Enjoy the little things, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things. --Robert Brault

1) Indian IT DOES NOT innovate. 2) Indian Manufacturing lacks capital and CAN'T innovate. 3) Biggest capitalists in India have NO NEED to innovate. They survive on government patronage. And, can't compete globally. India is their only hunting ground. This is a fact. Like it, hate it, bash it. When the focus is on religion, freebies, hate-mongering, it doesn't lay the basic groundwork for any innovation. Give it 5 more years, India will feel 20 years behind due to speed at which AI is moving.

Friends- This is a tough note to write, but since a bunch of you have started to suspect something, I’ll cut to the chase: Last week I was diagnosed with metastasized, stage-four pancreatic cancer, and am gonna die. Advanced pancreatic is nasty stuff; it’s a death sentence. But I already had a death sentence before last week too — we all do. I’m blessed with amazing siblings and half-a-dozen buddies that are genuinely brothers. As one of them put it, “Sure, you’re on the clock, but we’re all on the clock.” Death is a wicked thief, and the bastard pursues us all. Still, I’ve got less time than I’d prefer. This is hard for someone wired to work and build, but harder still as a husband and a dad. I can’t begin to describe how great my people are. During the past year, as we’d temporarily stepped back from public life and built new family rhythms, Melissa and I have grown even closer — and that on top of three decades of the best friend a man could ever have. Seven months ago, Corrie was commissioned into the Air Force and she’s off at instrument and multi-engine rounds of flight school. Last week, Alex kicked butt graduating from college a semester early even while teaching gen chem, organic, and physics (she’s a freak). This summer, 14-year-old Breck started learning to drive. (Okay, we’ve been driving off-book for six years — but now we’ve got paper to make it street-legal.) I couldn’t be more grateful to constantly get to bear-hug this motley crew of sinners and saints. There’s not a good time to tell your peeps you’re now marching to the beat of a faster drummer — but the season of advent isn’t the worst. As a Christian, the weeks running up to Christmas are a time to orient our hearts toward the hope of what’s to come. Not an abstract hope in fanciful human goodness; not hope in vague hallmark-sappy spirituality; not a bootstrapped hope in our own strength (what foolishness is the evaporating-muscle I once prided myself in). Nope — often we lazily say “hope” when what we mean is “optimism.” To be clear, optimism is great, and it’s absolutely necessary, but it’s insufficient. It’s not the kinda thing that holds up when you tell your daughters you’re not going to walk them down the aisle. Nor telling your mom and pops they’re gonna bury their son. A well-lived life demands more reality — stiffer stuff. That’s why, during advent, even while still walking in darkness, we shout our hope — often properly with a gravelly voice soldiering through tears. Such is the calling of the pilgrim. Those who know ourselves to need a Physician should dang well look forward to enduring beauty and eventual fulfillment. That is, we hope in a real Deliverer — a rescuing God, born at a real time, in a real place. But the eternal city — with foundations and without cancer — is not yet. Remembering Isaiah’s prophecies of what’s to come doesn’t dull the pain of current sufferings. But it does put it in eternity’s perspective: “When we've been there 10,000 years…We've no less days to sing God's praise.” I’ll have more to say. I’m not going down without a fight. One sub-part of God’s grace is found in the jawdropping advances science has made the past few years in immunotherapy and more. Death and dying aren’t the same — the process of dying is still something to be lived. We’re zealously embracing a lot of gallows humor in our house, and I’ve pledged to do my part to run through the irreverent tape. But for now, as our family faces the reality of treatments, but more importantly as we celebrate Christmas, we wish you peace: “The people walking in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of deep darkness a light has dawned….For to us a son is given” (Isaiah 9). With great gratitude, and with gravelly-but-hopeful voices, Ben — and the Sasses

Take notes. 🖊️

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Bharat Bandh on 24th Jan against the anti salaried class tax rates before the budget. If we don't do anything, they will keep robbing our houses. Our tax system is designed to loot and exploit only salaried class. Bengalore, hyd, pune, hyd, gurgaon streets should be empty.

Changing your privacy setting in whatsapp is a good idea.

the road to Spring Boot 3.4 is amazing and saw Spring Security 6.4.0 go GA! * support for Passkeys and One-Time Tokens * simplified OAuth 2.0 Configuration * refreshable SAML 2.0 Asserting Parties, and * new method security annotations and capabilities spring.io/blog/2024/11/19/sp…

#SpringSecurity two-factor authentication (#2FA) by sending secret token over email and using #JWT for secured communication howtodoinjava.com/spring-sec…

Latest Thoughtworks Technology Radar is out - our regular survey of technologies that capture our attention in our client work. We found lots of AI-adjacent tools to be useful, but also that coding assistants often lead to problems thoughtworks.com/radar

The Hibernate Search module works as a bridge between Hibernate ORM and full-text search engines such as Lucene or Elasticsearch. howtodoinjava.com/hibernate/…

Tried my hands on upcoming OTT change in #SpringSecurity. howtodoinjava.com/spring-sec…

A jargon-free explanation of how AI large language models work arstechnica.com/science/2023…

Well said 💯 That's why I advocate for the things that I use and love such as #SpringBoot #JOOQ #Testcontainers #Docker #IntelliJIDEA

Learn to build a fully functional chatbot application with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) capabilities using Spring AI. howtodoinjava.com/spring-ai/…

Python consumes 76 times more energy and is 72 times slower than C. haslab.github.io/SAFER/scp21…

Function calling is the ability for the model to request one or more function calls to be made on its behalf, so it can properly answer a user's prompt with realtime data. howtodoinjava.com/spring-ai/…

New Post: ETL Pipeline using Spring Cloud Function and Spring AI buff.ly/46nBGz2

LLMs are quite good at producing the source code when they are provided enough context information and asked very clear questions. The same is true for generating SQL queries. Learn how to do it? howtodoinjava.com/spring-ai/…

Learn different ways to install #Ollama on your local computer/laptop. And download, run, and access an LLM model’s Chat capability using #SpringAI. howtodoinjava.com/spring-ai/…