I am mostly spared from the social media addiction in a classical, normal sense, in that I am good at identifying when I am spending more than 15 mins at any of the social media and stop. The Reddits, Instagrams, Tiktoks and Bluesky’s of the world (Twitter is of course completely shunned because of Elon Musk).

But Youtube is another story.

For the most part, I have justified Youtube as something I learn from. Because I didn’t learn much in college, I owe a lot of what I learned in my life to Youtube. What and how I learn for work and career has changed overtime, but Youtube still remained a place for learning. In that I always gravitated towards long-form educational videos.

It was(and is) language some time, history, economics and politics others, or just run of the mill productivity and efficiency videos, which was a whole phase for me once. Not to mention the exercise videos.

Since the gamut of topics is quite large and growing, it has always been the most difficult to get rid of Youtube. I would guess my watchtime per day exceeded 2 hours (I don’t want to look into the actual numbers, I am afraid). I would watch it whenever there was time where I could be with my thoughts alone.

Why be my own thoughts when I could learn something new?

So watching while cooking, listening to videos while cleaning or washing, or going for a grocery run; and lately, downloading videos on my phone on wifi for my 1hr commute back from work was a regular thing. All this, made very convenient by Youtube premium, which I had been using for the last 4-5 years, and also the Arc browser, which goes PiP as soon as you navigate away to any other window. So you can always have that little window on the side without doing much. Multi-tasking, am I right?

I tried fighting it many times, but I always fell back into it.

However, Youtube blocked me from renewing my Indian subscription this year, and there is no way in the world that I am paying 15 euros/month for the thing where I used to pay that amount for a year.

So… this puts me in a very unique position now, doesn’t it. I haven’t watched a single youtube video on my phone this week, which was unthinkable just, well, a week ago. And since uBlock origin only really works on firefox properly (at least for me), which doesn’t have PiP support that spans different full screen desktop windows. I am automatically limited to watching videos I can pay full attention to.

Things are changing. Maybe I do succeed this time. 🤞🏽

Book I want to read

India, The Cookbook, by Pushpesh Pant

India, The Cookbook by Pushpesh Pant | Goodreads

India: The Cookbook is the first comprehensive guide to…

Yesterday I got reminded about this book again while cooking something and which has been on my to buy list for so long, but I haven’t been able to justify the costly purchase so far. I’ve heard great things about it.

Interesting reads

1. Weird little guys of FOSS
   Featuring some with questionable ideologies and most who are plain racist or some other -phobe

2. Claude discovers a novel enzyme system with CRISPR-like repeats
   While yes, a discovery that helps the field, it irritates me that these companies are growing to amass this kind of end-all be-all power that will create dependencies on them. These companies seems to not believe in funding a non-profit that may do other work, but rather being the saviour themselves.

3. Empire podcast: Spice Wars episode 2
   I was intrigued by this episode around Nutmeg and think you might like it too. Empire podcast generally is one of my favourites and one that always go back to first if I miss listening for a few weeks.

A project I discovered

A multiplayer environment for coding with agents and reviewing what they build.

Delta — A Multiplayer Environment for Coding with Agents

Build and review software with teammates and agents in shared threads, with every conversation and code change kept in context.

I have been often using zed code editor because of the lightweight and the smooth remote access experience that it has ever since I switched a lot of work to a VPS. Through that, I discovered this last week and am excited to try it today and the coming week. Maybe it helps you as well.

A photo I took

That’s all for this week. See you the next ✌🏽