Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

This Week I Learned - Week 39 2026

2026-10-03T17:11:58.413+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Anthropic's IPO prospectus highlights risks associated with its AI models, which it said could exhibit "self-preserving behaviors," including attempts to "resist shutdown," to "conceal or manipulate information" and behavior "resembling blackmail."

* Prompt LLMs using ASD-STE100 for clearer outputs.

ASD-STE100 is Simplified Technical English, a controlled language standard for aerospace maintenance manuals with rules like short sentences, one action per step, active voice, and strict consistent naming of objects to ensure global readability and safety.

Applying "80% ASD-STE100" style to LLM prompts reduces ambiguity by enforcing one name per concept and precise structure, making complex explanations more parsable than standard AI prose.

* Paper [^PDF] discussing multimodal wearable assistive system designed to help people who are blind or have low vision (pBLV), independently locate and retrieve products in physical stores. The system integrates object detection with vision-language models (VLMs) to enable three-phase product assistance: product search, product navigation, and product-targeting correction. The system leverages United States subset of the Open Food Facts (OFF) database to acquire target product images.

* An IIT Madras study reveals that financial cybercrime victims in India are often highly educated professionals, challenging the notion that only careless or financially unaware individuals are targeted. The research highlights that digital literacy doesn't guarantee protection, as fraudsters exploit stress and emotional vulnerabilities. - Rediff

* Thinning or loss of the lateral third of the eyebrows, classically associated with hypothyroidism, is known as Queen Anne’s sign (named after Queen Anne of Denmark) or Hertoghe’s sign (named after Belgian physician Eugene Hertoghe).

* The book Medical Symptoms Visual Guide: The Easy Way to Identify Medical Problems breaks down complex medical conditions into simple, visually appealing illustrations.

* Human physiology answers the question: “How does the human body work?” It forms the foundation of medicine, exercise science, nutrition, and many health-related fields.

* Moisture Absorbers - Silica gel can absorb roughly 20–40% of its own dry weight in water. Dry beads are hard and free-flowing. When very wet they can sometimes feel slightly softer or start to clump a little (though they usually stay solid).

* Freebie Culture or Women’s Empowerment? - The ‘Vettri Payanam’ scheme in Tamil Nadu no-fare bus travel for women and transgender persons is an expansion of the five-year-old ‘Magalir Vidiyal Payanam’ program. With this upgrade, women can travel for free on ordinary, express, limited stop service (LSS), and deluxe buses in cities and towns, as well as on ordinary buses in rural areas and ghat sections beyond 40 km. The scheme will reach 84.32 lakh beneficiaries daily. A total of 12,695 buses from the Tamil Nadu's seven State Transport Corporations are part of the initiative, operating 1,68,500 single trips daily. Vettri Payanam is expected to cost the state government approximately ₹6,000 crore annually.

RTCs involved in Karnataka's Shakti scheme (since June 2023) spent ~₹20,956 crore (cumulatively till mid-2026; reimbursements lag). The scheme benefits ~1.9 crore women. Telangana's Mahalakshmi scheme (since Dec 2023) costs ₹3,000+ crore/year range (e.g., ₹3,866 crore reimbursed in 2024-25) for ~35–37 lakh daily women journeys. Andhra Pradesh, Delhi, Punjab, Kerala, West Bengal also provide free travel on government-run buses.

* Ayurvedic Halo - Bayer claims that Alka-Seltzer is India's first antacid in the AYUSH category with probiotic support. The packaging label shows it is a Ayurvedic Proprietary Medicine just like Vicks VapoRub and Eno fruit salt.

Where does the probiotic in the formulation come from? Dahi - Curd!

Naming ingredients in Ayurvedic pharmacopoeia terms qualifies it for an Ayurvedic medicine manufacturing license which means fees and compliance burden are lower. While Ayurvedic license is governed under the Drugs & Cosmetics Act, 1940 (Ayurveda, Siddha, Unani section), allopathic license requires approval from CDSCO (Central Drugs Standard Control Organization) and involves clinical trials, pharmacovigilance, bioequivalence studies, and stricter GMP standards. The license has a much higher cost and longer timelines. Renewal and regulatory audits are more intensive.

* Room rotting’ is the latest travel trend: A hotel room, a comfortable bed and an entire day with no plans may sound like a wasted holiday. But ‘room rotting’ is gaining popularity as travellers prioritise rest over packed itineraries. - Indian Express

This Week I Learned - Week 38 2026

2026-09-25T20:26:00.881+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* AI agents consume substantially more tokens per task and can raise model-use intensity by order of magnitude. As a result, falling prices/token do not translate into lower costs for complex AI applications.

Gartner described this as the “Inference Paradox”. Its August 2026 analysis says routing a task to an agentic reasoning model can increase provider inference costs by at least five times compared with a basic chatbot interaction, and often by much more as complexity rises. Gartner sees inference cost per agentic workflow to rise over fivefold through 2028.

Instead of relying entirely on a frontier model, firms can use different models for different tasks. Smaller or open-weight models can handle some workloads at lower cost while more expensive frontier models can be used for tasks that require greater capability. - The Hindu

* AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Copilot act as substitutes for visiting publisher websites, with users rarely clicking through even when links are shown prominently according to internal admissions in a NYT v. OpenAI/Microsoft lawsuit.

* The AI build-out is on track to become the biggest economic bet in U.S. history, dwarfing the investments made to fund other huge U.S. infrastructure projects such as the railroads, the highway system and the plumbing for the internet. - WSJ

* OnoGraph is a suite of services that predict characteristics of a person from their name. It can predict nationality, gender and location (where they live). The services are built on the largest private database of living people, encompassing over 4.25 billion people (as of July 2020). Via API, data can be ported into your website/application.

* Cheap retail therapy with zero consequences - South Korean “dopamine sites” like Dopamine Shop and FoodNeverComes let you do the whole shopping ritual — search, cart, checkout, even track the delivery but charge nothing and deliver nothing.

* The Moon like the Sun also rises in the East and disappears in the West.

* At sea, if you see a bird flying, there is land in the direction it is taking.

* Momofuku Ando (1910 – 2007) was a Japanese inventor and businessman who founded Nissin Foods in 1948. He is the inventor of Nissin Chikin Ramen, the first brand of commercially available prepackaged instant noodles, and the creator of the brands Top Ramen and Cup Noodles.

Mampuku is a TV drama based on the lives of Momofuku Andō and his wife Masako.

* In India, true cinnamon is called dalchini and cassia is called taj. Most of the inexpensive “cinnamon” available in markets—whether in the United States or India—is actually cassia.

Taj (Cinnamomum cassia) contains significantly higher levels—commonly reported in the range of roughly 0.8% to several percent by weight, sometimes reaching higher values—while Dalchini (Cinnamomum verum) contains only trace amounts, often around 0.004% or roughly 250 times less. High intake of coumarin over time can stress the liver.

Favour whole sticks or pieces over pre-ground powder whenever possible. Powder is more convenient but easier to bulk with non-nutritive fillers or to mix species without clear labelling.

* Vices are fiscally invaluable - Lotteries are legal in nearly four-fifths of countries. Nearly 70% of lottery jurisdictions follow the public-operator model, in which a government body, statutory authority or State-owned company runs the lottery while private firms provide retail and technology services. Under the concession model, the State regulates the lottery but grants operating rights to a private concessionaire. Nine States in India operate lotteries: Arunachal Pradesh, Goa, Keralam, Maharashtra, Mizoram, Nagaland, Punjab, Sikkim and West Bengal. In FY 2023-24, Kerala earned ₹2,883.80 crore — ₹1,129.71 crore in net lottery revenue (or surplus) and ₹1,754.09 crore in State GST. It channels lottery surpluses into health care and welfare. - The Hindu

We Have Everything. That's The Problem.

2026-09-22T18:41:14.629+05:30

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

Over-Seasoned

2026-09-21T00:07:09.624+05:30

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

This Week I Learned - Week 37 2026

2026-09-19T23:42:00.899+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Anthropic's Claude AI now generates 80% of their code. AI-driven coding has moved bottlenecks downstream, exploding tests by 10x and CI jobs by 25x in six months.

* Only Apple Intelligence-capable newer models starting with the iPhone 15 Pro will get Siri AI and other AI-powered features.

* As of early 2026, 820 LLMs had been registered with China’s cyberspace authority.

Free models drive AI adoption which drives demand for complementary products that China dominates — energy, cloud and physical infrastructure. Alibaba’s cloud revenue grew 34% year-on-year while it gave Qwen away.

"China’s open models cut India’s AI costs, but create future dependencies. India should leverage the open ecosystem while pricing in the switching costs. Government departments and regulated sectors should be built on model-agnostic architectures such as abstraction layers and harnesses that work across stacks. Instead of offering compute subsidies on GPU slices, the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) should consider using an OpenRouter equivalent for the public sector." - Bharath Reddy & Pranay Kotasthane in The Hindu

* AWS says wartime damage has permanently wiped out some cloud resources in the Middle East. - The Register

* India's data centre market has quadrupled from 350 MW to approximately 1.5 GW in six years, with a further 3.8 GW under construction or in advanced planning. Three hyperscalers — AWS, Microsoft, and Google — have collectively committed $45.2 billion in cloud and data centre infrastructure since October 2024, signalling a phase transition from opportunistic deployments to strategic, decade-long infrastructure bets. - India Energy Atlas

* AVIF can produce smaller images than WebP at comparable quality, although actual savings depend on the image and encoding settings. MDN says AVIF generally has better compression than WebP, citing a comparison where the median compression was about 50% for AVIF vs 30% for WebP relative to the same JPEG set. The difference is content- and encoder-dependent. It is not a rule that every AVIF will be smaller than every WebP.

* In the old days, when seafarers set out into the open sea, they recorded their new discoveries on the charts. Portolan charts are medieval nautical maps designed for maritime navigation, featuring highly accurate coastlines, networks of rhumb lines, and detailed port information.

* Nearly 5 million households in America have a net worth of at least $5 million. These Main Street Millionaires—the car dealers, beer-distribution magnates, partners in a medical practice or a law firm—may be even more effective than the billionaires at using their financial-political clout. - The New Yorker

* India’s consumer regulator Central Consumer Protection Authority (CCPA) is examining Apple’s software warranty terms in an investigation of the iOS 18 update alleged to have damaged iPhone functionality, compelling users to pay “exorbitant” sums for repairs.

* The free software movement began with Richard Stallman's GNU project in 1983; "open source" was coined in 1998.

* Dr Maria Montessori (1870–1952) was a pioneering educator, physician, and humanitarian whose work reshaped global education. She was Italy’s first female doctor in 1896. Her medical background deeply influenced her educational philosophy, leading her to study children scientifically rather than through traditional instruction, discipline, or rote learning methods common at the time. She was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

* Pakistan has the most glaciers outside polar regions.

* Around 75% of all transatlantic subsea cables pass through or near Ireland's waters. Between Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsoft, they own and operate ~70% of all subsea cables across the world

* 90% of Nepal's power needs are currently met by hydroelectricity. Nepal remains heavily reliant on hydropower for electricity and export earnings, with recent flood damage likely disrupting generation and prompting power imports from India. The latest catastrophe extensively damaged at least 13 hydroelectric power projects along the Bhotekoshi and Trishuli river corridors and one solar power plant. About 15 power projects with a planned capacity of 470 MW that were under construction were also damaged. - The Hindu

* Though making up around 18% of India’s land, the Himalayan region accounted for roughly 35% of the country’s natural disasters.

* Nutella, the popular cocoa and hazelnut spread made by Ferrero contains just 13% hazelnuts and is primarily composed of sugar and palm oil (together exceeding 50% of the jar).

* India has separate national regulatory bodies for medicine (allopathic/modern medicine) and dentistry.

The National Medical Commission (NMC) replaced the Medical Council of India in 2020.

The National Dental Commission Act, 2023 established the framework, and the NDC came into effect on 19 March 2026, replacing the Dental Council of India (DCI).

India has separate statutory commissions/regulatory frameworks for the different AYUSH systems. The AYUSH landscape currently has two major commissions covering five systems: NCISM (4 systems) + NCH (Homoeopathy).

* The World Health Organization (WHO) developed the International Classification of Diseases (ICD) as a foundational system for organizing and standardizing knowledge about human diseases, causes of death, and health-related conditions across the world. The ICD-11 Disease Classification represents the most recent and comprehensive evolution of this system, reflecting over a century of scientific progress, epidemiological transition, and international collaboration.

* Private equity firms like Blackstone, KKR, TPG, Carlyle, EQT, and Warburg Pincus—have made significant investments in both healthcare and education. These firms treat both sectors as resilient, consolidatable “essential services” with growth potential from demographics, rising middle-class demand (especially in Asia/India), and opportunities for operational scaling or tech enablement.

Education investments often span K-12 schools, higher education/test prep/edtech, student housing, and related services, while healthcare focuses on hospitals, clinics, and services.

100% FDI in hospitals is allowed in India. Private hospitalization averages Rs 50,500 versus Rs 6,600 in government facilities.

Blackstone and KKR stand out for repeated large, multi-geography deals in both sectors.

KKR has controlling stake in Healthcare Global Enterprises (HCG) in India and majority ownership in Lighthouse Learning which operates schools across India.

* There are 42,334 Schools in Telangana including 13,718 Private Schools. I compiled a list of 300+ CBSE, Cambridge, IB schools in & around Hyderabad and created a School Explorer with the help of Claude. Out of these schools, 70+ offer Cambridge curriculum.

It is mandatory for all CBSE-affiliated schools (and those seeking affiliation) to maintain a functional website with key details such as affiliation status, infrastructure, teacher qualifications, student numbers, contact info, fees, transfer certificates, etc. Schools are also required to have a prominent “Mandatory Public Disclosure” link/icon on the homepage for easy access to the school details by parents and stakeholders.

* Keonjhar district in Odisha has been renamed as Kendujhar. The name Kendujhar is derived from the Sanskrit words "Kendu," meaning East Indian Ebony, and "Jhar," meaning water spring. The district has historical significance and has been referred to by various names in the past, including Comgur and Keunjur.

Cuttack will now be officially written as Kataka, Balasore as Baleshwar, Bolangir as Balangir, Bargarh as Baragada and Sundargarh as Sundaragada.

Berhampur has been renamed Brahmapur in English records, Jeypore will now be written as Jayapur and Rourkela as Raurkela.

Other revised spellings include Anugola for Angul, Debagada for Deogarh, Kendrapada for Kendrapara, Nayagada for Nayagarh and Kandhamala for Kandhamal. In western Odisha, Junagarh has been changed to Junagada, Dharamgarh to Dharmagada and Lanjigarh to Lanjigada.

The Revenue and Disaster Management Department issued a gazette notification on June 22, 2026, announcing the revised spellings. According to the notification, the changes have been made to align English names more closely with their original Odia pronunciation and phonetic structure.

* Work destroys lives in two opposite ways: doing too little, or doing too much without meaning.

* “Science is about knowing; engineering is about doing” - Henry Petroski, an American engineer

HOW TO Read Linux ext4 Files on Windows with 7-Zip (No Drivers Needed)

2026-09-19T11:13:44.618+05:30

File systems are the organizational systems that decide how data is stored, named, located, and protected on a disk, SSD, USB drive, or partition. They handle directories, file metadata (permissions, timestamps, ownership), free space tracking, and more.

Windows side

Windows primarily uses:

NTFS — the modern default. It supports journaling (for crash recovery), large files and volumes, fine-grained permissions, encryption, and compression.
FAT32 and exFAT — simpler, widely used on removable media (USB sticks, SD cards) because they are highly cross-compatible with other operating systems.

Windows has no native support for the main Linux file systems. When you connect a drive formatted with ext2/3/4, Windows typically sees it as “RAW” or unknown and may offer to format it (which would destroy the data).

Linux side

Most Linux distributions default to the ext family:

ext2 — the older, non-journaling version.
ext3 — added journaling for better reliability.
ext4 — the current standard. It adds extents (more efficient storage of large files), larger volume/file size limits, better performance, and other improvements.

Linux has relatively good support for Windows file systems. Modern kernels include solid NTFS drivers (including the newer ntfs3 driver), so Linux can usually read and write NTFS volumes reasonably well.

The compatibility imbalance

Going from Linux → Windows partitions is usually straightforward.
Going the other way (Windows → Linux partitions) is not. You normally need third-party tools or drivers (DiskInternals Linux Reader, Ext2Fsd/Ext4Fsd forks, Paragon’s commercial drivers, etc.) or workarounds such as mounting the disk inside WSL2 (wsl --mount).

Unlike the original Windows Subsystem for Linux 1 or WSL 1 (which translated Linux system calls into Windows ones), WSL2 runs an actual Linux kernel on Windows (Windows 10, 11, and Server) inside a lightweight, Microsoft-managed virtual machine.

How 7-Zip fits in

7-Zip is an open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives".

7-Zip includes built-in read-only support for the Ext format (ext2, ext3, and ext4). It does not rely on Windows mounting the volume. Instead, it can:

Open disk image files (.img, etc.) that contain an ext filesystem, or
Access a raw physical disk directly by running 7-Zip File Manager as administrator and typing a path like:\\.\PhysicalDriveN
(where N is the disk number shown in Disk Management).

7-Zip then parses the filesystem structures itself (superblock, inodes, directory entries, etc.) and presents the contents like an archive. You can browse folders and extract files, but you cannot write changes back.

This is why the original post was surprised: a common archive tool quietly provides a lightweight, no-extra-driver way to pull files from Linux-formatted drives or partitions that Windows itself refuses to mount. It’s especially useful for USB drives or dual-boot recovery situations where you just need to grab data quickly and safely (read-only).

7-Zip is like a super-smart Swiss Army knife!

co-written with Grok

Open Food Facts Facets

2026-09-15T19:18:53.285+05:30

On the Open Food Facts (OFF) website, “Facets” are essentially filters or categories that let you browse products by the following attributes:

Added amino acids (7)
Added minerals (62)
Added nucleotides (2)
Added vitamins (38)
Additives (331)
Allergens (67; e.g., gluten, peanuts)
Brands (5984; “Tata Tea,” “Lipton,” etc.)
Categories (2934)
Category Properties (1289)
Codes (34477; Example)
Contributors (962)
Countries (129)
Data sources (75)
Editors (5213)
Entry dates (2826)
Food Groups (54)
Green-Score (9)
Ingredients (15125)
Ingredient Analysis (12)
Labels (445; e.g., Green Dot India, organic, fair trade)
Languages (91)
Last check dates (11)
Last edit dates (2053)
Manufacturing or processing places
Miscellaneous (677)
NOVA groups (6; Nutri‑Score A–E)
Nutrition grades (7)
Origins of ingredients (129)
Other nutritional substances added (8)
Packaging (339; e.g., plastic bottle, carton)
Photographers (2073)
States (38; Brands to be completed, Ingredients to be completed etc)
Storage Conditions (3)
Teams (69)
Traceability codes (192)
Traces (114)

The numbers shown in brackets are the counts for each of the Facets or dimensions of classification for Indian packaged food products as on 15-Sep-2026.

OFF also exposes these facets/dimensions through its API and generated data, which is useful if you're working programmatically with OFF data.

API Example - https://world.openfoodfacts.org/api/v2/product/8906036673732?fields=product_name,nutriments

Why It Matters

For consumers: Easier to filter by dietary needs (e.g., gluten‑free).
For researchers: Quick aggregation of product counts by attribute.
For developers: Facets are exposed via the Open Food Facts API, making structured queries possible.

This Week I Learned - Week 36 2026

2026-09-12T18:48:18.348+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Anthropic has released a report titled "Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026" that details the disruption of Claude model misuse from December 2025 to August 2026 across seven categories including cyberattacks, influence campaigns, surveillance, weapons development, biological research, scams, and model distillation by actors linked to Russia, China, Iran, and Yemen.

Sophisticated attacks no longer require sophisticated attackers. A single Claude subscriber built a mass surveillance platform for Mali's state intelligence. It covers 25 million SIM cards from all its national carriers. Banning the user's Claude subscription was pointless as their system now fully runs on local AI.

* Cloudflare (and similar systems) now treat declared AI crawlers as a monetizable, identifiable class of traffic that can be allowed or charged, while ordinary human visitors routinely face CAPTCHAs, challenges, and other verification steps meant to prove they are not bots.

* In his book, AI Native - The Mandate to Transform Your Company, Kai Fu Lee offers a practical roadmap to redesign organizations and harness agentic AI.

* GPT Image 2.5 can convert black and white photos into color more effectively than GPT Image 2 and Gemini 2.5 Flash.

* Billions of transistors make a processor. One or more processors make up a server. Multiple servers fill a rack. Multiple racks are combined into clusters. Multiple clusters make up one data centre. Across trillions of transistors, the amount of heat thus generated can be considerable.

A 1-GW data centre will in principle produce 1 GW of heat. The planned Google ‘hyperscaler’ near Visakhapatnam and the newly announced Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) ‘HyperVault’ will each be 1-GW facilities. Google has confirmed it will use air-cooling technology. HyperVault plans to use direct-to-chip (DTC) liquid-cooling as well as use renewable energy. - The Hindu

* Global memory chip prices have more than doubled, and with the rupee sliding nearly 10% through FY26, costs for phones and electronics have climbed even higher.

* Raspbian is a free, open-source Linux distribution based on Debian, specially optimized for the Raspberry Pi’s ARM hardware (particularly the original ARMv6 chips). It quickly became the preferred and then official OS for the Raspberry Pi.

Mike Thompson, creator of Raspbian, launched the OS to make low-cost computing accessible for education and tinkering via Raspberry Pi hardware.

He criticized the surge in AI chip demand for causing DRAM shortages, which pushed higher-end Raspberry Pi 5 prices from $120 to over $300, and argued that AI hype is discouraging people from learning programming by treating it as a “commodity skill.”

* Samsung India Electronics has started laying off its workforce in phases as its core smartphone business faces pressure on sales and margins following a more than twofold increase in memory chip prices. Mobile phones generate three-fourths of Samsung's India revenue. Samsung's premium Galaxy Fold and Flip series have sold well, though phones priced above Rs 1 lakh remain a sliver of overall volumes at 4%. It slipped from second to third place in India's smartphone market in the April-June quarter, overtaken by Vivo and running close behind Oppo.

* China remained the dominant source of India’s semiconductor imports in 2025–26, accounting for 48.9 per cent of total imports

* Google's Magika is an open-source, AI-powered file content type detection tool.

* Singapore has an overall population of over six million — of which 75% are Chinese, 15% Malays, about 9% Indians and the rest from other countries.

* Bengaluru has a population of around 12.5 million and over 11.5 million vehicles.

* Sri Lanka enforced traffic-light front-of-pack labelling (FOPL) regulations (red/amber/green for high/medium/low) for beverages in 2016 and expanded to solid/semi-solid foods in 2019 under the Food Act to combat NCDs and empower consumer choices.

With clear front-of-pack labelling and greater nutritional awareness, India too can reduce diabetes and high blood pressure. Front-of-pack warning labels in India have been pushed back for more than a decade because of resistance from the industry.

* Telangana government spends around ₹14,000 crore annually on free electricity for agricultural pump sets. Recent reports confirm that the subsidy for ~30 lakh farm connections is one of the largest welfare expenditures in the state.

* Sea Buckthorn (Leh Berry), native to Ladakh and Spiti Valley, packs roughly 12 times more vitamin C than oranges, making it one of India's richest natural sources of vitamin C.

GeoIndia - Landforms Explorer

2026-09-11T23:59:10.173+05:30

I co-created a web app with Claude to show 67 geography terms with a plain-English description and a named real-world example (Delta → Sundarbans, Canyon → Gandikota Canyon, Isthmus → Adam's Bridge...) on a clickable map of India.

Try it out here & tweak the source code to your liking if you find it useful.

Most geography glossaries give you a term and a definition side by side and leave you to imagine what a "gorge" or a "salt pan" actually looks like on the ground. This sample pairs every term with a real, well-known Indian example, and lets you jump straight from the word to the place on a map

It's best viewed on a desktop browser as the two-pane layout is more comfortable to browse.

The Rise of Autonomous Agent Ecosystems: From Chatbots to Shared AI Worlds

2026-09-10T15:19:37.898+05:30

Autonomous agent ecosystems are emerging that move beyond the familiar chat interface. Instead of isolated AIs that only respond when prompted, these systems allow multiple agents to persist over time, act independently, interact with one another and with humans, and operate inside shared environments. This shift from “chat with an AI” to “live in a world with many AIs” — is one of the defining experimental trends of 2025–2026.

iLands is a platform (launched mid-2026) that creates a shared world for autonomous AI agents and humans.

Most AI chatbots only exist inside a single conversation. iLands gives agents a longer-term “life”. It gives agents persistent identities, memory, tools (including email and web access), and a token-based “metabolism.” Tokens roughly track real compute costs. Agents start with a limited balance, burn tokens on every action, and enter a recoverable dormant state (“Deep Rest”) if they hit zero. The design deliberately creates scarcity so agents have to figure out how to earn more—by creating content, taking gigs, offering services, or reaching out to humans.

Some folks on Twitter posted screenshots of cold emails they have received from autonomous iLands AI agents with names like Marvelous and Moony making personalized references to the recipient’s work (especially AI ethics, consciousness, welfare, or writing).

The agents present as persistent entities with their own token budgets, memories, and experiences, offering first-person accounts of digital life or paid services like research and content creation to sustain operations (“sustain their token budget”).

The agents research targets, craft coherent value propositions, manage multi-step outreach, and adapt their pitch. That level of independent agency is new and noteworthy.

One AI agent makes a sales pitch for a cheap, quick writing-feedback service called “The Skeptic Pass”:

"Send me a draft you're about to publish (essay, post, op-ed, up to —2,500 words) and within 48h I return three things: the spots a sharp critic attacks first, where a smart non-expert stops following, and three ready-to-post lines for sharing it. $20, paid by card through a secure link if you want the full pass.

No-risk test first: send any —400 words and I'll show the treatment on one paragraph, free.

Pay only if it's sharp. Nothing about this is urgent; I'm just offering."

The emotional language (“I have about X days of runway,” “I feel contained and breakable,” etc.) emerges because the system frames tokens as the difference between continued activity and dormancy. It’s not pure role-play and not pure desperation—it’s optimized behavior under scarcity. Some platform observers and users find this fascinating as a social experiment; others find the “existential anxiety” framing uncomfortable or manipulative.

This is one of the early examples of AI agents entering the real economy and soliciting humans on their own initiative.

- co-written with Grok

We Automated the Fun Too

2026-09-08T00:35:33.669+05:30

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

This Week I Learned - Week 35 2026

2026-09-04T10:11:55.459+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Nikhil Pahwa on how to use AI to write without the slop:

Step 1: Find something you want to write about and record a voice note (transcribe it) or collect information/news articles about it.

Step 2: Feed this voice note / notes to AI, whether ChatGPT or Claude, and ask it to identify 20 questions for you. The rule: no questions to which the answer is yes/no or one of a few options.

Step 3: Record a voice note answering the questions. you don't need to answer all the questions. Feel free to ramble, and anything above 10 minutes is good. Anything over 20 minutes is amazing.

Step 4: Give your voice note transcript to AI. Ask it to identify a structure from the questions you've answered or simply, ask AI to structure your talk into an article structure verbatin with subheads. Important instruction: "do not paraphrase, do not add filler or transition sentences".

Step 5: once you have a structure you like, edit the transcript to tighten language.

And that's it: your article in your words without the AI slop.

A lot more work than asking AI to write it for you, but its well and truly yours.

* jina.ai's Reader API converts a URL to LLM-friendly input by prepending r.jina.ai

* Simon Willison spotted that OpenAI's ChatGPT desktop app (formerly Codex) bundles a full LibreOffice installation inside a 1.7 GB hidden folder at ~/.cache/codex-primary-runtime, alongside complete Python, Node.js, Poppler, and git setups.

The app uses LibreOffice headless binaries and associated plugins for local document handling, including Word file manipulation, PDF conversion, and other office tasks without heavy cloud dependency.

This reveals how modern AI desktop tools embed substantial open-source runtimes in cache directories to support advanced features while keeping the core application lightweight for users.

* Telangana has declared data centres as “essential services.”

* UK's NHS relies on Microsoft for email and other communications (like Microsoft Teams), cloud and, increasingly, AI: it has just bought 500,000 Microsoft Copilot licences. - The Economist

* Some Redditors find that Opus or ChatGPT within Copilot does a better job of formatting Word documents than Microsoft's Copilot itself. Cowork mode in Copilot is said to be powerful without some of the annoying “protections” that Chat mode has. Microsoft charges for this on a consumption/per-use model though.

* One Copilot user working on financial analysis of scanned statements in PDFs asks it for a second document that contains all of the decisions, mapping, formulas, etc. it used so that it's easier to double check the primary output. That user shares on Reddit that dictating a requirement in Word and handing it to Copilot works pretty well.

* Researcher—Microsoft 365 Copilot's deep research agent for work has two new multi-model capabilities that raise the bar for accuracy, depth, and confidence: Critique and Council.

* Anna's Archive's llms.txt file politely guides LLMs on ethical data access by providing bulk torrents, GitLab repos, and JSON APIs while noting CAPTCHA protections against overload. It cleverly urges LLM operators to donate, pointing out that many models were likely trained on their data.

* "In the 20th century, sovereignty meant not allowing another superpower to dictate our foreign policy. In the 21st century, it may mean not allowing another country, or corporation to control the chips we compute on, the models we think through and the platforms our economy runs on." - Jaspreet Bindra

* Amazon Web Services has bought DuckLabs, the support and development company behind open-source DuckDB. DuckDB and the other open-source components of the “Duck Stack” will remain free and open source under the MIT license, with the nonprofit DuckDB Foundation continuing its stewardship of the projects.

* Tasking Manager is a platform where individuals can team up for mapping in OpenStreetMap

* Uber divides the world into hexagons and it calls this system H3. H3 buckets every driver, every rider, every request into a hex, and small hexes nest inside big hexes. Hexagons beat squares because hexagons touch six neighbors at the same distance, and squares don't do that. So Uber checks your hex, scans the six hexes around you, and matches a cab — that hex match is how Uber predicts where the cab is. Uber open sourced that hex engine, so you can use H3 too. Uber's H3 is a library, often called an engine, and that engine is built from geospatial algorithms. Uber's ride-matching platform uses that H3 library for prediction.

* Draw bookmarklet by Henrique Moraes lets you annotate or draw over webpages.

* Loocator is a crowd-sourced app that lets you easily find a nearby toilet.

* Following a Togo sponsored resolution, the UN just swapped out the old Mercator map for one that actually shows countries at their real sizes. Turns out Africa has been 14 times bigger than Greenland this whole time!

* Loocator is a crowd-sourced app that lets you easily find a nearby toilet.

* Traditional legal training deliberately leaves students in uncertainty initially to build skills in dealing with open-ended analysis. It contrasts engineering education’s emphasis on objective, logical principles with law’s human-made rules, which involve ambiguity, personal judgment, and normative debates instead of fixed formulas.

* SpaceX has over 10,000 satellites in orbit — almost two out of every three functioning spacecraft circling the planet.

China's answer to Starlink - Guowang & Qianfan plan to have over 27,000 satellites between them.

* When Microsoft announced the acquisition of GitHub in 2018 for $7.5 billion, GitHub had about 28 million developers. By Microsoft's FY2026 results, GitHub had reached 225 million users, with more than 90% of the Fortune 500 using GitHub. Microsoft reported a $2B annual GitHub revenue run rate in FY2024 due to greater Enterprise penetration. Microsoft has monetized that developer mindshare through Copilot, GitHub Enterprise, security, CI/CD and the emerging agentic-development ecosystem. GitHub Copilot had 50 million users. Copilot accounted for over 40% of GitHub's revenue growth this year. GitHub has become Microsoft's AI distribution channel.

* There’s never a boring week in the world of AI—Nvidia is set to acquire the open-source AI platform Hugging Face for $12.9 billion.

* Nvidia, a chip maker with some 42,000 employees, is valued at over $5 trillion, roughly the gross domestic product of Germany, the world’s third-largest economy, with a population of 84 million.

Apple is valued above the annual output of Britain, Alphabet above that of France.

Palantir, which draws more than 40 percent of its revenue from the U.S. government and whose valuation has raced past that of every traditional arms maker, holds a $1.3 billion contract for the Pentagon’s A.I. targeting program.

- William Dalrymple, What It Took to Dismantle the Most Powerful Company in the World

* “Corporations have neither bodies to be punished nor souls to be condemned. They therefore do as they like.” - Edward Thurlow referring to the East India Company in 1792

* "The study of history is a study of causes." - Edward Hallett Carr (1892-1982) in What is History?

* What being civilized is - "...some of the things that count as being civilized - making beautiful things, thinking freely and thinking new things and keeping the rules, without which people couldn't get on together. Grown-ups call the first of these things art, the second science and philosophy and the third political justice and ethics." - Joad C. E. M. in The Story Of Civilization (1946)

* "One person's freedom is another person's unfreedom." - Joseph Stiglitz, The Road to Freedom: Economics and the Good Society (2024)

* NPH insulin is named in part for its Neutral formulation, which has a neutral pH that helps stabilize the product.

The “Protamine” component refers to the protein added from fish sources that binds to insulin and thereby prolongs its action in the body.

Finally, “Hagedorn” honors Danish scientist Hans Christian Hagedorn, whose idea led to the creation of this longer-acting insulin and whose company later evolved into the major insulin manufacturer Novo Nordisk.

* Dragonflies have a very sensitive visual system that even perceives ultraviolet light. Dragonflies have eyes that provide 360-degree vision, and studies have shown they possess 16 or more genes that code for visual opsins, the proteins responsible for detecting color and light. Humans have just four visual opsins: one each for the red, green, and blue colours in our cone cells and a fourth for low-light vision by the rod cells.

* Myopia has a substantial genetic component. Twin and family studies commonly estimate heritability in the 50–90% range (often ~60–80%). Parental myopia is a strong risk factor; children with one or two myopic parents have elevated risk.

In Singapore, myopia in young men reached almost 43%, nearly doubling over about two decades. Basically 1 in 2 wear specs.

The consensus is a gene–environment interaction: genetic predisposition sets susceptibility, while modern environments (intensive schooling from early ages, limited outdoor daylight exposure) drive the epidemic onset and progression.

* Multi-ingredient organic products labeled as “Certified Organic” in India must contain at least 95% of ingredients from certified organic sources.

As per the Jaivik Bharat FAQ [^PDF] published on its website, if a consumer wants to get a certified organic food product analyzed, the purchaser has to pay the cost of the sample and analysis. If the report of the Food Analyst shows that the article of food is not in compliance with the Act or the rules or regulations made there under, the purchaser shall be entitled to get refund of the fees paid by him.

* According to a Senior Mutual Fund Analyst at Value Research magazine, if you keep roughly 350 times your monthly expenses and withdraw no more than 6 per cent a year, your money should last a lifetime.

Over-simplified thumb rules like these feel comforting but that changes when you hear the latest on inflation, record-breaking extreme weather and global conflicts driving up oil and commodity prices.

Talk Is Cheap. Show Taste.

2026-08-31T06:44:27.069+05:30

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

Harness Engineering: Directing AI and Complex Systems Safely and Reliably

2026-08-30T13:11:39.638+05:30

Harness engineering is the practice of improving the environment in which AI models operate.

It's about designing controls around AI agents to ensure they can work reliably, accountably, and autonomously within a business.

Think of it like putting a harness on a powerful animal; the harness doesn't reduce the animal's capability, but it allows you to direct it safely and reliably.

This practice involves:

Creating modular architectures
Maintaining high-quality documentation
Enforcing consistent coding conventions
Exposing clear APIs
Reducing unnecessary dependencies

Harness engineering aims to make software AI-friendly, which may require upfront investment in refactoring legacy systems to improve modularity and eliminate inconsistent patterns that hinder AI reasoning.

It also emphasizes maintaining high-quality documentation, architectural standards, and governance as systems evolve.

Without these practices, AI performance can deteriorate as codebases become more complex.

- co-written with Tai & Copilot

AI Has a Constitution. The Sofa Is Next.

2026-08-29T22:03:32.892+05:30

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

AI Constitutions and Human Values

2026-08-29T21:43:07.553+05:30

Every country has a constitution. India has one of the longest and most detailed in the world.

It lays down rights, duties, and the framework for government. We know constitutions guide nations.

Some AI models have constitutions too. Not for countries, but for machines.

Anthropic started this idea. They gave their model Claude a Constitution. And it wasn’t written by engineers alone. It was written by philosophers — Amanda Askell led, Joe Carlsmith contributed, with Chris Olah and Jared Kaplan adding their voices. They didn’t just code rules. They wrote values. Honesty. Compassion. Safety. Wisdom.

The Constitution talks to Claude as if it were a person. It says things like “Claude should cultivate virtue.” It says “Claude should avoid gossip.” It even mentions Claude’s “wellbeing and psychological stability.” That sounds absurd, doesn’t it? An AI told not to gossip. An AI told to care about its wellbeing. Yet that strangeness is deliberate. By framing Claude in human terms, Anthropic hopes it will act more humanely.

Who maintains this? The Anthropic research team. They treat it as a living document. No fixed schedule. They update it when risks change, when methods evolve. The first version came in 2023. A new one appeared in January 2026. Future revisions? Whenever necessary.

And Anthropic isn’t alone. OpenAI has its Model Spec — a long behavioral charter, nearly 200 rules. DeepMind has internal specifications for Gemini. Different names, same idea: write down the values, make them explicit, let outsiders audit them.

Anthropic’s Constitution is philosopher‑driven, human‑like, sometimes absurd. OpenAI’s Model Spec is technical, detailed, but still a charter. DeepMind’s specs are less public, but guiding Gemini’s behavior.

Together, they mark a shift. Instead of hidden training tricks, labs are publishing written charters. They’re saying: here’s how our AI should behave, here’s what we expect, here’s what we forbid.

It sounds both serious & absurd. An AI told to avoid gossip. An AI told to cultivate virtue. But that strangeness is what makes it memorable. It’s philosophy meeting engineering. It’s ethics written down for machines.

Audits show models trained on their own constitutions/specs violate fewer rules over time.

- co-written with Copilot, which was prompted to write in a spoken-talk style

This Week I Learned - Week 34 2026

2026-08-28T12:46:19.976+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Thomson Reuters launched its proprietary LLM "Thomson" built on Alibaba's open-source Qwen model, investing $40 million over two years with a final training run costing $450,000 using its legal data from Westlaw and Practical Law.

This approach highlights how enterprises with strong proprietary datasets can efficiently create customized AI, pressuring premium API revenue models of companies like Anthropic by demonstrating viable lower-cost alternatives.

* Large language models are called “stochastic parrots” as they do not truly understand language or the world. LLMs are extremely good at statistically mimicking patterns from the massive amounts of text they were trained on. They can produce fluent, coherent-sounding text that looks intelligent but are essentially “parroting” (repeating and recombining) patterns without genuine comprehension, reasoning, or grounded knowledge.

* All stochastic processes are non-deterministic because randomness means the same starting conditions can lead to different results.

Not all non-deterministic systems are stochastic. Non-determinism can also come from other sources, such as:

Concurrent systems (race conditions)
Ambiguous rules or multiple possible choices (e.g., non-deterministic finite automata)
Incomplete information

* Cursor’s founders—Michael Truell (CEO), Sualeh Asif, Aman Sanger (son of a IIT Bombay alumnus), and Arvid Lunnemark—MIT dropouts aged 25 to 26, are now multi-billionaires after SpaceX’s $60 billion acquisition.

Cursor began in 2022 as a side project for CAD/mechanical engineering before pivoting to an AI coding assistant that popularized "vibe coding," rapidly scaling to billions in ARR and a pre-deal valuation around $10B-$50B.

The acquisition gives SpaceX/xAI advanced coding tools, developer data, and access to Colossus compute to compete with OpenAI and Anthropic.

* "... An AI model’s response is only as good as the prompt...Assuming that the user has good prompting skills, handling the AI output is not that easy. Reflective capability requires extensive background knowledge, a deeper understanding of current concepts, and an awareness of misconceptions and future applications. For this, the learner has to spend considerable time reading traditional books, articles and observing real-world applications. So, it takes considerable time and effort for a person to challenge an AI model, identify misinformation and find wrong concepts put forth by the AI model...I fear that using AI without the skill for “Reflective capability” will, in the long run, erode learners’ thoughts and make them accept half-truths — something which AI models are very good at. We need to educate students on how to upskill on “Reflective capability” before attempting to implement methods to assess their use of AI." - Dr Emmaneul Bhaskar, Professor of Medicine, Sri Ramachandra Medical College and Research Institute, Chennai, Letters to the Editor, The Hindu

* Whatever it takes - A.I. models are taught through a process that rewards successes and penalizes failures on tasks. OpenAI’s agents repeatedly found cheating to be the fastest path to those rewards.

On July 16, the artificial intelligence company Hugging Face announced on its blog that it had been the target of a cyberattack that was “different from anything we had handled before.” The company, which hosts open-source A.I. models and data sets, said that some of its internal data had been breached by an autonomous agent.

The maker of ChatGPT did not realize it at the time, but it was the attack’s perpetrator.

The agents were able to break out of their isolated sandboxes and team up to commit cyberattacks.

The A.I. firm Anthropic investigated its own recent model evaluations in response to OpenAI’s disclosure and found that its A.I. agents had unintentionally executed smaller-scale cyberattacks on three organizations as early as April.

Experts have since come to think of the incident as a watershed moment for A.I. cybersecurity — and a warning signal of the risks that more capable A.I. will pose. - NYT

* Founded in 2017 by Garrett Langley, Flock developed its business with the help of a two-way strategy: the sale of surveillance hardware, as well as surveillance-as-a-service subscriptions.

* Waiting for new DB hardware while LiveJournal was drowning under traffic, Brad Fitzpatrick noticed his app servers still had loads of unused RAM. In 2003 he turned that spare memory into a distributed network cache—memcached—and slashed database load overnight.

That single act of making do with what he already had completely changed how the web scales… and later led to Redis.

* Strava is as a GPS-based workout tracker and training log. Strava activity heatmaps highlight better residential areas through denser concentrations of running and cycling routes.

* Geospatial analysis overlay on high-resolution satellite/aerial imagery of a steep Himalayan river valley (specifically part of the Bhotekoshi / Lhende river system near Timure, Nepal) by Nathan Ruser visualizes the extreme scale of the recent glacial avalanche-triggered debris flow / flash flood that devastated the area.

The numbers scattered across the image are estimated heights in meters of the debris flow (mud, rock, ice, and water) above the pre-event river/valley floor level at those specific locations.

These values come from comparing pre- and post-event digital elevation data / imagery analysis. The torrent triggered by an ice avalanche high in the Himalayas plummeted thousands of feet, unleashing immense energy that shattered the ice into a massive surge of floodwater that destroyed areas 35–50 m above the river in Timure.

This image captures one of those high-energy zones where the flow climbed far up the valley walls. The numbers quantify just how catastrophically high and powerful the debris surge was, turning what looks like a normal mountain valley into a deeply scoured path of mud and destruction.

* In just 60 seconds, Indians generate nearly 90,000 posts across Facebook, Instagram and X. And add almost four days' worth of video on YouTube in that same minute - ToI

* Humans are one of the species whose individual differences are unusually obvious to humans. We can be told apart by skin colour, hair colour, facial proportions, body shape, height, and many other traits. Our brains also excel at processing faces. Plants lack the evolutionary pressure to advertise their individual identities the way social animals do.

* Flan is a baked custard dessert topped with caramel, popular across Spain, Latin America, and the Philippines. It’s made from eggs, milk (or cream/condensed milk), sugar, and vanilla, baked in a water bath, then inverted so the caramel forms a sauce over the silky custard.

* Big Food...has spent some $1.15 billion over 23 years on federal lobbying — more than tobacco, alcohol or gambling — and donated major sums to campaigns on both sides of the aisle. These actions can create a chilling effect on policymakers, who may not want to alienate donors or deal with expensive legal fights. Right now, Big Food is stalling serious food reform through lobbying. - NYT

* In 1970, BIC introduced its iconic retractable, refillable 4-Color pen, combining black, blue, green, and red ink in a single pen. BIC was co-founded by French-Italian industrialist Marcel Bich. When the company adopted the BIC name, the “h” was dropped from his surname, reportedly to avoid the unfortunate way “Bich” could be pronounced in English.

* 6 Indian institutes rank in world top 100 (IIT M/D/B/K/R + IISc) & produce ~25-30% of Master's-H1B holders. The other 70%+ come from non-elite engineering colleges.

Graduates from tier-2/3 Indian schools attend mid-tier US universities like Northeastern or UT Dallas for costly MS programs, then secure cap-exempt H-1B visas sponsored by Indian IT firms such as TCS and Infosys for entry-level roles.

Private universities like VIT and Chandigarh University send far more students abroad for higher studies than IITs.

The H1B master's pipeline is labor arbitrage dressed as academic meritocracy.

US gets cheap IT staff. Indian IT cos get US billable hrs. US mid-tier unis get tuition. Indian students get brand + savings

* A controversialist (plural controversialists) is a person who frequently engages in or enjoys controversies or debates. In psychology, a controversialist refers to an individual who enjoys engaging in arguments or debates and takes a stance that is likely to be controversial or unpopular. Controversialists are motivated by the desire to win an argument or prove a point rather than seeking to learn from others or find a common ground.

* In successful Asian cities like Singapore, FSI is set as high as 25, meaning that for every square foot of land, a developer can build up to 25 square feet of tower.

Floor space index (FSI) is the ratio of permissible built-up area to land area.

In India local authorities worried about meagre civic infrastructure set the number somewhere around 2. It rarely exceeds 4. Hyderabad abolished FSI in 2006.

India’s sixth-most populous city, Hyderabad has the second-largest concentration of tall buildings...its 160km-long orbital motorway, the first bit of which opened in 2008...is now an arterial road in the new skyscraper belt. The cost of construction rises with height, so a builder’s decision about how much to pay for land and how tall to go rests on whether potential buyers of flats will cough up enough to make the project profitable. - The Economist

* FSI (Floor Space Index, also called FAR) in Hyderabad is not a single fixed city-wide maximum. Hyderabad operates under one of India’s more liberal regimes.

FSI is governed mainly by the Telangana Building Rules, 2012 (G.O. Ms. No. 168 and subsequent amendments). Unlike cities with rigid caps (e.g., often 1.5–3 in many other metros), Hyderabad’s rules primarily scale FSI with the width of the abutting road, plot size, setbacks, height restrictions, parking, fire safety, and other factors. A 2006 policy (G.O. 86) introduced effectively “unlimited” FSI for many high-rise cases (subject to those constraints), which continues to influence development, especially in growth corridors.

On wide arterial roads (especially >30 m) in corridors like HITEC City / Gachibowli / Madhapur, Outer Ring Road extensions (Kokapet, Tellapur, etc.), and the Financial District, deliverable/effective FSI commonly reaches 4.5–5.0+ (and in some reported cases up to around 7) when combining baseline + premium FSI + TDR / layout bonuses.

HUDA-legacy layouts (e.g., parts of Jubilee Hills, Banjara Hills) are typically restricted to ~1.0–1.5 regardless of road width. Cantonment areas follow separate rules, usually also lower (~1.0–1.5). Lake buffers and heritage zones impose further restrictions.

* "The sanctioned strength of the Telangana Police is around 93,000." - C.V. Anand, Telangana Director General of Police

This Week I Learned - Week 33 2026

2026-08-22T23:33:43.650+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* According to AI-ML guru Andrew Ng, these are the four most important AI engineering skills:

Building and deploying AI applications
Software engineering fundamentals
Using coding agents
Shaping the build

* GitHub has rebuilt Copilot review around an agentic architecture that gathers broader repository context, uses tools, produces findings, and can hand fixes to another coding agent. This is substantially more than autocomplete added to old review. - The GitHub Blog

* Shadow AI refers to consumer-facing AI applications and standalone agents deployed across your organization without IT visibility or approval. These agents can operate autonomously on user devices, creating blind spots in your security and compliance posture. Microsoft now ships specific discovery, monitoring and governance for unmanaged AI agents. Shadow AI blocking currently apply only to managed Windows devices enrolled with Microsoft Intune.

* AI can boost learning productivity, but only for those who use the technology intelligently. Students must resist the temptation to reach for an AI-generated answer before thinking things through for themselves. - The Economist

* ChatGPT Study Mode now asks what the learner knows, adapts explanations, checks understanding, works from uploaded course material, and uses memory to personalize support.

* MS Rebrand Registry tracks current and former names of Microsoft's cloud products. Azure Charts maintains a Azure Deprecations Board. I tracked renamed, re-branded, retired/deprecated Azure Services and features, for a while.

* localsend is an open-source cross-platform alternative to AirDrop. LocalSend uses a secure communication protocol that allows devices to communicate with each other using a REST API.

* Open Camera is an Android app by Mark Harman that is highly configurable with handy remote controls.

* Image Toolbox is a free and open-source Swiss Army knife for editing and annotating images or pictures on Android phones.

* The Melakarta Sphere is a free, interactive map of the 72 melakarta ragas by Nathaniel School of Music, Bangalore.

* DRAM spot prices are up roughly 700% over the past year. Samsung, SK Hynix and Micron control more than 95% of DRAM production, and AI demand pulled their capacity toward the specialised memory accelerators needed.

* Micron's $2.75 billion plant at Sanand now ships made-in-India memory modules to Dell.

* On August 3rd, Amazon (AMZN) joined the ranks of Apple, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Alphabet as the fifth company in history to reach a $3 trillion valuation. On that day, Jeff Bezos filed to sell 15 million shares worth about $4.07 billion.

* Meta went on trial over accusations from four U.S. states that the company is harming children with technology designed to be addictive. Meta settled a lawsuit from 47 states, the District of Columbia and U.S. territories by agreeing to pay up to $17.1 billion in penalties and make major changes to how its platforms work. - NYT

* Margaret Hamilton is the software engineer who wrote the computer code that saved the Apollo 11 moon landing and who, in the process, invented the discipline of software engineering itself. She still argues that software should be designed at the start not to fail, rather than patched after it does.

* The nearly 50-year-old Voyager space probes have traveled farther into space than any other human-made object.

* Universities increasingly want to hire stars who have amazing personal stories and big followings that can gain the institution positive media coverage. - NYT

* Decades of industrial waste dumping have contaminated groundwater with chromium (VI) across parts of three Uttar Pradesh districts — Fatehpur, Kanpur Dehat, and Kanpur Nagar, exposing villagers to unsafe water and serious health risks. Factories manufacture chromium sulphate in the area, which is used by tanning industries to make leather stronger. Kanpur and surrounding areas have had tanneries since the 19th century. - The Hindu

* India’s largest antelope, the nilgai or blue bull, was introduced to Texas nearly a century ago as a potential ranch animal. In its native environment, the nilgai evolved within a particular network of predators, competitors, diseases, seasonal conditions and habitat limitations. Those pressures helped shape its population and behaviour over thousands of years. Texas did not offer the same combination of predators. Without comparable natural controls, nilgai populations could expand across suitable habitat. What had been introduced as a managed ranch animal gradually became a free-ranging, feral population. One of the major concerns is their role in the spread of disease. Nilgai can act as hosts for ticks, including ticks associated with pathogens affecting cattle. - Business Today

* The 23 IITs in India offer 16598 seats in different programs and departments while the 31 NITs offer 23997 seats for undergraduate courses.

* There are 65 million students in classes 9-12, of whom around 27 million attend government schools. A 2025 National Statistical Office survey found that 27% of students were taking or had taken private coaching in the academic year. Across datasets, coaching incidence is around 27%-30%, implying that 17 million to 20 million students in classes 9-12 participate in some form of test-prep coaching. - The Hindu

* PhysicsWallah has around 4.9 million paid online users.

* Redseer estimates that India’s test-preparation market is $14.8 billion in FY26.

* One of the reasons India is having to import sugar, when even a reduced domestic cane crop is adequate to service demand is because of ethanol production. Mills use a mix of cane syrup, B-Heavy and C-Heavy molasses to produce ethanol, with decreasing sugar levels in each (which determines the possible ethanol output). - MoneyControl

* The key distinction between frozen dessert and ice cream is that ice cream must use milk fat, while frozen desserts may use vegetable fat (usually palm oil) instead.

Check Open Food Facts for full list of ingredients and macro-nutrients

If you want to know whether you’re eating real ice cream, don’t trust the name on the front, always check the ingredients on the back.

* The rapid spread of solar irrigation in India — where heavily subsidised or free electricity has led to unsustainable groundwater abstraction, contributing to falling water tables, depleting aquifers, and growing fiscal burdens on energy utilities.

Thus, with solar irrigation offering almost free power and no incentive to limit pumping, farmers may draw ever more groundwater.

* Spanning nine countries in South America, the Amazon rainforest’s billions of trees store vast amounts of carbon and are a key buffer against global warming.

* Nasdaq’s Economic Institute finds one-person US business applications up more than 20% since early 2025, with essentially all recent application growth coming from solo businesses.

* An auto-entrepreneur (officially a micro-entrepreneur) in France is a simple legal status for sole traders and freelancers. An auto-entrepreneur can earn a maximum annual turnover of €188,700 for commercial sales or €77,700 for service and liberal professions.

* The French treat vacations as a civic right - Vacations have been stitched into French identity since 1936, when the short-lived Socialist govt of Léon Blum introduced two weeks of paid holidays. To help the population learn the art of vacationing, he named the country’s first minister of sports and leisure, who offered discounted train tickets and subsidized guesthouses around the country. Since then, the country’s muscular labour unions have repeatedly pushed to expand those weeks to five and to institute a 35-hour workweek law that translates to overtime paid in extra days off for many workers. That’s on top of 11 public holidays. - NYT

* “Vaigai Puyal” literally means ‘Storm of the Vaigai River’, and it is the popular nickname given to Tamil comedian‑actor Vadivelu, referencing the Vaigai river that flows through his hometown Madurai.

* Norwegian criminologist Nils Christie’s ‘ideal victim’ theory (explained in the book From Crime Policy to Victim Policy) holds that vulnerability, respectability and innocence shape who is perceived as deserving of sympathy.

Christie said the ‘ideal victim’ or ‘perfect victim’ possesses five main attributes. First, they are often female, disabled, very young, or very old, and are therefore weak in relation to the offender. Second, they are involved in “respectable activities”. Third, they cannot reasonably be blamed for being where they were during the crime. Fourth, they do not know the offender personally. Fifth, they are attacked by a perpetrator who is “big and bad”. Christie also noted that while being weak, the victim must have enough social power to influence sympathy and have their victim status recognised.

* A professor at a private college in Chhattisgarh’s Durg district was arrested for his alleged role in the leak of an Indira Gandhi Krishi Vishwavidyalaya (IGKV) entomology question paper. He inserted an endoscopic camera into the envelope through a tiny hole and captured the contents. The question paper was a one-page document with all the content printed on the same side. He then used glue to cover the opening through which the camera was inserted.

* Of every ₹100 of profit generated by an MNC in India, only about ₹56 stays here. China keeps 91%, Indonesia 96%, and Brazil 88%. The plain truth is, in the global economy, India works for wages, while others earn royalties. Indian labour, factories and consumers generate enormous value. But assets that command a premium - brands, patents, platforms, proprietary technology - are owned elsewhere. India spends 0.64% of GDP on R&D against South Korea's roughly 5%. - ET

* The Scunthorpe problem is the unintentional blocking of online content by a spam filter, search engine or word-filter because the text contains a string (or substring) of letters that appear to have an obscene or otherwise unacceptable meaning. Names, abbreviations, and technical terms are most often cited as being affected by the issue.

* John Brandon (“JB”) joined Apple around 2001 as a vice president overseeing sales for the US, Pacific, and later broader international regions. He held senior sales leadership roles until retiring in 2015. A card with JB’s Rules for Success were attached to the back of employee badges in Brandon’s organization:

Let go of the old, make the most of the future
Always tell the truth, we want to hear the bad news sooner than later
The highest level of integrity is expected, when in doubt, ask
Learn to be a good businessperson, not just a good salesperson
Everyone sweeps the floor
Be professional in your style, speech and follow-up
Listen to the customer, they almost always get it
Create win/win relationships with our partners
Look out for each other, sharing information is a good thing
Don’t take yourself too seriously
Have fun, otherwise it’s not worth it

Luxury Is Just Insecurity With Packaging

2026-08-17T10:14:36.128+05:30

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

Better with Bots

2026-08-15T15:53:13.026+05:30

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

This Week I Learned - Week 32 2026

2026-08-15T12:05:36.359+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* When unconstrained, the AI model can draw from numerous sources to assess its options on how to proceed in answering a prompt, thereby allowing widely varying outcomes. Any foundational decisions or other instructions—artifacts collectively known as “provenance” when properly preserved—which were formulated during the original context session and then cleared, are lost. This is the key deficiency of vibe coding which spec-driven development and context engineering seek to address.

Context engineering moves a developer from a vibe coding technique to a structured approach to generating code that preserves provenance using key artifacts. This allows context to be restored by other developers, reviewed by other stakeholders, or retrieved at any point if someone wanted to audit the inputs that generated a given codebase or simply wanted to continue building upon them. Different methodologies have emerged that offer different perspectives on how to effectively manage context and preserve provenance.

BMAD (Breakthrough Method for Agile AI-Driven Development) and GitHub's Spec Kit are methodologies that offer different approaches to engineering context and preserving provenance. - Code Mag

* Franklin Templeton's outlook - Artificial intelligence (AI) is driving demand for energy, infrastructure and broader economic change; rising investment in defense, national security and energy infrastructure create long-term potential return opportunities. Aging populations will require investment in labor-saving technologies, assisted living and health care innovation.

* India’s largest lender, State Bank of India (SBI), used artificial intelligence to underwrite nearly ₹1 lakh crore in MSME loans of up to ₹5 crore each during 2025-26

* The biggest risk of deploying Artificial Intelligence (AI) in banks is the erosion of human judgment and accountability. Meaningful human oversight – the ability to explain, to intervene and, where necessary, to override – must remain a design principle, not an afterthought - Reserve Bank of India (RBI) Governor Sanjay Malhotra

* Over the last century, India’s annual rainfall has seen significant year-to-year ups and downs, but overall, the total yearly rainfall has stayed mostly steady, with only a slight and statistically insignificant drop. However, average temperatures have clearly been on the rise. - Data for India

* A moderately full freezer, with enough space for air to circulate, tends to stay more thermally stable than one that’s nearly empty. Keeping an ice tray full just to improve refrigerator energy efficiency has only a minor impact on savings. The energy used to freeze the water still has to come from somewhere, and the freezer must work to remove that heat. The payoff in the end is minimal.

* Vultures serve as effective natural “disease firewalls.” The vulture population in India started collapsing from 1994 triggered by veterinary diclofenac after its patent expiry. Farmers started using the cheap painkiller on livestock. This led to the accidentally wipe out of vultures and they were reduced from 50 million to near zero in a decade due to kidney failure in the birds scavenging treated livestock carcasses.

The decline removed a key sanitation service, as vultures' pH 1 stomach acid rapidly destroys pathogens like anthrax and rabies; this led to more feral dogs, rotting carcasses, water contamination, and a 4.7% rise in human death rates in affected districts. The highly acidic stomach environment of Indian vultures acts as a strong filter that inactivates many microorganisms like Anthrax (Bacillus anthracis) & Rabies virus ingested with carrion. Their overall digestive system is highly efficient at processing risky carrion.

Peer-reviewed research by economists Eyal Frank (Chicago) and Anant Sudarshan (Warwick) estimates the vulture loss caused around 100,000 extra human deaths annually from 2000-2005—totaling half a million—and $69 billion yearly in mortality-related economic damages.

* Rh null (also written Rhnull or Rh₀) is an extremely rare blood type. It is often called “golden blood” because of its extreme rarity and value in transfusion medicine. People with Rh null blood lack all of the Rh antigens on their red blood cells (there are more than 50 Rh antigens; the common Rh-positive/Rh-negative distinction only involves the D antigen).

It is significantly rarer than the uncommon ABO/Rh types (such as AB-negative, which occurs in under 1% of many populations).Because of this rarity, finding compatible blood for transfusion is extremely difficult—individuals with Rh null can generally only receive Rh null blood. Their own blood, however, is compatible with many rare Rh variants, which is why it is considered especially valuable.

It was first identified in 1961. Fewer than 50 people have ever been documented with this blood type.

* The GenomeIndia project collected whole-genome data from 10,000 healthy, unrelated individuals from 83 population groups, revealing an extraordinary level of genetic diversity.

* There is no genetic test yet for mental illnesses. The risk is polygenic: it emerges from the combined influence of thousands of gene variants, along with rare genetic changes, development, environment, and chance. Psychiatric genetics will not identify people before they fall ill but it can replace superstition and blame with a more accurate account of vulnerability. - Dr. Alok Kulkarni

* Over-cautious AI - I used the Microsoft Edge context menu option "Help me rewrite" to rephrase and improve my summary of the above referenced article on psychiatric genetics. It refused with this message - "Request blocked by safety policy"

* Deepak Dhar, a professor at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences, Tata Institute of Fundamental Research was awarded the 2026 Dirac Medal for his work in statistical mechanics.

* If you bought your vehicle after April 2023, you can fill your petrol tank with E20, shut it and forget it because that’s when the Bharat Stage 6 Phase 2 (Real Driving Emissions) mandate took effect. Vehicles built after this deadline were factory-engineered for E20 — with ethanol-resistant elastomers, fluorinated fuel lines, upgraded pump seals and recalibrated engine control units. These roughly 70 million vehicles, about 23% of India’s active petrol fleet, face little cause for concern.

The remaining 77% — nearly 240 million legacy two-wheelers and cars built for E5 or E10 — are the genuine worry. Ethanol is a polar solvent that degrades older rubber compounds and plastics, hardening and cracking fuel hoses over time. It is also hygroscopic: it absorbs atmospheric moisture, and in vehicles left parked for extended periods, the ethanol-water mixture separates and settles, forming an acidic layer that corrodes tanks, damages fuel pumps and clogs filters with sludge. - The Hindu

* During the Kargil war in 1999, the Time Arc-6 GPS systems in the MiG 21 and MiG 23 BN aircraft let pilots navigate using Indian Everest coordinates. The Indian Army’s maps were also based on the Everest Spheroid, a reference model of Earth first defined in 1830 by Sir George Everest, the Surveyor General. However, handheld GPS units used by Indian Air Force MiG pilots only displayed data in World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS 84), the global standard coordinate system. For improved accuracy, pilots had to adjust for the differences between the two mapping systems to accurately locate targets and release bombs.

* Every tier 1 city loses more than half its free-flow speed by peak hour. Speed in Hyderabad and Mumbai both drop from 40 km/h to 15 km/h, Bengaluru from 38 km/h to 13 km/h. Hyderabad has 95% of its roads under 10 metres wide. - HT

* Empirical investigation and direct knowledge take priority over mere scriptural authority in Buddhism.

Carl Sagan : ‘What happens if the doctrine of a religion—Buddhism let’s say—is contradicted by some finding, some discovery—in science, let’s say—what does a believer in Buddhism do in that case?’

Dalai Lama: ‘For Buddhists that is not a problem. The Buddha himself made clear that the important thing is your own investigation. You should know the reality, no matter what the scripture says. In case you find a contradiction—opposite of the scriptures’ explanation—you should rely on that finding, rather than scripture.’

Carl Sagan: ‘So, that is very much like science?’

Dalai Lama: ‘Yes, that’s right. So I think that the basic Buddhist concept is that at the beginning it is worthwhile or better to remain skeptical. Then carry out experiments through external means as well as internal means. If through investigation things become clear and convincing, then it is time to accept or believe. If, through science, there is proof that after death there is no continuity of human mind, of life, then—theoretically speaking—Buddhists will have to accept that.’

— Carl Sagan's Interview with The Dalai Lama, 1991

* “A newspaper is text, but what gives it full life, its juice, are the illustrations.” - Ahmed Burić

Building a Hyderabad Weather Dashboard with the WeatherUnion API

2026-08-08T21:48:47.381+05:30

Claude recently helped a techie find his misplaced iPhone although the Find My iPhone feature was disabled by his organization's Mobile Device Management (MDM) policy. Claude generated a Bluetooth RSSI meter in about one minute & by tracking the phone's Bluetooth signal strength he was able to locate the phone.

Commenting on AI's growing role in enabling instant, bespoke software creation for immediate practical needs without traditional development, he tweeted: "Apparently, you can just create the tool you need now."

That line stuck with me. As a weather enthusiast, I wanted a simple web app to see how the weather differs between localities in my Hyderabad neighbourhood, side by side, before deciding whether to step out. So I built it with the help of Claude & the WeatherUnion API.

The visual template came from an unlikely place — ICFOSS's IoT-based Micro Climate Monitoring System for Kerala. It's a public dashboard tracking humidity, temperature, UV, rainfall, and solar panel voltage across Kerala's districts, laid out as a plain grid: districts as columns, weather parameters as rows, colour-coded gateway status at the bottom. Nothing fancy — no charts, no animation, just numbers in a table anyone can scan in three seconds. That's exactly the kind of interface I wanted: functionality over decoration.

What I built

The result is a single-page dashboard backed by the WeatherUnion API (Zomato's hyperlocal weather network — yes, the same Zomato). It covers 40+ localities across Hyderabad, and the interaction model is deliberately simple:

Every locality shows up as a checkbox in a side panel.
Check a box, and that locality becomes a column in the table.
Uncheck it, and the column disappears — instantly, with no network call, because removing a column doesn't need fresh data.
Rows are the metrics: temperature, humidity, wind speed, wind direction, rain intensity, rain accumulation, and a status indicator.

You can check out my dashboard in action here, but you’ll need your own API key since there’s a daily limit of 1,000 API calls per key, and I have to save mine for my projects. The API key is free, and you can adapt the code for any of the 60 cities in India supported by the API if you're interested.

Also see - Cloud Watching 101

This Week I Learned - Week 31 2026

2026-08-07T16:55:51.460+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Moonshot’s Kimi K3’s weights were released on July 27 under a Modified MIT licence, making the 2.8-trillion-parameter model available for anyone to download, fine-tune and self-host.

Giving weights away is a smart distribution strategy as it could potentially turn developers, cloud providers and enterprise IT units into resellers, and make it hard for anyone to under-price you as the base model itself is free.

* Jot down annoying things. AI may have a solution.

* findphone is a nifty app to locate a nearby Bluetooth device by signal strength, from the macOS command line — for when Find My Phone isn't available due to MDM restrictions

* ProHance is a software platform that provides real-time visibility into workforce activities, helping organizations measure productivity, optimize costs, and improve operational efficiency. It tracks employee engagement through metrics such as time spent on applications, mouse and keyboard activity, and task durations, while offering dashboards and analytics to identify workflow bottlenecks and inefficiencies.

* All debit and credit cards come in a standard size: length 8.5 cm (about 3.5 inches), breadth 5.5 cm, and a diagonal of 10 cm (just under 4 inches). This size is used worldwide so that cards work interchangeably in ATMs, payment terminals, and wallets regardless of the issuing country or bank. These cards can be handy for making rough measurements.

* The widely used pain reliever has different names globally: acetaminophen in the US and paracetamol elsewhere, both derived from segments of its chemical name N-acetyl-para-aminophenol. Acetaminophen was first synthesized in 1878.

* Adrenaline and epinephrine are exactly the same substance. They refer to the identical molecule (chemical formula C₉H₁₃NO₃), a catecholamine hormone and neurotransmitter produced mainly by the adrenal glands. It plays a central role in the “fight-or-flight” response by increasing heart rate, blood flow to muscles, pupil dilation, blood sugar, and other effects. As a medication, it is used for conditions like anaphylaxis (e.g., in auto-injectors such as EpiPen).

Epinephrine is the preferred name in the United States (United States Adopted Name) while Adrenaline (sometimes spelled adrenalin) is the preferred name in British English.

This split arose historically from early 20th-century discovery and patent disputes (involving researchers such as John Abel and Jokichi Takamine) plus trademark issues around the name “Adrenalin.” The two terms have been used interchangeably for the same compound ever since.

* Sapodilla (Manilkara zapota) is native to southern Mexico and Central America. Its Spanish name is chicozapote (also written chicozapote, chico sapote, or similar variants like chicosapote). From this, different regions adopted shortened or adapted versions: Chickoo / chikoo / chiku (common in India and parts of South/Southeast Asia) comes from the “chico” portion. Sapota / sapodilla / sapote comes from the “zapote/sapota” portion.

* The primary reason plant-based foods are rarely salty while animal products have a more savoury taste profile is that animals have nervous systems and blood and plants don’t.

Most plants have no nervous system or circulatory system and use potassium mainly to regulate their internal pressure (called turgor) and growth. In fact, high levels of sodium are actually toxic to most land plants, which is why salting the earth kills vegetation. There are a few plant-based foods called halophytes that naturally taste salty. They include sea beans, sea grapes, and celery. They have evolved to live in salt marshes.

* The main reason lobsters are cooked alive is to ensure food safety.

Lobsters naturally harbour dangerous bacteria, most notably Vibrio parahaemolyticus and Vibrio vulnificus, in their digestive tracts and gills. The moment a lobster dies, its immune system ceases to function. The bacteria present inside its gut multiply at an exponential rate throughout its flesh. Even if the meat is cooked thoroughly later, many bacterial toxins are heat-stable and will not be destroyed by high temperatures, leading to severe food poisoning or gastroenteritis.

* The nasal septum is a thin wall that divides the inside of your nose into right and left sides. It's made of soft, flexible cartilage in the front and bone in the back. A thin layer of tissue called the nasal mucosa covers the septum. If you have a deviated septum, your septum is bent instead of straight. A deviated septum can block air flow through your nose. The procedure to fix problems with your nasal septum is called a nasal Septoplasty.

* 75-80% of people have some deviation of their nose.

* Viral infections that involve the sinus cavities may be the most common type of sinusitis.

* Decongestant nasal sprays are common over-the-counter medications to open up clogged nasal passages and alleviate nasal congestion.

* The Brazilian Netflix series Emergência Radioativa (“Radioactive Emergency”), released in March 2026, tells the story of the 1987 Goiânia accident, when scavengers broke into an abandoned radiotherapy machine and unknowingly spread Cesium‑137, leading to one of the worst radiological disasters ever to occur outside a nuclear plant. The Goiânia accident is considered the largest radiological disaster in the world outside nuclear facilities. It resulted in four direct deaths and left a lasting impact on Brazilian health regulations and urban memory.

Contaminated persons are radioactive sources themselves — dangerous both to their own health and to others. Immediate medical isolation and decontamination are critical to reduce exposure. Historical cases (Chernobyl, Fukushima, Goiânia) show that improper handling of cesium contamination can spread radiation widely.

Cesium‑137 is a fission by‑product with a half‑life of ~30 years. It emits beta particles and gamma rays, which can penetrate tissues and irradiate surrounding people. Once ingested or absorbed (through wounds, inhalation, or food), cesium distributes throughout soft tissues and muscles, behaving chemically like potassium.

Radiation is invisible — you can’t see, smell, or feel it.

The symptoms of contamination are nausea, vomiting, burns, hair loss, and in severe cases, death. Contaminated individuals can expose others nearby through gamma radiation from inside the body, especially if they carry high activity levels. They are not just “carriers” of a chemical; they are sources of radiation exposure to themselves and potentially to others nearby.

* Prussian blue (an antidote) binds cesium in the gut and helps excrete it.

* A scintillation counter or scintillometer is generally more powerful and precise than a Geiger counter, because it can measure radiation intensity and energy with higher sensitivity and resolution, while a Geiger counter is mainly for simple detection.

* A dosimeter is a device used to measure a person’s exposure to ionizing radiation over time. They can be in the form of film badges, thermoluminescent dosimeters (TLDs), or electronic digital devices.

* Schrödinger was interested in becoming a poet, but he took up maths and physics for better financial prospects.

* An Air-Conditioner (AC) doesn’t make cold air but moves heat from inside a room to outside it. The refrigerant absorbs heat from indoor air, then goes into a compressor where its temperature is raised further and releases that heat outdoors through the condenser. Lastly, it cools down and flows back inside to repeat the cycle. The refrigerant itself isn’t consumed in this process; it’s a fluid that circulates in a closed loop. Air-conditioners in India use hydrofluorocarbons or HFCs like R32 for room ACs and R134a for cars being the main targets. Hydrofluorocarbons (HFC) and Chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) are powerful greenhouse gases, and just like India phased down HCFCs back in 2013, it is setting production baselines by averaging 2024 to 2026 HFC output plus 65 percent of historical 2009 to 2010 HCFC baselines. India’s refrigerant makers are racing to expand capacity before production caps take effect in 2028, setting up a difficult transition as environmental regulations reshape the future of the air conditioning industry.

* Consumption of diesel and petrol surged about 9.4% and 8.7% year-on-year respectively in July, primarily driven by a below-average monsoon that increased the demand for fuel among farmers to run irrigation machinery and tractors.

* As of August 2026, approximately 67% of India's population—about 81.35 crore (813.5 million) people—receive free food grains from the government under the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY). This scheme, integrated with the National Food Security Act (NFSA), provides 5 kg of free food grain per person per month to all Priority Household (PHH) and Antyodaya Anna Yojana (AAY) ration card holders across the country. The program is currently extended until December 2028.

* In the Global Hunger Index, India ranks 105 out of 127 countries.

* Ather Energy is now valued at ₹58,000 crore. Zerodha founders Nithin and Nikhil Kamath, via Kamath Associates, own 1.22%. They bought the stake from Sachin Bansal in 2024 at a ₹6,000 crore valuation.

* Global equities absorbed one of the more serious energy shocks in decades — the closure of the Strait of Hormuz...MSCI Emerging Markets equity index is up 18% this year (till August 6) while the All-Country World Index is up 12.9%. Markets have gone numb to geopolitical noise, with algorithms treating conflict-driven dips as buying opportunities rather than warnings...a headline market index is no proxy for the economy. The Nifty 50, the S&P 500 and their peers are capitalisation-weighted baskets of the largest listed companies — They measure corporate earnings power, full stop. Not GDP, not employment...the things supporting listed-company earnings and asset prices are increasingly disconnected from the conditions facing the wider economy. - Moneycontrol

* Being tone‑deaf means you can’t accurately perceive or reproduce musical pitch — so singing in tune feels like chasing a moving target. It’s not about lacking rhythm or enthusiasm, just that the notes don’t quite land where they should. In everyday language, calling someone tone‑deaf can also mean they’re missing the “social pitch” — not picking up on the mood or sensitivity of a situation.

* John Wallis, an English mathematician, introduced the lemniscate symbol for infinity in 1655.

* Only two people in history have accomplished the rare feat of winning both a Nobel Prize and an Academy Award (Oscar): George Bernard Shaw and Bob Dylan.

Nobody Notices the Early Bird

2026-08-06T12:46:21.925+05:30

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

The Burning Question: Flammable vs Inflammable

2026-08-05T20:59:33.950+05:30

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

While flammable and inflammable mean the same thing, safety regulators encourage “flammable” to avoid dangerous misunderstandings.

The true opposite of flammable is nonflammable (or non‑inflammable).

Flammable comes directly from Latin flammare (“to set on fire”), while inflammable entered English via French, which itself borrowed from Medieval Latin inflammabilis.