December 2018 Reading List

The last article of 2018 on the last day on the year!. I have been super busy this last quarter. I switched teams which meant I have to learn a lot of things from scratch. Since then, I have lead 2 major projects, designed e2e systems from scratch and brought our work to launch. It has been a good learning experience and also got an engineering excellence award for the efforts. All in all, I enjoyed working on these challenging problems and there are still a lot more things to learn.

Aside from work, I went to Crater Lake (the deepest lake in US) and swam in it. We did river rafting and it was awesome! Played tennis, badminton and cricket. Celebrated Diwali in US (the right way for the first time) and started 6:15 am gym sessions. Did a lot of shopping for thanksgiving (got a new TV [LG C8], Xbox One X and some furniture [including a book shelf]) and bought gifts for the family. It was an immensely busy quarter and rewarding as well. In December, I came to India and this trip was all about family, food and travel. First went to Hyderabad for a friend's wedding and then a trip to Mumbai and Goa (my first visit) with family. Had tons of awesome food and have gained almost 5 kgs so far, but it's so worth it! Afterall, maa ke haath ka khana!

On a side note, I am planning to share my OKRs for 2019. This will keep me motivated to deliver the OKRs and will also keep me accountable. I will share these in a separate post and use the post to track the progress as well :)

• Hyperliterature: It's a nice concept and would love to see it evolved. The 17776 football story is fantastic. It reminded me of an awesome android game (lifeline) I played around 2 years ago.
• Apparently, Washington DC has made GitHub the authoritative digital source for DC laws. This is amazing advancement! Possibly something that can be extended into other domains and countries.
• Plan S: An effort to make all scholarly publications resulting from public research funding must be published in Open Access journals or on Open Access platforms
• Brilliant analysis: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/53452713/why-is-2-i-i-faster-than-2-i-i-in-java TL;DR Compiler over-optimization
• Another interesting read is this article which lists the type of tech companies out there. Personally I think it's over generalized, but the thing I like is about the lessons one should avoid, as a company, if they fall into one of these categories
• Herbicides: "When the last tree is cut, the last fish is caught, and the last river is polluted … you will realize, too late, that wealth is not in bank accounts and that you can’t eat money." But what if we can’t eat our own food, either?
  
  Farmers desiccate by applying herbicide to their crops; this kills all the plants at the same time, making them uniformly dry and easier to cut. In essence, desiccation speeds up plant aging. Before desiccation, crops would have to dry out naturally at the end of the season. Today, almost all conventional crops are desiccated in Canada, the US, and the UK. Chances are that most of what you ate today was harvested using a desiccant.
  Swathers are giant lawn mowers farmers use to cut crops. The cut plants are left to dry on the ground before combining. It can be tricky knowing when to cut. If you start too early, you’ll get too many green seeds. Depending on the crop, that might lead to early germination (wheat) or self-combustion (canola). But if you wait too long, you may be scraping your seeds off the ground after the snow melts.
  There are thousands of ways to kill a weed. You can starve it, bleach it, mess with its proteins. You can feed it fake hormones. You can force it to make acid so that it disintegrates from within. There are more than 400 licensed weed killers, or herbicides, in Ontario alone. And we love to use them. Canadians used more than 58,000 tons in 2014, compared with only 21,000 tons in 1994. Our thirst for herbicides is partly due to GMOs like RoundupReady corn, soy, and canola. These herbicide-tolerant crops came on the market in the late 1990s, and changed the farming landscape by making it possible to control weeds by using herbicides on crops still in the field.
  Glyphosate is increasingly used as, or with, desiccants. It’s sold under the trade name RoundUp, and is the most commonly used herbicide in the world, as well as the most commonly used desiccant. In 1974, global use of glyphosate was 3,200 tons per year. It is expected to reach 1 million tons per year by 2020. In the U.S., the rate of growth has been accelerating. Between 1995 and 2004, glyphosate use grew by 356 percent. Between 2005 and 2014, it grew by 637 percent. Glyphosate works by interrupting protein synthesis in plants, rendering them unable to photosynthesize.
  Herbicides have to be just right, else they end up in the grain.” If farmers apply a non-contact herbicide (like glyphosate) too early, it will be taken up by the growing plant and end up inside the seed. Non-contact herbicides are taken up by the living plant and incorporated into still growing tissues, while contact herbicides kill the tissues they touch.
  Long-term exposure to antibiotics results in lasting shifts in gut microbiota. Cattle are fed low dose antibiotics in feedlots—not to stave off disease, but because it makes them gain weight more easily than an antibiotic-free cow. It changes their gut microbes so that they grow fat on less food. A study from March this year showed that glyphosate exposure changed the composition of honeybee gut microbes, which could make the bees more susceptible to colony collapse.Herbicides are particularly dangerous for gut microbes because they’re poorly absorbed by the gut. Low absorption means that gut bacteria are subjected to prolonged contact with the herbicide as it passes through the digestive system. Ironically, poor absorption is part of the reason that herbicides are deemed safe enough to put on our food.
  We can’t prove that that there is any health cost to the practice. But neither can we say there isn’t a cost. Part of the answer is that neither Health Canada nor the U.S. EPA consider herbicides as antibiotics. This means that their safety assessments do not consider effects on human gut microbes.
• Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat: I have read something similar before about these 2, but this article remains an awesome read. Keeping it here for bookmarking purposes. One thing I have personally realized that never stop learning and going into the depth of the work you are doing. The overall effort pays off in surprisingly amazing ways. This is one attribute we are missing, due to the fast pace work-life and the constant focus on the promotions.
• Tesla, software and disruption: I have been following Benedict Evans for a while now and I really like his articles. Core points of the articles are:
• Disruption vs sustaining innovation: The idea of ‘disruption’ is that a new concept changes the basis of competition in an industry whereas sustaining innovations are things the incumbents are able to learn and absorb the new concept instead.
• Batteries would be a sustaining innovations for car manufactures in future i.e. just the part supplier will change.
• Software, modularity and integration is a debatable area on how far it would it will directly translate to sales. I personally think that the mindset and org charts in traditional companies is hard to get away from, and this might be a major advantage for Tesla, along with the incremental improvements they provide instead of a yearly one.
• Car delivery experience is again an on-going debate about value to customers. An ideal comparison is how much Apple Store experience contribute to sales vs Samsung. Is it really a game changer?
• Autonomy is the field where Tesla would have a huge advantage if they are able to solve it quickly or is the first mover in the field. Given that they already have a fleet of cars on the roads, distributing the technology would come off naturally for them. However, Waymo seems to be better placed at solving this field, We will know in just 2-3 years what is going to happen. With Tesla entering the trucking market, autonomy will become the most disruptive tech in the auto industry.
• PAKE (Password Authenticated Key Exchange): Informative read for knowledge but seems highly biased.
• Fusion Reactor: Wendelstein 7-X produced 1 MJ energy and also achieved long lasting plasma over 100 seconds. One of the few technologies I am most excited about are space travel, quantum computing, VR/AR, nanotechnology and fusion reactors.
  The goal of fusion research is to develop a climate- and environment-friendly power station. Like the sun, it is to derive energy from the fusion of atomic nuclei. Since the fusion fire only ignites at temperatures of over 100 million degrees, the fuel – a low-density hydrogen plasma – must not come into contact with cold vessel walls. Held by magnetic fields, it floats in an almost contact-free manner in the interior of a vacuum chamber.
  The magnetic cage of Wendelstein 7-X is generated by a ring of 50 superconductive magnetic coils which are about 3.5 meters high. Their specific forms are the result of elaborate optimisation calculations. Although Wendelstein 7-X is not designed to generate energy, the device is intended to prove that stellarators are suitable for use in power stations. With Wendelstein 7-X the intention is to achieve for the first time in a stellarator the quality of confinement afforded by competing devices of the tokamak type.