Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

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. - 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.

This Week I Learned - Week 31 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

In consuming intelligence, you are creating intelligence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* What the hell is El Niño, really?

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

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

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

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

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

Legal security deposit (not rent itself) limits:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cloud Watching 101

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's a useful reminder for anyone in technology.

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

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

The best resources to learn cloud identification

Cloud seeding is a weather modification method that can increase precipitation by 15% to 20%. The technique does not create new clouds. Cloud seeding is being used in around 50 countries to combat drought, hail, and air pollution. The effects of boosting rainfall through cloud seeding remain uncertain, its consequences difficult to measure, and its large-scale application costly.

co-written with ChatGPT

This Week I Learned - Week 30 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mahua Nectar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week 29 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

* From The Batch:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fine-Tuning the Drones

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

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

Honey, I Upgraded Our Dreams

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

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

Contrarian Research

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

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

How Pangram Smells AI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week 28 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

* Draw with Data by Schubert De Abreu

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What really is a Base64 Image?

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

Instead of this:

You get this:

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

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

The Native Way: userContent.css

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

Step 1: Find your profile folder

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

Step 2: Create the file

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

Step 3: Add your rule

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

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

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

display: none !important;

}

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

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

Step 4: Enable it

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

Restart Firefox. The image will be gone.

Does This Really Block the File?

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

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

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

Why sites use Data URI base64 images

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

Sites do it for three reasons:

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

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

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

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

The Firefox feature that lets you block it

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

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

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

about:config > toolkit.legacyUserProfileCustomizations.stylesheets = true

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

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

When to Use This Firefox feature

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

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

Why you would want to block them beyond "flashy"

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

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

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

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

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

Co-written with Meta AI

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

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

Open Food Facts has data on 4.6+ million food products worldwide. There are multiple ways to access that data but the simplest way to get a subset of the data with chosen parameters is to download it as a CSV file through the website's search interface. But if you need entire data for one country, you can filter the 7.64 GB file (size at the time of writing) hosted on Hugging Face as there are no natively available exports dedicated to specific countries currently.

Hugging Face acts as a CDN for large ML datasets — it not only stores the full Parquet file but also handles versioning, caching, and fast global downloads.

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

What you’ll end up with: A CSV like india_products_18613.csv with 16 columns, including a URL for each product. The same steps work for France, Canada, USA, UK, or any other country in the database.

What You Need Before Starting

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

Step 1: Create Your GitHub Token

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

Step 2: Set Up Your Colab Notebook

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

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

Python

# Install deps

!pip install -q huggingface_hub

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

import duckdb

import time

import os

import getpass

from huggingface_hub import hf_hub_download

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

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

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

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

GIT_NAME = "Your Name" # your name

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

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

start = time.time()

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

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

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

local_path = hf_hub_download(

repo_id="openfoodfacts/product-database",

filename="food.parquet",

repo_type="dataset",

local_dir="/content/hf_cache",

resume_download=True

)

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

# 2. Filter for your country and build the table

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

con = duckdb.connect()

con.execute(f"""

CREATE TEMP TABLE country_data AS

SELECT

code,

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

list_extract(product_name, 1).text AS product_name,

brands,

categories,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

nova_group,

nutriscore_grade,

to_timestamp(last_modified_t) AS last_modified_datetime

FROM read_parquet('{local_path}')

WHERE list_contains(countries_tags, '{COUNTRY_TAG}')

AND code IS NOT NULL AND code!= ''

AND len(product_name) > 0

""")

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

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

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

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

local_csv_path = f"/content/{filename}"

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

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

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

# 4. Push to GitHub

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

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

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

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

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

!cp {local_csv_path} /content/repo/

%cd /content/repo

!git add {filename}

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

!git push origin main

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

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

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

Step 3: Change It For Your Country

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

Python

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

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

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

GIT_NAME = "Your Name" # your name

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

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

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

Step 4: Run It

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

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

What’s Happening Under the Hood

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

Troubleshooting

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

Why This Approach Works

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

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

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

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

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

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

The New SUV — Now With Organic Emissions

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week 27 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* The most dangerous bacteria:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

#:~:text=YOUR_TEXT_HERE

Compatibility Note

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

The Absurd Times We Live In

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

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