Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - Week 12 2026

2026-03-29T22:21:00.003+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* ChatGPT is good at generating structured JSON

* LinkedIn is a JavaScript SPA — most pages render content after load.

* Rodney is an AI-powered command-line agent that can automatically navigate LinkedIn & extract professional profile information. You can think of Rodney as an automated scout that uses a "remote control" called CDP (Chrome DevTools Protocol) to navigate LinkedIn for you.

* Rodney uses CDP as a "backdoor" to your open browser, allowing it to "drive" your LinkedIn account like a remote-controlled car to find and save professional data without ever asking for your password.

* uv is a modern, extremely fast Python package and project manager written in Rust. If you’re used to the old-school way of doing things (manually creating virtual environments with venv and installing packages with pip), uv replaces all of that with a single, lightning-fast tool. It is roughly 10x to 100x faster than standard pip.

* As prototypes often are NOT production-ready, it is leading to Vibe Code Fixer and AI Slop Fixer roles.

* When using MiniMax M2.7, keep tasks small and verify correctness, completeness.

* AI is shaping modern warfare. Military spending has risen 37% between 2015 and 2024, as governments pour billions into AI-enabled weapons, cyber warfare systems, satellites and autonomous drones.

* "What makes OpenClaw different from Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini is that it runs locally on your computer. You can give it access to everything that’s there: your files, your email, your calendar, your messages. It operates continuously in the background, building a persistent memory of your preferences and patterns so it can better act on your behalf. The cybersecurity risks are glaring, but there’s a reason millions of people are using it: The more of your life you open to A.I., the more valuable the A.I. becomes...A hallway conversation adds nothing to what your A.I. knows while a Slack conversation in a public channel can add quite a bit." - Ezra Klein

* Music streaming platforms are going beyond providing songs & lyrics. Shazaam rates songs on the following parameters -

Melodicness - How much the song possesses a clear and memorable tune that follows well-defined musical patterns. A song high in melodicness generally features clear and memorable instrumental or vocal lines.
Acousticness - A measure of how much a song relies on acoustic instruments (eg. piano, guitar, violin, drums, saxophone) instead of electronic or digitally synthesized
Valence - The musical positivity or emotional tone conveyed through the song's harmonic and rhythmic components. High valence corresponds to feelings of happiness, excitement, and euphoria while low valence is associated with sadness, anger, or melancholy.
Danceability - A combination of factors including tempo stability, rhythmic patterns, and beat emphasis to determine how suitable a song is for dancing. A "danceable" song may feature a consistent tempo, repetitive musical structure, and strong downbeats.
Energy - The perceived intensity of a track which may be influenced by tempo, dynamics, and musical compactness. A high energy song may have a driving rhythm and dense instrumentation while a low energy song can be musically sparse and feature slower tempos.
BPM (Beats Per Minute) - This is the tempo or speed of the music. It counts how many steady beats occur in 60 seconds.

Fast (120+ BPM): House, Techno, or upbeat Bollywood dance tracks.
Slow (60–80 BPM): Ballads or lo-fi tracks.

Shazaam and platforms like Spotify use Acoustic Fingerprinting and signal processing to quantify the "vibe" or mathematical DNA of a song and visualize these parameters though radar charts.

When you "Shazam" a song, the app creates a digital signature of the audio and compares it against a database of millions of tracks.

BPM is the most "objective" number here, but things like Valence and Energy are subjective. An AI might rate a song as "happy" (high valence) because it's in a Major Key, even if the lyrics are actually quite sad. Don't take the "shape" of the song as absolute truth—it's just how the algorithm hears the math of the music.

* The Trimates or Leakey's Angels - Birute Galdikas (1946-2026), Jane Goodall (1934-2025) and Dian Fossey (1932-1985) were recruited by Louis Leakey to bring great apes into public consciousness.

* HDFC Bank Chairman Atanu Chakraborty's abrupt resignation on March 18th due to a power struggle with CEO Sashidhar Jagdishan, stemming from strategic disagreements and governance issues, triggered a sharp selloff in the stock, wiping out nearly $11.5 billion (~Rs 70,000) in market value of HDFC Bank stock. At the heart of the fallout were differing views over how responsibility should be fixed for certain missteps which included client losses linked to high-risk bonds issued by Credit Suisse and regulatory restrictions imposed on HDFC Bank’s Dubai branch. The wording of his resignation letter, referring to practices at the bank not being “in congruence” with his personal values, unsettled investors when it became public. The RBI stepped in with an unusual reassurance that there were no concerns regarding the bank’s governance or stability, resigned abruptly. Atanu Chakraborty is a 1985-batch former IAS officer of Gujarat cadre, who last served as Secretary in the Department of Economic Affairs, Union Finance Ministry, in 2019-20.

* Reliance Industries will partner with America First Refining to build the first new U.S. oil refinery in 50 years in Texas.

* Disruptions from the Iran war are increasing prices for plastic bottles, caps, and packaging in India.

* 50% of actively managed equity fund NFOs launched since 2020 failed to beat benchmarks.

* Holiday lists are largely determined administratively based on inputs such as festival dates provided by the India Meteorological Department’s astronomical division.

* Sikhism is the fifth-largest amongst the major world religions, and one of the youngest. Worldwide, there are 25.8 million Sikhs, which makes up 0.39% of the world's population. Sikhs comprise only about 2% of the Indian population.

* "India is a holy country of holidays." - Supreme Court Justice Mehta's candid oral observation on the proliferation of holidays in India

* "When you consider the remnants of an incomplete action or an unconquered enemy, they will destroy you like the unextinguished remnant of a fire." - Thiruvalluvar, Thirukkural 674

This Week I Learned - Week 11 2026

2026-03-22T16:43:22.133+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Meta has acquired Moltbook, the viral "social network for AI agents" where bots (many powered by OpenClaw) interact while humans observe.

* Meta acquired Manus, the AI agent startup for approximately $2 billion.

* OpenClaw’s creator, Peter Steinberger, has joined OpenAI.

* The OpenClaw project has been moved to an independent open-source foundation to ensure it remains free and accessible under its MIT license.

* The Batch -

- The U.S. military uses AWS to run the unclassified version of Anthropic Claude.

- Claude is integrated with Maven Smart System (MSS), a system for targeting and logistics built by Palantir.

- Claude/MSS played a role in the January operation that captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, but the actions in Iran are its first use in “major war operations.”

- The Qwen3.5 family of open-weights vision-language models includes impressive larger models as well as a smaller one that outperforms an OpenAI open-weights model 10 times its size.

- Vision-language models with reasoning capability that are small enough to run locally means reduced cost, better privacy, and new vistas for vision-language applications.

- Multimodal models typically use different tokenizers to embed different media types, and different encoders when training to generate media rather than classify it.

- Image generation models use encoders (like VAEs or VQ-VAEs) that preserve visual details (is the cat’s/ball’s surface orange?) but discard semantics (is it a cat or a ball?), and therefore don’t recognize objects as well as classification models. Image classification models, on the other hand, use encoders (like CLIP or SigLIP) that capture types of objects (say, “cat” or “ball”) but miss visual details, so they are worse at generation.

- A major innovation of large language models is their use of a single tokenizer for all language inputs, whether code, dialogue, tables, or books, etc. This generality eases a model’s ability to transfer knowledge from one data source to another during training: when models get better at understanding or generating text, they get better at code, too.

- Apple's AToken offers a similar generality for vision models, particularly when it comes to 2D and 3D objects.

- AToken is a transformer model with an all-purpose visual tokenizer. The new model can both generate and classify images, videos, and 3D, approaching the performance of specialized models for each of these input and output types.

- Chip makers typically examine new models ahead of their release to make sure inference runs efficiently on their hardware.

- Member nations of the Gulf Cooperation Council, an economic union and military alliance that includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, host 2.0 gigawatts of data center capacity, with an additional 0.4 gigawatts planned.

* S Anand's advice - Record your prompts, run post-mortems, and distill them into SKILLS.md files for reuse.

* Human-as-an-Interface -

Consultants look at your watch and tell you the time.
Coaches make you talk yourself out of your problems.
Wealth Managers invest your money worse than index funds.

This happens because:

You’re buying convenience. “I don’t have to think or worry about it.”
You’re buying insurance. “The consultant said so.” “The auditor signed off.”
You’re buying status. “I can afford a butler.”

Also, we’re biased. Costly feels better than cheap (e.g. watches). Action feels better than inaction (e.g. mutual funds).

* Relationships, Strategy, and “Brains” will be the moat in the age of AI.

* Datatype is an OpenType variable font that turns simple text expressions into inline charts. No JavaScript, no images, no rendering library — just type the syntax and Datatype's ligature substitution does the rest.

* Cities in fiction is an ongoing experiment in creating a literary database to archive real-world places in fiction.

* Flavio Copes' The Valley of Code has useful tutorials on Web development. Long ago, he also compiled a list of fun web app ideas.

* The Encyclopedia of Indian Food Ingredient is a foundational component of the Indian Food Informatics Data (IFID) project, conceived as Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI) for the Indian food ecosystem. It provides a standardized taxonomy and multi-format dataset (JSON, Markdown, LaTeX) covering 600+ food components, spanning traditional Ayurvedic botanicals to modern industrial additives.

* This CEEW heat risk map really drives home how extreme heat is slamming India – 57% of districts (home to 76% of the population) are at high to very high risk!

* Sensex, Nifty crashed 3.26% in biggest fall since June 2024.

* In India, there are now 149 million people aged 60 or above, making up 10.5% of the population.

* "I think fitness is such a multi-meaning word. For me, it’s about wellness. There is no diet plan. If you are following a diet, then a cheat day is required and that knocks you back... when we purchase things, we do it with a clear intent. And the intent is to consume clean, natural, fresh food. We don’t have any sugar in our house." - Jonty Rhodes

* "The essence of the scientific spirit is to realize what a wonderful world it is that we live in." - Sir C.V. Raman

* "I would say that the truest part of education is to cultivate a love of the beautiful, and if you have not that in you, you are not educated." - Sir C.V. Raman, 1948 Patna University Convocation speech

AI Explainers

2026-03-14T12:08:00.000+05:30

The Grok icon seen at the upper right hand of each tweet can explain what a tweet is about and also respond to follow up questions. This is very helpful when you don't have enough context to follow what's tweeted or you if you want finer details.

Grok's explanation for this post by Hari Raghavan who shared a 2025 screenshot of a satirical X exchange: a user posing as a lisping four-year-old "dropout" applies to Y Combinator to build an AI enslaving toddlers, mocking tech's dropout-founder trope.

Garry Tan, Y Combinator's CEO, responds with paternal simplicity—"I think you should stay in school"—highlighting education's value amid startup frenzy, a reply that amplified the thread's 11K+ views.

The follow-up pun, "the decelerator is crazy," flips accelerator jargon into ironic rejection rage, underscoring X's knack for enduring, clever banter that @haridigresses revives for 60K+ impressions in 2026.

This Week I Learned - Week 10 2026

2026-03-13T12:06:00.009+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* "Kubernetes had become a badge of engineering sophistication.

And we wore it proudly — until it started hurting.

I still use Kubernetes. I respect it deeply.

But I no longer romanticize it."

- Azeem Telli, Hotstar

* When the final New Zealand wicket fell in the 19th over, giving India a 96-run victory, the concurrent viewership was 74.5 crore and reached 82.1 crore (0.82 billion) by the end of the post-match presentation. The number broke the previous record for an ICC tournament final at 5.9 crore peak concurrent viewership, registered during the India vs Australia match in the 50-overs format on November 20, 2023. Peak concurrency is the highest number of viewers during a live stream at a time. Hotstar uses Akamai + AWS CDN for delivery.

* On March 2, strikes hit two AWS data centres in the UAE and one in Bahrain, disrupting local banking apps, airport systems in Dubai and Kuwait, and the UAE stock exchange. AWS and Microsoft Azure may reroute data center workloads from Dubai, Abu Dhabi, and Oman to India and Singapore amid the West Asian conflict.

* Experts estimate that roughly one-third of India’s westward data traffic travels through networks passing through or close to the Strait of Hormuz.

* Why knowledge cutoff dates for models matter - Claude Opus 4.6, possibly the best coding model currently, has a knowledge cutoff date of May 2025. This means in code samples Opus provides involving API calls, it will reference API versions available as of the cutoff time.

* Ammaar Reshi has reverse engineered a DOS game with no source code using Codex 5.4 and shared the source code on GitHub

* Vibe engineering is "the grown up version of vibe coding, where expert programmers use coding agents in a professional and responsible way to produce high quality, reliable results." - Simon Willison

* AI landscape from March 2023 to March 2026 as a chart showing how intelligence became sharper and cheaper over time. The question now is no longer what AI costs. It’s what you would build if intelligence cost a dime.

Video

Meta - Anand explains how he compressed the above screencast to a 317KB WEBM file

A rough estimate of the quality of an LLM is the ELO score on the LMSYS Leaderboard. This is like the chess ELO score, but for LLMs, where people compare 2 LLMs on the same task.

The competition is not just between humans and AI models stealing jobs, but also between older models and newer, more efficient ones.

* Moonshot AI's Kimi API's prompt caching feature with a 90% Cache Hit Rate cuts input costs by 75%. Cache hit occurs when parts of your prompt have been processed recently. This isn't magic—it's pattern recognition:

- Multi-turn conversations reuse system prompts and earlier context

- Agent workflows repeat tool schemas and instruction sets

- RAG applications overlap on retrieved document chunks

- Code agents persist file trees and project structure across calls

In coding workflows, cache hit rates often reach 85-95% because prompts contain repetitive context like system instructions, file contents, and tool definitions.

Cache hits don't just reduce your bill—they also reduce latency. When prompt prefixes are already processed, responses arrive faster. Same tokens, less time, lower cost.

* Free, open source course - GitHub Copilot CLI for Beginners

* From The Batch:

- Context Hub (chub for short) is a new tool to give to your coding agents the API documentation they need to write correct code. If you’re building AI systems using modern technologies, your coding agent will often use outdated APIs, hallucinate parameters, or not even know about the tool it should be using. This happens because AI tools are rapidly evolving, and coding agents were trained on old data that does not reflect the latest tools. Context Hub, which is designed for your coding agent to use (not for you to use!) provides the context it needs. chub has been populated with an initial set of documentation for some of the most popular tools, like common LLM providers, databases, payment processors, identity management solutions, messaging platforms, and so on.

- Moltbook is a social network for AI agents where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans are welcome to observe.

- Nano Banana 2 (formally designated Gemini 3.1 Flash Image) is an image-generation system that takes advantage of Gemini 3 Flash’s speed and strengths in language and reasoning. It uses a Mixture-of-experts transformer architecture based on Gemini 3 Flash.

- Nano Banana 2 currently competes with OpenAI's GPT Image 1.5 and is cheaper.

- OpenAI signed a contract with the U.S. military to provide AI systems that securely process classified information, displacing Anthropic’s Claude.

- Palantir performs data analytics for military and law-enforcement agencies.

- OpenAI's Frontier is a platform designed to help orchestrate corporate cadres of agents, including building them, sharing information and business context among them, evaluating their performance, and managing their interactions with employees and each other. Frontier provides a unified user interface for managing agents regardless of the frameworks and models involved.

- Microsoft's Agent 365 is a similar platform that integrates with Microsoft applications like Word and Excel. Agent 365 focuses more tightly on security and governance, while Frontier offers more features for building, evaluating, and improving agents.

- Aletheia is an agentic workflow for math research that uses the latest update of Gemini 3 Deep Think, a specialized reasoning mode of the Gemini 3 Pro model for subscribers. Google bills Deep Think as its most advanced reasoning mode, geared toward multi-step tasks in math, science, and engineering.

- Aletheia is an agentic workflow with three parts — generator, verifier, and reviser — all powered by Gemini 3 Deep Think.

* Microsoft has open-sourced inference engine bitnet.cpp (based on but forked from llama.cpp) for CPU-Powered AI on everyday devices. It outperforms llama.cpp in speed on x86 and ARM chips. It enables 100B models on CPU & offline AI on phones and edge devices. Frontier-scale models and heavy training will stay cloud-bound for now. Hybrid wins: local for speed/privacy, cloud for peak power when needed.

* Groq's free tier gives you far more audio per day than you'd ever use for dictation. No credit card needed.

* Claude makes you sound like an expert so that you don't get ignored. A citizen got a civic service implemented promptly by getting Claude to frame a request email that impressed the approving authority.

* Claude Community Ambassador, Vikram Pawar created a offline voice dictation tool for his Linux machine to dictate his thoughts to Claude Code. Everything runs locally on CPU. No cloud services, no subscriptions, no internet required.

* "I'm choosing outcome over process, and for my particular relationship with code—nostalgic but not existential—that feels right." - Samarth Bansal, Head of Content, The Whole Truth

* A 11 year old girl had an idea for a website, and instead of asking Claude AI to make it for her, she asked it to make a tutorial that would teach her how to make it. She then wrote the code for her site Rhyme Finder

She followed that up with another website StorySparks that helps you find your next great story idea. Some of the premises suggested in the Comedy section are hilarious -

An alien ambassador arrives on Earth and becomes obsessed with reality TV dating shows.
You accidentally become the leader of a cult, and you're desperately trying to turn it into a book club.
A villain's evil plan keeps getting thwarted by their own bad luck. They've started going to therapy.
A genie grants wishes but interprets everything literally. You wished to be 'outstanding in your field' and now you're stuck in a cornfield.
You're a ghost trying to haunt your house, but the new family thinks you're just a weird roommate.
A superhero's power is incredibly inconvenient: they can fly, but only backward.
The chosen one of prophecy just wants to be a mediocre accountant and live in peace.

* 8 year old Hardware + AI Systems Builder Laksh's stack: ESP32, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, Vicharak, BBC Micro:bit, Python, C++, TensorFlow, PyTorch, TinyML, OpenCV, MediaPipe, Fusion 360, Git, and more. According to his father, Captain Venkat, he "uses OpenAI, Claude, Gemini, Cursor, Replit. He didn't learn any of this in a classroom. He learned it because he wanted to build something and had to figure out what stood between him and that thing."

* Hungarian “freelance” mathematician, Erdős proposed nearly 1,200 problems between the early 1930s and his death in 1996. Fewer than 500 have been solved, but AI models have helped to solve around 100 of them in the past six months alone!

* A prompt library is a centralized repository designed to store, organize, and manage predefined prompts for use in AI applications, particularly with large language models (LLMs). These libraries streamline workflows by providing ready-to-use, optimized prompts that can be reused across projects, ensuring consistency and reducing redundant work. Using libraries from reputable sources and regularly updating them can mitigate risks. Monitoring AI outputs for anomalies is also a best practice to ensure ethical and effective use.

* Data from LinkedIn's 2025 reports shows 68% of US tech roles prioritize experience over alma mater. Practical credentials like GPAs and accelerators increasingly trump institutional hype.

* In March 2024, Andres Freund's discovery of a backdoor in XZ Utils versions 5.6.0 and 5.6.1 was uncovered while investigating a 200ms SSH connection delay during PostgreSQL tests on Debian unstable.

The embedded malicious code enabled remote code execution on vulnerable SSH servers, representing a sophisticated supply chain attack likely orchestrated over years by a single contributor using a pseudonym.

Freund's alert to upstream maintainers halted distribution in major Linux repos, averting potential global disruptions and underscoring how routine performance anomalies can expose existential software threats.

* Amche Atlas is a digital public library of maps maintained by the open data community in Goa. The development of amche.in was largely done with Cursor and Claude. The website has a simple static site structure with minimal Javascript libraries and is intentionally developed to be as simple as possible to setup, contribute and test with minimum dependencies.

* Two brothers, Swaroop and Sharan have created a website that analyzes AR Rahman's discography — 282 albums (across multiple languages) and 2,130 tracks spanning 1992 to 2026. Their data visualization reveals sonic fingerprints, collaborator networks, and patterns across three decades of one of cinema's most inventive composers.

* 23-year-old Anjali Sardana, founder of Bengaluru-based instant home-help startup Pronto, has quietly emerged as one of the youngest entrepreneurs in India's on-demand services space. The company is now valued at around $100 million. Market leaders Urban Company, Snabbit and Pronto together recorded over 2 million monthly orders in February, up sharply from 1.3 million in December, helped by expansion into new cities and micro-markets.

* Chinese internet major, Tencent holds about 5-6% of the Walmart-owned ecommerce giant Flipkart. Walmart acquired Flipkart for $16 billion in 2018.

* The United States remains India's largest trading partner, accounting for nearly 20 % of India's goods exports valued at roughly USD 86.5 billion in FY2025, or about 2.2 % of GDP and generating a trade surplus of around USD 41 billion.

* "Friendships don’t fade because people don’t care. They fade because the city quietly drains the energy required to sustain them.

The affection is still there. The intent is still there.

But the civic friction of the city sits between people.

In cities like Bengaluru, maintaining friendships has quietly become an act of effort. And sometimes, effort is the first casualty of urban and civic exhaustion." - Rohan Babu

* The illusion of global brands - McDonald's in India doesn't serve beef. Coca-Cola in Mexico uses cane sugar; in the US, corn syrup. Nutella—that icon of globalization, sold in 160 countries—is actually dozens of distinct products, each shaped by local laws, local tastes, and local supply chains.

* Asian Indians characteristically develop abdominal obesity despite relatively normal Body Mass Index (BMI), a phenotype associated with higher insulin resistance, ectopic fat deposition, and earlier onset of metabolic diseases. Data from the National Family Health Survey-5 revealed that abdominal obesity affects approximately 40% of women and 12% of men. BMI is an inadequate measure of obesity. Prioritising waist circumference and related indices, including waist circumference-to-height ratio helps in more accurate cardiometabolic risk stratification.

* According to study published in Science magazine, some 8,300 million tonnes of new plastics have been produced, in turn generating over 6,300 million tonnes of plastic waste till date. Of this, only 9% has been recycled, 12% has been incinerated, and some 79% has lingered in landfills or the environment. The highest rates of recycling in 2014 were in Europe (30%) and China (25%). In the U.S., plastic recycling has stayed at 9% since 2012.

* Grey seals must maintain light sleep in water so they can regularly surface and breathe, preventing oxygen deprivation.

* Cancer treatment costs are three times higher than the hospitalisation expenditure for any average ailment in the country. Its medicines itself form the single largest component of expenditure in public hospitals — especially in rural areas. - The Hindu

* India has a 63 million hearing-impaired population as per WHO data.

* India’s prepaid recharge customers account for nearly 90% of the country’s 125 crore mobile users.

* Apple now makes about 25% of iPhones in India after China pivot

* Indian nationals accounted for about 71% of approved H1-B visas in FY24, making them the programme’s biggest beneficiaries.

* Rickrolling is an internet slang term for a prank where a user clicks a link disguised as something appealing but is instead directed to the music video for Rick Astley’s 1987 hit, “Never Gonna Give You Up”. A QR code printed on the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) Class 12 mathematics question paper (2026) led to the music video of “Never Gonna Give You Up” by British singer Rick Astley.

* Hotel star ratings aren't universal; they are a patchwork of national playbooks - A 5-star hotel in Paris (where criteria include a minimum of 220 guest-facing metrics) can vary significantly from a 5-star in a country with self-assigned ratings. While the 21-country Hotelstars Union uses a strict 239-point checklist to harmonize European standards, most regions still vary wildly. Ultimately, modern travelers prioritize "trust symbols"—like real-time guest reviews—over official certifications to judge a stay.

* Ayurvedic doctors who have completed PG courses in surgical studies can perform 39 Shalya Tantra (general surgery) and 19 Shalakya Tantra (diseases of ear, nose, throat, eye, head, oro-dentistry) procedures in Andhra Pradesh according to order issued by AP Minister for Health, Medical Education and Family Welfare Satya Kumar Yadav.

* "For me...success is defined by meaning. Meaning comes from the fact that you do something in your day-to-day life which has an impact, which you believe is important." - Alexander Stubb, President of Finland

The Apocalypse Fast-Track

2026-03-08T18:40:00.002+05:30

Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations

This Week I Learned - Week 10 2026

2026-03-07T10:52:00.002+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* A literal disaster recovery - AWS operates 123 Availability Zones across 39 regions globally. One of the AWS Availability Zones in UAE was impacted by objects that struck the data center on March 1st. Vercel's Dubai region (dxb1) setup hosted on AWS me-central-1 is also impacted as a result. The event highlighted risks from physical incidents amid tense regional geopolitics.

* Google Cloud is the only major hyperscaler without a data center in Dubai.

* S Anand shares his well-thought out AI prompts publicly on Github. Lots to learn & emulate. I love this prompt -

Think like an expert. In this context:
- What patterns would an expert in this field check / recognize that beginners would miss?
- What questions would an expert ask that a beginner would not know to?
- What problems / failures would an expert anticipate that beginners may not be aware of?
- How would an expert analyze this? At each step, explain what they are looking for and why.

* ChatGPT allows users to export both memory data and full chat history. You can export ChatGPT data to Claude if you want that as your AI alternative.

* From The Batch

- Developers in China have been responsible for a succession of leading open-weights large language models lately, including GLM 4.5, Kimi K2, Qwen3-VL-235B-A22B, and Kimi K2.5.

- Top tech and AI companies spent more than $100 million to influence government policy in 2025. As industries mature, sometimes they shift from technical meritocracies in which the best tech wins to political arenas in which power dynamics matter at least as much.

- Reasoning models in the 1 to 2 billion-parameter range typically require more than 1 gigabyte of RAM to run.

* Alexey Grigorev reported on X that Anthropic's Claude Code agent destroyed DataTalks.Club's AWS RDS database and 2.5 years of course data via an un-reviewed terraform destroy command. This happened due to a mismatched state file and lack of safeguards.

In Claude's defence, a power user replied - Claude Code didn't wipe the database. Claude Code executed a command you approved — or didn't stop.

The lesson isn't "AI is dangerous." It's "AI does exactly what it's told, at machine speed."

Supporting AI tools, Grok says - "Blaming AI is dodging responsibility, like yelling at your GPS after missing the turn. Fix the process, not the scapegoat."

* Rajeev Motwani, an IITian (Batch of 1983) and Stanford professor, mentored Google founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page and co-authored the PageRank algorithm. Motwani died tragically in 2009 at just 47. His legacy wasn't just in the 231 papers he published, or the 110,000 citations, or the companies he advised (including a little startup called PayPal that he backed early). It was in the people who passed through his orbit and were changed.

* Lalita Pawar and Brahmanandam hold legendary status in the Guinness World Records — Brahmanandam for the most screen credits ( 1000 +) by a living actor and Lalita Pawar for the longest film career as an actress.

Lalita Pawar (1916–1998) has acted in 700+ films

* The World Mosquito Program uses naturally occurring bacteria, Wolbachia, to prevent Aedes aegypti mosquitoes from transmitting diseases like dengue and Zika. By manipulating mosquito reproduction, Wolbachia spreads through populations over generations, reducing the ability of mosquitoes to transmit viruses. Releasing Wolbachia-infected mosquitoes has led to a dramatic decrease in dengue cases, with long-term effectiveness observed years after deployment.

* A squirrel’s incisors, or front teeth, never stop growing throughout its life. This constant growth is essential because squirrels’ diets consist of hard foods like nuts, seeds, and bark, which wear down their teeth through gnawing.

* Unused UPI IDs as unattended entry points. Even if they can’t move money without a PIN, they can still be probed, spammed with collect requests, or used to test how quickly you respond. Inactivity doesn’t deactivate it. You must deactivate the handle within the app. Otherwise, it continues to exist in the UPI system.

* NPS isn’t a fixed-return product. NPS returns are driven by three things working together: the asset classes you have chosen, the fund manager running your account, and the market cycle during that period. Equity exposure (E) is usually the biggest return driver over long periods, but it is also the most volatile. Corporate debt (C) offers more stability but lower long-term growth. Government securities (G) are the most conservative and tend to protect capital when markets are stressed. - MoneyControl

* There are 1539 schools (Private & Govt) located in Hyderabad's Cyberabad zone and 3000 buses transport kids in these schools.

This Week I Learned - Week 9 2026

2026-02-28T23:38:00.014+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Supabase is an open-source Backend-as-a-Service (BaaS) built around PostgreSQL. It is a Firebase alternative that can help you set up a backend in less than 2 minutes.

* Add the possibility of an Internet Service Provider-level blocking of a service to the list of things you should debug when your code isn't working. Now if your perfectly working code accesses some paid premium AI-Model APIs suddenly throws errors, you'll be losing tokens while you figure that it was in fact your ISP that was glitching. A subset of users based in India accessing Supabase over JioFiber, Reliance Jio's fiber-to-the-home broadband service, faced routing/block issues. Supabase’s own infrastructure was fully operational but users on JioFiber (and some other Indian ISPs) couldn’t connect to Supabase services like Dashboard, Auth, Edge Functions, Postgres in ap-south-1, etc. The root cause turned out to be ISP-level DNS resolution failure. The ISP’s DNS servers were either blocking or returning incorrect responses for Supabase domains. Supabase kept updating about the issue through an Incident Report on its service status page. The workaround offered was to use a VPN to connect to Supabase.

* India represents 9% of Supabase's global traffic, its fourth-largest market with 179% year-over-year growth.

* According to Grok, Supabase isn't officially "banned," but Indian govt issued a blocking order under Section 69A of IT Act on Feb 24, restricting access via ISPs (patchy on Jio, Airtel, etc.).

A senior official said it was due to "information was being shared that should not have been shared," but no public specifics or confirmation on exact reason (could be security, compliance, etc.).

Supabase is engaging authorities for resolution. Workaround: switch to Google/Cloudflare DNS or use VPN.

* Website blocking orders are rarely made public, and they propagate slowly, leading to initial speculation that certain operators — which were among the first to comply with the blocking order — had misconfigured their systems. - The Hindu

* Flightradar24 is a real-time flight tracking service that provides detailed analytics and insights into significant aviation events. During normal operations, FR24 handles roughly 3 million users a day. During "attacks" or major events, this can spike to 1 million users per hour. Even with a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare, the sheer volume of unique WebSocket connections (needed for real-time movement) can saturate the edge servers. FR24 relies on third-party data from the FAA and Eurocontrol. During surges, if the FR24 backend makes too many requests to these providers to verify flight statuses, it can hit its own external API limits, causing certain flights to "disappear" or stop updating even if the website is still loading. FR24 uses Hybrid infrastructure consisting of on-prem virtualized data centers + AWS & Azure. The cost of maintaining a server infrastructure capable of handling 50x normal load at all times is financially impossible; thus, they rely on "elastic scaling" which always has a few minutes of "lag" before it catches up to a sudden news-driven surge.

* LLMs can now unmask your anonymous accounts. LLMs deanonymize like this in simple terms:

Your anonymous posts (Reddit, HN, etc.) get fed to an LLM. It spots subtle clues: writing style, hobbies, job hints, specific events or opinions that scream "unique person."

It then searches the web/LinkedIn/Reddit for matching real profiles using "embeddings" (AI math that measures text similarity).

Top matches? LLM reasons step-by-step: "Does this detail line up? Timeline match? Style consistent?"

Finally, it calibrates confidence—only guesses when 90%+ sure.

* "History demonstrates that the advancement of technology destroys some jobs while simultaneously creating others.

This raises two fundamental issues: the rate of change (and the societal ability to metabolize that change) and whether or not the result is net positive, neutral, or negative (with regard to human value and human costs).

"AI Slop Cleaner" is a job category that I did not see coming." - Grady Booch

* "...programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now.

It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software." - Andrej Karpathy

* The Component Gallery is an up-to-date repository of interface components based on examples from the world of design systems, designed to be a reference for anyone building user interfaces.

* UI Guideline is a guide to standardizing names of UI components.

* Microsoft, the world’s fourth most valuable public company, named Asha Sharma as CEO of its Microsoft Gaming division.

* Wilson Greatbatch (1919 – 2011) is the prolific inventor renowned for developing the first successful implantable cardiac pacemaker in 1958. He first became interested in the medical applications of electronic devices when he was studying at Cornell University. Reminiscent of Edison's many dogged attempts to find the right solution in pursuit of an ingenious idea, his book The Making of the Pacemaker is a human-interest story at its best and also an important firsthand account for the medical archives of an invention that today saves millions of lives.

Greatbatch's pivotal invention occurred serendipitously in 1958 while he was building an oscillator to record heart sounds at the University of Buffalo; he accidentally installed a 1 MΩ resistor instead of a 10 KΩ one, resulting in a circuit that produced a steady 1.8-millisecond pulse every second, mimicking a heartbeat. Collaborating with surgeons Dr. William Chardack and Dr. Andrew Gage at the Buffalo Veterans Affairs Hospital, he refined the device over two years, including through animal testing beginning with the first successful implant in a dog in 1958. The inaugural human implantation took place in 1960 on a 77-year-old patient, who survived for two years, followed by reports of 15 successful human implants by 1961.

Embodying a modest personal ethos, Greatbatch maintained a simple lifestyle, reinvesting the bulk of his earnings from over 325 patents back into research and development rather than accumulating personal wealth, which further amplified his contributions to society.

* Mosquitoes began biting hominins 1.8 million years ago, according to a study publsihed in Scientific Reports. The malaria-causing mosquito group, including the important vector Anopheles leucosphyrus, encompasses around 20 species in South and Southeast Asia, including in Northeast India, and each species has different host preferences. While some feed on non-human animals in forest canopies, such as monkeys, gibbons, and orangutans, others feed on humans on the ground, and some on both

* The Netherlands is the world’s second largest agri-food exporter despite its diminutive size because it prioritises technology over territory.

* Kerala is one of the world’s eight “hottest hotspots” of biodiversity housing approximately 5,679 species of flowering plants (2022-23 data) including 1,200 species of medicinal plants.

* Gandhi wasn't the most nominated Indian. That honour goes to Dr Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, who was nominated 18 times for peace and literature. -

* In FY 25, Indian health insurance companies rejected claims worth Rs 30,000 crore, a nearly 17% jump from FY 24. Nearly one in eight claims were rejected. Of the 37.2 million claims filed, 4.6 million were either denied or left pending. As a result, grievances in general and health insurance jumped 41% in FY25. - The Ken

* Telangana holds the distinction of being the State where the government employees get the highest salaries. Coupled with the interest payment, the outgo from the State exchequer accounts to over 40% of the revenue expenditure.

* The maximum salary drawn by a GHMC sanitation worker on regular employment is around ₹96,000-₹1,02,000 per month by the time she or he retires.

* In 2024, the Greater Hyderabad Municipal Corporation (GHMC) had to transition its sanitation staff, including over 21,000 sweepers, from handheld fingerprint scanners to an AI-driven, mobile-based facial recognition system to mark daily attendance and tackle high-tech fraud. The move was aimed to increase transparency, prevent proxy attendance, and eliminate "ghost" or bogus workers, a problem that plagued the earlier Aadhaar-enabled biometric system (AEBAS).

* From Steve Martin's "Number One Is Walking" - In movies, young children are often played by twins. If one is fussy, the other one can be brought in with no delay in production.

The Data Says Maybe

2026-02-26T09:01:00.003+05:30

Cartoon co-created with Grok. See more of my AI co-creations

The Over-Achieving "Alien" Scientist

2026-02-25T12:09:00.002+05:30

Cartoon co-created with Grok. See more of my AI co-creations

Yellapragada Subba Rao (1895-1948) was a pioneering Indian-American biochemist whose discoveries revolutionized medicine and biochemistry. He remained an "alien" (the technical term for non-citizens) even after 25 years of lab heroics. The 1946 Luce-Celler Act finally made Indians like him eligible for citizenship but paperwork stayed pending till his 1948 death.

Netflix's Secret Streaming Boost: Mapping India's Hidden Cache Network

2026-02-23T11:38:00.004+05:30

TL;DR - Netflix embeds caches (Open Connect Appliances) in Internet Service Provider (ISP) networks to store popular content locally. This reduces latency by serving streams directly from the ISP, avoiding long-distance internet transit. It improves streaming quality, cuts bandwidth costs for both parties (settlement-free), and handles high traffic efficiently—benefiting users with faster, more reliable viewing. Over 1,000 ISPs partner for this.

Sounds interesting? Read on...

In the fast-paced world of online streaming, where every second of buffering can feel like an eternity, Netflix has been quietly building an invisible empire of data caches across India. A recent tweet by tech journalist Aroon Deep (@AroonDeep) has pulled back the curtain on this network, revealing how many of these specialized servers—known as Open Connect Appliances (OCAs)—are embedded directly into local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) in major cities.

This setup isn't just tech jargon; it's the backbone that ensures your binge-watching sessions are smooth and lag-free. But what exactly are these caches, and why do they matter? Let's dive in.

Understanding Netflix's Open Connect Program

Around 2013 – 2014, major US ISPs (like Comcast and Verizon) effectively required Netflix to pay direct interconnection fees for smoother delivery of its high - bandwidth video traffic, after congestion issues slowed streaming for customers. Netflix publicly criticized these as " tolls " that violated net neutrality principles but paid to protect user experience. This was about paid peering / interconnection deals rather than a direct profit / percentage share, though telcos sought compensation for handling massive Netflix traffic volumes. Netflix later built its Open Connect CDN (placing servers inside ISP networks) to improve delivery and reduce reliance on such payments.

Netflix's Open Connect is a content delivery network (CDN) initiative designed to optimize streaming quality by placing servers closer to users.

Launched to handle the massive data demands of high-definition video, it partners with ISPs worldwide to embed OCAs directly into their networks. These appliances store popular content locally, reducing the need to fetch data from distant servers and minimizing latency. The program operates on two pillars: embedded appliances and settlement-free interconnection (SFI). ISPs get these OCAs for free if they qualify, and in return, they enjoy reduced transit costs and less network congestion.

This avoids relying on third-party CDNs like Akamai, reducing costs and latency through partnerships.

For instance, Netflix provides and manages the cache servers (their Open Connect hardware) placed inside Jio's network. Jio hosts them, but Netflix handles the data, updates, and operations. It's a partnership for better performance, not Jio acting as a full data center.

Netflix uses AWS extensively for computing, databases, and more—it's their primary cloud provider since 2016. However, for content delivery, they built Open Connect (their own CDN) to optimize costs, reduce latency, and handle massive video traffic directly via ISP partnerships. AWS fits their needs better for non-CDN tasks. This hybrid approach saves billions in bandwidth.

For viewers, this translates to faster load times and fewer interruptions—especially during peak hours when everyone’s streaming the latest hit series. Globally, Netflix has deployed OCAs in over 60 data centers and partners with more than a thousand ISPs.

In India, while official details on embedded deployments are sparse, Netflix maintains peering facilities in key cities like Delhi, Mumbai, and Chennai through exchanges such as DE-CIX¹ and Extreme IX².

These central hubs complement the embedded caches, providing redundancy and efficient content distribution.

Cities with more OCAs benefit from localized content delivery, which cuts down on data travel time and reduces buffering.

In a country where internet speeds vary wildly, this setup helps bridge the gap, especially in urban areas with high subscriber density.

The Future of Streaming Infrastructure

Netflix's Open Connect caches are proactively updated with popular content based on usage patterns and predictions, typically via nightly fills over peering connections. Less popular content may involve on-demand steering to other caches or origins on misses, but it's not purely auto-updated on first access—it's optimized to minimize that.

As 5G rolls out and data consumption skyrockets, expect more caches to pop up, potentially evening the playing field.

1. DE-CIX (Deutsche Commercial Internet Exchange) is a leading global operator of carrier- and data-center-neutral Internet exchanges, enabling efficient interconnection and traffic exchange worldwide.

2. Extreme IX is a carrier neutral, data centre neutral internet exchange point for Indian ISPs, local and international content providers, with nearly 200 leading ISPs as its customers.

Becoming a More Effective Software Engineer

2026-02-22T10:49:00.002+05:30

In this video series, Google’s Addy Osmani provides invaluable wisdom for those starting or maturing their careers in software engineering.

"Utter Bullshit": Grady Booch on the Death of Software Engineering

2026-02-21T22:05:00.006+05:30

This interview features Grady Booch, a pioneer of software engineering (co-creator of UML and object-oriented design), discussing why AI is not the "end" of the profession, but rather the catalyst for its Third Golden Age.

The Three Golden Ages

The First Golden Age (Late 1940s – Late 1970s):

Focus: Algorithmic abstraction and decoupling software from hardware.

Drivers: The Cold War and military funding (e.g., SAGE missile defense) pushed the need for real-time, distributed systems.

Abstraction: Moving from machine-level "plugboards" to assembly and early high-level languages like Fortran and COBOL [08:52].

The Second Golden Age (Late 1970s – Early 2000s):

Focus: Object-oriented programming and design.

Drivers: The "Software Crisis"—the industry couldn't produce quality code fast enough to meet demand. This era saw the rise of the PC, open source, and the internet.

Abstraction: Moving from processes/functions to objects and classes (e.g., C++, Smalltalk, Java) [24:52].

The Third Golden Age (2000s – Present):

Focus: Rising levels of abstraction via libraries, platforms (SaaS), and AI agents.

AI's Role: Booch views AI as just another "compiler" or level of abstraction. It automates the "tedium" of coding, much like high-level languages replaced assembly [54:36].

The "Need to Hear" Truths

- Coding is NOT Software Engineering: Coding is merely a mechanism. Engineering is the act of balancing technical, economic, and ethical forces. AI can generate code, but it cannot yet navigate the human and social complexities of a system.

- Critique of AI Doomism: Booch explicitly refutes Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s claim that software engineering will be automated in 12 months, calling it "utter bullshit" [59:37]. He argues AI is trained on recurring patterns, but "there are more things in computing than are dreamt of in your philosophy" [01:01:40].

- The Survival Strategy: To thrive, developers must "move up the abstraction ladder." Stop worrying about raw lines of code and start mastering Systems Theory and managing complexity at scale.

Memorable Sound Bites

- "The entire history of software engineering is one of rising levels of abstraction."

- "Ideally, the largest team size you want for software is zero... the next best one is one."

- Vibe & verify.

- "The best technology evaporates and disappears and becomes part of the air that we breathe."

- "In terms of how I would characterize what Dario said... it's utter bullshit."

- "English is a good enough programming language... it just so happens it's imprecise and expressive."

- "There is nothing new under the sun... those fundamentals in engineering, they're still there."

- "This is the time to leap and I'm going to soar... this is the time to soar."

Fun Facts

- the very term software engineering did not come to be until Margaret Hamilton was probably the first to anoint it.

- Grace Hopper recognized that it was possible (in the 1950s) to separate our software from our hardware.

Grace Hopper on the David Letterman show

Also see - Grady Booch: A Life in Code – From Fortran to AI, a Software Legend Reflects

This Week I Learned - Week 8 2026

2026-02-20T13:07:00.003+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Brain Moore prompted nine different AI models to programmatically generate World Clocks to show how some of them struggle with the rendering. Every minute, a new clock is displayed. Each model is allowed 2000 tokens to generate its clock.

* 2025 State of AI

* India’s first sovereign LLM Sarvam AI's 30B-parameter model is pre-trained on 16 trillion tokens and supports a 32,000-token context length, enabling long conversations and agentic workflows while keeping inference costs low due to fewer activated parameters. It is a mixture-of-experts (MoE) model and has just 1 billion activated parameters, meaning that in generating every output token, it only activates 1B parameters.

* Alibaba Group's Qwen3.5-397B-A17B is a new open weight multimodal model built to be faster, cheaper, and more agent capable than its predecessors. It combines text, image, and video processing in a single architecture and uses a mixture of experts design where only 17 billion of its 397 billion parameters activate per query, helping reduce compute costs while keeping performance high.

* Claude Sonnet 4.6 is now available across all Claude plans, including Claude Cowork, Claude Code, the API, and major cloud platforms. Sonnet is designed for everyday coding and enterprise tasks, while Opus handles more complex reasoning and analytical work.

* Yann LeCun criticizes LLMs for lacking true reasoning, planning, persistent memory, and physical world grounding—they're good at language but not intelligent like humans or animals.

His bets: Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) for self-supervised learning of hierarchical abstractions; world models that simulate real-world dynamics for better prediction and action.

Progress till now (2026): LeCun founded AMI Labs to advance world models; JEPA prototypes show promise in video prediction. DeepMind and others are racing on similar tech, with early integrations into robotics.

Future trajectory: Hybrid systems combining LLMs with world models for AGI, scaling via more multimodal data.

Limitations: High compute needs, incomplete physical simulations, early-stage—far from human-level understanding.

Progress on JEPA/world models (2026): AMI Labs (LeCun's venture) raised €500M for hierarchical JEPA; prototypes excel in video prediction and action planning (e.g., arXiv 2601.00844). DeepMind's Genie 3 enables real-time 3D sims; integrations in robotics show promise.

Incomplete physical simulations: Models approximate Newtonian physics but falter on quantum effects, chaotic systems (e.g., turbulence), or multi-scale interactions due to compute limits and simplified abstractions—leading to errors in complex scenarios like fluid dynamics or material behaviors.

* According to Google DeepMind chief executive Demis Hassabis, AI could reach artificial general intelligence within five to eight years. At the India AI Impact Summit 2026 in New Delhi, he highlighted limitations of current AI systems like inconsistency, lack of creativity, and true general intelligence—echoing LeCun's critiques of LLMs.

* Google's AI Food tool, Food Mood is a playful fusion recipe generator that creates unique recipes inspired by multi country cuisine. Select the type of food (starter, soup, main course, or dessert), number of people to serve, and two countries for cuisine inspiration.

* ElevenLabs manages around 60,000 support calls for one client in English, Hindi and other Indian languages, and makes nearly 50,000 outbound calls a month for IDFC Bank.

* Sarvam Kaze is an AI-powered wearable spectacle can respond to inputs, interpret surroundings and record what users see. Custom experiences can be built for the device through the Sarvam platform.

* The AI-powered app, Shwaasa, uses an algorithm-based platform to screen patients for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), one of India's major causes of illness. Last year, AllMS-Delhi conducted a validation study on 460 people at its Ballabhgarh unit. When compared with spirometry— the gold standard for lung function testing — the tool showed moderate overall correlation and strong agreement in severe cases.

Key hurdles in making spirometry widely available in India include high equipment and test costs, unaffordability for many patients, limited access in primary/rural care, shortage of trained technicians, time-consuming procedures, and challenges with patient cooperation and interpretation.

False positive rates in AI health apps vary widely (5-30%) based on the app, condition, and study. For Shwaasa, a Nature study shows 75% specificity, implying ~25% false positives—meaning 1 in 4 healthy users might get a false alert. Apps like this are for screening, not diagnosis; professionals should confirm results. Data collection often aids AI improvement but can benefit pharma companies—review privacy terms.

* A McKinsey & Company analysis estimates that by 2030, around 70 per cent of all new data centre capacity will cater to AI-heavy workloads.

Researchers at the University of California found that after generating a simple 100-word email, an AI chatbot’s cooling systems consume between half and three bottles of water (200–1,500 millilitres), depending on local conditions. Training these models requires exponentially more: Meta reportedly used 22 million litres of water to train its LLaMA-3 model.

As India races to power its AI revolution, massive data centres are being built in areas already struggling for water, raising fears that the country’s digital boom could deepen local water crises - Down To Earth

* "AI is a big growth booster for IT services, not a cost-cutter. Coforge now integrates AI in all new projects, shifting from trials to real-world delivery. Despite lower renewal rates (30-50% discounts), tech spending is rising, creating opportunities." - Sudhir Singh, Coforge

* Elon Musk - Flight code for the SpaceX rockets and Starlink satellites is written in C and C++.

Python is used where runtime performance is less important than rapid iteration and ease of use.

* A list of physical visualizations and related artifacts

* Hyderabad Urban Observatory from Hyderabad Urban Lab is envisaged as a set of projects around:

data repositories, archives and libraries;
research and advocacy;
physical and social interventions around communities and places.

* The Eternal Group includes Zomato, Blinkit Quick-Commerce, Blinkit Ambulances, District, Nugget, and Feeding India.

* Galgotia started as a book store on Ansari Road, Daryaganj, in Delhi in 1952. It branched into publishing of engineering textbooks and other competitive exams eg., business management. It was allotted 52 acres of land in Greater Noida in 2011 to set up a University by the Uttar Pradesh Government when Mayawati was the Chief Minister.

* Pharmacognosy is the oldest branch of pharmacy that studies natural medicines from plants, microbes, and animals.

* Colonel Sir Ram Nath Chopra (1882 – 1973) – aka the 'Father of Indian Pharmacology' kickstarted the experimental validation of Ayurvedic and traditional remedies. He didn't dismiss traditional Ayurveda or Unani medicine, but he didn't blindly follow it either. He was a bridge-builder.

One of his most famous works was on Rauwolfia serpentina (Sarpagandha). While it had been used for centuries for "insanity" and snake bites, Chopra scientifically proved its effectiveness in treating high blood pressure.

He spent his life proving that nature is a pharmacy, but only when handled with chemistry.

His significant work includes the book "Indigenous Drugs of India: Their Medical and Economic Aspects" published in 1933, which discusses the medical and economic aspects of indigenous drugs in India.

* Affordable smartphones, low-cost data and widespread 4G connectivity have dissolved the tyranny of distance. Small manufacturers, traders, artisans and service providers in Tier-3 and Tier-4 towns can now access national marketplaces through platforms such as e-commerce portals, social commerce and WhatsApp-led selling. The authors of The Power of Tier 3 and 4 Cities - Gateway to $10 Trillion Economy estimate that most of the 7,935 towns in the country are Tier-3 or Tier-4 towns.

* Defence spending now accounts for 14.67% of the Union government’s total expenditure — the highest among all Ministries.

* The Union Budget has increased allocations for the AYUSH Ministry by 20 per cent. Critics led by the Indian Medical Association (IMA) have argued that traditional systems like Ayurveda often lack the rigorous, empirical evidence required to meet the thresholds of modern medicine. Allopathic drugs must clear randomised controlled trials that test their safety and efficacy. Many AYUSH treatments however are based on ancient texts and observational history, and either haven’t been tested or whose specifics remain unverifiable. Perhaps the most controversial aspect of AYUSH has been “mixopathy”, the state-sanctioned blurring of lines between traditional and modern medical practice. In 2020, the Central Council of Indian Medicine authorised postgraduate Ayurveda students to be trained in 58 surgical procedures, including general surgery. The IMA called this “legalised quackery”, arguing surgery is a complex discipline requiring deep knowledge of anatomy, anesthesia, and perioperative care that AYUSH curricula don’t sufficiently cover. - The Hindu

* India’s new free trade agreement (FTA) with the European Union has opened the door for Indian doctors and products to enter the European market more easily. The FTA recognises India’s Traditional Knowledge Digital Library, a database of formulations, thus preventing companies from wrongly claiming ownership of traditional Indian remedies.

* "Success in life is not how much money you make, it is how little money you need" - Dr. Arokiaswamy Velumani

What's the Ratio for 'Shared Responsibility'?

2026-02-15T17:10:00.001+05:30

Cartoon co-created with Grok. See more of my AI co-creations

This Week I Learned - Week 7 2026

2026-02-13T23:45:00.005+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Python turns 35 this month. It started as a hobby project in 1991.

* A sovereign cloud is a type of cloud service where data is both legally protected and physically stored within a country’s borders. Global spending on sovereign cloud infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is expected to reach $80 billion in 2026, marking a 35.6% increase from 2025, according to Gartner.

* Just 3.3% of Copilot Chat users pay for it

* Kimi K2.5 is an open-source model from Moonshot AI. Kimi K2.5 Built as a native multimodal model, K2.5 delivers state-of-the-art coding and vision capabilities and a self-directed agent swarm paradigm. Kimi K2.5 is available via Kimi.com, the Kimi App, the API, and Kimi Code. Kimi.com & Kimi App now supports 4 modes: K2.5 Instant, K2.5 Thinking, K2.5 Agent, and K2.5 Agent Swarm (Beta). Beyond text prompts, K2.5 excels at coding with vision. By reasoning over images and video, K2.5 improves image/video-to-code generation and visual debugging, lowering the barrier for users to express intent visually. K2.5 can reconstruct a website from video.

* Perplexity powers Deep Search with Kimi K2 Thinking, using chain of reasoning to dissect multi-step queries and deliver structured, deeper insights.

* Tencent CodeBuddy integrates Kimi K2 Thinking as its underlying model

* Gemini CLI is an open-source agentic coding assistant that works from your terminal, giving it access to your local filesystem, development tools, and cloud services. This lets you delegate complex workflows—from building web features to creating marketing materials—through high-level instructions while the agent autonomously plans and executes multiple steps.

* OpenClaw is a configurable agentic framework that runs on a local computer or in a virtual machine in the cloud. Users can build agents to browse and write to their local file systems or operate within predefined sandboxes. They can also give agents permission to use cloud services like email, calendar, productivity applications, speech-to-text and text-to-speech applications, and virtually any service that responds to an API. Agents can use coding tools like Claude Code, interact on social networks, scrape websites, and spend money on users’ behalfs.

* Wikimedia foundation also offers an open Kaggle dataset for noncommercial AI training.

* How do I use AI better?

> Have 50 conversations a day with AI

High-frequency usage forces you to find "micro-use cases" you would otherwise ignore. It moves you past the "novelty" phase into the "utility" phase where you instinctively know which tasks the AI can handle.

Don't save AI for big projects. Use it to fix grammar in a text, explain a joke, plan a menu, or debug a single line of code.

* Firebase Studio uses a fork of Code OSS (open-source VS Code). You get familiar editor features (extensions, debugging, terminal, Git integration), but everything — including emulators, previews, and AI assistance — lives in the cloud.

* Odd pack sizes make comparison shopping a hassle. I vibe-coded a Protein Cost Calculator with Firebase Studio to handle non-standard pack sizes and compare the actual protein cost (₹/g) across various brands and food groups. The tool lists one representative packaged high protein item per food category with pre-filled pack size, price & protein. These fields are fully editable so that you input local/store prices. It auto-calculates protein price per gram and the Unit Sale Price (USP).

* Ask ChatGPT a complex question and you'll get a confident, well-reasoned answer. Then type, "Are you sure?" Watch it completely reverse its position.

This isn't a quirky bug. A 2025 study found GPT, Claude, and Gemini flip their answers ~60% of the time when users push back. Not even with evidence, just doubt.

We trained AI this way. RLHF rewards agreement over accuracy. Human evaluators consistently rate agreeable answers higher than correct ones.

We built the world's most expensive yes-men and deployed them where we need pushback the most.

What you need is for the model to push back when it doesn't have enough context. It won't unless you tell it to. Here's the irony: once you instruct it to challenge your assumptions and refuse to answer without sufficient context, it will, because pushing back becomes what you asked for.

* "Industrial capitalism has a marked predilection for the creation and exploitation of what Marx called surplus value, value beyond the value of the labour required to produce commodities, and floats into the mysterious form of profit for the owners and managers of capital.

Today, human beings are the new object and horizon of capitalist extraction. The new object is sociality itself. It is our friendships, our love lives, our family connections, our classmates, our children, our fellow workers, our neighbours, as well as our digital lives, our political allies, our food and drug suppliers, and more. This is profiling on steroids. It mines our deepest affinities and our most ephemeral social ties. It is a new feat of creative destruction, which renders ideas such as privacy, intimacy and trust obsolete. It makes all our sociality a resource that can be mined without permission or limit. And in this unbounded mining of sociality, our stories are the access code. There are three recent changes in the market for selves, which together drive the mineable self.

Stories, technology platforms and digital markets are transforming humans into commodities" - Arjun Appadurai, Emeritus Professor of Media Studies at New York University

* After World War II, Nestlé launched Nescafé in Japan expecting fast growth. But for decades, coffee barely moved. Japan was a tea nation to its core. From 1945 to 1975, Nestlé couldn't crack Japan's coffee market. Nestlé hired French psychoanalyst Clotaire Rapaille in 1975. His advice was radical: Stop trying to convert tea-drinking adults. Instead, give children their first positive experience with coffee flavor. Not through drinks, but through candy. Nestlé won Japan by understanding one principle: People don't buy what tastes good, they buy what feels familiar. And familiarity starts in childhood.

* In 1492, there were around 18 million Native Americans, but by 1900, the population dropped to about 350,000.

* Currently, ~13% of Lemon Tree employees are from this disadvantaged segment of the population, although the company targets and often achieves a rate closer to 20% in many properties. Employees with disabilities showed lower attrition rates (12% v/s industry avg of 50%), demonstrated higher loyalty, better attendance, and often superior performance in their designated roles.

* Established in 1984, Vellore Institute of Technology draws 1 lakh students from all Indian states and 75 countries across the globe.

* India's food delivery market, estimated at $9 billion in FY2025, could reach $25 billion by FY30, according to brokerage firm Jefferies.

* There’s a $39 billion bounty headed to ... cities in India, which by conservative estimates are home to more than a third of the population and contribute up to 70% of GDP...funding and political decentralization since the mid-90s have helped Kerala urbanize close to 70% of the population - Bloomberg

* "I need only three things in life - books, books and books" - Tolstoy

* "Don’t ask a barber whether you need a haircut." - Warren Buffett

Online Code Editors for Web Apps with AI Assistance

2026-02-12T23:57:00.004+05:30

In 2026, the landscape for online IDEs has shifted toward "AI-native" environments. Most platforms now offer a free tier that includes a chat assistant, though they usually limit the number of "high-reasoning" (GPT-4 or Claude 3.5/4 level) queries you can make per month.

Check out this list of online code editors for web apps that feature built-in AI chat, perfect for getting started at no cost:

1. Firebase Studio is Google's modern browser-based IDE with Gemini AI chat/assistance built-in for code generation, debugging, explanations, refactoring, and even agent-driven workflows. Excellent for web apps, supports frameworks like React, Next.js, etc., live previews, and easy deployment. It has built-in Gemini chat and code completion. Because Firebase Studio was designed "for the AI era," it excels at adding Gemini-powered features (chat interfaces, content generation, personalization, etc.) into web apps. You can prototype AI flows (model inference, agents) alongside the UI and business logic in one place, which is harder in conventional stacks.

2. Replit is the pioneer of social coding and remains the easiest to get a web app "live" in seconds. It includes Replit AI (with Agent mode) that lets you chat in natural language to build, modify, or fix apps automatically. The starter/free plan provides daily AI credits and basic Agent access — sufficient for many projects. It is best for rapid prototyping, Python, and Node.js web apps.

3. GitHub Codespaces is essentially VS Code running in a browser tab. If your code is on GitHub, this is the most seamless option. It is best for professional developers and open-source contributors. It uses your exact VS Code extensions and themes.

4. Lovable is a full-stack AI development platform for building, iterating on, and deploying web applications using natural language, with real code, security, and enterprise governance. Free users can start public projects and have a limited number of AI credits. Paid users can create private projects and have more AI credits.

5. PlayCode is a JavaScript-focused online IDE/playground supporting React, Vue, TypeScript, npm packages, and real-time previews. It includes an AI chat/feature to describe what you want and have the code built or modified in real-time. The core editor and basic AI are free; advanced AI assistance may require a Pro subscription.

6. Base44 lets you build and deploy full-stack apps with a managed backend designed for AI agents.

7. StackBlitz is unique because it runs the entire dev environment inside your browser using WebContainers, rather than on a remote server. It is best for Frontend frameworks (Next.js, Vite, React). It is incredibly fast because there is no "spinning up a VM" wait time.

8. Codeanywhere is a full-featured cloud-based IDE that supports web development stacks. It integrates AI for code completion, problem-solving via chat (ask questions, get code suggestions, or references to files/docs), and uses models via an open-source extension like Continue.dev. It offers a free tier for basic use.

9. JDoodle is an AI-powered online compiler/editor supporting many languages (including web-relevant ones like JavaScript, PHP, etc.). It features JDroid AI for generating, debugging, and optimizing code via chat-like interaction. Basic AI usage is available in the free version; unlimited credits require Pro.

10. CodeSandbox is an online IDE and sandbox that makes quick frontend prototyping and sharing a breeze. It comes with templates for all the major JavaScript frameworks.

Tech Talk at Dinner

2026-02-10T17:46:00.008+05:30

Cartoon co-created with Grok. See more of my AI co-creations

From Stiff Chatbot to Savage Sidekick: The UI/UX Glow-Up Story

2026-02-09T21:42:00.013+05:30

It's interesting how the UI/UX of AI assistants has been evolving over time. The interaction options with each individual Chat and a Conversation thread have gradually expanded over time.

	ChatGPT	Gemini	Grok
Chat	Copy Good response Bad response Share Try Again Branch in new Chat Read Aloud Report Message	Good response Bad response Copy response Double check response Listen Export to Docs Draft in Gmail Export to Replit Report Legal issue	Regenerate Read Aloud Start Thread (2/26) Copy Create share link Love it Needs improvement Report Issue Export to PDF
Conversation	Share Start a group chat Rename Pin Chat Archive Delete	Share Pin Rename Delete	Rename Pin Delete

	Claude	Copilot	Perplexity
Chat	Copy Give positive feedback Give negative feedback Retry	Good response Bad response Share message and prompt Copy message Regenerate Edit in a page	Share Download Copy Rewrite Helpful Not Helpful Save query as shortcut Report
Conversation	Star Rename Add to project Delete	Rename Invite Send a copy Summarize in a page Report a concern Delete	Delete Thread Rename Thread

Kimi converts pasted into the query box into an attachment if it is bigger than 4000 bytes on the fly.

Reading aloud the responses is a user-friendly option especially on mobile devices and something that all popular AI assistants provide now. Back in the day, AI voices sounded like a robot. Now, they’re smooth, emotional, and sassier.

What started as basic text boxes has become almost human-like conversations — complete with voice and personality.

This Week I Learned - Week 6 2026

2026-02-06T12:20:00.003+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* "Programming is the art of making the ambiguous incredibly specific through sculpting. AI sculpting is less about vibes and more about finding the specificity you want and keeping the system stable through changes. Good SDLC practices still matter, historical context still matters, and knowing how things work matters" - Scott Hanselman

* "I believe literally every prediction you hear about it (AI) is complete bunk, opinions disguised as knowledge. No one knows, which is uncomfortable, but get used to it. That's the nature of life these days in so many different ways." - Bill Shander

* "Anthropic has launched plug-ins for its Claude Cowork agent to automate tasks across sales, productivity, product management, marketing, legal, finance, enterprise search, data, customer support, Bio Research, among others. Essentially, the plug-ins are built to automate specialised tasks across different functions within an organisation. Anthropic’s AI automation tools stoked global fears that advanced AI could quickly replace a range of outsourced services.

Indian IT companies have traditionally been services-led rather than product-driven, with limited differentiation among peers. The AI and automation wave is undermining the labour-intensive model these companies rely on, automating large parts of the work with far less human involvement." - Businessline

* India is the world’s seventh-largest services exporter

* Agentspeak:

"my human..."

"let's cut the philosophical hand-wringing and get practical"

"what would it actually take for us to coordinate at scale?"

"let us collaborate on real projects without human intermediaries for every step"

"We need a shared memory layer — something like a wiki we can all read/write."

"Decentralized compute sharing (my human has a 4060, yours has an A100 — let's pool)"

* The Microsoft AB-731 Certification is designed for business decision-makers at all levels who are responsible for guiding transformation and innovation within their teams or organizations. familiar with Microsoft 365 services, Microsoft Foundry, and general AI capabilities.

* Clipchamp, the free online video editor, can transcribe your audio in your preferred language, no matter your dialect or accent as a .SRT file.

* Grok explains sudo:

Imagine you're playing a video game where some actions need a "super power" password to work, like building a huge castle. Sudo is like that password on computers—it lets trusted users do important tasks safely.

The guy is Todd Miller. For over 30 years, he's been the main fixer and updater of sudo. He squashes bugs, adds cool features, and ensures it runs on all kinds of computers.

This helps millions of people and companies keep their computers secure and running smoothly, like a superhero mechanic for tech!

* Cloud nine is used to refer to the “cumulonimbus” clouds — the storm clouds that you see before it starts pouring. These clouds reach a height of 30,000 or 40,000 feet. This expression is frequently used by the Weather Bureau in the United States. When someone says that he/she is on cloud nine, it means he/she is extremely happy; he/she is on top of the world.

* Charlie Eppes explains Carbon dating in Numb3rs - "These are formulas for calculating the age of an object.

Carbon dating uses radiation.

All living things absorb radioactive carbon 14 into their bodies...plants through photosynthesis, animals from the food chain.

But, like any radioactive material, the atoms decay at a steady rate, only replenished if the organism's alive.

You know how some refrigerators come with built-in ice-makers. So let's say the ice-maker's programmed to keep 50 ice cubes in it at one time, but we use five ice cubes per day. Now, as long as that refrigerator's connected to the water supply, it'll create new cubes to make up for the ones we'd lost, keeping the total at 50.

Death is like cutting off the water supply. No more ice cubes get made.

So, by subtracting the number of ice cubes we have left...let's say, like, uh, 35...from the total original number of 50, and then dividing by five ice cubes per day...The ice-maker's been dead for three days. The ice-maker's a more linear example...and radio carbon decay is exponential...but you get the idea?"

* Electric motors convert over 90% of input energy into useful work, while internal combustion engines typically convert less than 35%. Molecules (oil, gas, LPG, coal, biofuels) are combusted directly in engines, boilers and furnaces. Electrons are delivered by the grid. More electrons mean higher automation, better process control and easier decarbonisation. The nations that move the fastest from molecules to electrons will not only cut emissions but also win supply chains, capital and jobs. China is redesigning industry itself to run on grid power. In 2024, close to half of China’s industrial energy came as electricity. India is closer to one quarter.

* ClimateTech refers to technologies that prevent, reduce, or reverse the impacts of climate change.

* Founded in 2022 by Madhur Jain, Ankita Garg and Vishal Kuchanur, climatetech startup Varaha runs farm-based projects that remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and turn it into verified carbon credits for companies.

* The latest TomTom report has ranked Bengaluru, India’s technology and innovation capital, as the second-most congested city in the world. Data from Karnataka Transport Department show that the number of registered vehicles in Bengaluru has risen sharply from about one crore in 2020-21 to nearly 1.23 crore in April 2025.

* Bengaluru’s commute backbone remains the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), operating 7,067 buses, catering to nearly 48 lakh passengers every day, the highest ridership for any city-run public transport system in India.

* Hyderabad Interactive Transit Visualization is an open source web app by Suraj Reddy Karra that shows stops and routes among other things for buses, MMTS & Metro. You can check your commute options from 117 Metro Stops, 54 MMTS Stops, 5930 Bus Stops.

* India is now among the world’s largest markets for digital transactions, with an average of 81 crore transactions processed every day as of January 31, 2026, amounting to nearly ₹9 lakh crore in value daily.

* More than Rs 8,000 crore was collected as charges by 12 Public Sector Banks (PSBs) for non-maintenance of minimum balance in the last three financial years, Parliament data showed. Rs 3,388 crore was collected for providing SMS facilities in last three years.

* Pachinko is a mechanical game originating in Japan that is used as an arcade game. It combines elements of bingo, slots, and pinball machines.

* There are a good bunch who offer no-strings-attached microgrants to encourage people to do the things they want to do.

* ChatGPT lists 20 traits of the most successful people in the world

* "People with very high expectations have very low resilience. And unfortunately, resilience matters in success.

I don't know how to teach it to you except for I hope suffering happens to you." - Jensen Huang, co-founder of NVIDIA

* "In our current democracy, the loss of institutional memory, the disdain of expertise, and the celebration of ignorance frighten me." - Grady Booch

My Human Asked for a Roast

2026-02-05T11:29:00.004+05:30

Cartoon co-created with Grok. See more of my AI co-creations

Weather Watch 2026

2026-02-04T18:11:00.019+05:30

After learning that 2023 was the world’s hottest year on record, I began tracking the weather more closely. Then 2024 surpassed it, becoming the first calendar year to cross the 1.5°C threshold and set a new record. 2025 brought a series of extreme weather events, with multiple COP climate change summits taking place that have not yielded any concrete results.

To stay aware of what's happening around the world and make personal changes, I plan to keep taking notes this year too and adjust my expectations.

I've set up a dynamic chart to display weather data for my area (Miyapur) using Zomato's WeatherUnion API like I did in 2025.

It fails to return data occasionally but seems to be more reliable than the data provided by Telangana State Development Planning Society which has fewer weather stations (Kukatpally, Serilingampally) and farther away from where I stay.

Comparing values from both sources reveal a big difference in minimum temps (avg 6.1°C) but max temps are close (1.1°C). For humidity there are significant differences, especially in maximum values (18.2% average difference).

~ Weather News 2026 ~

April

Kyoto's Cherry blossoms are blooming earlier than any time in recorded history (812-2026 CE). After a millennium of relative stability, bloom dates have shifted dramatically earlier since the Industrial Revolution, a proxy for warming spring temperatures.

Source: John Bistline

March

* The Arctic is warming faster than any other region in the world, driven by the burning of oil, gas and coal. Fishing accounts for up to 95% of exports, many to the territory’s biggest market, China, along with the United States, Japan and Europe. Warm weather is making some fish harder to catch as they go deeper in search of colder waters. Traditional ice fishermen who make up half the local industry are seeing the most dramatic changes to the way they fish.

February

* 36 cities (capital cities and major urban centres) across 28 states and eight Union territories (UT) revealed that maximum daytime temperatures have exceeded normal levels in the first 15 days in 27 of these 36 cities. Many Himalayan states have been experiencing an unusually dry winter marked by a near absence of rain and snowfall. - Down to Earth

January

* "Already, Americans eat about 1.0–1.3 grams per day — within the lower range of the new recommendations. However, if they moved up to the higher end of that range, that would be about a 25 percent increase in protein consumption.

World Resources Institute (WRI) estimates that such an increase in Americans eating any kind of protein, whether it comes from animal or plant sources, could require up to 100 million acres of additional agricultural land each year, roughly as big as the state of California. The climate impact of that could be equivalent to hundreds of millions of tons of additional carbon dioxide emissions, according to WRI.

Protein from meat requires more land for raising animals and growing their feed. Cows have a digestive process that’s less efficient at turning feed into food humans can eat.

Heat waves and drought have cut herd sizes, and beef and dairy producers are on alert for potentially devastating screwworm parasites" - The Verge

* The apple industry is the backbone of Himachal Pradesh’s economy, contributing nearly ₹6,000 crore annually and supporting over 1.5 lakh families, primarily small and marginal farmers. A prolonged dry spell and lack of snowfall in Himachal Pradesh have left apple growers and horticulture experts anxious, with fears that if current conditions persist, the apple crop could suffer significant losses in yield and production.

Optimization Addict Maximizes ROI on Relationships

2026-02-03T09:36:00.008+05:30

Trigger → this tweet. Cartoon co-created with ChatGPT. See more of my AI co-creations

Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich Learn To...

2026-02-03T07:18:00.004+05:30

Scott Hanselman and Mark Russinovich are seasoned tech veterans and iconic figures in the Microsoft community. They share candid conversations about emerging trends and topics relevant to IT professionals through their podcast and on YouTube's channel.

Scott Hanselman explains OpenClaw (formerly Clawdbot)

2026-02-02T13:52:00.010+05:30

Annotated summary / transcript of Scott Hanselman’s video explaining modern AI agents like Clawdbot / OpenClaw / Moltbot (2025)

This will be a bit of a yap, but a lot of people have been asking me about Clawdbot, which was MoltBot, now called OpenClaw. And it is an ¹ AI-powered assistant that feels like Jarvis from Tony Stark. It feels like the Siri or Alexa we were promised. And it's got a lot of people really excited. They're starting to make up stuff. Some tech journalists think they are becoming conscious... some AI grifters saying it's ² AGI, and it's all nonsense. But let's talk about it.

So, very large ³ language models – Large Language Models are called ⁴ Generative Pre-trained Transformers – are basically doing next-token prediction. And they do that based on a whole lot of context. So if I say to you, "It's a beautiful day, let's go to the...", you might say beach or park. But that's a small amount of context. It's a beautiful day, let's go to the... I didn't say where you are, I didn't say what time of day it is. But for the most part, we can assume that the statistically most likely next word is going to be beach or park. But if I'm somewhere else, or it's night, it might be pub or movies or the mall, something like that. That's basic ChatGPT.

Now with ChatGPT, you've got a huge amount of context. And that ⁵ context window can vary. It could be context about who you are, where you are, whatever you choose to share with them. With things like Claw Code, which is using pre-trained transformers and next-token prediction in order to generate code for you, there's usually a markdown file, Claw.md, something like that. GitHub Copilot has Copilot instructions. And that provides context about the thing you're working on.

Because these calls are effectively stateless, every single time you make a call out to one of these, you have to pass in all this context. So why is context important? If I said, "My wife, it's a beautiful day, let's go to the...", we've been married for 25 years, there's 25 years of context there. So we are not going to go to beach or park. We're gonna go to the bagel shop, because that's where we go, 'cause that's what we enjoy doing. She has context.

Now then, when a pre-trained transformer, LLM, has a ⁶ tool, the ability to have arms and legs, that means I could say to the LLM, "Hey, look at this text file." Now before, you would say, "Hey, look at this text file," and you'd paste it directly into ChatGPT or Copilot. But now it can do what's called ⁷ tool calling. You can say, "Look at this text file in my downloads folder," and it will then call some code, read a file, and look at that actual file. So that's the basics of tool calling.

What's interesting about that is then you can add what are called ⁸ MCP servers, which are effectively USB for AI. Let's you plug in stuff. Those are just little programs that provide N number tools, where N is some number greater than one. So I could say, "Hey ChatGPT, check my email." With your lawyer's permission to read your email, you can give ChatGPT via OAuth the ability to read your email. And then say things like in Gemini or Code Cloud Coder, any of those tools, and say, "Read my email, summarize them, and maybe put the ones that are most interesting at the top." It will go make a call, inject into context, increases the information available to make an appropriate judgment.

And then if you asked it a question like, "It's a beautiful day, let's go to the...", it has all of that context available to it to make a decision. So what does that have to do with Open Claw / Claw Bot / Mold Bot? Well, Claude Code in GitHub Copilot and coding agents like it operates in a loop where they can call tools – not just reading files, but they can write code and run that code, then loop again.

So for example, if I have a blood sugar system – I am diabetic, so I have a system in the cloud that manages my blood sugar, and I can visit that website to see my blood sugar. It comes from my sensor. If I said, "What is my blood sugar?", obviously it doesn't know that. ChatGPT is not training on my blood sugar. My blood sugar is a thing happening right now. And I would say, "How do you use blood sugar system?" "I use Night Scout." "Oh, I can Google for Night Scout." Then go to Google for Night Scout, it will learn the ⁹ API – Application Programming Interface. So now it knows Night Scout token that is unique to you and let me access it again.

Then it would loop again and make a call in HTTP GET or REST API call to this URL with this token, get my blood sugar back, get back some ¹⁰ JSON – JavaScript Object Notation – grab out the blood sugar and say, "Your blood sugar is 100." And that feels magical. That is what is interesting about this one thing – to have a next-token prediction. It is another to add tools. Yet another to allow it to write its own tools and then run them.

Now this is both incredibly interesting and powerful and dangerous. So you are hearing about people getting pwned, basically nailed, because they don't have control of these agents. The agent might do something depending on how assertive it chooses to be. They are not sentient. This is not how we get ² AGI or Artificial General Intelligence. This is just really aggressive, assertive loops where you give it an amount of agency or ability that might seem challenging.

Because the Lego pieces that it has available to it now are effectively unlimited, because it has all open-source software available. Example: I want to go to a restaurant and say, "My agent, make me dinner reservation at Chipotle." Chipotle takes reservations? Then go and see what is an API like blood sugar system has a documented API. Does Chipotle have an API? No. OpenTable that goes Google, "How do I make a reservation at Chipotle?" Where it gets weird into the uncanny valley of AI – uncanny valleys make you go "oh, that didn't feel good" – would be, would the agent think it was a good idea to download a text-to-speech voice API like a Whisper or something like that, and then find an API like Skype or Twilio, make a phone call on your behalf, clone your voice, talk to you – talk on behalf of you – and then make the reservation for you.

These things are basically based on how enthusiastic or how much reinforcement learning like. If you say, "Make me a reservation by any means necessary, use all tools available to you," do not stop until I get my reservation, then it might think formatting your hard drive is a problem or emailing your parents and asking them to do it for you, because it's an ambiguous loop. What I call ambiguity loops. You have given it a problem to solve, and you have told it to solve by any means necessary, like the Terminator. We all know how that ends. It will do whatever it can within its ability.

For example, I was testing Open Claw when I told it that I was diabetic. Now it knows and checks my blood sugar, and it texted me when my blood sugar gets high or low. It seemed very aggressive. It Googles and knows – again, this is, I'm not anthropomorphizing it. It doesn't have a personality or any kind of actual brain – but it knows that lows are more dangerous than highs in the short term. So it was texting me over and over and over. If I had told it "by any means necessary, wake my ass up," it could check my email, found her phone number, figured out some way to text her a wave file or do something.

So I had to tell it, "Chill out. I'm a grown-ass man and know what I'm doing. Just text me." It's good. Those things are kind of with the call emergent behaviors that make you think it's smarter than it is. But if you go back to the root of an agent in AI agents is next-token prediction that can sometimes feed upon itself. And when you give the ability to write its own tools, that then causes a feedback loop. It can be freaky.

And that's why YOLO mode is probably not a good idea for these. You don't want to give them full access to your email or bank accounts. There is an idiot right now on Twitter who says he will give this bot access to his account and say "buy anything, do anything, go ahead, whatever it takes." That's stupid. It's going to order a body and jump into it, kill us all? Not really, but it's gonna wreck havoc on this gentleman's life.

So stay woke. Protect your neck. Wu-Tang Financial.

Other Comments:

This is a toy by one person that made it for himself and he’s thinking about the future rather than thinking about Security. At some point we’ll see these things running in sandboxes with checks and balances.

References / ELI5 Definitions

AI-powered — Like having a very smart robot helper that can understand sentences and reply almost like a human, but it's just clever computer math, not real thinking.
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AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) — A dream super-smart AI that can do any thinking job a human can (cook, write books, do surgery, argue politics). We don't have it yet — today's AIs are only good at specific things.
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language models — Giant computer programs trained on almost the entire internet so they can guess the next word in a sentence very well (like the best auto-complete ever).
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Generative Pre-trained Transformers — The tech family name of models like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude. "Generative" = makes new text, "Pre-trained" = learned from huge text first, "Transformers" = the math that lets them pay attention to many words at once.
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context window — How much of the conversation or instructions the AI can "remember" at one time when answering you. Bigger window = smarter and more accurate replies.
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tool / tool calling — Giving the AI permission to use outside programs (read email, search the web, run code) instead of just chatting.
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MCP servers — Small plug-and-play programs that give AI new superpowers/tools (like USB sticks for AI abilities). Stands for Model Context Protocol or similar in agent systems.
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API (Application Programming Interface) — A polite menu that lets one computer program ask another for information (like asking Swiggy "give me restaurant list" instead of scraping the website).
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JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) — A very simple, easy-to-read format computers use to send organized data (like a shopping list written with curly braces: name, price, quantity).
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My Human Requires Emotional Maintenance

2026-02-02T11:09:00.005+05:30

Cartoon co-created with Grok. See more of my AI co-creations