Notes

Overall Pros: Tax-wise, annuity works out better than holding the same assets in an individual brokerage account. (See below.) Annuity will come out ahead by 0.62% in the best case scenario but, in reality, the number will be lower. So, question is whether this number is big enough to justify the additional complexity in my portfolio. Cons: The annuity gains, whenever withdrawn in future, are taxed as income, not capital gains, tax. And, at least today, income tax > capital gains tax. This may be similar to how a 401k works but, in that case, you are putting pre-tax dollars, so you are saving tax. Therefore, not a justified comparison. There is no step-up in cost basis when these assets are passed on to heirs. If we don’t use the money before we die and all of it goes to our kid(s), they’ll have to pay income tax on that. That’s a major concern because chances are high we’ll hit this scenario. Only money that I am sure I’ll withdraw during retirement should go into this. (If I withdraw earlier, the penalty will bite.) I don’t know how much money I want to spend between today and retirement, so I’d be taking a major risk by locking up money in such a vehicle. Cost calculation Assumptions: ...

I can’t estimate how many times I’ve seen this scene on YouTube. And it has given me goosebumps every single time, without fail. Cooper’s expressions were extraordinary: how quickly he spurs into action after the blast (without sulking or getting depressed about what actually happened) and how adamant he is that he needs to dock even though it’s almost impossible. Earlier, I also used to be amazed by thinking that Mann couldn’t dock when he was so close to the ship and Cooper did it after the ship was blown and rotating like crazy. It was only yesterday I realized that Cooper’s contribution was more about his attitude. The actual execution - rotating Endurance at the right speed and docking after that - was handled by the robots, TARS and CASE. Even the robots went from “this is not possible” to “this is no time for caution” pretty quickly! Hans’ soundtrack was equally crucial, maybe more, to make the scene work. Such anxiety-inducing. I want to say that this scene is the best I’ve seen in any movie but that’ll probably be recency bias. But is it amongst top 5, absolutely.

There are 7 namespaces. At any point in time, there can be multiple instances of each namespace. A process can belong to one, and only one, instance of every namespace. It can also move from one instance to another of a given namespace. This means that 2 processes can be on the same instance of one namespace and different on another namespace. Virtual machines, running on a hypervisor, run an independent kernel. They, therefore, provide all or nothing isolation. Namespaces, on the other hand, provide lightweight isolation. For e.g., you can isolate 2 processes on just one namespace. List of namespaces: Mount: It allows you to mount a device to some directory. However, there is a single copy of the underlying device. So, even if the device is mounted in different directories for 2 processes, any change made by one will be visible to another. If you want to prevent that, then not mounting the device at all is one option. PID: Allows 2 processes in different instances to have the same PIDs. It’s also hierarchical: a process can see PIDs of all its child processes even if they are created in separate namespace instances but not vice versa. I didn’t know that PID “1” is special. If killed, the kernel panics and restarts. Network: This is something that I’ve encountered, but not fully understood, before. Helps setup iptables and routing rules but I need to dig deeper into those. One, rather mundane, use of network namespaces is that you could run multiple web-servers on port 80 on the same kernel if they are running in different network namespace instances. UTS: domain name etc. IPC: IIRC, processes in the same instance can communicate with each other through IPC (i.e., inter-process communication), otherwise can’t. Cgroups. User: Helps map user and group ID in one instance to something else in another. For e.g., you may be root inside an unprivileged container but that’s mapped to non-root on the kernel.

Something strange happened yesterday: I went to two Indian grocery stores, both of them good ones, and they were out of flour. (They did have couple of brands. However, Rotimatic likes only a few specific ones, which also happen to be very popular, and those were out of stock.) A guy at the store said more stock may not come for awhile because of slow imports or something. Strange, such things happen in this land of plenty. ...

I (finally) finished Oathbringer today. The book is so long, I dropped it a few months ago and decided I won’t read it again. Eventually, I picked it up recently and went through the last 12-15 hours of it. There was one part in the middle that bored me at the time. Some of the main characters were stuck in Shadesmar and nothing much was happening. This time, I got through it and feel glad I did. The part that stuck me the most is how accepting the mistakes of his past was the first step for Dalinar to become a better person. Second, he says the next step is always the most important one that a person can take. In true Sanderson style, the characters went through their own struggles and, in some cases, found ways to overcome them. For e.g., Szeth decided to follow a man he once tried to assassinate, Teft overcame his addiction to become a Knight Radiant, Shallan eventually decided that she loved Adolin and not Kaladin, Rock broke his vow - to never kill someone - to save Kaladin etc. I am sure I’ll remember more examples if I press my brain. I have the next book in my Audible library but it too is long (at 57+ hours!), so I’ll start it after some time. I also saw somewhere that the one after the next is expected to come out next year, so there is a lot of ground to cover in the series!

I am trying to integrate Netlify CMS on this website. This post is a test for that. Random image for the test: Edit, on Dec 7 20222: I migrated from Netlify’s identity management to GitLab’s Client-Side PKCE Authorization. I’ll just save this edit and verify that I am able to push the change to the my GitLab repo.

I watched No Time To Die today. IIRC Bond fell in love for the 3rd time (with a daughter, no less): before this, he got married once and his wife died the day on their wedding, the other time was with Vesper in Casino Royale who kind of betrayed him and died as well. In this movie, his family survived but Bond died. The movie reminded me of Indiana Jones: bullets were flying past Bond but each of his shots were on point.

I learned a few random things lately: India doesn’t have a big number of skyscrapers despite high population because of two reasons. One, albeit minor, is that skyscrapers require consistent power supply and that’s hard in India. Two, the bigger one, is the government allowed FSI: a ratio of total floor space within the building to the area of land on which the building is built. FSI varies with project or location but is usually small (2-5) in India compared to that in other countries where it can go as high as 25. Third place: The YouTube presenter argues that a third place, other than your home and office, something like a local pub etc. where you can walk to, is socially important. Allows you to serendipitously bump into a set of people periodically. That’s where new community members can form first friends. The following don’t serve the same purpose: Self-organized backyard parties because you already know the people that you’ll meet. Malls or those pubs that you need to drive to because you possibly won’t bump into the same people multiple times. (Also, I myself can’t imagine going up to strangers in a random bar and starting a conversation. ) Recently, as I’ve started going to the office every week or two, I’ve noticed how nice random conversations are. They just don’t happen on video calls when you are working from home because you only call people with an agenda.

In other news, we got a TV today: it has a gorgeous 65 inch OLED screen. I am kind of tired of watching videos on my phone or laptop, so I spent at least 4 hours on the TV! Part of it went into watching Dune.

Today, I was reminded of a book that I had heard about earlier: how to read a book. I was about to borrow it from the library when I realized that it’ll become yet another thing on my todo plate, however useful it might turn out to be. So, I didn’t check out. I do this often but here’s another list of what’s, or should be, on my plate right now: Entertainment: Oathbringer. YouTube and other stuff on TV. Books: CI. If possible, some stuff on distributed systems. As usual, work, workout and household chores. When I look back on my notes from a week or two before, I see pretty much the same things there. I think what’s happening is I am dividing my time disproportionately in these buckets. For example, a lot of it on self-hosting and randomly checking for Black Friday deals. Life will become pretty simple if I stuck to such a small number of things.