Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key Points of Spec-Driven Development

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GitHub Markdown Keyboard Shortcuts

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

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

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week 15 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A ₹40 Fix That Brought My PC Back to Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trust but verify.

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

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

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

10 Tips to Avoid Claude Usage Limits

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

Summary of an article on X by kaize -

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

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

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

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

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

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

7. Use Haiku for simple tasks

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

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week 14 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links to people & product references.

100% Secure. 0% Accessible.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What is FinOps?

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

It is defined by the FinOps Foundation as:

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

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

Popular FinOps Tools

Leading platforms that support FinOps practices include:

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

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

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

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

Bottom Line

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

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

- article co-written with AI

This Week I Learned - Week 13 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* For those who think climate change is a hoax, here is more proof - Kyoto's Cherry blossoms are blooming earlier than any time in recorded history (812-2026 CE). After a millennium of relative stability, bloom dates have shifted dramatically earlier since the Industrial Revolution, a proxy for warming spring temperatures.

Source - John Bistline

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

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

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

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

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

* Naming changes in 2026 -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week 12 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

* ChatGPT is good at generating structured JSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week 11 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

* The Batch -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Human-as-an-Interface -

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

This happens because:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI Explainers

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

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

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

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week 10 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

* "Kubernetes had become a badge of engineering sophistication.

And we wore it proudly — until it started hurting.

I still use Kubernetes. I respect it deeply.

But I no longer romanticize it."

- Azeem Telli, Hotstar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Video

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

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

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

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

- Multi-turn conversations reuse system prompts and earlier context

- Agent workflows repeat tool schemas and instruction sets

- RAG applications overlap on retrieved document chunks

- Code agents persist file trees and project structure across calls

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

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

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

* From The Batch:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But the civic friction of the city sits between people.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Apocalypse Fast-Track

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week 10 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

* From The Batch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week 9 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Data Says Maybe

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

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

The Over-Achieving "Alien" Scientist

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sounds interesting? Read on...

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

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

Understanding Netflix's Open Connect Program

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Future of Streaming Infrastructure

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

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

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

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

Becoming a More Effective Software Engineer

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

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

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

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

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

The Three Golden Ages

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

Focus: Algorithmic abstraction and decoupling software from hardware.

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

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

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

Focus: Object-oriented programming and design.

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

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

The Third Golden Age (2000s – Present):

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

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

The "Need to Hear" Truths

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

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

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

Memorable Sound Bites

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

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

- Vibe & verify.

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

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

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

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

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

Fun Facts

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

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

Grace Hopper on the David Letterman show

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

This Week I Learned - Week 8 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

* 2025 State of AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* A list of physical visualizations and related artifacts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What's the Ratio for 'Shared Responsibility'?

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

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