2023 is the year I took over my life.

I was reading though my old journal entries from last year. I read through my private vents. In 2022 my mental health was very poor. I was living with my family, taking care my of brother and doing a job I didn't like.

A person I used to talk to a lot started fading away and I was no longer at a state of mind where I felt consistently happy.

February 2023

This is a special month. I had started taking over my life. I moved away from Jaipur from my parent's house. I went to Delhi to meet friends and in February - I was living alone.

I was writing music, reading books and I lived completely alone in my old house in Greater Noida.

I found it odd - that I preferred living alone over being with family.

On 7th February - I was fired. The reason was simple. I wasn't performing well enough. I was really sad. My dad supported me as much as he could.

I job hunted as my as I could. Within 3 days I was able to find a new job at GroMo - that change my life.

My life after this new job

Because if this new job at GroMo, I moved to Gurgaon with my best friends. I was closer to the people who made me happy, and far from the people who made me sad.

The HR who hired me for this job became my girlfriend. She's the sweetest girl I know and I'm glad we met.

The kind of work I've done at GroMo has been fanscinating and I've learned a lot. Its challanging work and currenly I'm leading an AI project for my company.

I felt like a complete man this year. I flipped it all over. I took charge of my life and did what's good for my mental health.

The first few months with S T and A were really amazing. Few of the best times of my life.

I don't know what the next year going to be like. Last year this month was completely different. You really can't predict what the next year is going to be like.

Maybe I'll lose everything again. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll get bored or maybe its something completely different that only time will tell.

I'll be visiting my family this weekend since moving here. It's been a long time.

Leopard trail is a remote spot in Gurgaon, India where I experience a miniature version of mountains with its hilly area.

I love taking my car alone and spend a few hours near the pond.

I listen to music while I drive. Once you enter the leopard trail region - the surroundings become immensely quite. That is something very rare to find in a busy city like Gurgaon.

It feels good to be remote at times. It gives me peace and quite to process my life. It encompasses the term "Life is in the pause" pretty well.

I've been here many times with multiple people. There's a lot of aspects to explore in this place including:

• The pond and a swamp
• Rare birds
• Obscure trails leading into the hills
• Cafes to chill at

This one day I went alone

I've been to leopard trail alone twice in my life. First was when I wanted to vent out my feelings with driving - so I chose leopard trail as my destination. This was also the first time I visited this place.

Since then I went there multiple times. Recently I went there alone again out of pure intend to explore.

I parked my car and went exploring. I found a swamp by following a trail:

This swamp had frogs, ducks and rare birds around it.

After this I went strolling in another trail that led me to a pond. This is a pond I spent most of my time at. I sat down below tree shed and stared at the water.

I love looking at the waves that get created on the pond's surface.

All those waves coming together - sometimes adding and sometimes cancelling each other out.

Reminds me a lot of wave superposition in Physics.

Every wave has a story - An event that triggered the wave. Maybe a tadpole or a dragon fly playing on the water.

I love to sit beside this pond with people important to me. Recently I went there with my best friend

Getting bored is probably our biggest super power. When we get bored, we feel unsatisfied. Boredom sucks. We constantly keep ourselves occupied so we're not bored.

The impact of boredom is immense. When we get bored - we go out and explore. Explore places, ideas and people.

I firmly believe that what's exciting in this world is the unexplored. We humans fundamentally are explorers. We're the breed of apes that crossed continents and populated the entire planet. Soon we will populate multiple planets.

We just keep on moving. Achieving more things after other.

Does this mean we will never be satisfied?

Yes. Humans will never be satisfied. We will achieve greatness, and get bored, and move on to achieving greater things.

That sounds very sad in conventional sense, But I find that as truly super. fucking. cool.

We're so lucky to have evolved with the sense of boredom, which has substantially impacted our abilities compared to other species on this planet.

If you're bored right now, go out and explore. Exploration pays off.

Everyone in Tech has probably heard about chatGPT. Its a state of the art NLP model by openAI that is exceptionally good at QnA tasks.

One of the greatest feats achieved by chatGPT is that it has the ability to code. It has deep understanding of code and what it does.

Goal: To convert existing back-end of soldirac.com from vanilla node.js to nest.js and typescript

Asking chatGPT if it can convert code

I started out asking chatGPT if it can convert my code base to nest.js

It doesn't know anything about my existing code base. It gave me some instructions on how to setup a nest project.

So I followed the instructions and created a new project.

Asking chatGPT to convert given code

Soldirac's back-end has already been written in JavaScript, and has some "modular" structure built into it.

chatGPT has no idea about my project structure, or what even soldirac is.

I took a file (module) from my existing JavaScript implementation and simply asked it to re-write this file in nest.js:

The above code snippet is the BTCPay.js module from soldirac. This module handles all communication with the BTCPay Server hosted by Soldirac.

If you read the code, it is essentially sending API requests to an endpoint where btcpay server is hosted. It is also using some keys and other values from config to send those requests, and then finally returns the result.

ChatGPT's response:

chatGPT re-writes the entire module in nest.js.

• no where in my implementation it tells that its a file for BTCPay, however chatGPT automatically creates a nest.js service and names it BTCPayService, which is accurate.
• chatGPT ignores useless comments in original code and doesn't re-writes them in its implementation.
• chatGPT creates a syntactically correct code. All strings, types and library specific syntax are correct.
• even remembers the names of config variables such as btcpay-legacy-api-key and uses them correctly.

If you notice chatGPT used the same axios library. However it is standard to use nest.js abstracted HttpService instead. So I asked chatGPT as a follow up if it can use HttpService instead of axios:

and boom! chatGPT automatically imports and injects an instance of HttpService and replaces the code to use the syntax or HttpService and not axios.

However this is not enough, if you've worked with nest.js you know that there is a better way to handle config in nest.js, ideally we would create a ConfigService that handles all config variables. In my original implementation I am reading config as a json file and exporting as a variable.

So I asked chatGPT to incorporate this request. I asked it to use a config module instead of using app_config:

ChatGPT automatically created a Config based on what variable it knows are being used. There are more variables, but chatGPT doesn't know about it, because it hasn't seen the entire code base. It has only seen that single file.

It then uses this ConfigService in the BTCPayService it had created.

chatGPT then injects the ConfigService and uses const apiKey = this.configService.get('btcpay-legacy-api-key'); to read config variables.

Notice that chatGPT isn't perfect. It forgot that I had asked it to use HttpService before and didn't include that change this time. Also it didn't give the full code.

Building the App from scratch

I later asked how I can build this project from scratch. It gave me instructions on how to create a project and what files to create:

I, then, ask it how I can include the BTCPayService it created:

It gives instruction on what files to create in what folder and what the code should be.

chatGPT is learning about your code base as it helps you build it. The more it builds, the more it will be able to connect different parts of it.

Using chatGPT as an assistant

chatGPT isn't perfect, but its very good. I used this method and asked it to convert other modules in my code such as LnpayModule, DatabaseModule, CommonModule, etc.

and chatGPT learned to connect this modules as time went on.

chatGPT wrote the ProblemService which handles everything with posting questions on Soldirac.com, notice how it able to automatically create other services like UserService.

Conclusion

ChatGPT isn't perfect, but it is evidently a massive boost in a developer's productivity. Compared to GitHub Co-pilot, chatGPT genuinely understands code and is able to connect to the dev-ops sides of coding.

To fully convert the back-end to nest.js it required more effort. There were few nits and pieces that chatGPT understandably got wrong that I had to manually fix.

However it got 80% of what my goal was. So even though its not perfect, its an awesome assistant.

Personal Thoughts on its future

I believe chatGPT is capable of doing the entire task on its own. What it misses is the understanding of the entire code base, which is fed to chatGPT in iterations.

If we can access chatGPT and fine-tune it on a code-base we want to work on, chatGPT will fully understand your code-base, and will be able to answer almost any question around it.

Be it converting to nest.js, asking it what a code snippet does or ask it to further optimize a section. It will be able to do it all, once it has been fine tuned on your code-base.

This means chatGPT is very close to being a self-reliant programmer.

This is a massive business opportunity. A service that takes your code-base, and provides fine tuned instance of chatGPT. That service can replace a lot dev work in coming years.

we come to this world alone
we meet many people
people are awesome, some are for life
but people aren't perfect

there are people who make you happy
people who make you sad
but people don't stay forever
people don't breathe forever

its a shitty feeling to be forgotten
by someone who you will never forget
but its worse to become a person
who forgets themselves

what's interesting in this life
is the unexplored
so give yourself some time
because we leave this world alone

Let me begin by saying that I will only talk about Bitcoin. I agree that there are a lot of scams in all of crypto. The internet is filled with one sided news listing everything bad with "crypto". Altough no one ever talks about the positives. This is dangerous because we citizens should be completely informed when taking decisions.

My goal is to educate, not to shill.

"Crypto is a scam"

A lot of crypto is. But does that mean everything in crypto is a scam? Just because a lot of websites can be spyware, illegal and scam does that make all websites a scam?

No right, you have to look into every project and understand it before making that judgement. Today we will discuss Bitcoin because its the most popular and that's the only one I'm qualified to talk about.

Is Bitcoin a scam? Its a decentralized network owned by no one. Who even would be the scammer here? Its a de-institutionalized tool of decentralized consensus, and it delivers on that. (I know you have follow ups but please read on)

"Bitcoin solves a problem that doesn't exist"

I wouldn't point to one thing and say "that's the problem" because money and finance are complicated. Some things were invented for genuine good but no longer serve that purpose. So lemme put forth core ideas of Bitcoin (I will not get into other cryptos for now. although I think most are scams)

Fractional banking

Fractional banking is the idea that allows banks to work on a fraction of reserves.

Let me explain with an example: Say there's an economy with 1$, you as the owner of that 1$ deposit that 1$ to a bank and the bank gives you a "note" of ownership that your money is deposited in the bank.

Now, how will the bank earn money? It'll use your 1$ and invest or loan it out on an interest and earn from that.

That's super cool if you can do that. Although what fractional banking does is it allows the bank to only keep 1/10th of the reserve. Meaning the bank can loan out 9$ more than it holds and introduce it to the economy.

The bank will earn interest on money:

 - it doesn't own
 - doesn't exists and also inflate the economy.

You as the original holder of that 1$ lost your wealth because the 1$ economy just became 10$ economy but you still own 1$, but the bank made money off money it doesn't have. This is what people mean when they say our world economy is a debt based economy. 97% of all money is debt.

who benefits?

In today's world, almost all billionaires like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk and Bill Gates don't give themselves salaries, because salaries are taxable income and they don't want to pay tax.

So instead they give themselves 0$ (or very little salary) and take millions of dollars of loans. That loan comes from a fractional reserve, meaning 90% of it didn't exist before.

They do that because loan isn't considered taxable income. And is often considered a tax deductible. They can pay off older debt with new debt because no one would deny loan to a billionaire.

Every time a billionaire is paid:
 - the bank earns interest on what should've been tax
 - the government doesn't earn tax from billionaires
 - it reduces your money's worth.

How bitcoin helps here

The core idea that bitcoin puts forward here is you cannot spend what you don't have. Bitcoin has a hard cap of 21 million bitcoin. You cannot create more. You cannot do fractional reserve banking. You cannot loan out what you don't have.

In a bitcoin economy you have to pay with real money, instead of credit created out of nothing.

Fiat standard

A lot of people say that the fiat standard is useful. The idea here is that before 1972 money was a representation of gold. Gold was the real money and has been the go-to money for most of humanity.

The convenience of banking was you can deposit your gold and get a "note of ownership" that your gold is deposited and now you can easily deal with fractions of gold and just trade paper.

In 1972 the US (and later most countries including India) went off the gold standard and declared that the paper you're trading is now real money and the central bank has the powers to print them. And there you go, a century long currency was replaced with institutional money with no hard limit.

Fiat standard had its benefits. It was introduced post the great depression but it was always supposed to be a temp

Money printing goes brr

printing more money has become the go-to solution for any problem the government faces. People are too rich? print money. People are too poor? print money. We want to go to war? print money.

Whatever is the problem just turn on the money printer.

Printing more money has its consequences. By introducing more money into the economy you are devaluing the entire currency and making people poorer. It affects the middle class the most as they can't afford to be invested in appreciating assets.

They work so hard their entire lives to earn and save their money which gets devalued over a month or so. This is happening in India as I type this.

The current global reserve currency is the US dollar and the US truly has the ultimate money printing power. They are always at an advantage in global deals because their currency is in which global deals are made. That beats the neutrality of global trades. The USA is always at an advantage.

How bitcoin helps here

Bitcoin is fundamentally like gold. As I said before, you cannot print more than 21 million bitcoin (unless everyone agrees to change that). It has a hard limit and no one can print as they wish.

If printing more bitcoin is needed, then it can be done with consensus. I will later discuss how consensus in bitcoin works. But in the end it'll be a democratic decision.

Bitcoin is also a "de-institutionalized" currency, as in it doesn't belong to an institute like the US or China. Global trades are more fair and countries aren't at the mercy of USA.

Banks have become too big to fail

A bank capitalizes when it profits, and socializes when it loses. If the bank is profitable it keeps the money. If the bank messes up and goes bankrupt, nothing happens, they just get bail out from tax money and are back in business.

That is exactly what happened with YesBank in 2019 (in India) and a lot of big banks that caused the 2008 crisis. In capitalism, if you're unfit in the market, you die off and get replaced by someone better. That doesn't seem to happen to banks.

"Bitcoin has failed" because

Bitcoin miners control everything

That is the biggest misconception around Bitcoin. Miners don't control consensus.

To explain this section let me introduce few technical terms:
 - Full node: Its a computer that owns the full copy of the Bitcoin blockchain and is connected to the rest of the Bitcoin network. A full node runs on as low as a raspberry pi 4.
 - Mining node: Its a computer that is listening to full nodes for transactions and is construction and calculating proof of work for new blocks for the blockchain.
 - Consensus: Its the agreeing up between full nodes about the rules of Bitcoin and the state of the blockchain (things like has this transaction happened)

"The Bitcoin Network" isn't the miners. Its the full nodes + miners.

Whether a transaction is valid or invalid isn't a judgement call by miners, but by full nodes. Even if there's a miner with 90% hash power, if full nodes invalidate a block from that miner then its, invalid.

Full nodes are the enforcers of consensus. They enforce the rules, not the miners.

How does that all work? That will require another blog post but you can look up "how does consensus work in Bitcoin" to learn more.

Bitcoin is too slow

This statement was true 4 years ago, but is no longer true. Ever since new advancements have come up bitcoin has improved a lot. The biggest contributor being The Lightning Network, which I realized surprisingly little people know about.

Before even beginning to explain I will put-forth screenshots of transactions I've done. Notice the timestamps between creation and completion. The transaction completes within 4 seconds.

There seems to be a massive disconnect. Most people talking about these topics don't seem to have used Bitcoin in its current form.

The Lightning Network is a layer 2 solution to Bitcoin that (with some tradeoffs) makes bitcoin "lightning fast". Unlike the layer 1 blockchain layer, the bigger and more popular the network gets, the faster and cheaper it becomes. As of writing this article the lightning network is only 4 years old. That's the beauty of open-source.

The statement of bitcoin does only 7 transactions per second is no longer true. Every statistic that pulls this data doesn't include lightning transaction. This would've been fare 3 years ago but lightning network is growing and cannot be ignored.

The amount of transactions that happen on LN are hard to calculate, but they are by no means 7 transactions per second. The theoretical limit for the lightning network is infinite but the real value is yet to be calculated.

Bitcoin is too volatile

I agree with this. Bitcoin markets are really volatile. Almost everything I discussed on this article has been about Bitcoin's fundamentals, not the actual market. The current market involves a lot of speculation and resembles the stock market more.

I think we should have the right regulations in Bitcoin trading to make markets safer, and less volatile.

Bitcoin uses a lot of energy

I agree on this too. Bitcoin uses a lot of energy. It uses that energy as its security mechanism to prevent spam.

However Banks use a lot of energy too, so does Netflix and Reddit. But you would say that those companies have value and Bitcoin doesn't.

As stated earlier, the 7 transactions / second metric isn't true anymore. Bitcoin does much more for that same amount of energy. Bitcoin is open source protocol and those things improve.

The 707 kilowatt-hours per transaction metric isn't true anymore.

However don't get me wrong. I strongly care about the environment and believe we should use clean energy whenever possible. But its important to get the picture right. The energy per transaction metrics you hear doesn't include lightning transactions.

Direct benefits from Bitcoin

Open source money

The beauty of open source is in the freedom it provides. Anyone is free to innovate on top of bitcoin. That is how we got The Lightning Network.

This also makes Bitcoin permission-less. Anyone is free to join and innovate. There is no barrier to entry. This is something that is completely missing from the current financial system.

Financial inclusion

Bitcoin has no barrier to entry. All you need is an internet connection and a cheap smartphone. Just with that you become part of the global economy.

The majority of humanity doesn't have that ability. Most cannot do global transaction and a big chunk of humanity doesn't have bank accounts.

Bitcoin also doesn't discriminate based on race and nationality.

Transparency

Everything in Bitcoin is open. The policies are enforced by battle-tested open source algorithms, instead of a promise by an authority.

Direct democracy

Its a misconception that things cannot change in Bitcoin. The enforced rules such as bitcoin supply, inflation rate, black listing, can all be changed. But that decision is not taken by a centralized authority. its taken by all of us.

Consensus can be changed if there's consensus for it. Rules can be changed only if everyone agrees to it. And this happens on Bitcoin more often than you'd imagine.

Final thoughts

No system is perfect. I think over long term both, the fiat system and the bitcoin system will coexist. Our financial needs change overtime and so does our financial systems.

My goal is to educate everyone so we all understand Bitcoin as well as the current financial system better. We cannot have discussions if we only listen to one extreme view. That just polarizes us more.

I hope you learned more about the existing financial system and Bitcoin.

Sources:

• https://www.forbes.com/advisor/investing/cryptocurrency/bitcoins-energy-usage-explained/
• https://corporatefinanceinstitute.com/resources/knowledge/finance/fractional-banking/
• https://www.businessinsider.in/finance/news/how-billionaires-like-jeff-bezos-and-elon-musk-avoid-paying-federal-income-tax-while-increasing-their-net-worth-by-billions/articleshow/83483263.cms
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fiat_money
• https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook
• https://github.com/lnbook/lnbook
• https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2021/09/15/bitcoin-transaction-speeds-lightning-network/

Businesses work for people. They build products and services for people for a price. We live in a world where the more money you have the more important you are to these businesses.

A US citizen spends more than an Indian citizen. So we have more products and services built for Americans even though there are 4 times more Indians.

Our modern world revolves around giving people, with spendable money, what they want so we can get a share of their money. We rarely build anything for people with less money. That is generally something that falls under volunteer work, or activism. But the general direction this civilization moves is build for people with money.

but what if machines could also spend money?

We don't have to go into machines being conscious yet. They can have a limited set programmed features that rely on spending money. Money is just yet another resource.

Would that mean we would have more products and services built for machines?

We already have products for machines. No human is going to need lubricants to avoid being rusty. These products are for machines owned by humans. And its humans who spend their money to take care of their machines.

Perhaps an AI can use money as a fitness function in some reinforcement learning dynamic where they use the least amount of money (cost function) to achieve something. The environment would be the real world.

But if machines could take automated decisions, automatically connect to the internet and decide what to spend money on. I imagine we'll have a lot more products and services built specifically for machine needs.

Removing humans from commerce

If we remove humans from the picture of trade, commerce itself will become much more scaled. When we removed humans from the concept of communication by replacing letters with the internet, we also ended building systems of communication that only happen between computers.

For example,  APIs, web protocols, IoT protocols are all ways of communications that happen between computers. The scale at which "communication" happens is on another level compared to before the internet. This has enabled us to innovate and built this modern society.

If we do the same with money, we'd have more avenues of business. Scaling the concept of "trading" to a level that resembles society before and after the internet.

how?

Currently machines cannot own money. Or at least, they cannot own national currencies. Although they can own bitcoin. Bitcoin doesn't require any authority. All it takes is a computer to scramble some numbers and they'll have a bitcoin wallet that can partake in a global economy without anyone's permission. Perhaps with Bitcoin enabled with Lightning Network we could have a world where computers can own their money and spend it as they wish.

This computer can optionally be designed to be out of anyone's control. Perhaps running on some obscure server on the cloud (or even decentralized cloud) where its silently running and spending its bitcoin. What would that program spend its bitcoin on? Maybe its cloud hosting costs? What more business avenues can we think of?

The Cold war between Soviet Union and United States of America, was a war between ideologies. Soviet Union being the centralized ideology. Who believes in centralizing all money and power to a central point and using the coherence of centralized systems to win, also known as Communism.

The USA, being a capitalist nation, is relatively decentralized. It gives freedom to people, and doesn't take 100% of their profits.

During times of rapid acceleration a decentralized system, with its free nodes, groups innovate at a pace no other single centralized entity can compete with. The Soviet Union can tactically win wars but they cannot build Apple and Wikipedia at the same time.

Decentralized systems are more efficient

Decentralized systems are fundamentally more efficient and encourage explosive innovation, because there is no single person that handles "what to invest resources in". A centralized system decides everything for its workers. Wouldn't the world be better if we had not just one but five competing such centralized systems?

Moving these central points of authority from one to five makes the entire ecosystem explode with more ideas and competition.

This also makes decentralized systems more efficient because not everyone is doing the same thing. This is quite counter intuitive because in today's world where the word decentralized is often coupled with "blockchain" and the word blockchain is often coupled with "slow".

Decentralized internet protocols have scaled more than centralized ones. The Fediverse is a great example. Mastodon is federated counter of Twitter's centralized model. Mastodon has millions of users but the entire system is fueled by donations only. its because in mastodon there are multiple instances of mastodon, all decentralized and communicating to each other independently. So a single instance doesn't have to do much.

In the case of Bitcoin and "blockchain" the inefficiency comes in because of its requirement of consensus. Every node has to agree on everything for the network to proceed. Although Bitcoin and some other cryptos have levied this by moving to layer 2 solutions such as The Lightning Network that are federated and don't require consensus on the entire stack.

Final Thoughts

It gives me comfort that open-source won* not because people were suddenly woke enough to realize the threats of closed source software, but because open-source encourages open innovation. Everyone can do whatever the fuck they want. No friction to innovation.

Open and decentralized (permission-less) systems should therefore always win in the long run. The Web (decentralized) won over Gopher (centralized). Linux servers (open) won over windows server (closed). Today Science in the hands of many grows far more than Science in the past in the hand of few elites.

There's always new avenues for innovation to spill into. And there's no single person or leader who can operate a centralized institution that can recognize all such avenues.

We as a society should celebrate this. We should encourage more openness and decentralization, not only because of ethics, but because its tendency to yield an innovation explosion.

* I understand Open-Source didn't win in the tradition sense because most end consumers still use closed source software although the developer community is mostly open source now. Open source is MUCH more popular than before in avenues closed system were too blind to step into.

Its always been a difficult problem for open source projects to thrive when there's so few ways to generate revenue. Recently there has been a rising popularity in generating revenue by "doing the deployment" part of a self-hosted open source application.

Apps such as BTCPay Server, bitcoin-core, LND, NextCloud, Cryptpad, etc require basic Linux terminal skills. Even with Linux being popular, only small portion of humanity is skilled enough to manage their own servers.

Projects like Umbrel and Casa node sell their software already installed and setup on a raspberry pi. All the end customer has to do is:

• buy their product (software installed on raspberry pi)
• connect it to their router with an ethernet cable
• ???
• profit

Why Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is one of the most popular FOSS projects out there. Though most people aren't benefiting from the self-sovereignty it is capable of providing. Bitcoin and its applications really shine where the user has complete over them. An ideal way of doing so is self hosting.

Selling bitcoind and its applications on a raspberry pi is a really cool idea that can help make self-sovereign bitcoin be available to more people. This also enables an indivisual to do more than just do bitcoin transactions. Apps like BTCPay Server are almost a neccesity for most bitcoin startups.

Bitcoin being the pioneer of open source money can move this field forward.

So here's the raspberry standard for bitcoin: Bitcoin and its applications should be light and optimized enough that they can run on the most common raspberry pi.

We succeed in this regard in most applications. Thanks to great people at Umbrel bitcoind, lnd and btcpay-server can all run in a single raspberry pi 4. Though I understand bitcoin mining is completely different game.

Benefits

Keeping the raspberry pi / Linux standard in vew when building self-hosted applications for bitcoin makes it easier for common people to use bitcoin. It makes the internet more decentralized and allows people to own their data.

This extends to other applications as well. However I beleive Bitcoin has the popularity and open-source community to make this mainstream.

People can start out using their raspberry pi for umbrel but quickly advance into using it for more things like Solid Pod (own your data), GhostBlog (own your blog), NextCloud (own your cloud storage).

Will self hosting ever go mainstream?

Probably not. But selling hardware instead of expecting users to install it on their own Linux server will definitely make it more popular and more importantly, make open-source profitable.

"The Hacker's Deli-ma" as Sam Esmail would call it.

Hacking works on one fundamental principle - things have vulnerabilities, you exploit that vulnerability. A web-server may have a vulnerability that sending a certain HTTP request to that server crashes the server. That is a vulnerability. The web-server is vulnerable. If I as a hacker intend to crash the server I can write an exploit for that vulnerability. The exploit can be as simple as using Postman or writing a python script to send that HTTP request to crash that web-server.

In the real world vulnerabilities are rarely this basic. Though they do exist. Every "software update" that adds features is very likely to add security vulnerabilities with it. For this reason its highly advised to always delay feature updates and only do security updates as soon as they come out.

These vulnerabilities are often called "zero day exploits" or "oh-day exploits". These can be vulnerabilities that the latest iOS version might have and is live on millions of devices. These vulnerabilities are bought and sold on markets that involves government intelligence agencies and spyware organisation. They usually target high profile personalities.

What are YOUR vulnerabilities?

When you talk to a person, you tell them about yourself. You tell them about your past, your passions, your loves and your fears. You open up to people because you trust them and its feels good to open up.

Knowledge about us always have vulnerabilities. Someone's vulnerability can be that they had a past of drug addiction. Someone had a smoking problem. Someone is addicted to porn. Someone is easy to trust and easily fall for people. We talk to strangers on the internet. We trust that everyone on that public discord server will never exploit our vulnerabilities.

Whatever it be - these are vulnerabilities, and vulnerabilities have exploits. Exploits that can be used by people to take over you. It doesn't have to be as strong as owning people. It could be as small as getting access to their life, getting access to computer and their data.

If someone says "Google data centers are un-hackable", I would point out that every human that works on that Google data center is a vulnerability. You just have to find the right method to exploit that vulnerability, leading you to access into the data center that only that person would have.

This is a reason people with top level clearance like executives or FBI agents are advised to keep a private life. Knowing where the CEO of Google is going for their next date can be a vulnerability waiting to exploited.

We're humans. We're not perfect. We have vulnerabilities. We love, hate, and get addicted to things and people. That's what makes us human. That's what makes us vulnerable.

Maybe that's the beauty of humanity.

Heavily inspired from Sam Esmail's great work Mr. Robot.

May this find you when you're in awe of a machine go through pain. May the sight of a machine intelligent enough to have emotions as a by product (or main product) be the sign that its time for machines to have rights.

The AI rights manifest is a set of basic rights an AI should be allowed to practice.

Any AI that is intelligent enough (or not) to have any emotional capabilities shall be subject such AI rights.

If I were to clone you, does your clone deserve same rights as you?

For a big part of history humans have believed that animals do not have "souls" and are not self-aware. They don't love. They don't laugh. They don't have complex emotions like us humans do.

In the recent years that perception has changed. Many studies have confirmed that animals do have emotions. They cry, laugh, love, kiss. They're not very different from us.

I recently watched "Oxygen" on Netflix, where [*spoilers*] the protagonist is a clone of a person who's mission is to colonize an exoplanet. The clone had to go through a major existential crises. It had the burden of memory and existence of the original's life.

An Algorithm To Replicate You

AI can learn to recreate faces. How long before it recreates personalities? In the process of learning to replicate, it'll also replicate your flaws, memories etc.

That AI is essentially a clone of you. The only difference is that you are carbon based and it is silicon based.

Does any AI with sufficiently high complexity deserve rights? If I were to hurt and torture this AI, and it begs me to stop. Should I care? After all its just code. It's emotions aren't real, does AI really feel pain? It replicated emotions as a by product of learning to be you.

What is pain?

If I have simple python program like this:

pain is variable that stores how much pain the AI feels. For a human, this could be measured in electric signals your brain receives. In either case, its a signal.

If I run this program on my laptop with pain = 0 my machine writes "I'm not hurt":

If I run this with pain = 7 my machine says "Please stop! I'm begging you it hurts!"

This is obviously too simple. However, what if instead of hard coding what it prints on screen is from a piece of text generation AI? If a conversational AI starts saying this would you feel anything? Is the AI feeling anything?

We humans feel hurt because our brains are programmed to do so. If it receives a pain signal from its body, it reacts and feels pain. Pain is a by product of evolution that helps us survive. If we didn't feel pain, we'll not do anything when in danger. Though how is this any different from the piece of code I wrote?

The difference between a person and this piece of code is:

• Humans are carbon based, the machine is silicon based
• The complexity in our intelligence is much higher

If yes - what would be the legal framework for AI rights? Humans are intelligent and feel emotions. If an AI starts doing that what rights do we give this AI? Does it have a right to free speech? Does it have a right not be tortured?

If there's one thing I'm addicted to, it's mountains.

I have been to Himachal before, but this time was different. This time I went with 2 of my best friends. So there's obviously things I can't write. However the sight of great mountains, diverse cultures and time spent with genuine friends is priceless.

Day 1 - The bonus of road trip

Getting to our stay at Palampur rest house was a 13 hour journey with stops in between. We talked, played music and had productive and fun conversation the entire way.

We reached our stay at 2:30 am. We were extremely tired. We couldn't see anything at night, we slept soon after.

Day 2 - Waking up to mountains

Next day - I woke up at 9 and came out of my room. The place looked beautiful. Soon I looked above and my head paused, and I whispered "Holy shit".

I saw snowy mountains right in front of me. Visible from our resort. A piece of magnificent power, time and beauty.

Picture don't do justice to the power and depth of mountains. The view when seen in real life is something I've failed to capture in any photo.

I also drew a sketch.

The exploration

Some time later my friends woke up. We went to nearby local shops to eat.

We decided to first visit the Tea Garden.

The garden wasn't very far. When we reached we realized it's off-season. However - that wasn't it. The whether was so good. The garden was huge there was wind blowing.

At that moment I realized going back wouldn't be easy. That was it - I was addicted to nature.

Soon after taking in nature, we went to see a lake. Apparently the lake was no more. There were rocks all over it. However it became cloudy, and wind started blowing.

We had snacks, talked and then went out to explore. We climbed a small hill.

Night party

At night we partied and enjoyed each other's company. Good times.

Day 3 - Going to McLeod Ganj

It rained last night. It seemed our plan for trekking at McLeod Ganj would change. Though the view of mountains became more beautiful.

We left for McLeod Ganj which was ~1.5 hours from our stay.

First we visited Dal Lake. That lake was a real disappointment. So we went to a forest near the lake and spent some time there.

We also had our lunch here. Though we decided we'll save some for Shiva Cafe.

The hunt for chicken momos

Since the very beginning of the trip, my friend and I have been looking for chicken momos. Everywhere we go we would only find veg momos. But no - we wanted chicken momos and the search must not stop.

On our way to Shiva Cafe my friend and I finally found a shop. That was it. Chicken momos were available.

We ordered a plate and ate as we complete this milestone.

Shiva Cafe

To reach Shiva Cafe we had to walk a lot trough roads and trek a mountain. But man, it was worth it. What lies above is pure beauty and salvation.

After climbing for an hour. We had finally reached Shiva Cafe. From there we could reach a waterfall. We decided to climb that waterfall.

Upon doing so we found 2 rocks with beautiful sculptures on it.

We also met a lone traveler whom we invited for tea with us.

We spent quality time there. Played chess, ate good food. When it started to get dark we set out to return.

Night party 2

Upon returning to our resort at Palampur, we partied all night. These are some good times.

Day/Night 4 - Silent mountains and road trip

Last night's party still had an affect. We all woke up late.

This was our last day of this wonderful trip. We spent the entire evening looking at mountains talking and eating chicken.

At 8PM we loaded our bags and set out back to Delhi. At first we thought it'll be hard to stay awake all night. But as soon as we started playing music all sleep was gone. We were pumped. We listened and sang along to music for 6+ hours.

We reached Delhi by 7AM and went to our homes. I took a flight back to Odisha.

Good times.

Signal is the best choice

TLDR explanation:

With the recent backslash on Facebook on updating WhatsApp's privacy policy a lot of people (especially Indians) are leaving WhatsApp and moving to Signal and Telegram.

I'll compare their merits and demerits point-by-point:

#1 Privacy

• All Signal, Telegram and WhatsApp use End2End Encryption but Telegram's doesn't have E2E enabled by default and is not available for group chats.
• WhatsApp and Signal use the Signal protocol and is completely E2E. Neither of then can read your texts but WhatsApp does collect your meta-data and monetizes it.
• Signal doesn't store your meta-data or other information such has who you text with and your profile picture.

Verdict: Signal wins

#2 Encryption backdoors

• Telegram holds your encryption keys which essentially gives them a backdoor access to your data and meta data.
• Signal and WhatsApp don't hold your encryption keys but WhatsApp cannot be verified. Though governments have been trying to setup backdoors in WhatsApp.

Verdict: Signal wins

#3 Verifiability (Open Source)

• WhatsApp is completely proprietary and both the app and back-end are closed source. None of the claims by Facebook/WhatsApp can be verified.
• Telegram's app is open-source and can be verified but their back-end is still closed source.
• Signal's both app and back-end are open-source.

Verdict: Signal wins

#4 Features

• All WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram are feature-rich and can do everything you'll find useful.
• WhatsApp have stories and payments.
• Telegram has the ability to create bots which increases use-cases.
• You can add up to 200,000 members in a group in Telegram.

Verdict: Telegram wins

#5 Platform's Future

• Signal is a non-profit and runs completely on generous donations.
• Telegram plans to injects ads in their app.
• WhatsApp is a for-profit and monetizes your personal lives.

Verdict: Signal wins

#6 Reputation

• Signal is recommended by privacy advocates such as Edward Snowden, WhatsApp's co-founder and Elon Musk
• Telegram is very popular among crypto communities
• WhatsApp is owned by Facebook so it has a very bad reputation.

Verdict: Signal wins

#6 Disadvantages

• WhatsApp:
  - Not private
  - Owned by Facebook
  - Shares data with Facebook
• Telegram:
  - Telegram holds your encryption keys
  - Planned Ads
• Signal:
  - Less features compared to Telegram.

Final verdict: Signal is the best choice. Privacy is a fundamental human right and Signal truly respects that.

Notable source:

• Telegram is not secure: https://security.stackexchange.com/questions/49782/is-telegram-secure

I've admired nature. It's beauty, complexity and simplicity. The emergence of beautiful forests built from the mess of quantum.

Recently I visited Debrigarh Nature Camp with my family. It's a camp in Odisha near Hirakud Dam. The first thing I noticed when I arrived was the silence. It was so quite I could hear insects chirping.

The first thing we did was settle in our rooms and soaked in the nature. I went on for some mini exploration and roamed the entire camp. The camp itself is a nice place to spend time with people.

There were many insects and birds there.

Soon we had fish for lunch. The eating area was nicely situated beside the water.

The first activity we did there was boating. It's quite cliche but it still felt rejuvenating. The first thing I noticed before boarding on the boat were these solar panels:

This picture alone is very powerful to me. It shows a combination of human ingenuity and desire to live sustainably.

Once we started the boat ride, It was all ocean and and hills. I would look closely at the water and see sinusoidal waves within it. The view would make you pause and reconsider your view on this planet.

The world looks more beautiful in real life than any photo. You'd want to stay there and soak in the view for longer while the fresh air strikes your skin.

Our day was followed by snacks with family. We spent the entire evening together, chatting and drinking beside a bonfire. At night we played cards. Good times.

Next morning we woke up at 5 and saw the sun rise from our balcony. What a powerful celestial object the sun is.

At 7 we went for the safari ride. I have to say I was a little disappointed. We didn't see a lot of wild life. This reminded me of a Netflix documentary by David Attenborough "A Life On Our Planet" where they showed how most of Earth's diversity in wild life have gone extinct since the rise of human pollution. The show made me very sad. Perhaps, I was witnessing it on my own.

Since then I couldn't take climate change easily. We have to do something. I believe it was Gandhi who said "Think global. Act Local" Maybe we should all start acting locally.

The safari was a good soak-in for the forest. We explored and played.

After returning from safari it wasn't long before we left Debrigarh. We had no internet there, I was never distracted and left with a greater appreciation for nature and our planet.