@harshad@sharma.io
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harshad

@harshad@sharma.io

Tends to soil, plants and various animals on a small farm somewhere in the hills of Kodaikanal, India. Rides a 2008 Royal Enfield Thunderbird everywhere.

No ideologies, handful labels. Friend to life in all shapes and forms.

Expect photos, anecdotes and rants about living off-grid in middle of nowhere with occasional motorcycle rides.

He/him.

This profile is from a federated server and may be incomplete. Browse more on the original instance.

harshad, to random
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As the wind dies down, the smoke from smoldering logs around the hill settles into the valley, forming a thick cloud. This is the 4th day we'll be breathing smoke all night. It clears up when wind picks up again in the day.

All because slash and burn agriculture is still a thing and humans are #&%§∆.

😂😭

harshad,
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Why's there so much smoke?

The darkness of night makes is easier to spot:

Zoomed in frame of silhouettes of trees on a hill ridge against orange glowing smoke behind.

harshad,
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harshad,
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Heh, I had not touched my big camera for months. But had to pull it out of hibernation to get these shots, mobile camera cannot be able to 😬

Took a few quick shots without much attention to quality, didn't feel like standing in the smoke outside.

Now that it's out, will use it more :)

harshad,
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Found some old photos from 2021 in the spare memory card that I had not formatted for years!

This friend is a resident on my farm.

harshad, to motorcycles
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The colorful Poombarai village

harshad,
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Kenji has a vantage point for naps.

harshad,
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It was just as hot as yesterday until about 2 pm, and same as yesterday the forest has turned the air conditioning on with the low clouds.

A few more days/weeks and those clouds will be bringing in mist and the hill across the valley in previous photo will not be seen for days while monsoon quenches the landscape.

timnitGebru, to random
@timnitGebru@dair-community.social avatar

""What I’m really calling for is something like tech Zionism,” he said, after comparing his movement to those started by the biblical Abraham, Jesus Christ, Joseph Smith (founder of Mormonism), Theodor Herzl (“spiritual father” of the state of Israel), and Lee Kuan Yew (former authoritarian ruler of Singapore).""

Nothing to see here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/180487/balaji-srinivasan-network-state-plutocrat

harshad,
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@vinay nailed it. @timnitGebru

harshad, to random
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Chimkin's first egg 🥺

Others started laying as days got longer, this one is still getting a hang of things.

harshad,
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Pretty sunset today ✨

harshad,
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Tinkoo lit up by the colorful sunset :)

harshad, to Weather
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Temperature is 30°C indoors in an airy room today. All animals (including me) are feeling sluggish and just want to lie down. I'm ensuring everyone has cool water to drink nearby.

This is not normal in the hills, 26°C is about as hot as it used to get only a few years ago.

I shudder when I recall being passed out in a pool of sweat whole day when temps in plains rose to 45+°C in summer. It is getting worse there.

harshad,
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(in plains) I remember pointing a thermal camera at the concrete roof outside my first-floor room and being in disbelief as it read out ~70°C. This was about 7 years ago. I'm afraid to even think what it's like today.

harshad,
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The only relief is when the forests get fed up and turn on the air conditioning for everyone.

But this year a whole lot of trees burned down, and people love "cleaning up" land by burning whatever grows on its own.

Eventually there won't be enough trees left to pump up water and form the low clouds that protect and rehydrate the land. I fear that day is coming soon.

harshad,
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And once that threshold is crossed, these beautiful hills will start turning into a barren landscape. I've seen this happen where I grew up, I don't want to see that repeat here.

harshad,
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Gave all four doggos a good drenching on their heads, they shook off the water and seem to like the cooling effect.

They usually are jumping to meet every time I step outside, not today.

harshad,
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Looked at weather app (Windy) and… yikes! 🔥

Don't be fooled by the coastal areas under 38°C, the humidity there makes it worse.

harshad,
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@cydonian yes, when I moved here in 2019 and spoke of climate change, the locals laughed me off saying these hills won't change. Nobody has even a fan around here. Never needed one. But several of those same people agree now that no place is immune 🥺

harshad, to Cats
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My purrbaby Kelly has decided to sleep on my tummy today. This is after two months of being aloof, only visiting to eat a little and then running out for another day or two.

She has no idea how much I've searched for her, even cried wondering where I fell short in convincing her that this is home.

Rest of the cats don't go too far and are back by evening, usually making me negotiate for space on my bed at night.

harshad,
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That's more like it ♥️

I've missed this idiot so much.

harshad,
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Meanwhile, (most of) the rest of the cats…

(Remember that thing I mentioned earlier about negotiating for space on my bed? 😬)

And my married friends complain about sharing space with one (1) human 😂

harshad, to random
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When a site takes a whole minute to load their javashit and presents you with a "Can't show you text because of GDPR" you can be sure they're a very slimy business.

harshad,
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I guess my cats will have to find out the hard way, eh?

harshad,
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What should you do if you see an ad-tech guy drowning?

Hand him every surveillance consent form you've ever encountered, printed on lead sheets.

What if it's a front end designer who loves removing the No option when prompting for things you definitely don't want?

Say "Remind me later." and walk away.

javi, to random

Actually, let me use this as an example of how everything has gone wrong with web development in the last decade or so.

Dan Abramov is a very brilliant guy who is part of the Facebook's React team. He has been the most important name in the team working on React for years. And now, they are pushing for changes in React that would make it consume streams of data that updates the UI before the entire data request is completed, instead of just requesting the data and then 'painting' it once they get the reply for that request.

This is nuts. This is a micro optimization. 95% of the users won't ever notice, and those who do (people using extremely bad connections) would be much better if the site wasn't using React at all. At the same time, I'm sure half of the websites in the World who currently uses react will jump to implement this, making their code way more complex, brittle, sucking their productivity down, and in the long term, being worse for the users. Just for absolutely not even a short-term gain at all in their products.

Then why these kind of things keep happening? Because Facebook is too big. And somehow they ended being the ones in control of the most popular web-app framework used by most of the sites nowadays.

The state of the current Javascript ecosystem is what happens when you get companies with hundreds, thousands of engineers, to build sites that 15 years ago would have been built by 1/10th of that number of people. What you get is a lot of people working on a product that's actually mature already, and whose job end being going after that extra 1%, that last micro optimization that could make your site better in a very narrow set of cases. And they don't care about the complexity, because they are part of an engineering organization with literally thousands of hands to throw at any problem. Setting up your code bundler now takes hundreds of lines of code that need constant maintenance to achieve just a 5% improvement over gzipped plain JavaScript? No big deal, they have 6 people working full time on that. React switching to a different programming paradigm each two versions? Nice, now the 900 devs working in the web version has something to do for a few months.

But then small to medium teams adopt these tools. And suddenly you have a 5, 20, 50 devs team having to do the same work the Facebook web team does. Without any of the problems Facebook has to solve.

What's worse: a big share of the current JavaScript ecosystem exists just to solve problems introduced by the previous iterations. Think about it from a user perspective: does the web work any better, does Netflix, Facebook, twitter, tumblr, etc load faster, perform better than they did ten years ago? On the contrary, most of us have more powerful computers, phones. We have significantly faster internet connections. But sites are, at best, as fast as they used to ten years ago. In most cases they are even slower.

And from the engineer perspective it's not better: web development is significantly harder, more complex, slower nowadays that what it was ten years ago. Things that were trivial are now complex. Things that were complex still are. Product-wise, we are not doing anything more complex than what we were doing in early to mid 10s. But somehow now everything is harder, involves more code, everything is now orders of magnitude more complex. And it's not even making the web a better experience.

We made this mess. We made the web worse for everyone. We made our jobs harder for ourselves. It's so stupid.

RE: https://goblin.band/notes/9qyaoxpilruusopk

harshad,
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@M0CUV @econads @javi something to consider: https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@logloggames/112338799445947520

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