Dudurudh

This article was originally written as part of my unfinished submission to the nine dots prize. Maybe next time I'll actually submit something.  “The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy we've ever had.” -Eric Schmidt, Co-Founder and CEO, Google.com In the year 1947 when John Bardeen and his team at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey were busy inventing the first transistor, Harry S Truman was on the campaign trail with almost every prediction indicating that he would be defeated by Republican Thomas E. Dewey in the elections that would be held the following year. Meanwhile, somewhere in Illinois, Hugh Rodham and Dorothy Howell were celebrating the birth of their first child, a baby girl they named Hillary Diane Rodham and nearly 7000 miles away, 300 million Indians were celebrating their hard-fought independence from over 200 years of British colonial rule. The invention of the transistor ...

This article was originally written as part of my unfinished submission to the nine dots prize. Maybe next time I'll actually submit something.  “The internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn't understand, the largest experiment in anarchy we've ever had.” -Eric Schmidt, Co-Founder and CEO, Google.com In the year 1947 when John Bardeen and his team at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey were busy inventing the first transistor, Harry S Truman was on the campaign trail with almost every prediction indicating that he would be defeated by Republican Thomas E. Dewey in the elections that would be held the following year. Meanwhile, somewhere in Illinois, Hugh Rodham and Dorothy Howell were celebrating the birth of their first child, a baby girl they named Hillary Diane Rodham and nearly 7000 miles away, 300 million Indians were celebrating their hard-fought independence from over 200 years of British colonial rule. The invention of t...

The dust hasn’t settled on the Apple Special event but I’m back to review my predictions. Firstly, let me convey my condolences to the intern who posted the tweet about the iPhone 7 on Apple’s (new and till now unused) twitter account before it was even announced on stage. Also, for a company whose mysterious aura used to captivate audiences, if the only things you could hide from everyone was the Mario app and the Pokemon Go what-ever-the-hell announcement, you might want to take a step back and evaluate where it all went wrong. It’s naïve of me to expect the return of the Apple of Steve Jobs. But if you want any evidence that Apple has changed, it was all in today’s presentations. More on that in a later post! For now, let’s get straight to it! Predictions from the previous post are italicized. My reactions to my predictions are below them. If you want to read the previous post, it's here. An amazingly new iPhone. Well, amazement lies in the eyes of the beholder. The new iPhone ...

The dust hasn’t settled on the Apple Special event but I’m back to review my predictions. Firstly, let me convey my condolences to the intern who posted the tweet about the iPhone 7 on Apple’s (new and till now unused) twitter account before it was even announced on stage. Also, for a company whose mysterious aura used to captivate audiences, if the only things you could hide from everyone was the Mario app and the Pokemon Go what-ever-the-hell announcement, you might want to take a step back and evaluate where it all went wrong. It’s naïve of me to expect the return of the Apple of Steve Jobs. But if you want any evidence that Apple has changed, it was all in today’s presentations. More on that in a later post! For now, let’s get straight to it! Predictions from the previous post are italicized. My reactions to my predictions are below them. If you want to read the previous post, it's here. An amazingly new iPhone. Well, amazement lies in the eyes of the beholder. The new ...

[Updated with one additional paragraph I forgot to include when I posted this half an hour ago] Apple’s latest special event is in less than 24 hours and as is usual before this event every year, speculation is rife about what they will announce. A new iPhone is widely expected to be launched but nobody is still quite sure what’s going to be in it. It’s been a while since I last wrote an Apple-related piece so I’m quite rusty but this post is basically my two cents about what could possibly come out of this event. More internet garbage! What’s new!  An amazingly new iPhone. Well, amazement lies in the eyes of the beholder. The new iPhone will have a faster processor and a better camera. The difference from its predecessors being that this one will have iOS 10 and as we have noticed increasingly in small yet significant features of iOS 10, there seems to be a lot of on-board machine learning happening which means that the 64-bit, rumored 3Gb RAM might finally be put to more use than...

[Updated with one additional paragraph I forgot to include when I posted this half an hour ago] Apple’s latest special event is in less than 24 hours and as is usual before this event every year, speculation is rife about what they will announce. A new iPhone is widely expected to be launched but nobody is still quite sure what’s going to be in it. It’s been a while since I last wrote an Apple-related piece so I’m quite rusty but this post is basically my two cents about what could possibly come out of this event. More internet garbage! What’s new!  An amazingly new iPhone. Well, amazement lies in the eyes of the beholder. The new iPhone will have a faster processor and a better camera. The difference from its predecessors being that this one will have iOS 10 and as we have noticed increasingly in small yet significant features of iOS 10, there seems to be a lot of on-board machine learning happening which means that the 64-bit, rumored 3Gb RAM might finally be put to mor...

16 year old raped, filmed and blackmailed for a year , India Times, August 2016. The article hyperlinked above starts with the sentence “despite the enactment of the stringent anti-rape law”. There seems to be a notion that harsher punishments will be an effective deterrent to crime despite innumerable instances where that notion fails. Harsh punishments are absolutely necessary steps to, well, punish the convicts. But what do we really want? Harsher jails or safer streets? (The former doesn’t necessarily lead to the latter). The problem with candle light vigils and week-long street protests is this: they’re consoled by paper legislation. Tell me, after Nirbhaya did anyone see increased night time patrolling? Did you see more street lights in your gully? Did you stop seeing auto drivers driving autos in which the license on display is not theirs but someone else’s? Did you hear of psychological evaluation and treatment for rowdy sheeters and eve teasers? In short, did you hear of A...