Allwyn Fernandes

#100DaysofWriting Life as it isn't.

200708 test blog push

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Als 2020 Theme

Theme for the year Just like massive organizations assign a theme to the year, I feel like doing the same for my personal life. If it does some good long tailed organizations like the Church and Rotary, the idea ought to do my life some good. To that end, I'd like to assign a theme to this year. I have already assigned one to this decade - The deliberate decade. Its time I dig a tad deeper give a name to the first year of this decade. Its funny actually as I hadn't thought of this earlier. ...
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the deliberate decade

I woke up to a decade of being alive, alert and deliberate. I was born in 95. Spend the next 5 years figuring out the people, world and goodness around me. In 2010, I'd love to say I knew where I was but I didn't. Similarly, I spent the next 10 years dealing with basic education. Really just running away from school and studies. In 2011, I was hoping the Mayans were gonna come through on their body of work. They didn't I spent the decade again dealing with education, just this time accepting ...
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lessons from kshmr

Chasing a dream Be irresponsible. Be a bum. Bums don't owe anybody any thing. Responsibilities suck the energy out of you. The more responsibilities, the lesser energy. Which is why chasing a dream right from when you are young is a great thing. Chasing dreams requires huge amounts of energy. Use people Pay them, give them credit. Be nice to people, then use them, then be nice to them. See the gifts within others, then utilize them. If you cant be used, you're useless. Be 0 or a 100. No one w...
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Never be predictable

Never be predictable or an absolute slave to a routine. Some scientists believe that driverless cars will not work unless they learn to be irrational. If such cars stop reliably whenever a pedestrian appears in front of them, pedestrian crossings will be unnecessary and jaywalkers will be able to marching to the road, forcing a driverless car to stop suddenly, a great discomfort to its occupants. To prevent this, driverless cars may have to learn to be angry, and you occasionally maliciously f...
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what to learn

While investing time in the method of learning sure makes sense, I also see it as potent to give a lot of time to choosing what you want to learn. You've got limited time and energy so you need to devote time to pinpoint what you want to learn. How do select that choice? You may have many desires but only devote time to things that matter - Things that - increase happiness, credibility / demand, capitalize on a strength, go beyond a life crisis ...
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Reading and books

Reading books is not about how many books you've read or how many are in your attic. It's about having a select few collection of books that really resonate with your personality and goals and to read them repeatedly, going back to them when you need advice. ...
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learning x in y time

problem #opportunity #competition Learn X in one day Problem is, I really dont want to learn x for the sake of learning x. I want to learn X to do Y while I am P. If the course title does not contain XYP then I am not interested in it. Even if I can learn X in an hour, I do not care. I have no desire to know 'What a variable is' I am however, eternally interested in making a bot that auto reminds me of my follow ups or better still, does them for me. If learning what a variable is will make th...
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learning software my way

I believe learning to use a software should be easy, fun and quick. I see software as a tool. To achieve a goal. But this change in perspective came only recently. Just until two years ago I used to think of MS office and the Adobe suit as mammoths with a steep learning curve. It is only recent, this co-relation I made between the buttons on an Oven and the buttons in Photoshop. How much time did you take to learn how to operate a hammer? a spatula? or an oven? I doubt you'd need more than one ...
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Why I don't believe in online degrees

I see multiple companies selling online 'diploma' courses. I'm not against any of those but the idea of them irks me. In my opinion, University and higher education degrees are as much about the core concepts as they are about networking and after class chats with the knowledgeable professors. Its about building that one to one connection with those stake holders MOOCs or even these online Diploma organisations for that mattee cannot provide you with this. Hence the only thing they could be con...
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YAGNI

This is an acronym for You Ain't Gonna Need It. Always implement things when you actually need them, never when you just foresee that you need them. This Extreme Programming (XP) principle suggests developers should only implement functionality that is needed for the immediate requirements, and avoid attempts to predict the future by implementing functionality that might be needed later. Adhering to this principle should reduce the amount of time and effort being wasted on functionality that ...
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A rival

Another player in the game who reveals to us or weaknesses. See your competitor company or co worker as rivals ...
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Photography is story telling

Photography is story telling and photographers are artists, a particular one at that. Not a musician or a performer but a painter. Your calling as a photographer is to tell a story through that one frame, in that split 10th of a second of life. Just as one would stop and admire the Monalisa at the louver, your photography too should aim to stop people in their tracks and just think about what you've created. ...
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authority and me

“The whole educational and professional training system is a very elaborate filter, which just weeds out people who are too independent, and who think for themselves, and who don't know how to be submissive, and so on -- because they're dysfunctional to the institutions.” ― Noam Chomsky I find this applied to myself now more than ever before. ...
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what is storytelling

Story telling through photography Typically, storytelling has been about a plot, a set of characters, and environment and conflict. This however would make for a very bland and basic story. ...
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action and perception

We may often make one choice with our rational mind but end up practicing another. Sometimes these two things are exactly opposite. How could this be ? Which one is the correct one? Well, yes and yes. If someone is to ask you what kind of men are you into? you instant answer is - I'm really like intelligent men who are judicious with their spending but when in a social setting you are almost immediately attracted to the most well dressed man. How could this be? Well because there is a disconnec...
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hobby and purpose

I find it interesting why people who do graffiti do it. They risk their lives, the art work bears no exclusive names. If you ask them its all about getting a high when they know that stuff they have put out there is being viewed by others. That it travels and has a life of its own. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaKV2pgCF14 ...
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worth of your product

To me the test of how useful or uselessness of a particular thing is completely dependent on how and how much its end users interact with it. To me it does not matter how long you have toiled in writing the code or the choice of color pallets or whatever. Does the end user use it? end of story. They should either love it or hate it but never ignore it. If they love it and use it.. Don't repair it if it ain't broke. If they hate it but still use it,I see it as scope for improvement. But God forb...
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Value is perception

The value of a particular stock is nothing but the perception of the value of the stock that the majority of the masses have. Okay, that was a mouthful. Ref the tulip crises of Ireland Or investing in art and painting. Ancient paintings hold value and auction for such a high price simply because the common perception is that they are valuable. No one thinks the same of the paintings my niece made last summer. The example of this idea being implemented and coming crashing down is a Ponzi scheme g...
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pareto

The Pareto Principle suggests that in some cases, the majority of results come from a minority of inputs. I am yet to see a significant real life application of this law in my personal life. I'll probably update this entry when I do. ...
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Being lied to

People do not get tricked because they are dumb, they get tricked because they desperately want the hoax to be true. They, in a way, want to be lied to. The need the lie to be true. R: book blink gladwell ...
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future work force

I see a desperate lack of automation in the small and large and mid size companies. Case in point, My own employer, a mid sized, 50 year old pharma player has people employed who pick up hefty packages for rule based routine work. I do not blame the management. How could they know better. But moving forward I do see a stark change in the structure of the workforce. Irrespective of the core business of the company. I see each companies employing a 'Chief Automation Officer' either on payroll or a...
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hypelaw

It has come to my notice that hype too is governed by a law - This law suggests that there is typically a burst of excitement around new technology and its potential impact. Teams often jump into these technologies quickly, and sometimes find themselves disappointed with the results. This might be because the technology is not yet mature enough, or real-world applications are not yet fully realized. After a certain amount of time, the capabilities of the technology increase and practical opport...
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Your goal as an employee

I'd often wonder why certain heads of departments would crib to me about how a certain manager, vendor or employee had not delivered on a promise or had out right not preformed their task. This had directly blocked them from undertaking their own tasks. Taking action was out of their locus of control. "Why not simply let the VP know that X had not done their job?" I'd think to myself. "Why don't they just go and tell the MD that X was not performing and get them to add pressure." I now realize ...
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math vs language and keeping score

the reason why in school one could potentially score 100/100 in math but only 80/100 in history, languages or 'moral studies' is because unlike religion, language or human interactions, math has only one right answer. An answer will either be right or wrong, true or false, 1 or 0. All my student life I thought it was a huge conspiracy that worked in the favor of smart people, I wish someone stepped in and told me this back then. I would probably have worked harder and even focused more on a give...
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Disciplinarian culture

"Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they cant afford time to think. Tuition fee increases are a 'disciplinary technique' and by the time students graduate, they are not only loaded with debt, but have also internalized the "disciplinarian culture. This makes them efficient components of the consumer economy" Noam Chomsky This. This is so true for almost everything I have to s...
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Life by Roy Anderson

Everyone white face You have no messages I'm happy to hear you are doing fine So depressing but so hilarious but so depressing How not to tell a story of course The general explaining his plight People looking straight at me with slaves burning inside Made me fear old age more than death And a life without purpose or reason ...
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Learning happens when you are made to decide

“We can kind of read the animal’s mind in a way, we can predict what the animal is going to do before he does it,” Churchland said. “When you’re a novice at something your brain is doing all different things, so you have neurons engaged in all different things. But then when you’re an expert, you hone in on exactly what you’re going to do and we can pick up that activity.” R: https://www.cshl.edu/the-difference-between-an-experts-brain-and-a-novices/ ...
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Supplements

For the longest time I've thought of taking supplements as being unnatural and inhuman even but my thought is changing. I've know for long but only recently paid attention to the fact of chickens being injected with hormones, vitamins and yes supplements. For decades I've had no qualms about consuming this form of food. Kind of hypocritic it is of me, now that I think of it that the food of my food is indeed full of supplements, and I am against supplements. Now that I think of it, food itself ...
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Reeds Law

Reed's Law Reed's Law on Wikipedia The utility of large networks, particularly social networks, scales exponentially with the size of the network. This law is based on graph theory, where the utility scales as the number of possible sub-groups, which is faster than the number of participants or the number of possible pairwise connections. Odlyzko and others have argued that Reed's Law overstates the utility of the system by not accounting for the limits of human cognition on network effects; ...
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