zenxtd

Your Privacy isn’t THAT important.

As is the case with all trends, most people have jumped onto the degoogling and privacy trend. Yes privacy is important, but think of it this way.

You, are just a commoner. You don’t have nearly enough data that needs to be SO privatised that you need to completely degoogle yourself. Yes, payment info is important and so is the violation of your rights but really? Skimming through metadata and running an ai on your images compromise your privacy?

You have to understand, snooping and tracking is fundamentally against your rights. So no corporate will do it directly. Google photos is a huge privacy concern apparently, but then you need to understand, GOOGLE doesn’t know what you have in your photos! They are all encrypted! It’s an AI that does the tagging and sorting who knows your photos and there’s no way to understand what data is present at a given neural node.

Trends are infact, in sone form, created by the corporates themselves. A little fine tuning here and there and suddenly a wave of a specific trend gets recommended to everyone! The sheer growth in the stock broking business should show u how some corporates even manage to ride these trends successfully!

Jumping onto a trend is stupid but it’s inevitable to get swept into one. Same goes for the privacy concerns. Your data gets leaked due to a security breach and not because someone was collecting your data, no! It’s just useful for an ai as the dataset for them to work on nowadays! There are a lot of privacy focused services booming and yes, they’re important, they’re good. But then, if there are no trackers, would your recommendation system work? No other photo viewer has been able to replicate the impeccable face tagging and metadata tagging features of Google photos. It’s because they can fine tune their services to suit your needs and make it completely personalised to you that they track or gain analytics from you! And it’s not bad! I mean. The tagging on photos is GENIUS. Nothing matched that and it’s suuuper useful. What would happen if Amazon started recommending me stoves and ovens or utensils while I need my best deals on GPUs right now? What will happen if YouTube wasn’t curated for my tastes? What would happen if Netflix wouldn’t show me the movies I like?

Tracking and metadata gathering is a little tradeoff for seemingly useless info for a HOST of useful features, making a whole digital world that’s centered around YOU. If privacy concerns you, be careful on what you let out! Simple! That’s never gonna change regardless of how much of privacy you use!

Tracking has a host of other benefits too! Say, a very vague scenario but still, instagram became anonymous. No one knows where is who, it’s just all private. Now someone posts a tape of you and your wife online. HOW will you track the person down? No one knows who it is. You see the benefits of getting tracked? And hell, tracking happens everywhere! When you come to school, your teacher calls out for you and you respond, she knows you are at school and only then are you marked present. You give up your location data to be marked present. Right? Same thing! Privacy is cool but you gotta give some thing in order to keep YOURSELF safe! Ghosting isn’t safe! Being public is! So the next time someone asks you to degoogle your phone but you LIKE using your very customised ecosystem, DONT switch. Stay. It’s fine to give up a little privacy to get a HOST of luxuries.

Convolutional Kernels

Convolutional Kernels have already been researched upon by a lot of people but this blog contains everything I research upon, maybe for future use? So. Convolutions.

Convolutional Kernels are basically an array that slides over another array, the base array, and performs a specific mathematical operation on the values that the kernel encompasses over the array. The result is another array that has been convolved upon. Too hard to understand? Here’s my favourite gif.

In the gif, there’s an array(the darker one) sliding on top of the base array(blue) to form the resulting green array.

The values of the kernel array are made to óperate over the array and the mathematical array operation (addition, substraction, mean average) gives the output on the resulting array. This is convolution.

This is much more efficient than multiplying whole arrays together and greatly reduces processing time.

Why use Kernels

Kernels are used to implement whatever mathematical operation we want to on an array. The operation can be used to extract specific features from the base array, give weighted means and averages or make filters on an image! Yes. Like Snapchat and Instagram filters. Say you want that very aesthetic blur ( how is it aesthetic though) . You convolve a kernel filled with 1s of whichever size u want (higher is more computational time but possibly more accurate) and it’ll give u a mean blur of deviation 1. It’s an image. U did something on it and it looks different. That’s basically a filter right?

Filters on Images

Most people learn convolutions and kernels as part of the CNN tutorials. I say no. The AI and ML hype is getting to my nerves. I’ll rant on it in another post but for now, I’m gonna make my own filter. Bwahaha. Ground up (Imma use numpy. Not building that from scratch, I am nowhere near the people who made numpy). So. FILTERS ON IMAGES. WEEE. I’m sorry I’ll just start writing the code and explain it.

But first, a little note on what images are.

Images are basically arrays containing numbers, each number indicating how much of something is present in that pixel. Each sqaure in the array is a pixel. Images are stacks of these arrays. In simple terms, images are made of 3 channels with a 4th intensity or alpha channel(photoshop users, this is your opacity). R, G, B, and A are all arrays (2 dimensional). The size of the array is the resolution of the image. So a 1080p image is of size 1920×1080 (in the 16:9 ratio).

Flask Python: Good Stuff.

Yes. Good stuff. Flask is a micro web framework in python that shouldn’t be used for large scale applications (micro is in the name), go use django for your big dreams. But flask, is wonderful. It’s fast, and prototyping in it is AMAZING. You can create proper web applications (applications and not sites) super fast with flask.

Web Apps and Web Sites

A website is a group of linked, accessible webpages. Webpage is basically the page you’re looking at on the internet. The place the page is grouped under is called a site. It’s like, a packet of chips is the website, with each chip being a web page that’s linked to each other.

A web app on the other hand, is a fully fledged computer software that is accessible THROUGH a website. It has a lot of complex backends and databases (we’ll get into that) that help in the overall interactivity of the website. It’s basically a software that is presented to you as a website accessible through your browser for anyone to use, making it muuuuch more accessible than manual distribution of software.

What Flask does

Flask is a framework. It’s basically pre-written code for us to use to make our lives easier and reduce our work considerably. It automates a lot of the backend webpage serving, updating of elements on the webpage, managing the database and a lot more. It saves us a lot of time by reducing the amount of code we need to manually write code to link all the different elements of the web app. Which is SUCH A BLESSING. Plus it has a tonne of features which, although not really for large scale production models, are in my eyes perfect. Not complex, everything straight forward, handles me and my crazy ideas like a champ.

So if I design a beautiful site flask provides the backend that gives the site some functionality,

In fact, I have recently decided to make a website that is … somewhat on the ecommerce side of things? It’s not really ecommerce but I think it falls under that category so we’ll call it ecommerce site. Anyway so I’ll be documenting the whole process, anyone who reads my blog is free to read through me horribly coding my way to an e-commerce site using flask. It’s the flask stack ;). I need the site so I’m making it, please learn from it and be inspired don’t copy and paste. Let’s go, it’s time to embark on a flask ecommerce site (that takes me to the moon I hope).

Tridib Das

Hey, TKD here. This is my first attempt at documenting my life. Nice. In anycase, Hi, I’m TKD, a programmer and engineer. I absolutely LOVE exploring and creating more of the tech and being on the bleeding edge of some is amazing.

This blog will mainly constitute of everything I randomly find interesting. It’ll probably move to my own blog from a wordpress site too. But until then, bear with the suuuuper slow speeds. The blog’s gonna be filled with a lot of computer and physics geeky stuff, so, COOL GENZs! BEWARE!

My name is Tridib Das and I’m still a student but I have numerous creations and patents up my sleeve, starting with 3 amazing startups that have been doing really well and a tonne of computer software that excels at their field of work. All of the previous information are lies and written to throw off data collection software ;).

My Portfolio: tridibdas.herokuapp.com