C 26 finally ships with contracts! Wrote some personal opinions about it here: sbjoshi.github.io/posts/cpp2…

You have to give it to Odisha. Even with so much population in Puri, the beach is so clean! I wish people all over India were as conscious for cleanliness.

Economist Arthur Laffer: "If you tax people who work, and you pay people who don't work, do not be surprised if you have a lot of people not working." "We tax speeders on the highways to get them to stop speeding. We tax cigarettes to get people to stop smoking." "Why then do we tax people who earn income? Why do we tax people who employ other people? Why do we tax companies that make wonderful products at low cost and make lots of profits?" "Don't for a moment think that the same consequences don't befall taxes on income, employment, and profits as they do on speeders and on smokers."

In the first decade of this century, we entered information age, once internet became ubiquitous. Now we have entered the age of misinformation since AI has become ubiquitous.

"Without teachers, life would have no class" --Anonymous I had read this quote several years ago, and it's so true even today. So many teachers, from school to college and beyond has taught so many things, not only academic stuff but about life. Happy Teacher's Day to all my teachers for providing me guidance and lessons through the journey of life. 🙏

Perhaps twitterverse can help me. I am experimenting with various coding agents for a personal project, nothing serious. So far only copilot with GPT-4o or sonnet-3.7 were somewhat helpful in achieving partially what I really wanted to do. Then I hit copilot monthly limit. I tried switching to gemini with vscode and I found it utterly useless. Just at high level design phase, it gives up and hits its limits, let alone generating any code. It works on canvas but not on VS code and I don't know how to do full development on canvas. Cline with vscode also hits the free limits very fast. Any suggestions on which extension/agent combination works best with VSCode in free tier? I am just trying to automate some things that I do manually for my personal use.

Even when I was in academia, publishing a research paper never seemed as fulfilling as building a tool in systems research and having other people tell me that they are using the tool I built. As a part of the team @SUPRA_Labs , I was super excited to be part of the team that made DORA a reality. And now with the launch of Native Automation, the sense of fulfillment is off the charts. 🚀

If you are wondering why India is not able to compete with China / Vietnam in Manufacturing, here is a gist. If you are a brave Indian who decides to start an MSME or a Manufacturing company or a factory 1. A Municipal clerk / officer can reject your land registration file because of a missing annexure on the 16th page of the 17th form 2. A clerk from the GST office could misplace your online GST Certificate application. 3. Your GST Application could be marked for physical verification despite digital Aadhar verification, because your Insta photo and Aadhar card photo, doesn’t match 4. A GST officer can reject your application and force you to start over, because you committed the cardinal offence of not being in office at 7:30 PM when the Good God McLord GST Officer visited without any warning. 5. The Tehsildar can reject your application for using your own land for your own company, citing some obscure provision which was written in annexure 578 of the Factories Act 1948 6. Their superior district officer can send you a stop work notice, under some random act which was passed in 1869 7. The Salt Commissioner's office (There actually is such a department) can send you a notice for misuse of salt pan land, despite your land being 600 kms from the nearest sea. 8. The Environment ministry can send you a notice for cutting a tree that wasn’t there. 9. The Agricultural department can send you a notice for illegal conversion of Farmland to industrial use, despite the land being barren since 1857. 10. Customs can withhold your manufacturing machinery citing wrongful declaration and impose a 600% penalty for its release. 11. Power department can refuse you a connection citing a missing signature on Pg 301 of your commercial power application form. 12. The Water Department can stall your water connection because they have run out of smart meters - This is Digital India you see. 13. State Pollution control board can impose a penalty for toxic effluence, despite your factory being idle and having no effluents 14. A no name, random, Local Political Party can stop work at your factory because they want 120% reservation for local people 15. A different no name, random Local political party can destroy your factory because you didn't give prominence to local language on the name board. We cannot tolerate Language imposition, you see. 16. The Factory opening can be indefinitely delayed, because the local councilor / MLA / MP is too busy for inauguration 17. The Import Export department can block your export license and classify you as an international smuggler because you put a wrong comma in Page 354, Annexure 45, para 6. This, while the real international smugglers, happily smuggle. 18. RBI can Freeze your bank account, for some FERA / TERA / MERA violation of $1.08 19. You can receive a random Penalty, and a stop-work notice from a department, that you didn’t know existed 20. The Legal Metrology Department can block your production, because your 1 Kg is not equal to their 1KG 21. The GST department can send you a Notice for wrongful GST interpretation, an interpretation that you ironically fixed with consultation from the same GST Department. 22. They can impose additional GST retrospectively and just for kicks, put a 1200% penalty on top of it. And freeze your bank account if you don’t pay in 7 days. 23. A random disgruntled local guy, probably paid off by someone, can shut you down by filing a petition in district court for "health hazards” 24. CBDT can freeze your bank account due to non-payment of taxes, despite the factory not earning a single rupee of revenue. 25. The local municipality can suddenly decide to re-dig and re-concretize the already dug up concrete road, which is in front of your factory. That’s why most aspiring entrepreneurs quit and go back home wondering if they should have simply stuck to a normal salaried job. And few of the great souls who persevere, they spend most of their time and energy fighting the Indian govt machinery on compliance. Not China / Vietnam on cost and quality.

A fraud called Reliance RESQ. @RelianceDigital has an after sales service arm called RESQ. They charge several thousands by promising end-to-end product warranty. On 9th of April, I raised a complaint regarding the remote control not working, they promised to close within 72 hours. When 72 hours was nearing, it was cancelled unilaterally from their side without anyone contacting me. I re-raised complaint, on 12th April, a new promise of 96 hours resolution, nothing happened. Another call on 15th april, they generate yet another service ID, nothing happened. I called on 16th April yet another service ID, nothing happened. Escalated to Customer Service head, yet another service ID, no resolution. Escalated to CEO, yet another service ID, no resolution. So far no technician visited my home. One local service center person called and mentioned remote control is an accessory, so it will not be covered. My argument is that without remote control, TV can not be used with its intended feature, the remote control came in the original box of the product and more importantly, in their service booklet, in the exclusion list, remote control is not mentioned. I get the same reply on twitter. Essentially, they gobble up 17k rupees without any shame but will not provide you with a replacement, even though you are entitled to. The SONY authorized service center mentioned that the remote costs 2400/-. They DO NOT have mechanism for auto escalation, they just generate a new service ID. They put a facade on social media that they care, so they send one message saying DM us with your concern and they don't do anything. They generate new service ID, they keep cancelling unilaterally. So if you are planning to become a huge conglomerate, start by committing fraud, gobble up money.

एक झूठ अगर सो हजार बार बोला जाए तो वो सच हो जाता है। This seems particularly true with people's over reliance on AI, search engines. I don't know if anyone noticed that spelling within Indian languages shown by Google etc, is wrong many times. However, I have seen many articles written also with incorrect spellings. Many people lament that in regional language newspapers the number of spelling mistakes has increased several times. To me it seems that a wrong spelling picked up by search engines or AI boosts incorrect usage further and since people lookup on search engines, AI the vicious cycle starts. In my understanding, LLMs are just fancy statistical inference engines. The problem with that is these engines show what's more likely or popular and not what's true.

We created a FREE Road Rules course for Students which can be played at any college classroom that has Internet. It's prerecorded, just log in and press Play. 45 minutes, 15 essential road rules, in English, Telugu, or Hindi. Any interested college anywhere in the country can use this. What's stopping you? Course is on our website at topdriver.in #roadsafety #CollegeStudent

Indian Govt: We do not want people with small savings to engage in speculative trade such as Futures and Options so we would increase the ticket size. Also Indian Govt: We don't mind people fritter away their savings on gambling apps which are easy to download and very tempting when you are bombarded with gambling apps' ads in IPL.

🚨 BREAKING: Supra introduces ZERO-BLOCK DELAY Blockchain Automation! ⚡ Welcome to Automatic DeFi (AutoFi) — where smart contracts execute themselves, instantly, without external triggers. This changes everything. 👇🧵

BREAKING: SupraNova demos the first BRIDGELESS Cross-chain Transfer!! Traditional bridges have been hacked for over $2B, but what if we could move across L1s without a bridge? 🤔 Enter Supra’s game-changer: SupraNova — the world's first bridgeless cross-chain solution! 🧵👇

And we have a new World Chess Champion! Congratulations @DGukesh !