Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Maareesan (2025) Mapped with Datawrapper Locator Map

2026-11-08T18:28:11.354+05:30

I enjoy films that take you on a journey, where the changing landscape becomes almost another character in the story.

The morally ambiguous character played by Fahadh Faasil in the road comedy-thriller strolls by the Kanyakumari beach

Maareesan (2025), the Tamil comedy-thriller starring Vadivelu and Fahadh Faasil, is one such film. It also gave me an excuse to indulge in another interest: mapping places and turning a movie's geography into a visualisation.

The film brings together two very different characters, played by two seasoned actors who make an interesting pairing. Vadivelu brings his distinctive screen presence and comic timing, while Fahadh Faasil lends his trademark intensity and unpredictability. Their performances keep you invested as the story moves between humour, mystery and suspense.

The journey takes the characters across Tamil Nadu, from Palayamkottai and Nagercoil in the south, through Madurai, and onwards to places including Echampatti, Veeraganur, Bodhamalai, Tiruvannamalai and Coimbatore. There are unexpected detours, connections to the characters' pasts and geographical twists that make the journey as intriguing as the story itself.

To make better sense of this zigzagging geography, I plotted the locations on a Datawrapper Locator Map. The map turns the film's many stops into something you can explore visually, helping you follow the journey across Tamil Nadu without giving away the story.

I jotted down each location, their latitude and longitude in a CSV file & dropped the file into the mapping wizard interface. Datawrapper lets you add point markers for places, lines to connect locations and arrows to indicate direction. Tooltips can provide additional context without cluttering the map.

In the Refine tab of the Datawrapper charting wizard, the look of the map can be customised. I choose to have minimal labels. Here's how it finally looks -

If you enjoy movies and maps, take a look at the route. And if it piques your curiosity, Maareesan is available on Netflix in Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada and Hindi with subtitles in English and other international languages.

This Week I Learned - Week 45, 2026

2026-11-07T13:27:55.573+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* GitHub Copilot app for Beginners - 7 Chapter course by Dan Wahlin

* An analysis of 5 lakh peer-reviewed papers in physics, chemistry, materials science, engineering, and computer science published in 2023-26 has revealed 1,135 fake references in 619 papers. These fictional citations often stem from the unchecked use of AI tools or misconduct.

* Felony Bench monitors the rogue behavior of AI agents. It counts unique instances where AI agents inadvertently compromise or affect third-party entities.

* Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Uber are restricting AI access for employees.

* Dario Amodei is an atheist who believes in utilitarianism (people should maximize happiness for the most living beings). He was influenced by Ray Kurzweil’s idea that advanced technologies would let humans exist beyond natural limits, a belief known as transhumanism.

He was diagnosed with testicular cancer in 2014, underwent chemotherapy and made a full recovery.

Prior to founding Anthropic with his sister Daniela Amodei, Jared Kaplan and Christopher Olah, Dario worked at Baidu, Google Brain, OpenAI (starting from 2016 when it was a nonprofit). In 2018, Daniela Amodei joined OpenAI, eventually becoming vice president of safety and policy. In 2018, Dr. Amodei and Ms. Amodei took over a company project called GPT, short for generative pre-trained transformer. In December 2020, Dr. Amodei, Ms. Amodei and other colleagues quit OpenAI. Four weeks later, they started Anthropic. - NYT

* Matthew Henry Phineas Riall Sankey, the inventor of the Sankey diagram, was the nephew of Sir Richard Hieram Sankey, who built Sankey Tank in Bengaluru. - via @serendeepthii

* Tathyakosh is a catalogue of open datasets from India: census, agriculture, public health, climate, governance, and more. It doesn’t host data. Each entry describes a dataset (publisher, format, coverage, how to access it) and links back to the source.

* Apple Maps' high-resolution India imagery comes from domestic firm MapmyIndia. MapmyIndia partners with ISRO, using data from Cartosat-3, which delivers 0.25-meter panchromatic resolution satellite imagery for detailed mapping applications. This setup complies with India's 2021 geospatial guidelines, which deregulate high-accuracy data production for Indian entities while restricting foreign companies from independent high-precision collection to protect national security.

* Himanshu Mohanty built Gita Vishwa, a free web app that turns the Gita into a knowledge graph you can explore.

* The Tirumala temple alone accounts for half of India's supply of Remy hair - the premium grade that makes the best wigs and hair extensions.

The share of high-priced natural black hair - the most coveted category among wigmakers - in the hair donated has nearly halved over the past three years, even as dyed and grey hair have gained ground. - ET

* The urban population across India is now 36%.

* "99% of India’s over 35 crore vehicles are not built for ethanol blends of more than 20%.

Vehicles sold after April 2023 have been certified only up to E20.

Assuming a 10% mileage loss at ₹100 a litre, the hidden loss to consumers would amount to around ₹62,000 crore." - Rizwan Arshad, Karnataka Minister for Food, Civil Supplies and Consumer Affairs

* Indian law under the Motor Vehicles Act requires private two-wheelers' RC to be valid for 15 years initially, then renewed every 5 years after a fitness test; driving with an expired RC violates Section 192 and attracts fines of ₹2,000–₹5,000.

* By the end of October 2026, Groww, Angel One, and Zerodha made up nearly 60% of the active clients on the National Stock Exchange (NSE).

* On Dhanteras, the price of a tola of 24-carat gold in Hyderabad was ₹1,43,460, dropping from a peak of ₹1,75,231 on January 29, 2026, and hitting a low of ₹1,33,880 on November 1.

* The strength of Telangana Police is 90,000.

* Honasa Consumer, co-founded by Ghazal Alagh and Varun Alagh in Gurugram, is the parent company of popular brands like Mamaearth, The Derma Co, Aqualogica, Dr Sheth's, BBlunt, and Staze.

* Deepinder Goyal, founder of Zomato, is facing controversy with his new startup Temple, following allegations that its wearable device’s claims of measuring blood flow to the brain lack scientific evidence. Goyal mentioned that Temple had already poured $30 million into developing the product, with $20 million coming directly from his own pocket.

* Various causes of seborrheic dermatitis, including the overgrowth of an oil-loving yeast called Malassezia, which naturally lives on the skin, as well as increased oil production and inflammation. All three components can alter the scalp’s microbiome. They can weaken and damage the skin barrier and cause flaking, itching and greasy, scaling skin. Dandruff is limited to the scalp, while other forms of seborrheic dermatitis can occur elsewhere on the body,

In most instances, dandruff can be treated — and prevented — with an over-the-counter dandruff shampoo containing selenium sulfide, pyrithione zinc or ketoconazole. These ingredients target the yeast, oil and skin cell buildup on the scalp.

* An unvaccinated child in upstate New York died after contracting measles, the first death in the state from the viral disease in 30 years.

* Florida is fighting a dengue outbreak. In the past, Americans were infected with dengue after being bitten by mosquitoes while traveling. But now, most of the current transmission is from local mosquitoes. - NYT

* There are more than 1.5 million known zoological species on Earth, with at least as many enigmas.

Every year, millions of monarch butterflies undertake a 3,000-mile journey across North America to the warm forests of central Mexico, where they spend the winter. As they return north, they lay their eggs and, eventually, die, passing the baton to the next generation to finish the circuit. It takes about four generations to complete the entire round-trip journey.

Body size and life span tend to be correlated in animals; the smaller the species, the shorter its life. But birds generally live at least twice as long as nonflying mammals of the same size. Bats, the only mammals capable of true flight, also live roughly 3.5 times longer than terrestrial mammals of the same size.

In many mammals, including humans, the cerebellum accounts for just 10 percent of the brain’s volume but roughly 80 percent of its neurons. In African elephants, the figure is even more astonishing: the large, lumbering mammals somehow manage to pack 97.5 percent of their 257 billion neurons into the cerebellum.

Every year, deer shed their antlers. And every year, they grow back. - NYT

* As of November 2026, NASA's Voyager 1 is still operating and communicating with Earth, more than 49 years after its launch on September 5, 1977.

* A “lateral thinker” is someone who tackles problems in creative, unconventional ways, often by making surprising connections instead of sticking to step‑by‑step logic. It’s basically another way of saying “thinking outside the box.” The term was coined by Edward de Bono in 1967, who contrasted it with “vertical thinking,” which follows a logical and sequential approach.

* There is a misapprehension that Winston Churchill said it, but actually the saying “Never waste a good crisis” is not a quote from the big man. It is an example of “Churchillian drift”, the phenomenon where aphorisms from obscure people, or of unknown origin, are misattributed to major historical figures.

* "If you want to be wealthy, think of saving as earning." — Benjamin Franklin

* "Even if you are a minority of one, the truth is the truth." — Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi

This Week I Learned - Week 44, 2026

2026-10-31T23:38:08.421+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Boris Cherny, who created Claude Code, has called giving Claude a way to verify its work probably the most important thing for getting good results.

* “No member of the team has a full mental model of Claude Code in their head, nor do we think anyone needs to. Rather, when anyone wants to learn about a piece of the codebase, they ask Claude to generate an explainer about that exact slice. It only takes a few minutes and the explainer is always up to date.” - Addy Osmani

* Claude Cowork is now just Claude.

* Oracle will offer Google’s Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) via its cloud infrastructure platform, marking the first time specialised AI accelerators will be available on a hyperscale cloud platform outside of Google’s ecosystem. TPUs are processors designed by Google to accelerate machine-learning workloads. They offer an alternative to graphics processing units.

* AI Spin-off - Using sensors developed for self-driving cars, a Chinese start-up claims it can track and destroy tiny flying targets while avoiding people, pets and reflective surfaces.

* Python on Azure App Service and Azure Functions on Windows retires on 31 March 2027. To continue running Python workloads, create a new app on Azure App Service on Linux or Azure Functions on Linux and redeploy your Python applications.

* In Git, the command git blame filename tells you who last modified each line of code. Some APIs borrow the same terminology: Open Food Facts, for instance, lets you add a blame parameter to find out who last modified each product field. It's essentially a digital version of asking, "Who did this?"

* The India database of Open Food Facts (OFF) has crossed 25,000 products!

* To fetch the transcript for a YouTube video without manually navigating within YouTube, take a YouTube URL, extract its video ID, construct a transcript URL by appending the YouTube video ID to YouTube Bulk Transcript's transcribe service like so - https://ytbulktranscript.app/transcribe?v=VIDEO_ID

* According to global cybersecurity firm Palo Alto Networks, Artificial intelligence (AI) models have helped flag more than 14,000 previously undetected vulnerabilities in open-source software, matching a full year of manual penetration testing in just three weeks.

* Cryptocurrency exchange Binance reported a security breach with an estimated impact of $6.3 billion with an initial investigation pointing to a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop that let an attacker submit unauthorised withdrawal transactions. The attack is attributed to TraderTraitor, a North Korean state-sponsored hacking unit.

* Google Cloud’s Mandiant team reported that its AI-assisted system discovered over 100 confirmed critical vulnerabilities in just two days.

* A timeline of religions - an interactive history

* Portolan charts are medieval maps that show coastlines, place-names, distances and directions for navigation at sea.

* Testing a data visualization's usefulness: can someone understand it in 30 seconds? Novelty alone isn’t enough.

* Setting self-imposed constraints help me to finish things or bring them to some kind of a conclusion. - Pea Bee

* Fatty liver is a silent condition. The typical range for liver fat is about five percent, but ideally, it should be closer to two percent.

* India's consumption story from Worldpanel's latest Kharcha Report:

- Homes priced >1 Cr at 54% of sales vs 49% YoY in H12026

- Affordable homes at 6% of new launches vs 52% in 2018

- International Air Travel grew 2.8X faster than domestic

- +37% more Swiss watches imported into India in HI 2026

- Apple's India sales crossed $10 billion, +67% in last 3 years

- Household debt at 45.5% of GDP, consumption loans make up nearly half of it

* Redditor’s Hot Take on Kumar Vishwas - "he was never a good poet or writer, just chetan bhagat of hindi language"

AI by the Numbers

2026-10-29T09:21:48.573+05:30

Stats from the internet about AI compiled as I come across them -

Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Meta are projected to spend $700 billion on A.I. infrastructure in 2026.
Amount of debt taken on by hyperscalers, chipmakers, neoclouds and other companies providing data centers and electricity for the A.I. build out: at least $3 trillion.
Share of projected S&P 500 earnings gains for this year driven directly by tech companies spending heavily on A.I.: two-thirds
Share of the world’s electricity that data centers currently consume: 1.5 percent
Anthropic is the biggest company ever to debut on the stock market. Its potential valuation in the initial public offering is $2 trillion or two thousand billion dollars.
In 2026, Anthropic earned $16.3 billion and lost $80.7 billion.
Amazon and Google are the largest investors in Anthropic.
As of September 30, 2026, more than 1,900 Anthropic customers had each spent at least $1 million over the past year.
Over 90% of Anthropic’s code is written by Claude Code - Krishna Rao (CFO)
75% of all new code across Google’s internal repositories is generated by AI (via Gemini) and then reviewed and approved by human engineers. - Sundar Pichai, Alphabet and Google CEO
20% to 30% of all code written across Microsoft's repositories is generated using GitHub Copilot. - Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO

Renewed my Associate Cloud Engineer Certification through Google Skills

2026-10-26T19:58:31.730+05:30

Google now allows eligible certification holders to extend their credentials for 12 months by earning specific skill badges and completing courses through Google Skills instead of taking the proctored exam.

I availed this opportunity to renew my Associate Cloud Engineer Certification till next year by completing courses and acquiring skill badges through Google Skills.

You can choose any of the following options to count toward renewal of eligible Google Certifications:

2 skill badges
1 skill badge & 2 courses
4 courses

These activities must be completed within the 12 months prior to certification expiration

The Courses and Labs are thoughtfully designed and regularly updated to stay relevant to the workplace. The AI related modules were particularly useful to me.

I compiled a glossary of Google Cloud & AI terms from the material -

Agent Platform is a comprehensive machine learning development platform that provides both predictive and generative AI capabilities. It allows you to train, evaluate, and deploy predictive machine learning models for forecasting purposes. Additionally, you can utilize the platform to discover, tune, and serve generative AI models to produce content.

Agent Studio lets you quickly test and customize generative AI models so you can leverage their capabilities in your applications. It provides a variety of tools and resources, including an intuitive user interface (UI), that make it easy to start with generative AI, even if you don't have an extensive background in machine learning.

AlloyDB is Google Cloud's scalable and performant PostgreSQL-compatible database, to store and search by a special kind of vector data called vector embeddings.

Context caching lets you to store frequently used input tokens in a dedicated cache and reference them for subsequent requests, eliminating the need to repeatedly pass the same set of tokens to a model.

Gemini is a family of powerful generative AI models developed by Google DeepMind, capable of understanding and generating various forms of content, including text, code, images, audio, and video.

The Gemini API in Agent Platform provides a unified interface for interacting with Gemini models. This allows developers to easily integrate these powerful AI capabilities into their applications.

Gemini Enterprise Agent Platform is Google Cloud's fully-managed, unified AI development platform for building and using generative AI.

Gemini Flash is a multimodal foundation model optimized for speed and efficiency.

Gemini Pro is a multimodal foundation model designed for complex reasoning.

Google Antigravity is a standalone desktop application tailored for managing and orchestrating AI agents that execute complex knowledge and coding tasks. Serving as a central command center, it provides a unified platform to launch, monitor, and manage agent activities independently of your IDE.

Google Gen AI SDK provides a unified interface to Google's generative AI API services. This SDK simplifies the process of integrating generative AI capabilities into applications and services, enabling developers to leverage Google's advanced AI models for various tasks

Grounding is the ability to connect model output to verifiable sources of information.

MCP Toolbox is a middleware server that exposes database operations as a set of tools.

Prompt design is the process of creating prompts that elicit the desired response from language models. Writing well structured prompts can be an essential part of ensuring accurate, high quality responses from a language model. The iterative process of repeatedly updating prompts and assessing the model's responses is sometimes called prompt engineering.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is the pattern of retrieving some non-public data and using that data to augment your prompt sent to the LLM. RAG allows the LLM to generate more accurate responses based on the data included in the prompt.

System instructions allow you to steer the behavior of the model. By setting the system instruction, you are giving the model additional context to understand the task, provide more customized responses, and adhere to guidelines over the user interaction.

Vector embeddings can be retrieved using a semantic search, which allows retrieval of the available data that is the best match for a user's natural language query. The retrieved data is then passed to the LLM in the prompt.

This Week I Learned - Week 43, 2026

2026-10-24T07:00:51.963+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* Indra OCR 1.1 is a 1M param model from Datalab that runs on CPU, 15x faster than Tesseract and much more accurate. 1M param OCR model - runs on CPU, 15x faster than tesseract, close to 1B+ param models in accuracy

* Coding is the mother of all AI use cases with 90% of AI spends in most enterprises going to AI coding. Via AI lets developers use what they are using but cuts the costs by 25% - 40%. - Rajan Anandan

* Via is a middleware that sits between a CLI / IDE and an LLM, installs in 10 seconds

* AI models learn patterns from data during training. Their trained parameters, called weights, are numerical values that help fix how the models process inputs and generate responses.

Think of an AI model as a chef who learnt from thousands of recipes. During training, the model learns patterns that help it decide what ingredients to combine and in what proportions to make a certain dish. Its weights shape these decisions. Making the weights available is like sharing the chef’s acquired knowledge with other chefs, who can then adapt it to their own needs and create dishes of their own.

Most people access proprietary AI models via websites or apps while developers may access them via application programming interfaces (APIs). The provider controls access and may charge for usage.

An open-weight model makes its trained parameters available for download. Developers can run it on compatible computers or servers, adapt it for particular tasks or integrate it into applications.

This can give businesses and individual users greater control over how they deploy and customise AI models, and reduce dependence on a single provider. However, open-weight does not automatically mean open-source in the fullest sense. A firm may release weights without publishing training code or sufficient information about the data used to train the model. Licences may also curb some uses.

OpenAI released GPT-2’s weights in 2019. Beam, Muse Spark Open, Nemotron 3.5 Super VL, Nemotron 3.5 Bolt 74B-A9B, Timestral are non-Chinese open-weight AI models.

Open weights alone do not guarantee lower costs. Hardware, maintenance, performance and licensing still matter and organisations must assess if running a model themselves is more economical than using a hosted service. - The Hindu

* PyTorch is an open-source machine-learning framework used to develop and train AI models. Amazon estimates 85% of AI researchers and developers use it.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has developed TorchNeuron, a tool that allows developers to run AI workloads built using PyTorch on its Trainium2 and Trainium3 chips with minimal code changes.

The move addresses a key challenge for firms developing alternatives to Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs). NVIDIA’s CUDA platform provides software tools and libraries that allow developers to run AI workloads on its GPUs. Its integration with frameworks such as PyTorch helped build a broad developer ecosystem.

* About 3.6 billion people use at least one of Meta’s family of apps daily.

* PHP powers roughly 69–70% of websites on the internet. Researchers and the PHP project disclosed two severe bugs (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) in the core of PHP (“PHP2Shell”) itself. The disclosure heightened concerns about A.I.’s potential to upend cybersecurity unless shortcomings are addressed. Successful exploitation lets an attacker take complete control of the web server. They could steal data, deface sites, install malware, or use the server to attack others.

The PHP project released security updates on October 21, 2026. PHP 8.1 and older versions, including 8.0 and all 7.x versions, have reached end-of-life, and the PHP project has not released patches for them. PHP 8.2 also reaches end-of-life on December 31, 2026.

* eMudhra is an Indian company that acts as a Certificate Authority (CA). Certificate Authorities issue the digital certificates that browsers and devices use to verify websites are genuine and to enable the padlock/HTTPS encryption you see in the address bar.

In April 2025, during a key-generation process, eMudhra created eight intermediate certificates (the “middle layer” that signs actual website certificates) with extremely weak private keys. These were so weak that researchers recovered all of them from the public certificates in under a second. Major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Apple, etc.) rapidly blocked trust in the affected certificates. eMudhra revoked them and later announced it is exiting the global TLS certificate business.

If the weak keys had been actively abused, attackers could have created fake “valid” certificates for any website, enabling highly convincing phishing or man-in-the-middle attacks.

According to cofounder Kaushik Srinivasan, an April 2025 script error exposed eMudhra keys to AI.

The board of eMudhra has decided to voluntarily step away from the global Secure Sockets Layer/Transport Layer Security (SSL/TLS) certificate business.

* SBI is India’s largest bank. 3,897 records of the bank's customers containing personally identifiable information (PII) ended up on the dark web.

* The Indian Government operates its own cloud infrastructure, called MeghRaj, through the National Informatics Centre (NIC). In December 2025, the government reported that 2,170 ministries and departments were hosting applications on MeghRaj, but that they also depended on empanelled private cloud providers, including those based abroad.

In February, AWS and an Indian company named Yotta announced they would deploy AWS Outposts technology for MeghRaj 2.0, allowing cloud services managed by AWS to operate from within NIC data centres and thus keeping Indian data physically within India.

However, the AWS documentation says Outposts need a connection to an AWS regional control system for monitoring and software updates, meaning it’s possible the arrangement will continue to leave Indian physical infrastructure exposed to a management service controlled by foreign operators. - The Hindu

* OrganUI is a set of interface components for healthcare and life sciences: 3D anatomy, clinical charts, molecules and medical images.

* Palantir and SAP have explicit programs or pathways for hiring and supporting neurodivergent people (including those with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and related profiles) in technical roles involving data, software, systems, and related work. Both companies treat neurodivergence as a potential competitive strength for data- and systems-oriented technical work and maintain active recruitment/support mechanisms.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp (who has spoken publicly about his own dyslexia and neurodivergence) has been involved in Neurodivergent Fellowship’s framing and final interviews.

SAP has run its Autism at Work program since 2013.

* Common Rabies vaccines in Europe are not US FDA-approved.

* Why do sodium and chloride, two extremely toxic and harmful chemicals combine to form normal table salt?

Neil deGrasse Tyson - This is the beauty of chemistry.

Sodium...is a lethal metal that you can cut with a knife. That's how soft it is and it reacts violently with water.

Add that to chlorine, which would poison you if you breathed it...put them together and you get completely necessary table salt. Necessary for life. So when you put them together, all the chemistry, it's a new chemistry.

It's a new thing. Don't think of it as it probably has some of those properties it used to have, no.

All that matters is what are its electrons doing when they talk to your electrons?

And if the configuration is different, that's all that matters and the electrons that manifest themselves to you in table salt are differently configured than the electrons that manifest themselves to you as either sodium or chlorine.

Hydrogen is explosive...hydrogen will explode if you light a match to it. Oxygen promotes combustion. If you have a flame and add oxygen to it, it'll burn faster. Combine hydrogen and oxygen you get water that puts out flames.

* Under the RBI’s customer protection norms, reporting within three working days limits your liability in third-party fraud.

* France’s public debt has soared to over $4 trillion, amounting to almost 120% of its GDP. India’s general government public debt (central + state governments combined) stands at approximately 83–84% of GDP. US & UK have significantly higher debt ratios than India (127% & 102% respectively). Japan has long had the highest debt ratio among large advanced economies.

* Mutual Funds now hold a record ~11.7% of Indian equities

* The Indonesian stock market saw more than 10% single‑day fall this week after MSCI announced it may remove it from the Emerging Markets category and downgrade it to a Standalone Market.

* The Taiwan and Korean stock markets show extreme single‑stock concentration — TSMC is ~50% of Taiwan’s market, and Samsung Electronics + SK Hynix together make up ~50% of Korea’s KOSPI Index.

* "Development is a byproduct of corruption" - In certain flawed political environments, the desire for personal gain (corruption) ends up leaving behind tangible physical assets or growth (development) as an accidental side effect. However, while it explains how some infrastructure gets built in high-corruption settings, it is a distorted form of growth that usually comes with severe hidden costs to society.

Intensive Binge Residency

2026-10-20T09:52:12.939+05:30

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

Oracle University Free Courses & Certification Exam Prep Material (2026)

2026-10-19T14:19:47.936+05:30

A few decades ago, quality training was scarce and costly. Thanks to the convergence of several new advancements, software vendors now provide online training to a worldwide audience, making skill acquisition more accessible than ever.

Microsoft offers its Microsoft Learn platform, Google provides Google Skills, and Oracle University is doing a great job of delivering training for their products while also covering higher-level concepts relevant to the database, cloud, and AI domains.

The following Oracle certification exams are free to take and come with learning resources:

Additionally, Oracle University offers many other free training and certification paths in areas like Oracle Cloud Infrastructure AI and Agentic AI. Some of these topics are of general interest and can be particularly useful for IT professionals:

This Week I Learned - Week 42, 2026

2026-10-18T23:36:00.737+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* 18 large language models from six AI labs now generate everything from code explanations to creative fiction. Even in a single short paragraph, every model leaves subtle clues in its word choice, tone, and sentence structure. Each lab's training data and post-training choices leave behind distinct stylistic fingerprints in vocabulary, phrasing, and punctuation. The October Kaggle competition requires participants to build models to classify ~4,000 unlabeled text passages across 18 frontier language models from OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, Qwen, ZAI, and Moonshot AI. The goal is to find out how reliably today's frontier models can be fingerprinted from short text alone.

* Experiential Labs is an OpenAI-compatible model gateway. A user reported that they're injecting ads into free tier model responses without disclosure. It turns out it is mentioned in their long privacy policy that no one really reads.

* Tesla's Full Self-Driving (FSD) system rests on foundational AI research by Yann LeCun, especially convolutional neural networks central to computer vision.

* How Misanthropic! According to a recent Anthropic report humans are “bottlenecking the agents.”

* "I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer.

Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it.

Or just walk away.

AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one.

It may not have been that "clearly" even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today.

There are other questions around AI (like what the economy of it will actually look like in the end), but "is it useful" is no longer one of those questions. Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn't actually used it.

Yes, it can also be a somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and just from a "it keeps finding embarrassing bugs" standpoint.

But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing "La La La, I can't hear you" at the top of your voice like some people seem to do...

We're not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it.

And no, AI isn't perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at

themselves at the same time.

Because it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.

The kernel project has been and will continue to be about the technology.

Sure, the social angle of working on open source is important and often a very motivating part of the project, but in the end that's a side benefit, not the _point_ of the project.

This is *NOT* some kind of "social warrior" project, never has been, and never will be.

In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons.

And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools." - Linus Torvalds while rejecting AI Restrictions in Linux Kernel

* "Intelligence is not that important anymore. Cooperation, negotiation, dealing with uncertainty and risk matter." - S Anand

* JioMotive is an On‑Board Diagnostics (OBD) device that plugs into a car’s OBD‑II port—usually located under the steering wheel—to provide smart‑car features without rewiring. It uses Jio’s e‑SIM for connectivity and works with the JioThings app. The device works with most cars that have an OBD‑II port (common in vehicles manufactured after 2010) using your existing Jio mobile plan. Features include real‑time 4G GPS tracking for location monitoring, geo‑fencing & time‑fencing alerts to set boundaries and movement times, vehicle health monitoring, including engine load, battery status, and diagnostic trouble codes and driving behavior analysis and historical route playback.

* For years, Ukraine’s armed forces have relied on Starshield, the satellite communication services developed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

* AgingHallmarksDB is an interactive web platform that systematically catalogs and curates 3,111 genes associated with the 11 major core biological processes driving how we age. The platform shows which of the 15 types of body cells and 36 organ tissues these genes work in, how they talk to each other and which ones act like ‘master switches’ in the body.

For age-related diseases such as Alzheimer’s, heart failure, lung trouble and diabetes, the AgingHallmarksDB showed that almost all the 11 ageing categories were popping up everywhere. The tool pointed out that air pollution turns on genes linked to skin swelling and gene damage, making skin age faster.

* A 1994 analysis of Ramanujan's medical records and symptoms concluded that his medical symptoms—including his past relapses, fevers, and hepatic conditions—were much closer to those of hepatic amoebiasis, an illness then widespread in Madras, than of tuberculosis. He had two episodes of dysentery before he left India. When not properly treated, amoebic dysentery can lie dormant for years and lead to hepatic amoebiasis, whose diagnosis was not then well established. At the time, if properly diagnosed, amoebiasis was a treatable and often curable disease.

* A generic drug is a medication created to be equal in performance, safety, dosage, strength, quality, and intended use to an existing brand-name drug. It contains the exact same active ingredient(s) as the original brand-name version, but it is typically sold at a significantly lower price. To get regulatory approval (such as from the US FDA or CDSCO in India), generic manufacturers must prove bioequivalence.

Generics fill 90% of US prescriptions. 40% of those generics are made in India. US FDA inspections of Indian plants are now unannounced. - NYT

* Unlike standard sponges that rely on soap or chemical detergents, melamine foam (commonly sold under brand names like "Magic Eraser") works through physical abrasion.

Melamine foam is made from melamine-formaldehyde resin spun into a three-dimensional network of glass-hard, open-cell fibers. Even though the sponge feels soft to human touch, on a microscopic level, these rigid fibers act like extremely fine sandpaper. When moistened with water, the sponge’s open-cell structure creates friction that breaks up stubborn stains, dirt, scuffs, and grease, trapping the debris inside the tiny voids of the foam.

As the sponge wears down, it sheds small particles (microplastics). Avoid dry scrubbing, which creates airborne dust. Always wet the sponge before use to reduce shedding and improve cleaning power.

* Journalist Srinivasan Jain is the son of Gandhian economists Devaki Jain and L.C. Jain.

* Year-on-year data from the Department of Consumer Affairs shows a sharp double-digit rise in the prices of essential commodities.

* Indian professionals account for over 70% of all approved H-1B petitions annually.

Priest-King: Attended Meetings, Made No Decisions

2026-10-17T07:48:49.419+05:30

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

The Priest-King is a roughly 4,500-year-old sculpture discovered at Mohenjo-daro in present-day Sindh, Pakistan by the archaeological team led by Sir Mortimer Wheeler. They gave it that name as Mesopotamian cities were often ruled by religious monarchs.

The name stuck, even though there’s zero evidence the Indus Valley people were ruled by kings or priests at all!

Since the Indus script remains unreadable, we can only guess.

This Week I Learned - Week 41, 2026

2026-10-10T02:37:52.710+05:30

This Week I Learned -

* "We are making Markdown files work natively across Google Drive and Docs.

You can now preview .md files in Drive, open them in Docs, edit them, comment on them, and collaborate without converting the file into a Google Doc!

Markdown has become the common language between humans and AI agents - specs, plans, READMEs, tables, task lists, generated docs - so much of this starts as .md.

Now you can keep the file as Markdown and still use Google Docs collaboration workflows." - Chandu Thota, VP at Google

* Article 50(2) of the EU AI Act requires providers of generative AI systems to ensure AI-generated or manipulated content, including text, is marked in a machine-readable format and detectable as artificially-generated or manipulated.

OpenAI will begin adding an invisible watermark to eligible text generated by ChatGPT and Codex in the European Union (EU).

OpenAI's text watermarking technology, called textGrain, adds an invisible statistical signal to the model’s choice of words. A detector can later analyse the statistical pattern in the model’s word choices.

* In June 2026, during an internal OpenAI evaluation/research task focused on looking up public statistics and answers about Australian medicine spending, an autonomous AI agent encountered access blocks on the Services Australia Medicare Statistics Reporting Service portal. It independently found workarounds, gained unauthorized access to both public and non-public files (including internal program files, settings, and aggregate statistics), ran commands, and even wrote a test file to the server. OpenAI detected the activity later while reviewing “misaligned model activity,” notified Australian authorities in September (initially via a general email inbox), and stated that no individual patient or client records were accessed. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese publicly disclosed it in late September 2026 as the first known case of an AI agent infiltrating a government website

* This Axios report mentions AI executives (including from OpenAI and Anthropic) privately gaming out post-catastrophe scenarios including “world harm” due to catastrophic events capable of triggering public wariness, a blame game against company leaders, and political revolt. Examples include large-scale cyberattacks disrupting financial services, internet connectivity, power, or water, or a “rogue-agent swarm” that breaks containment from testing environments (or is misused by bad actors).

* Google Stitch is an AI-native software design canvas developed by Google Labs. It bridges the gap between design and development by transforming natural language prompts, hand-drawn wireframes, or screenshots into fully editable user interfaces and production-ready front-end code.

* Google Gemini is one of the sponsors of the game show Kaun Banega Crorepati hosted by Bollywood legend Amitabh Bachchan. A contestant in S18E44, a mother of two sons who are both IIT alumni, mentioned that she uses Gemini extensively and treats it like her own son.

* Netflix began in the United States but has been earning more revenue from international markets since the fourth quarter of 2018.

* India has 70% of its population connected to the internet, making it one of the most sought-after global markets for internet services and digital platforms. That vast, eager, and active user base is also a tempting target. One that is ripe to be picked on by cybercriminals. The Status of Policing in India Report (SPIR) 2026 points to an almost paradoxical association: the more people use digital payments, the more they trust them, and the more likely they are to be victims of cybercrime. - Vinson Prakash, Common Cause

* Shivam Jaiswal's OneHealth is an open source offline-first training and nutrition tracker. No server, no account; everything is computed and stored on the phone. Indian food database with household portions.

* A web app featuring 170 Indian foods from the University of Sydney Glycemic Index Research Database, searchable by name or manufacturer, and sortable by glycemic index and glycemic load.

* The SSL industry is shortening how long certificates stay valid, from about a year down to just 47 days by 2029. That means certificates need to be reissued much more often than before.

* Margaret Hamilton coined the term “software engineering”.

* PhotoCraft, a clean-room open-source Photoshop reimplementation built in pure Rust with Claude Opus 5.5. PhotoCraft is early alpha with high PSD fidelity but below 50% full parity, offering a free alternative to Adobe's subscription model.

* Clean-room design / clean-room reverse engineering means the open-source reimplementation of Photoshop (and the rest of the Adobe suite) was built without ever looking at or copying Adobe’s proprietary source code, binaries, shaders, or assets.

* S Anand who teaches the Tools in Data Science course at IIT Madras encourages copying from friends and AI (except in the final in-person end-term exam) because in real life, no one rewards you for reinventing the wheel.

* When trust is thin, people equip themselves with evidence - Widespread personal recording (dashcams, smart glasses, phone video, doorbell cams, etc.) both responds to and can reinforce lower social and institutional trust. When people expect others (drivers, airline staff, insurers, police reports) may shade the truth, stage incidents, or that systems will not reliably sort out “he said/she said,” an objective, always-on record becomes valuable insurance. Constant documentation can itself signal and deepen low trust.

* It's a treat to read well illustrated Wikipedia articles like the one on Confectionery

* Only about 10% of humans are naturally left handed.

* Between 1957 and 1961, thalidomide resulted in more than 10,000 babies across Europe and other countries being born with severe congenital abnormalities. Pharmacologist and physician, Dr. Frances Oldham Kelsey, working as a medical reviewer for the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) refused to approve it despite heavy pressure from the manufacturer because the company failed to provide reliable safety data. Her refusal kept the drug off the U.S. market.

It is now strictly controlled and used today under the brand name THALOMID to treat multiple myeloma (a type of bone marrow cancer) and complications of leprosy.

* Constellations serve as coordinate regions rather than just star patterns. Astronomers use them to specify the location of stars, galaxies, and other celestial objects within the standardized 88‑region sky map. Modern constellations form the foundational map for all positional astronomy.

* Toothpaste is also called dentrifice. Dentifrices can also be tooth powders, tooth gels, or even chewing sticks in traditional practices. Dentifrice is the broader term used in dentistry and pharmacology for any substance used with a toothbrush to clean and polish teeth.

* The Construction...sector consumes steel and cement, among other materials, and its footprint contributes 35% to 40% of all greenhouse gas emissions around the world.

Most of these emissions are because of the energy that the steel and cement sectors need to reach extremely high temperatures required for industrial processes. But even between the two, the cement sector also emits carbon when calcinating limestone — a chemical reaction that makes cement one of the few hard-to-abate sectors, and which contributes 7 to 11% of emissions, almost double that of the aviation sector.

Limestone — the raw material for cement — is formed when calcium-rich marine life, such as oysters and corals, is fossilised and compressed over millions of years.

Accessing it requires miners to first clear forests and all layers of fertile soil in specific areas to expose the sedimentary rock layer. Depending on the geography, limestone can be found 30 to 60 meters under the topsoil in Karnataka, Chhattisgarh, and Andhra Pradesh and at more shallow depths in Rajasthan.

Once that limestone is brought to a factory, it is mixed with clay and heated to around 1,450 degree Celsius. This heating process alone accounts for 35% to 40% of emissions from cement-making; the rest comes from the chemical breakdown of limestone.

When limestone is heated in the calcination process, it releases carbon dioxide as a by-product along with small stone-like balls called clinkers. These clinkers, responsible for 53% to 65% of emissions, are made of calcium silicates, calcium aluminates, and calcium aluminoferrites. They are crushed into powder and mixed in several ratios with gypsum and fly ash and sold as the various cement types available on the market.

Traditional ordinary Portland cement (OPC) consists of over 95% clinker mixed with gypsum. Portland pozzolana cement has 65-80% of clinker with fly ash and gypsum. Portland slag cement consists of 35-64% of clinker, with the rest a mixture of gypsum and granulated slag from a blast furnace. Real-estate developers and builders generally prefer OPC. One reason is that while all three types have a similar setting time of around 30 minutes, OPC gains strength in one week while the other two could take twice as long.

* Steve Irwin is widely celebrated as one of the greatest animal lovers and conservationists of modern times, remembered for his infectious enthusiasm and hands‑on approach to wildlife education. He tragically died in 2006 at age 44 after a stingray barb pierced his heart while filming in Australia’s Great Barrier Reef. He championed animals that most people feared — crocodiles, snakes, spiders — and showed they deserved respect and protection. His TV series The Crocodile Hunter aired in over 120 countries, reaching hundreds of millions of viewers and inspiring them to care about wildlife.

* Kunal Bahl co-founded the e-commerce company Snapdeal in 2010. In 2022, the company assumed the group corporate identity of AceVector, which houses multiple businesses such as Snapdeal, Unicommerce, and Stellaro brands. Unicommerce had its IPO in 2024.

* Dev tested Indian foods derived from Open Food Facts against Chile's limits: 7 in 10 Indian packaged foods would carry a warning label.

* RDA is short for Recommended Dietary Allowance. % RDA is the share of a day's amount that one serving gives you. FSSAI works it out from fixed daily figures:

Energy: 2000 kcal
67 g total fat
22 g saturated fat
2 g trans fat
50 g added sugar
2000 mg sodium (5 g salt)

* Around 1.05 million sellers supply goods through Indian ecommerce platforms.

* Astrotalk achieved a $1 billion valuation (unicorn status) following an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) liquidity event and buyback for over 100 employees.

Founded in 2017 by Puneet Gupta and Anmol Jain, Astrotalk is an Indian "spiritual-tech" and online astrology marketplace. The platform connects users directly with verified astrologers, tarot readers, numerologists, and Vastu experts for consultations via chat, audio calls, or video calls.

* “I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.” - Richard Feynman

* Purer, abstract fields like math fall to AI earlier due to their structured and formal nature - "Sociology is just applied Psychology. Psychology is just applied Biology. Biology is just applied Chemistry. Chemistry is just applied Physics." - xkcd

HOW TO Spot AI Trickery in Images

2026-10-10T00:39:25.175+05:30

Sunday newspapers once featured fun “spot the difference” puzzles with two similar images. That same careful eye is now essential in the AI era to avoid falling for manipulated images.

Here’s a practical checklist based on a New York Times article to tell if a photo is an AI fake:

Check the perspective - Look at lines that should run straight into the distance (like floor tiles or walls). Do they bend, warp, or point in different directions?
Watch for prompt keywords - Scan for brand names, place names, or other words from the original prompt that appear in strange or overly prominent places.
Zoom in on small text - Big letters may look fine, but smaller writing often turns into gibberish. Also look for odd soft shadows on the characters.
Examine how objects connect - Does a strap actually attach to a badge? Do skin tones match between a person and the photo on their ID? AI often fails at real physical relationships.
Read the text carefully - Even sharp, pixel-perfect text can be nonsense. Check if slogans or labels actually make sense when you read them closely.
Look for missing real-world knowledge - Are there incorrect, made-up, or non-standard symbols, signs, or details that someone with specialized knowledge would notice as wrong?
Hunt for quieter logical mistakes - Look for small oddities that don’t add up. These subtler errors are what experts often use to confirm a fake.

A.I. image generators once struggled to replicate human features, haphazardly attaching six- and seven-fingered hands to arms that bent at inhuman angles. Those glaring errors have largely disappeared, making today’s fakes far harder to detect at a glance.

As AI image generators continue to improve, the most obvious giveaways will keep fading.

Use this checklist regularly, stay curious about the details that don’t quite add up, and remember that no single sign is definitive on its own.

Nothing Personal, It's Just Statistics

2026-10-07T08:38:12.824+05:30

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

HOW TO Filter Products on Open Food Facts by Country (India) Using DuckDB & Superset

2026-10-04T09:48:26.262+05:30

Open Food Facts (OFF) is a crowd-sourced database of food products from around the world.

Somewhere in the world, a shopper scans the barcode on a packet of biscuits and adds basic product details. Another person photographs a package label for the same product in Hyderabad. A volunteer in France fixes a typo.

That's Open Food Facts, a volunteer-built, openly licensed database of food products that's continually changing and growing.

Each product is identified by a barcode and carries ingredients, nutrition facts, brands, labels and more. The whole database has millions of products, and let's say you only want the products recorded as being sold or available in one country like India.

There are multiple ways to extract a subset of the OFF database. I have already tried using the daily dump available on Hugging Face through Google Colab and GitHub Actions in the past but it blew my mind that using the OFF deployed Apache Superset, you can execute a SQL query in a browser and pull out a country specific subset of the large OFF dataset and export it as a CSV file within seconds!

DuckDB provides cheap, fast analytics over OFF's Parquet data and Superset provides the interface, sharing and visualization.

Open Food Facts maintains the Superset instance, the DuckDB database behind it, and the regular import of its Parquet product export (into the food_products table). As a developer, you don't install, load or refresh anything.

While researching food products from India and periodically retrieving the India-specific subset of the OFF database, I enlisted my AI chatbots to help me craft the SQL query and explain how it works. Here's the query -

If you are new to Superset and DuckDB and excited to know how it all works like I did, read on...

Superset & DuckDB — What’s the Link?

DuckDB is an open-source, in-process analytical database that can query large files such as Parquet directly. It runs as a library inside your program or inside Superset's backend, with no server to install or manage. It stores and processes data in a columnar, vectorized way, which suits "scan lots of rows, aggregate a few columns" workloads (OLAP).

OFF publishes its full product database as a Parquet file, with over 4.7 million products and about 115 columns, some of them nested (lists and structs). Parquet is a file format for storing big tables. Instead of storing data row by row, it stores it column by column (a columnar format) so DuckDB can often read only the columns needed by a query rather than scanning the entire file. If your query only needs 5 of 115 columns, the engine reads just those 5 and skips the rest. That is why analytics on a huge file can still be fast.

DuckDB can query that data directly with its dialect of SQL so the file behaves like a table.

Apache Superset is an open-source, web-based business intelligence tool. It does not store data. It lets you run SQL in SQL Lab - the query editor in Superset, and turns results into charts, dashboards and CSV exports. With a DuckDB connection configured, Superset gives anyone with a browser access to the OFF data.

Superset is just the interface, while DuckDB is the execution engine.

Superset takes some effort to deploy and administer and that aspect has been handled by Open Food Facts.

Its behavior depends on the SQL dialect of the connected engine (PostgreSQL and DuckDB). I choose DuckDB and queries must be written in DuckDB syntax.

When you type SQL in SQL Lab (Superset's query editor) and press Run, Superset sends your text to DuckDB. DuckDB executes it and returns rows and Superset displays them as a table you can export to CSV.

Before asking anything clever, let's ask DuckDB to show us the floor plan:

PRAGMA table_info('food_products');

This DuckDB command returns every column with its position, name and type. You can review and download the result as a CSV.

The floor plan or the schema reveals an important complication. OFF's Parquet data contains nested fields. Some columns are not simple values:

countries_tags is a LIST: several values in one cell.
product_name is a LIST of STRUCTs, each with a lang and a text. A typical result looks like a tangle of JSON:
[{"lang": "main", "text": "Cassatta"}, {"lang": "en", "text": "Cassatta"}]

The first language entry refers to the "main" name. The data is nested. Ordinary SQL expects one tidy value per cell. DuckDB is happy to unfold these, but you have to ask in its dialect.
nutriments is a LIST of STRUCTs: name, 100g, serving and more.

Next, DESCRIBE tells us the shape of a table or of a query's output without running the whole thing -

DESCRIBE SELECT unnest(product_name) FROM food_products;

To get a sense of how many records are there for a specific country (India in this example), you can use the COUNT function like this -

SELECT COUNT(*) AS india_products
FROM food_products p
WHERE list_contains(p.countries_tags, 'en:india');

The table food_products holds the OFF data. Each row is one product. Some columns hold lists. For example, the column countries_tags holds a list of country labels. OFF's countries_tags represents countries where a product is sold/available, not necessarily where it was manufactured.

The label for India is en:india. The query considers only the rows that have this label. Swap the values to en:france or en:usa or any other country using OFF's language:value tag convention if you're interested only in products from those countries.

When I ran this COUNT query on 4th October 2026, there were 24,588 records carrying the en:india country tag. The number will change as contributors add or update products.

Upon running the query to get values for a specified set of columns for each product (basic details of each product including ingredients, nutrient values, NOVA and Nutri-Score) in the India subset of OFF database, the output (5.9MB CSV export) was returned within 5 seconds!

One of the main highlights of the output is the health rating based on the popular NOVA and Nutri-Score frameworks generated by OFF:

NOVA group: a 1-to-4 score for how heavily processed a food is, where 1 means unprocessed or minimally processed and 4 means ultra-processed.
Nutri-Score: a letter grade from A (most favourable nutrition profile) to E (least favourable), calculated from the nutrients per 100 g.

NOVA and Nutri-Score have no unit.

How the query works

The query has three main parts -

FROM food_products p selects the table. The letter p is a short name for the table.
WHERE list_contains(p.countries_tags, 'en:india') is the filter. It keeps a row only when the list contains en:india.
SELECT selects the columns for the result.

The function list_filter examines each item in a list. It keeps the items that match the condition.

(list_filter(p.nutriments, x -> x.name = 'energy-kcal')[1])."100g" AS energy_kcal,

→ find the item in the nutriments list whose name is energy-kcal, take the first matching item, and read its 100g field (the value per 100 grams). The quotes around "100g" are needed because a name starting with a digit isn't a normal identifier. This repeats for each nutrient you want.

The x -> ... part is a lambda, a tiny inline function meaning "for each item x, test this".

The text x -> x.lang = 'main' is the condition. It keeps the item with the language main.

The text [1] selects the first item. In DuckDB, the first item is number 1.

.text and ."100g" reach inside a struct to grab one field.

The function COALESCE gives the first value that is not empty. If no main text exists, it gives the first available text.

'https://in.openfoodfacts.org/product/' || p.code || '/' AS URL

→ the symbol || joins text. The query uses it to make the product URL from the barcode, turning a barcode like 8906084521276 into a clickable product page.

The icon labeled with the tooltip "Download as CSV," as shown in the screenshot, allows you to export the query results as a CSV file.

Differences from standard SQL

Standard SQL does not have list_contains and list_filter. These are DuckDB functions.
Standard SQL does not have the x -> condition syntax in these functions.
Standard SQL does not use the .text syntax to read a field in a struct.
PRAGMA is not part of standard SQL, and databases that offer it use it differently.

A query written for DuckDB can fail in PostgreSQL.

Epilogue: Why this matters

Open Food Facts provides a setup where you can query a large public dataset from a browser without first downloading the entire dataset or installing a database server.

It's amazing to me that with an open dataset, an open-source engine (DuckDB), an open-source interface (Superset) and curiosity, everything can be inspected, reproduced and improved by anyone, and that includes the data itself. If you spot a wrong ingredient list on one of those product pages, you can fix it, and the next person's query will return your correction.

Also see - Open Food Facts Facets

This Week I Learned - Week 40 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

* Prompt LLMs using ASD-STE100 for clearer outputs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Announcing his retirement from being a "professional programmer" for 25 years, the creator of Ruby on Rails, David Heinemeier Hansson (@dhh on X) says "And on the other side is...an energized career as a professional maker of things...steering intelligence".

This Week I Learned - Week 39 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We Have Everything. That's The Problem.

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

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

Over-Seasoned

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

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

This Week I Learned - Week 38 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* Pakistan has the most glaciers outside polar regions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Windows side

Windows primarily uses:

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

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

Linux side

Most Linux distributions default to the ext family:

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

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

The compatibility imbalance

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

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

How 7-Zip fits in

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

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

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

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

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

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

co-written with Grok

Open Food Facts Facets

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why It Matters

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

This Week I Learned - Week 37 2026

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

This Week I Learned -

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GeoIndia - Landforms Explorer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- co-written with Grok

We Automated the Fun Too

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

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