Jitin
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jitin.xyz
Jitin
@jitin.xyz
160 followers 310 following 410 posts
Cat dad, mostly curious. Eats, jokes and leaves.

interests: writing, films, books, programming, math, coffee, academia and memes among others.

currently in the act three of the coming of age arc of my life

Say Hi? 👋 DMs open. Also, Signal: jitin.19
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jitin.xyz
Some more photos from the nearby Electrical Engineering department at IISc
A part of a vermillion-filled pumpkin placed at the entrance The entrance to the Electrical Engineering department at IISc with a rangoli (ok, it’s not really called a rangoli here but the local equivalent name would be more like a kolam maybe?) and parts of a vermillion-filled pumpkin placed at the entrance to ward off any overly excited extroverts (ok, that’s a joke, I guess people do this because of local Dushera customs)
September 30, 2025 at 3:35 PM
jitin.xyz
Halloween season is starting! (haters will say this is just Dushera related)
A vermillion filled pumpkin which has been smashed and placed at the entrance of entrance of my department at IISc. I think it’s just in prep for Halloween but some people believe this is as a part of local Dushera customs
September 30, 2025 at 11:31 AM
jitin.xyz
Ok, one more:
September 24, 2025 at 1:05 PM
jitin.xyz
Share your favorite black and white movie
September 24, 2025 at 1:05 PM
jitin.xyz
This reminded me of another Nehru story on these lines:
In 1937, Nehru had been elected president of the Indian National Congress for the third time. But he was worried that the Indian people may begin to perceive his and the INC's prominence as Caesarism-akin to the dictatorship of Roman Emperor Julius Caesar, a charismatic authoritarian leader whose rule was characterised by the cult of his personality. Cognisant and cautious of the dangers of his own pride and position, he wrote an essay titled "Rashtrapati," under the pseudonym Chanakya. The essay was published in 1937 in the Modern Review—a Calcutta-based monthly journal founded by Bengali thinker Ramananda Chatterjee in 1907. In it, "Chanakya" describes Nehru as "some triumphant Caesar passing by," who might turn dictator with "a little twist."
September 18, 2025 at 7:14 AM
jitin.xyz
XKCD comic: Panel 1 reads: SITUATION: THERE ARE I4 COMPETING STANDARDS. Panel 2: Two people are talking Person 1: 14?! RIDICULOUS! WE NEED TO DEVELOP ONE UNIVERSAL STANDARD THAT COVERS EVERYONE'S USE CASES. Person 2: YEAH! Panel 3: SITUATION: THERE ARE (now) 15 COMPETING STANDARDS.
September 13, 2025 at 4:28 PM
jitin.xyz
Book Cover: The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out of The Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson
September 13, 2025 at 11:14 AM
jitin.xyz
As usual, relevant XKCD:
XKCD comic. A bomb has to be disabled and the only way Rob can do it to enter a valid tar command on first try without Googling. Last panel ends with Rob just saying “I’m sorry” to the people looking to him to disarm the bomb
September 11, 2025 at 10:59 AM
jitin.xyz
CSS is hard:
The new Bluesky bookmarks option below à post, but not spaced correctly with the other options like reply, repost, like etc.
September 9, 2025 at 2:20 AM
jitin.xyz
Books turned out to be a very valuable component of the "data mix" to train strong models. By 2024 Anthropic had a new approach to collecting them: purchase and scan millions of print books! To find a new way to get books, in February 2024, Anthropic hired the former head of partnerships for Google's book-scanning project, Tom Turvey. He was tasked with obtaining "all the books in the world" while still avoiding as much "legal/practice/business slog" as possible (Opp. Exhs. 21, 27). [...] Turvey and his team emailed major book distributors and retailers about bulk-purchasing their print copies for the AI firm's "research library" (Opp. Exh. 22 at 145; Opp. Exh. 31 at -035589). Anthropic spent many millions of dollars to purchase millions of print books, often in used condition. Then, its service providers stripped the books from their bindings, cut their pages to size, and scanned the books into digital form — discarding the paper originals. Each print book resulted in a PDF copy containing images of the scanned pages with machine-readable text (including front and back cover scans for softcover books).
September 7, 2025 at 7:38 AM
jitin.xyz
One more, Heraclitus reviews books: No man can read the same book twice, for it not the same book and he is not the same man.

Reminds me of this:
The Get Better Material meme: A crow is performing stand up with the premise “things are like prisons” and someone yells out “get better material!” but the crow (who’s Foucault) only has more of “factories arand like prisons, schools are like prisons etc”
September 4, 2025 at 12:41 PM
jitin.xyz
As seen here: www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/11/30/2...
A note from Joel on Software that says: “Programmers should only use lower level tools for those parts of the product where they are adding the most value. For example, if you’re writing a game where the 3D effects are your major selling point, you can’t use an off the shelf 3D engine, you have to roll your own. But if the major selling point of your game is the story, don’t waste time getting great 3D graphics — just use a library.”
August 31, 2025 at 8:47 PM
jitin.xyz
By the fifth minute, even I wanted to chip in with ideas along with his students on call. I can sort of see how pair programming came to be a thing:
A comic strip showing a programmer at work. His colleague walks up to him and looks at the screen asking “What are you doing”. The programmer replies with “Pair Programming”
August 31, 2025 at 9:04 AM
jitin.xyz
Reminded me of this legendary Wikipedia entry:
Photo of a Penguin and a man with the caption: "Piper Kerr (right), a member of the Scottish National Antarctic Expedition, plays the bagpipes for an indifferent penguin, March 1904"
August 25, 2025 at 2:34 PM
jitin.xyz
When people said LLMs responses felt so “human”, I wasn’t convinced.

Then, I asked it to help me fix some of my LaTeX formatting and it’s response felt human enough:
LLM responses to my prompt asking it to clean up my LaTeX with: “Looking at your file, the mathematical notation is a complete mess - it's got raw Unicode Greek letters, mangled HTML entities, and zero proper LaTeX formatting. This is precisely why you should always use proper LaTeX from the start rather than trying to retrofit it later”
August 22, 2025 at 10:08 PM
jitin.xyz
There is some risk of course, but I usually rotate keys in maybe six months or so, all my accounts have 2FA, other measures etc. which help a bit

I had some incident losing access because one of my devices crashed so then I switched to the GitHub route for the convenience.

This reminded me of:
XKCD: on security. What actually happens when someone wants to gains access to an encrypted laptop is that they drug you and get it out of you instead of some super strong encryption preventing it.
August 18, 2025 at 7:07 AM
jitin.xyz
Saw this toy car in one of the parking spots in my building. Going by parking skills alone, the kid might grow up to be a BMW driver someday
A child’s toy car parked in one of the parking spots for my building
August 17, 2025 at 5:07 PM
jitin.xyz
Thank you! Also, my brain now:
“Ah shit, here we go again.”
August 8, 2025 at 7:23 PM
jitin.xyz
No autocorrect, that is not what I meant
Autocorrect suggests misanthropy as correction for anisotropy
July 25, 2025 at 8:20 AM
jitin.xyz
The "How did you hear about [our product]?" question has "AI Chatbot/LLM" as one of the options!
A sign-up question that asks "How did you hear about [our product?]" with one of the available options for the answer as "AI Chatbot/LLM"
July 24, 2025 at 5:40 PM
jitin.xyz
Youtube comment that says: “We're getting new AI IDEs faster than new JavaScript frameworks. Truly a strange timeline.”
July 16, 2025 at 4:18 PM
jitin.xyz
Thanks for highlighting this!

For anyone else interested: this is the figure in question (it’s in the Appendix section of the full paper)
Plot that shows “Developers with prior Cursor experience (who use Cursor in the study) are slowed down similarly to developers without prior Cursor experience, and we see no difference between developers with/without Copilot or web LLM experience.”
July 11, 2025 at 3:53 PM
jitin.xyz
Others finding love vs. me:
An onion with the innermost layer looking like a heart. There is a cut across the heart becuase I noticed the heart miliseconds after I started cutting the onion
July 3, 2025 at 1:30 PM
jitin.xyz
So, TIL:
Quoted post by @nhuntwalker.bsky.social: We rebranded "French Fries" into "Freedom Fries" because France didn't want to join in immediately in attacking Iraq even though the people that attacked us were Saudi
June 20, 2025 at 9:22 AM
jitin.xyz
Also, the origin of the name Valgrind:
From Nordic mythology. Originally (before release) the project was named Heimdall, after the watchman of the Nordic gods. He could "see a hundred miles by day or night, hear the grass growing, see the wool growing on a sheep's back", etc. This would have been a great name, but it was already taken by a security package "Heimdal". Keeping with the Nordic theme, Valgrind was chosen. Valgrind is the name of the main entrance to Valhalla (the Hall of the Chosen Slain in Asgard). Over this entrance there resides a wolf and over it there is the head of a boar and on it perches a huge eagle, whose eyes can see to the far regions of the nine worlds. Only those judged worthy by the guardians are allowed to pass through Valgrind. All others are refused entrance. It's not short for "value grinder", although that's not a bad guess.
June 12, 2025 at 3:52 PM