I’ve started work at Progress. Not much interesting happened this week. I barely engaged with anything other than on-boarding at new job.
I replaced my existing broadband connection with Airtel today. My current connection is run by a local guy. Speed was good and I barely got any disconnect over the last couple of years. So why change? Six months ago, he switch off my connection without telling me that payment is due. This time as well, I had to remember when the payment is due. He doesn’t send invoices or receipts so getting refund wasn’t even possible.
My neighborhood dog Jumbi bit a couple of delivery guys in last few months. Not a serious bite but he sank his teeth enough to break skin. He was vaccinated by BBMP a couple of years ago. My neighbors called BBMP to take him away but they haven’t acted on it yet. I’ve put up a notice on a pole in my street with his picture. My street is a dead end and sometimes people wander into it. He is not fond of barking. He doesn’t look dangerous and he sneaks and it makes him dangerous.
I learnt about Golu (Gombe Habba). A friend is very fond of it and she has been working on her dolls for this Navaratri (picture below). Ookie play-school asked kids to bring a few dolls to the play-school.
I went to Western Ghats near Ettina Bhuja: an overnight stay in a homestay, and easy hike early in the morning. It was a long weekend so a few friends also joined. Kaalu enjoyed hiking in the mountains.
Yesterday (Sep 25, 2026) was my last day at Toyota Connected India (🚗️TCIN, Bengaluru). I’ll be starting a new position (Principal Engineer, tech-stack: Rust) at Progress Software (Bengaluru) from Oct 1. I’ve mostly positive things to say about my 7 months long stint at TCIN. I recommend them for Rust and C++ roles.
Over last few months, I turned a C firmware to Rust/embassy. The first iteration was done using Claude. After couple of days, I had a non-blocking firmware which worked without any bug!! This is very rare in other languages where things just work if they compile (Haskell also comes pretty close but it doesn’t work on embedded systems).
Claude did a decent job i.e. we had non-blocking firmware that has similar behavior. The code is also better than I’d have gotten if people wrote it. I am cleaning it up now especially around error handling. I’d say it was overall positive. On the other hand, the firmware I was working at TCIN, requires keen eyes if you are using Claude/Copilot.
When multiple people are working on a codebase, the trouble with LLM generated code is same as LLM generated text. Its hard to know what is important in the wall of text. When people write decent text or code, the important bit is usually obvious and review process starts from there. This is not to say that people don’t write vacuous or disjointed prose and code.
Ookie had annual sports day at her daycare this week. It was a fun gathering though clouds didn’t offer help. It was a sunny morning and kids got tired soon. Parents were as usual more tired!
SIR has been going on in my neighborhood where I’ve been voting for last ten years. Yesterday, the ECI appointed contact person called and asked for 2000 bribe to “take care of SIR notice”! I’ve blocked his number and will take care of notice by myself.
Voting is one of those rare thing in this country which was available to everyone without paying bribe to anyone. Imagine getting a passport or even a birth or death-certificate without paying someone! In fact, politicians are known to pay bribe voters to vote! It feels surreal.
🏃️I’ve completed 700 km of running. More than 3 months are left. I should be able to finish my 1000 km run this year without trying extra hard in Nov and Dec.
I’ll be starting a new job from Oct this year. My role will be focused on (Rust) tooling around infrastructure management for self-hosted, air-gapped, or hybrid infra. Think of software supply chain management and lifecycle management of apps. Pretty much like docker/Kubernetes on one hand; and ansible/puppet on the other.
A friend got excited about newly opened something called Brick Oven in our neighborhood. We went there for dinner earlier this week. I found the place to be OK. Among such places, I still prefer Onesta. Usually, I prefer to go to traditional south Indian eateries with self-serving. Those are most efficient eateries and food quality is very good. But if you are catching up with someone, I guess places like Brick Oven, Onesta, CCD are fine.
Lately, I’ve not been feeling like visiting HN. I am spending more time on lobste.rs and RSS feed. I also discovered something called Webring (https://webring.xxiivv.com/) — interesting idea but I won’t see myself browsing them just yet.
I feel more energetic when I write code by myself. In retrospect I now understand why. Because there are occasional dopamine rush when I discover a better pattern and whole codebase is now slightly better and when I learn something on the job. This works because getting better and learning matters to me emotionally. I am almost certain that a long-term LLM usage will burn me out in a year. I’ve been seeing signs.
Another solution to this problem is that I use 30% of my time coding using LLM and 70% of time solving problems and designing systems by hand. This will also work for me. What is not going to work in long run is being a developer and only using LLM.
🌦️As of today, the southern peninsula is very rain deficit. Interesting summer ahead of us. Some twenty five years ago, when I went to Chennai for college, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that rain-water harvesting was mandatory for every building. Why it is so hard for such good-practices to become popular?
The generative AI is on my mind for last couple of weeks but I don’t want to write to think about it too much. The genie is out of the bottle and we have to deal with it somehow.
Most people think of throughput when they think of AI. IMO, throughput is not a value-add of AI though the limelight is on the throughput. It doesn’t increase throughput without costing you in long-term. I think the real advantage of AI is getting to a higher altitude easily. That also means you should know the questions you need answers to. AI can’t ask good questions. Also see “Do you sill read the code“.
It is now pretty obvious that many (perhaps most) don’t see tech (at least the IT) as inherently good. We have squandered most of the goodwill that our predecessors accumulated.
Software companies needs to see FOSS and community engagement as long-term investment. Unfortunately, not many companies can think beyond a few quarters.
I spend some time on my old FOSS work, without using any AI. I felt a little better. The temptation to use it very strong to use it on boring part but when you touch it, you don’t usually stop there!
Creatine supplements have positive impact on my fatigue levels.
I love dua: I use it to analyze disk usage, and recently they’ve added a feature to clean up temporary files easily. Oh joy!
I successfully ran Kodagu Marathon 2026! I wasn’t sure if I will be able to finish it this year. I ran my last half-marathon three years ago. I have been feeling completely out of shape for last couple of years: my running pace had been abysmal. But not only I finished the half-marathon but beat my PR by 2 minutes! I should have gotten a hair cut before the run.
My manager at Toyota finished with me 💪🏼! He helped me save at least 5 minutes. I saw him after half-way return point. We ran last 4 km together. Fun times!
My labmate and friend from Ph.D. times Adiya and his wife Chinmayee joined us for this half-marathon. He finished it in about 2 hours despite not in best of his form. We get to meet his 1.5y old daughter.
Kaalu had really good time at homestay near Gonikoppal! She got to eat fresh chicken and eggs which she gulped down like a hungry monster. The homestay manager was extremely pet-friendly and he took extra care of Kaalu (I say almost spoiled her).
Kodagu felt very dry this year. The local manager at homestay told me that there is hardly any rain this year. When driving past Brahmagiri range, I noticed no water streams which is a common sight during monsoon time. The Irfu waterfall had very little water.
We couldn’t go the waterfall since they don’l allow dogs there. So we played downstream where people come to wash clothes! Ookie loved time in the stream and Kaalu was shirt-scared of deep and noisy water, as usual. But this time, she stood inside the water.
Near Mysore, we found a pet-friendly cafe called Queens Coffee. It is ran mostly by women. It had all the good vibes — clean, colours that are easy on eyes, clean toilets, and very pet-friendly. If you pass-by, please visit and support.
On lobte.rs, I was complaining about recent increase in LWN subscription prices and how declining Rupee has made it harder for me to continue with “starving hacker” plan. One kind soul on internet bought me a subscription gift. I felt guilty accepting the gift since I can surely afford it. But I didn’t want to threw cold water at the kind gesture. So I accepted the gift whole-heartedly and I donated $35 (starving hacker plan that I used to subscribe) to PARI (https://ruralindiaonline.org).
I did some maintenance work for a few FOSS projects especially Smoldyn. The cmake build system major version is 4.x and pybind11was updated to 3.x series. Removed Cygwin support from build system since smoldyn can built on Windows now.
I’ve resigned from Toyota this month. I am service notice period. I’ll be joining Progress software from October 1, 2025 as a Principal Engineer on habitat/chef team.
I went through a few interviews and got a couple of offers. I’ll be switching into a Principal Engineer role early Oct. I picked the offer where team gave me the best vibes. I’ve started giving team the highest weightage.
I also learnt how to negotiate the offer. I was a little nervous but it went well.
Negotiations are most effective if you have some leverage. Or your interviews were great.
📔️Read ‘Designing Distributed Systems’ by Brenden Burns. Its a good book and very readable if you are just starting with them.
🦀️Interesting study https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3830438.3830958 Abstract: (notes in () are mine). We investigate the effects on code quality of the design patterns typestate and newtype in the language Rust, by conducting three case studies… The findings:
Typestate improves code faultlessness and testability, but comes at the cost of more boilerplate code and can degrade readability (use macros?). Code with extensive branching logic and many invariants likely benefits most from the pattern.
Newtype combined with the “Parse, don’t validate” principle improves code quality at a low cost and prevents invalid states at runtime.
🏃️I’ve finished 620 km of running so far. 4 more months, less than 400km to go to complete 1000km run. My pace is very slow but I don’t mind it. Also looking forward to Kodagu Marathon early next month.
I’ve been spending more and more time on rust-lang and rust-for-linux Zulip. Zulip is good but they have kept ‘mark it as resolved’ and ‘mark it as read’ so close that I ended up marking a few thread resolved and annoying a few folks 🥹️.
Funny to see LinkedIn added 'Seems like AI slop' to feed options. There is something so bad even LinkedIn is willing to filter!
🌧️ No rain this week! This is the driest I’ve ever felt in Bengaluru.
📚️”Domain Driven Design” by Eric Evans is an excellent book. I am half-way through. I plan to write a review later. Its written by a practitioner for other practitioner. There are a few powerful ideas in the book which I often find articulated bits and pieces often.
🏃️Kodagu half-marathon in couple of weeks! Not really prepared for it but looking forward.
🥤️Creatine supplements works for me. I’ve been feeling like 2024. For last one year, I’d been very low on energy. Tried multiple things like vit-D and b12 supplements (I was low on them) but only creatine helped.
It also brought back my nightly leg cramps. I think APT production is normal in my muscle :).
🏦️I’ve closed my GST registration today. I’ll be accepting a full-time offer soon and closing the consultancy gig this month.
🌧️ No proper rain this week either. The Cauvery catchment areas had some good times with rain which is very fortunate. This summer may be pretty painful for Bengaluru if the water reservoir doesn’t fill up fully!
I bought physical copy of “Domain Driven Design” By Eric Evans. I sincerely hope more folks read this book. This kind of books are even more relevant in this LLM generated code age.
Talking of LLM generated code, I am not surprised to read this blog post by Raymond Chen on something very fundamental to merge requests. LLM are straining and breaking some well established social contracts (i.e. reader spending much more time than writer!). It is good to often remind that there are still humans at the other side of table.
This week, Digit Insurance pulled a “scam” in me. It almost succeeded! They sent the following WhatsApp message.
I bought this car from Spinny almost a year ago. Under the impression that Digit is my car insurer, I went ahead and renewed the policy pending KYC and pre-inspection video. KYC was easy to do using PAN but I could not login in their app (that’s a different story). Frustrated, I cancelled the policy, refund pending.
So where is the scam? First, after wasting an hour on their app, when I double checked, my insurance is not expiring on Aug 3, not in next 5 days as they mentioned. And the insurer is United Insurance company, not Digit! Should’ve known better since they used the fear “fine of 2000” etc in the message to nudge me click!
I now understand that they advertise heavily in IPL and a famous cricketer is their scammer-in-chief or brand ambassador or whatever. Enjoy your cut, motherfucker!
I was “saved” by AI slop (refund is still not in my bank though). Their app didn’t let me login for inspection because my phone number starts with 91 and it confused it with ISD code (+91 part) and complained that mobile number is not complete but also won’t let me type more than 10 digits 🥁️🤣️. I had similar experience with these websites/apps when I was purchasing life-insurance. I ended up buying from LIC because their PHP website still works. Perhaps I should start using the govt. entities, they don’t seem to change their color-scheme and look & feel every other week and they sites seems to work better than most fancy looking websites I’ve lately used.
I had some recognition at work by my peers 🥹️. Its nice to be appreciated by your peers you appreciate. There is nothing more to the “career” IMO.
At work, there is a hard limit on AI tokens. I burned my limited monthly quota in a week or two and then went through withdrawal symptoms 🥹️. I’ve started writing some code by hand now. Most of the time, I do not ping anyone when I have a doubt about code-base. LLM works great because a lot of people invested time and effort in writing docs and great MR reviews.
The expectations from AI is a bit more saner these days but I don’t think the AI psychosis is going away anytime soon. We had an internal hackathon where AI was the judge! So did Kaggle last week.
I am yet to see AI increasing revenue per head or keeping folks focused enough to finish it off. There are some productivity gains here and there. More people are now talking about it.
I learnt about this ecological event in Mizoram last week. Every few decades mass blooming in their forests causes a rodent boom, and devastation to crops.
I filed my ITR for this year. I think finally I know the process. I created a Notion template to use next year. I also filed my GST returns. The GST website is not bad, it is not as good as ITR website though.
I learnt the Boko Haram has been using AI and killing themselves. > We saw in a movie how motorcycles can jump over bridges. We used AI to learn how to do this. We gave it information, like what motorcycles we use and the distance we need to jump and so on and it gave us steps on what we have to do. We practiced a lot and kept asking questions. We dug holes and filled them with broken glass and fire to practice. 18 of us died in the process. Eight of us managed to do it. The next time we attacked, we could jump.
I watched a few videos of Casey Muratori talking. Nice guy.
This season for Rick & Morty is excellent. I enjoyed the episode 9, Mortgully, thoroughly 👍️.
I don’t follow football much. I read the Donald Trump got Fifa to reverse a red card! Then learning that USA lost to Belgium was pretty nice. Donald Trump has lowered the bar so much as even lowest among the lowest don’t compare to him when it comes to pettiness.
This week was busy at work. I am participating in an internal competetion.
The popular version of the Dunning-Kruger effect says that stupid people overestimate their capabilities. This is true, but the effect is much more general than that. It says if your expertise level is different from the average, then you judge the “average competency” differently. So if you have above-average expertise, you might overestimate what the average competency is. Folks who had above-average education tended to overestimate what average education looks like (and vice versa), and so on.
Embassy is a great project. I am porting a blocking C firmware to non-blocking firmware using Rust, and it is a joy to write in. I hope things are still as good as now when I need to take a not-so-happy path. The other option was using ROS or FreeRTOS, but I am not very excited about writing in C or C++ or even Python.
Things are getting interesting at work. The AI pricing is increasing, token usage is being curbed, and folks are demanding their dosage back.
All sync communication like Slack must be banned around serious work unless they are moderated by grumpy old people who get heart attacks every time someone shoots 10 notifications when one would have done :-). Go back to emails, please! Put effort into writing and reading. And no, I don’t mean write in Victorian English or have perfect grammar.
I had to go see the mechanic about my Tata Nano. It’s been 8 months since the car went to his garage. Man, he can lie with a straight face! I may have to explore legal options from next month onwards.
The monsoon has arrived in Bengaluru, but rains are still deficient. Lantana plants in my neighborhood are doing great, sadly for local flora.
Yesterday, I had a chat with my neighbor. He is a retired bus driver from KSTRC. Nice guy and very helpful. Old people love to talk about plot price, house price, cars, and other stuff. He has experienced an automatic car in Bengaluru traffic and is now planning to sell his manual.
Today, I filed my ITR and GST returns. I am getting a bit used to them now. Both government portals are actually fine. The ITR portal is pretty good, and the GST portal works after some practice. This year, I had to file ITR2 (due to some stock selling/buying). It was easy to get the details from the CSDL repository and add them to the form. It takes a while to learn the acronyms and abbreviations. Last year notes in Notion helped.
I thought of hiring a CA but I didn’t see much value. They save the hassle of knowing how to file ITR, which I was keen on learning anyway. And to file ITR by CA, I need to collect all data and share it with them, which would take the same amount of time. So what’s the point? Perhaps they know something that Reddit/Gemini doesn’t about saving taxes?
I got my 3D printer back from my cousin. He stopped using it for a few years. He sent it back to me when he had to move. I’ve been printing a lot of useless stuff, like the one below.
I have been reading “Medieval India 1” (edited by Irfan Habib). I found a few papers in it quite interesting — especially on social mobility and travelers accounts of Hindu religious practices at many famous places; many of them don’t exist anymore. Perhaps I will write a review later. Mr. Habib has an excellent, readable body of work on Indian history. Indian history was a very emotional subject when I was in college. Mere mention of a historian was likely to invite accusations of partisanship. I’ve mostly read what people would call “leftist” historians. Mr. Habib, D. D. Kosambhi, etc., were/are my favorites. Though I don’t touch Romilla Thapar anymore. I don’t like her as a person anymore after her stint at EPW.
The economy and the reality are catching up with the AI usage at work. Costs have been rising, and token-maxxing by a few is burning through the monthly budgets in a week. Given its effect on memory prices, I am a bit glad that I bought a Linux machine a few years back, though I didn’t need any. It is quite a weird situation; the promise of AI is replacing labor and jobs, then who’s going to buy it, and what is its point other than being a tool of economic destruction?
Congrats to Ireland and New Zealand for their wins over India and England. I didn’t watch any of those matches.
My favorite podcast, In Our Time, continues after its host retired from the show :-). I’ve listened to a few new episodes. It will take some time to get used to the absence of Mr. Melvyn Bragg. Content produced by the BBC is still one of the best in the world, but this podcast had been out of this world.
Work was very slow this week. I also took a few technical interviews for a client who has been using AI to screen resumes. I am not a fan of using AI in the interview process, but it is what it is. Earlier, I didn’t like structured interviews, but now I prefer them since comparison across becomes a bit easier. I don’t have anything against unstructured interviews if you practice beforehand and make sure it doesn’t derail candidates. Now I wish the candidate also practiced interviews, especially how they answer the questions; please get to the point as soon as possible.
Something is perhaps churning in the PHP community: RFC for geneic was rejected! And I saw a talk about the RFC process. I think it is usually a VERY GOOD idea to make the lives of programmers easier.
📚️I ordered a few of Prof. Andre Beteille books. He dies a few months back. He is perhaps the only sociologist that I could read. MN Srinivas’s “A remembered village” was also a great read.
I also bought a few books on software engineering in general, especially on refactoring, design patterns, and architecture. Books on software engineering becomes outdated pretty soon. I prefer blog posts or papers.
🥭️ The peak mango season in Bengaluru is over!
🏏️I think I’ve lost all interest in cricket. I can no longer watch a full game, even watching highlights takes some effort. While the heart misses the test matches but I don’t have that much of time or attention. Then the T20, the “pornography of cricket”, fun as it is, has already killed neural circuitry that appreciated delayed-gratification required for test cricket. Good riddance, perhaps!
🤖️I learnt that Hyundai bought Boston Dynamics a few years back (80% stake) and now finished the deal by buying the remaining stakes. Automotive industry is betting on “physical AI”. Toyota, where I currently work, also have significant focus on physical AI.
🛵️ It was a WFO week at work. I think I should once a week to office just to ensure that bike is in good shape. My office bag content remain relevant to seasons. I got caught in rain and I didn’t have my rain jacket in my bag.
This year is going to be most tumultuous as far as “coding” is concerned. Either we’ll figure it out how to use AI properly. Or I’d have gone through the stage of griefs and reached acceptance by then. I’ve been thinking about AI or pushing back on it till December this year.
Couple of bad news from the village: an old widow died after shock of bank proceedings against her 5 lacks loan sent her to a comma. She was milking her cows when she fell back. It is typical for banks to announce these things loudly in public because public shaming seems to work on villagers. The rural economy has been under duress for a long time and Iran war made things worse. There are long lines for diesel, petrol and LPGs, and prices of fertilizers are up. Despite what your media and govt telling you (or keeping mum), things have not been positive for a long while.
Talking of govt telling anything to the public, they have not yet released the Air India crash report. And there are many more still pending. Congress govt used to tone deaf, BJP govt is an improvement, it is just deaf.
It was heartening to see PARI is publishing many more news stories. I’ve setup a monthly subscription. Currently, I only subscribe to two news portals, PARI & Caravan. I’ve cancelled most others: frontline, Indian Express, and even EPW after Thakurta fiasco and trustees using Prof. Beteille name on the letter while he was ailing in the hospital. It was vile! Vote with your money, it works!
I tried to read “Inversion of Control layer” but couldn’t find motivation after a few paragraph. I am pretty sure it has some value in it but the motivational example is way too “enterprisey” to pay attention to.
I think I am now suffering from AI fatigue and communication slop it causes. The social rules around using/producing AI content are in flux. I feel irritated when someone sends AI generated content my way but occasionally do the same myself. One solution to this is maybe to slow down and take time to do things the old way but not using AI now feels like “not using your super-powers”. Interesting times I am living in.
Its been over 6 months that my Tata Nano XTA is still in garage. The mechanic has been telling me this week or next week for last three months!
I wished I watched the Bangladesh and Australia second ODI match. Bangladesh played excellent cricket.
It is becoming very very hard to watch cricket when India is playing — the advertisements are so cringe on Hotstar. And commentary has become really meh — commentator are also parroting ads! I don’t know how long they are going to milk nationalism.
Perhaps I need to find a more sports-friendly streamer who is less interested in shoving ads down my throat. I watched few hours of NZ and ENG test match on Sony LIV which otherwise has terrible content; and SL and ENG T20 match (Women World Cup). Commentary was good. I get to learn a few things and tidbits about cricket and cricketers. And ads were just ads. Or maybe I am just getting old.
Age has stopped becoming “just a number” now, more and more it feels like a timer!
So have you heard that someone has 1 trillion dollars now? A few decades ago, I read a historian talking about how after world war II, super riches have become things of a past! 🙄️
Following is a really good talk — a bit long. Ask AI to summarize if you are interested in content, and then enjoy the details.
🏃️In last 5 months, I’ve ran over 320km, 680 more km to go in next 7 months. Pretty doable since running in winter is easier. It’s harder to run >4km without a good company.
These days I come across more and more apps broken in subtle ways. After the last update, my Android phone becomes unusable within a day unless I reboot it once a day. Android has started behaving now a bit like Windows! I feel anxious about updating anything (including Linux kernel).
Most annoying is when bluetooth and phone apps stops working in weird ways. I hear caller tune but no icon to pick the phone. If I switch off the bluetooth, I won’t switch on again unless I reboot the phone. Google playstore complains that I am not logged-in and BHIM stops working since googple play service complains that I am not logged in! 😪️
Web-apps are also broken in equally silly ways. One of my client uses a new and upcoming HR web-app which I always found annoying. These days, I loaded a few mega bytes of data on landing page, and that keeps changing its background images. Their login flow is mysterious once you are off the happy path. I just want to upload invoices. I’ve given up on it just send invoice over email.
I downloaded GST application for Linux to sign my filings. I wasn’t expecting it to work since it is a govt. app and it didn’t disappoint. It didn’t work.
It is a java application that requires Sun Java and doesn’t work with openjdk. I downloaded the Oracle java and ran it but again no dice. I asked Claude if it can help mitigate the sloppiness of my country men/women and it did a good job.
Apparently the developers (eMudhra) shipped Windows related files inside a Linux app. I don’t think anyone opened it on a fresh Linux machine before shipping. Claude was able to patch the app. Patch is available here https://github.com/dilawar/GSTSigner-linux . We Indians have a well-deserved reputation of being sloppy and lazy at everything we do.
My neighborhood saw rain this week, decent amount. Mosquitos are back! Surprisingly there was no power-cut after first bout of strong winds. In last couple of years, they replaced naked aluminum wires with a bundle of insulated coated wires. Perhaps that helped.
I learnt a bit about “mock testing“. I thought it knew about it. The way it interacts with Rust’s trait was new to me. This weekend, I am going to collect materials on it.
Govt agencies are rarely known to be a place for efficiency and accountability but recent news of CBSE botching up student’s mark-sheet is a new low. I read that a “journalist” called the student who brought up the issue Pakistani and cockroaches! Why rush towards a new system just a few weeks before an event is beyond me?
I’ve never been a fan or admirer of any living politician. I find them necessary evil to be tolerated as long as we can potentially replace them next election cycle. I feel a bit sad when I meet someone who is. The job of citizens is to keep its government on it’s toes rather than touching its feet! Perhaps that is the issue: some folks want to be a subject rather than a citizen? A politician influencing ECI so brazenly is like watching a cricket team installing their own umpires in a match! What is left to celebrate after victory then?
Some psychologists claim that old people who are bhakt now were chamchas before. Why do they start worshiping Mr. Modi after so rudely disillusioned by Ms. Gandhi is beyond me. It would make a good Ph.D. thesis.
Powerful leaders, more often than not and surely in our country, cause more harm than good to the foundation of nation. What Ms. Gandhi did to civil services and press is not different than what the current government is doing to judiciary and press. These have long lasting effects that rarely gets corrected on its own. For a weaker judiciary and a spineless press and police are more useful for any politician doesn’t matter which party they belong to.
We have few examples in Europe to compare. In US, a cult of personality seems to be winning over a “check-and-balance” style of governance.
Reminds me of Gandhiji who deeply distrusted political parties in general and two parties system of US in particular. He thought that a two party system will eventually turn citizens against citizens. Despite finding Gandhiji politically naive, he sure has a point if you think beyond a few decades.
We sure have a thing for “powerful leaders”. Sadly even among people who should know better. Perhaps the educated class in this country is subconsciously aware of worthlessness of their education and degrees. I’ve seen them lining up behind Anna Hazare and Mr. Modi as if they couldn’t think of better ideas.
Even when your leaders are “good” and not interested in lining up his pockets or keep himself in the limelight, they can’t think beyond next election! Some leaders might enjoy nothing more than contesting elections because it gives them a high they can’t get by solving problems that may take more than a election cycle. The timescale of 5 years is too short in life of a nation to lay the foundation of semiconductor fabrication, improve primary education and health system and to improve universities. Might institutes that don’t have to think about their existence every five years help? I hope this to be largely the case but we also have institutes like DRDOs!
In may countries, political parties are also “institutes” for they easily outlive their current leaders. And these parties can think beyond election cycles though I find this to be rarer and rarer. In our style of society, we have factions rather than parties because they grow and wither with their ring-leaders.
Sure, one can ditch democracy and look for autocrats for they don’t seek votes. It might work in some cases for a few decades but when it doesn’t work, and it eventually win not, it is going to hurt really bad.
Some rain this week on Tuesday. Cloudy week. Not bad. Running after the rain when there are no dust particles in the air is already pleasant.
People are still very confused about AI. What should it be used for and how much? What are its real benefits?
I wish there is little less AI content on my feed. LinkedIn is bad again but in a different way. HN and lobste.rs also have way too much AI on front-page. Some reddit communities are doing well but someone will mention AI somehow on every tech thread!
I’ve got GSTIN this year since I am mostly working as contract/freelance roles.
My phone has been misbehaving in mysterious ways for a few weeks now. Pressing call icon doesn’t work unless I restart!! GMail app is crashing when I try to open right panel, MS Team doesn’t sync calendar with system calendar anymore. Google Play complains that I am not logged-in but shows my google profile picture anyway and also refuse to show me “Log In” button because I am logged in. BHIM refuses to open unless I login to google play service but google won’t let me because I am also logged in and not-logged in at same time! A bit like Schrodinger cat. I am almost sure that these small small bugs are due to AI slop and compounding now. I hope this all ends badly soon enough so we can move on.
Skill rot due to AI use is real (at least for me). I am finding it very hard to write code manually now. The struggle to type by hand is mostly psychological. Like trying to wash dish by hands when you’ve gotten used to dishwasher and it working well, or driving manual after driving automatic. These analogies are from people on podcasts, and somewhat true. AI is mostly convenience driven programming.
