Chromebooks and Googlebooks

Recently Google released Googlebook - built by many of its partners. To me there are two major concerns for this: Whom this is for? I feel that it is trying to find user for this - who doesn't exist. The pricing of this is such that it squarely falls under MacBook Air category - but then it cannot do all the things that the MacBook can do - like the true desktop things. And then there is connectivity issue - it missed a chance to not support un device cellular connectivity - something that I truly hope that the next MacBook will have. 

That brings me back to google's other product : the chrombook (the device I am currently using to write this). What does it really offer over Chromebook - higher spec and higher cost - but functionality ? Barely anything worth paying the extra premium. 

Essentially - Googlebook just doesn't compute.   

sankode and sankript : a devanagrai native programming language

If you have read my previous posts from years ago (c.f. https://blog.tovganesh.in/2007/08/programming-in-and-for-devanagari.html) I have always had an interest in building a language that is devanagri first and explore the possibilities of how it will be. So I eventually wrote a spec and with help of Google Antigravity built the first working version of the a new programming language (sankode) and a scripting language called (sankript) with a very basic IDE to play around, and a basic tutorial with examples. 
I also built a basic LLM, and a ReLU based LLM using entirely sankode and used abhigyan shakuntalam as a training set. It has been so much fun making this, try it out and let the feedback flow in. 
In the mean time I also encountered Laya developed by Nandakishor M (Nandakishor m (@Nandakishorm1) / X) - so I tried out build that as well using sankode - it seems to work ok.

                                 sankode studio: a simple IDE to play around with sankode and sankript                            

                                  sankode laya

Back after a lull in writing

The past 3 year have been rather enjoying for me in my learning and life. Technically have learned and built enterprise grade air-gapped RAG systems, helped co-found a company HouzeGuru - which is building digital tools in the form of a super app for Indian Families and learned to custom train an LLM model from scratch. 

But the most fun things have been to emply coding agents to do things that I always wanted to do but did never get the bandwidth to do - build an OS, and build a language that is Devanagari native. Both of these are my currently going pet projects : check kosh (https://github.com/tovganesh/kosh)  and sankode ( https://github.com/tovganesh/sankode ) repos.

In the meantime - I didn't add much in my personal hardware. The 32gb windows machine has been the best buy for all my works. I had access to a Mac mini M4 base model from an year now - and I got it just in time before the pricing went crazy northwards. I just do not think any hardware is worth buying for at-least next two years. Their expense to usefulness has significantly deteriorated - unless you just have too much money to put in. Oh and if you have too much money - you may as well think of sponsoring my open source projects - which are for public good - and research. 

More on what I have been building in the past months and more in up coming posts. 

Two "affordable" laptops

 "Affordable" is a relative word. I got hold of two affordable Windows laptops in different price segments. I felt both were value for money looking at the specs and their price points. The experience with one of them however wasn't good. The other I am still exploring. Read on... 

Ulitimus laptop had display issue after a day of usage. But otherwise, the machine was generally easy to use.

Infinix ZeroBook laptop has a pretty good spec, and a decent if not good display.

The first device was Ultimus by a company called Futopia Global (Futopia-Global). This company claims to be Indian, and this was the primary reason for me to get this device. Secondary reason was price: I needed a cheap laptop attached to my printer which has decent word processing capability. This could be purchased for around 8K INR with offers on Flipkart (Ultimus Pro Celeron - Flipkart) during the recent sale. I had very low expectation from this laptop, but when I got this I was pleasantly surprised with decent build quality, screen and genuine Windows 11. The sound is pretty bad, so use a headset if you want to use this for any online meetings. The pleasantry however stopped there - the display developed multiple horizontal lines on the second day, and any attempt to replace this product has failed so far. I contacted Flipkart, but they say electronic issues are only handled directly by Futopia, trying to reach Futopia has however been futile so far. Their numbers are not reachable, and they barely reply to the emails. Without the display issue, however, the device is pretty usable as a basic office device. You won't be able to handle heavy tasks, but a pretty much usable Windows 11 machine which has got the update to Co-pilot too. Would I recommend this machine? A big NO. Reason being that a machine is not just hardware and software, but the support that comes with it. With Futopia / Ultimus, however the experince is a big letdown. 

The second device was Infinix Core i9 Zero Book that was again on sale on Flipkart. The specs were perfect (32GB RAM, 1TB storage) for some of the projects that I was doing and my regular work machine - and M1 MacBook Pro had memory limitations. That was the primary reason to get this machine, the secondary reason was obviously the price, a similar speced MacBook Pro will set you back by 3+L INR whereas this one was on offer for less than 60K INR. Ofcourse the silicon is different - Intel vs tightly integrated silicon of Apple, and the OS is different Windows vs macOS - but on pure affordability to specs comparison - this wins hands down. The build quality of the machine is solid - it is a Macbook quality aluminum enclosure but has vents at the bottom. I have been using this machine for more than a day, and I have setup my full development environment on this machine, and it was a breeze. I have so far not faced any issues on this except battery life once charged. While the M1 MacBook Pro lasts for 20+ hours, I think this lasts possibly for about 6hrs for my kind of heavy usage. Call quality on Zoom is ok, the noise isolation on MacBook, however, just beats this hands down - but is not a deal breaker. The screen is only FHD - so if you have a graphics centered workflow, I will still recommend a Mac or another better display quality Windows laptop - say from LG or Asus. For an idea on computation-oriented benchmark, see my X/Twitter thread here: https://x.com/vganesh/status/980636080755040258?s=20 Would I recommend this? It is a qualified YES. If you are a developer, who doesn't need GPU and is on tight budget - this is a defo - especially if you are looking for a fully speced up machine. I am not sure of the support the company Infinix provides, but apparently their support of mobile phones is quite commendable in India. 

 

Update: I tried using Ubuntu on Infinix Core i9 Zero Book. It mostly works well - except that the sound is not as loud as is on Windows. Which is kind of strange. Else it is a blazing fast developer machine.

OS usage for my programming

 I started professional programming in 2000, that decade I mostly used Windows and Linux. In the decade that followed 2010 - I mostly used macOS and Linux. I have been mostly still using maOS and Linux - but since I have bought an LG Gram after selling off my Chromebook - I am ready to make a shift to Windows as a primary development OS. I will still use macOS and Linux - but probably will be using a lot more of Windows now. 

Another Cyber fraud - Google Reviews fraud

Some frauds happen in a matter of minutes, before you could intervene - even if you are physically present with the victim and are passively listening to what is going on. This is one of them. 

Essentially, we were trying to book a hotel in Kolhapur. I am not so much into booking by directly calling the hotel - I generally use either Oyo or other hotel booking site. But my cousin wanted to book by Googling and directly calling the hotel. So I became passive to the discussion. By the time I entered actively in discussion - something had already clicked me that a fraud is in work - the guy on the other end was asking to punch in "12999" as the merchant code in place on amount and provide UPI pin - thankfully that transaction didn't happen and I could intervene and stop. 

But before that already 1500 had be transferred to the fraudsters account as the "booking amount".  

So here is how the fraudster (or probably a gang of fraudsters) worked.

They post google review picture with morphed image that has a phone number:

That fraud image is usually the first in the listing of the hotel. For instance this hotel in Kolhapur (TrushanDham) is actually a good hotel, but the google review from the users is hijacked by the fraudster.  The first image is this:

Obviously a morphed image with phone number. Now for me, this would immediately ring alarm - but for some reason, it didn't for my cousin. My cousin called this number (this wasn't the one on the day of the fraud - apparently this keeps changing) - and the other person sent a UPI QR code - under a personal name - another red flag, but again for some reason got ignored, before 1.5 k was transferred to the fraudster. Another real red flag was - he was giving free breakfast and lunch - impossible in any budget hotel. Any how, if you look into the profile of this person who posted this picture, you would see that this person has listed himself in multiple other hotel - so this is probably handled by a gang of fraudsters:

If you report this profile (I have reported multiple profiles like this), some new profile will appear again. 

I have reported this fraud on https://cybercrime.gov.in/ (you should too if you come across any such). I am not sure how to contact Google to notify it about this fraud. But hoping that the cyber crime investigations can be made to on-cover this obvious fraud. 

I also plan to volunteer at https://cybercrime.gov.in/ as I really feel the need for it for a safer digital society. 

Where have I been?

Data has suddenly become a very big deal in tech space. Today the data processing/analytics platforms are more valuable than the actual code that power these platform - in the sense that monetization happens on the platforms and not the code. The code is of course the foundation without which you cannot build solid platforms. So despite all the talk about "no-code", demand for solid programming skills are going no where. Most of the code that powers these modern data stack platforms are open-source with a very healthy and collaborative community of very smart people. 

When I joined Cloudera innovation accelerator via Turing.com this Feb (2022), and I had absolutely no idea of anything about modern data stack. I had experience with building ML models for medical domains, but the data sizes I dealt with were generally few thousand rows rather than million. Since then it has been quite a wonderful journey of learning, finding and connecting to new people. 

During this time I have primarily dabbled with building adapters for a transformation tool called dbt from dbtLabs (https://www.getdbt.com/dbt-labs/about-us/). One of these adapters for the Impala is now open source and is available from (https://github.com/cloudera/dbt-impala). I also made my first upstream contribution to impyla project (https://github.com/cloudera/impyla), which is used by dbt-impala to connect to Impala warehouse. It is cool, when you discover how does the actual patch process work in an open-source project. If you came here looking for using dbt-impala, do check this tutorial written by Alasdair Brown (https://community.cloudera.com/t5/Innovation-Blog/Getting-started-with-dbt-impala-amp-Cloudera-Data-Warehouse/ba-p/342616?es_id=1fabf7040a) 

The most fun part of working here has been closely interacting with people not only at Cloudera but also dbtLabs, something I have hardly done in my previous assignments. 

Last but not least the whole journey was possible due to the platform provided by Turing.com and the wonderful staff they have. I would strongly recommend that you try them out if you are looking for meaningful remote assignments.