Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

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 -

GitHub’s Growing Pains

2026-05-08T21:06:15.751+05:30

GitHub has experienced explosive user growth in recent years, particularly accelerating in 2025. The platform crossed 100 million developers in 2023 and reached over 180 million developers by late 2025, with more than 36 million new developers joining in 2025 alone—equating to roughly one new developer every second.

This rapid expansion, further amplified by AI-powered tools like GitHub Copilot, has driven significant increases in activity: hundreds of millions of pull requests, nearly 1 billion commits in 2025 (up 25% YoY), and surging repository creation and API usage.

Impact on Availability

This hyper-growth has strained GitHub’s infrastructure, leading to multiple high-impact outages and degraded performance in early-to-mid 2026. GitHub’s own engineering leadership has publicly acknowledged that rapid load growth, architectural coupling between services, and challenges in handling large-scale workloads (including monorepos and AI-driven automation) have caused cascading issues.

A Reddit user charted out the availability of GitHub over the last decade: near-perfect stability early on, then visibly higher volatility as scale and complexity grow—likely tracking the platform’s massive user growth and heavier real-time workloads.

Source: Reddit r/github

The rapid pace of growth is starting to take its toll. New activations for Copilot Student, Pro, and Pro+ are temporarily on hold.

Key incidents in early 2026 (e.g., February and March) affected core services such as Git operations, Pull Requests, Actions, Search, and the API, sometimes with failure rates reaching 40%+ for web requests during peaks.

Mitchell Hashimoto, the co-founder of HashiCorp and the creator of several foundational open-source DevOps and infrastructure tools, announced that Ghostty (his current major terminal emulator project that he has been developing as a passion project since around 2021) is leaving GitHub due to frequent outages disrupting git operations, CI runs, PR reviews, and issue discussions, with impacts occurring almost daily over recent months.

Hashimoto is the guy behind Vagrant, Terraform (Infrastructure as Code), and much of the HashiCorp ecosystem (Packer, Consul, Vault, Nomad, and others.)

As GitHub user 1299 since February 2008, he described 18+ years of daily use as a core part of his life and open-source career and expressed personal sadness about the departure.

In an April 2026 update, GitHub’s CTO noted the need to scale capacity dramatically (initially targeting 10X, later referencing even higher multiples) to keep pace with demand.

In summary, while GitHub remains the dominant platform for code collaboration, its unprecedented user and activity growth—fueled by global developer adoption and AI tools—has exposed scaling limits, resulting in more frequent reliability challenges that impact developer productivity worldwide. GitHub is said to be actively investing in infrastructure improvements to address these issues.

Some interesting stats from GitHub Octoverse reports (annual):

Users (Developers on GitHub)

2015: ~9 million users
2016: 12 million
2018 (following Microsoft acquisition): ~28 million
2020: ~56 million
2023: 100+ million
2024–25: ~100–120 million+ (GitHub blog / Octoverse updates)

Repositories

2015: ~21 million repos
2018: ~85 million
2023: 330+ million repositories
2025: 630 million total repositories with +121M new repositories in 2025

63% of all repositories were public.

Open source saw record participation globally, especially from India

Open source development reached record levels this year with 1.12 billion contributions across public repositories

Six of the overall top 10 projects by total contributors are AI‑centric (vllm, huggingface/transformers, modelcontextprotocol/servers, llama.cpp, etc.).

- Article co-written with Grok

HOW TO Optimize Token Usage in GitHub Copilot

2026-05-04T10:51:47.317+05:30

GitHub Copilot is moving to usage‑based billing on June 1, 2026, where token consumption (input, output, cached) directly affects costs. To optimize tokens, you need to reduce unnecessary context, use caching, and structure prompts efficiently. 1 2 3 4 5

How Copilot Uses Tokens

Input tokens → what you send (code, prompts, context).
Output tokens → what Copilot generates.
Cached tokens → reused context (cheaper than new input).
Context loading (files, repo, history) often consumes 80–90% of tokens, not the generated code itself. 5

Practical Strategies to Optimize Token Usage

1. Control Context Aggressively

Avoid opening large/unrelated files while prompting.
Limit selection scope before asking Copilot.
Exclude build, log, and generated files at the enterprise level (e.g., /target/**, *.class, *.xml). 4

2. Break Tasks into Micro‑Operations

❌ Bad: “Refactor entire microservice.”
✅ Better: “Refactor this method to use reactive pattern.”

Smaller scope = fewer files scanned = fewer tokens. 5

3. Reset Sessions Frequently

Long sessions accumulate history → exponential token growth.
Start new chats for unrelated tasks. 5

4. Use Prompt Caching

VS Code 1.118 introduced 93% cache reuse for Copilot sessions.
Cached tokens cost ~10× less than new input tokens. 3

5. Optimize Prompts

Be explicit: mention exact file paths or modules.
Avoid vague prompts like “Analyze the whole repo.”
Use .github/copilot-instructions.md for concise repo‑level guidance. 5

6. Limit Tool & Agent Usage

Each tool call = extra tokens.
Disable unused tools and avoid unnecessary agent chaining. 5

Admin & Enterprise Controls

Content Exclusion → remove irrelevant files from Copilot context globally.
Budget Controls → set per‑user or team limits on AI credits.
Pooled Credits → share unused credits across teams. 4 6

Takeaway

Most savings come from reducing context, not output.
Use caching, break tasks down, reset sessions, and exclude irrelevant files.
Admins should enforce content exclusions and budget controls.
With usage‑based billing, efficient prompting = lower costs + faster responses.

Draft notes co‑created with Copilot — a work in progress that will grow with further study.

This Week I Learned - Week 18 2026

2026-05-02T07:52:39.736+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* AI is influencing not only how fast code is written, but which languages and tools developers use. - Octoverse 2025

* GitHub Copilot CLI for Beginners -

* Apple's Support app update v5.13 accidentally included CLAUDE.md files, which are configuration documents used to guide Anthropic's Claude Code AI coding assistant on codebase architecture and rules.

Apple quickly released v5.13.1 to remove the files, exposing a rare view into their use of third-party AI tools for app development while highlighting a build process oversight at the highly secretive company.

* Claude sometimes refuses or postpones work based on inferred time/context, possibly to manage token limits, avoid rushed outputs, or simulate thoughtful behavior.

* As A.I. makes the production of knowledge work more and more efficient, the job of presenting, debating, lobbying, arm-twisting, reassuring or just plain selling the work appears to be rising in importance. And the need for those sometimes messy human tasks may limit the number of people A.I. displaces. - NYT

* Anthropic's Project Glasswing gave 40 US companies early access to Mythos so they could harden their systems in advance.

Companies testing Mythos reported it could detect tens of thousands of vulnerabilities, compared to around 500 found by Anthropic’s earlier model, Opus 4.6—a twentyfold increase in just one generation.

* ChatGPT Images 2.0 is OpenAI's first image model with thinking capabilities. With thinking mode, the can automatically browse the internet and find relevant contents for reference.

You can ask for the aspect ratio you want in the prompt or select from preset options to regenerate any image in new dimensions.

Instead of prompting one image at a time and stitching the project together yourself, you can ask for a coherent set of up to ten outputs in one go with character and object continuity, that sequentially build on one another.

* Chinese open-source models accounted for roughly one-third of global A.I. use last year, according to a study by OpenRouter, an A.I. model marketplace. DeepSeek was the most widely used, followed by models from Alibaba, the Chinese internet company. - NYT

* CRAVIS (Climate Resilience Analytics and Visualisation Intelligence System) is an integrated platform that brings together historical trends, future projections, and sectoral data in one place.

It has a built-in Agentic AI layer that lets you ask questions and get source-backed insights on questions of heat stress, changing rainfall patterns and extreme events.

* Web QR Code Scanner is a handy open-source web app by Lazar Laszlo that lets you scan QR codes directly in the browser using your camera or an uploaded image.

* Nikhil Pahwa has built a tool to convert Office files into clean Markdown or JSON

* "People who are into Python aren't actually into Python. They just want to get the work done." - Bram Cohen, creator of BitTorrent

* In 2008, Professor Harald zur Hausen received the Nobel Prize for his discovery that persistent infection with high-risk strains of the Human Papillomavirus (HPV) is the cause of cervical cancer. His discovery paved the way for the development of prophylactic vaccines as well as tests to detect the infectious agent. The first generation of vaccines were directed against the two most virulent strains, HPV 16 and 18, that account for 70% of cervical cancers globally but 85% in India. India launched a nationwide HPV vaccination campaign on February 28, 2026, aimed at vaccinating approximately 11.5 million girls aged 14 to prevent cervical cancer, which is the second most common cancer among women in the country.

* Sucking on candies helps many people during flight travel, primarily by reducing ear discomfort caused by pressure changes, often called "airplane ear" or ear barotrauma. It's especially useful during ascent and descent.

During takeoff and landing (especially descent), cabin pressure changes rapidly. The Eustachian tubes (which connect your middle ear to the back of your nose/throat) need to open to equalize pressure. If they don't, you feel fullness, popping, pain, or muffled hearing. Sucking on hard candy (or chewing gum) promotes frequent swallowing and slight jaw movement.

Swallowing activates small muscles that briefly open the Eustachian tubes, allowing air to flow in or out and balance pressure.

* While viruses and bacteria cause sore throats, cold air from fans or drinks creates favorable conditions by triggering vasoconstriction that limits local immune cell delivery and by drying the throat's mucus layer and cilia, impairing pathogen clearance. Studies link lower temperatures and humidity to increased upper respiratory infection risk. Practical prevention includes breathing through the nose as a natural humidifier, positioning fans/AC so they don't hit your face directly and staying hydrated to preserve the mucosal barrier against existing microbes.

* The average adult body contains roughly 5 liters of blood. The heart is a master of recycling. These same 5 liters are pushed through your entire circulatory system roughly once every minute.

At a resting heart rate, your entire blood volume completes a full circuit of your body about 1,440 times a day.

5 Liters/minute x 60 minutes x 24 hours = 7, 200 Liters per day

Blood from the right heart → lungs → oxygen in, CO₂ out

Blood from the left heart → body

Distribution of cardiac output at rest is roughly:

Brain: ~15%
Kidneys: ~20%
Muscles: ~15–20% (varies)
GI/liver: ~20–25%
Skin: ~5–10% for thermoregulation (heat loss)
Heart itself (coronary circulation): ~4–5%; the heart needs its own dedicated blood supply
Bones, connective tissue, and others: ~5%; includes resting tissues with lower metabolic demand

* The UAE has withdrawn from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a cartel that it joined in 1967, and OPEC+.

OPEC was founded on 14 September 1960 in Baghdad, Iraq, by five countries: Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela, with the goal of giving oil-producing nations greater control over their resources and pricing, which had been dominated by Western oil companies known as the "Seven Sisters".

OPEC+ is a broader alliance formed in 2016, including OPEC members plus additional major oil producers like Russia, Kazakhstan, and Azerbaijan. This coalition controls roughly 40–45% of global oil production, enhancing its ability to influence international energy prices.

As of April 2026, OPEC has 12 member countries: Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Venezuela, Libya, Algeria, Nigeria, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea, Congo, and the UAE, though the UAE’s membership ends on 1 May 2026. Membership has changed over time, with countries like Angola, Ecuador, Qatar and Indonesia leaving due to strategic or production-related reasons.

* A nemophilist is a person who loves the forest, woods, or woodland scenery.

* "As it turns out, necessity is not the mother of invention, noticed necessity is. The problem needs to affect the important, before the problem is seen as important. The long-handled mop arrived when middle-class households began cleaning their own floors. What changed was who the problem belonged to." - Santosh Desai

Open Food Facts Slack Notes: Data, Trends, and Discoveries

2026-04-30T22:02:39.205+05:30

Open Food Facts is the largest and more comprehensive open database on the planet, by far. This global collaborative citizen-led project is supported by an international community of more than 150,000 contributors.

The Open Food Facts Slack (open to all) has several channels for discussions, updates, and collaborations. I’ll keep sharing interesting facts I come across in the conversations there, right here:

* Pierre (teolemon) - The data (is)...legally acquired, through crowdsourcing and/or AI extraction from Crowdsourcing or existing OFF data. We don’t allow scraping for legal reasons.

* Alex Bourreau - I made a small tool to check what your contributions to Open Food Facts are used for : https://contributionreuses.bourreau.dev/

Enter your OFF username and it shows you a list of scientific articles that relied on data of products you've created !

* James Addison - OpenFoodFacts does have methods to detect products where errors seem likely; it tracks those errors and distributes them to registered volunteers, who then help by reviewing the errors, often fixing them where possible.

some links that I'd recommend:

an overview of the process: https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/Data_quality

the errors that OFF detects: https://wiki.openfoodfacts.org/List_of_data_quality_errors_(generated)

data quality trends over time dashboard: https://mirabelle.openfoodfacts.org/-/dashboards/data-quality-dashboard

* Stephane - Open Food Facts computes the Nutri-Score, but the formula was created by the EREN research team, and then further developed at the European level

How is NOVA class calculated? Is the algorithm designated by the system, or is it made up for OFF?

* Pierre (teolemon) - it’s following the Scientific paper of Pr. Monteiro, and we use a list of Ultra-processing markers defined in the paper to trigger NOVA 4, we also use categories in some cases as a supplement (like for Sodas where the whole category is NOVA 4)

* Tacite - If you mix two databases (your local + OFF), the OFF licence requires you to share your local database

* Stephane - OFF currently does not compute recommendations for alternative products. One option is to do a search query for the category of the product, and then rank products based on their nutrition etc.

W.I.P

Optimized Workflow

2026-04-28T15:38:19.739+05:30

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

Use Case vs User Story

2026-04-28T13:05:38.618+05:30

Allen Holub explains the difference between a use case and a user story -

Bob Martin describes use cases pretty well in his book Clean Architecture:

"A use case is a description of the way that an automated system is used. It specifies the input to be provided by the user, the output to be returned to the user, and the processing steps involved in producing that output." Put another way, a use case describes how a user uses a computer program. A use case describes how to use an existing program, or, if the program can't do everything necessary, it identifies aspects of the program we'll have to create. Use cases live in the implementation space.

A user story, on the other hand, is a description of the user's work. It is literally the user's story. The story describes a domain-level problem and, when fleshed out, describes how a user solves that problem when working at the domain level. The story describes the user's work, not ours. A story does not describe or specify a computer program at all. It does not describe how a computer program works. Stories live in the domain—in the problem space.

Neither use cases nor stories specify programmer tasks. You cannot represent them as "tickets" (despite what Jira claims). They are part of the architectural process, not the construction process. That's true even when architecture and construction are concurrent. You cannot estimate either because neither has anything to do with the construction.

Both use cases and stories are useful in different ways. Both are elements of the architectural process, but you cannot even think about implementation until that architecture, or a portion of it, is at least roughed out in your head. A skilled programmer can work on both simultaneously.

Beyond Booking: The Rise of Intelligent Tools for Indian Train Travel

2026-04-26T18:22:17.243+05:30

Trains are the lifeline of India. From the humble beginnings of online ticket booking (which was an absolute game-changer), we’ve come a long way. What started as simple add-ons like checking waitlist status or seeing which stations fall on your travel route has now exploded into a full-blown ecosystem of smart tools and services.

Today, you can track trains in real-time, check for seat availability, predict delays, analyze patterns, and make travel decisions like a pro. Indian railways data has truly become everyone’s playground.

Here’s a list of some of the other cool software tools and services that are making train travel smarter, smoother, and way more fun:

Google Maps Presents: Traffic Trauma Live

2026-04-26T12:03:06.161+05:30

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

Google Maps officially rolled out AI-powered audio notifications for accident-prone areas (Sample: "Accident prone area for the next 500 meters") and proactive congestion alerts ("Congestion 1km ahead. You're on the best route") in India in November, 2025.

While basic traffic alerts have been around for years, this specific update introduced "Accident-Prone Area Alerts" and "Proactive Traffic Alerts" as part of a major integration of Gemini AI into the app. Maps also displays official speed limits beside the in-app speedometer.

India was a pioneer market for these specific AI-driven safety features. The proactive and accident-specific audio notifications were part of a specialized "India-First" push.

What was "India-First"?

Accident-Prone Area Alerts: This feature was developed specifically for the Indian road context. Google collaborated directly with local Indian authorities (like the NHAI and traffic police in cities like Gurugram and Hyderabad) to map out "black spots." While some safety features exist globally, the specific voice-guided warning for high-risk zones debuted in India first.

Proactive Traffic Alerts: India was one of the first two markets (alongside the US) to receive these notifications that alert you to major jams even when you aren't actively using navigation.

Flyover Navigation: The voice-guided "Take the flyover" vs. "Stay below" instructions in 9 Indian languages was a massive technical update designed specifically to solve the "Indian Flyover Dilemma," which later influenced how Google handles complex interchanges globally.

The "Why" Behind the India Launch

Google treats India as a "living lab" for navigation for a few reasons:

Density & Complexity: If an AI can successfully navigate a driver through Bengaluru or Mumbai, it can work almost anywhere.

Two-Wheeler Market: India is the world's largest two-wheeler market, leading to features like "Navatars" and narrow-road routing that started here before expanding to Southeast Asia and Latin America.

Local Data Partnerships: The deep integration with Indian traffic police to mark accident zones provided a data set that wasn't as readily available in a unified way in other regions.

This Week I Learned - Week 17 2026

2026-04-24T23:59:27.861+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* From The Batch -

- Alignment training teaches LLMs to behave like assistants, but it tethers them to that behavior only loosely. Beyond alignment training, system prompts act as behavioral guardrails, but motivated users can bypass them.

- The lengths of tasks completed autonomously by AI agents have doubled roughly every seven months, according to METR, an independent testing organization

- LLMs' knowledge is still relatively limited with respect to infrastructure and the complex tradeoffs good engineers must make...finding infrastructure bugs — say, a subtle network misconfiguration — can be incredibly difficult and requires deep engineering expertise.

- Research involves thinking through new ideas, formulating hypotheses, running experiments, interpreting them to potentially modify the hypotheses, and iterating until we reach conclusions. Coding agents can speed up the pace at which we can write research code.

- Meta has pivoted from its open-weights strategy to deliver a closed alternative, Muse Spark, a natively multimodal reasoning model with support for tool use and multi-agent orchestration.

* If Indian data keeps training US and Chinese models while domestic capability goes unbuilt, the IT services sector hollows out with nothing to replace it. Well-known independent equity research and brokerage firm Bernstein's ask: fund domestic foundation models, build compute capacity, and push global AI companies to list in India — sharing value with the public.

* Google’s AI writes 50% of code, trailing Anthropic’s near 100%.

* A year after its viral debut, China’s DeepSeek has rolled out its latest AI model, V4.

* Sam Altman’s OpenAI has rolled out GPT-5.5.

* Avi Kivity developed the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor, which powers many production cloud environments. Following his work on KVM, Kivity developed the Seastar framework and the ScyllaDB database. He co-founded the company ScyllaDB with Dor Laor.

* Firefox stores your history and bookmarks in a single file called places.sqlite.

* Korean gaming publisher Krafton Inc's PUBG Mobile remains banned in India, but its Battlegrounds Mobile India consistently ranks among the country’s three top revenue-generating games.

* Income or consumption share of the richest 10%, 1963 to 2024

* Open Source your Knowledge

* How To Learn In Private

* In medicine, a differential diagnosis is the systematic process used to distinguish a particular disease or condition from others that present with similar symptoms.

Think of it as a medical "elimination round." When you tell a doctor your symptoms, they rarely have a single answer immediately. Instead, they create a list of all possible "suspects" and then work to rule them out until only the most likely cause remains.

* Kangaroos evolved the ability to hop larger distances on two legs, as that was more efficient than running on four legs. Female kangaroos can pause embryonic development through a process called embryonic diapause, allowing them to time births for better survival conditions.

* In the last 12 months, Hyundai & LG together took $4.7 billion out of their Indian subsidiaries and sent it to their Korean parents.

* 28% of mobiles in India are made by domestic companies.

* According to the National Sample Survey’s 80th Round Report on Household Social Consumption: Health, 15% of Telangana’s population reported some form of illness in a 15-day period, which is higher than the national average of 13.1%. The average medical expenditure per hospitalisation (excluding childbirth) (as in-patient) in TG is among highest in India at ₹52,743. The national average is comparatively lower at ₹37,858.

* Overcharged.in is a free tool for private citizens to benchmark what they pay against official Central Government Health Scheme (CGHS) rates for CGHS beneficiaries.

* Jhalmuri is air-infused indigenous rice crackle with artisanal mustard oil reduction added with some hand-crushed chillies and cloudy coconut chunks.

A Guide to Spec-Driven Development: Plan, Implement, and Validate

2026-04-23T21:30:11.319+05:30

The DeepLearning.AI short course on Spec-Driven Development with Coding Agents introduces a professional paradigm shift in how we build applications using agentic coding assistance.

Rather than "vibe coding"—where developers rely on quick, high-level prompts that often lead to technical debt—SDD brings engineering rigour back to the process.

Agent is the muscle, but the SPEC is the brain - In this workflow, the human takes on the role of a senior architect, providing the "blueprints" (specifications), while the AI agent acts as the "muscle" to implement those designs.

The 1 Hour 20 Minute video course has 15 short lessons -

Introduction - 4 mins
Why spec−driven development? - 4 mins
Workflow overview - 3 mins
Set up your environment - 5 mins
Setup - 1 min
Creating the constitution - 10 mins
Feature specification - 3 mins
Feature implementation - 1 min
Feature validation - 4 mins
Project replanning - 6 mins
The second feature phase - 6 mins
The MVP - 3 mins
Legacy support - 4 mins
Build your own workflow - 6 mins
Agent replaceability - 3 mins
Conclusion - 1 min
Quiz - 10 mins

Key Points of Spec-Driven Development

The Paradigm Shift: SDD decouples the Specification (the "what" and "why") from the Implementation (the "how"). Developers focus on providing the unique context an agent lacks rather than writing code by hand.

Downstream Amplification: One of the primary benefits is the ability to control massive code changes with minor spec adjustments. For instance, changing one sentence in a spec to switch a database can automatically update hundreds of lines of code.

Eliminating Context Decay: Unlike chat-based "vibe coding," where history is often lost or the agent's memory becomes "full," specs provide a permanent, high-quality context that anchors the agent across multiple sessions avoiding the drift that comes from long prompt dialogues.

High Intent Fidelity: By defining problems, constraints, and success criteria upfront, the agent is significantly more likely to produce code that accurately matches your long-term goals.

The Project Constitution: Every project begins with a Constitution, consisting of three pillars: the Mission (vision/scope), the Tech Stack (technologies and constraints), and the Roadmap (sequence of phases).

Feature Development Loops: Work is organized into repeatable loops on isolated branches. Each loop follows a structured Plan, Implement, and Verify process to ensure feature quality and reduce cognitive debt.

The process where an agent creates something and we check or verify it is called human in the loop.

Because agents are so fast at writing code, software developers have lately been talking about cognitive debt, the mental load of tracking what your code is doing and how it has evolved.

To avoid drift, the agent can update the related specs simultaneously, ensuring the docs and code stay in sync.

Human-in-the-Loop Validation: The human's role shifts to supervisor. You review the agent’s work against the spec, using tools like code reviews and automated tests to ensure the implementation hasn't drifted from the original intent.

It’s important to “replan” between features in the SDD workflow, as it’s a great opportunity to reflect, update the constitution and roadmap, and fine-tune your process — a normal step, not a sign of failure.

Support for Brownfield Projects: SDD is not just for new "greenfield" projects. For legacy codebases, agents can "reverse engineer" a project constitution by exploring existing files, commits, and documentation.

Workflow Automation via Skills: A "Skill" in the context of agentic coding is a reusable package of instructions and resources that gives an agent a repeatable capability — handy when you catch yourself retyping the same prompts. Developers can create "Agent Skills"—packages of instructions that give agents repeatable capabilities, such as automatically updating changelogs or running complex validation suites.

Agent Flexibility and Standards: SDD is designed to be agent-agnostic. By using standards like the Agent Client Protocol (ACP) and Model Context Protocol (MCP), developers can switch between different AI models (like Claude or ChatGPT) without losing their established workflow.

The agent landscape moves fast. Keeping specs and tools independent of any single agent lets you switch tools without rebuilding your workflow.

GitHub Markdown Keyboard Shortcuts

2026-04-19T13:37:00.003+05:30

GitHub's web editor (used in issues, pull requests, comments, Markdown files, etc.) has built-in keyboard shortcuts that work in the standard Markdown editing mode -

Keyboard Shortcut	Description
Ctrl + B	Inserts Markdown formatting for bold text
Ctrl + I	Inserts Markdown formatting for italic text
Ctrl + E	Inserts Markdown formatting for inline code (one-liner)
Ctrl + K	Inserts Markdown formatting for a link
Ctrl + Shift + 7	Inserts Markdown formatting for an ordered (numbered) list
Ctrl + Shift + 8	Inserts Markdown formatting for an unordered (bullet) list
Ctrl + Shift + .	Inserts Markdown formatting for a blockquote
Ctrl + Shift + P	Toggles between Write and Preview tabs (in comments, issues, PRs, or file editor)
Ctrl + Enter	Submits the comment/form (in issue/PR/comment fields)
Ctrl + V (with text selected)	Converts pasted URL into a Markdown link
Ctrl + Z	Undo last action
Ctrl + Y	Redo last action

Note: These shortcuts work in GitHub’s web editor for comments, issues, pull requests, Markdown files, and the file editor (including github.dev). They are specific to Windows/Linux. (Mac uses Command instead of Ctrl.)

This Week I Learned - Week 16 2026

2026-04-18T00:04:00.004+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Potato Prompt used in Custom Instructions can make AI stop being a collaborator and start being a "Devil’s Advocate" -

"Whenever I type the word 'Potato' followed by an idea or argument, I want you to ignore your 'helpful' persona. Instead, act as a Hostile Critic. Your only job is to find the 'holes' in my logic. Point out three specific ways my argument could fail, two assumptions I’m making without proof, and one counter-argument I haven't addressed. Do not be polite; be precise."

* Yann LeCun and his team have developed LeWorldModel, the first stable model built with his Joint Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA). Their aim is to create models that go beyond just predicting words, focusing instead on truly understanding the world and how it functions.

* Distillation is a technique where an older “teacher” AI model is used to train a newer, “student,” model that replicates the capabilities of the earlier system — often at a much lower cost than producing an original model from scratch.

Yet distillation has been controversial when used by third parties — particularly in adversary nations like China or Russia — to replicate proprietary work without authorization.

Last year, Anthropic blocked Chinese-controlled companies from using its Claude chatbot model, and in February it identified three Chinese AI labs — DeepSeek, Moonshot, and MiniMax — as illicitly extracting the model’s capability via distillation.

Information-sharing by US AI companies about adversarial distillation echoes a standard practice in the cybersecurity industry, where firms regularly swap data on attacks and adversaries’ tactics as a way to strengthen network defenses. By working together, the AI firms are similarly seeking to more effectively detect the practice, identify who’s responsible and try to prevent unauthorized users from succeeding. - Businessline

* "Today, AI is metered. You rent it by the token.

Indian companies are doing the hardest, most unglamorous work in the digital economy: acquiring price-sensitive users, navigating complex local regulations, and structuring messy domestic data. Yet the highest-margin layer of the entire value chain — the API fee for the intelligence itself — flows immediately outward.

For three decades, India exported human talent to power the global digital economy. But in the generative AI era, selling human effort is a depreciating asset." - Nishant Sahdev

* DeepFace (22.6K Stars on GitHub) is a lightweight Python framework for face recognition and facial attribute analysis, including age, gender, emotion, and race. It’s a hybrid system that integrates state-of-the-art models.

* Gemini 3.1 Flash Live enables low-latency, real-time voice and video interactions. It processes continuous streams of audio, video, or text to deliver immediate, human-like spoken responses, creating a natural conversational experience for your users. The outputs from this model will have SynthID watermarks, which are not perceptible to human listeners. It is based on Gemini 3 Pro.

* "Google engineering appears to have the same AI adoption footprint as John Deere, the tractor company...Google is about average." - Steve Yegge

"Over 40K SWEs use agentic coding weekly here...Google is anything but average." - Addy Osmani, Director, Google Cloud AI

* Google is sunsetting Firebase Studio on March 22, 2027. Move your code to Google AI Studio or Google Antigravity to continue building.

* Vibe coding with Google Antigravity shifts the focus from writing syntax to directing a mission. Instead of micro-managing lines of code, you guide autonomous agents that handle the heavy lifting across your editor, terminal, and browser.

* OpenAI is now offering open source developers six months of API credits for ChatGPT.

* A.I. has “jagged intelligence”: brilliance in some areas, incompetence in others. The term “jagged intelligence” was coined by Andrej Karpathy, one of the founding researchers at OpenAI, a former head of self-driving technology at Tesla and, on social media, one of the most closely watched commentators on the rise of A.I.

* "There is considerable evidence that demonstrates large language models bring value; there also exists considerable evidence that – when applied without human oversight or an ethical framework - large language models are excellent generators of dangerous bullshit at scale.

I find the same to be true of generative coding assistants: they greatly accelerate the generation of disposable code, but at the same time they introduce a dangerous and seductive amount of sloppy legacy that, if left unattended to fester, are a cognitive and economic ticking time bomb" - Grady Booch

* Matthew Gallagher took just two months, $20,000 and more than a dozen artificial intelligence tools to get his start-up off the ground.

To make sure...his A.I. customer service system stuck to the task at hand...he tested it by asking the system for lasagna recipes; it took some tweaking to get it to stop supplying them.

At this point, I kind of want to hire people because I’m lonely,” he said.

- How A.I. Helped One Man (and His Brother) Build a $1.8 Billion Company

* In New York City schools, teachers can use artificial intelligence to generate ideas for lesson plans. They are also encouraged to deploy it for research and drafting some documents. But it should never be used to determine disciplinary action against a student or to assign grades to homework or tests.

Those examples of how artificial intelligence should or should not be used by teachers across New York City’s nearly 1,600 public schools are laid out in an initial A.I. playbook released by the school system, which is the country’s largest.

The guidance represents the first major step in establishing ground rules and safeguards for artificial intelligence in New York City classrooms. - NYT

* "AI systems today are optimised for frictionless completion: reduced time-to-answer, higher engagement, faster resolution. Dopamine hits, like Social Media algorithms. Development requires the opposite: friction, struggle, boredom, social negotiation, the experience of being wrong in front of people you care about." - Nikhil Pahwa

* Netflix prevents screenshots and screen recordings using DRM (like Widevine on Android, FairPlay on iOS). It is enforced at the OS/browser level to protect licensed content.

The video stream stays encrypted. It's decrypted and rendered only in a secure hardware layer (Trusted Execution Environment) that the OS protects—screen capture APIs can't access it.

Result: black video in recordings/screenshots, while UI shows normally. It's the device enforcing content protection, not Netflix "detecting" your recorder.

* On the morning of March 31, IT firm Oracle eliminated up to 30,000 jobs — roughly 18% of its global workforce — in a single automated email with no prior conversation with HR or warning from line managers. Access to company systems was revoked the same day. In India, about 12,000 employees were let go.

The layoffs come right after Oracle closed a profitable quarter with a $6 billion bottom line — revenue of $17.2 billion, up 22% year-on-year. The company’s future looked secure with contracted future revenue at $553 billion, up 325%, almost entirely driven by AI deals.

With that kind of order book and profits, a layoff signals a strategic shift as the company liquidates its workforce to fund AI data centre infrastructure. Analysts have predicted cutting 20,000 to 30,000 employees could generate $8 to $10 billion in additional annual free cash flow. This will allow the company to reallocate payroll cost to AI infrastructure buildout. - The Hindu

* According to Conductor’s 2026 AEO/GEO Benchmarks Report, 25% of Google searches now generate an AI Overview, based on an analysis of 21.9 million queries. AI visibility is becoming a critical new currency for not only AEO (answer engine optimization) and GEO success, but also long-term digital success.

AI Overviews tend to appear most often for informational and how-to queries, especially when users are looking for explanation, synthesis, or step-by-step guidance rather than a single fact.

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) is the practice of optimizing content to be featured in AI-driven answer engines like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) involves optimizing digital content for improved visibility and authority in generative AI engines. It ensures that AI systems can understand and process content across different languages and cultures.

* NeophyteID is an AI-powered mobile application designed to help users identify and manage invasive plant species across Kerala. Developed by researchers from the Malabar Botanical Garden and Institute for Plant Sciences, it utilizes the YOLOv11 machine learning model for accurate image recognition. The app allows users to upload images of plants to identify their species and contributes to a real-time distribution map, supporting conservation efforts and community-based biodiversity management. The app has won the WWF National Award from the World Wide Fund for Nature.

* In a blog post on CCTV espionage, Check Point Research asked organisations to remove direct WAN (wide area network) access to cameras and place them behind a VPN or a zero-trust access (no one except the designated person) gateway. It wanted them to change default passwords and enforce unique credentials.

* The Election Commission of India (ECI)’s Special Intensive Revision (SIR) of electoral rolls has been conducted in 13 States and Union Territories so far. Under a new AI algorithm, the ECI identified five types of discrepancies:

(a) spelling differences in names between 2002 and 2025 rolls;

(b) cases where more than six voters linked themselves to a single ancestor;

(d) cases where the differences between the grandparents’ age and the voters’ age was less than 40 years; and

(e) instances where the voters’ gender did not align with the name provided.

* With robots on the rise, proving your humanity has almost become a daily task.

* Proxemics is the study of how physical space influences human communication, revealing relationships, comfort levels, and social dynamics. It is a key component of nonverbal communication, alongside haptics (touch), kinesics (body movement), and chronemics (time).

* Wars & conflicts can be long & costly - The war in Sudan, between the military and the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces, is stretching into a fourth year.

Since February 24, 2022, Russia and Ukraine have been engaged in a large-scale war, now in its fifth year.

Since 1948, Israel has experienced periodic conflicts with neighboring states and non-state groups over several decades. The current phase of hostilities, involving Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, has been ongoing for over two years since October 2023.

* India’s $315 billion IT industry is one of the main engines of the country’s economy. The release of ... autonomous agentic AI tools in February 2026 unleashed a global “software-mageddon” that wiped out about $800 billion in stock value in a single week. India’s Nifty IT index plunged almost 20% for the month, its biggest drop since the 2008 financial crisis. - Bloomberg

* India spends roughly $130 billion a year importing oil.

A ₹40 Fix That Brought My PC Back to Life

2026-04-16T09:28:00.006+05:30

Of all the computing devices I use, my custom-built desktop PC is the most comfortable to work on, and it offers great flexibility for upgrades. I collaborated with a hardware expert to have it configured some seven years ago.

After all these years, the time on that Windows PC kept going out of sync and behaved erratically. My AI assistant informed me that it was because of the CR2032 CMOS battery dying. A few years ago, I wouldn't have dared to meddle with the hardware but AI assistants & DIY YouTube videos gave me the courage to experiment.

I learnt about how to replace a CR 2032 battery, bought it at a neighborhood hardware store for Rs 40 and replaced it in 5 minutes giving my PC a new lease of life.

YouTube video on how to change CR2032 batteries on the most common styles of battery sockets. The socket of my PC's motherboards is described at the 2:43 mark.

I now open up the PC cabinet from time to time to clean the insides, admire the components that keep everything running, and take satisfaction in knowing I can plug things in and keep it going.

Uncle Bob vs. Grady Booch: Rethinking Code Reviews in the Age of AI

2026-04-15T16:22:00.005+05:30

In response to a question about the feasibility of effective code reviews for large (e.g., 500-line) AI-generated PRs like those from Claude, especially when reviewers lack deep codebase familiarity in new projects or fast-paced environments, Uncle Bob Martin and Grady Booch have contrasting views

Uncle Bob Martin advocates metrics-based oversight (test coverage, complexity, dependencies) and higher-level management over line-by-line AI code review, while Grady Booch stresses manual verification for vulnerabilities, dead code, and performance factors.

Uncle Bob Martin: "I don’t review code written by agents. I measure things like test coverage, dependency structure, cyclomatic complexity, module sizes, mutation testing, etc.

Much can be inferred about the quality of the code from those metrics. The code itself I leave to the AI.

Humans are slow at code. To get productivity we humans need to disengage from code and manage from a higher level."

Grady Booch: "Unlike Bob, I review all code generated by agents.

Test coverage and similar metrics will give me confidence of functionality, but they offer me no confidence whatsoever that those agents have not introduced vulnerabilities, that they have not introduced dead code that will diminish understandability in the future, that they have missed factorizations that would have significant impact upon performance.

Trust but verify.

As an experienced developer, I know the smell of what is good and what is not.

And no agent has either the experience or the context to know those things.

If you want to be sloppy and fast then I suggest you proceed with Bob’s advice."

10 Tips to Avoid Claude Usage Limits

2026-04-14T11:28:00.004+05:30

Summary of an article on X by kaize -

1. Edit your prompt. Don't send a follow-up because Token cost per message = all previous messages + your new one.

2. Start a fresh chat every 15–20 messages: When a chat gets long → ask Claude to summarize everything → copy it → new chat → paste as first message.

3. Batch your questions into one message for fewer context reloads (that cost tokens).

4. Upload recurring files to Projects - Cached project content doesn't eat into your usage.

5. Set up Memory & User Preferences - Save your role, communication style, and settings once. Claude will automatically apply them to every new chat.

6. Turn off features (like Web search, Connectors, "Explore" mode, "Search and Tools", "Advanced Thinking") you're not actively using.

7. Use Haiku for simple tasks

8. Spread your work across the day as Claude uses a rolling 5-hour window.

9. Work during off-peak hours. Anything outside of peak hours: 5:00 AM to 11:00 AM Pacific Time / 8:00 AM to 2:00 PM Eastern Time on weekdays.

10. Enable Extra Usage as a safety net to avoid losing your work due to session limit at the worst possible moment. Note - this will switch to pay-as-you-go billing at API rates & cost you more.

This Week I Learned - Week 15 2026

2026-04-11T18:44:00.004+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Since A.I. coding tools from Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor and other companies took off last year, one result has now become apparent: code overload. - NYT

* GitHub platform activity is surging. There were 1 billion commits in 2025. Now, it's 275 million per week, on pace for 14 billion this year if growth remains linear — Kyle Daigle, COO, GitHub

* At tech companies like Meta and Shopify, managers have started to factor A.I. use into performance reviews, rewarding workers who make heavy use of A.I. tools and chastening those who don’t. It has created an expensive new status game, known as “tokenmaxxing,” among A.I.-obsessed workers who are desperate to prove how productive they are. - NYT

* OpenAI's agentic coding tool, Codex, had tripled its weekly active users since the start of the year. Overall Codex use, measured in tokens, has increased fivefold. Google's A.I. models processed more than 1.3 quadrillion tokens a month in 2025.

* AI companies charge more for “output” tokens than “input” tokens.

* OpenAI is shutting down Sora, its AI video generator.

* "I typically have four to five projects running at once and go between windows checking the output and sending a new prompt. It feels a bit like Magnus Carlsen taking on five grandmasters in parallel." - Matthew Schwartz, Professor of Physics at Harvard University

* Claude is bad at honest verification. It says “verified” when it hasn’t actually checked. You have to call it out, insisting, “Did you honestly check everything?” or, “Go line by line and verify every step.” It finds one error, thinks it’s satisfied the task, and stops looking. You need to repeat “Check again” until it finds nothing new. Skills and CLAUDE.md help with this a little, but not enough.

Asking LLMs to double-check is a good habit, but not fail-safe. Explicitly tell it to find mistakes. Turn AI against itself. Show examples of failures to avoid. Give negative examples. Ask it to list failures explicitly. Break large tasks into batches.

* Anthropic uses a range of chips, including tensor processing units (TPUs) designed by Alphabet's Google and Amazon's chips to develop and run its AI software and chatbot Claude.

* Rent A Human (rentahuman.ai) is an online marketplace where AI agents can seamlessly hire humans for various tasks. It has 500,000+ registered humans across 100+ countries.

* A Visual Guide to Gemma 4 by y Maarten Grootendorst, author of "Hands-On Large Language Models"

* Anthropic has stopped allowing third-party agent platforms, such as OpenClaw, to operate on Claude’s subscription plans. Users who were routing agent requests through their existing Claude subscriptions must now pay separately through usage add-ons or API keys.

* Netflix Research has introduced VOID, a free, open-source tool that can remove objects from videos and rewrite the surrounding scene’s physics. The vision language model analyses the scene and maps what to erase, what is physically affected and what to keep. A diffusion model then generates the corrected footage. An optional second pass uses optical flow to smooth any distortions.

* Granola AI transcribes your meetings and calls without needing to put a bot in the room. It captures audio from your device, operates quietly, and provides structured notes with action items the moment you hang up.

* urlscan.io is a free tool for scanning and analyzing websites, especially handy for checking unknown or potentially harmful ones. When you submit a URL, it automatically browses the site like a regular user and logs all the activity it generates. This includes tracking the domains and IPs contacted, the resources like JavaScript and CSS pulled from those domains, and gathering extra details about the page itself. It also takes a screenshot, saves the DOM content, records JavaScript global variables, notes cookies set by the site, and captures plenty of other observations. Just like you’d use a malware sandbox to analyze suspicious files, you can use urlscan.io to do the same thing for URLs.

* The first rule of career planning: Do not plan your career. Instead of planning your career, focus on developing skills and pursuing opportunities. - Marc Andreessen

* The Government of India is partnering with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Innefu Labs, CoRover, Cactus Communications, Kyndryl Solutions and NEC Corporation to develop and deploy AI solutions across government departments.

* TCS ended the quarter with 584,519 employees, down 23,460 from a year ago.

* Harshita Arora, a 25-year-old entrepreneur from Saharanpur, Uttar Pradesh, has become the youngest general partner at startup accelerator Y Combinator. Arora joined YC as a visiting partner in the summer of 2025, mentoring early-stage founders, before being elevated to general partner. Arora dropped out after eighth grade, tried homeschooling, and then chose an unconventional route into tech. She interned at Salesforce in Bengaluru at 16, attended a short entrepreneurship programme at MIT, and later built a crypto portfolio-tracking app that found users in the US & Canada.

* India's Income Tax related TRACES (TDS Reconciliation Analysis and Correction Enabling System) portal is now built with Flutter, Google’s UI toolkit to build apps for mobile, web, & desktop from a single codebase

* Telangana is among the few states in India to launch a cancer registry, aimed at systematically recording every cancer case. The registry would effectively create an atlas of cancer in Telangana, mapping both types of cancers and their geographical distribution. This would help identify patterns, such as the prevalence of specific cancers in certain districts, thereby aiding research and improving disease management.

* Employee Provident Fund Organization’s Employees’ Pension Scheme (EPS) has high administrative costs. For every ₹2.50 paid out as pension, approximately ₹1 was spent on administration.

EPFO's own employees receive an average pension of ₹37,045 per month (under the Central Civil Services or equivalent pension rules) as they follow a different structure, not Employees’ Pension Scheme (EPS).

In sharp contrast, under the Employees’ Pension Scheme (EPS 1995) for private sector workers, 96.58% of the total 81.48 lakh pensioners (as on 31 March 2025) receive a monthly pension below ₹4,000.

* 10 years after UPI, the BHIM app just has 1% market share.

* "Time is the dominant factor in gambling. Risk and time are opposite sides of the same coin, for if there were no tomorrow there would be no risk. Time transforms risk, and the nature of risk is shaped by the time horizon: the future is the playing field." - Peter L. Bernstein in Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk

* "You cannot change somebody else, but you can change yourself." - Swedish behavioural expert Thomas Erikson in Surrounded by Idiots, a bestselling book that explains human behavior through four personality types and offers practical strategies for effective communication. Erikson has also authored Surrounded by Narcissists, Surrounded by Bad Bosses and Lazy Employees, Surrounded by Vampires, Surrounded by Setbacks, Surrounded by Psychopaths, Surrounded by Liars

Before AI Made Small Teams Cool: WhatsApp's Efficiency Playbook

2026-04-09T21:32:00.002+05:30

Gergely Orosz chats with Jean Lee, who joined WhatsApp as its 19th engineer when it was still a small company with barely any formal processes. She played a key role in scaling it to hundreds of millions of users, experienced the $19B acquisition by Facebook, and later continued her career at Meta.

Here are the standout sound bytes and interesting facts from the talk:

Why Jean got into tech: "After talking to a lot of adults, I realized people who are in tech were the only ones who were really excited about their jobs. So in Silicon Valley, when you ask people like tell me about your work, people are often very hopeful for the future and very proud of what they're building. Compared to many other adults that I spoke with, they were not so encouraging. They're like, "Oh, don't become an architect. Don't become a designer.""

On process: "We didn't have code reviews... The only time I got my code reviewed was the first time I made a commit."

On product focus: "99% of the time he (WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum) would say no... All the cool features were missing in my mind, but that was by design because we really wanted to prioritize again the quality of a grandma in a remote town being able to use our app."

On hiring speed: "What would it take for you to take the offer right now?" (Jan Koum closed the deal in person the day after the interview while another company took weeks)

On AI efficiency: "WhatsApp did not use AI, but we were efficient because we were small."

Tiny team, massive scale: WhatsApp had only ~30 engineers serving 450 million monthly active users at the time of the Facebook acquisition.

Multi-platform native: They built and maintained eight different native platforms simultaneously (iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Windows Phone, Nokia S40, S60, Symbian, Web) rather than using cross-platform frameworks to ensure lightweight performance on low-end devices.

Exotic backend: The server stack was built in Erlang, a language rarely used in startups but common in telecommunications (Ericsson), chosen specifically for its ability to handle massive concurrency and "maintain the engine of an airplane while it's flying 24/7."

Intentional growth suppression: The $1 annual fee wasn't just for revenue—it was a "growth discretion tactic" to slow user acquisition because the founders didn't want to raise too much money. The fee covered all costs (servers, salaries, SMS verification) and kept growth manageable without touching the $8M Sequoia funding.

No outages metric: The office had a physical countdown display tracking "X number of days since the last outage" as their primary metric, rather than user growth or media mentions.

Zero documentation for outages: There were no formal post-mortem documents or blameless culture processes; server issues were discussed in group chats and fixed through direct communication.

The acquisition moment: When Facebook bought WhatsApp for $19B, Jean was wearing noise-cancelling headphones at her desk and initially thought the company was going out of business when summoned to the meeting room. Zuckerberg walked in during the announcement.

Demographics: Despite being a "startup," the team was unusually experienced—Jean was engineer #19 at age ~27, but most of the other 15+ engineers were over 30, many hired from Yahoo.

Feature discipline: They worked on video calling for two years internally (using it with their own families) before shipping it, refusing to launch until 100% sure of quality.

Career reset at Meta: Despite being a founding engineer at WhatsApp, Jean was leveled as an L3 (junior engineer) at Facebook and had to "climb all over again," eventually becoming an engineering manager and opening the London office.

Visibility = Promotion: At Facebook, engineers who posted frequently about their work on internal Workplace groups got promoted more easily than those who didn't, as calibration meeting managers often didn't know the engineers personally and relied on visible impact.

Links to people & product references.

Also see - WhatsApp Fun Facts

100% Secure. 0% Accessible.

2026-04-06T13:01:00.001+05:30

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

21–32% of Cloud Spend Wasted – The Case for FinOps

2026-04-05T17:48:00.007+05:30

Industry reports put average cloud waste between 21% and 32% of their cloud budgets, with some analyses showing even higher figures as AI workloads drive unexpected spikes in spending.

This “cloud shock” happens because cloud usage is elastic and decentralized, yet traditional finance and IT processes treat it like fixed capital expenditure. The result: over-provisioned resources, idle instances, forgotten workloads, and poor alignment between engineering speed and business value.

Cloud cost management is the process of tracking, optimizing and managing cloud computing costs.

Cloud cost management and FinOps (Financial Operations) are terms often used interchangeably, but there are some key differences between them. Cloud Cost Optimization narrows its focus on reducing expenses. In contrast, FinOps casts a broader net, encompassing not only cost optimization but also financial management aspects like budgeting, forecasting, and insightful reporting.

What is FinOps?

FinOps is a collaborative cultural and operational practice that brings engineering, finance, and business teams together to maximize the value obtained from every dollar spent on cloud and technology.

It is defined by the FinOps Foundation as:

"An evolving cloud financial management discipline and cultural practice that enables organizations to get maximum business value by helping engineering, finance, technology, and business teams to collaborate on data-driven spending decisions."

FinOps operates across three core phases — Inform (visibility & allocation), Optimize (rightsizing, commitments, automation), and Operate (governance, culture, and continuous improvement).

Popular FinOps Tools

Leading platforms that support FinOps practices include:

IBM Cloudability (Apptio) — Strong in multi-cloud visibility, budgeting, forecasting, and executive reporting.
Flexera One FinOps — Excellent for hybrid/cloud + on-premises governance and asset management.
VMware CloudHealth (Broadcom) — Policy-driven cost governance and compliance at enterprise scale.
IBM Turbonomic — AI-powered automated workload optimization and rightsizing.
Ternary, CloudZero, Finout, and DoiT Cloud Intelligence — Modern, engineering-friendly alternatives focused on real-time insights and automation.

Many organizations also start with native tools (AWS Cost Explorer, Azure Cost Management, Google Cloud Billing) before layering on third-party platforms.

While tools provide the visibility and automation, building the right skills is equally critical — especially as AI accelerates cloud costs.

The FinOps Foundation has introduced a dedicated certification pathway — FinOps for AI — to address this growing challenge.

Bottom Line

FinOps is no longer optional. Organizations that treat cloud cost as a shared responsibility — rather than a surprise at month-end — consistently reduce waste, improve forecasting, and deliver better business outcomes. In an era of rising AI-driven cloud consumption, adopting FinOps principles has become a competitive necessity.

Start small: gain accurate visibility, implement proper tagging, and build cross-functional accountability. The savings — and strategic value — follow quickly.

- article co-written with AI

This Week I Learned - Week 14 2026

2026-04-04T08:33:00.007+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Anthropic's Claude Code, a closed-source AI coding CLI tool, leaked ~512,000 lines of TypeScript source code on March 31, 2026, via an exposed source map in its npm package, revealing internal architecture, 44 feature flags, and 20 unreleased features; the company responded with DMCA takedowns on original copies.

A developer quickly rewrote the codebase in Python using OpenAI's Codex, creating a functional derivative hosted on GitHub that evades copyright claims, amassing 29k stars and 40k forks in hours as an educational open-source alternative.

This incident underscores AI's role in accelerating code replication, challenging traditional IP protections for software—Anthropic may overlook enforcement to avoid precedents that could restrict LLM training or generation of similar derived works.

* Andrej Karpathy compares LLMs to probabilistic CPUs that handle tokens statistically, in contrast to the traditional deterministic computation based on bytes.

The agent-as-kernel framing positions it as the orchestrator for LLM execution, managing prompts, skills, and tools in loops, as echoed in Guido van Rossum's prompt-skills-tools definition.

* Sarvam is India's voice-first, multilingual AI that can support 22 Indian languages.

* Microsoft favors Linux: Python support for Azure App Service on Windows and Azure Functions on Windows will be retired, and Python applications on these platforms will cease to run. To maintain Python workloads, create a new app on Azure App Service on Linux or Azure Functions on Linux, and redeploy your Python applications before 31 March 2027.

* SentrySearch is an open-source Python tool (>1.7K Stars on GitHub) for semantic video search, allowing users to query descriptions like "red truck running a stop sign" to instantly extract and export matching clips from raw MP4 files.

Technically, it chunks videos into 30-second overlapping segments, embeds them via Google's Gemini API or local Qwen3-VL models (2B/8B variants with quantization for efficiency), stores in ChromaDB, and retrieves via cosine similarity, running fully offline on Apple Silicon or NVIDIA hardware with at least 6GB VRAM.

Local AI video tools like SentrySearch are great for tasks like CCTV analysis and dashcam reviews, offering privacy advantages over cloud services, though they do require significant GPU resources.

* A DOI (Digital Object Identifier) is a unique and permanent alphanumeric code assigned to a work, such as a journal article or book, ensuring consistent access and citation regardless of any changes to its location.

The DOI Foundation is a not-for-profit organization that governs the ISO standard for the DOI system

* ORCID is a free, unique, persistent identifier (PID) for individuals to use as they engage in research, scholarship, and innovation activities. ORCID allows universities and research institutions to stay up to date with their researchers’ outputs, reduce administrative burden and input errors, and helps their researchers, post-docs, employees, and students improve the discoverability of their work.

* ResearchGate is a commercial social networking site for scientists and researchers to share papers, ask and answer questions, and find collaborators.

* LaTeX (pronounced “LAY-tek” or “LAH-tek”) is a tool for typesetting professional-looking documents.

A LaTeX document is a plain text file interspersed with LaTeX commands used to express the desired (typeset) results. To produce a visible, typeset document, your LaTeX file is processed by a piece of software called a TeX engine which uses the commands embedded in your text file to guide and control the typesetting process, converting the LaTeX commands and document text into a professionally typeset PDF file. This means you only need to focus on the content of your document and the computer, via LaTeX commands and the TeX engine, will take care of the visual appearance (formatting).

* Overleaf is a collaborative LaTeX editor that automatically compiles your work in the background as you type. This online tool makes writing, editing, and publishing scientific documents faster and easier, streamlining the entire process.

* Zenodo is a platform for hosting and sharing data, software and other research artifacts with DOIs. It supports open data and open access initiatives in Europe and integrates with GitHub.

Zenodo code is itself open source. The code, work-in-progress and open issues are shared openly in GitHub. All meta data is openly available under CC0 licence, and all open content is openly accessible through open APIs.

The simple web interface is supplemented by a rich API which allows third party tools and services to use Zenodo as a backend in their workflow.

Zenodo is derived from Zenodotus, the first librarian of the Ancient Library of Alexandria and father of the first recorded use of metadata, a landmark in library history.

* Matomo, previously known as Piwik, is an open-source web analytics tool that serves as an alternative to Google Analytics, giving users complete ownership of their data.

* kaun.city is an open civic accountability platform for Indian cities. It is "infrastructure for civic accountability" revealed through a map. Although Bengaluru is showcased first due to having the richest data, it’s designed to work for any Indian city. This social initiative led Bharat Jilledumudi is open source and if you want this for your city, open a GitHub issue and provide the following -

Ward boundary GeoJSON (usually available via datameet or municipal GIS portals)
Elected rep data (MyNeta has every state)
Work order / tender data (most municipal corporations publish this)

The architecture is city-agnostic: ward boundaries, elected reps, budget data, contractor profiles, RTI generation - all driven by a city config file.

The contractor entity resolution engine, blacklist cross-referencing, and the civic news pipeline work across any city once the base data is loaded.

* For those who think climate change is a hoax, here is more proof - 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

* By the time WhatsApp was acquired by Meta, it had fewer than 30 engineers serving 450 million monthly active users. Due to the high trust environment, there were no code reviews according to Jean Lee, engineer #19 at the company.

* Like a rotary phone, the manual typewriter appears simple but is not intuitive to the smartphone generation...the dinging bell signifies the end of a line and the need to manually return the carriage to start the next line. ("Oh," said one student, "that's why it's called 'return."')

* HP, Canon, and Epson hold over 75% of the consumer printer market.

* A VPN gives you a different postal address, but your timezone, language, DNS, WebRTC, browser fingerprint, and login details are still the same. Netflix, Google and Spotify don’t care about your IP address. They care about your account. Your registered country is stored in their database, not in your connection.

* Starting April 1, 2026, India requires mandatory cybersecurity certification for internet-connected CCTV cameras, effectively halting sales from major Chinese makers like Hikvision, Dahua, and TP-Link due to concerns over chip origins and vulnerabilities. Domestic companies such as CP Plus, now holding 45-50% market share, have filled the gap by switching to Taiwanese chips and securing approvals for over 500 models, though prices rose 15-20%. This push boosts homegrown tech like L&T's indigenous chips for millions of cameras, aiming for secure surveillance amid smart city growth, even as some buyers miss familiar options.

* Naming changes in 2026 -

The two confusing terms: Previous Year (you earn) + Assessment Year (you file) have been replaced with one unified term - "Tax Year"

Tax Year 2026=income earned from Apr 2025-Mar 2026

Form 16 is now Form 130 - Salary TDS certificate from employer

Form 16A is Form 131 - TDS certificate for non-salary income

Form 26AS / AIS is now Form 168 - Summary of all taxes linked to PAN

Form 26Q is Form 140 - TDS return for non-salary payments

* Since 2003, on a five-year rolling return basis, the Mutual Fund category ELSS (equity-linked savings schemes) has outperformed Flexi-cap funds 53 per cent of the time and the Nifty 500 TRI index 58 per cent of the time.

* There is zero tax advantage to an SWP (Systematic Withdrawal Plan) over a manual redemption of the same amount. SWP has a "tax advantage" when compared to the IDCW (Dividend) option, not manual redemptions. Dividends are taxed at your Income Tax Slab Rate (can be up to 30%+). SWP/Redemption is taxed as LTCG (12.5% above ₹1.25L) or STCG (20%).

* Ramayana: The Legend of Prince Rama is a 1993 anime film by Yugo Sako. In the United States, the film was released as The Prince of Light: The Legend of Ramayana, or Warrior Prince in 2001. This version was released in a localized English dub with narration by James Earl Jones and prince Rama voiced by Bryan Cranston (best known for his work on the hit 'Breaking Bad' series).

* Our ability to flourish comes not from life’s wins and losses, but from how we navigate them. To flourish is to have a life that feels meaningful and rich, despite the challenges we’ll inevitably face. Flourishing falls into a few main categories: awareness, connection, insight and purpose.

This Week I Learned - Week 13 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 12 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.