Udhay Shankar

QotD (referring to the AWS outage, but can refer to many other things also):

"Once you reach a certain point of scale, there are no simple problems left."

Oh, definitely with headphones. Bluetooth headphones suffer from much worse sound quality than wired ones. Plus, of course, the need to keep them charged.

QotD: "Ethernet: because cables are ugly, but packet loss is uglier."

Programmers Using AI Create Way More Glaring Security Issues, Data Shows AI has proven repeatedly to have issues with accuracy — and using it as a coding assistant creates more security problems, too.

Hanlon's Razor.

futurism.com/ai-coding-se...

#MorningMusing : Removing the first letter from both words in the phrase "trick troll" yields a phrase that means roughly the same thing.

Nudge theory in action.

www.business-standard.com/health/skipp...

Here's the post it reminded me of (hi @rohitkhare.bsky.social )

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/...

The Trust Quotient (TQ) Wherever there is autonomy, trust must follow. If we raise children to go off on their own, they need to be autonomous and we need to trust them. (Parenting is a school for learning how to trust.) If ...

This is basically Part 2 of a train of thought that @rohitkhare.bsky.social started a few decades ago. (link in comments) kk.org/thetechnium/...

In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses It’s the most transparent estimate yet from one of the big AI companies, and a long-awaited peek behind the curtain for researchers.

"...the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second."

www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/21/1...

China cut itself off from the global internet on Wednesday : Great Firewall took out all traffic to port 443 at a time Beijing didn't have an obvious need to keep its netizens in the dark

Probably a test of some kind.

www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/c...

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing There’s a stark difference in success rates between companies that purchase AI tools from vendors and those that build them internally.

This is not surprising. Without:

⁍ Training (of the humans using it);
⁍ Training Data (for the models); and
⁍ Use cases (of actual pain points);

this will just be another hypefest that will wither in the face of the inevitable backlash.

Why Indian cricket doesn’t deserve Jasprit Bumrah The fickle fans and rent-a-quote experts have been exposed by their insensitive criticisms of a player fighting his body to do his best for the country

Can't really argue with this. One only hopes the political appointee coach doesn't overwork him into premature retirement. indianexpress.com/article/spor...

SEO Is Dead. Say Hello to GEO. Search-engine optimization now feels dated. Generative-engine optimization is all about trying to trick AI chatbots.

If the MSM has picked up on it, has it peaked? :)

nymag.com/intelligence...

Art imitates life imitates art...

This seems to be the first case of a company developing a feature because ChatGPT is incorrectly telling people it exists.

www.holovaty.com/writing/chat...

Researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to detect cancer-specific DNA fragments in the bloodstream more than three years before a clinical diagnosis.

aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscov...

One of my favourite lines seems appropriate here: "what are you optimizing for?"

(I mean that you should ask this person this)

Microsoft Retires Legendary 'Blue Screen of Death' After 40 Years of Frowny Faces Meet its mournful replacement: the black screen of death, which won't have the same sad face.

I sure don't mind a change
I sure don't mind a change
Yeah, I sure don't mind
I sure don't mind a change
I sure don't mind a change

But I've fell on black days
I've fell on black days

Just read an article where the writer had to use AI to filter out the flood of AI generated job applications he was getting. I am wondering what the net utility value is.

Essential-Web v1.0: 24T tokens of organized web data Data plays the most prominent role in how language models acquire skills and knowledge. The lack of massive, well-organized pre-training datasets results in costly and inaccessible data pipelines. We ...

24T tokens of organized web data arxiv.org/abs/2506.14111

#TIL: Add swearing to your Google request for AI-free results.

"How to paint a fence" will return AI summaries & recommended results, in addition to actual results.

"How to paint a fucking fence" will omit that & focus on actual results.

Not sure why, or how long this will last, but here we are.

YouTube video by Building in India VCs Secretly Look For Founders With This ONE Skill | Udhay Shankar

I sat down with Sandeep Balaji and Pushkar Singh of the Building in India podcast recently for a wide-ranging conversation about (heh) building a startup in India.

Give it a watch here, and feel free to forward it far and wide if you think it is useful.: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-Z...

Lol

The progeny : "The entire credit card business is based on people going into DEBT! Why would they DO that?"
A demo of
1. Admirable clear headedness
2. Amazing naïveté
3. All of the above
Discuss.

“Localhost tracking” explained. It could cost Meta 32 billion. You just can't finish off Zuckerberg.

For those following the latest Meta privacy controversy. Here's a somewhat technical explanation of how they are evading Android's sandbox restrictions, and how it could lead to VERY LARGE liability. www.zeropartydata.es/p/localhost-...

Moore's Law. Kryder's Law. Edholm's Law. These are the what that enabled business to move to the cloud. That also implies your business is at the mercy of someone else's server infrastructure. And when (not if) it goes down, there's not a whole lot you can do.

www.moneycontrol.com/technology/c...

Coming back into town after a couple of weeks, started the car, which was throwing up scary messages about battery failure. Turns out the system needed to be rebooted. So the first law of tech support still holds. ("Most problems can be fixed by turning it off and on again.")

This is tomorrow, 5:30 pm IST.

For me, there's an easy answer: Judas Priest's Painkiller.

Chemists discover 'anti-spice' that could make chilli peppers less hot An analysis of compounds in chilli peppers has revealed chemicals that seem to negate their heat-giving capsaicinoids. This explains why the Scoville scale for measuring spicyness isn't always accurat...

This sounds like the line about putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier into the same room and letting them fight it out.

www.newscientist.com/article/2480...