brush aside your shoulders
and fall on your skin
as the mundane keys play an incomprehensible but worthless tune
i give up, rise and give up again

every moment is besmirched by a tension, it longs
only too hard to evacuate, but i can't
at the centre of the room, in the middle of the grove
lies the easiest task for man, to
pick the fruit up and enter salvation

but the thirst will never end,
and the man will never rise
the lowly disdain of lowly human beings
is meant for sufferance and insufferable souls

if everything cannot be, then nothing shall be
and nothing shall let remain
the remainder of our lives shall be marred,
with charcoal and dust
we weren't made of fine grains, we were
but the coarse sand

we wore bare feet and dirty limbs
our spirits once flew and we were full of mud
our eyes but knew, but never gave up
our souls but knew, but they restrained, defied and survived

we were tormented, but we prevailed
we are tormented, albeit by ourselves,
but we shall prevail
prevail, we shall, but with steadfast mockery
prevail, we shall, but never to glow, except for
the momentary flicker of misrepresented fortune
amidst a momentary gain of reason

blessed we all were, blessed we all are
sometimes we tried, often we failed
often we gave up, and sometimes we really tried
and at those times we felt we always did
but it had to end a certain way

it had to be a certain way,
it had to be a certain drone
it had to happen, come at some point
it might gradually die and out and i shall never know
but for all the flecks of light around me,
in this moment, i shall try mother

Insights from Quora Q/A with Andy D'Angelo.

Today I attended a Q/A session by Adam D'Angelo. It was part of a recruiting drive Quora is running at CMU. It was quite a thought provoking session - obviously with the benefit of talking to someone who's been there, done it et. al.

Take aways

1. Think bigger - What is the vision of Quora? They mention that the vision of Quora is to create a repository of human knowledge that can be accessed by anyone/everyone in the world. There is so much knowledge that's inside a person's "brain". It is a way to bring that knowledge out into the world. You watch their vision "video" and statement and you can't help but feel that it is audacious. It's not just audacious in a large way, it's audacious in that the scale of the imagination is a little scary. Many might think it, few would attempt it. That's big. Also, they say they are a long term focused company - so that's good.

2. Idea - There are so many pieces of information that are missed in Wikipedia, etc. Not facts, information. One reflection is that the content on Quora is so often opinions. Opinions are knowledge and learning. Distilling facts from information and using that to create knowledge repositories is excellent, but it's also limited. It can't share insights that opinions can have. The best way to know about something is to have 5 experts argue over it. Done - you have all the information that you need.

3. Implementation - Incentivize users who contribute, Make sure you can separate good content from bad content. That is the trick of the trade - that is what other Q/A websites weren't able to do. It is a difficult problem that is going to grow over time. This is what keeps users interested and gives contributors the visibility that makes them continue sharing.

4. Startup Motto - Get Users! - If you can get users, that are willing to use your product, you can almost certainly get investors who can bring in money which can then be used to hire employees etc. It can all move on from there. Get users! Also, once you get users, the biggest thing they give you is that they tell you what to do. That is the biggest barrier to entry in software, and possibly in all businesses - you don't know what to make. But users tell you that, and then make you rich for giving them that. In internet, they tell you that every single minute, all the time - and you can respond quicker.

5. Content and the internet - Mid way during the talk I started thinking. Will google become irrelevant or commoditized in the future? With facebook, there is so much content/information that google doesn't know. Now, with quora there will be so much information that google wouldn't really know. Sure, it'll see the content and remember direct page clicks, what what about who. What about who upvoted what, what they are interested in, what topics they follow, who their friends are, which topics did their friends follow, what questions their friends like. Google will not know any of that stuff. One thing mentioned by Andy was that Quora is complementary to google (like yelp, tripadvisor etc.) So they bring all the content on to the internet and then allow google to index it. Google in turn sends a lot of traffic their way. Works out well for both of them. Google might even become a gateway into all of these websites - quora, stackexchange for Q/A, FB for profiles/social, Wikipedia for knowledge. So one might say not really losing relevance. But but but, where will the money go? If I am an advertiser I'll choose FB. People are going to buy based on what they hear from friends and reviews from yelp. If I'm a recruiter, I'll pay Quora/Stackexchange more when questions are asked about my company. I'll market myself more on FB/Quora. I'll use a blogging platform like tumblr, there will come other specific news portals. There was once a time when all the content on the web was unorganized, open web pages. Simple HTML web pages. That day is gone and getting away faster. Content is quickly getting structured and really really fast. The content on a simple e-commerce site is so complicated and specific to it. There are far more connections on the web and the owners are people who create them - more often that not the specific applications. Google is an IR system that works on the unstructured - In a world when vanilla HTML pages are no longer the norm, would google lose out? [They probably won't lose out in the way it sounds - They have android and now glass! but they might become Microsoft or IBM.]

6. Business Model - Some person had to ask about the business model. He had to mention it. Some form of advertising in the future. The good part is investors know they are going to be able to make money in the future so know they are focusing on growing the company. It works! Worked with Amazon, works  Internet, for all the ubiquity it offers can very easily be a market largely pervaded by a single company. Traditionally the larger players lose out on the fringes - and there are markets left for niche and various other things that affect the economies of business. For a while at least it seems like the . Partly, penetration only depends on internet - customer cost acquisition in new geographies lower. Marketing by referral and it's almost as if one company comes in and creates a brand that just defines that space. Largely prevalent in the internet. What I'm trying to get to is that for most businesses online, there is one company that has simply dominated a market after the battle ends and one emerges the winner. Mail/Search/Social Network/E-Commerce etc. (Not mentioning blogging because it's not entirely there yet.) Possibly because the power is a function of power works acutely here.

7. Andy built a simple service he built when he was in high school or something - one someone can build over a weekend. It was before the social network days - something one could use to simply put their IM friends list online and then people could use it view other friends' lists and contact them if they approved. Received over 200K visits. I still don't have an intuition about how big the world is and how powerful a social medium is. Should work on that.

8. Internet changing - More people online, More information, More time spent online, More time on mobile. More people spending more time on internet and less on TV.

9. Internet is changing - How does this affect the content? I put some thoughts about this in point 6 and I guess it deserves more inspection. In this world of roti (food), kapda (clothes), makaan (shelter), electricity and internet there might be a world where I have services that take care of nutrition, healthcare, shopping, networking (social/business). Content gets split back into strict domains like it used to. Computing and internet become merely the glue that tie them together and are (any maybe should) are relegated to the background. Companies with knowledge prevail. The content will change drastically, and the rules will change a lot too. I am not sure how they will, but they will.

10. Machine Learning techniques - Difference with academia is that things need to be high performance, so the models used are often much simpler in preference for those that work well efficiently. Who answered the question and Which friends liked an answer are almost more important than the content. Recommendations at right about which questions you might find interesting are written in a very simple way at the moment - based on some keywords etc.

11. Blogging - One thing I didn't mention in the list in 6 next to mail/search etc. was blogging. One thing I was thinking about during the talk was that Quora in some way is like blogging right. I am an expert who is putting views out there. Blogging is a lot like that, in fact it's exactly like that. It's just that instead of writing about what I want, I'm writing about what people ask. Quora is almost a blogging tool. And then, lo as we were talking to Andy, he mentioned that himself. Quora is like a blogging tool in some ways.

12. Culture - There is a general culture in the company to look at product features and discuss them all the time. For eg., google introduced tabs for browsing - and then discuss it on a mailing list. Obviously companies put out what works for them. A lot can be learnt by looking at what they are doing. The product is an answer to them sharing their learnings.

13. Chicken and Egg - Oh and one thing I forgot to mention - The one question that I asked was how did you get the first community of users online? I had imagined they targeted some communities and asked them to use it and maybe they were expert communities - Bah, not at all. They asked 500 (yes that many) of their friends to use it to ask questions and answer them on the website. 50 of them actively did. They kept using it and realized some benefits of QnA. Then it slowly became popular once for information about silicon valley startups and companies in the valley. Generally about startup culture and it went from there - becoming popular in more circles and geographies. Key Insight - You just have to be valuable enough to one set of people for them to use your service. The rest will come.

14. High entry barrier to new comers problem - One problem in Q/A kind of sites is that after a point of time the power users of the community become really powerful and attain good status. They end up increasing the entry barrier to newcomers and thus people slowly tend to move out. Solution - Low entry barrier to good content. If the content is good, you'll show up regardless of how well known you are.

limitations

if at every moment, every time i learn more i realise how young, inexperienced and naive i was. if after every experience, i say i have grown and can now see things in a way i couldn't earlier, how can i ever be so sure of decisions/beliefs/intuitions. i should then always be completely unsure and treat every instinct with caution, because as i breathe and live i shall soon be wiser and see the fallacy of my beliefs. Sure, some may be reaffirmed, but so many will change. I can/should thus never be sure of what I feel/think/do.
On the flip-side, if I'm never sure, I can never do, or at least never do with good enough conviction. So pragmatism would have me do imperfectly than not at all. It might even be said it's better to do wrong than to not do at all - and it seems like anything done would be wrong since over time i'll see how incomplete and incoherent my views were.
So the best is what can be done at the moment to the best of our abilities. The best is what can be done right with the right intentions - since every decision will ultimately affect someone in a harmful way and as long as it is being done in oblivion it should be okay. But is it right to then stop seeing further in time, when you can start seeing faults. What do you do when every option has harm written all over it? Should you then choose the one with the least harm? How do you measure that? Should you choose the one with more harm in the present or more in the future?
Do/should we care about our progeny? About future generations. About the world we leave to generations after us. Do we really care? Why is that counter-intuitive to most of us? Probably because it's much harder to sympathise with those we haven't seen and thus we can relate much less to. Speaking for myself, I suppose I empathise much more with past generations that have existed than future generations that haven't yet started. I guess if i think ahead I might find a conveniently scary world out there for them, but my empathy is limited by the reach of my senses - and since empathy is almost like an involuntary reflex, only the sensation matters, not the rationalisation. Thus I'm more biologically suited to empathise with more structural closeness to my senses over time. Thus family more than others, and hence the structural difference of national/religious sympathies in people. We humans are limited. We can imagine and hypothesise global and cosmological events but our empathy is limited by us being a biological tool. A tool that senses the environment and builds connections.
In short we are screwed.

bed of blood

a bullet to the wound, and

a bullet to the mind

can rarely be as sublime

as the pangs of a charred heart

a knife to the navel, or

a blow that ruptures out the blood in your guts, and then

your guts all artistically spilled out

are rarely as comprehensive

as the tunes the mind can take

if the moment were to breathe

and if these moments were to grow

i wonder what we could make with

a spastic mind harvesting a dark undercurrent

and deep undergrowth

torrential rain can water much dust

and clean much dirt

but beyond the pain begone

it can only pick up the remains of a mutilated carcass

it can only wash away the morbidity of the infected soul

nothing can revive it

not even the torrential rain

but if society and i had a choice

i'd prefer a clean road

and we do have a choice

the blushes of the trees

and the faces of the plants

only appear as murderers now

the gaze of lights like a flesh-eater on the prowl

every object around me like a fiend

waiting to rape me and crumple me 

as i crack in every bone

i'd invite them all and let them have their way 

but that would be too simple

i deserve much more

the bed i sit on engulfs me

like a coffin would spit out a corpse

the wires around me dangle. as if

waiting to rip me until my skin is red

they are the foot soldiers of beloved enemy

i can either concede or suffer

the choice has always been mine

i can only concede or suffer

and i do have a choice

death, morbidity and more (the complete package)

if only i could speak, i would say

not just things that wander around in my mind

not just things that matter

but the things that pain

if only i had words,

my lone option would not be

to kill every bit slowly, one by one

so none is left, and none is better than some

if there was any light left

i would paint it with shadows

my words are knives

and they're full of blood

i would continue to mock

i would continue to drone

shell out junk, pilfer, plunder and scream

in mirth and joy as i destroy everything

there is nothing left

nothing more can be

i shall continue to be tormented

that was my curse

and i was born with it

i never believed in naysayers

or the mystery of birth

never accorded to heredity

or the star soothsayers

but torment and hatred was bred within me

and yes, i was born with it

until everyone kills me

i shall continue to fight my battle

to continue to kill everyone within me

one shall win in the end

sadistic as i am, i hope it's me

the dry leaves shall wither

the oceans shall dry

blood dust and torment will breathe the land

smoke and charr will be all you will be allowed to breathe

and as you try and live,

i will suck every breath of life from within me

sometimes i wonder if the tormentor

is around me or within me

i cannot defend myself from the one around me

i can at least harvest the one within me

every night every morning

even as this tinge of melodramtaic greed gnaws away

i shall resist it

there is no hope left for any of us

why should i then leave anything within me

beauty was a mistress then

and beauty is a mistress now

beauty will continue to prey on us all

i have already sacrificed myself

but it shall not forgive me

by the end i will lose my eyes

and be spread out like a corpse

and it will eagerly chew up my carcass

it shall enjoy scavenging slowly and painfully

but not give up

my obsession is only matched by my murderer

i shall continue to struggle and

it will never let things end

in my dying moments

in what i can only hope for myself

the only optimism is that

when i close my eyes

let there be nothing left of me at all

ejipura evictions

So let's put things in a bit of perspective here.

On the one hand it is wrong to take over someone else's property and land. It is illegal and part of the law system which protects other people/corporations and governments from taking what is rightfully ours. If one of these people came and took over part of our homes we would feel bad, right?

But that's not the half the picture.

1. How did the people who currently own this land come to become its owners? We are fully well aware of how the sale of land of this size happens. Are we not aware of how much money exchanged hands or are we not aware of how many bureaucrats themselves have vested interests in it. I would be interested to look at the uncensored deed of the papers, the partnership of the venture that is making that mall. Who is willing to bet there's a politician who's part owner in the enterprise? How the revenue generated from sale of commercial shops will go on to fund the next candidacy of an elected official. Police force that harasses women in the city doesn't become effective overnight. This happens when a minister orders them to evacuate people.

2. On what basis was this land distributed. The premise of the government is that it owns public land (since it is made up of 'public') and ideally distributes land to serve the community better. There are huge ranges of green in bangalore that have been destroyed and are currently being destroyed for construction. Finding a park in the city is now almost akin to finding an oasis in a desert. Greens used by military are taken over for corporate construction in the city. There is no consideration towards these people with respect to their lives when these decisions are made. The only beneficiaries of these constructions are us, the upper middle class and consumers and the rich corporations who are the producers. 

3. These people are being dislocated because they are affecting someone's plans and there is/might be talk about them being compensated. Why can't the people who own the land be relocated and then compensated by more quantity of land in a different less posh location. Surely the eviction of 2000 families should seem like enough reason. But the decision is to favour the few who have come to own this through corporate and government machinery designed for and by them. ( Let us not even go into the interest benefits received by the corporations using fabricated balance sheets, who essentially build the entire project funded largely by public money )

4. Also, according to the Indian constitution, there is no fundamental right to property as of the 42th amendment (or something similar). If there is a man who owns a house on a site where a highway or a trainline needs to be laid, he is removed from that place with compensation. Surely, the lives of 2000 families should be enough cause for that to come into effect. This is in fact an abuse of that very recommendation.

5. One more question we need to ask ourselves is what constitutes owning the land. Living there with your family, constituting a livelihood etc. seem like they should amount to something. If it really comes down to legal residence, most of the poor (tribals etc) don't have legal certificates for land. Two generations ago we wouldn't have any physical ownership to our lands. For crying out loud, we as a country are only 3 generations old.

Moreover, I don't think that law can be used as an absolute defence. They are more often than not the garb much of the powerful hide behind. It is often a mirage designed for protection of the rich and powerful.

For a moment, let us say everything is by the book - Law is useless if all we know is the letter of the law and not the essence of the law.

Rules are made for a reason, to protect not to destroy. Just because a rule is present doesn't mean that it should be blindly followed. If this is a case that makes it look invalid, it should not be followed. And let's face it the reason why we are sitting here typing this mail is because we have won a genetic lottery in india. The people owning/constructing the land are not born geniuses who have hard earned something unique through labour. They are more often than not at the right place at the right time.

Maybe it is even wrong to the corporation that has bought this land. Maybe the business venture they invested in gets hampered and there are some losses. Compensate that by delaying payment liabilities. It's a call between supporting blind economic growth and an inclusive empathetic decision.

At the gut of it, we just need to ask ourselves one moral question whether it is ok to destroy the lives of 2000 families who are already living at the fringes of society.