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Jasvir Nagra

@jasvir.bsky.social
224 followers 89 following 228 posts

Advisor & builder. Formerly security @dropbox, product @instart & @google, authored Surreptitious Software, TL for Caja. I love good food, fine wine & great JS.

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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 22h
I guess this domain will be rather valuable when they have to rename the company to avoid being the "enemy". Kudos to anticipating this in 2002 random domain sitter. www.the-independent.com/news/world/a...
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 07/10/2026
PhotoCraft says it cloned Photoshop from public specs and observed behaviour. What does that say about obfuscation? It can make secrets/algo in code harder to recover. It does much less if you can rebuild the app by watching what it does. Whitebox vs blackbox matters again.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 05/10/2026
Don't be fooled - Humans don't reason either. I loved this article and struggled applying Graepl's definition of reasoning to myself. When applying their definition of reasoning to humans, it's interesting what gets dropped and what extras get added. www.recursiverhymes.com/p/dont-be-fo...
recursiverhymes.com
Don’t Be Fooled - Humans don’t reason either
Some thinking about Thore Graepel’s demanding test for “reasoning”
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 02/10/2026
Here's a JS library with every function in the world. Ish... DWIM asks Gemini Nano to hallucinate the implementation, then runs it in your browser. DWIM.reverse('hi'); I thought I was overdue for some grr's from @feross.bsky.social and @shriram.bsky.social .... jasvir.github.io/dwim/
jasvir.github.io
DWIM — your API probably exists
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
I can almost smell the hot dogs and feel the tension in the crowd when I read "Casey at the Bat." Even knowing how it ends, the final line still catches me out. Poem 16 of Two Dozen Poems. www.recursiverhymes.com/p/casey-at-t...
recursiverhymes.com
“Casey at the Bat” by Ernest Lawrence Thayer
Two Dozen Poems · Entry 16 of 24 · American comic verse
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Apple watch said my sleep score last night was "Very High" - this is a first in a while. It's ridiculous how happy that made me AND psychologically makes me feel as if I must have slept well!
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
Poe carried the idea behind "A Dream Within a Dream" for more than twenty years. What stayed with me was simpler: the helplessness of holding tighter as the grains of sand continue slipping into the waves. www.recursiverhymes.com/p/a-dream-wi...
recursiverhymes.com
“A Dream Within a Dream” by Edgar Allan Poe
Two Dozen Poems · Entry 11 of 24 · American English
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Reposted by Jasvir Nagra
Recursive Rhymes on Reason @recursiverhymes.com · 19/09/2026
Small paper boats, each carrying a boy's name, blown along a current beyond his control. Tagore's English version preserves the hope, but the fuller Bengali poem made the loneliness clearer to me. www.recursiverhymes.com/p/paper-boat...
recursiverhymes.com
“Paper Boats” by Rabindranath Tagore
Two Dozen Poems · Entry 10 of 24 · Bengali
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
I was working on a project today and what should sneak up on me but the absolute need...absolute need!... to solve the problem requires virtualizing the DOM. Again. It's only been half a decade since my last go to look into this abyss & witness the darkness of the soul.
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Reposted by Jasvir Nagra
Recursive Rhymes on Reason @recursiverhymes.com · 09/09/2026
I recorded a short video about the first week of Two Dozen Poems, ending with a reading of Hilaire Belloc's "Tarantella." www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dTI...
youtube.com
"Tarantella" by Hilaire Belloc — Read Aloud | Two Dozen Poems
YouTube video by Recursive Rhymes
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
It's 746pm - Mum would have been proud of the full use of value for money. I can't understand why it was so satisfying seeing it flick down to 1% minutes before it bounced back up to 100% with the query still going. I know what i'll be doing on Sunday evenings now.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
Where should PII or a secret token go in an HTTP request? URLs reach history & logs. Bodies reach error reports. Headers miss redaction. Even fragments can remain visible to browser APIs. I tried putting together a practical guide to the trade-offs: 🦭 jasvir.github.io/secretseal/
jasvir.github.io
secretseal
Documents places where PII & secret tokens accidentally leak
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 03/09/2026
This one has stayed with me since I was a teenager. It changed what I thought poems were—not dead words on a page, but words with life, meant to be read aloud. heh - I may read it in tomorrow’s first weekly video.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Day 1 of Two Dozen Poems: Bashō’s "Old Pond." Before reading a translation, I tried saying the Japanese aloud and wrote down the pond I pictured. Then I learned how much can change when English chooses one frog - or many. www.recursiverhymes.com/p/old-pond-m...
recursiverhymes.com
“Old Pond” — Matsuo Bashō
Two Dozen Poems · Entry 01 of 24 · Japanese
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 25/08/2026
Hand written manuscripts used to be worth more than a house before the printing press and kept chained in dark cool rooms... just like programmers, before AI.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Wait - wut! What is this craziness!
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 19/05/2026
Funny seeing insights rediscovered. The second most interesting insight I had building at Google (this with the awesome Claudio) was if your fuzzer finds far fewer bugs but with executable, replayable test cases - more bugs got fixed. AI will get there too. Eventually.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 15/04/2026
Slightly late for April Fools - it's marinated a while. A while back I joked with @isaacevans.bsky.social and Daghan about a terrible idea: structural code search, but with CSS? Unfortunately I built it. CSSemgrep: www.linkedin.com/pulse/cssemg... A cursed tiny tribute to Semgrep.
linkedin.com
CSSemgrep – Grep but CSS
This really is an April Fools experiment. I built it for my Dad's 80th birthday.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 02/04/2026
I keep waiting for someone to dispute this result and keep going back to reread it even though it bugs me so much.... ... before realizing I'm confirming the result. www.science.org/content/arti...
science.org
People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts
Human mind may be wired to find inner reflection unbearable
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 17/03/2026
I used to chase the "Vienna coffeehouse" version of university: small tables, big ideas, ok coffee. Mostly failed. But one night, someone asked: "So... what’s special about meat?" And we accidentally speedran today's AI debate years before LLMs. Part 1: www.linkedin.com/pulse/g%C3%B...
linkedin.com
Gödel, Escher, Me — Part 1: The Coffeehouse I Tried to Host
I had this romantic idea of university. The version in my head looked like a Vienna coffeehouse — the late 19th-century “Vienna 1900” scene through the interwar years, roughly the 1880s–1910s and then...
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 24/02/2026
So I like HP. A lot. I think about Hogwarts as a security thingy & honestly it holds up alarmingly well: Polyjuice breaks auth, the Trace is noisy telemetry, and the Fidelius Charm is basically ocaps with some extra drama. www.linkedin.com/pulse/hogwar...
linkedin.com
Hogwarts: Names & Delegation
If part one was the theory, this one is wizardry. And yes: this post is going to be very Hogwarts-focused, partly because Hogwarts is weirdly good for threat modeling, and partly because I am a fan of...
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 17/02/2026
I think about names a lot. Names aren’t labels...they’re handles. Human names are messy & relational, myths treat true names as power, and ocap security makes it literal: hold the handle (key/token/secret URL) → you have power. www.linkedin.com/pulse/names-...
linkedin.com
Names Are Handles
There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors. This old joke highlights that naming stuff is notoriously tricky — and not just for progra...
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 30/01/2026
subgraph isomorphism is in NP - that feels like something!
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 27/01/2026
Quines say "say me" Inequ say "see me" Self-recognizing programs that read program text & ask: "Is that… me?" Starts as byte checks & spirals into mirror tests, regex narcissism & CS slamming an UNDECIDABLE stamp on dreams. www.linkedin.com/pulse/i-am-u... #RecursiveRhymesOnReason
linkedin.com
I Am Not U
or I ≠ U The sequel to Quines Previously, we have played with Quines: programs that print their own source code. Self-reproduction.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 20/01/2026
I translated Ezra Pound’s 14-word metro poem into a Perl one-liner with Unicode emoji—and it literally prints trees: a tiny experiment in what translation really preserves (spoiler: not the words). www.linkedin.com/pulse/ezra-p... #RecursiveRhymesOnReason
linkedin.com
Ezra Pounds Forests
In a Station of the Metro with Perl and Unicode Last week I argued that translation isn’t moving words from one language to another — it’s swapping interpreters, and admitting you can’t keep everythin...
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
I didn't realize today is National Nothing Day. Unfortunately, I didn't celebrate it. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nationa...
en.wikipedia.org
National Nothing Day - Wikipedia
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 14/01/2026
I translated a nursery rhyme into JS & learnt with translating poems, you gotta choose what is load-bearing. From nonsense poems to haiku constraints to code-poetry... Translation: It's staged word magic + citations. Enjoy! www.linkedin.com/pulse/untran... #RecursiveRhymesOnReason
linkedin.com
Untranslatable
Lessons from what it means to translate a nursery rhyme into JavaScript “Poetry is what gets lost in translation” — Robert Frost This quote is widely attributed to Robert Frost but the attribution its...
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 07/01/2026
Fun with JS const _=new Proxy([],{get:(b,k)=>k=="_"?(console.log(b.join` `),b.length=0,_):(b.push(k),_)}) _.Humpty.Dumpty.sat.on.a.wall._ _.Humpty.Dumpty.had.a.great.fall._ _.All.the.kings.horses.and.all.the.kings.men._ _.could.not.put.Humpty.Dumpty.together.again._ jsfiddle.net/jnagra/vg79m...
jsfiddle.net
Humpty Dumpty - JSFiddle - Code Playground
JSFiddle - Test your JavaScript, CSS, HTML or CoffeeScript online with JSFiddle.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 06/01/2026
Sometimes we don’t know yet, sometimes the answer doesn’t fit in the universe & sometimes we can’t ever know. Chaos, quantum dice, uncomputable monsters, Gödel’s ceiling - knowledge has weirdly beautiful limits. I wrote on things we cannot know: medium.com/@jasvir/know... Enjoy!
medium.com
Know It All: A Tour of Knowledge’s Limits
There are questions we don’t know yet, questions we can’t know ever, and questions where the answer literally can’t fit inside the…
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 25/12/2025
Do you think Pavlov's dogs like pavlova? Or are they just conditioned to think they do?
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 14/12/2025
Ok this meteor shower is gorgeous. I find it oddly romantic that a comet exploded around this part of the solar system ages ago and now once a year in December as earth blazes through it, we get shiny pretty things in the sky. #GeminidMeteorShower
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 01/12/2025
A joke for vexillologists - Is the US nervous about China because it's a red flag? 🚩
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 30/11/2025
The sky is solid uniform white today! It's like they forgot to finish rendering the screen in a game.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
rorohiko:song jas$ time say "aioli" real 0m1.024s user 0m0.115s sys 0m0.047s rorohiko:song jas$
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
I think you're right! Currently my machine is saying outloud every word in /usr/share...words and timing it. I just need some consistent pronunciation - else I'll fool myself by saying some words faster than others.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
"Strengths faded after six long months." Time: 2.825s | Length: 38 | Time per char: .0743 s/char "Sixths of their strengths were gone." Time: 2.183s | Length: 36 | Time per char: .0606 s/char "They survived on crisps and squirrel strength." Time: 2.817s | Length: 46 | Time per char: .0612 s/char
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
Oh the sentence has to be grammatically correct ofcourse.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
This is my best attempt so far: rorohiko:song jas$ time say Squirrels hid crisps through sixteen long months. real 0m3.150s user 0m0.159s sys 0m0.112s rorohiko:song jas$
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
In case you're foolish enough to be nerdsniped, there is presumably the shortest sentence that takes the longest to say clearly... what is that sentence?
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
Soooo... I had a weird dream about a silly made up puzzle then woke at 5am trying to think of ways to solve it. And have now spent 4hrs on it. How's your Saturday?
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 29/11/2025
You joke but you know, weirdly, in the limited world of programming languages - this is a large part of the work you've done fixing JS - making the core make consequences be intentional. :p
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 27/11/2025
Mostly the summaries @gothamchess.bsky.social makes.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 27/11/2025
Thanksgiving feels like a good day to think about Dining Philosophers.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 24/11/2025
I think watching the World Cup Chess this year is the first time I've remembered the passionate enthusiasm sports fans have about about whatever their game is since maybe the 1990 rugby 7s. It's so crazy all over the place. So fun!
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 21/11/2025
What's the fastest thing humans' have ever made? Is it Voyager? It's moving at such a small fraction of the speed of light. I guess we've made torches that make photons ...that move at the speed of light. But that feels like cheating.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
I dreamt about how I would write prolog to solve this game and it's so crazy impossible. It _feels_ possible but I can't reason about it. You should play it. hempuli.com/baba/
hempuli.com
Baba Is You
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 20/11/2025
BABA IS YOU AND UNREASONABLE
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 19/11/2025
Why are so many world leaders so friggin cartoonishly evil? And not even in a fun Pinky and the Brain way. Just slimey evil. It might be reflecting our revealed preferences.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 13/11/2025
Are you telling me the one friggin night that I, a resident of the desert that always has clear skys, has a solar flare and the northern lights in the sky happens to happen - I also have clouds and rain?!? Universe - you're an ass.
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Jasvir Nagra @jasvir.bsky.social · 12/11/2025
You know we just don’t talk enough about the positive aspects of pollution. Like pretty sunsets. 😛
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