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Software Engineer living in Bangalore, India.| Shubham Jain's Blog
Wingsuit BASE jumping is one of the most dangerous sports in the world. Studies indicate that it has a fatality rate of nearly 1 in 500 jumps. This means that every active participant faces alarmingly high odds of meeting with a fatal accident. I always wondered why did these jumpers took such enormous risks for tiny amount of thrill? Couldn't they see statistics? To me, the answer was obvious: they were adrenaline junkies. Addicted to the sport just like an addict is to his drug. For them, n...| Shubham Jain's Blog
Meditation is great — most of us can agree on that. But like exercise, it’s been overcomplicated. There are just so many forms of it: guided, silent, body scans, vipassana, kriyas. There are apps, videos, retreats, books, and self-proclaimed gurus. Everyone’s selling their version of meditation. I also think its benefits have been oversold. Only a few years back, I was convinced that it was a path to everlasting bliss. An intense form of meditation called Vipassana is often touted as a ...| Shubham Jain's Blog
The idea that Bangalore’s water causes hair loss—a modern myth—began around a few years back, and today, it's treated as an unquestionable fact. Like many such myths, it thrives on casual observations: someone notices their or their friends' receding hairline and quickly concludes that something in the water must be to blame. And from there, the story spreads. In India, we lack the scientific or statistical groundwork to rigorously confirm or refute such claims. But with high confidence...| Shubham Jain's Blog
In 2012, I asked a question on Server Fault: How do servers handle thousands of connections per second when a regular home internet connection would be too slow for that? I had just set up Apache on my home IP and was genuinely curious about large-scale servers. This was the response I got : Hm, I hate to say it, but it’s not a very SMART question. It’s like asking, “I have a car, but when I want to transport a lot of people it’s too small. How do big companies do it?” — they don...| Shubham Jain's Blog
Why do people complicate WiFi passwords to the point where they either have to look it up themselves or recite them like instructions—'Capital A, everything small,' or 'At the rate, 54321, dollar sign'?" It's a password that you have to share often and input frequently, so it seems foolish to make it complex. Your WiFi is not a bank account. There's little incentive for anyone to hack into yours (except maybe to get free internet). If you're worried someone can use your Internet to do somet...| Shubham Jain's Blog
There's an interesting story behind making DDLJ (Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge).For those who don’t know, it’s one of the most successful Bollywood films ever, with the longest theatrical run in history. I always considered it to be a run-of-the-mill crowd-pleaser movie. I am not being harsh here. Aditya Chopra, the director himself, admits: My film is not different. I’m making the most commercial, clichéd, tapori (pedestrian) movie. I’m making the oldest story in the world. What's int...| Shubham Jain's Blog
Time and again, I encounter posts, people, who believe that they are sick of programming and can't wait to retire to do something worthwhile (farming, traveling, for eg). Maybe they are and programming was just an ill-suited career, but higher chance that they're not actually sick of programming, but fed up with: Bureaucratical bullshit to get simple things done Lack of product vision where everyone from sales to marketing to support is driving it. Lack of ownership in product; the inability ...| Shubham Jain's Blog
"At Asana, our mission is to help humanity thrive by enabling the world’s teams to work together effortlessly." (Link) "Juul Labs is on a mission to transition the world's billion adult smokers away from combustible cigarettes" (Link) "Lyft’s mission is to reconnect people through transportation and bring communities together.” (Link) I don't know why startups have the urge to write statements like this, to connect themselves to a noble goal. Asana is a project management tool. It is he...| Shubham Jain's Blog
Humane's AI Pin is in the news and unsurprisingly, it's been universally [panned by reviewers](https://twitter.com/MKBHD/status/1779641280110161957). I don't have anything to add there. I appreciate the courage to invent a new paradigm, but there are no excuses for shipping something so pointless after raising hundreds of millions. What I want to discuss is voice as an interface. Movies like Her have led us to believe that voice is the ultimate user interface. Why bother with a keyboard and m...| Shubham Jain's Blog
I had never been a fan of devops/server-admin work. The sheer number of headaches involved in setting up the services, configuring them, automating them, and ensuring their reliability were just annoying and time-consuming. PaaS offerings like Heroku, AWS—and later—Railway, and Render, were appealing options out of this mess. I could do everything from the web interface and didn't have to run a bunch of commands now and then. I switched to PaaS when they started to look affordable and did...| Shubham Jain's Blog
