• US and Israel are killing children again, in a different country this time! Probably doing its standard “decapitate and delegate”.
  • The way English can be used for propaganda is just amazing. This language has so many rich patterns for making horrible things sound normal. This is now seeping into other languages as well especially among IT savvy politicians.
  • NY Times reporting on Gaza where I often user words “young adults under 18” rather than children to refer to deceased children, is not a lone example but serves as an excellent example. You can’t find those screenshot easily using US based search engines.
• I deleted my ChatGPT account yesterday. You should too.
• This week, I traveled to work 3 times! It is quite helpful actually despite hating it. I felt getting back in rhythm in sync with the outside world. My energy levels are slightly better.
  • On the first day at work, I planned to take an auto/taxi and read something on the way to office but had tonwait 10-15 minutes for ride to arrive with multiple cancellation. So I started using my scooty.
    • This weekend, I gave scooty for servicing. It’s been 5 years and scooty is only serviced thrice! Only 3000 Km on it so far.
  • Traffic is typical of Bengaluru. But if I leave early around 7:30 am and comes back around 3:45 pm, avoid worst of the traffic. Yet evening traffic is taking its toll — I’ve been inhaling a lot of fumes. I bought some N95 masks this week. Let’s see how it goes from next week.
• I read some articles by M. Krishnan again (published in Nature’s Spokesman) while traveling to work one day. Lovely stuff!
• I need to install some wooden slabs on the wall. Got better drills and I was also out of wall-plugs. Ordered!
  

Reading list

• More Cows, More Wives . Some interesting excerpts
  • Margaret Mead’s 1928 book Coming of Age in Samoa depicted a society that regarded ‘lovemaking as the pastime par excellence’ and where young women aimed to ‘defer marriage through as many years of casual love-making as possible’. At the same time Bronislaw Malinowski’s 1929 The Sexual Life of Savages in North-Western Melanesia described trial marriage among the Trobriand Islanders, where young lovers would live together for a few years in the bukumatula – the bachelors’ and unmarried girls’ house. If this relationship went well, it would lead to marriage, but it could also easily be dissolved. In other words, it resembled modern dating.
  • In contemporary Western settings, things seem to have changed once again. Many people are monogamous and have children with a single partner, much like our agricultural forbearers. But others divorce and remarry, similar to hunter-gatherers. Young couples often live together before deciding whether to commit, like the trial marriages of the Samoans. True polygamy is usually illegal, yet some rich divorced or widowed men can attract young second wives, who can bear them a new set of children. Ethical non-monogamists are a growing and vocal minority. To an outsider, it may seem like we have no marriage system at all.
• The Normalization Of Corruption In Organizations is now 23 years old! The corruption in India has only grown worse. Folks have become quite numbs to it. There is hardly any anti-corruption movement. It felt very different during last Congress government which lost to an anti-corruption movement. Though Arvind Kerjiwal appropriated to his own gain (He is an IITian, they do that!), it felt that country is on the right track to call-out and demonize corruption. All seems to have changed now. Its was always typical of fellow Indian to suggest that they can’t survive without corruption since prices of everything is so high. Lately, I’ve been noticing many have started “valorize” corruption as well.
  
  Abstract
  Organizational corruption imposes a steep cost on society, easily dwarfing that of street crime. We examine how corruption becomes normalized, that is, embedded in the organization such that it is more or less taken for granted and perpetuated. We argue that three mutually reinforcing processes underlie normalization: (1) institutionalization, where an initial corrupt decision or act becomes embedded in structures and processes and thereby routinized; (2) rationalization, where self-serving ideologies develop to justify and perhaps even valorize corruption; and (3) socialization, where naıve newcomers are induced to view corruption as permissible if not desirable. The model helps explain how otherwise morally upright individuals can routinely engage in corruption without experiencing conflict, how corruption can persist despite the turnover of its initial practitioners, how seemingly rational organizations can engage in suicidal corruption and how an emphasis on the individual as evildoer misses the point that systems and individuals are mutually reinforcing.
• (Almost) Every infrastructure decision I endorse or regret after 4 years running infrastructure at a startup · Jack’s home on the web is a good summary of various tools and solutions you are likely to encounter while developing SaaS solutions these days.
• Nobody Gets Promoted for Simplicity was hot on HN last week.

• 💻I migrates some more code to HTMX — really enjoying working with HTMX.
• 🔐I was curious if anyone is using Probably Approximately Correct Learning (PAC Learning,
  PAC: Valiant84.pdf ) in cyber-security. Its not yet mainstream but some folks have been proposing it as an alternative to classical ϵδ
  ϵδ-differential privacy
  [2210.03458] PAC Privacy: Automatic Privacy Measurement and Control of Data Processing (summary in
  Trip report: ‘CWI Lectures on Secure Computation’ (Amsterdam, NL) | Roseman Labs Tech Blog). I liked it! PAC gives you lower bounds for free so in many situation, you don’t have to assume or compute the worst-case scenario youself which are great for proving guarantees.
• 🦀 I also bookmarked 🦀 Patterns for Defensive Programming in Rust | corrode Rust Consulting​
• 📝Found a another good piece by No access E.W.Dijkstra Archive: The undeserved status of the pigeon-hole principle (EWD 1094)
• 📕Beej has a new book Beej’s Guide to Learning Computer Science

Last week; November 1, 2025: Weekly Notes, 2025/20

• Ookie is very interested in bubbles🫧 these days. Soap bubbles are nice but they don’t last long and burst easily. You can add quite a bit a sugar t solution to make bubble that bounce and don’t burst easily. In fact you can go further Physicists determine the optimal soap recipe for blowing gigantic bubbles – Ars Technica.
• Quite a lot of software building is about figuring out the list for invariants and taking care of them. ****Some languages makes is easier to work with invariants e.g. Haskell and Rust type systems are great of enforcing invariants that would require a lot of asserts and manual enforcing in Python etc. Thinking clearly about software
• I keep coming back to (Quite) A Few Words About Async every time I see a popular post on HN about async. May be my long term memory is getting worse. Perhaps I need to write a blog to understand it properly and drill it into my head.
• What is the best resolution screen for programming Resolution limit of the eye — how many pixels can we see? | Nature Communications has some hints now. If you keep your screen 50cm away like I do, anything above 275 PPI is an overkill.