Tag Archives: toyota

Weekly Notes 2026/29

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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 šŸ„ļøšŸ¤£ļø. 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 šŸ„¹ļø. 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 šŸ„¹ļø. 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.

Weekly Notes 2026/28

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  • 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 šŸ‘ļø.
  • 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.

Feb 21, 2026: Weekly Notes 2026/08

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We celebrated Ookie’s second birthday on Feb 17. I found an excellent place for cake, Chiris Patisserie. Pretty costly, Rs. 1700 per kg but totally worth it! For birthday food, I ordered food from Chetty’s Corner from the neighborhood. Decent food. The kids loved the pizza and burgers. As expected, only folks who stay in the neighborhood showed up. Anu sent some gifts for daycare — rainbow pencils and pouches for kids. People shouldn’t send food to the daycare on birthdays especially chocolate or other sugary stuff. I don’t like Ookie eating chocolate at daycare at this age!

Ookie’s second birthday.
  • I had a mild runny nose the whole week! It was very hard to sit at the desk and do any work for a long time.
  • This Friday was my last day at Dognosis. I’ll probably engage with them as consultants occasionally. Before starting my next job, I’ll spend some days at Puducherry this week. I’ll be meeting Somya, her husband and possibly a few more friends. It will be the first time both Kaalu and Ookie will both see the beach and the sea.
  • I am collecting reading materials to prepare for my new job. Mostly about microservices, API design and related DevOps.
  • Someone from datameet group cleaned up data of the Periodic Labour Force Survey (PLFS). It is available at https://india-plf-survey.pages.dev/. The average earnings are still pretty bad <Rs 20,000 per month! Much touted IT/Software doesn’t even break into of professions that employ more than 0.3% of workforce.
Software/IT doesn’t even show up in the top contributor (>=0.3%) to employment in India.

Feb 14, 2026: Weekly Notes 2026/07

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  • My second round at Fortanix was a failure!
    • It was a medium leetcode question to be solved inside a browser. Yes, a leetcode for senior roles and that too in a browser! I mostly use vim with a buttload of plugins. Maybe I should start asking if leedcode in browser would be used for evaluation and just say no.
  • Review article of a very interesting book. Here is a mindmap from Reddit.
  • An old friend, Somya Mani and her husband John, came to visit Monday morning. Flight from Vienna to Bengaluru took almost half day and both of them super tired. Both slept after having breakfast. I got busy with office meeting and they went to their hotel. We may have dinner sometimes this week.
  • The engineering workflow that I designed for my current employer might get adopted this week. One of the founders is very interested in it and we refined it over the weekend. Tomorrow I need to sell it to the team. Ideally I should practice the presentation. I will if I get some time in the morning before I drop Ookie to the day care.
  • Many of the street lights in my neighborhood don’t have a proper switch. I’d loved a light sensor based but a manual one is also fine since labor is cheap. But the current way is monumentally bad and pretty dangerous.Ā 
  • I opened account on to learn trading! My niece has been sending me screenshots of how much he is making every day. I made 2500 in half an hour from 10k investment and lost 8k next day. This platform requires constant attention which I don’t have. I’ll probably learn a few more things with very little amount of money and move on. Its not for me. It is pretty addictive though.
A dog is scratching himself in a sunny February day in Bengaluru, India

February 01, 2026 – Weekly Notes

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  • I spent last month (Jan 2026) interviewing and job hunting. I have one offer that feels good, and I may receive another by the end of this week. I also have one interview left that starts next week.
  • I really enjoyed Veeamā€™s interview process. The Toyota interview went great as well. I was a bit disappointed with Cloudflareā€™s processā€”I was expecting them to reschedule after I missed the second round.
  • Kaalu is now officially overweight. She weighs 25 kg; her ideal weight is 20 kg. Dieting doesnā€™t work since the whole neighbourhood feeds her, and she eats competitively outside.
  • Iā€™m thinking of migrating from Notion to WordPress. Notion is great at what it does, but the publishing options are less than ideal. Iā€™m also reluctant to pay $12 per month for it. They should bring back the $5 personal plan! It feels like theyā€™re moving more toward enterprise users.
A black dog is resting in her bed

January 10, 2026: Weekly Notes 2026/02

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  • Iā€™m trying to set up an engineering workflow at Dognosis (my current employer). After brainstorming with ChatGPT, I ended up with a template: Engineering Workflow Rhythm for a 20ā€“100 Person Startup.
  • I clearly spelled out what I was looking for in the promptā€”and what I didnā€™t want:
    • The first thing in the week is a short meeting; everyone should know theyā€™ll work independently for the rest of the week.
    • Every Friday, we review work, update status, and report to stakeholders.
    • During the week, no cat herding. Each engineer acts like a professional and is treated like one (I donā€™t ask for updates).
    • Write before talking. Every meeting must have a written agenda.
  • I did the same exercise with Gemini. The results were not to my liking. ChatGPTā€™s responses were short, pointed, andā€”most importantlyā€”felt implementable. Gemini, on the other hand, used language I donā€™t usually hear from good engineers. It added phrases that would make a PHB from Dilbert proud.
  • You may also like this post:Small projects, clear scope | Swizec Teller, along with his other posts on related topics.
  • I used to think std::move was C++ā€™s way of implementing Rust-like move semantics. Turns out itā€™s another confusing monstrosity created by the committee that doesnā€™t do what it sounds like (f**king RAII?). std::move doesnā€™t move anything: A deep dive into value categories. Academic-type people should never be in charge of a languageā€”or anything used by many people. Get a few normal programmers onto the committee, you C++ šŸ˜”.
  • šŸ’” Suddenly thereā€™s a lot of incoming interest in my resume. Either the job market is heating up, or my resume is finally making sense to people. I spent over three months tweaking it (revisiting once a week). Talking to AI about my resume helped a lot.
  • šŸ’¬ I gave a few interviews this week.
    šŸš— Toyota Connected is almost done. Itā€™s Rust + firmware + software-defined vehicle work, which Iā€™m pretty excited about. The interview itself was very pleasant: the technical team asked relevant questions and were very friendly. I felt comfortable after the first five minutes and didnā€™t suffer from brain fog.
  • Another interview was with a seemingly good company working in the secure computation domain. Senior leadership described the role one way, while the interviewer described it differently. The interviewer was very focused on dotting iā€™s and crossing tā€™s on a LeetCode questionā€”and asked me to write code in Google Docs! Iā€™m not really sure what he wanted to see. You meet every kind.
  • I had a first round with Cloudflare. I applied for a zero-trust and data-protectionā€“focused role. They have the network, they have the edgeā€”I wouldnā€™t be surprised if they start offering secure enclaves and other services where ā€œtrustā€ is explicitly computed.
  • A few surprising moments in the first round: I wasnā€™t expecting a technical screening but rather a discussion about the role and engineering problems with a manager. It turned out Iā€™m in their general hiring pipeline, which means a phone screen by a manager first. Perhaps Iā€™ll talk to the relevant team later. Not great, but not a deal-breaker.
  • I went through the round and felt I did average. I said a few very dumb things and had some brain fog. We finished early, which I really liked. +1 to the manager for keeping the agenda tight and being professional. I wasnā€™t very surprised when I was moved to the next round.
  • After that, I did something embarrassing. I made an off-by-one error in real life and ended up missing my second round šŸ˜¢. I scheduled it for early Saturday morning (00:00 hrs) but marked my desk calendar for Sunday morning. Strong DND settings on both my phone and desktop made it impossible to error-correctā€”there was no persistent notification. Very unprofessional on my part, though Iā€™m not mad at DND at all.
  • I sent an apology to the interviewer and asked to reschedule, but Iā€™m not sure if this error is recoverable. Letā€™s see.
  • Three more opportunities are in the pipelineā€”all incoming interest, and all pretty interesting: hardware/algorithm development for space satellites, Windows security kernel development, and a data backup and protection SaaS.