Sundarrajk's Weblog

Archive for the ‘Empathy’ Category

A Wonderful talk by Maciej Ceglowski

Posted by: on: July 30, 2015

Read this to enjoy the wonderful interpretation of different aspects of life by Maciej Ceglowski. His take on the types of people who want to use the internet for different purposes is profound to say the least.

Some quotable quotes are

“As soon as a system shows signs of performance, developers will add enough abstraction to make it borderline unusable. Software forever remains at the limits of what people will put up with. Developers and designers together create overweight systems in hopes that the hardware will catch up in time and cover their mistakes.”
In continuation “We complained for years that browsers couldn’t do layout and JavaScript consistently. As soon as that got fixed, we got busy writing libraries that reimplemented the browser within itself, only slower.”

“Right now there’s a profound sense of irreality in the tech industry. All problems are to be solved with technology, especially the ones that have been caused with previous technology. The new technologies will fix it.”

“We see businesses that don’t produce anything and run at an astonishing loss valued in the billions of dollars.
We see a whole ecosystem of startups and businesses that seem to exist only to serve one other, or the needs of very busy and very rich tech workers in a tiny sliver of our world.”

He argues that we start using the technology at hand to help out the ones that really need help and not wait for everybody to get a computer and then a smart phone and then a wearable and then wait for everybody to have the next fad of the technologists.

Helplessness

Posted by: on: November 4, 2010

Though the title reads “Helplessness” I am not sure if it is “Helplessness” or “Helplessness Enforced because of apathy and inertia”.
As I was walking down the roads to come to my office I saw two children and their mother begging for food outside an eatery which is frequented by college going boys and girls.
The boy was carrying a whip with which he would whip himself trying to win the sympathy of the people around and then asking them for the money. The children and mother were slovenly and one would shy away from having contact with them because of the dirt that had accumulated on their bodies. These bodies were outside the eatery.
Inside the eatery there were bodies decked in clean clothes sitting on tables an eating food at a price in which the two children and mother could have lived probably for at least a week. Note the contrast, the people inside were paying as much for one meal as that would have help feed the bodies outside for at least three days if not more.

And what was I doing; rushing to office as it pays me a fat salary to keep my luxuries flowing in. Just past the eatery was a shop selling pastries and past it was a shop selling biscuits and chocolates all of which is enjoyed by my son (about the same age as the boy with the whip) and self too.
And did I stop by to get the child a pastry or a chocolate or a pastry? No. I was too much worried about what will happen if I miss my train and I go late to my office and will I not get my full increment the next time around. I just had a fleeting thought as to what the child would go through as it passed the glass front with display of pastries and the glass bottles filled with chocolates. But that was about it. I did not even stop by to buy a few biscuits and give it to the children; whereas a couple of days back I spent more than what the bodies in the eatery were spending to get pastries and cookies for my family.
What kind of people are we?

Whaling

Posted by: on: May 8, 2007

http://www.hindu.com/2007/05/08/stories/2007050803490900.htm
It is so sad to hear the conutries like Japan and Norway want to re-introduce whaling. It is a pity that human beings, so called ‘civilised’ (as apart from barbarians) wish to kill whales and that too in numbers.
A few months ago there was a report from the US (http://www.dailyadvance.com/featr/content/features/stories/2006/07/23/072306_life_Sunday_Gothard.html)
(http://www.underwatertimes.com/news.php?article_id=57098321016) where a hammerhead shark was caught only to achieve a world record, and guess what, the shart was pregnant with 55 pups of which most where full term. How does one get the heart to do something like that? Will one not fall down and cry at such an atrocity? Will one not feel like giving up fishing after reading something like this?
No it does not look like it. It is just a matter of sport for humans to kill other living beings. The bull fighting in Spain being a classic example. The worst part of it is that these matadors claim that the bull is not hurt by all the swords that poke into it. It is considered a national sport. If one can justify whaling and killing of bulls for sport then one should not be outraged when slaves were set upon each other in the Roman Empire for the thrill of the Emperor. That should be fully justified too. Probably it was done in some way by the slave traders of the past.
If this the kind of sympathy we show for the living beings where are we headed?


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