Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Contrarian Research

2026-07-13T12:08:40.407+05:30

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

How Pangram Smells AI

2026-07-13T08:47:50.850+05:30

A pangram, or holoalphabetic sentence, phrase, or word, uses every letter of a given alphabet at least once.

The Pangram AI detection tool from Pangram Labs on the other hand identifies AI-generated content with high accuracy.

Pangram's detection model takes a comprehensive view of a document and uses a deep-learning based detector that synthesizes millions of signals about a particular text.

From its extensive research it has identified nine patterns that occur frequently -

Markdown formatting inserted into plain text contexts
AI Phrases like "delve into" that appear far more often in AI-generated text
Overuse of em dashes where human writers typically would not
Bullet lists used to organize information systematically
Triads like "past, present and future", grouping ideas in threes, a common AI rhetorical pattern
"Not just X but Y" type of word choices and constructions common in AI writing - the best-known tic of AI writing called "contrastive phrasing" & "negative parallelism"
Unusual Unicode characters that may indicate humanization attempts
AI-style headers like "Certainly! Here's..." and other overly helpful introductions common in AI output
Emojis inserted where human writers typically would not

The distinctive markers of AI writing keep evolving, and now those familiar AI quirks are showing up more often in spontaneous human conversation.

It's fascinating how AI writing has spawned AI detection tools, sparked forums where users trade tips about AI writing (using words like "Claudeisms" and "deslop") and fueled heated debates over its merits, further polarizing an already intolerant society.

This Week I Learned - Week 28 2026

2026-07-12T21:06:09.485+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* arXiv offers HTML papers alongside the existing PDF to improve accessibility.

* "Students need to learn how to work with AI, recognize weak output, think through choices, test results and decide what is worth doing.

I described my own approach as “delegate maximally”. Instead of keeping a fixed list of AI-proof skills, keep giving AI everything it might be able to do. Whatever remains is the human role for now." - S Anand

* "The reason I dislike this emphasis on term “LLM Visualization” or “Claude Viz” or even “Agentic Viz” is the focus on the tool. No one goes out and says “Excel Viz” // “PowerPoint Viz” // “Figma Viz”. The tool is there to augment the human and has never been the important part. The craft and skill of the human using the tool is what we should acknowledge and celebrate." - Amit Kapoor

* Draw with Data by Schubert De Abreu

* Bharat Atlas is a lightweight open-source visualiser for India administrative boundaries

* Paisa is an open-source Personal Finance Manager created by Anantha Kumaran

* DuckDB is very close to SQLite, except it has higher performances: database size is 3 times lighter, and requests performs 5-10 times better.

* Tad is a free (MIT Licensed) desktop application for viewing and analyzing tabular data. It is a fast viewer for CSV, Parquet files, SQLite and DuckDb databases that support large files. Internally, Tad uses DuckDb for fast, accurate processing.

* Louis Pasteur was awarded one of the first known patents covering a microorganism in 1873, specifically for “yeast free from organic germs of disease.” This patent laid the groundwork for modern microbiology and directly connects to the process we now call pasteurization, used in milk, juice, and wine.

Pasteur patented a method to obtain pure yeast, free from contaminating germs, and processes to prevent microbial spoilage in beer and wort.

Pasteurization is the process of heating liquids (milk, wine, beer, juice) to kill harmful microbes without affecting taste.

* Wool is hygroscopic: it absorbs up to 30-35% of its weight in moisture (vapor or liquid) into the fiber core without feeling drenched on the surface, thanks to its scaly structure and lanolin. This preserves some air-trapping loft (crimped fibers create insulating pockets), and the absorption process is exothermic—it releases heat as moisture binds. It is naturally flame-resistant. It doesn't catch and melt onto your skin like plastic does. It chars, refuses to sustain the flame, and puts itself out when you take the fire away. Wool has high nitrogen and moisture content, a high ignition temperature (570-600°C vs. polyester ~485-560°C or nylon lower), and a high Limiting Oxygen Index. It chars rather than melts, forms a protective insulating layer, self-extinguishes once the flame source is removed, produces less smoke/toxic fumes, and doesn't drip molten plastic onto skin. It manages moisture, breathes, and resists smell so well you can wear it for days.

Wool isn't perfect though - heavier when wet, slower drying, more expensive, animal agriculture footprint.

* US tobacco companies developed billion-dollar food businesses that were prominent internationally between the 1980s and mid-2000s. Tobacco companies developed their international food businesses with the same strategies they used to establish their international tobacco businesses. - American Journal of Public Health (ajph)

* Food Access Research Atlas provides food access data for populations within census tracts in the US.

* There is really only one "world ocean." Oceanographers have divided the world ocean into five principal areas, or basins: the Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic, and Southern Ocean basins. The Southern Ocean has the unique distinction of being a large circumpolar body of water totally encircling the continent of Antarctica.

* The vagus nerve (cranial nerve X) is uniquely "special" due to its extensive reach, complex function, and role as a master regulator of the body's involuntary processes. It is the longest cranial nerve in the body. While most cranial nerves primarily serve the head and neck, the vagus nerve originates in the brainstem and "wanders" (the Latin origin of vagus) down through the neck, chest, and abdomen, branching out to connect to vital organs including the heart, lungs, stomach, intestines, liver, and kidneys. It is a critical component of the parasympathetic nervous system (the "rest and digest" system). It houses approximately 75% of the nerve fibers in this system, making it the primary pathway through which the body promotes relaxation, digestion, and recovery after stressful events. The vagus nerve acts as a superhighway for information between the brain and the gut. It sends signals about the state of internal organs to the brain, while simultaneously conveying instructions from the brain back to those organs. This connection is central to the "gut-brain axis," influencing mood, stress responses, and cognitive function. Beyond its role in heart rate and digestion, the vagus nerve has significant immunomodulatory properties. By regulating the production of pro-inflammatory cytokines, it helps the body manage inflammation, which is a factor in many chronic diseases. Because of its broad influence, the vagus nerve is a major target for medical therapy. Vagus Nerve Stimulation (VNS)—a technique that delivers electrical impulses to the nerve—is used to treat conditions such as treatment-resistant depression and epilepsy.

* Vitiligo affects 1 to 2% of the global population. India's prevalence runs higher than the global average.

* Gamifying tax payment - In order to prevent stores from evading taxes, every receipt in Taiwan is automatically a lottery ticket, too, which can win up to $300k, turning customers into voluntary tax auditors.

* PhonePe and Google Pay have split four-fifths of UPI volume between them for four straight years, even as the regulator’s 30% market-share cap keeps getting deferred. - Time Series of India

* 47% of all Fixed Deposits with all banks in India are held by senior citizens

* The Guilloche pattern is a sophisticated, highly intricate design feature used on the Aadhaar PVC Card. Consisting of interlaced, continuous geometric curves, it is extremely difficult to replicate or forge accurately, acting as a visual security layer to prevent counterfeiting. The Guilloche pattern can be found overlaid near the borders and design elements of the card.

* While English is an official language of the Union under the constitutional provisions relating to official languages, it is not one of the 22 official languages in the Eight Schedule of the Constitution.

* India is the world's largest producer and exporter of rice, yet the Food Corporation of India (FCI) is holding rice stocks that are nearly five times the prescribed buffer norm, at a carrying cost of over Rs. 10,712 crores in FY25. The environmental costs of the current policy framework, including the use of ~ 4,000 litres of water to produce one kilogram of rice, high methane emissions from paddy cultivation, and nitrate contamination of groundwater associated with serious health risks. - ICRIER

* “It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice” - Deng Xiaoping

HOW TO Hide Data URI Base64 Images in Firefox Without Extensions - Using userContent.css

2026-07-12T18:01:41.548+05:30

If an image on a site is flashy, animated, and distracting, and you inspect it only to see this as its HTML source:

src="data:image/webp;base64,UklGRiQAAABXRU..."

There is no image file to block. That's a base64 image embedded directly in the page. You can still hide it in Firefox with no extensions, using a built-in feature called userContent.css.

What really is a Base64 Image?

Normally, an image is a file. Your browser downloads logo.png from a server. A base64 image is different. The image data is converted to a long text string and pasted directly into the HTML.

Instead of this:

You get this:

Sites do this to load a small icon a bit faster, or to hide tracking pixels, or to inline ads without a separate file request. The downside is you can’t block it like a normal file. It’s not a URL you can block in your hosts file. It’s baked into the page itself.

Browsers don’t have a built-in “block base64 images” button. But they do let you apply your own CSS to any site. That’s how we hide them.

The Native Way: userContent.css

Firefox has a feature called userContent.css. It’s a stylesheet you control that runs on every website you visit. It was made for exactly this kind of customization.

Step 1: Find your profile folder

Type about:support in Firefox’s address bar. Next to Profile Folder, click Open Folder.

Step 2: Create the file

Inside that folder, create a folder called chrome if it isn’t there already. Inside chrome, create a file called userContent.css.

Step 3: Add your rule

Here is the CSS rule to block base64 WebP images on a specific domain:

@-moz-document domain(example.com) {

img[src^="data:image/webp;base64"] {

display: none !important;

}

What this does is simple. @-moz-document domain(example.com) says only run this on example.com. img[src^="data:image/webp;base64"] says find any image whose source starts with that string. display: none !important says hide it and override the site’s own CSS. Change example.com to any site you want.

If you want to block base64 everywhere, remove the @-moz-document wrapper entirely, but keeping the domain scope is safer.

Step 4: Enable it

Type about:config in the address bar, search for toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets, and set it to true.

Restart Firefox. The image will be gone.

Does This Really Block the File?

Not exactly. This method hides the image after the browser has already read it. For a base64 image, that doesn’t matter much because there was no separate download anyway. The data was already in the HTML.

If your goal is to stop a normal image file like ad.jpg from downloading to save data, CSS hiding won’t help.

For base64 images, though, hiding is blocking. There is no file to block. The image is the text string itself, and CSS removes it from view.

Why sites use Data URI base64 images

Normally a page loads an image with a separate request: <img src="/logo.png">. A data URI skips that request by converting the binary image into a long text string and pasting it into the HTML or CSS.

Sites do it for three reasons:

1. Speed for tiny assets. For a 2KB icon, one less HTTP request can be faster than downloading a separate file.

2. No broken links. Email templates, single-file widgets, and tracking pixels use data URIs so the image always loads even if the external server is down.

3. Obfuscation. Ad networks and flashy promo badges often inline images as base64 so simple ad blockers that block ad.jpg can't find them. You can't block a URL that doesn't exist.

The tradeoff is the HTML becomes huge, it can't be cached separately, and you as a user can't easily block it.

The Firefox feature that lets you block it

Firefox lets you inject your own stylesheet into any website you visit. The file is called userContent.css. You create it inside your profile's chrome folder.

This is not a new hack. Guides for placing userContent.css in ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/.../chrome go back to at least 2004. The @-moz-document rule you use to target a specific domain has been available since Firefox 1.5.

For a long time Firefox loaded these files automatically. Starting with Firefox 69, Mozilla disabled loading of userChrome.css and userContent.css by default to improve startup time. New installs now require you to flip one preference:

about:config > toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets = true

After that and a restart, your file works on every page, including dynamically inserted content. It also bypasses the site's Content Security Policy, which extensions sometimes can't.

This is different from @-moz-document being disabled for web pages in Firefox 61. In user stylesheets like userContent.css, @-moz-document still works.

When to Use This Firefox feature

Use userContent.css when you want a lightweight, permanent, no-addon solution that survives Firefox updates and works on sites where you can’t install extensions. It’s perfect for removing an annoying banner, logo, or tracking pixel that uses a data URI.

If you need true network-level blocking or want to toggle rules quickly, an extension is still easier. But for a native, set-and-forget fix, this one CSS rule is all you need. No addon, no subscription, just one file Firefox has supported for over 20 years.

Why you would want to block them beyond "flashy"

Flashy and distracting is a valid reason, but there are others:

1. Performance. A page with ten 500KB base64 images embeds 5MB of text directly in the HTML. Your browser has to parse it all before it can render. Hiding it doesn't save the download, but it saves the paint and animation cost, especially for Lottie or looping WebP badges.

2. Privacy. Many 1x1 tracking pixels are delivered as data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAIAAAAAAAP///yH5BAEAAAAALAAAAAABAAEAAAIBRAA7. They exist only to trigger JavaScript. Hiding them breaks some trackers.

3. Accessibility and focus. Auto-playing, high-contrast badges in sidebars are a problem for ADHD, motion sensitivity, and screen reader clutter. Removing the data URI badge makes the article readable.

userContent.css is a nifty Firefox feature that let's you not just hide but also manipulate the HTML that has already downloaded into the browser including changing the visual order.

Co-written with Meta AI

HOW TO Download Open Food Facts Data for Any Country Using Google Colab and Push It to GitHub

2026-07-11T18:06:32.009+05:30

Open Food Facts has data on 4.6+ million food products worldwide. But if you only need data for one country, downloading the full 7.64 GB file (size at the time of writing) hosted on Hugging Face is overkill. Hugging Face acts as a CDN for large ML datasets — it not only stores the full Parquet file but also handles versioning, caching, and fast global downloads.

This guide co-written with Meta AI shows you how to use Google Colab to filter the dataset for just one country, add direct product links, and save the result to a public GitHub repo. Takes < 30 minutes total based on your familiarity with these tools & file size. No software installs needed.

What you’ll end up with: A CSV like india_products_18392.csv with 16 columns, including a URL for each product. The same steps work for France, Canada, USA, UK, or any other country in the database.

What You Need Before Starting

A Google account to use Colab
A GitHub account + an empty public repo where the CSV will live
A GitHub Personal Access Token so Colab can push files for you

Step 1: Create Your GitHub Token

Colab needs permission to upload files to your repo. You give it that with a token.
Go to GitHub → click your profile pic → Settings
Scroll to the bottom of the left menu → Developer settings
Personal access tokens → Tokens (classic) → Generate new token (classic)
Name it Colab OFF and set expiration to 90 days
Under “Scopes”, check repo only. Uncheck everything else.
Click Generate token and copy the code that starts with ghp_. Save it somewhere. You won’t see it again.

Step 2: Set Up Your Colab Notebook

Go to colab.research.google.com → New notebook

Copy-paste this entire code block into the first cell:

Python

# Install deps

!pip install -q huggingface_hub

# Full pipeline: Download OFF data, filter by country, add URL column, push to GitHub

import duckdb

import time

import os

import getpass

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

# ========== CHANGE THESE 5 VALUES ==========

GITHUB_USER = "your-github-username" # your GitHub username

GITHUB_REPO = "your-repo-name" # empty repo you created

GIT_EMAIL = "your_email@example.com" # your email

GIT_NAME = "Your Name" # your name

COUNTRY_TAG = "en:india" # change this for other countries

# ===========================================

start = time.time()

# 1. Download the 7.64GB Open Food Facts file from Hugging Face

print("Step 1/4: Downloading Open Food Facts database...")

print("This is 3.2GB and takes 3-8 minutes. It'll resume if interrupted.")

local_path = hf_hub_download(

repo_id="openfoodfacts/product-database",

filename="food.parquet",

repo_type="dataset",

local_dir="/content/hf_cache",

resume_download=True

)

print(f"Downloaded: {os.path.getsize(local_path) / 1e9:.2f} GB")

# 2. Filter for your country and build the table

print(f"\nStep 2/4: Filtering for {COUNTRY_TAG}...")

con = duckdb.connect()

con.execute(f"""

CREATE TEMP TABLE country_data AS

SELECT

code,

'https://world.openfoodfacts.org/product/' || code AS url,

list_extract(product_name, 1).text AS product_name,

brands,

categories,

list_extract(list_filter(nutriments, n -> n.name = 'energy-kcal'), 1)."100g" AS "energy-kcal_100g",

list_extract(list_filter(nutriments, n -> n.name = 'carbohydrates'), 1)."100g" AS carbohydrates_100g,

list_extract(list_filter(nutriments, n -> n.name = 'sugars'), 1)."100g" AS sugars_100g,

list_extract(list_filter(nutriments, n -> n.name = 'fiber'), 1)."100g" AS fiber_100g,

list_extract(list_filter(nutriments, n -> n.name = 'proteins'), 1)."100g" AS proteins_100g,

list_extract(list_filter(nutriments, n -> n.name = 'fat'), 1)."100g" AS fat_100g,

list_extract(list_filter(nutriments, n -> n.name = 'saturated-fat'), 1)."100g" AS "saturated-fat_100g",

list_extract(list_filter(nutriments, n -> n.name = 'salt'), 1)."100g" AS salt_100g,

nova_group,

nutriscore_grade,

to_timestamp(last_modified_t) AS last_modified_datetime

FROM read_parquet('{local_path}')

WHERE list_contains(countries_tags, '{COUNTRY_TAG}')

AND code IS NOT NULL AND code!= ''

AND len(product_name) > 0

""")

# 3. Count rows and save CSV with count in the filename

filecount = con.execute("SELECT COUNT(*) FROM country_data").fetchone()[0]

country_name = COUNTRY_TAG.replace("en:", "")

filename = f"{country_name}_products_{filecount}.csv"

local_csv_path = f"/content/{filename}"

print(f"Found {filecount:,} products for {country_name}")

print(f"\nStep 3/4: Writing {filename}...")

con.execute(f"COPY country_data TO '{local_csv_path}' (HEADER, DELIMITER ',')")

# 4. Push to GitHub

print(f"\nStep 4/4: Pushing to GitHub...")

GITHUB_TOKEN = getpass.getpass("Paste your GitHub Personal Access Token: ")

!git config --global user.email "{GIT_EMAIL}"

!git config --global user.name "{GIT_NAME}"

!git clone https://{GITHUB_USER}:{GITHUB_TOKEN}@github.com/{GITHUB_USER}/{GITHUB_REPO}.git /content/repo

!cp {local_csv_path} /content/repo/

%cd /content/repo

!git add {filename}

!git commit -m "Update {country_name} products: {filecount} rows - $(date +%Y-%m-%d)"

!git push origin main

print(f"\n✅ Done in {round((time.time()-start)/60, 1)} min")

print(f"File: https://github.com/{GITHUB_USER}/{GITHUB_REPO}/blob/main/{filename}")

print(f"Raw CSV: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/{GITHUB_USER}/{GITHUB_REPO}/main/{filename}")

Step 3: Change It For Your Country

Before you run the cell, edit these 5 lines at the top:

Python

GITHUB_USER = "your-github-username" # put your username

GITHUB_REPO = "off-data" # name of your empty repo

GIT_EMAIL = "you@example.com" # your email

GIT_NAME = "Your Name" # your name

COUNTRY_TAG = "en:india" # change this line if you need data for a different country

For country-specific sites like https://in.openfoodfacts.org/product/, change the URL line to:

'https://in.openfoodfacts.org/product/' || code AS url,

Step 4: Run It

Click the play button next to the code cell
When prompted, paste your GitHub token and hit Enter
Wait ∼5-10 minutes. You’ll see progress for each step.
When it’s done you’ll get 2 links. The “Raw CSV” link is a direct download anyone can use.

Note: If your file count is >150k, the CSV will be ~30-40MB. GitHub is fine with that, but it'll take 10-20 sec to push.

What’s Happening Under the Hood

Download: The script grabs the official Open Food Facts 7.64GB (on 7-July-2026) Parquet file from Hugging Face. Using hf_hub_download gives us two key benefits: 1) the download resumes automatically if Colab disconnects, so you don’t restart a pull, and 2) HF’s infrastructure avoids the strict rate limits you’d hit querying the file over HTTP directly. You don’t need an account or token for public datasets, though adding one boosts your bandwidth if you hit 429 errors. Essentially, Hugging Face is just the reliable warehouse we fetch the raw data from before DuckDB filters it.
Filter: Uses DuckDB, which can query that huge file without loading it all into memory. It keeps only products tagged with your country. When Colab downloads the file, it saves it to /content/hf_cache on the notebook’s temporary VM disk. This is ephemeral storage that Google provides with every Colab session. It has nothing to do with your Google Drive, Google Cloud, or any other subscribed service you pay for. The VM and its disk are wiped when your runtime disconnects or times out, so you’re not charged for storage.
Transform: Pulls out 15 useful fields: barcode, name, brand, nutrients, NOVA score, etc. Adds a url column so you can click straight to the product page.
Export: Saves a CSV with the product count in the filename, like india_products_18392.csv
Upload: Pushes that CSV to your GitHub repo so it’s public and versioned.

Troubleshooting

HTTP 429 error - The code already handles this. If it still fails, add a free Hugging Face token.
File too large for GitHub - GitHub’s limit is 100MB. Most country files are 5-40MB. If yours is bigger, switch to Parquet or use Git LFS.
Wrong country / 0 rows - Check your COUNTRY_TAG. It must match Open Food Facts exactly. Use en: prefix.
Token rejected - Make sure you checked repo scope when creating the token. Generate a new one if needed.

Why This Approach Works

No local setup: Colab gives you a free VM with 12GB RAM. Enough to handle the 3.2GB file.
No rate limits: Downloads the file once locally. DuckDB then runs offline, so no more API calls.
Reproducible: Anyone can run your notebook, change COUNTRY_TAG, and get their own dataset.
Public + versioned: GitHub stores every run. You can track how the data changes over time.

You can use this process for any country or schedule it monthly using GitHub Actions.

30+ GitHub Products & Key Ecosystem Features You Should Know in 2026

2026-07-10T11:31:40.097+05:30

GitHub has grown far beyond a place to host code — today it's an entire ecosystem covering CI/CD, AI-assisted development, security, package management, and team collaboration. Whether you're new to the platform or just want a single reference point, here's an alphabetical list of GitHub's major products and features, each linked to its official page -

Also see - Student Perks: Free Software, Certs, and Learning Bundles

The New SUV — Now With Organic Emissions

2026-07-07T22:43:10.689+05:30

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

This Week I Learned - Week 27 2026

2026-07-04T16:39:18.864+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Intensive Vibe Coding Course With Google - self-paced Kaggle Learn guide

* Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) bridge internal development and real-world deployment by embedding with enterprise clients to build solutions while guiding the product roadmap. FDEs are the "Technical Special Ops" who bridge the gap (The Delta) between a core product and a client’s messy, real-world reality.

* Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis and researcher John Jumper won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for their work on the company’s AlphaFold model, and DeepMind has also made major contributions to meteorology, materials science, and a variety of other disciplines. John Jumper is leaving DeepMind for Anthropic.

* Like Claude Code, Claude Science can autonomously carry out meaningful work when given concise, high-level instructions, and it has access to tools that make it particularly useful for research in computational biology and drug development. Claude Science is a full-featured, standalone product. It prioritizes reproducibility, so that scientists can trace back the source of any figure or result and check it for accuracy and validity.

* "AI-driven speed makes it tempting to use fast generation as a safety net for messy planning. True strategic alignment often stalls because the complexity and planning opacity of doing it the right way feels paralyzing. We find ourselves trapped in a persistent gap between strategic intent and our tactical reality...this compromise was traditionally rooted in resource scarcity. Our real leverage today is less about AI-assisted coding and more about AI-enabled thinking. By shifting our focus away from pure delivery velocity, we can use these tools to model complex topologies, stress-test architectural boundaries, and resolve systemic edge cases before a single line of production code is even written."

* "AI and morality do not observe the same time. AI is developed at the breakneck speed of the start-up culture, driven by an ethos to move fast and run perpetual beta tests on society in the guise of progress. This velocity is fuelled not just by commercial rivalries, but by relentless mathematical innovation spanning from Silicon Valley to Shenzhen. It presents a deeper hurdle for lawmakers worldwide: parliament can govern what a person does, but it can never forbid a mathematical theorem, a discovery, or an equation from being made.

Law in most democracies moves slowly. By the time landmark legislation such as the European Union’s Artificial Intelligence Act or the United Kingdom’s Online Safety Act were painstakingly debated and passed, the specific technical harms they were built to combat had already mutated, leaving an entire generation to grow up inside unaddressed digital vulnerabilities.

If legislation is fated to lag behind innovation, the consequences for democratic societies are not merely regulatory; they are existential. Democracy cannot function if citizens cannot distinguish reality from fabrication. At its core, democratic governance relies on a shared epistemic foundation: a collective agreement on basic facts from which public debate, policy, and electoral choices can flow. When that foundation is systematically undermined, the entire democratic project is threatened. Today, AI-generated disinformation and advanced synthetic media (“deepfakes”) have advanced to a level of fidelity where the human eye and ear can no longer reliably detect forgery.

This vulnerability is hyper-charged by algorithmic manipulation. Big Tech platforms operate on business models engineered exclusively to maximise user engagement. Because outrage, fear, and sensationalism generate the highest click-through rates, platform algorithms systematically prioritise and amplify hyper-partisan content, driving radicalisation. By trapping citizens within hyper-customised echo chambers, these systems normalise online hate and accelerate social fragmentation. In doing so, private platforms exert an unprecedented form of unaccountable power, effectively rewriting the rules of the public square to optimise quarterly corporate profits at the expense of social cohesion.

In an environment where digital adoption outpaces structural digital literacy, the weaponisation of synthetic media and algorithmic polarisation poses a unique threat to India’s pluralistic society.

AI governance cannot remain merely regulatory or technical...it must rise to the level of a constitutional imperative." - Shashi Tharoor

* The Oracle Agentic AI Foundations course and certification exam are free to take.

* Since February 2026, Microsoft has introduced 17 new Certifications and exams.

* ScanQR.org is a web based QR code scanner that supports real-time webcam scanning and image uploads. Runs completely in the browser.

* SignalHire API — access contact information, emails, phone numbers, and social profiles from a global database of professionals.

* Simon Willison's HTML table extractor takes rich text as input, pulls out any tables inside it and offers it as HTML, Markdown, CSV, TSV, and JSON.

* AWS opened its first office in India in Mumbai in 2011, followed by the launch of the AWS Asia-Pacific (Mumbai) Region in 2016.

* Tier-I IT companies typically derive 25-30% of their revenue from their top 25 accounts – mostly Fortune 500 to Fortune 2000 companies.

* India has the world's largest emigrant population, accounting for 6% of all international migrants globally as of 2024.

The treemap shows that the US, UK, and Canada are still favoured, but they are no longer the default destination. Labor migration to the Gulf has flipped the script entirely.

* Amazon.in offers more than 1.6 million products and delivers to every pin code in India

* India is the world's third-largest automobile market, selling over 26 million vehicles annually.

* The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) has directed (MeitY) has directed Google Android and Apple iOS to remove seven mobile applications including BAT-BMS, SMART BMS, and LOSSIGY from their respective app stores following allegations that they were being misused to remotely disable batteries in e-rickshaws and other electric vehicles.

* The most dangerous bacteria:

Cholera causing bacteria Vibrio cholerae can kill within hours from dehydration if untreated, though oral rehydration therapy makes it highly survivable.

Clostridium tetani (tetanus) has a ~10–50% fatality rate without modern care.

Clostridium botulinum produces the most potent known toxin. Botulism has a high fatality rate without antitoxin and ventilatory support.

Streptococcus pyogenes (flesh-eating disease/necrotizing fasciitis) is rapidly progressive and deadly without prompt surgical and antibiotic intervention.

Diphtheria is a bacterial infection caused by Corynebacterium diphtheriae, which primarily infects humans. Diphtheria spreads from person to person through respiratory droplets (coughing or sneezing) or contact with contaminated surfaces. It is not a zoonotic disease, meaning it does not transmit from animals to humans.

Mycobacterium tuberculosis which causes TB is the deadliest bacterium currently, followed by bacteria causing lower respiratory infections (like Streptococcus pneumoniae) and sepsis-related pathogens.

Leprosy (also known as Hansen's disease) is caused by the slow-growing bacterium Mycobacterium leprae. It primarily affects the skin, peripheral nerves, mucous membranes of the upper respiratory tract, and the eyes. It is believed to transmit via respiratory droplets from prolonged close contact with an untreated infected person. It is not highly contagious, and most people have natural immunity. Leprosy is curable with multidrug antibiotic therapy (MDT). The World Health Organization provides MDT free of charge worldwide. Treatment typically lasts 6–12 months depending on the form of the disease. Early diagnosis and treatment prevent disability and stop transmission. There is no vaccine, but research continues.

* Migraines are hereditary. Rather than being caused by a single "migraine gene," it is a polygenic disorder. This means it involves variations in multiple genes that affect how the brain regulates chemicals (like serotonin), controls blood vessel tone, and processes pain pathways.

* Cryptobiosis, a step beyond hibernation, is a state in which an organism’s metabolism nearly stops, allowing it to survive extreme environmental conditions until favorable conditions return. Cryptobiosis represents nature’s ultimate survival strategy, enabling life to persist in environments far beyond the limits of ordinary biological tolerance.

* Tardigrades, also known as water bears or moss piglets, are a phylum of eight-legged segmented micro-animals. Tardigrades can withstand extreme temperature, radiation, and pressure while in a cryptobiotic state that can last potentially decades to 100+ years.

* Among mammals, the edible dormouse (Glis glis) holds the record for the longest natural hibernation, spending up to 11 months of the year in torpor in the wild.

* The Egyptian desert snail (Eremina desertorum) holds the record for the longest known survival in a sealed, dry state by a land animal — up to roughly 8 years in controlled experiments. This is technically estivation (dormancy during heat/drought), not winter hibernation, but the biological principle is similar: extreme metabolic shutdown.

* Dolphins and other cetaceans practice unihemispheric slow-wave sleep — one cerebral hemisphere sleeps while the other stays awake. This allows them to keep swimming, maintain body temperature, and surface to breathe voluntarily. If both hemispheres slept simultaneously, they would drown. This is one of the most extreme sleep adaptations in the animal kingdom.

* George Washington Carver (1864 – 1943) was an American agricultural scientist and inventor who promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion. By 1920, the U.S. peanut farmers were being undercut by low prices on imported peanuts from the Republic of China. Following his testimony, a duty on imported peanuts was imposed in 1922. His widely noticed impact with peanuts even brought black and white communities together due his farming strategies being essential for both races as he was working towards racial equality. He was not just "The Peanut Man", but he was a pioneer who used his ability to understand science and agriculture as a way to educate and uplift the Black Diaspora. In 1941, Time magazine dubbed Carver a "Black Leonardo".

Carver is often mistakenly credited with the invention of peanut butter. The Aztecs were known to have made peanut butter from ground peanuts as early as the 15th century. Canadian pharmacist Marcellus Gilmore Edson was awarded U.S. patent for its manufacture in 1884.

* Kaolin or hydrated aluminum silicate is a type of clay found in nature. It is used in skincare to absorb excess oil, cleanse pores, and soothe the skin without over-drying. When kaolin is applied to wounds it speeds up blood clotting.

* Dubai’s rise is a masterclass in smart diversification:

Started with pearls, fishing, and small-scale trade.
Modest oil discovery in the 1960s gave them seed money (but Dubai never had Abu Dhabi-level oil).
They wisely invested that money into ports, airports, free zones, and infrastructure.
Today, the real money machines are: trade & logistics, tourism, real estate, aviation (Emirates airline), finance, and hosting global events/business.

Oil is now a tiny slice of Dubai’s GDP (under 1-2%).

* Offline coaching institute Aakash Educational Services was acquired by Byju's in a $1 billion deal in 2021, but its stake has since been diluted to a minority. Manipal Health is now the single largest shareholder.

* "Modern life encourages individuals to optimise every dimension of existence. Carers must provide wealth and purpose. Friendships must be meaningful. Vacations must become experiences. Meals must become photographs Personal interests must become busineses. Happiness itself must become evidence. The result is not necesarily greater fulfilment. Often, it is relentless self-surveillance." - Dr Srinath Sridharan

HOW TO link directly to a specific word on a webpage with Scroll to Text Fragment feature

2026-07-03T13:38:31.110+05:30

Did you know you can link directly to a specific word on a webpage and have the browser automatically scroll down and highlight it? It’s called Scroll to Text Fragment, and it's a game-changer for sharing quotes, data, or proof.

This is especially useful when the content you want to link to doesn't have a standard HTML anchor (like #heading). This feature lets you link directly to any specific word or text block on a webpage, highlighting it for the user automatically.

I was amused to find that La Opala Crockery is 100% Vegetarian and it proudly sports on its packaging the green dot logo that's typically used by food products. They also mention this claim on their blog in a long article. I wanted to share the link on a forum that mentions the exact sentence so that readers can jump to the specific point.

Here’s how the link can be constructed to highlight "100% vegetarian" -

https://www.laopala.in/blog/what-sets-laopala-cup-set-apart#:~:text=100% vegetarian

The spaces and symbols can also be URL-encoded so that the % sign becomes %25 and spaces become %20.

https://www.laopala.in/blog/what-sets-laopala-cup-set-apart#:~:text=100%25%20vegetarian

When a user clicks that link in a compatible browser (Chromium-based browsers like Chrome, Edge, Brave, and Opera), the page will automatically scroll down to the exact section discussing the vegetarian aspect and apply a temporary colored highlight to those words.

If the phrase appears multiple times on the page and you want to point to a specific occurrence, you can provide context by specifying the words immediately before or after your target text using the following parameters:

With preceding context: text=prefix-,targetText
With succeeding context: text=targetText,-suffix
With both: text=prefix-,targetText,-suffix

For example, if you want to make sure it jumps specifically to where it mentions bone ash, you could append:

#:~:text=bone%20ash-,100%25%20vegetarian (This tells the browser: Find "100% vegetarian" but only if it's preceded by "bone ash").

So in summary, the URL trick that highlights your exact point the second they click is to append a special fragment identifier to the end of the URL using this syntax:

#:~:text=YOUR_TEXT_HERE

Compatibility Note

Supported: Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Brave, and Android browsers.
Fallback: If someone opens the link in a browser that doesn't support this yet (like older versions of Safari), the link will still work perfectly—it will just open the top of the webpage normally without scrolling or highlighting.

The Absurd Times We Live In

2026-06-30T11:37:55.959+05:30

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

This Week I Learned - Week 26 2026

2026-06-27T08:21:13.602+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* "Hallucination is a feature when you’re being creative." - S Anand

* "AI doesn't have to be right to be useful. The goal is outputs you can iterate over time — not perfection on the first try." - Agentic Thinking 101, Udacity

* "...language models hallucinate because the training and evaluation procedures reward guessing over acknowledging uncertainty" - Why Language Models Hallucinate

* "Large language models (LLMs) do not work like databases, storing facts in neat rows and columns, and retrieving the right answer when asked. They are trained on enormous collections of text and learn statistical patterns in language. When prompted, they generate a response by predicting what will come next, one piece at a time.

An LLM generates text one word at a time, each word a probability drawn from patterns it absorbed during training. A setting called the temperature governs how adventurous those draws are. If the temperature is low, the model will pick the safest, most predictable next word and produce an accurate and dull output. If the temperature is higher, the model will reach into the less likely options and begin to surprise you. This is the dial you turn up when you want a poem instead of a weather report.

The trouble is that the same dial governs hallucinations.

...hallucinations are not bugs to be patched but a statistical inevitability of how these systems are trained and tested.

The difference between AI systems and human societies is that the latter developed methods to discipline imagination: science uses experiments, journalism uses verification and philosophy uses argument

AI needs something similar: not a ban on hallucinations but better institutions of verification around it." - Viraj Kulkarni in The Hindu

* OpenCode is an open source agent that helps you write and run code with any AI model. It's available as a terminal-based interface, desktop app, or IDE extension.

* Kilo Code is a free, open-source coding agent for VS Code, JetBrains IDEs, and the CLI. It gives you access to 500+ AI models with zero markup, multiple agent modes, and no vendor lock-in.

AI coding assistant in 2026 fall into one of three buckets:

IDE extensions (GitHub Copilot, Kilo Code, Cline, Roo Code) that plug into VS Code or JetBrains and let you pick your own models.
Standalone AI editors (Cursor, Windsurf) that fork VS Code and build proprietary agents on top.
CLI and terminal agents (Claude Code, Kilo CLI) that run alongside your existing editor.

* GSAP (GreenSock Animation Platform) is a framework-agnostic JavaScript animation library for the modern web.

* Speaker Coach in PowerPoint recommends that presenters speak at a rate of 100 to 165 words per minute; this is the rate at which most audiences find it easiest to process the information they hear.

* Stacked area chart on the right visualizes the demographic segments of China using three layered color bands. It illustrates the core relationship between the working-age population and the merged dependent populations (young and old). The layout visually demonstrates that as the bottom base (working age) narrows rapidly, it must support a combined upper mass (merged dependents) that is increasingly made up of elderly citizens, mirroring the main headline's warning regarding a "huge burden on the shrinking population."

* Colleges & technical institutes in India are now advertising number of students who have been selected for Google Summer of Code

* Interesting use of IoT with a public-benefit spinoff - Atomberg Intellon Adaptive Water Purifier has the ability to sense water’s TDS and uses RO only when necessary. If TDS is within safe limits, it switches to UF & UV (non RO mode).

Using anonymized TDS data from tens of thousands of Atomberg water purifiers installed across the country, combined with publicly available data from different government sources, it has built a free tool where you can enter your pincode and check water quality - TDS levels, TDS variance, chemicals present etc - for your locality.

* Starfish are not fish – Despite their name, starfish are echinoderms, closely related to sea urchins, sand dollars, and sea cucumbers, and they lack gills, scales, and fins like true fish do. Starfish can extend their stomachs through their mouths to digest prey externally, then retract the stomach back into their body once digestion is complete. Starfish can regrow lost arms, and in some cases, an entire new starfish can grow from a single arm if part of the central disc is attached

* Cultural traditions can spark groundbreaking science—Tu Youyou won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for developing a life-saving antimalarial drug inspired by traditional Chinese medicine.

* Since Brexit (2016), the U.K. has seen 10 Home Secretaries, nine Foreign Secretaries, eight Chancellors of the Exchequer and six Prime Ministers.

* Wimbledon has increased its 2026 prize fund to £64.2 million/Rs 800 crore.

* Meta has invested $900 million into credit card payments and lending platform Cred for a 20% stake. Kunal Shah, founder of Cred, is joining WhatsApp as its global head, taking charge of a product used by 3 billion people around the world. He takes over from Will Cathcart, who assumed the role in 2019, a period when India emerged as WhatsApp's largest market. Shah also built and sold Freecharge during the mid-2010s.

* Fun fact - Count of IAS Officers with following names in the IAS Directory (compiled by Vonter):

"Rajeev" - 40
"Rajeev Ranjan" - 8
"Rajeev Sharma" - 6
"Rajeev Kumar" - 4

* There are at least 6 lakh students who study French and 1.5 lakh students who study German in all schools across India spread across various grades, including CBSE schools.

* More than 1.6 lakh buildings in Mumbai are now over thirty years old and due for structural audits.

* "Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things. What I do takes long hours of studying and uninterruptible concentration. I try to learn certain areas of computer science exhaustively; then I try to digest that knowledge into a form that is accessible to people who don't have time for such study." - Prof. Donald E. Knuth

* "...being first matters little if you cannot scale. The AI race may ultimately be won by those who make intelligence affordable, ubiquitous and widely available. The next phase of India’s technological journey must combine self-reliance with global ambition. The challenge is no longer merely to invent; it is to build, scale, commercialise and create enterprises that can compete globally." - Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

Incentivizing the Human in the Loop

2026-06-25T08:22:02.667+05:30

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

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