202534
Counter Strike was developed by Minh Le in his dorm. Of the many games that I played during my school/college/initial days of work, Counter Strike probably is the one I miss the most. It wasn’t because it was very strategic or anything, but it was the most social game. And yes, we have many social games now. And the trend has been to make pretty much every game social with an auto matching algo (for instance Lichess/Chess.com). But back in 2000s when there was no such Auto-matching algo. You had local counter strike servers (mostly running on LAN) and you played with your folks. People you knew in real life.
When I first joined Infy, during my days at the Training Center in Mysore, the entire cohort/batch played Counter Strike on LAN. It used to be super fun. We had our unique handles (I was WastedF), we had our own trash talking and it wasn’t about being good or bad at the game. It was just purely a way to relax after a day full of theory/practicals. As soon as I graduated from the Mysore Training Campus and went to my first deputation in Bangalore, I did find many online servers but never felt the fun of playing with people I knew.
Croatian Freediver, Vitomir Maričić, held his breath under water for 29 minutes. Of course this was after he pre-breathed pure oxygen before the immersion (which increases the amount of oxygen in the lungs 6 times compared to breathing air). But still this is impressive. For a long time, while I played Under Water Hockey in Singapore, one of my goals was to hold my breath underwater for at least 5 minutes. I never got to achieving it. I did get to about 4 minutes. But maybe I should get back to practicing and improving my lung capacity.
Apps like reddit/youtube/instagram etc might not be bad, but they have dark patterns and one of them is the auto-scrolling. People end up losing hours just doom-scrolling. Pretty much most apps to help beat doom-scrolling rely on blocking the targetted app. But Scroll Gurad is an android app that blocks the Shorts/Reels. For Youtube, you can just shut off your recommendations and it should take care of doom-scrolling. But for the rest, this app might be a pretty good way to bypass the push by the app makers to feed you content that you didn’t subscribe to.
I also think, people should delete apps and use the webapp. Companies like Meta make their webapp glitchy to force people to download the app. End users have far less control on native apps compared to web apps.
Something to try out this week: How to Build a Coding Agent or How to build an Agent
NotebookLM is now my favorite note taking tool. Also love how people are hacking it to do some fun stuff, for instance this person using NotebookLM to watch videos. It reminds me of the time when Google Wave was launched and people used it in some fun ways.