Day before yesterday, I decided to shut down Atlarch at the end of the month.

It’s not a great feeling to decide to definitively shut down something that you’ve been working on and off for almost three years. But at the same time, as with a lot of these things, it’s also clarifying in so many ways.

I had the idea for Atlarch (though it was not called Atlarch at that time) close to more than a year or so before I started actually working on it. In fact I had almost started working on a different version of the same idea before I decided to go do a job.

I didn’t always enjoy reading docs or manuals for software that I was using. Despite the constant chant to RTFM in forums, I used to get by through tutorials and skimming just enough docs to do the things that I wanted. I nonethless appreciated that docs were an authoritative source which could always diambiguate things. Though as time went on my appreciation for good documentation grew and eventually solidified into making me one of those people who tries to read the docs completely if possible or at least skims it completely. (To be clear I don’t do it all the time and for all software that would simply be infeasible). I don’t exactly know when this transition happened but it must be relatively recent and to my great misfortune this seems to have coincided with a deluge of bad software documentation 1Thoughout this article I use docs, manuals, wiki’s interchangable and I understand that they are different but the general malaise that I’m talking about doesn’t differentiate between them .

Saw this absolutely beautiful documentary called China’s Van Goghs yesterday. It’s about a painter who has painted and sold thousands of Van Gogh replica paintings, despite having never actually seen the real Van Gogh’s in person. The documentary follows him as he eventually visits Amsterdam to see them in the museum.

If a painter has painted replicas of an artist more times than the total number of paintings by the original artist, is the painter still just a painter and not an artist by himself? Zhao Xiaoyong though is now definitvely an artist with the production of his own works as can be seen from his gallery. I particularly liked the Metamorphosis series, which to my untrained eye, clearly seems like a marked progression from the style of the master that the artist admired and perfected in replicating.

If you have a lot of tabs open, it’s very irritating when you open a new tab with Ctrl + T only to have it be opened at the very end of your tabs. For a long time the way I used to work around this was to duplicate the tab that I was in and then change the URL .

Turns out there is a way to change this default behaviour in Firefox. Open about:config and change broser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent to true. This setting seems to also override browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent, so if you have the browser.tabs.insertAfterCurrent set to true, this will also be true irrespective of it’s value.

I was researching about Otl Aicher who was the lead designer for the 1972 Munich Olympics. It turns out he was one of the designer whose pictograms inspired the DOT pictograms which then went on to inspire the ubiquitous signage pictograms that we see everyday 1I could find atleast one reference which definitively says that DOT pictograms were used during the standardization process of ISO 7001 in the book “The Politics of Design” by Ruben Pater, in the Chapter Symbols and Icons, subsection Icons of Inequality . I used to think that emoji’s and related pictograms were actually introduced during the Japanese Olympic, but from what I could figure out from my limited research, the genealogy of emoji’s is much more diverse. Nonetheless, Otl Aicher did seem to have consulted with the designer of the 1964 Japanese Olympic Games. As such there is a direct line of inspiration from the Japanese Olympics to the current signage.

It’s been quite a while!

I redid the blog, this time with my own custom design which I implemented myself 1What is implementing yourself in this age of LLM’s? For me and for this blog, it was writing the code mostly myself but occassionally referring to LLM’s for help . Apart from the cosmetic changes, stealing a good idea from other blogs, I have also added a new section called Notes, which is where this post is. The idea is that this would allow me to write about and link to things which might be topical or things that I find interesting, but which are not long form articles. Currently I don’t have a hard-and-fast rule on what is an article and what is not, but I think it would be fairly obvious as I get to writing each of them.

One of my favorite pet peeves is the incentive misalignment of doctors. In a very simplified format, the problem is doctors make more money the sicker you are and thus they have a perverse incentive that competes against them making you get better.

This incentive misalignment problem is also present in fields like consulting where the consultants get paid more if there are more problems in the company that they can solve, but the doctor problem is the example that I use most of the time to introduce the idea since it’s very starkly visible in that case and most people would have experienced it at some point. 1Obligatory “not all doctors and consultants”

Decentralization and distributed system are relatively old terms in computing that are getting more widely used outside of these circles. Most of this adoption can be attributed to one phenomenon, crypto.

Decentralization is as the name suggests refers to systems without a center. This is in contrast to a centralized system where the center is the source of truth, control, dispute resolution, etc. all of which still need to be solved in a decentralized system but are done so without a center. Distributed on the other hand refers to systems that are spread out over multiple things (nodes, processors, etc.). For this post, I’ll be focusing on decentralized systems, but often decentralized systems rely on distributed state, 1For a more detailed distinction between decentralization and distributed, see here, or here or more classically the Wikipedia definitions of decentralized system and distributed computing so I’ll be referring to systems that arise due to both of these qualities interworking.

At an abstract level, people generally use tools and technologies primarily for three reasons, to make money, to save money, or to save time. All technologies have to provide at least one (ideally all three) of these benefits to their users for the overhead of using them. This is true for all tools and technologies from the primitive tools used to create fire to modern computers used to solve all kinds of problems.

“A buddy of mine” has been building a dating app, so I’ve been thinking a lot about services which connect people.

In an abstract sense a lot of the companies today are services which connect people in some context. For example

• Tinder / Dating Apps : Connecting people in the context of dating
• LinkedIn / Other Job Service Portals : Connecting people in the context of job finding
• Facebook / Twitter / Social Media : Connecting people in a generalized context [Often manifested as information sharing, community organizing etc.]

There are also services such as