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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 29d

Oh, definitely with headphones. Bluetooth headphones suffer from much worse sound quality than wired ones. Plus, of course, the need to keep them charged.

Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Sep 13

QotD: "Ethernet: because cables are ugly, but packet loss is uglier."

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Sep 9

Hanlon's Razor.

futurism.com/ai-coding-se...

Programmers Using AI Create Way More Glaring Security Issues, Data Shows

AI has proven repeatedly to have issues with accuracy — and using it as a coding assistant creates more security problems, too.

futurism.com

Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Sep 9

#MorningMusing : Removing the first letter from both words in the phrase "trick troll" yields a phrase that means roughly the same thing.

Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Sep 7

Nudge theory in action.

www.business-standard.com/health/skipp...

www.business-standard.com

Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Sep 4

Here's the post it reminded me of (hi @rohitkhare.bsky.social )

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/...

What's in a Name? Trust: Internet-Scale Namespaces, Part II: IEEE Internet Computing: Vol 3, No 6

Resolving &ldquo;renowned programming pioneer&rdquo; to &ldquo;David Wheeler&rdquo; may seem little enough like resolving w3.org to 18.29.0.27; the former process weighs human relation...

dl.acm.org

Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Sep 4

This is basically Part 2 of a train of thought that @rohitkhare.bsky.social started a few decades ago. (link in comments) kk.org/thetechnium/...

The Trust Quotient (TQ)

Wherever there is autonomy, trust must follow. If we raise children to go off on their own, they need to be autonomous and we need to trust them. (Parenting is a school for learning how to trust.) If ...

kk.org

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Aug 23

"...the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second."

www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/21/1...

In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses

It’s the most transparent estimate yet from one of the big AI companies, and a long-awaited peek behind the curtain for researchers.

www.technologyreview.com

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Aug 22

Probably a test of some kind.

www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/c...

China cut itself off from the global internet on Wednesday

: Great Firewall took out all traffic to port 443 at a time Beijing didn't have an obvious need to keep its netizens in the dark

www.theregister.com

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Aug 21

This is not surprising. Without:

⁍ Training (of the humans using it);
⁍ Training Data (for the models); and
⁍ Use cases (of actual pain points);

this will just be another hypefest that will wither in the face of the inevitable backlash.

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing

There’s a stark difference in success rates between companies that purchase AI tools from vendors and those that build them internally.

fortune.com

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Aug 10

Can't really argue with this. One only hopes the political appointee coach doesn't overwork him into premature retirement. indianexpress.com/article/spor...

Why Indian cricket doesn’t deserve Jasprit Bumrah

The fickle fans and rent-a-quote experts have been exposed by their insensitive criticisms of a player fighting his body to do his best for the country

indianexpress.com

Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Aug 9

If the MSM has picked up on it, has it peaked? :)

nymag.com/intelligence...

SEO Is Dead. Say Hello to GEO.

Search-engine optimization now feels dated. Generative-engine optimization is all about trying to trick AI chatbots.

nymag.com

Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Jul 30

Art imitates life imitates art...

This seems to be the first case of a company developing a feature because ChatGPT is incorrectly telling people it exists.

www.holovaty.com/writing/chat...

Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists | Holovaty.com

www.holovaty.com

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Jul 21

Researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to detect cancer-specific DNA fragments in the bloodstream more than three years before a clinical diagnosis.

aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscov...

Detection of Cancers Three Years prior to Diagnosis Using Plasma Cell-Free DNA

AbstractTo explore how early cancers can be detected prior to clinical signs or symptoms, we assessed prospectively collected serial plasma samples from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study, ...

aacrjournals.org

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Jun 30

One of my favourite lines seems appropriate here: "what are you optimizing for?"

(I mean that you should ask this person this)

Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Jun 30

I sure don't mind a change
I sure don't mind a change
Yeah, I sure don't mind
I sure don't mind a change
I sure don't mind a change

But I've fell on black days
I've fell on black days

Microsoft Retires Legendary 'Blue Screen of Death' After 40 Years of Frowny Faces

Meet its mournful replacement: the black screen of death, which won't have the same sad face.

www.cnet.com

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Jun 29

Just read an article where the writer had to use AI to filter out the flood of AI generated job applications he was getting. I am wondering what the net utility value is.

Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Jun 25

24T tokens of organized web data arxiv.org/abs/2506.14111

Essential-Web v1.0: 24T tokens of organized web data

Data plays the most prominent role in how language models acquire skills and knowledge. The lack of massive, well-organized pre-training datasets results in costly and inaccessible data pipelines. We ...

arxiv.org

Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Jun 19

#TIL: Add swearing to your Google request for AI-free results.

"How to paint a fence" will return AI summaries & recommended results, in addition to actual results.

"How to paint a fucking fence" will omit that & focus on actual results.

Not sure why, or how long this will last, but here we are.

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Jun 13

I sat down with Sandeep Balaji and Pushkar Singh of the Building in India podcast recently for a wide-ranging conversation about (heh) building a startup in India.

Give it a watch here, and feel free to forward it far and wide if you think it is useful.: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-Z...

VCs Secretly Look For Founders With This ONE Skill | Udhay Shankar

YouTube video by Building in India

www.youtube.com

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Jun 13

Lol

Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Jun 12

The progeny : "The entire credit card business is based on people going into DEBT! Why would they DO that?"
A demo of
1. Admirable clear headedness
2. Amazing naïveté
3. All of the above
Discuss.

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Jun 12

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Jun 11

For those following the latest Meta privacy controversy. Here's a somewhat technical explanation of how they are evading Android's sandbox restrictions, and how it could lead to VERY LARGE liability. www.zeropartydata.es/p/localhost-...

“Localhost tracking” explained. It could cost Meta 32 billion.

You just can't finish off Zuckerberg.

www.zeropartydata.es

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · Jun 10

Moore's Law. Kryder's Law. Edholm's Law. These are the what that enabled business to move to the cloud. That also implies your business is at the mercy of someone else's server infrastructure. And when (not if) it goes down, there's not a whole lot you can do.

www.moneycontrol.com/technology/c...

www.moneycontrol.com