My essay on #Transhumanism. A broad review of all technologies and some ways in which humanity will need to evolve. Do read it at your leisure and share with any who might be interested. 😃

The students who chose to meet @RahulGandhi to discuss the CBSE fraud and their parents are more clear-sighted and courageous than many of our intellectual friends. Does it say something about us that meeting a political leader is now seen as a courageous act?

This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification. Let me explain what he found, in simple terms. Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE's new On-Screen Marking system. He spent days reading through CBSE's evaluation tenders, scraped all 576 tenders CBSE has issued, and tracked how the rules changed across three versions of the same tender. The core finding is that the company that won the contract to scan and grade 17 lakh students' answer sheets is Coempt Eduteck. Coempt used to be called Globarena Technologies. Globarena was the company behind the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster, where software failures led to 3.8 lakh students getting wrong or missing marks, and 23 students died by suicide. A government committee found systemic failure and negligence. Six months later, Globarena rebranded to Coempt Eduteck. So a company with that track record won a contract to handle 17 lakh CBSE students. Sarthak's investigation is about how the rules were rewritten to let that happen. The tender was issued three times. > First tender, February 2025. It existed, then disappeared from the public GeM portal. Sarthak scraped all 576 CBSE tenders and this one was missing from the archive entirely. > Second tender, May 2025. Four companies applied including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation. Cancelled. > Third tender, August 2025. Coempt won. Between the second and third tender, a series of rule changes happened, and every single one made it easier for Coempt to qualify. Here is what changed, one by one. 01. The old rules disqualified any company with a history of abandoning work, failing to complete contracts, or financial weakness. The new rules deleted this clause entirely. Coempt's Telangana history stopped being a barrier. 02. The old rules disqualified any company that was "blacklisted earlier." The new rules changed this to "currently blacklisted." Because Globarena rebranded after Telangana, removing the word "earlier" effectively erased their past. 03. The rules required Rs 50 crore average turnover over three years. Coempt's exact average came to Rs 50.86 crore. They cleared the bar by less than 1%. Earlier, a smaller company had asked CBSE to lower the bar to Rs 30 crore for fairer competition. CBSE refused. So the bar was kept high enough to block small players, but sat exactly low enough for Coempt to scrape through. 04. Software maturity is measured on the CMMI scale, 1 to 5. The old rules required Level 5. The new rules dropped it to Level 3. Coempt is a Level 3 company. 05. The cooling-off period for engaging retired CBSE officials was cut from two years to one. This makes it easier to use recently retired insiders to influence the process. 06. The old rules required experience with large projects of at least 5 lakh students each. The new rules removed the student count and counted cumulative answer-book volume across small projects instead. Coempt has many small fragmented university contracts. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS. 07. The old rules required bidders to own their own data centre and disaster recovery centre on Indian soil. The new rules allowed third-party MeitY-empanelled cloud hosting. Coempt runs on AWS and Azure. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS, which owns its own data centres. It also means student data is no longer on sovereign, Indian infrastructure. 08. The old rules required the bidder to own or control the complete source code of its software. The new rules deleted this. Coempt's platform runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS, which they don't own. 09. A last-minute corrigendum, issued right before bid submission, removed CBSE's own power to blacklist the firm if its software failed catastrophically. So even a Telangana-scale failure couldn't get Coempt banned from future government tenders. 10. The penalty structure shifted from punishing mistakes to punishing delays. The old rules fined the vendor for wrong scanning, merged pages, and unscanned books. The new rules dropped those and instead levied Rs 50,000 per day for delays. This incentivises rushed scanning over accurate scanning. 11. The old rules had a hard accuracy threshold, error rate not to exceed 0.5%. The new rules removed this number entirely. 12. The old rules specified proper book and robotics scanners. The new rules just say "sufficient scanners." The definition was vague enough that, as Sarthak notes, the scanning could be done with a phone on a stand. 13. On the security side, the contract required a VAPT (vulnerability and penetration test) certified by CERT-In before go-live, and a restricted beta phase before launch. The system clearly wasn't restricted, because the other researcher, Nisarga, was able to access it and find vulnerabilities four days before go-live. So the mandatory security audit appears to have been bypassed. These are more than a dozen rule changes, all between the failed tender and the winning tender, all pushing in the same direction, all benefiting the one company with the worst track record in the field. The security holes Nisarga found last week now have an explanation. The system was built by a vendor that was specifically allowed to skip the security certification, the source code ownership, the data sovereignty, and the quality thresholds the original rules demanded. Following things need to happen immediately; 1. An immediate CAG audit of the tender process. 2. A parliamentary debate on the topic. 3. An independent investigation into > Why the first tender vanished? > Why the disqualification clauses were deleted? > Why the turnover bar was held exactly where it was? > Why the security level was dropped? > Why the blacklisting power was removed at the last moment? Sarthak, this is genuinely exceptional investigative work. Far better than most journalists with full resources ever manage. Take a bow. :)

Can’t believe 17 years olds have to turn to twitter to get their exam sheets re evaluated. What a failed system.

Never forget that you are the main data center. Drink water, and consume as much literature as possible.

Please stop. I don’t want an AI summary of my Google search. I don’t want an AI summary of the text message from my friend at work. I don’t want an AI summary of the email I’m about to read. Please just stop.

I’m convinced we’re living in god-forsaken basement reality. Subjects of experience cannot arise at different levels of computational abstractiion. But if I’m wrong, then the only reason I can think of for creating a virtual world with such obscene real suffering is to prevent some even worse horror whose nature eludes us.

Khushwant Singh, in his book, ‘The end of India’, published in 2003, had warned about Narendra Modi and his fascist agenda. Today, in retrospect, one has to say that the great writer was bang on!

RT @SushantSin: Xi Jinping is hosting Trump and Putin. Even Pakistan is trying to mediate peace between the US and Iran. Here we have Modi…

Bank: Why should we give you a loan? Why should we trust you? Me: I come from the land of yoga, zero, Covid management, and women with voting rights.. trust me bro!

Exactly. The journalists of India should be able to do their work without being scared of repercussions.

Interviewer at the MNC: Why should we give you this job? Me (With my legs on the table):

Heights of embarrassment. I'm sure this will be topped by someone else soon.

The best thing on the Internet right now.

Reports of 100 people killed in UP due to storm in Indian Media : 00 Reports of 100 people killed in UP due to storm in Foreign Media : 15 Indian TV Media is the worst organisation in the world and the worst thing to happen to India.

RT @fumuee:

27 Lakh Voters were deleted in West Bengal. These were not 'dead people' or 'bangladeshis'. These were real people who had already appealed to get their votes restored. The Supreme court could’ve delayed the West Bengal elections until the tribunals finished hearing the appeals of these voters. But they didn’t. Only around 1607 voters were restored in time by phase 2 of these elections. Almost every appeal that was heard turned out to be a wrongful deletion. In any functional democracy, this would not count as a free and fair election where a large section of voters have lost their voting rights. I'm not saying that TMC would've won for sure if they were added back, maybe BJP would still win, but the question is about the fairness of these elections. Free and fair elections are a spectrum. Ever since Delhi-Maharashtra-Bihar-Bengal, this needle has moved more and more towards being unfair. Each time somehow the opposition parties participate as usual in the electoral process thinking that they can still pull of a win despite the compromised EC, ED, CBI etc. and each time they have been proven wrong after 2024 Lok Sabha. The question is, at what point will they feel that the level of unfairness is so unfair that elections should be boycotted? I personally feel TMC should have refused to participate in these elections until all those 27 lakh appeals were finished being heard.

Hustle culture.

Of course it's the CEOs who are obsessed with AI They are used to providing absolutely zero value & their only purpose is to dictate vague requests so that other people create great things To them, AI makes that feel easier - because they'll never comprehend the value of talent