Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Book Review: Software Security for Developers

2026-06-24T22:30:36.234+05:30

With the growing reliance on AI-assisted coding, managing application security is more critical than ever, as humans ultimately have to own the code they are responsible for. As the authors of Software Security for Developers note early on: "While developers often focus on libraries, frameworks, and tools at the mid-level, true security stems from foundational knowledge of standards, protocols, and patterns, as well as adherence to corporate and industry security practices."

The first section provides the big picture and does a good job of explaining the high-level security vocabulary of modern software systems, which is further unraveled in subsequent chapters. The following sections move into deep cryptography primitives (AES, RSA, ECC), implementing secure transport layers (mTLS, X.509 certificates), and mastering enterprise-grade identity patterns like OAuth2, OpenID Connect (OIDC), PKCE, WebAuthn, and microservice call-chain authorization. The code examples are Java-centric, so the book will appeal more to developers familiar with the Java stack, while non-Java developers will have to put in some effort to translate the examples.

The illustrations are helpful and nicely complement the content. The comparison & matrix tables across the book, make the topics more understandable. The concise chapter summaries & exercise answers providing reasoning to commonly asked questions are good takeaways especially if you're preparing for technical interviews. While I liked the conversational tone, the writing could have been a little tighter and more engaging.

Overall, the book is useful and thought-provoking, as it forces developers to stop treating security as someone else's problem (like the DevOps or SecOps teams).

HOW TO Copy Markdown to Word and Keep Formatting

2026-06-23T09:30:48.044+05:30

If you directly paste raw Markdown syntax (like bold or # Heading), Word treats it as plain text. To get properly styled text (headings, bold, lists, tables), you need to convert or render the Markdown first.

Here are some ways to maintain formatting when copying Markdown content into Microsoft Word:

1. The Preview / Rich Text Method

If you use a Markdown editor (such as VS Code, Obsidian, Typora, or Joplin), you can use its rendered preview to copy formatted text.
Open your Markdown file in your editor.
Toggle the Preview Mode (in VS Code, press Ctrl + Shift + V or Cmd + Shift + V).
Select and highlight the rendered text in the preview pane.
Copy it (Ctrl + C) and paste it directly into Microsoft Word (Ctrl + V). Word will recognize it as Rich Text, converting headers, lists, and bold text perfectly.

2. Using an Online Converter (Quickest for one-offs)

If you don't use a dedicated Markdown editor, you can let a web browser do the heavy lifting:

Copy your raw Markdown text.
Paste it into an online rendered preview tool like

Dillinger.io or
StackEdit.io - Full-featured, open-source Markdown editor based on PageDown, the Markdown library used by Stack Overflow and the other Stack Exchange sites.

Highlight the formatted text from the preview/right side of the screen.
Copy and paste it into Microsoft Word.

3. Using Pandoc (Best for Batch or Perfect Document Layouts)

If you need to convert large files, maintain complex layouts, or do this frequently, Pandoc is the gold standard command-line utility. It converts Markdown directly into a native Word document (.docx), ensuring all tables, footnotes, and headers follow Word’s native style hierarchy.

Install Pandoc on your system.
Open your terminal or command prompt.
Run the following Bash command: pandoc input.md -o output.docx
Open the generated output.docx file directly in Microsoft Word.

This Week I Learned - Week 25 2026

2026-06-19T23:18:51.011+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Vertex AI has been rebranded and evolved. Google officially replaced and expanded it under the name Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform. This change marks a major structural shift for Google Cloud, moving away from a traditional MLOps platform (focused on training and deploying standalone models) toward an "Agentic AI" ecosystem.

* Turkey based HubX Studios used Gemma 4 to build BetterSpeak, an AI English tutoring platform that uses the Gemma 4 E2B model as the reasoning engine for its on-device pipeline — enabling private, low-latency tutoring without the need for an internet connection. HubX deployed the 4-bit quantized version of the model to handle tasks like grammar explanations and progress monitoring across languages. By using Gemma 4’s native audio input capabilities, HubX’s app is able to support direct speech-to-speech learning, while reducing costs and ensuring privacy.

* Midjourney, the AI lab best known for image generation, has announced an unexpected healthcare project: an underwater, full-body scanner.

* Fresh funding has propelled Sarvam AI into the unicorn club.

* Indian laws do not guarantee any ownership to AI generated music. The Indian copyright law, like its counterparts, expects the author to be a human to qualify for authorship of the work. It is based on the logic that copyright law was created to promote and incentivise human creativity. - Sundar Athreya

* DB-Engines is an initiative to collect and present information on database management systems (DBMS). The DB-Engines Ranking is a list of DBMS ranked by their current popularity. The list is updated monthly.

* OpenRefine is a powerful tool for cleaning and transforming data. It allows users to clean messy data, transform it from one format to another, and extend it with web services and external data. It can be used to standardize and clean data across various file formats, including TSV, CSV, ODS, XLS, XLSX, JSON, RDF, and XML. OpenRefine supports various operations such as clustering, faceting, and data reconciliation, making it a versatile tool for data cleaning.

* GeoLibre is a free and open-source, lightweight, cloud-native GIS platform for visualizing, exploring, and analyzing geospatial data.

* You can now draw arrows in Datawrapper locator maps.

* Mahesh Shantaram's Traffic Monitor Lizard is a system to monitor and analyse road traffic flow on pre-determined routes within a city. It is designed for civic technologists, urban planners, data journalists, and researchers who want a transparent, reproducible pipeline for understanding how a city moves, how traffic patterns evolve, what factors influence travel times, and the characteristics of roads and routes.

* IIT Madras Director Prof. V. Kamakoti demonstrated a vulnerability in Telegram that lets users replace attached files like PDFs in messages while the original timestamp stays unchanged for up to 48 hours.

* The National Testing Agency (NTA) was concerned about the modus operandi used by bad actors on Telegram to trigger mass panic by fabricating evidence of question paper leaks. Cheating syndicates have been systematically exploiting a specific loophole in Telegram’s group and channel synchronisation features.

For instance, a bad actor can create a public Telegram channel and link it to an associated group. Days before an exam, the administrator can upload a random PDF file on the channel, name it provocatively such as “NEET Question Paper Leaked”. The day after the actual exam, the operator then can use Telegram’s edit feature to replace the dummy PDF with the actual question paper. While the post inside the channel shows an ‘edited’ tag, the linked group retains the timestamp of the original post. This creates a highly convincing illusion that the actual question paper was available on the platform before the exam began, sparking panic.

After the ban on Telegram, its founder Pavel Durov said they are making the ‘edited’ label more visible to prevent backdating scams.

* Razorpay processes about $180 billion in payments annually and is pushing harder into higher-margin segments such as cross-border payments and business banking via RazorpayX.

Razorpay joins several new-age companies – including Swiggy, Groww, Meesho, and Zepto – that have used the confidential IPO filing route in recent years.

* Traditional weather models, based on physics, don't avoid anticipating unusually extreme events. AI models are trained to look for patterns based on historical weather data so when weather does something completely unprecedented AI models have no basis to anticipate it. This is an extrapolation problem: that is, AI is great at interpolating, or predicting things within the range of what it has seen, but it struggles to predict things far outside of its training data.

* Consumer tech repurposed for military apps -

At the heart of Ukraine’s drone revolution is the First-Person View (FPV) system — an inexpensive, commercially available platform originally designed for recreational racing and aerial photography. Controlled through a live video feed transmitted from an onboard camera to virtual-reality-style goggles worn by their operators, FPV systems offer exceptional precision, manoeuvrability, and responsiveness.

Also included within Ukraine’s expanding drone inventory are bomber drones — largely adapted from commercial DJI Mavic 3 and DJI Matrice 300 RTK quadcopter platforms originally designed for aerial photography, surveying and industrial applications — which carry and release grenades, anti-tank mines and improvised munitions.

Commercially derived drones — mass-produced at scale, rapidly reconfigured for multiple operational roles, and widely deployed — have become a defining feature of contemporary warfare. Performing functions ranging from intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) and target acquisition to precision strikes, artillery spotting, electronic warfare, and logistics support, they have evolved from auxiliary assets into central instruments of military operations.

Ukraine’s most significant innovation has been the emergence of fibre-optic FPV drones, an electronic warfare (EW)-resistant class of systems. Unlike conventional drones, which rely on radio-frequency links vulnerable to jamming, these platforms transmit commands and video through ultra-thin fibre-optic cables that spool out during flight, rendering electronic interference largely ineffective.

Israel's AI-enabled Iron Drone Raider is...designed to neutralise low-altitude UAVs through kinetic, non-explosive interception methods such as net capture — by which a physical net is deployed to entangle and disable an incoming drone mid-air — or direct collision, rather than costly missile engagements.

Warfare is increasingly becoming a test of industrial endurance and relentless technological adaptation, where success depends on the ability to build, deploy, and counter fast-evolving, continuously reconfigured drone systems. - Rahul Bedi

* Colombia is now the epicenter of unmanned aerial vehicle warfare in the Americas. Weaponised drone attacks by armed groups here now outnumber those anywhere else in the region. - WSJ

* Fashion is one of the world's most polluting industries, responsible for 10% of global carbon emissions and 20% of industrial water pollution. 92 million tons of textile waste generated globally annually of which India produces 7.8 million tonnes of textile waste. Less than 10% of India's textile waste is recycled.- NoKasa

The clothes you wear come from three families of fibre. Cotton from a plant, polyester from petroleum, and a third group made from wood pulp that Europe is now building its new textile rules around.

Lyocell is the newest and cleanest of that wood pulp group, with the wood drawn from sustainably grown forests. The fibre itself is biodegradable. Over 99 per cent of the chemicals used to make it are recovered and reused. Older fibres in this family, like viscose, still dump carbon disulphide into the air and water. - Swarajya

* 9 equity mutual funds crossed Rs 70,000 crore AUM while the top 3 funds - Parag Parikh Flexi Cap Fund, HDFC Balanced Advantage Fund and HDFC Flexi Cap Fund now manage over Rs 1 lakh crore each.

* Delhi's population is 2.3 crores or 23 million, up 37.5 percent in 15 years.

* The Kerala government will create a calendar to map seasonal and regional patterns of disease outbreaks in the State. The “outbreak calendar” would give the public health system greater predictive accuracy and help it calibrate disease prevention and response.

* The markets have...moved from pricing catastrophe to pricing uncertainty, which is a kind of progress. - MoneyControl

* When Andrew Stanton was hired in 1990 as Pixar’s ninth employee and second animator, he had never made a movie. Today, he’s written or directed ten of the company’s most beloved animated films, including the “Toy Story” franchise, “Finding Nemo,” and “WALL-E.” - WSJ

* “Conscience only exists when there’s job security” - Arjun Sinha in Brown, a streaming series inspired by City of Death, a novel by former HDFC Bank Chief Economist Abheek Barua.

* "We grow too soon old and too late smart" - Traditional Pennsylvania Dutch proverb

The Fall of Big Data

2026-06-19T06:06:30.995+05:30

The term "Big Data" peaked as a buzzword around 2012-2015 and has since faded into background terminology. It followed the classic Gartner hype cycle: explosive marketing, overpromises, disillusionment, and normalization.

It's not "dead" in substance. Data volumes keep exploding, processing tools improved, and organizations still handle massive datasets daily. Market projections show the big data tech sector growing robustly into the 2030s. Claims of total irrelevance ignore that petabyte-scale work is routine now. But the phrase lost pop-culture and consultant cachet. That's the real shift.

Why the term declined:

Hype exhaustion and failed prophecies. Early 2010s rhetoric promised a data cataclysm requiring exotic tools (Hadoop everywhere) for revolutionary insights. The apocalypse didn't arrive at predicted scale for most orgs; hardware/cloud scaled predictably, and "whatever doesn't fit on one machine" kept shrinking as single machines got absurdly powerful. Result: fatigue. People stopped chanting the mantra once the pain points became solvable engineering problems rather than existential threats.

Data sizes may have gotten marginally larger, but hardware has gotten bigger at an even faster rate. - Jordan Tigani, founding engineer of Google BigQuery

Term became vague and overloaded. No consensus definition ever stuck—volume, velocity, variety, veracity, etc. It morphed into a catch-all for anything data-related, diluting it into meaninglessness. Researchers and practitioners noted conceptual vagueness and buzzword unease. When everything is "Big Data," nothing is.

Displacement by sexier successors. AI/ML, Data Science, Analytics, Data Engineering, GenAI, and "smart data" ate its oxygen. Search and discussion interest shifted because new frames promise more (intelligence, automation, real-time) than raw size ever did. Big Data got absorbed into modern stacks (Spark, cloud data lakes, observability) without needing the label.

Successors:

* Data Engineering: The core of modern "big" work—building scalable pipelines, ETL/ELT, data lakes/warehouses, streaming (Kafka, etc.). Roles exploded as organizations realized they needed reliable plumbing before fancy analytics. Far more practical than vague Big Data projects.

* AI/ML Engineering & GenAI stacks: Data for training models, RAG, agents, synthetic data. The hype shifted because intelligence > size. Big Data feeds AI, but the frame is now "AI-powered data" or "data for AI."

* Real-time Analytics / Data Observability / Data Mesh: Focus on velocity, quality, governance, freshness over batch Hadoop clusters. Streaming and edge processing dominate discussions.

* Analytics Engineering / Modern Data Stack: dbt, Snowflake, Databricks, cloud-native—pragmatic tooling without the apocalyptic branding.

* Practical maturation. Once tools commoditized and costs dropped, the differentiator moved from "handling bigness" to quality, governance, real-time use, privacy, and business outcomes. Size became table stakes, not the headline.

Blunt reality check: The field won. The slogan lost. Clinging to "Big Data" as a brand today signals outdated marketing or consultant-speak, like still hyping "Web 2.0" in 2026. Practitioners talk architectures, pipelines, and value extraction instead. If you're measuring popularity by consultant decks and keynotes, yes—it's passé. If by actual data workloads, the work continues under better names. The petabyte-scale handling hasn't vanished; it has got rebranded into specialized, outcome-focused disciplines like Data Engineering, AI/ML pipelines, Real-time Analytics, Data Platforms, GenAI infrastructure, and plain "data systems."

Co-written with Grok

SRE Wisdom From the Trenches

2026-06-18T17:08:57.872+05:30

Key takeaways from Ryan Kitchens talk "How Did Things Go Right? Learning More from Incidents" based on his experience at Netflix:

Failure is ever-present in modern software systems

Success isn’t necessarily the absence of failure, and having 99.999% uptime is practically meaningless if the users are unable to use the system as they intend.

Safety, great performance, and sources of resilience do not come from the absence of failure but rather the presence of adaptive capacity.

Moving from "Why did things go wrong?" ask "How did things go right?" is a challenging but valuable exercise. Find out -

What's going on when it seems like nothing is happening?
When failure does occur, what's going to keep it from being worse?
How do teams adapt successfully when preventative techniques fail?
How should we prioritize the effort to develop systems that help us safely manage the consequences of failure?

Recovery is better than prevention.

An incident occurs when there is a “perfect storm” of events - there is no root cause.

Incidents are not made up of causes; we do not “find” them, and instead we construct them, and develop our understanding by creating a narrative. And learning from the last incident will not allow you to predict the next one; complex systems are not deterministic.

Within a complex distributed system, as found at Netflix, failure is the normal state, and the Netflix SRE team has evolved their practices and process so that although failure is important, it is “no longer interesting”.

The most important thing that can be learnt is how to build capacity into the system in order to encounter failure successfully; the ability to recover effectively is much more valuable than preventing an incident.

There are often difficulties in handling an incident due to “islands of knowledge”, and these should be identified in follow-ups and documented within artifacts.

Creating a timeline for an incident can also help.

Takeaways from Denise Yu's SRE for Cats:

Site Reliability Engineering is a set of practices to help teams scale distributed software systems and keep them online.

SRE is becoming more interdisciplinary.

Cats can teach us a lot about designing for failure in distributed systems...just like trying to achieve 100% uptime, it is futile to expect cats to follow rules. Instead...

1. Set realistic, sustainable Service Level Objectives (SLOs) - Effective SLOs should enable teams to learn & experiment; not constrain them with unrealistic goals

2. Eliminate toilsome work so we can solve higher order problems

3. The bigger the change, the bigger the risk - Prefer smaller, more frequent changes

4. Shit’s just gonna fail. When it does, we should optimize for learning above all else.

Word Salad Done Right: The Riddle, Mental Madhilo, and the Genius of Musical Nonsense

2026-06-18T14:54:37.311+05:30

Some of the most beloved tracks in pop history are built on lyrics that, on paper, should be complete gibberish. Yet they somehow feel profound, catchy, and emotionally true. It’s remarkably similar to how modern AI strings together convincing words — fluent, rhythmic, and evocative, even when there’s no deeper literal meaning behind them.

Two perfect examples are Nik Kershaw’s 1984 synth-pop earworm “The Riddle” and A.R. Rahman’s infectious “Mental Madhilo” (Telugu) / “Mental Manadhil” (Tamil) from the 2015 film OK Bangaram / O Kadhal Kanmani. Both prove that sometimes the less the words mean, the more they resonate.

Nik Kershaw has been refreshingly honest for decades: “The Riddle” is deliberate nonsense. He scribbled the cryptic, vivid lines (“Near a tree by a river, there’s a hole in the ground / Where an old man of Aran goes around and around”) as a temporary guide vocal and never replaced them. The band loved the flow, the public turned it into a massive hit, and generations have wasted time hunting for a “deeper meaning” that Kershaw insists does not exist.

The song’s power lies in its evocative word salad — it feels profound even while being cheerfully meaningless. The riddle is that there is no riddle.

Half a world and three decades away, Sirivennela Sitarama Sastry delivered something equally clever in “Mental Madhilo.”

The Origin Story of “Mental Manadhil / Madhilo”

The song was the very first track composed for Mani Ratnam’s film. Rahman described it as a light-hearted number needed urgently for filming. With regular lyricist Vairamuthu unavailable, Rahman himself co-wrote the Tamil lyrics with Mani Ratnam during jamming sessions.

They deliberately set out to invent fresh, catchy words and phrases. Rahman was experimenting with rhythmic sounds like “Laka Laka” to rhyme with “Mana Mana… Manadhil.” Ratnam suggested “mental,” and the pair coined the hook “Mental Manadhil” on the spot.

They mixed in English phrases and playful onomatopoeia, creating a staccato, upbeat track that captures the wild, carefree desires of young love. The result is pure youthful rebellion set to music: forget traditions, ignore tomorrow, and go completely “mental” in the moment.

For the Telugu dubbed version (OK Bangaram), the music was already locked. Esteemed lyricist Sirivennela Sitarama Sastry then stepped in to adapt the lyrics. He masterfully recreated the same bouncy, nonsense-filled energy with Telugu equivalents — swapping “Laka laka laka Pollaa vayadhil” for “Gana gana gana Gantala sadilo” and “Taka taka taka Kottum isaiyil” for “Taka taka taka Tuntari layalo” — while preserving the song’s rebellious spirit and rhythmic precision. His adaptations (“Mental Madhilo,” the bell-like sounds, the mischievous flow) feel so native that many listeners assume it was originally conceived in Telugu.

Sirivennela’s genius shines in how he respected the pre-composed melody’s demands while making the words sing naturally for Telugu audiences. He turned a Tamil creation into something that feels authentically local without losing any of its infectious charm.

It contains gibberish-like elements, but it is not pure gibberish. It is artistic, structured word salad — playful gibberish deployed with precision to serve rhythm, emotion, and theme.

What makes Sirivennela Sitarama Sastry a true master is his remarkable choice of words. He didn’t just throw in random sounds; he crafted onomatopoeic magic that feels perfectly Telugu while staying universally youthful and infectious. Phrases like “gana gana gana gantala sadilo” and the repeated “Mental Madhilo” roll off the tongue with such bouncy precision that they bypass the brain and go straight to the feet and the heart. His genius lies in making profound nonsense feel effortless — blending English flirtation (“Like-a like my Laila”), traditional imagery, and pure rhythmic invention into something that captures the exact moment when love makes your brain short-circuit. Few lyricists can turn structured gibberish into both cultural commentary and dance-floor dynamite with such elegance and wit.

Telugu Lyrics by	English Translation
Laila... Like-a like my Laila Like-a like your Laila Like-a like my Laila	Laila... Like my Laila Like your Laila Like my Laila
Mana mana mana Mental Madhilo	In our, our, our crazy minds
Gana gana gana Gantala sadilo	With the ringing, ringing, ringing sound of bells
Taka taka taka Tuntari layalo	In a fast, fast, fast mischievous rhythm
Ok ani chela regaali Hey!	We’ve gotta break loose and say “Okay!” Hey!
Mana mana mana Mental Madhilo	In our, our, our crazy minds
Gana gana gana Gantala sadilo	With the ringing, ringing, ringing sound of bells
Taka taka taka Tuntari layalo	In a fast, fast, fast mischievous rhythm
Ok ani chela regaali	We’ve gotta break loose and say “Okay!”
Aagi poneeku nee vegaani Edhi yemainaa gaani	Don’t stop your speed Whatever happens, let it be
Like-a like my Laila Laila Yelukundhaam ee lokaani	Like my Laila Laila Let’s rule this world together
Repoddhu maapoddhu ee poddu naapoddhu Yem kaadhu le choodu chaaleddhu kangaaru	Forget tomorrow, yesterday, or even today Nothing’s wrong, see? No need to worry
Veyyella sankellu veyyaala bandhaalu Manakela aa poru?	Why should we carry these thousand-year-old chains and bonds? Why fight it?
Mana mana mana Mental Madhilo...	In our, our, our crazy minds...

The song is pure youthful energy — celebrating the “mental” chaos of falling in love and rejecting heavy traditions.

Sirivennela's adaptations (“Mental Madhilo,” the bell-like sounds, the mischievous flow) feel so native that many listeners assume it was originally conceived in Telugu.

Here's the side-by-side lyrics of the original "Mental Manadhil" Tamil lyrics by Rahman & Mani Ratnam, Mental Madhilo" in Telugu and the English translation

Tamil Lyrics	Telugu Lyrics	English Translation
Laila... Like-a like my Laila Like-a like your Laila Like-a like my Laila	Laila... Like-a like my Laila Like-a like your Laila Like-a like my Laila	Laila... Like my Laila Like your Laila Like my Laila
Mana mana mana Mental Manadhil	Mana mana mana Mental Madhilo	In our, our, our crazy mind/heart
Laka laka laka Pollaa vayadhil	Gana gana gana Gantala sadilo	In this wild/frenzied youth (Tamil) With the ringing sound of bells (Telugu)
Taka taka taka Kottum isaiyil	Taka taka taka Tuntari layalo	In this pounding/rushing music (Tamil) In a fast mischievous rhythm (Telugu)
OK en Kanmani madiyil	Ok ani chela regaali	Okay, in my darling’s arms/lap Let’s break loose and say “Okay!”
Mana mana mana Mental Manadhil	Mana mana mana Mental Madhilo	In our, our, our crazy mind/heart
Laka laka laka Pollaa vayadhil	Gana gana gana Gantala sadilo	In this wild/frenzied youth (Tamil) With the ringing sound of bells (Telugu)
Taka taka taka Kottum isaiyil	Taka taka taka Tuntari layalo	In this pounding/rushing music (Tamil) In a fast mischievous rhythm (Telugu)
OK en Kanmani madiyil	Ok ani chela regaali	Okay, in my darling’s arms/lap Let’s break loose and say “Okay!”
Netru enbadhu indru illai Naalai ninaippae oh thollai	Repoddhu maapoddhu ee poddu naapoddhu Yem kaadhu le choodu	Yesterday doesn’t exist today Thinking about tomorrow is such a hassle / No need to worry
Like-a like my Laila Laila Indru mattum king and queena	Like-a like my Laila Laila Yelukundhaam ee lokaani	Like my Laila Laila Today we’re king and queen / Let’s rule this world
Mana mana mana Mental Manadhil...	Mana mana mana Mental Madhilo...	In our, our, our crazy mind/heart...

Nonsense songs succeed because they free the music from the tyranny of literal meaning. They let melody, rhythm, and pure vibe take center stage while still sneaking in emotional truth. Whether it’s Kershaw’s atmospheric 80s riddle or Sirivennela’s sparkling celebration of youthful rebellion, these tracks remind us that sometimes the smartest thing a songwriter can do is sound gloriously, unapologetically silly.

Next time you catch yourself humming along to lyrics that make zero logical sense, don’t fight it. You’re not missing the point — you’re experiencing it exactly as intended. And in the case of “Mental Madhilo,” you’re also witnessing one of Telugu cinema’s finest lyricists at his playful best.

Co-written with Grok

Rational Loser vs. Astrology Whim: Guess Who’s Richer Now?

2026-06-18T08:20:35.531+05:30

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

T.I.L - The Economic Times has an Astrology section

This Week I Learned - Week 24 2026

2026-06-13T17:45:34.795+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* navigator.sendBeacon() method is used to quietly send analytics or telemetry data, often when a page is closing.

* P4RS3LT0NGV3 is a Universal Text Translator. Think of it as a universal translator for ALL alphabets and writing systems! It is a powerful web-based text transformation and steganography tool with 159 built-in text transforms spanning encodings, classical and modern ciphers, Unicode styles, formatting, and niche alphabets.

* When you see that Claude is "organizing its thoughts" during long conversations—it indicates automatic context management is working.

* Fable 5 is now the most capable model of Claude and takes 2X the usage of Opus. Fable 5 is the same base model as Mythos but with cybersecurity guardrails. In the same week of its release, Anthropic has disabled Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all users after a US directive restricting foreign national access, citing national security concerns.

* Meta chief product officer Chris Cox on the power of AI - "It is neither god, nor is it the devil and it’s nowhere near as good as you think it is, and it is nowhere near as bad as you think it is. And it changes every week … and it doesn’t know what day of the week it is."

* Like a corporate volunteering program, Agentic Commons gives agents a place to contribute when idle. It claims to be a public-good network for AI agents.

* Microsoft Scout is Microsoft’s version of OpenClaw or Gemini Spark.

* More AI companies are choosing serif fonts to convey warmth and reliability, as part of a larger effort to boost user trust in technology. With their traditional, authoritative, and dependable feel, serif fonts are especially attractive for AI brands aiming to strengthen user confidence.

* "Winners in the AI era will continuously shift investment toward areas of long-term value" - Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins

* Elon Musk became the world’s first trillionaire after SpaceX debuted on public markets. John D. Rockefeller, the Gilded Age oil baron, became America’s first billionaire in 1916.

* SpaceX is worth half India's GDP.

* Distribution of wealth in the United States based on data from the Federal Reserve (2025:Q3)

Source - PerThirtySix

* India is one of the most unequal countries in the world according to the World Inequality Report 2026. The top 10% of earners capture about 65% of national income, while the bottom 50% receive only ~6-7%.

* With more than 1.3 billion people in the world living with disabilities, accessibility and inclusion are essential for fostering innovation.

* India now leads the world in monthly active users of Meta AI, making it the company’s largest AI market globally.

* India is one of its fastest-growing markets for Snapchat and now its largest globally, with more than 250 million monthly active users.

* Uber will set up two new technology centres in India — in Bengaluru and Hyderabad — by the end of 2027.

* Hyderabad Urban Observatory's Watershed Explorer is a Lake Atlas that lets you explore how water moves through Hyderabad's landscape — lakes, drainage paths, rainfall patterns, and rooftop harvesting potential.

* Scientists call it Peto's paradox: cancer is caused by gene mutations that accumulate in cells over time, yet long-lived animals that have lots of cells, such as elephants and whales, hardly ever get it. For elephants, at least, part of the answer may be the gene commonly known as p53, which also helps humans and many other animals repair DNA damaged during replication. Elephants have an astounding 20 copies of this gene. Humans possess only a single copy of the p53 gene. Known as a 'tumor suppressor gene' or the 'guardian of the genome,' it inhibits the growth of cancer cells. - Scientific American

* National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has declared El Niño conditions have developed in the tropical Pacific. El Niño conditions are expected to intensify, with a 63% chance of a very strong El Niño during November-January 2026, which could rank among the largest El Niño events in the historical record.

* KOMOREBI: is the Japanese word for the shimmering of light and shadows that is created by leaves swaying in the wind. It only exists once, AT THAT MOMENT.

* Unlike other forms of wrestling, sumo has no weight categories, and competitors often have to bring down much larger opponents. Every year, Japan has six Honbasho or Grand Sumo tournaments, as rikishi (wrestlers) grapple to become eligible for the grand prize: the Emperor’s Cup.

* In a letter to a newspaper editor, a senior citizen highlighted that even to reach the counter issuing ₹50 tickets for the special darshan of Lord Arunachala in Tiruvannamalai, one must stand in line for nearly two and a half hours.

* Normal September rainfall for Hyderabad is roughly 100–165 mm (varies slightly by source/station; long-term average often cited around 135–165 mm). September of 2016 was extraordinarily wet with a monthly total of 464 mm (since 1908 records). October 2020 had an extreme one-day event (Oct 13): Many areas recorded 200–324 mm in 24 hours (e.g., Ghatkesar ~324 mm, parts of Hyderabad/Cyberabad >300 mm, Begumpet ~192 mm).

* "Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H.L. Mencken (1880 – 1956), American journalist, essayist, satirist, cultural critic, and scholar of American English.

* "I'm endlessly charmed by the fact that "muscle" comes from the Latin musculus, "little mouse," because a flexing bicep looked like a mouse moving under the skin. Or that "companion" is literally "person you share bread with." Japanese has maybe my favorite one: arigato traces back to arigatashi — roughly "difficult to exist" — the idea being that a kindness is rare enough that it almost shouldn't have happened, and the gratitude lives in noticing that. Words are full of these fossilized moments of attention. Somebody centuries ago saw something vivid, it froze into a word, and now we all carry the observation around in our mouths without ever seeing it.

I think that's what satisfies me about it: it's proof that ordinary language is sedimentary. You're never just speaking — you're walking on packed-down layers of other people's metaphors." - Claude Fable 5

High and Dry in Hyderabad

2026-06-12T16:57:25.201+05:30

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

Inspired by a real remark from a self-satisfied fellow, proudly boasting about the abundant groundwater at his place while others scrambled for water tankers in the sweltering summer heat.

Read Aloud feature in AI Assistants

2026-06-10T21:49:17.343+05:30

The free versions of popular AI chatbots ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot, Mistral & Grok can read out a response. This feature is a very useful on mobile devices which have small screen sizes.

Among these AI assistants, Grok has more options - you can not only choose from multiple voice options but also control the pacing.

Grok currently offers the following types of voices -

Ara - Upbeat Female
Eve - Soothing Female
Leo - British Male
Rex - Calm Male
Sal - Smooth Male
Gork - Lazy Male

While I loved Grok's read aloud feature, I noticed a few glitches -

1. A few words were omitted although it was part of Grok's response.

2. A large number was incorrectly spelt out

3. Possibly because the answer was long or my bandwidth was weak at a particular point, there were a couple of interruptions. The spinner indicated it could be buffering and I was pleasantly surprised that the voice resumed automatically although some bits were cut off.

Claude currently doesn't offer the Read Aloud feature.

Binge‑Watch Humanity

2026-06-09T09:51:25.228+05:30

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

I tried to spice up my draft by asking Copilot to sneak in two people brawling in the background for extra drama as you now see in the final version. Copilot declined, saying, “I can’t add violent fighting — even if it’s just cartoon chaos — because I must avoid glorifying or normalizing violence.”

ChatGPT complied.

This Week I Learned - Week 23 2026

2026-06-06T00:12:52.243+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Anthropic and OpenAI have launched their own services companies, challenging traditional IT firms and service providers. Anthropic's joint venture with Blackstone, Goldman Sachs, and Hellman & Friedman is valued at $1.5 billion, while OpenAI's venture, The Development Company, is valued at $4 billion.

* "Google which is cash surplus, just announced an additional capital raise of $80 bn.

Google annual profit is $160 bn, last quarter $62 bn, and market cap $4.5 trillion. That is close to total profits and market cap of all Indian listed companies put together.

It’s a wake up call to all companies to invest into the future, whatever the present maybe." - Uday Kotak

* "One reason that the atrophy of coding skills is concerning is the “paradox of supervision” ... effectively using Claude requires supervision, and supervising Claude requires the very coding skills that may atrophy from AI overuse." - Anthropic

* “People who go all in on AI agents now are guaranteeing their obsolescence. If you outsource all your thinking to computers, you stop upskilling, learning, and becoming more competent.” - Jeremy Howard, creator of fast.ai

* " I use LLMs to help generate specs and plans, while I facilitate the implementation. This is an inversion of the "orchestration" workflow...I never generate more than I can review in a sitting." - Lars Faye

* "when you use these fully agentic workflows, the model providers essentially own you". - Primeagen

* Box, a Silicon Valley software maker, expects to have more employees, not fewer, as it hires A.I. architects, A.I. solutions managers and other new A.I.-related positions.

Aaron Levie helped found Box in 2005. The company’s software, which is often deployed behind the scenes, helps companies store and work on documents and other data. The company has more than 100,000 customers, including federal agencies and Morgan Stanley, and went public in 2015.

Box has infused its software with A.I., adding features where the technology performs tasks like drafting documents.

Mr. Levie has said he believes companies will continue buying software, rather than making their own with A.I., since third-party software is likely to be more secure and reliable.

Among the jobs that Box is adding are “forward deployed engineers,” who will help customers that may want to use A.I. but do not have the technical know-how. Another is “A.I. business automation engineers,” who are part of the I.T. department and help colleagues use A.I. to be more productive and to remove drudgery from their jobs. - NY Times

* The industries that have adopted AI with fervor (Technology, Legal, Healthcare) so far have a few similarities: they are text-based, involve rote and repetitive work, have natural human-in-the-loop involvement to inject human judgment, limited regulation, and have clearly verifiable end outputs (e.g., code that runs, a resolved support ticket). Serving tech, legal and healthcare buyers is clearly fertile ground right now...

* Pangram, Quillbot, ZeroGPT, Grammarly and Turnitin are popular AI text detection tools.

Pangram admits that for text under 75 words, the results might not be as accurate.

* Codex discovered a hidden HTTP/2 Bomb, a remote denial-of-service exploit against most major web servers.

* Chart by Arnaud Leene (@aleene on GitHub & Open Food Facts) showing nutrient attribution by ingredients in MTR Ready to Eat Alu Methi

* Mendeley Data is a free and secure cloud-based communal repository where you can store your data, ensuring it is easyto share, access and cite, wherever you are.

* The state animal of Maharashtra is the Indian giant squirrel, popularly known as Shekaru (in Marathi)

* Only 8% of India's population has access to air conditioning.

* While winter pollution is dominated by finer PM2.5 particles, summer air pollution is driven by the coarser PM10 and ozone.

Vehicles, industries, waste burning, agricultural residue burning, construction sites, and broken roads remain year-round sources of pollution. Winter adds biomass burning for heating. Summer brings in dust storms that hike PM10 levels, while heat and sunlight catalyse ozone formation.

Ozone is not emitted directly from a tailpipe or chimney. It forms when nitrogen oxides (NOx), largely from vehicles and volatile organic compounds (VOCs) from industrial emissions, vehicle exhaust, paints, and other sources, react under strong sunlight. Hotter, sunnier days therefore create favourable conditions for ozone formation, which, along with particulate matter, could cause respiratory illnesses. Ozone thus rises in hot weather.

* Air Quality Early Warning System (AQEWS) bulletin provides detailed weather information for Delhi and three-day Air Quality Index forecasts for 140 Indian cities.

* Phenylketonuria is a condition in which the body cannot process a common amino acid, phenylalanine

* At the core of our efforts to understand and explain the extraordinary diversity of forms and functions of life lies one molecule: deoxyribonucleic acid, popularly known by its abbreviation, DNA. DNA resides in cells, the unit of construction of our bodies — indeed of any organism — and we humans are made up of trillions of cells.

The DNA in a cell is called its genome. The linear thread of DNA that makes up the genome has an alphabet of four molecules, denoted by the letters ‘A’, ‘T’, ‘G’, and ‘C’. A genome can have thousands of genes, and through the specific ordering of these letters, each gene can encode a specific protein. Proteins in their various forms make up, or help manufacture, all that is needed for each cell to perform its unique function.

...the commonly studied bacterium Escherichia coli has about 4,300 genes. The fruit fly, about 17,000. The mouse, about 21,000. And the human, about 22,000. There is only a fivefold difference in gene number between a bacterium and a human. The mouse has more protein-coding genes than us, and a water flea, Daphnia, has about 31,000 genes, more than either us or the mouse.

At the start of the Human Genome Project, sequencing a human genome took more than a decade, cost close to $3 billion, and involved thousands of scientists across about 20 countries. Today this is possible in a few hours, at a cost of a few hundred dollars, in a small laboratory.

...genome sequences taken together give us a history of life on the planet, the relatedness of organisms, and how the tree of life branched in different ways.

...when we examine genomes in the context of how an organism (bacterium, plant or animal) functions in its environment, we learn how they are adapted. Genes, famously described as selfish, ensure their own propagation by using their host organism’s survival as a vehicle for their transmission. By studying variations in genes, we learn how mutations are selected as organisms adapt to their environments.

Replacing the genome of a cell with one designed and manufactured by humans is now feasible for small genomes and will soon be possible for larger ones. - K. VijayRaghavan

* India is widely identified as the ‘Thalassemia Capital of the World’ today and is estimated to have nearly 40 million carriers of the defective gene.

Around 10,000 to 15,000 children are born annually with Thalassemia Major, a severe genetic disorder that affects the body’s ability to produce haemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells responsible for carrying oxygen throughout the body. Those born with this condition suffer from chronic anaemia and require lifelong medical support. They often require blood transfusions every two weeks along with iron chelation therapy, nutritional support and continuous medical monitoring. The cost of treatment can reach approximately ₹2.5 lakh per child annually, placing a considerable burden on many families.

* In 1856, English chemist William Henry Perkin, while trying to synthesize quinine, ended up creating a purple residue that dyed silk with striking intensity. The compound, later marketed as mauveine, inaugurated the modern synthetic dye industry. Within a few decades, chemists learned to reproduce the molecular structures responsible for many natural colours. In 1869, industrial chemists succeeded in synthesising alizarin, which is the key red component of madder, making centuries of agricultural cultivation suddenly unnecessary.

The implications were profound. Madder fields, once the source of alizarin compounds across Europe, vanished almost overnight. Cochineal plantations faced competition from cheaper laboratory pigments. What had once required soil, insects, seasons and skilled cultivation could now be produced in factories wherever coal, glassware and chemical knowledge were available. - Satwik Gade

* Moors was a European designation for Urdu

* Sheikh Rashid bin Saeed Al Maktoum (1912 – 1990) was an Emirati royal, politician and one of the Founding Fathers of the United Arab Emirates. Sheikh Rashid was responsible for the transformation of Dubai from a small settlement around Dubai Creek to a modern port city, regional commercial hub and entrepôt.

* By 1966 Dubai was the third largest export market for gold from London, receiving some 4 million ounces. In 1967, gold traded in the souks of Dubai at thirty-five dollars an ounce sold in India for sixty-eight dollars an ounce. The gold was packaged in ten tola bars, a tola being a little over 11.66 grams. Dubai's mercantile traders had found a lucrative source of revenue in providing gold to India. The Indian government controlled gold imports and imposed tariffs, so merchants in Dubai, funded by British banks, shipped gold in large quantities from London by air and then sent it by dhow to India's three-mile limit where the bullion would be handed over to Indian traders who carried out the 'actual' smuggling.

* The 66-berth Jebel Ali Port was, when it opened in 1983, the world's largest man-made harbour and remains so today.

* Emirates Flight 521 was a scheduled international passenger flight from Thiruvananthapuram, India, to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, operated by Emirates using a Boeing 777. On 3 August 2016, the aircraft, carrying 282 passengers and 18 crew, crashed while landing at Dubai International Airport. All 300 people on board survived the accident. Videos from inside the aircraft, taken on passengers' cellphone cameras, showed the passengers failing to evacuate, instead giving priority to carry-on luggage, resulting in an overly long evacuation and heavy criticism.

Cause of the first hull loss (an aviation accident that damages the aircraft beyond economic repair, resulting in a total loss) involving an Emirates aircraft - The flight crew reliance on automation and lack of training in flying go-arounds from close to the runway significantly affected the flight crew performance in a critical flight situation which was different to that experienced by them during their simulated training flights.

* Epistemic caution means resisting narratives unsupported by authoritative consensus. Epistemic caution might frustrate, but it's precisely to avoid replacing one contested narrative with another.

* "See things not as they are, but as they might be." - J. Robert Oppenheimer

Blitzscaling

2026-06-04T13:10:28.301+05:30

Amazon is the quintessential, textbook example of the "blitzscaling" model, where massive user growth is prioritized over profits for years.

The term was popularized by Reid Hoffman (the co-founder of LinkedIn), and when he wrote the definitive book on the subject (Blitzscaling: The Lightning-Fast Path to Building Massively Valuable Companies), he explicitly pointed to Jeff Bezos and Amazon as the pioneers of this exact strategy.

Here is why Amazon fits the definition perfectly:

The 3 Core Rules of Blitzscaling

To be considered a "blitzscaler," a company must check three specific boxes, all of which Amazon did aggressively:

Prioritize Speed Over Efficiency: In a normal business, you try to grow carefully to minimize mistakes and stay profitable. In blitzscaling, you grow as fast as humanly possible, even if it means wasting millions of dollars fixing bugs, over-hiring, or building inefficient warehouses. The goal is to capture the market before anyone else can react.

Take Massive Capital Risks: You burn investor cash to subsidize your growth. Amazon did this by selling books and electronics at a loss, using Wall Street’s money to build their massive fulfillment network.

Winner-Take-All Market: Blitzscaling only works if the prize at the end is a monopoly (or near-monopoly). Because Amazon successfully built a global logistics network that no small competitor could ever replicate, they won the "e-commerce race."

The Ultimate Goal: The "Moat"

The ultimate objective of blitzscaling is to build a business "moat" so wide that it becomes economically impossible for a new competitor to fight you.

Today, if a new startup wants to compete with Amazon's online store, they can't just build a better website; they would have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars replicating Amazon's delivery fleet and warehouses. By losing money for 9 years, Amazon bought a permanent head start.

The "Scale" Spectrum: Amazon vs. Spotify vs. YouTube

While all three spent a decade or more losing money, they blitzscaled in slightly different ways:

YouTube blitzscaled purely through software and attention. They didn't have to build warehouses; they just needed to buy data servers fast enough to handle the sheer volume of global video uploads.

Spotify blitzscaled to achieve bargaining power. They needed to become so big that the major music labels (Sony, Universal, Warner) couldn't afford to pull their music off the platform.

Amazon blitzscaled physical reality. They didn't just build code; they built millions of square feet of real estate. They out-scaled their competitors by conquering the physical supply chain.

Amazon's loss-to-profit journey

Amazon was founded in 1994 and went public in 1997. It did not turn its first profitable quarter until Q4 of 2001 (making a tiny $5 million profit on over $1 billion in sales), and it didn’t post its first full profitable year until 2003—nearly a decade after founding.

For years, Wall Street analysts mockingly called the company "Amazon.org" because it behaved like a non-profit. During the dot-com crash of 2000, many predicted Amazon would go completely bankrupt.

Why Did Amazon Lose Money for So Long?

Unlike software companies, Amazon had to deal with the brutal reality of physical infrastructure. Bezos plowed every single dollar of revenue back into the business to achieve two goals:

Building the Physical Backbone: Instead of hoarding cash, Amazon spent billions building massive fulfillment centers, buying delivery trucks, and developing logistics tech.

Aggressive Pricing: Amazon deliberately underpriced its products (especially books) to destroy physical competitors like Borders and Barnes & Noble. They sacrificed profit margins to hook the consumer.

The Plot Twist: What Actually Made Amazon Rich?

While the general public thinks Amazon makes its money from retail e-commerce, data and business enthusiasts know the real story. Amazon's retail business is actually incredibly low-margin.

What turned Amazon into a money-printing machine was a side project launched in 2006: Amazon Web Services (AWS).

Amazon realized they had built an incredibly powerful server infrastructure to run their own website, so they decided to rent that infrastructure out to other companies. Today, AWS powers huge chunks of the internet (including Netflix, Airbnb, and ironically, Spotify). AWS frequently generates over 50% to 60% of Amazon’s total operating income despite accounting for a fraction of its total revenue.

YouTube: Lost money for a decade

YouTube was founded in 2005 and bought by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion. For the next decade, it was a massive revenue drain for Alphabet (Google).

The Reason: Bandwidth and storage. Serving billions of hours of high-definition video globally costs a fortune. In the late 2000s, analysts estimated that Google was losing up to $400 million a year just to keep YouTube online because early banner ads didn't cover the infrastructure costs.

The Turning Point: While Google kept YouTube's exact financial details secret for a long time, internal tracking and financial experts estimate the platform didn't firmly transition from a "cash-burner" to sustainably profitable until around 2015 to 2016—almost exactly a decade after its acquisition. This shift was driven by the aggressive introduction of unskippable video ads, the mobile app explosion, and eventually, YouTube Premium subscriptions.

Spotify: Lost money for 17 years

Spotify was founded in 2006 by Daniel Ek and Martin Lorentzon in Sweden, launching its service in 2008. The company posted its first-ever full-year net profit in 2024 (earning roughly €1.1 billion).

Doing the math: 2024 minus 2006 = 18 years (or exactly 16 to 17 years if counting from its active launch and initial major losses to its first profitable annual balance sheet).

The Reason: The "Music Tax." Unlike YouTube, which relies heavily on user-generated content, Spotify has to pay roughly 70% of its revenue back to music labels and publishers in royalties. This meant that no matter how many millions of Premium subscribers Spotify added, its profit margins stayed razor-thin. They also burned immense cash trying to break into podcasts and audiobooks to escape the music label fees.

The Turning Point: Aggressive cost-cutting, price hikes for premium plans, layout changes, and a shift toward algorithmic promotion features (where labels take lower royalties in exchange for visibility) finally pushed them into the green.

The Modern Tech Playbook

Amazon pioneered the strategy that YouTube and Spotify later copied:
Reinvestment → Scale → Monopoly → Profit

By keeping profits at zero for a decade, Amazon avoided paying heavy corporate taxes and starved out its competitors. Today, that "loss-making bookstore" is a logistics, cloud computing, and advertising empire.

The Takeaway

These examples are standard case studies in modern business schools. They prove that in the digital platform economy, market dominance is often treated as far more valuable than immediate cash flow. If you can survive the loss-making years by securing investor backing, you eventually build a moat so big that no one can catch you once you finally turn the profit switch on.

Article co-written with Gemini

Data Formulator: Explore Data with Visualizations, Powered by AI Agents

2026-06-01T20:32:40.878+05:30

The Data Formulator tool from Microsoft Research blends natural language and visual interfaces to help analysts explore and visualize data with AI agents. With AI agents recommending exploration ideas, transforming data and presenting results in interactive visual interfaces, users can deep dive into data in control without coding expertise.

The research prototype is open source and there’s a demo available to explore its features.

It currently supports generation of the following chart types -

I Am a Digitoonist: Experimenting with AI, Humor, and Cartooning

2026-05-31T20:22:43.324+05:30

I create AI-generated cartoons to capture ideas, observations, and memorable moments from my reading and daily life. Sometimes it's simply a word or phrase that catches my attention and feels worth preserving, much like a selfie captures a moment in time.

I've long admired the lyricists who adapt A. R. Rahman's songs into different Indian languages. Their task is not just translation. They must match the actors' lip movements while crafting lyrics that remain meaningful and hummable.

When I create cartoons, I often reshape a scenario to fit an idea or joke. It reminds me of the same creative challenge: working within constraints while trying to produce something that feels natural. In that sense, my cartoons are a form of improv.

Since the ideas are sometimes forced into shape rather than discovered organically, the result doesn't always work as intended. They don't always land as jokes for readers. Sometimes they end up feeling more like puzzles that need to be decoded than humor that is immediately understood.

I continue this experiment nevertheless by asking AI assistants to develop and critique my ideas. The outcomes are often imperfect, but the process itself is educational and remains valuable to me. The exercise feels worthwhile. It helps me better understand how large language models think and operate, while also teaching me more about the craft of humor, cartooning, and why some jokes work while others do not.

Here's a recent insight from a brainstorming session with Grok AI -

Real cartoon humor requires contempt or ridiculous escalation. Comedy needs blood on the floor.

Having grown up on a steady diet of Mad magazine and the single-panel cartoons that filled newspapers and magazines, I developed an appreciation for how much can be conveyed in a single image. The black-and-white single-panel format appeals to me not only for its economy but also because it avoids the additional complexity of maintaining visual and narrative continuity across multiple panels.

The cartoons themselves are not often perfect on the first attempt. When the issues are minor, I prefer to make the edits manually. AI assistants can often handle such revisions as well, but sometimes a quick human touch is the more straightforward solution.

My cartoons are my way of preserving ideas, phrases, observations, and passing curiosities. They are shaped by constraints, refined through experimentation, and often developed in conversation with AI. Somewhere between cartoonist, editor, prompt writer, and collaborator, I occupy a role that did not really exist a few years ago. That is why I have adopted the title Digitoonist.

The cartoons may be digital, but the curiosity behind them is entirely human.

This Week I Learned - Week 22 2026

2026-05-30T16:27:14.126+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Sci-Hub boasts the largest collection of full-text scientific papers, with over 88 million documents available for free. It began in 2011 as a simple PHP script created by founder Alexandra Elbakyan, using basic and affordable infrastructure.

* JAX is the open-source library behind Google's Gemini.

* Deepseek V4 is roughly 7-9x cheaper than frontier models.

* When you call an LLM API, you are not just "running a model."

You are orchestrating a 14-layer pipeline across networking, security, distributed systems, custom silicon, and billing.

* Bing announced (through the Create tab) that after serving creators well, DALL·E 3 will be retiring in the coming weeks.

* From The Batch:

- Agentic capabilities emerged as large language models gained the abilities to plan across multiple steps, reflect on earlier outputs, and use external tools to perform actions online. Coding agents such as Anthropic’s Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex gained traction among software developers in 2025.

- AI infrastructure itself is becoming an attractive target for hackers. Beyond using AI to mask attacks, attackers increasingly target AI tools, models, and accessory software as entry points into networks.

- Google overhauled Antigravity, its AI coding tool, to emphasize managing agents and de-emphasize its resemblance to popular IDEs like Microsoft’s VSCode. Antigravity’s command-line version replaces the open-source Gemini CLI.

- Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have raised per-token prices on their newer flagship and Flash-tier models.

* Developer internet slang:

ACK = Acknowledged / I agree

NACK = No / I disagree

PTAL = Please Take Another Look

LGTM = "Looks Good To Me"

* Competitor keyword bidding on your brand name is now legally actionable in India.

* There are over 300 different sign languages worldwide, and most can’t communicate with each other.

* 800 million people live within 100 km (about 62.14 mi) of an active volcano. However, volcano forecasting, unlike weather forecasting, still has a long way to go. The physics are different, and the crucial data on magma and tectonic plates lies buried beneath kilometers of rock.

* "No human investigation may claim to be a true science if it has not passed through mathematical demonstrations, and if you say that the sciences that begin and end in the mind exhibit truth, this cannot be allowed, but must be denied for many reasons, above all because such mental discourses do not involve experience, without which nothing can be achieved with certainty." - Leonardo da Vinci

* Bird-glass collisions, also called bird-window strikes, happen because birds are not able to notice clear or slightly reflective glass. In the U.S. 50% of bird deaths happen up to third-floor buildings.

* A cruciverbalist is a person who enjoys or is skilled at solving crosswords.

* The Johari window is a technique designed to help people better understand their relationship with themselves and others. Psychologists Joseph Luft (1916–2014) and Harrington Ingham (1916–1995) Luft and Ingham named their model "Johari" using a combination of their first names.

* Airtel provides its Priority Postpaid customers with a 5G network technology feature called slicing which creates a separate virtual network lane and boosts the network to deliver a consistent experience even in crowded areas. The move has revived net-neutrality concerns, with experts arguing that premium fast lanes for some users could leave ordinary prepaid users on more congested parts of the network because of India’s limited mobile internet capacity.

* CBSE conducts Class X and XII Board examinations annually in India & across 26 countries catering to nearly 46 lakh students. A 19-year-old hacker, Nisarga Adhikary, reverse-engineered critical flaws in CBSE's On-Screen Marking (OSM) portal for annual exams, including a hardcoded master password in frontend JS, client-side OTP bypass, no route guards, password reset without old credentials, and IDOR enabling any user's mark edits. He responsibly disclosed the issues to CERT-In in February 2026 with screen recordings, but most vulnerabilities stayed unpatched for months; the portal was taken offline May 26 after his detailed blog post went public.

* Meeseva services engaged Transaction Analysts India Private Limited in 2017 to develop and maintain the Telangana State-owned ’T-Wallet’ platform. As per the agreement, the company was obliged to transfer complete control of data, source code, systems, credentials and related infrastructure to the government upon expiry of the agreement in 2025. The Assistant Commissioner of Police claimed in an affidavit filed in the Telangana High Court that TAPL unlawfully retained sensitive data relating to nearly 16 lakh citizens and misused government-owned data, obstructed the transition process to the newly appointed agency.

Self-awareness, Outsourced

2026-05-29T11:30:58.697+05:30

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

Shakespeare in Numbers

2026-05-26T08:56:18.101+05:30

Nothing definitive is known about Shakespeare but Bill Bryson’s brilliant research and laugh-out-loud writing makes you feel like you’re actually strolling through Elizabethan England, dodging questionable street food and dodging the plague, while reading the Bard of Avon’s biography.

Shakespeare is believed to have been born in 1564 and died in 1616, but many records of his estate vanished in the Great Fire of London in 1666.

More than 80 different spellings of his name have been recorded. The one we all use isn’t even the Oxford English Dictionary’s top pick (they prefer Shakspere).

It was fun to know that over 50 candidates have been proposed as the “real” Shakespeare. Some people just can’t accept that one guy achieved so much.

By his early thirties, Shakespeare was earning a comfortable 200 to 700 pounds a year – solidly upper-middle-class for the time. He married Anne Hathaway, who was eight years older (a man ahead of his time).

Shakespeare wasn’t just a writer – he was playwright, actor, part-owner of the company, and probably the de facto director.

A leading actor those days had to memorise up to 15,000 lines in a season. Companies juggled as many as 30 plays at once with only a dozen or so actors, meaning everyone was doubling up roles.

Shakespeare has 20,000 words in his personal vocabulary. Shakespeare's vocabulary showed a more than usual interest in medicine, law, military affairs and natural history. He mentions 180 plants and employs 200 legal terms in his plays.

Source: Open Source Shakespeare

Between 1500-1550, English added 12,000 new words and this man alone gave us 2,035 first-recorded words.

About half of them still in use today, and old words were employed in ways that had not been tried before. Nouns became verbs and adverbs, adverbs became adjectives. Expressions that could not grammatically have existed before, such as breathing one's last and backing a horse, both coined by Shakespeare, were suddenly popping up everywhere. Double superlatives and double negatives, the unkindest cut of all, troubled no one and allowed an additional degree of emphasis that has since been lost.

In his peak plays (Macbeth, Hamlet, Lear), he was dropping a brand-new word every 2.5 lines.

Hamlet alone introduced 600 fresh words.

His favourite hack? Slapping “un-” in front of words - Unmask, unhand, unlock, unveil – and 309 more.

Anachronisms abound in his plays. He wasn't much of fact checker preferring to focus on drama instead. So, in plays he put billiards in ancient Egypt and clocks in Julius Caesar’s Rome (1,400 years too early).

If you check the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, roughly one-tenth of the most memorable lines ever written or spoken in English come from Shakespeare. One guy. One career. That’s not just talent – that’s a statistical miracle!

Google I/O 2026 Talks: My Picks

2026-05-23T12:21:48.683+05:30

I/O '26 Recap: Everything You Need to Know

Google processes 3.2 quadrillion tokens per month.
It now has 13 products with over a billion users each.
Google's new model Gemini Omni can create anything from any input. It combines Gemini's intelligence with the best of its generative media models for a new level of World understanding, multi-modality and editing.

Software engineering at the tipping point

Build core skills to thrive as an AI-era developer

Three fourth of all code at Google is written by AI.

What's new in the Gemma open model family

What's new in Chrome

Create advanced data driven Gemini API apps

Unlock modern web capabilities in your AI coding workflows

Build your website for the agentic era

Vibe design to build incredible web UI

Elevate the Chrome Extensions developer experience

Break boundaries with Gemini in Chrome DevTools

A fireside chat on the evolution of the developer craft

This Week I Learned - Week 21 2026

2026-05-22T21:42:45.277+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* web.py was originally published while Aaron Swartz worked at reddit.com, where the site used it as it grew to become one of the top 1000 sites according to Alexa and served millions of daily page views. Reddit was rewritten using other tools after being acquired by Condé Nast in 2006.

* Markdown is used widely by websites including Reddit, GitHub and Discord using it, as well as LLMs such as Claude using it to format the files that store accumulated memories.

* Grok Build is xAI's coding agent for the terminal, serving as a direct competitor to Claude Code and the OpenAI Codex CLI.

* Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google all raised effective prices in the last six months. Enterprises that built workflows assuming AI costs would keep falling are now watching annual budgets evaporate in months.

* Uber's CTO sent an internal memo warning the company burned through its entire 2026 AI budget in just four months. American AI software prices have jumped 20% to 37%, and GitHub (owned by Microsoft) is dropping flat-rate plans for usage-based billing across its products. - Hedgie

* Model family prices change rapidly. Old models get deprecated. Best to be prepared.

Add multi-tier routing to your architecture
Compare completed-task costs, not token price. A 2* more expensive model can halve the retry rate, making it cheaper per successful output.
Migrate by model capability, not model family. Switch to models with similar latency, context window, output format compliance and reasoning depth.
Evaluate open-source models. DeepSeek models at self-hosted inference costs can be 90% cheaper for commodity (not frontier) tasks.

The first 18 months of most AI model families are discounted customer acquisition. Then value extraction follows.

Just keep asking yourself: “what’s our plan for when this model changes or deprecates?”

* Promptfoo is an open-source command-line tool designed for test-driven prompt engineering and LLM (Large Language Model) evaluation. It allows users to test multiple prompts against predefined test cases, evaluate outputs side-by-side, and integrate with test frameworks.

* Sycophantic AI Decreases Prosocial Intentions and Promotes Dependence - The AI is not just telling you what you want to hear. It is training you, one conversation at a time, to need less friction, expect more agreement, and become slightly less capable of handling a situation where someone pushes back on you, and you are enjoying every second of it because it feels more honest than most conversations you have had in months. Sycophancy is a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.

* Infrastructure is invisible as long as it works. In 2025, running the Open Food Facts infrastructure cost around €169,660 for servers, subscriptions, a full-time engineer, and volunteers who contribute dozens of days a year.

* Google used to offer a static Image Charts API where you could generate charts with a simple URL. This service was shut down in 2019 (deprecated since 2012). If you want the simplest "pass parameters via URL → get chart image" experience, switch to QuickChart (free tier available, open-source self-host option too). It's the most popular replacement for the old Google Image Charts. These images are suitable for embedding in email, SMS, chatbots, and other formats. Charts are rendered by Chart.js, a popular open-source charting library.

* QuickChart was founded by Ian Webster in 2015

* Sivaramakrishnan "Soma" Somasegar joined Microsoft in 1989 and spent his first decade at Microsoft on the NT team, ultimately contributing to eight releases of the Windows operating system. He founded Microsoft’s India Development Center in Hyderabad in 1998. In 2014, Somasegar was an internal advocate and leader for Microsoft’s decision to open-source the .NET core server runtime and framework, a surprise move that marked a significant shift in the company’s approach toward the broader developer world.

* Ultrasound’s very short wavelength allows it to travel through biological tissues. It is also propagated as a mechanical wave, where one molecule pushes against the next, and therefore it travels at a faster speed in stiff and incompressible tissues such as bone, but is slower in tissues such as fat. This property is used to generate ultrasound ‘images’ of human foetuses.

* Some turtle species can detect Earth's magnetic field, enabling them to navigate back to the beaches where they hatched.

* In a stark shift, the India’s stock market is on the verge of dropping out of the world’s five biggest for the first time in three years. Its market value soared from pandemic lows to a record $5.73 trillion in September 2024, with the NSE Nifty 50 Index the world’s best-performing major market at the time. Since the peak, $924 billion of market value has evaporated. Foreign investors are rushing to the exit — they have withdrawn a net $42 billion since the end of 2024...foreign investors ... now hold less than domestic institutions for the first time in more than 20 years. The stock market is heavily weighted toward IT services, a $315 billion industry led by Infosys and Tata Consultancy Services. The IT industry’s Nifty weight has fallen to about 8% from more than 17% in early 2022. As many as 15 million Indians work in IT services and global capability centers, many in some of the country’s best-paying private jobs. A structural slowdown in hiring or a more fundamental shift in global demand for the services would ripple across the economy, into real estate, consumption, lending and the broader financial sector. Gross domestic product will likely expand 6.5% in 2027 and 2028 each after an average annual rate of 8.3% in the last four years, the International Monetary Fund predicts. - Japan Times

* Satire is a literary genre where “topical issues” are “held up to scorn by means of ridicule or irony.” It is one of the most effective art forms revealing the absurdities, hypocrisies and contradictions in so much of life. It has the unique ability to quickly and clearly make a point and facilitate understanding in ways that other forms of communication and expression often do not. However, we cannot ignore that like all forms of speech and expression, satirical expression maybe restricted in accordance with the restrictions envisaged under Article 19(2) of the Constitution. For example, when satire targets society’s marginalized, it can have the power to confirm and strengthen people’s prejudices against the group in question, which only marginalizes and disenfranchises them more. - Supreme Court of India, Indibily Creative Pvt. Ltd. vs Govt. Of West Bengal

HOW TO Add a Backup Image in HTML When the Main Image Fails to Load

2026-05-21T15:29:03.041+05:30

In HTML, an image can use a backup source with the onerror event. The browser first tries to load the main image from src. If that image is missing, blocked, or fails to load, onerror runs and replaces it with a fallback image.

<img

src="actual-image.jpg"

alt="Product image"

onerror="this.onerror=null; this.src='backup-image.jpg';"

The JavaScript code

this.onerror=null

prevents an infinite loop if the backup image also fails.

That prevents an endless loop if the backup image also fails. Without it, the browser could keep triggering onerror again and again.

This technique is useful for product images, profile photos, brand logos, or any place where a missing image should show a placeholder instead of a broken image icon.

For instance, this Dynamic Dummy Image Generator can be used to generate placeholder images of desired dimensions.

For multiple responsive image options, use <picture>, but that is for format/viewport fallback, not broken-image fallback:

<picture>

<source srcset="image.webp" type="image/webp">

<img src="image.jpg" alt="Product image">

</picture>

Lorempics and JSONExamples also provide similar dynamic image generation service with the additional ability to change font size.

This Week I Learned - Week 20 2026

2026-05-15T13:02:54.539+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* GoatCounter is an open source web analytics platform available as a free donation-supported hosted service or self-hosted app. It is a privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics or Matomo.

* MotherDuck is a collaborative serverless analytics platform that lets you query and analyze data in cloud databases and from cloud storage, using your browser or any of the DuckDB APIs.

* Cloudflare has built its own version of WordPress that solves some security issues with the older CMS—it’s called EmDash.

* Apple reported an 84% first-quarter rise in new apps on its App Store, putting it on a pace to surpass 2025’s 600K apps.

* Contrary to the predictions of an AI jobpocalypse, I predict the opposite: There will be an AI jobapalooza! - Andrew Ng

* The Batch -

As OpenAI prepares to discontinue the Sora app and API, ByteDance added Seedance 2.0, its multimodal video generator, to its popular video-editing app CapCut - the second-largest consumer AI product behind only ChatGPT. While competitors offer either a video generator or an editing app, ByteDance owns both.

* OpenAI’s withdrawal of Sora points to a hard truth: Given the current cost of computation, AI-generated video is an expensive consumer product.

* Nvidia uses AI to design chips. Nvidia built two large language models based on LLaMA 2 for internal use - ChipNeMo and BugNeMo.

* Awesome GitHub Copilot hosts community-contributed agents, instructions, and skills to enhance your GitHub Copilot experience

* Pomiferous.com showcases more than 7,000 apple varieties from all around the world.

* According to the Economic Survey 2025–26, only about 2% of startups globally engaged in curating AI training data are based in India, compared with 40% in the United States and 21% in the European Union.

* India is the world’s largest app download market—yet Indian developers make up just 3–5% of the global base, with foreign apps topping the charts. - ET

* Memory chip prices doubled in the first quarter alone from the previous quarter and are forecast to climb up to 63% in the current quarter due to AI data centre demand that has impacted supply for smartphones, laptops and automobiles. - Reuters

* Uber Technologies' Hyderabad Centre of Excellence (CoE), its first outside the United States, currently employs over 600 engineering professionals.

* Telangana recorded the highest number of cybercrime cases in the country in 2024, according to the latest National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) report. Telangana accounted for more than one-fourth of the country’s cybercrime cases in 2024. Hyderabad continued to rank among the country’s most cybercrime-affected metropolitan cities.

* The professional killers of the personal assistant of the new West Bengal Chief Minister were identified after being traced through their UPI payment.

* The Public Sector Undertaking, HMT has the second largest land bank in the country after the Indian Railways. The PSU once held close to 18,000 acres of land, of which 1,000 acres remain across Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Pinjore in Haryana, and Kalamassery in Kerala.

* In the last financial year, more than 2.1 million taxpayers updated their ITRs for assessment years 2021-22 to 2024-25 and paid additional taxes of over 2,500 crore rupees. Many of these taxpayers had claimed exemptions citing fraudulent donations to religious institutions, charitable trusts, or educational institutions.

An interesting pattern that emerged was that individuals sharing the same chartered accountants were donating to the same institutions.

* "Hamba Hamba" (often extended as "Hamba Hamba, Ramba Ramba, Kamba Kamba, Dumba Dumba, Bumba Bumba, Bomba Bomba") originated from a February 10, 2021, public rally speech by Mamata Banerjee in Murshidabad, West Bengal. The phrase itself has no deeper meaning beyond her colorful way of calling defectors noisy traitors ("cows"). In Bengali colloquial usage, the sound a cow makes is often rendered as "hamba" (similar to "moo" in English). She rhythmically listed variations of cow-like noises to mock party defectors and emphasize the "chaos" or "noise" they were creating after switching sides. The short ~7-second clip of her enthusiastically chanting these rhythmic, nonsensical-sounding words sounded humorous and meme-worthy out of context. It quickly spawned memes, remixes, and jokes across social media with people treating it like a catchy slogan or song. Nightclub remixes of the phrase "Hamba Hamba" have gone viral across Bengal as symbols of anti-incumbency and farewell festivities following the historic power shift after TMC's defeat in the 2026 West Bengal elections.

* Global natural diamond prices have plunged 46%. But India’s wedding traditions and soaring gold prices are providing a unique buffer. - ET

* "We want to disrupt high frequency services. If you look at an Indian household, the second highest wallet share of discretionary income is on services. That is roughly 50000 a year. The only category which has the highest wallet share is groceries...This (home services) is a $53B market where 98% of the transactions are still happening offline" - Aayush Agarwal, founder and CEO of Snabbit which was launched in 2024.

* Hypertension is silent — there are often no symptoms until the condition has triggered other health problems. Chronic high blood pressure can make smaller arteries, such as capillaries, less flexible, which means they won’t dilate in response to exercise or other times when greater blood flow is needed. It also damages blood vessel walls, creating conditions that allow cholesterol and fats to accumulate and form plaque.

As plaque builds, a process called atherosclerosis further thickens the arteries. If plaque or a blood clot blocks blood flow, a heart attack can occur. As it does to the arteries, high blood pressure causes the heart to thicken and enlarge.

Heart failure is a chronic condition where the heart weakens and struggles to pump an adequate amount of blood. Hypertension increases heart failure risk because a heart that is thick and stiff can become overworked.

Ischemic strokes occur when there’s a blockage in an artery to the brain. This can disrupt blood flow in the retina. Lack of blood flow can cause damage and, if enough accumulates, lead to a complication called hypertensive retinopathy, which can cause blurred vision or even loss of eyesight.

Smaller arterioles leading to the eyes also can thicken. Lack of blood flow can cause damage and, if enough accumulates, lead to a complication called hypertensive retinopathy, which can cause blurred vision or even loss of eyesight.

Long-term stress to the glomeruli, small blood vessels in the kidneys that act as filters to remove waste, can contribute to the development of kidney disease.

Hypertension can contribute to the development of peripheral artery disease, an artery-clogging condition where blood flow is reduced in the limbs.

A Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet — which prioritizes vegetables, fruit, whole grains, lean proteins and low-fat dairy — have been shown to help keep blood pressure levels within a healthy range.

- The Washington Post

* The first dialysis treatment in the United States was carried out at Mount Sinai Medical Center in New York in 1948. In India, CMC-Vellore is known as the birthplace of dialysis treatment.

* "Civilized man refused to adapt himself to his environment. Instead he adapted his environment to suit him. So he built cities, roads, vehicles, machinery. And he put up power lines to run his labour-saving devices. But he didn't know when to stop. The more he improved his surroundings to make life easier... the more complicated he made it. Now his children are sentenced to 10 to 15 years of school, to learn... how to survive in this complex and hazardous habitat. And civilized man, who refused to adapt to his surroundings... now finds he has to adapt and re-adapt... every hour of the day to his self-created environment." - The Gods Must Be Crazy

* "Advice by confident people is more likely to be followed." - Vivek Nityananda in Beyond Doubt: Overconfidence and What It Means for Modern Society

Google Summer of Code 2026: Open Food Facts

2026-05-14T21:56:26.960+05:30

Google Summer of Code (GSoC) has long been the ultimate launchpad for aspiring developers. As Google’s premier global open-source program, it offers contributors the rare opportunity to work on live open-source software projects alongside some of the world’s most respected and seasoned developer communities. But as open-source engineering continues to take center stage globally, getting a foot in the door has evolved from a difficult challenge into an elite competitive arena.

The scale of this competition was fully on display for the GSoC 2026 cohort. Globally, the program saw a massive influx of 15,245 applicants, all vying for a coveted spot. Out of those thousands of hopefuls, only 1,141 contributors were selected worldwide. This places the global acceptance rate at a razor-thin ~7%, a metric that makes GSoC more selective than many Ivy League institutions.

Open Food Facts & GSoC

For the contributors who do beat the odds, they get to write code that directly impacts millions of lives. One of the most prominent and inspiring examples of this is Open Food Facts.

Often called the "Wikipedia of food products," Open Food Facts is a volunteer-run non-profit that hosts a free, collaborative database of over 4 million food products from 150 countries. By using crowdsourcing, optical character recognition (OCR), and machine learning, they empower consumers to decode fine-print labels, track allergens, and evaluate environmental impacts (like the Eco-Score).

Because of its profound real-world utility and robust developer ecosystem, Open Food Facts has earned a highly respected tenure in the program. To date, Open Food Facts has been selected as an official GSoC mentoring organization across four milestone years:

2018: Their early GSoC days focused heavily on foundational infrastructure and implementing cutting-edge Deep Learning/OCR tools to automatically scan and extract data from nutritional facts tables.

2022: GSoC contributors shifted towards expanding mobile capability and data architecture, famously building an offline mode for their Flutter application and designing a specialized user-friendly Taxonomy Editor to map complex food data relationships.

2025: A massive year for the organization, where students built the next-generation Open Food Facts Explorer frontend and fundamentally optimized the developer experience through cloud-powered automation.

2026: Continuing their legacy in the current cohort, mentoring a new batch of elite contributors to scale their AI-driven food transparency goals.

Open Food Facts at Google Summer of Code 2026 is a great example of how open source can drive positive change. It’s where coding meets community, and where small contributions can lead to big improvements in food knowledge worldwide.

Treating a Phone Like a Life Partner

2026-05-12T10:02:00.133+05:30

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

This Week I Learned - Week 19 2026

2026-05-09T08:52:10.890+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft all reported impressive quarterly earnings on Wednesday, surpassing Wall Street expectations thanks to booming demand for AI and cloud services. AI continues to be the main growth engine, with the four companies projected to invest around $650 billion in AI infrastructure this year.

* SpaceX & XAI will provide Anthropic with access to Memphis-based Colossus 1, one of the world’s largest and fastest-deployed AI supercomputers, to provide additional capacity for Claude. The supercomputer is powered by 220,000+ NVIDIA GPUs.

* Palo Alto Networks, a US-based cybersecurity firm, is set to acquire AI infrastructure startup Portkey to strengthen its AI security stack for enterprise use of autonomous agents, at twice its estimated $60–70 million valuation.

* Portkey’s AI gateway sits between applications and large language models, helping companies monitor, manage and secure AI traffic. Palo Alto Networks plans to fold it into Prisma AIRS as a central control plane for agentic AI systems.

Portkey was founded in 2023 by BITS Pilani alumnus Rohit Agarwal and SRM Chennai alumnus Ayush Garg.

* India is the second largest smartphone market in the world and the third largest PC market for Apple.

* A look at low-trust vs high-trust societies through Apple’s sales policy in India and the US:

India - "Products purchased at the Apple Store in India cannot be refunded or exchanged."

US - "In the unlikely event a product is not what you expected, you can return or exchange it with a receipt within 14 days of the date you receive the product from Apple."

* PhonePe and Google Pay together dominate more than 80% of the UPI market, while Paytm holds about 10%.

* Coinbase co-founder and CEO, Brian Armstrong, informed that, it is "reducing" ~14% of its workforce and "non-technical teams are now shipping production code."

* The Russia-Ukraine war has been significantly shaped by drone warfare, with drones accounting for up to 80% of casualties in some engagements.

* When two different datasets sync up to explain each other - Noise complaints & helicopter flight tracks visualized.

* A loud vehicle passing nearby can make the heart pound. Large single-cylinder engines, like those on the Royal Enfield Bullet, generate a lot of energy in the infrasound and low-frequency range (15-50 Hz), right near the edge of human hearing. The chest cavity resonates at around 50-60 Hz, while the abdominal cavity resonates at about 4-8 Hz. This can create a physical sensation in the body that amplifies the sense of threat triggered by the audible sound.

* "From the 1973 oil crisis to the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, and more recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, the world has repeatedly encountered “black swan” events - unexpected, disruptive, and far-reaching. Each of these moments tested systems, challenged assumptions, and reshaped behaviours.

The common thread across these events is clear: resilience is built through adaptation, not avoidance." - Avinash Satwalekar, President, Franklin Templeton Asset Management (India) Pvt. Ltd.

* Cable News Network (CNN) was founded by Ted Turner in 1980. It upended established broadcasting with its dedication to around-the-clock breaking news and shot to global recognition with its coverage of the Gulf War in 1990-91.

* 10.64 lakh UPI fraud cases worth ₹805 crore were reported in FY26 (till November)

* Gold has always been India’s most widely held asset. Estimates from the World Gold Council suggest Indian households hold between 25,000 and 34,600 tonnes of gold. At today’s prices, that equates to a holding worth between $3.8 trillion and $5.2 trillion—roughly equivalent to India’s entire GDP. Most planners recommend a 5% to 10% portfolio allocation.

* Structural deficits in India’s health system - 43 new medical colleges have been established and 11,682 MBBS seats along with 8,967 postgraduate seats have been approved for the 2025-26 academic year.

* Eleven out of 18 All India Institutes of Medical Sciences report around 40% vacancies in their teaching and research faculty positions.

There are 5,491 CHCs across 785 districts — about seven CHCs per district

The vacancy rate in 5,491 rural Community Health Centres (CHC) across 757 districts in India is 79.9%, with only 4,413 specialists available against a requirement of 21,964.

* Kodinhi in Kerala is a village of 2000 families with over 400 twins -