FlyingSnake

“It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal.”

Thank you for inventing Docker, it truly changed the life of many developers.

I was there when dotCloud announced Docker in 2013 and it was truly pragmatic. I had previously burned my hands on LXC, Juju Charms and Vagrant to containerize the apps, but it was all a house of cards. I remember helping a friend ship his whole Vagrant Box to the interview panel for a job!

It’s incredible to think about how much boilerplate Docker removed right at it's launch. Thank you.

Author here! I built voxlocal as an educational experiment to understand how the magic behind voice agents work. I wanted to have a raw CLI setup that does the bare minimum tasks needed for me to debug and understand the stuff behind the hoods. I have left many things out of the scope like VAD and async streaming as they might have complicated the journey.

Looking forward to learn more from the HackerNews community and their experiences about voice agents.

With all due respect, PG and JS were titans of an era where attention spans were not short. I am not sure if that strategy would work in the LLM-era.

Many folks are great writers, but bad editors and the meandering intro is what kills most blog posts for me. Too bad because we really need more personal stories.

I start with the conclusion in the first paragraph[1], and the user can decide if it’s worth their time or not. Unless you’re Gabriel Garcia Marquez, no one’s going to read your rambling.

[1] https://samkhawase.com/blog/email-is-crazy/

I’m lazy so With fish, I just type a part of the command and press up few times to get to where I want. There’s also fish-fzf.

> If proof free speculations are your thing…

Funnily enough I’ve given enough examples and sources already in this thread. I think it’s better than “I know someone who knows” and “it’s expert vetted research”. I’ll stick to my theory about Sanskrit/Prakrit diglossia for now.

In the end we are two lay people arguing about a topic we’re not experts in and speculating how things would have been few millennia ago. It’s fine to have diverse perspectives! I’m not sure which quacks you deal with but I wish you all the best.

आ नो भद्राः क्रतवो यन्तु विश्वतः

This isn’t a black and white case where “proofs” exist. Indian history is notoriously hard to study due to lack of primary sources.

> historical changes in Sanskrit used in the Vedas.

This is just one small corpus of Sanskrit linguistic traditions. It hardly gives them expertise over the rest of the traditions spanning few millennia.

Jains, Buddhists and various other Sramana movements were championed by lower varnas and they all used Sanskrit as a liturgical language.

I have already mentioned the widespread presence of edicts, danapatra, inscriptions, secular literature created for wider public which hints that Sanskrit was widely understood and Sanskrit/Prakrit Diglossia is not too far fetched.

Comparing Sanskrit to the status of Latin in 17th CE is bit disingenuous and a sign of presentism.

Sanskrit enjoyed scholarship since 6th BCE and it was prevalent and commonly used for more than a millennia after that.

The various inscriptions found across the subcontinent, and meant for common people are in Sanskrit which disproves this idea that it was not widely used.

With all due respect, are they historians of Sanskrit linguistics or professors of Sanskrit language? That makes a big difference.

Diglossia is very common in Indian culture and it is not far fetched to imagine Indians speaking Sanskrit and Prakrits fluently and switching them based on context.

You can find minor examples of it even today if you look at public announcements, which are done in Sanskrit inspired verbiage.

The majority of surviving Sanskrit literature is actually secular like Poems, Dramas, science and mathematics.

Sanskrit was widely spoken and understood just like Latin or Avestan, in its heyday. Otherwise it wouldn’t be part of the liturgical traditions of Buddhism, Jainism and Nastika traditions.

Why would Sudraka,Vatsayana, Brhathari write in Sanskrit if no one spoke it?

> can travel up to 125 kilometers (77 miles) on a single charge

This would be a big hit in European cities. I own VW e-Up! and it's a perfect EU city car. With it's 375KM range, I rarely charge it more than once a month.

Which “entire industries” has ChatGPT upended?

Great article. Hacking old kindles is fun! I encourage everyone to give it a try. The retro feel of eink makes it special for me.

I wrote about my experience in cross compiling zig on an old kindle some time ago.

https://samkhawase.com/blog/zig-kindle-gdb/

Used Vivaldi for years but it kept breaking my workflows and would wipe out my meticulously assembled tab groups. After few such gaffes I switched to Brave. I really wanted Vivaldi to work but can’t let it break workflows.

Adding C++ to the project wasn't unprecedented TBH. The app was blazing and we didn't have any issues with perf in the project. The app failed for a different reason.

PiZero is a pretty solid machine.

I run my micro-homelab on a Pi Zero from 2018. It’s behind Cloudflare tunnels. It runs the apps i need on a DietPi OS within 180MB and it’s uptime is ~8 months.

All good brother, we all are going through interesting times.

You seem to be in the arena and have skin in the game. Would love to read your blog on these topics.

> Mughals palace households were mainly speaking Persian language

They actually spoke Chagatai Turkish in the households and Persian was the court language. Urdu developed independently, mostly outside the royal patronage, and much later.

May I ask what kind of study did you do on the Mughals? What stands out the most for you?

Fun fact: They called themselves "Gurkhaniye" and not "Mughals". It was a term mostly popularized by rivals like Marathas (which is also an exonym)

Ignoring your snark, I'm in agreement with what you said. It is indeed a complex topic and I see no John Fairbanks like figure championing the cause.

I have nothing against Mughals, they had a great impact on the subcontinent history esp during 17th century. However the center of gravity was the Indian Ocean Spice trade network which was the South. This is what the Portuguese and various EICs wanted to connect to. We have records of the vast riches of these Deccan cities from these travelers.

> few dynasties were comparable to the vastness of Mughals

The Mauryas perhaps ruled a much larger area than Mughals. Khalji, Tughlaqs, Satvahanas, and Marathas also ruled over vast landscapes, but they are not much known outside India.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maratha_Empire#/media/File:Ind...

Text is Lindy. It has withstood the test of time and it's as ubiquitous as SQL or TCP/IP.

Reminds me of this decade old post (and discussion) by Graydon Hoare, "Always bet on text".

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8451271

[2]: https://graydon2.dreamwidth.org/193447.html

True that. There is no interest in objectively studying history in India. It is just a tool to further the agendas of various parties involved.

The unwavering focus on the Mughal empire by the West, is a curious phenomenon. Is it because they built highly visible monuments like the Taj? Mughals didn’t even reach their zenith until 1680s and were vastly reduced by 1730s.

The Deccan Sultanates and Vijayanagara were more relevant to world history in the 16th Century India. The wonders of Bijapur, Golconda and Hampi would put 16th CE Delhi to shame.

I've traveled to Hanoi and absolutely loved the phở there. One perk of living in Berlin is the exceptional Phở we get here. Thanks to the large Vietnamese community we have great phở, Bahn mí (esp at the Dong Xuan center). The phở we get here is top tier too, as confirmed by my Vietnamese friends.