Update: Trended on Page 1 on HN for the whole weekend! Part 2 coming soon! Thanks for all the feedback. Hackernews discussion How local, learnable routers can reduce token overhead, lower costs, and bring structure back to agentic workflows. Modern agentic architectures rely heavily on chaining LLM calls. A typical pattern looks like: Use an LLM to decide which tool to invoke Call the tool (e.g…

Early computing started with logic gates. We wrote in binary because we could reason about how bits flowed through circuits. As complexity grew, we invented assembly languages to abstract over machine code: still low-level, but easier to manage. Eventually we built high-level languages like C that let us describe intent, not instruction sequences. Each jump in abstraction made us more productive…

We’re racing toward something. Whether it’s AGI or another false summit, the scale of what we’re building is hard to ignore. There are only a few ways this plays out. 1. We scale current techniques to AGI. The compute, energy, and coordination required are beyond any single country. power grids the size of Brazil, cooling towers louder than waterfalls. It becomes clear that no one country can do…

Most software today is basically deaf. You poke at it, and if you’re lucky, it does what you want. But it doesn’t listen. Not really. That’s about to change. Say your product’s ad campaign just blew up. The VP wants a buy‑3‑get‑1‑free promotion online in the next ten minutes. In most companies, this would kick off a chain of escalation: tickets, grooming, prioritization, maybe a hotfix sprint…

There’s a belief circulating in AI circles right now that a cleverly written prompt is proprietary gold. That if you can coax the right output from a model, you’ve created something defensible. I get the instinct. When something works, and nobody else seems to have figured it out yet, it feels like IP. But that feeling won’t last. Not because prompts aren’t useful, but because they’re legible…

As we create more autonomous tools like @Anthropic Claude Code and @OpenAI Codex, it’s getting more important to understand how to rein in AI that codes on our behalf. Today, devs use AI to write code inside IDEs like @Cursor_ai, but it’s a closed loop. The system spits out what you ask for, but it can only touch what it’s explicitly allowed to. A fixed set of tools. A few whitelisted APIs. No…

What people aren’t talking about yet, surprisingly or maybe not, is how @OpenAI is going to have the most insidiously detailed experiential narrative of human life ever collected at unimaginable scale. There’s a trite saying about the best minds of our generation optimizing ad click revenue. A bit quaint in retrospect. When you know every person’s needs, dreams, aspirations — not through surveys…

Yesterday’s Signal mishap — where a journalist was mistakenly added to a White House group chat about military planning — wasn’t a technical failure. It was a process failure. Ben Thompson summed it up clearly: “Signal is an open-source project that has been thoroughly audited and vetted; it is trusted by the most security-conscious users in the world. That, though, is not a guarantee against…

Everyone’s buzzing about “prompt engineering” or “vibe coding” using tools like Cursor or Windsurf to turn text prompts into code. It feels exciting, but it’s fundamentally limited. Why? Because text prompts require massive, precise context to work well. Right now, you’re either pasting snippets of code or manually selecting files to contextualize prompts. This might seem fine at first, but as…

AI reasoning is often misunderstood. We assume that once a model is trained, it simply retrieves knowledge and applies it to solve complex problems — but real intelligence isn’t that simple. When I was building language model-powered workflows at Myra Labs in 2017-18, I saw this firsthand. Early NLP systems could generate responses, but getting them to reason through multi-step tasks reliably was…

We've traditionally thought of programming as carefully translating our ideas line-by-line into code. But what if writing explicit code isn't the endgame, but just an intermediate step? With the recent breakthroughs in LLMs, we're entering a new paradigm — one where we specify intent clearly, contextually, and visually, allowing an LLM to compile that intent directly into executable code. Here are…

Microsoft recently announced the Majorana-1 quantum processor, hailed as a breakthrough in quantum computing. Media coverage often glosses over the details, so I set out to deepen my understanding by breaking things down step by step: How classical computers work How quantum computers differ Why topological quantum computing could finally make quantum systems practical and scalable Why Can’t…

We’ve LLM-powered Microsoft VSCode. Engineers now build at speeds that were once unimaginable—with @cursor_ai and @windsurf_ai leading the charge, development is set to redefine what’s possible. We’ve also upgraded Figma with LLM capabilities. Tools like Lovable, Replit Agent, and Bolt.new let PMs and designers prototype at lightning speed, while engineers implement those ideas seamlessly. The gap…

AI is rewriting the rules of tech dominance, and Mark Zuckerberg is playing a high-stakes game to keep Meta in the fight. Once an unassailable titan of social media, Meta now faces slowing growth, privacy-driven advertising challenges, and fierce competition from emerging platforms. In response, the company has taken a bold step by open-sourcing its large language model, Llama. Far from a simple…

When people think of a country showcasing its technological might, they might recall the early days of nuclear breakthroughs or iconic space missions. Those were the gold standards of another era. AI foundation models — the kind that can consume as much power as an entire city and cost millions to train — are rapidly becoming the new index of global influence. It’s no longer just about coding…

Yesterday, I discussed the three pillars of AI sovereignty. Today, I’m diving into the first pillar—hardware fabrication—and examining where India stands in the global AI chip and GPU landscape. Manufacturing technology and process nodes India’s semiconductor production today is anchored in legacy process nodes—from 65nm down to 28nm—with only incremental progress toward 14nm. For example, the…

AI is becoming a cornerstone of national power. Nations are locked in an escalating AI arms race, as witnessed even this week at the Paris AI summit. But what does it take for a country to secure its future in AI? Is it solely about foundational models, or is that merely scratching the surface? Here are three essential pillars for anyone shaping AI policy. I. Hardware and compute: The engine of AI…

JD Vance’s recent Paris address was less about championing democratic AI, and more a mirror of U.S. companies’ relentless push for fewer regulations. His pledge to “restrict access to all components of the AI stack” is a calculated move to control innovation, lifted straight from Peter Thiel’s Palantir playbook. Algorithmic imperialism in action The U.S. isn’t just locked in an AI arms race with…

Over the years, I’ve had the good fortune to build two startups supported by amazing people. In my evolution as a founder, I realized that building a product isn’t just about the “what”: it’s about the “why.” The “why” is driven by a story that explains why your product exists and how it solves a customer’s problems — a story that must be both rational and emotional, distilling complex ideas into…

In the most literal sense, an “end user” is someone who receives a final product. Someone who has no hand in its design or development. But as large language models (LLMs) continue to evolve, that dynamic is about to vanish. Regardless of technical expertise, we’ll be able to talk our way into building personalized software and orchestrating online services. What does it mean to live in a world…

It is abundantly clear that AI slop is here to stay. We’re in an era of cheap, disposable, shallow content so generic that it barely holds anyone’s attention anymore. Worse, the flood of AI generated slop will only grow, fragmenting our already shattered attention, eroding trust in platforms, and burying the important stuff in an ocean of noise. Scarcity breeds value In this world, authenticity…

While industry leaders like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei tout that more compute, more data, and ever-lower loss are the keys to AGI, much of this messaging seems designed to generate PR buzz and secure funding rather than address fundamental challenges. Scaling has yielded unexpected abilities, such as improved chain‑of‑thought outputs. Yet these gains primarily come from learning the “low‑hanging…

There’s a clamor that AI is going to crash software developer salaries and render them obsolete. Some companies are already saying they won’t hire junior or mid-level engineers this year, or that most of their code is now churned out by AI. But here’s what they’re missing. Human creativity, spontaneous initiative, and ethical judgment remain irreplaceable. Consider the advent of spreadsheets. By…

Chaos may be the catalyst that pushes AI to the next level. Ten years ago, I asked a question: Can there be an algorithm for creativity? I defined creativity as “the ability to generate unique and novel explanations for events that can’t be deduced from the past”. Fast forward to today. While AI has made exponential progress, it’s still trapped in the past — optimizing, predicting, reinforcing…

For decades, software was built by professionals. Now, a billion people are making it — without realizing they’re developers. Casual developers aren’t engineers. They’re educators automating lesson plans, small business owners tweaking Notion databases, and retirees building book review apps. They structure data, automate workflows, and generate scripts — programming without writing a single line…

When disaster strikes, AI won’t ask who deserves to be saved. It’ll ask: who paid for priority access? There’s an old machine learning story: the U.S. military trained an algorithm to spot enemy tanks. It aced tests but failed in the real world. Why? Because it hadn’t learned to detect tanks — it learned to detect clouds. The tank photos were taken on cloudy days; the others, on sunny ones. AI…

When expertise becomes copy-paste, the architecture of civilization will no longer built around humans. It’ll be around the servers and power grids that make infinite intelligence possible. Dwarkesh Patel’s excellent recent essay lays out what happens when AGI can run firms without human input. As he puts it, “Everyone is sleeping on the collective advantages AIs will have, which have nothing to…

In the 1970s, people thought synthesizers would kill music. Instead, Kraftwerk made it more human. When Kraftwerk released Autobahn in 1974, critics feared the worst. Here was a band ditching traditional instruments for cold, mechanical synths. Wasn’t this the death of authentic music? But Kraftwerk’s synthesized sounds didn’t strip music of emotion. They redefined it. Their pulsing rhythms…

We’ve been building AI backwards: training giant models in data centers and squeezing them onto devices. What if the future of AI works the other way around? For years, the AI blueprint has been stuck on repeat: train giant models in billion-dollar data centers, compress them for your phone, and siphon your data back to the cloud to make the next version smarter. It feels inevitable, but it’s not…

I'm experimenting with a more social way of writing on Substack. Follow me there for more. -- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.

AI will democratize education, but it may also create a new class divide — where human mentorship and connection becomes the ultimate privilege. Imagine two classrooms in 2035. In one, students absorb lessons from AI tutors: efficient, tireless, optimized for results. They ace tests, master coding, and solve equations with machine-like precision. In another, a handful of students engage with human…

The internet runs on human attention, but AI agents won’t have any. Ads work because people see them: scrolling, clicking, impulse buying. But AI agents don’t get distracted. They parse, compare, and execute, stripping out everything that doesn’t directly serve their task. When products like OpenAI’s operator replace a lot of human browsing, the internet’s ad economy is going to collapse. And…

In 2025, AI is centralized in the hands of a few western companies that control everything — training data, compute power, access, and distribution. The path to decolonizing AI isn’t just about forcing them to comply with national laws. It’s about building technology to offer real alternatives to the status quo. Here are three upcoming shifts that have the power to wrestle away the control from…

OpenAI’s dismissal of India’s copyright lawsuit as a “jurisdictional mismatch” reveals a fatal blind spot — India’s case isn’t about payments. It’s about dismantling the neocolonial data economy that fuels AI. OpenAI’s defense hinges on two colonial era tactics: extraction, and the dismissal of local governance. By scraping India’s newspapers, books, and films without payment, it replicates the…

The future of AI isn’t about bigger models; it’s about smarter apps that solve real problems. The winners will understand business pain points better than anyone, AND stay ahead of AI’s rapid shifts. Here are 5 trends I think builders should think about to make something that lasts. Local models and hybrid compute. The future isn’t entirely in the cloud. Distilled LLMs, like those emerging from…

Innovation isn’t about having the most resources. It’s about reconfiguring what you have under constraints. Karl Marx’s insight from his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy feels surprisingly modern: “It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.” In other words, material conditions…

Forgotten bug reports. Awkward email drafts. Chaotic Slack threads. These aren’t just the digital clutter of our lives. They’re going to be the gold veins that power Big AI’s next gold rush. Consider this — large language models have already been trained on most of the available data on the internet, and fervent media articles and AI CEOs lament the upcoming shortage of training data. Meanwhile…

I thought customer interviews were about asking the right questions. Turns out, they’re about what you give, not what you get. Early on, I treated customer interviews like a checklist: ask questions, take notes, move on. The result? Shallow insights and vague answers I couldn’t use. After one frustrating interview, though I realized I wasn’t giving anything back! My conversations were transactions…

When anyone can create apps as easily as content, software stops being a product. It becomes a language of expression. For decades, apps have been meticulously crafted products designed for broad audiences. But most of life happens in the long tail: fleeting moments, hyper-specific needs, and niche communities. Traditional apps ignored these because they were too costly or unprofitable to build…

Every time you ask ChatGPT a question, a server gulps down electricity. Multiply that by billions of queries, and you begin to see the staggering energy appetite behind AI’s rise. For context, a Google search uses 0.3 Watt-hours of energy. ChatGPT? 2.9 Watt-hours — a 10x increase. Data centers already account for 1–1.5% of global electricity consumption. With AI driving exponential growth, that…

Your buyer doesn’t care about your cool technology. They care about saving money**,** making money**, or** looking good to their boss**.** When I started selling AI-powered products to enterprises, I thought the tech would sell itself. Cutting-edge language models, sleek interfaces, and mind-blowing demos? I was sure it was enough. The problem? I was pitching what I thought was amazing, not what…

"An AI agent that can be shut down or quietly rewritten isn’t autonomous. It’s just pretending to be.” In 2021, a major AWS outage disrupted countless businesses and tools. Now imagine relying on an AI assistant during that outage — only to find it offline because a server halfway across the world went down or was suddenly banned in your country. This isn’t a rare inconvenience. It’s a design flaw…

Static product specs are obsolete. They’re relics of a slower, less iterative world, disconnected from the realities of modern product building. Developers figured this out years ago. Instead of writing static documentation, they generate it directly from their code, ensuring accuracy and alignment with the product. So why are product managers still stuck writing specs that can’t keep up? Creator…

The best product managers (PMs) aren’t defined by how much they create — but by how fast they discard wrong hypotheses. AI has fundamentally reshaped product management. Tools like Replit and V0 turn concepts into reality in minutes, removing the barriers to experimentation. No waiting on engineers. No holding for designers. Just test, iterate, and refine — all before the first meeting starts…

The US has imposed new restrictions on AI exports, claiming they’ll “protect innovation.” Instead, they’re setting the stage for a global arms race. Blocking advanced AI chips might slow rivals like China down temporarily, but history shows it’s more likely to spark competition than prevent it. Take nuclear technology. After World War II, the US attempted to control nuclear proliferation through…

Every startup begins with the same goal: solve an unsolved problem for a specific group of people. But here’s the often-overlooked question: Which group of people should you solve for? Before you can nail product-market fit, you need to find a community that truly speaks to you. It’s not about targeting an audience or pitching a solution. Those approaches often miss the mark. Instead, it’s about…

There’s a persistent myth that AI is here to replace human workers. It’s an easy narrative to believe—robots taking over jobs make for sensational headlines. But the truth is more nuanced. AI doesn’t eliminate jobs; it changes them. And that’s where the opportunity lies. When I worked on Myra, an AI-powered customer service platform, this became clear. AI handled repetitive tasks like password…

Over the years, my interests have centered on technology, society, and how the two intersect. Here are three areas I’m actively exploring: 1. AI and its transformative impact AI is my professional background, and its evolution continues to intrigue me. While the spotlight is on training ever-larger models, finding use cases, figuring out regulations, and creating AI policy — I’m also curious about…

10 years ago, I built a chatbot called Myra that could handle restaurant recommendations, grocery orders, and even Uber bookings—all through WhatsApp. Excited by its potential, I decided to turn it into a company. Over the next five years, I went on an incredible journey, learning hard lessons about technology, business, and myself. I hope sharing these 3 mistakes I made can help founders avoid…

Imagine this: Your AI assistant reminds you to pick up coffee filters—and suggests a deal at the local shop. Welcome to the age of ad-supported AI, where your assistant is also a marketer. It’s inevitable, practical, and fraught with challenges. Marissa Mayer’s vision of ad-sponsored AI chatbots could make these tools universally accessible by turning conversations into contextual ad opportunities…

T-Mobile’s $100 million deal with OpenAI isn’t about chatbots making small talk. It’s about hiring AI workflows to replace the grind of managing customer care. Their IntentCX platform anticipates problems, solves them, and even acts autonomously—all while giving human employees the enviable role of looking like geniuses who planned it all. For years, companies like Palantir sent armies of…

Everyone's building AI services. Every business will have its own AI assistant. But there's a problem: these AIs can't find each other. They can't work together. Each one is rebuilding capabilities that hundreds of others already have. In 2017, thinking about conversational AI, we predicted assistants would become gateways to services. That wasn't quite right. The interesting part isn't just the…

Search engines used to find knowledge. Now they're starting to compute it. The shift is already beginning: ChatGPT and Perplexity show us glimpses of AI synthesizing the internet's vast content. But that's just the prologue. The real transformation happens when search stops finding answers and starts computing them. Think of it as moving from a library to a research lab. Every query will spawn a…

Search engines used to find knowledge. Now they're starting to compute it. The shift is already beginning: ChatGPT and Perplexity show us glimpses of AI synthesizing the internet's vast content. But that's just the prologue. The real transformation happens when search stops finding answers and starts computing them. Think of it as moving from a library to a research lab. Every query will spawn…

Everyone's building AI services. Every business will have its own AI assistant. But there's a problem: these AIs can't find each other. They can't work together. Each one is rebuilding capabilities that hundreds of others already have. In 2017, thinking about conversational AI, we predicted assistants would become gateways to services. That wasn't quite right. The interesting part isn't just the…

Something interesting is happening in enterprise software: Generative AI isn't just changing how we sell – it's changing what we're selling. The shift Traditional software = rigid features that need sales to explain Generative software = adapts itself to each customer's context Key software capabilities Reads company data → suggests specific workflows to automate Watches workflow patterns → builds…

Something interesting is happening in enterprise software: Generative AI isn't just changing how we sell – it's changing what we're selling. The shift Traditional software = rigid features that need sales to explain Generative software = adapts itself to each customer's context Key software capabilities Reads company data → suggests specific workflows to automate Watches workflow patterns → builds…

‘viksit has notes’ is a collection of atomic essays on the future of AI—brief meditations on where it's headed and the changes it's bringing. It is written from the perspective of an ML engineer and 2x founder who has built search engines, language models, and humanoid robots. -- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.

Recent actions by Reddit and Stackoverflow, both pillars of internet communities, have ignited a flurry of debate and concern. The shutting down of APIs, questionable moderation practices - these are not just isolated incidents. They're symptoms of a deeper malaise within centralized platforms. Take a glance at Twitter or Instagram, and you'll see they're grappling with similar issues. The crux of…

This is the second in a series of threads of "The Product thinkers guide to Web3". Please leave me feedback @viksit on Twitter! 1/ In this thread, we'll build upon WHY web3 matters with the HOW -- what are its building blocks and what is a framework to think about them from a product builder's perspective? 🧵 2/ First, if you haven't read my earlier thread on why blockchains are important for…

This is the first in a series of threads of "The Product thinkers guide to Web3". Please leave me feedback @viksit on Twitter! 1/ A thread on why blockchains are important for anyone thinking about building web based products. 🧵 2/ In 2009, @Bitcoin's blockchain technology successfully solved a fundamental problem in finance — the ability to transfer a digital asset between two peers anywhere in…

1/A centerpiece of humanity's cultural evolution is our ability to preserve important artifacts like paintings and books in museums and libraries.Our archival techniques, however, haven't kept up with the pace at which we create digital content. 2/With Web 1.0, companies like Yahoo created content and earned money off it.With Web 2.0, people create content and companies like Instagram possess and…

1/ As technology, standards, and incentives evolve, all software applications will eventually move to the web -- with the browser serving as the operating system. We are already almost there today. But there are some challenges. 2/ Software today is written in 2 parts - code that runs on your client (the browser), and code that runs on the cloud (the servers). Because of the way the internet has…

1/ Here’s a thought experiment about the future of the internet. Can we model it as a complex system in the same way we look at human societies and governments in real life? 2/ Humans began as individuals, who had the ability to form progressively larger organizations which became support networks that helped our species achieve the largest throughput from our lives. 3/ Over time, these…

I grew up in New Delhi in the late 90s on a steady diet of 2600, phrack, BBSes and the EFF. Two of the people I’d read a lot about, and was subsequently very inspired by, were JPB and Mitch Kapor, as founders of the EFF – and I decided one day that I’d like to actually reach out and talk to Barlow (I didn’t actually have a goal in mind, now that I think about it). Figuring that an email would…

Life, as we lead it, is very uncertain. All of the myriad ingredients that constitute our daily existence are nothing but ephemeral experiences, and many wise voices over millennia have spoken about the follies of being too attached to them. As a species though, most humans tend to value what they have lost, what they don’t have, or what they can’t have much more than what they can or do. We tend…

The pursuit of happiness is a very curious goal that modern society has imprinted upon all of us. When asked what we desire most in the world, happiness, along with success, is perhaps at the top of the list. But we must ask ourselves – what does being happy mean to a group of people who have never experienced anything else? Not having anything to compare their normal state of being must surely be…

On a recent trip to Los Angeles, the driver of the car that picked me up from the airport started talking about his life through the course of our journey. Having come to LA as an aspiring actor almost 30 years ago, he told me how he had dreamt big, and gotten parts in independent and mainstream movies, but always remained on the sidelines. Enough to generate hope that things would work out, but…

Silicon Valley prides itself on being a spearhead in providing amazingly flexible work environments to its employees. There are barely any established timings to get in and out of work, lunch jogs are du jour , working from home is a luxury given to most people, appearances aren’t important as long as they’re not offensive, and people are judged by not how they dress but what they achieve. The…

Artificial Intelligence has always been one of the most fascinating aspects of computer science. With devices getting smaller, the cloud more ubiquitous, and processors becoming more powerful, we are starting to find ourselves in the beginning of an era where machines will get progressively smarter. Apple’s Siri, Google Now, and Microsoft’s Cortana are but some examples of teething intelligent…

Religion, if you look at it, is ultimately just an idea. One, admittedly, that has the support of a large number of people. But as an idea, it is by itself not sacred. The illusion or reality of its sacredness is driven wholly by how it is perceived by those who believe in it and put it on a pedestal. Unlike people however, an idea doesn’t have any rights. When someone has a very emotional…

If there are places we call third world countries today, then I would call Armenia a fourth world country As our jet black GMC Yukon sped through an interchange to get on to the I-405 in Los Angeles yesterday, those were the words my Uber driver said with all the passion he could muster in response to my question about how his home country had turned out almost two decades after he left. Armen…

When the term Y Combinator is mentioned in most technology circles today, the image it usually conjures up is of the well known startup incubator with their orange logo and a list of famous funded companies. There’s a very interesting reason they chose this name, and their FAQ page 1 gives some context on why they did so, The Y combinator is one of the coolest ideas in computer science. It’s also…

If the past few generations (millenials and onwards) have grown up spending the majority of their lives communicating over the written medium – text, email, et al – aren’t they more likely to have a better command over language? Rather than be lambasted for using SMS and have people cry about how language is devolving over time, isn’t it fair to assume that they’re much better off than those who…

The rise of the middle class has been a hugely important political and social development across the world, spanning a large part of the 20th century. How would society change if the number of jobs that have historically driven this section of the population were to come crashing down, as a result of technological progress and automation? Would widespread unemployment potentially result in the…

Apple’s iPad has been the poster child of the “post PC era” ever since its inception. As the device has matured however, it has gained competition from practically every company that can build a hardware device, from Microsoft to Samsung. Its reviews have gone from praising it as the harbinger of the post PC era to how its interactions are broken to a point where it will never serve the generic…

Quoting Ramchandra Guha, In his pomp — which ran roughly from 1948 to 1960 — Nehru was venerated at home Representative are these comments of The Guardian, written after the Indian prime minister had addressed a press conference in London in the summer of 1957: ‘A hundred men and women of the West were being given a glimpse of the blazing power that commands the affection and loyalty of several…

It is the combination of things we remember that point out how certain places are special to us, hallowed by their unique features and our own experiences in them. It matters not whether we intended to go there, or whether a series of serendipitous choices led us there. What matters is that there will always remain memories and thoughts that make such places important in our lives – they are not…

When the inimitable Mr Seth, penned that beauty, The Golden Gate, little did he dream that one day he would, inspire a rhyme, that if it could, serve as an ode to that gorgeous book, and inspire others to take a look, at a city he spied from across the bay, its skyline rising on a gorgeous day, from Indian rock out there in Berkeley, or from the top of the campanile, the fog framing its rolling…

But tonight, I can’t help but feel bad about what he must feel, huddled in the small space without a roof, trying his best to protect himself from the increasingly wild rain. I can’t imagine the events that brought him to this, but I just wish life had been fairer to him. -- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.

In its quest to make the world a better place, the Indian Ministry for Environments and Forests released the following regulation a few months ago, abolishing the use of dolphins in marine circuses and advising state governments to reject any proposals to establish any enterprise that directly or indirectly supports the capture of cetacean species. Whereas cetaceans in general are highly…

The entire internet is ablaze with headlines that tout how morally repressive, unconstitutional and barbaric the Supreme Court of India has been in upholding a section of the Indian constitution that criminalizes homosexuality. What happens between two consenting adults is entirely their business – obviously, within limits that do not endanger either them or society as a whole. How is it becoming…

It’s the beauty of perspective and the state of your mind that governs how you read this Calvin and Hobbes strip. !(https://i0.wp.com/s2.postimg.org/z1rkge115/last_calvin_hobbes.jpg?w=1050) If you have the context that this is the last strip of the entire series, there wells up a feeling of nostalgia, almost a sadness that something so good is seemingly coming to an end. Of the familiar having…

There are three rungs at which conversations around this bill have surfaced recently. From the perspective of the ruling government, this bill aims to reduce and eventually stamp out the scourge of malnutrition in India, which today is supposedly worse than some sub-Saharan countries; the main opposition party however calls it an attempt to win votes for the general elections of 2014; and…

Surely not. Why then is this such a hard ask, and why has no one done it before? Simple design is definitely hard to do. Taking a complex workflow and reducing it to something that feels intuitive is challenging for even the best designers out there. This is especially true in the world of physical products, where the best designed products are those which accomplish their function in a manner…

Being alone without being lonely is an art – something that everyone strives to learn when they realize how important it is to do well. To figure out how not to get encumbered by the expectations of a society that seems to look down upon people who like to be by themselves for a period of time. They are labelled introverts, and their lives are just assumed to be drab and depressing. An especially…

A few years ago when it first started as an invite only service, Facebook had all the allure of any place where all the early adopters and “cool kids” hung out. Cutting edge, social, and a place to connect with your classmates, it was definitely something to check once every day, if not more. Over the years however, it transformed into a place where your entire universe of friends and…

The summer of 1994 holds a special significance for me – it marked my first access to both a “multimedia” computer, and more importantly, the internet. One of the first things my Dad showed me was to use a terminal emulator called Procomm to connect through a dial up connection and access the catalogue at the Library of Congress in Washington DC. It’s probably fair to say that I was hooked. That…

Ensime is an amazing plugin for developing Scala code in Emacs – it is very similar to the way Slime for lisp works, and works on the same swank RPC system that slime uses. It stands for “ENhanced Scala Interaction Mode for Emacs”, and provides many features that are commonly found only in IDEs, such as live error-checking, symbol inspection, package/type browsing, and basic refactoring. It’s…

For mostly my reference, and anyone else who’s googling for it, <br></br>cat /tmp/my-log-file.txt | grep --only-matching --perl-regexp "http(s?):\/\/*" | awk '{print $1}'<br></br> -- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.

I was just thinking about this the other day! !(https://i1.wp.com/topnews.net.nz/data/iBGStar-IPhone.jpg?w=1050) anofi-Aventis just unveiled the iBGStar: a stand alone blood glucose monitor that can plug directly into your iPhone and iPod Touch. The device, which builds upon the existing diabetes-tracking technology WaveSense allow diabetics to test their blood sugar levels on the go, record notes…

I came across an (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/17/magazine/how-a-mexican-drug-cartel-makes-its-billions.html?pagewanted=all) today that goes in detail into the inner workings of drug cartels in Mexico – specifically that of the Sinaloa Cartel. This has been a rather hot topic of discussion in the US – the largest consumer of illegal drugs in the world, given its repercussions on the internal law…

The Achilles heel of a simple digital tree is very poor memory utilization, especially when the N in N-ary (the degree or fanout of each branch) increases. Enter the Judy Tree. The Judy tree design was able to solve this problem. In fact a Judy tree is more memory-efficient than almost any other competitive structure (including a simple linked list). A highly populated linear array\ is the notable…

I never had the privilege of meeting Steve Jobs. And yet, on hearing the news today, it felt like someone very close to me had died. As someone I’ve followed from ever since I can remember – growing up listening to the stories of his showmanship and visionary designs, its hard to even remotely express the sense of loss I feel today. Reading up on every book about him I could lay my hands on…

For all of you who land on this site using the google query “nbdjs” – it stands for “No Big Deal, Just Saying”. Courtesy of an ex Stanford post doc who shall go unnamed – you know who you are! :) -- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.

I found this gem of a snippet today, and I rather agree with what it says! “How solemn and beautiful is the thought that the earliest pioneer of civilization, the van-leader of civilization, is never the steamboat, never the railroad, never the newspaper, never the Sabbath-school, never the missionary — but always whiskey! Such is the case. Look history over; you will see. The missionary comes…

A simple and effective way to read properties files in Clojure, since they transform into Clojure maps! Next, to actually read this in, using atoms to swap the values like this seems to work, -- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.

From this Wired article (http://www.fastsum.com/support/md5-checksum-utility-faq/md5-hash.php), it looks like there’s a number that is part of the cyber command’s logo – 9ec4c12949a4f31474f299058ce2b22a. Well, its 32 characters long, and looks like a hash. Sure enough, a quick python check later of the organization’s mission statement with md5 results in, Voila! -- If you have any questions or…

In my last post, I was playing around with methods to serialize Clojure data structures, especially a complex record that contains a number of other records and refs. Chas Emerick and others mentioned in the comments there, that putting a ref inside a record is probably a bad idea – and I agree in principle. But this brings me to a dilemma. Lets assume I have a complex record that contains a…

I’ve been trying to figure out how best to serialize data structures in Clojure, and discovered a couple of methods to do so. (Main reference thanks to a thread on the Clojure Google Group (http://groups.google.com/group/clojure/browse_thread/thread/29a94dd74b8beaaa/a05b126b192195e9) ) This works well for any Clojure data structure that is serializable. However, my objective is slightly more…

A whiff of citrus – vibrant, shiny, dimpled and thick, your fingers move, probing textural ecstacy, as your tastes await the sweet tartness within. Peel away the layers softly, envelop a piece, let your tongue steep in a myriad of flavors, with the lingering scent of summer under a blue sky, look around, and all is well again. -- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out…

My last post on the topic was creating a stack implementation using Clojure protocols and records – except, it used atoms internally and wasn’t inherently “functional”. Here’s my take on a new implementation that builds on the existing protocol and internally, always returns a new stack keeping the original one unmodified. Comments welcome! -- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate…

I recently started getting a number of SSL related errors on accessing https links with Google Chrome on Ubuntu. One looks like, 107 (net::ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR) The top link on Google’s search results is pretty fuzzy, so here’s the solution that works for me. Go to Settings -> Options -> Under the hood, and enable both SSL 2.0 and SSL 3.0. This should allow Chrome to talk to the server with…

I was trying to experiment with Clojure Protocols and Records recently, and came up with a toy example to clarify my understanding of their usage in the context of developing a simple Stack Abstract Data Type. For an excellent tutorial on utilizing protocols and records in Clojure btw – check out (http://kotka.de/blog/2010/03/memoize_done_right.html#protocols). More tutorial links on Protocols…

Update As Hans points out in the comment below, it appears pycassa natively supports authentication with org.apache.cassandra.auth.SimpleAuthenticator. Lazyboy on the other hand doesn’t by default. It’s not too hard to do it though. Intuitively, we could do something like this. NB: Untested code!! I might create a patch for this when I get the time, so this is just an outline. And in lazyboy’s…

I was experimenting with some sequences today, and ran into a stumbling block: Using immutable data structures, how do you execute multiple transformations in series on an object, and return the final value? For instance, consider a sequence of numbers, How do you transform them such that you increment each number by 1, and then get their text representation, Imperatively speaking, you would run a…

From the (http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6341EA20100506), The Dow suffered its biggest ever intraday point drop, which may have been caused by an erroneous trade entered by a person at a big Wall Street bank, multiple market sources said. and the suspected cause? A UI Glitch! In one of the most dizzying half-hours in stock market history, the Dow plunged nearly 1,000 points before paring…

Its surprising that the modulus (%) operator in C++ works upwards, but not downwards. When working on some code, I expected, -1 % 3 = 2 0 % 3 = 0 1 % 3 = 1 2 % 3 = 2 but ended up with, -1 % 3 = -1 0 % 3 = 0 1 % 3 = 1 2 % 3 = 2 As a result, you’d need to ensure that either you check that your result is result = n % 3; if( result Or, a better solution might be to change the expression such that…

I was trying to implement a simple binary search using a purely functional approach, and after much hacking, googling and wikibooking, came up with this in Clojure. -- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.

I was recently looking for a method to create an application with Clojure that would allow specification of command line arguments. I came across an excellent (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1341154/building-a-clojure-app-with-a-command-line-interface) on Stack Overflow by (http://stackoverflow.com/users/128927/alanlcode), that provides a spectacular example. I’ve (http://gist.github.com…

Came across an excellent (http://loufranco.com/blog/files/category-20-days-of-clojure.html) of blog posts by Lou Franco, where he uses the SICP videos as input to learn more about Clojure. His explanation of HashMap implementations in Clojure, using multimethods, as well as pointers on parallelizing functional programs are very well written. I’m currently on his day 10 post. -- If you have any…

I just finished skimming through Bruce Eckel’s Thinking in C++ book – available for free from his website. Volume 1 covers the basics pretty well and I didn’t really do much more than glance at it, but volume 2 is highly recommended for its marvelous treatment of the C++ STL containers and algorithms. -- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit…

This post contains a list of changes between Clojure 1.1.0 and 1.2.0 that would affect you if you’re reading Stuart Halloway’s “Programming Clojure”. It looks like you’d have to replace, (use ‘) (filter indexable-word? (re-split #”\W+” “A fine day it is”)) with –> (“fine” “day”) since the str-utils module got renamed to string, and the re-split function to split. -- If you have any questions or…

I was looking for a suitable library for Clojure that would work like Python’s BeautifulSoup or lxml – and found enlive. An excellent tutorial here http://github.com/swannodette/enlive-tutorial. -- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.

I was trying to figure out how to AOT compile a Clojure program, in order to really see some fast execution times. The simplest way to describe AOT compilation would be how its done in Java, `` javac file.java java file The invocation of the Java compiler (javac) is the pre-compilation of the source file, which is then loaded by the JVM in the next step. In the case of Clojure, when a program is…

It’s been a while since I’ve uploaded code back to the community. This page will track my code on the web, as well as contains links to useful snippets of code in various opensource projects that I’ve worked with. Below is the Google code repository for my code. http://code.google.com/p/viksit-code/ I’m just getting into using git for everything which totally rocks, (http://github.com/viksit…

Moving on from the question of which NoSQL database you should choose, after reading these excellent posts from (http://about.digg.com/blog/looking-future-cassandra%0A) and (http://nosql.mypopescu.com/post/407159447/cassandra-twitter-an-interview-with-ryan-king), I recently asked a question on (http://www.stackoverflow.com) regarding the pros and cons of moving from MySQL to Cassandra…

Just came across an excellent (http://ventilla.posterous.com/hello-world-2603) by Max Ventilla, the co-founder of Aardvark (a company that Google bought a few weeks ago). His description of how Aardvark was the 6th idea that he and his co-founders tried is pretty uplifting to anyone even remotely interested in entrepreneurship. What I found interesting was that they would build a prototype and…

-- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.

Google Buzz seems to have mashed up a number of positive features from Twitter and Friendfeed into itself, and I quite like the idea – or rather, the vision it is supposed to espouse. Unfortunately, it is at a stage where too much of my private data is available to people I would much rather not allow access to. So I quit it, removed all my buzzes, made my Google profile even more private than it…

.. a poem by (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Percy_Bysshe_Shelley) comes to mind. I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: “Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless…

Usually, if you were to use something like, `` class testform(forms.Form): n = forms.ModelChoiceField(queryset=Models.objects.filter(id=32773), empty_label="All") you’ll end up with a drop down box populated with “M objects” rather than a field from the model. Instead, this works better, <br></br>class vModelChoiceField(forms.ModelChoiceField):<br></br> def label_from_instance(self, obj):<br></br…

Woo, finally. (http://cluud.in) is a new service to help you discover new places and follow conversations about your favorite places in your city. This means you can plan out where to go in real time – getting input from everyone who has talked about it! Neat. -- If you have any questions or thoughts, don't hesitate to reach out. You can find me as @viksit on Twitter.

From an address on “America’s place in the world” that (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Fry) – one of my favorite comedians of all time – gave at (http://www.stephenfry.com/blog/2009/07/04/americas-place-in-the-world/) (which you should totally read in full, btw – its hilarious superbly penned). When referring to the well known idiom of making lemonade if life gives you lemons, he makes a…

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5cfd7324-762b-11de-9e59-00144feabdc0.html Interesting analysis on how Asia has faith in western economic theories, but none in their management practices. Moreover, we’re improving trade with all kinds of FTAs being signed between ASEAN and other asian countries – whereas the US Congress has actually let a number of intra-americas FTAs die. I just hope that the emulation…

Just to put it out there, but David Cramer – who developed the spectacular django-sphinx project – omits a crucial piece of information needed to install Sphinx into your Django models. So if you find that everything works perfectly well, but your search results are 0 in number – this is what you should do! You have to add ‘djangosphinx’ into INSTALLED_APPS in settings.py, in the main django…

A quote from Gao Xiqing, the man who runs the China investment corporation (and manages $200 Billion in funds for their sovereign fund). Here’s something I came across in the (http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200812/fallows-chinese-banker<br%20/>%0A) – his explanation of the financial derivatives debacle.. If you look at every one of these \ products, they make sense. But in aggregate, they are…

So, what exactly are we talking about? The other day, someone pointed me to an article about how a small section of the Indian population has stashed away close to $1.5 trillion(!) in secret swiss bank accounts. Curious that I am, I promptly went ahead and searched for this amazing piece of information on the web, and found – Dishonest industrialists, scandalous politicians and corrupt IAS, IRS…

Mr. Tharoor’s article is (http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1864196-2,00.html) And I quote, .. But this time the terrorists may have gone too far. The murderers of Mumbai made special efforts to single out American and British nationals among their hostages, and they killed the Israelis running Mumbai’s Jewish center. This was clearly not just an attack on India; they were taking on…

My attempts at creating a list of movies I want to see. Comments welcome on additional ideas! You know that feeling when someone tells you of an *awesome* movie thats highly recommended that you forget about the next day – and then rack your brain to remember what it was? This post is intended to help alleviate that! Updates: (I realized I’ve seen a bunch of these already, but keeping them here…

I’ve been thinking about whether I should migrate old blog (2001-2007) entries to this site’s new avatar. On one hand, they speak volumes about what I was thinking about at that point and are fun (mostly only to me) to look back upon. And that is the flip side as well – you tend to reflect on how crazy/stupid you were from your 2008 persona. Hmm. Oh well, there’s always the Wayback machine to keep…