Author | Lightnews

Sandip Bhattacharya

@sandipb.net

310 followers 1.5K following 780 posts

Opensource/photog/food/other fleeting interests. SRE/Devops/Observability. Currently Toronto. ⛺️: 🇮🇳🇺🇸🇩🇪🇨🇦 @sandipb on Twitter

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Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · Jul 10

Many months back when I moved to Bluesky wholeheartedly and deleted everything on Twitter, I made a personal decision for future SM usage - I will make original posts only on Bluesky. I will continue to maintain engagement on Twitter, but restrict myself to replies and simple reposts (without quote)

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Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 58m

The usage limits on Claude Code is absolutely ridiculous. I switched to *Haiku* and tested it doing a review of my barebones tmux.conf. It used 12% of my limit for the next 4 hours.
Can't justify > $20/month for personal projects. I will switch and settle for Codex.

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Reposted by Sandip Bhattacharya

Tommy Siegel @tommysiegel.bsky.social · 1h

finally: a comic so niche that only birders will understand

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Reposted by Sandip Bhattacharya

Dan of the FEAR💀 @downwithdan.bsky.social · 12h

Brace for another wave of x refuges

& What's happening: Elon Musk confirmed that X will delete all heuristics from its recommendation system within six weeks. In other words, the familiar logic of likes, replies, and reposts that shaped Twitter for years is about to disappear. In its place, Grok, the platform's in-house Al model, will read and watch more than one hundred million posts
and videos every day to decide what users see. At the same time, X is testing a new interface that keeps users inside the app even when they open external links.

How this hits reality: This marks the first time a major social platform has handed full control of content discovery to an Al model.
Engagement farms, trend-hacking accounts, and traditional growth tactics may soon lose their edge. The new winners will be those who write in ways that Grok interprets as engaging, turning social media optimization into a new form of prompt engineering. This shift could reshape influencer strategies, ad targeting, and even political communication in a matter of weeks.
• Key takeaway: X did not just change its algorithm; it replaced it with an Al reader.
Your reach will soon depend on how fluently you can speak Grok.

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Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 1d

FML.
The Netflix #AHouseOfDynamite might be the most collossal collective waste of people’s life world wide ever. What an incredible waste of top level talent.

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 4d

Wtf. I had asked some question back in February related to the Bengali language. Chatgpt apparently created a memory at some time that "I prefer responses in Bengali".

Suddenly in the middle of a convo it switched to Bengali.
🤦 Had to go delete all the memories. There was a lot of obsolete crap

ChatGPT replying in Bengali to an English question

Reposted by Sandip Bhattacharya

Anil Dash @anildash.com · 8d

Okay, for the folks who asked: here's the majority AI view, writing up the reasonable, thoughtful view on AI that the vast majority of people in tech hold, that gets overshadowed by the bluster and hype of the tycoons trying to shill their nonsense. anildash.com/2025/10/17/t... Please share!

The Majority AI View - Anil Dash

A blog about making culture. Since 1999.

anildash.com

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Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 17d

“And now … Aluminum free deodorant “

Excuse me, wtf, why was there aluminum before in the first place ?

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 18d

The SMTP url took some time to delve in, to handle custom mail servers with auth. Finally got some notes down about how to set them up.

notes.sandipb.net/Tech/Apprise

Apprise - Sandip's Notes

A single, lightweight Python toolkit and CLI that fans one message out to 100+ services (Discord, Telegram, Slack, SMS, email, webhooks, more) with one simple, unified syntax.

notes.sandipb.net

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 18d

Then I discovered that while Apprise is actively maintained, Mailrise is not. And there are a whole bunch of knowns bugs in it.

Spent some time forking Mailrise, updating its Apprise dependency and even updating its Python support.

hub.docker.com/r/sandipb/ma...

hub.docker.com

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 18d

Discovered #Apprise and then #Mailrise recently. Brilliant pieces of software and just what I needed for my homelab/cloud servers - SMTP to notification gateway locked down to whitelisted destinations.

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 19d

I feel there is a difference between beauty and art. Nature can be beautiful. But art is deliberate expression.

A butterfly may be beautiful to us but it very didn’t set out to be. Years of evolution brought about this remarkable display likely as a mechanism of survival and not art.

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Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 19d

Tbf, people have long been sharing news articles after having only read the headline 😛

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 19d

Not great when finance shows are not talking about whether there is an AI bubble. But what is the best way to walk away when it pops
“Ride the last peak and get out!”

youtu.be/NL-0HKRuBJA?...

Is AI mania a bubble? Here's what experts have to say

YouTube video by CNBC Television

youtu.be

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 19d

I also discovered "brew leaves" (a really really well named subcommand 😀) which gives you a list of stuff you directly installed, as compared to "brew list", which includes the 5x more transitive dependencies you installed.
"brew leaves" is an excellent source to create your global brewfile.

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 20d

I can't believe I used Homebrew for so many years without discovering how easy it is to put a (version controlled, preferably chezmoi or some other dotfile system) Brewfile in ~/.homebrew and just run "brew bundle install -g" to keep only the important packages updated

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 20d

BTW, I mostly develop on a Mac, but on the one Linux server which I also use for developing, I use Homebrew for Linux. So this really works well cross-platform for getting me the latest and greatest versions of dev tools.

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Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 20d

TIL that I can install vscode extensions in a declarative way using Homebrew's Brewfile.

docs.brew.sh/Brew-Bundle-...

```
vscode "editorconfig.editorconfig"
```

Homebrew Bundle, brew bundle and Brewfile

Documentation for the missing package manager for macOS (or Linux).

docs.brew.sh

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Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 23d

Cost of doing business will just be passed on to the clients I.e. American companies. None of them will be willing to publicly object, so yes. More “tariff” kind of costs ultimately paid by Americans

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 25d

I saw some suggestions for using the IDE as a file explorer and running terminal agents taking up the full space. But not being able to look at the code while I am working on it? Not something I am fully comfortable with yet.

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 25d

The Claude Code extension for VSCode seemed way better. It could detect selections. Didnt try terminal selections though.

But for now, I think I will keep using Cursor as the main editor. Their rate limits are a pain but their ux still feels superior for the IDE (not terminal) AI experience

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 25d

I stopped using Cursor for a day and used Github Copilot in vscode for one day. It didn't go well - providing context from editor and terminal was buggy at times. I tried the Codex plugin too - but there doesnt seem to be a way to easily send selections to it like copilot.

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 26d

I always get confused between using useradd and adduser in Ubuntu. Finally added a note about it.

notes.sandipb.net/Tech/Adding+...

Adding New Users in Ubuntu - Sandip's Notes

Why you should be using adduser instead of useradd in Ubuntu

notes.sandipb.net

Reposted by Sandip Bhattacharya

Kat Tenbarge @kattenbarge.bsky.social · 27d

The real generational divide is people who refuse to watch a video if it could be an article versus people who refuse to read an article if it could be a video

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Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 26d

I admit, I get mildly FOMO curious from time to time about what people I know are discussing on FB, Reels, Threads etc. I may or may not act on those impulses.
I cannot for the life of me comprehend what would ever make me curious to check out a feed of content not made about real people.

Dare Obasanjo @carnage4life.bsky.social · 26d

It sounds like TikTok for AI generated videos is officially a “hot” category.

OpenAI Is Preparing to Launch a Social App for AI-Generated Videos

The platform appears to closely resemble TikTok and is powered by Sora 2, OpenAI's latest video generation model.

www.wired.com

Sandip Bhattacharya @sandipb.net · 26d

I also feel that most people who live in the software world have no idea of how much of a magnitude harder it is when software meets the real world. When all the talk of “we will just throw data and train them better” hits the seemingly infinite parameters we humans have dealt with like forever