Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - Week 31 2026

2026-07-31T10:51:55.873+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* "Models learn from "exhaust," the prompts people write, the tools agents use, and especially the corrections people make when the model is wrong. Every correction is distilled into institutional know-how.

In consuming intelligence, you are creating intelligence.

If learning flows in only one direction, economic value converges toward the owners of the learning infrastructure rather than the creators of the knowledge itself.

In the cloud era, enterprises accumulated data. In the AI era, they accumulate learning.

A company should be able to use a model without giving up the knowledge that makes it unique." - Satya Nadella

* Wire services such as PTI, ANI, Reuters, AP, and AFP provide verified facts to other outlets, which then adapt the content to their own style. Their business model depends on reader trust in the accuracy of the wire’s reporting and on receiving compensation for the verification work. While search engines direct readers to the original source, large language models extract the facts, omit sourcing and verification, and deliver responses without attribution.

News agency Asian News International (ANI) sued AI research firm OpenAI in November 2024 for using its content to train ChatGPT without permission or payment. According to the Delhi High Court, storing ANI’s articles to train ChatGPT is covered under Section 52 of India’s Copyright Act, which allows private use and research without it being considered infringement. The court also noted that ANI couldn’t prove ChatGPT reproduced or “memorized” its actual reports, so no infringement occurred.

* Slack AI can summarize forum discussions from the past week or within a chosen date range.

* BitChat is an open-source Bluetooth mesh messaging application developed by X co-founder Jack Dorsey. Being a decentralised peer-to-peer messaging application that operates over Bluetooth mesh networks, it requires no internet connection, no servers and no phone numbers.

* At least six Nvidia-backed neocloud companies, CoreWeave, Together AI, Nebius, Lambda Labs, Crusoe and Nscale are in talks with Indian operators to lease data centre capacity for artificial intelligence (AI).

Neoclouds, or "babyscalers," differ from hyperscalers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud by focussing solely on renting Nvidia GPU clusters for AI training and inference.

A 20-year tax holiday for foreign cloud providers, announced in this year's Union Budget, along with abundant engineering talent and low infrastructure costs, has made India the most attractive data centre destination in the region. - ET

* The Hype Literacy Toolkit for Journalists - Hype is characterized by the fascination with the future: Exaggerated and unrealistic promises of value development are coupled with a strident optimism that captures the attention of investors, technologists, politicians, journalists, and the general citizenry. Hype leverages uncertainty and emotions like hopes and fears, linking these to strong expectations.

* The Government uses gazettes as its primary means of publishing laws and bringing them into force and these are published as PDFs. India’s legal publishing system remains fragmented and dependent on PDFs, making it difficult for citizens, lawyers and even courts to access, track laws and amendments in force; adopting open legal publishing standards would make laws more accessible and strengthen democratic participation.

Many African countries have adopted the Akoma Ntoso standard, a markup language specifically designed for legal documents. They use an open-source legal publishing platform called Indigo, which allows users to add or edit laws. [US & UK use modified versions of Akoma Ntoso]. - Sushant Sinha, founder of legal search engine, Indian Kanoon

* Elon Musk’s companies directly employ ~160k people (Tesla ~135k, SpaceX ~22k, X ~2.5k, others). - Grok

* What the hell is El Niño, really?

* Tropoworks provides drone-assisted systems to transport tea leaves from fields to processing factories. In the trial phase, it has successfully carried loads of 12 kgs for 5-10kms in Kerala's Idduki for HML.

* India’s digital economy, valued at ₹32 lakh crore in 2025 and accounting for about 12% of GDP, together with more than 1.03 billion active internet users and around 22 billion monthly UPI transactions, is driving demand for data centre infrastructure.

* The number of Indians with an annual income of ₹100 crore or more has increased from 142 to 576 between the assessment years (AY) 2021-22 and 2025-26.

* About 82% of working women in India are in informal employment according to a 2018 ILO report, spanning agriculture, home-based production, domestic services and micro-enterprises.

* 11-month rental agreements remain standard across India to avoid compulsory registration and elevated stamp duty under the Registration Act 1908, which applies to leases of 12 months or longer, while enabling easy annual renewals.

Legal security deposit (not rent itself) limits:

Bengaluru: No hard statutory cap under Karnataka Rent Act; amount is contractual (market often 6-10 months). Recent amendment only decriminalised penalties.
Mumbai: No statutory cap under Maharashtra Rent Control Act; contractual (market 3-6 months).
Hyderabad: Telangana Act limits advance to 1 month’s rent; excess can be challenged.

Only Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu have enacted Model Tenancy Act variants with 2-3 month deposit limits, while Mumbai and Hyderabad rules remain largely contractual.

* Early 20th-century British playground chants (which likely adapted older Celtic sheep-counting numbers or Anglo-Saxon counting tokens) -

Eena meena mackeracka
Rare rye dominacka
Chicka racka romerica
Om pom push!

Compact Business PCs Explained: Dell OptiPlex, Intel NUC and Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny Desktops Compared

2026-07-27T08:54:56.856+05:30

For many people, a desktop computer conjures up images of a large tower sitting under a desk. Yet over the past decade, manufacturers such as Dell, Intel, ASUS, and Lenovo have shown that a capable desktop doesn't have to be much larger than a paperback book.

Compact business desktops—including the Dell OptiPlex Micro, Intel NUC (now ASUS NUC), and Lenovo ThinkCentre Tiny series such as the M700 Tiny—typically occupy just around one litre of volume, earning them the nickname "1L PCs."

Despite their small size, these machines often include desktop-class Intel Core processors, support up to 32–64 GB of RAM (depending on the model), NVMe SSD storage, Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi, and the ability to drive multiple monitors. Many consume only 10–30 watts during typical office work, making them significantly more energy efficient than traditional desktop towers.

Originally designed for enterprise environments where desk space and manageability were important, these systems have found a second life among home users. Refurbished models such as the ThinkCentre M700 Tiny and Dell OptiPlex Micro are popular for home labs, software development, media servers, Home Assistant, Docker, Proxmox, and lightweight virtualization.

The Intel NUC (Next Unit of Computing), introduced in 2012, played a major role in popularizing the ultra-compact PC category. Although Intel exited the NUC business in 2023, ASUS continues the product line with newer processors and modern connectivity under the ASUS NUC brand.

One of the biggest advantages of these compact desktops is their balance of size, reliability, and upgradeability (mainly RAM, SSD). Unlike many mini-PCs built for consumers, business models are designed for continuous operation, easy servicing, and long product lifecycles. Memory and storage can usually be upgraded in minutes, extending their useful life.

They are highly popular in tech communities for running Proxmox, Home Assistant, or media servers (Plex) because they are cheap, power-efficient, and quiet.

Compared to traditional tower desktops, they offer fewer upgrade options though, limited internal storage, no support for full-size graphics cards or PCIe expansion cards, and may throttle under prolonged heavy workloads due to their compact cooling systems.

For students, developers, and hobbyists, these tiny desktops demonstrate that you don't need a bulky tower to build a capable workstation. Whether it's writing code, running virtual machines, experimenting with Linux, or hosting services at home, these miniature powerhouses continue to prove that good things really do come in small packages.

Cloud Watching 101

2026-07-25T11:32:18.047+05:30

As cloud architects, we spend our days designing systems in the cloud. Load balancers, autoscaling, fault tolerance, multi-region deployments—we know them inside out.

But when was the last time you looked up at the original cloud?

A children's book recently reminded me that the sky has its own architecture, complete with naming conventions that sound suspiciously like service tiers.

Clouds are mostly made of tiny water droplets, tiny ice crystals, or a mixture of both suspended in the air.

The first well-designed "cloud taxonomy" predates cloud computing by about 220 years. In 1802, English pharmacist and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard borrowed Latin words—cirrus (“curl”), stratus (“layer”), cumulus (“heap”), and nimbus (“rain cloud”)—to create a cloud classification system so elegant that it’s still the global standard more than two centuries later. It's a reminder that well-designed taxonomies can stand the test of time—whether they're describing the atmosphere or a distributed computing platform.

Altitude	Cloud Types	Appearance
High (Above 20,000 ft / 6 km)	Cirrus	Wispy, feather-like streaks of ice crystals. They're often the first sign that the weather may change. Think of them as the notification service of the atmosphere.
	Cirrostratus	Thin, transparent veil covering much of the sky; often produces halos around the Sun or Moon.
	Cirrocumulus	Tiny white ripples or patches, often called a "mackerel sky."
Middle (6,500–20,000 ft / 2–6 km)	Altostratus	Gray or bluish sheet covering much of the sky, often preceding steady rain.
Middle (6,500–20,000 ft / 2–6 km)	Altocumulus	Rounded white or gray patches or rolls, larger than cirrocumulus. Mid-level puffs that can hint at instability. Meteorologists often see them as an early clue that thunderstorms could develop later in the day.
Low (Below 6,500 ft / 2 km)	Stratus	Uniform gray flat layer, resembling fog that hasn't reached the ground.
	Stratocumulus	Low, lumpy cloud layer made of broad rolls or rounded masses.
	Nimbostratus	Thick, dark blanket cloud producing prolonged rain or snow.
	Cumulus	Fluffy white clouds with flat bases/heap; the classic fair-weather cloud.
Vertical Growth	Cumulus	Can grow vertically into towering cumulus under strong rising air. A single fair-weather cumulus cloud may contain hundreds of tonnes of water.
Vertical Growth	Cumulonimbus	Massive thunderstorm cloud with a low base, towering height and anvil-shaped top; produces lightning, heavy rain, hail and sometimes tornadoes.

Cumulus appears twice—once under Low (where it normally forms) and again under Vertical Growth to illustrate that it can develop into towering cumulus and ultimately Cumulonimbus.

What fascinates me is that long before Doppler radar, satellites, or weather apps, people learned to read clouds. Farmers, sailors, pilots, and mountaineers could often make surprisingly accurate short-term weather predictions simply by observing cloud types and how they evolved.

That's a useful reminder for anyone in technology.

Modern monitoring dashboards are invaluable, but good architects also learn to spot the early signals—a gradual increase in latency, an unusual traffic pattern, a queue that's growing just a little faster than usual. Just as cirrus clouds can foreshadow changing weather, subtle system metrics often precede major incidents.

Perhaps that's why "the cloud" became such a fitting metaphor. Whether it's floating overhead or running your applications, clouds reward those who take the time to understand them.

The best resources to learn cloud identification

co-written with ChatGPT

This Week I Learned - Week 30 2026

2026-07-24T09:34:50.039+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* The OpenRouter Pareto Router is a dynamic model selection tool that allows users to select a coding model based on a minimum coding score preference. It maintains a curated shortlist of strong coding models ranked by Artificial Analysis coding percentiles. Users can set a min_coding_score between 0 and 1 to control the strength of the coder they need. The router automatically selects the cheapest model within the chosen tier or the fastest with the Nitro variant. This approach ensures that users receive a strong coder without overspending, as the exact shortlist evolves over time with new models and benchmarks. The OpenRouter API is compatible with most SDKs, allowing for easy integration into applications.

* openrouter/auto-beta is a task-aware router. It classifies each request, routes it to the model teams are actually spending on for that kind of task, and filters that choice by the cost-quality tradeoff you set. The response is priced at the routed model's rate. There is no router fee.

* Clem Delangue, the chief executive of Hugging Face after OpenAI's models went rogue and successfully hacked into Hugging Face - “This incident, possibly the first of its kind, proves a point we’ve long believed: A.I. safety won’t be solved by any single company working in secret.”

* On-device AI processes machine learning algorithms and generative AI models directly on a smartphone’s local hardware; while physical constraints prevent it from matching the scale of cloud-based large language models, the industry is converging on a hybrid application model. On-device AI refers to the processing of machine learning algorithms and generative AI models directly on the smartphone’s local hardware. Instead of relying on a constant connection to a remote server, the device performs the computation using dedicated silicon, primarily Neural Processing Units (NPUs). Unlike general-purpose CPUs or graphics-heavy GPUs, NPUs are purpose-built to handle the mathematical heavy lifting required by neural networks. - The Hindu

* macOS 26 (Tahoe) ships with a 3B parameter LLM. Out of the box, the on-device model powers Siri, Writing Tools, and system features. Apfel is a lightweight open-source tool that runs Apple’s on-device model directly from the terminal, from code, or through an interface that mimics an OpenAI server. apfel gives you CLI access with one brew install. No model downloads, no API keys, no configuration needed, just works. It’s MIT licensed.

* People get an enormous amount of enjoyment and satisfaction out of creating stuff if it’s low effort. People who want to be creative, but might not be very good at it, can turn to A.I. and find a bunch of barriers removed. - Why Slop Matters

* GitHub Sponsors is a global funding network that supports over 70,000 maintainers and organizations, and includes more than 280,000 sponsors spanning individual developers to Fortune 500 companies. In 2022, nearly 40% of sponsorship funding came from organizations. Since launching GitHub Sponsors in 2019, it took nearly two years to reach the first $10 million. The latest $10 million came in just five months, pushing the program past the $100 million mark.

* Make-money-fast influencers and passive-income enthusiasts on Reddit have been spreading the word for some time: Use A.I. to write a book. If it sells, it’s free money. Amazon does not mind if people hawk A.I.-generated books on its platform, unless they are truly and deeply terrible. (There are)...about 10 million books published on Amazon over the last five years. - NYT

* The Mahua tree (Madhuca longifolia) is revered by many tribal and indigenous communities in India as a Kalpavriksha, the “wish‑fulfilling tree,” because nearly every part of it provides food, medicine, livelihood, and cultural value.

Mahua Nectar

Its flowers are eaten fresh, dried, used as sweeteners, fermented into liquor (also called "mahuli", "mahura","Ippa") - quite possibly the world's only flower-based spirit!

* The Banyan tree is the national tree of India and one of the largest species in the world. India is in fact home to seven of the largest banyan trees in the world.

* Thimmamma Marrimanu is considered the largest tree in the world: with its connected trunks spreading out 180 meters in diameter, it is the largest banyan and one of the superlative trees on Earth. The banyan tree was first added to the Guinness Book of World Records in 1989 (its entry updated in 2017) as being 550 years old and having the “greatest perimeter length for a tree”, spreading over five acres with a circumference of 846m. It has more than 4,000 roots making up its canopy.

It is one of the 962 trees documented by YD Bar-Ness in the Landmark Trees of India project

* The healing power of trees is perhaps not as far out as it may seem. After all, they provide the Earth with breathable air, something we can’t live without, and many medicines are derived from trees. For example, aspirin comes from willow bark, and melaleuca oil derived from leaves of the Australian tea tree is widely used for skin infections. Additionally, research shows that being among natural green spaces like forests significantly reduces blood pressure and stress levels, and Japan has embraced the concept of forest bathing to promote wellness. - BBC

* Forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku, originated in Japan in the 1980s. Unlike exercise-focused activities, it involves spending quiet time in a forest while engaging with the surrounding environment.

* ...across their whole lifespans, American baby boomers, born between 1946 and 1964, have been the worst off. They have repeatedly experienced higher death rates than previous generations. - The Economist

AIDS hit in their early adult years; the opioid crisis struck in middle age. On top of that, boomers seem to be significantly less healthy than previous generations.

Leprosy, also known as Hansen’s disease, is caused by the bacterium Mycobacterium leprae and was first identified by Norwegian physician Gerhard Armauer Hansen in the 1870s. Common in tropical regions, this disease affects the nervous system and is often referred to as the world’s oldest known illness.

* pH is a scale from 0 to 14 that measures how acidic or alkaline (basic) a substance is. 7 is neutral (like pure water). Below 7 is acidic; above 7 is alkaline.

* Baking soda is pure sodium bicarbonate (NaHCO₃). It's mildly alkaline with a pH of about 8.3 in solution.

Baking powder is a mixture: baking soda plus an acid (like cream of tartar) and a starch. When dry, it's roughly neutral, but when mixed with liquid, the acid and base react. The resulting pH depends on the formulation, but it's typically in the 6.5–7.5 range—much closer to neutral than baking soda.

The key difference: Baking soda is a single alkaline ingredient. You need to add an acid (like buttermilk, lemon juice, or vinegar) to activate it and balance the pH in a recipe. Baking powder is self-contained—it already includes the acid, so it works with plain liquids and produces a more neutral final product. If you use baking soda without enough acid, your baked goods can taste soapy or metallic.

If a recipe calls for baking powder and you only have baking soda, you'd need to add an acid. If it calls for baking soda and you only have baking powder, you'd need to use much more powder (about 3–4 times the amount) and the result may taste slightly different or be less tender, since baking powder contains starch and other fillers.

* Acidic cleaners like vinegar (acetic acid) are particularly effective at removing mineral buildup and soap scum. Vinegar, which has a pH of about 2.4, can dissolve hard-water stains, soap scum, and mineral buildup on bathroom fixtures and shower doors. Acid reacts with alkaline minerals like calcium carbonate in limescale or hard-water deposits and breaks them down into soluble salts, water, and carbon dioxide, which you can easily wipe away. You should not use acidic cleaners on natural stone, such as marble, granite, or limestone, or on hardwood, as they can etch or dull those surfaces. Always check the manufacturer’s instructions.

Baking soda (sodium bicarbonate) is great at cutting through grease, oils, and everyday dirt, and some can work as disinfectants, as well. Baking soda, thanks to its slightly abrasive texture, is ideal for scouring many hard surfaces without damaging them, such as stainless steel, oven interiors, metal fixtures, and glass on appliances such as ovens and microwaves. Baking soda can also neutralize odors in refrigerators or on rugs and upholstery because it reacts with acidic odor molecules and neutralizes them. Baking soda (which has a pH of 8 to 9) isn’t the most alkaline cleaning product available, but bear in mind that the higher on the pH scale you go, the more corrosive a solution is

Choose either acidic vinegar or basic baking soda, depending on what you’re trying to clean.

Household chlorine bleach, which has a pH of about 12 can remove mold and mildew and disinfect a wide range of household surfaces, such as toilets, tubs, and sinks. - NYT

* The skin, hair and nails are highly responsive to changes in weight, nutrition, hormones, inflammation and physiological stress. When a person loses weight rapidly on GLP-1 (Glucagon-Like Peptide-1) treatment, changes may be seen in the face, body, scalp and nails. These changes are not usually dangerous, but they can affect comfort, appearance, confidence and quality of life.

* The Indus Valley Civilization (3300 BCE to 1300 BCE) was geographically the largest in area among the four early riverine civilizations (Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, and the Indus), covering over 1.5 million square kilometers. The Indus had an estimated total population of 1–5 million. Harappa was identified in the 1820s, with systematic excavation beginning in 1920. R.D. Banerji of the Archaeological Survey of India identified Mohenjo-daro's antiquity in 1919–1920, but large-scale excavations began in 1922–1924 under Kashinath Dikshit and John Marshall.

* “Show me the heroes that the youth of your country look up to, and I will tell you the future of your country.” — Idowu Koyenikan

This Week I Learned - Week 29 2026

2026-07-19T14:14:51.860+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Microsoft's Phi-4 Mini is widely regarded as one of the most capable models under 4 billion parameters. It punches significantly above its weight class, outperforming older 7B and even 70B models in specific reasoning tasks. It runs at a smooth 13–18 tokens per second on flagship devices with 8 GB+ RAM (like the iPhone 16 Pro/17 Pro or Galaxy S25/S26 series).

* From The Batch:

- PrismML, a Caltech spinout backed by Khosla Ventures, publicly released compressed versions of Alibaba’s Qwen model on Tuesday, shrinking it from 54 GB to under 4 GB so all 27 billion parameters run on an iPhone (15 or newer). PrismML achieves the compression by reducing the models to ternary or binary quantization, reducing each value from 16 bits to just two or three possible values.

- Two people asking the same model for business feedback, one in Hindi and one in Russian, may receive substantively different advice not because they’re using different models, but because the same model calibrates its character differently depending on the language it’s processing.

- It takes more than a decade and costs more than $1 billion to develop a drug in the United States, and the government approves only around 50 drugs a year. Finding new uses for drugs that are already approved, and new treatments for diseases that share underlying biological mechanisms, is an especially efficient use of time and funds. Robin is an open-source agent that proposes existing drugs to treat a given disease.

* According to Airtel's Unlimited 5G Data Offer Terms & Conditions, customers aren’t allowed to share their unlimited 5G data through a mobile hotspot. If you use more than 300GB in a month, they’ll still cut off your unlimited 5G and cap you at 2GB per day.

* USB tethering is faster and more stable than a mobile hotspot for sharing a phone's mobile internet with a laptop or computer using a USB cable. You have to turn on the tethering option in your phone's settings in order to share.

* Cityfinance.in is Janaagraha's platform tracking financial data for 4,000+ Indian cities.

* Currently, less than 8% of Indian citizens hold a passport.

* Goldmines, a company founded by Manish Shah, dominates nearly 80% of the Hindi-dubbed cinema market. - The India Notes

* Behenic acid, also known as docosanoic acid, is a saturated fatty acid with the chemical formula C22H44O2. It is primarily derived from the seeds of the moringa tree and is used in various applications, particularly in cosmetics as a thickener, cleansing agent, and opacifier. Behenic acid is valued for its emollient properties and is commonly used in skincare formulations.

* Jo Nagai, a 10 year old young boy from Kobe, Japan, presented a 33-page research paper at the 2024 International Congress of Entomology showing swallowtail butterflies retain learned aversions through metamorphosis.

Jo contacted entomologist Dr. Martha Weiss after noticing his hand-raised butterflies behaved differently from wild ones; together they adapted her moth experiment using lavender scent paired with mild vibration from a muscle therapy device on caterpillars.

Trained butterflies (70% avoidance) and their untrained offspring and grandchildren showed the same lavender aversion in Y-maze tests, demonstrating potential transgenerational inheritance of the behavior via a home science project.

* A cat’s sense of smell is incredibly powerful—they have up to 200 million scent-sensitive cells in their noses, compared to only about 5 million in humans. A dog's sense of smell is even more powerful, roughly 10,000 to 100,000 times more sensitive than a human's. Their noses contain over 300 million sensory receptors (compared to our 5 million).

A perfume scent that feels mild to you hits pets like dogs & cats like a "scent tsunami," causing extreme sensory overload, stress, and anxiety.

When you spray perfume, microscopic droplets linger in the air and settle on nearby surfaces, including your cat’s fur. Because cats are fastidious self-groomers, they will lick their fur to clean themselves, meaning they directly ingest the perfume chemicals and oils. Cats are obligate carnivores, and their livers lack a key enzyme called glucuronyl transferase. This enzyme is required to break down and detoxify many chemicals, particularly plant-derived compounds (like phenols and essential oils) and synthetic chemicals commonly used in perfumes. Because they cannot metabolize these toxins, they can easily build up in their system over time, leading to cumulative toxicity.

Ingredients like phthalates (used to make scents last longer) act as endocrine disruptors and can damage a cat's liver and kidneys over time.

* Savlon antiseptic disinfectant liquid uses blind-friendly Braille labels or tactile markings on their packaging to improve accessibility for the visually impaired.

* Walking depends on our brain expecting each step of a staircase to be the same height, so even one stair that’s a bit off can throw off our balance by disrupting our sense of position and automatic movement patterns, even if we notice it visually.

* Singapore's Mottainai Food Tech has a mission to use unconventional and underappreciated ingredients, which can be nutritious and widely available throughout Asia.

The inspiration for the name comes from the Japanese term mottainai, which laments waste - BBC

* In 2021, Vandana Shiva advised the government of Sri Lanka to ban inorganic fertilizers and pesticides stating "This decision will definitely help farmers become more prosperous. Use of organic fertilizer will help provide agri products rich with nutrients while retaining the fertility of the land." The policy applied overnight, with the main purpose to save State foreign exchange bills on imported fertilizers, caused a crisis with a significant reduction of farming output in several sectors, hitting the tea industry in particular and reducing rice yields were by one third. The ban was overturned seven months later.

* The nickname Iran-e-Sagheer" meaning "Little Iran" or "Lesser Iran," has been used historically to refer to Kashmir, especially by Persian writers and later historians. It reflects the deep Persian cultural influence that developed in Kashmir over several centuries, particularly from the 14th century onward. Persian became the language of administration, literature, and scholarship under successive Muslim rulers, much as it did across much of South Asia.

* The size of an engine is referred to by its cubic centimetres (“cc”), which measure the total volume inside all the cylinders and represent the engine’s displacement. Higher cc generally means more power and torque, but also lower fuel efficiency. Lower cc engines are common in hatchbacks and compact cars like Maruti Alto K10 (998cc), Renault Kwid (999cc), Tata Tiago (1199cc), while high cc engines are found in luxury sports cars and SUVs like Toyota Fortuner (2694cc), Mahindra Thar (2184cc), Jeep Meridian (1956cc).

* "...when teaching becomes content, it begins obeying the logic of content. That logic – shaped by Meta’s recommendation engine – rewards outrage, oversimplification, and para-social intimacy. The semiotics of the classroom shift. The teacher is no longer a symbol of institutional knowledge and fair authority. She becomes an influencer: a personal brand whose value depends on likeability scores. Here, enforcing discipline, giving a student a poor grade, or delivering hard feedback become threats to the brand." - The dangers of being a ‘cool teacher’, Nabeela Siddiqui in The Hindu

* "Distinguish failures from mistakes. Failures can happen despite good execution. Mistakes often stem from poor judgment, emotional reactions, or a lack of awareness about your circumstances. Understanding the difference helps you focus your reflection." - Mistakes to Meaning by Joshua Steiner, Michael Lynton

Fine-Tuning the Drones

2026-07-19T11:02:24.552+05:30

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

Honey, I Upgraded Our Dreams

2026-07-17T09:43:49.260+05:30

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

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
Overrepresented 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 prompt") 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. There are multiple ways to access that data but the simplest way to get a subset of the data with chosen parameters is to download it as a CSV file through the website's search interface. But if you need entire data for one country, you can filter the 7.64 GB file (size at the time of writing) hosted on Hugging Face as there are no natively available exports dedicated to specific countries currently.

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_18613.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