iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 30/01/2026

subplot to this is that while @mmasnick.bsky.social's post is up. The CNET article linked to as the source has been lost to linkrot.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 01/01/2026

Recreated last year, and I’m afraid I’ve already set off a chain of events which suggests 2026 is going to 2026 harder than 2025 2025-ed. You’re welcome.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 17/10/2025

It is really not clear to me what GoI has done to earn this much trust on the question of AI governance. What explains this? www.pewresearch.org/...

Many around the world trust their own country's ability to regulate the use of Al effectively
% who have
_ in their country to regulate the use of artificial intelligence
effectively

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 15/10/2025

I think this is extensible to other subjects and regions, and has so many implications for framing and public discourse. ourworldindata.org/d...

Screenshot showing difference in actual causes of death vs what gets covered in the media in the US.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 15/06/2025

Before I watch anything involving a dog or cat.👇

Screenshot of an article that answers the question of whether or not the cat in Apocalypse Z survives. Image shows a grey cat in a crate.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 31/05/2025

Lots of updates to Poster Beware, especially instances of people commenting on the India Pakistan conflict.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 06/05/2025

This is wild, I will never understand why so many outlets (especially the big ones) don't consistently credit loudly and clearly. www.splinter.com/pla...

Screenshot of the first two paragraphs from https://www.splinter.com/plagiarizing-independent-journalists-is-part-of-mainstream-medias-business.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 06/05/2025

Interesting, though, at the price point, out of reach for many who probably need to read it (when it comes out).

Screenshot of cover of the book "A Revolution of Rules : The Regulatory Reform of India’s Nonprofit Sector"

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 11/04/2025

Joining the Inverted Republic ™ club I see.

Screenshot of headline which reads:
‘Unprecedented intrusion’: DOJ shreds Trump-appointed judge for letting Associated Press back into press pool, says it’s invasion of president’s ‘most intimate spaces’

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 11/04/2025

Trying to convince my friends to do a ‘Smartypants Society’ type thing on our video calls. So far I have a few wisecracks, and 0 takers.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 11/04/2025

Pretty kicked about being on this episode of Ctrl-Alt-Speech with @benwhitelaw.bsky.social. Thanks for having me on, Ben! podcast.ctrlaltspeech.com/2315966/epis...

Screengrab of episode listing of Ep. 54 of Ctrl-Alt-Speech podcast. A link to the episode is in the post.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 11/04/2025

Me, to the plot, before I do things for it.

Screenshot of lyrics from (Everything I do) I do it for you by Bryan Adams with 3 lines in focus:

You know it's true
Everything I do
I do it for you

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 06/04/2025

At the park today someone (visibly older than me) stopped me and asked (without any hint of irony), “bro, where is the dog show?” Good sir, I am too old to be anyone’s “bro”(!)

Danny Glover saying (captioned) “I’m too old for this shit.”

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 05/04/2025

There is a reel in my feed featuring Christopher Walken’s* dance from Fatboy Slim’s Weapon of Choice set to Chappel Roan’s Pink Pony Club talking about “dissociating” to get through 2025. Yes. * read the name as the man himself would say it. I don’t make the rules.

Screenshot of reel featuring Christopher Walken’s Weapon of Choice dance set to Chappel Roan’s Pink Pony Club talking about “dissociating” to get through 2025

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 04/04/2025

Does Delhi HC not understand intermediary liability? (maybe there is more in the order 🤷‍♂️) scroll.in/latest/108...

The High Court also said that Wikipedia can not evade responsibility for content on its platform by claiming to be just an intermediary.

“[Wikipedia] cannot completely wash its hands of the contents of the article on the ground that it is only an intermediary and cannot be held responsible for the statement that is published on its platform,” the court said in its judgement.

It highlighted that the platform carries carries “higher” responsibility because it “professes itself to be an encyclopedia and people at large have a tendency to accept the statements made on [it] as gospel truth”.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 03/04/2025

"The only exceptions are places like North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, where there’s no difference between young men and their grandfathers." Damn!

**Demsas:** Let’s step back for a second. This question, though, that I have because you’re raising this question of young men feeling this resentment: Are young men becoming more sexist? Is that what you’re seeing in the data?

**Evans:** I think it depends on how we phrase it. So in terms of, yes, young men are much more likely to say, *Yes, women could work. They can go out to clubs. They can do whatever they like. They can be totally free*, and young men will support and vote for female leaders. So in terms of support for recognizing women’s capabilities, absolutely, younger generations tend to be much more gender-equal, and that holds across the board.

==The only exceptions are places like North Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia, where there’s no difference between young men and their grandfathers.== But in culturally liberal, economically developed countries in the West and East, young men are more supportive.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 24/03/2025

India: ‘Joke-making’ comics are enemies of the state. ‘Hate-speeching, violence-committing’ politicians are the state.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 23/03/2025

Roads and footpaths were ‘yucky’ so Zoey channeled her inner cat and walked on the parapet instead.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 20/03/2025

Google Maps being randomly creepy on a weekday.

Screenshot of a google maps notification with the text:
Download maps for your trip
Search & navigate in <redacted>

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 20/03/2025

This is, what you would call in pro-wrestling parlance, a heel v/s heel affair.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 19/03/2025

What an insane account - Jasmine Mooney who was detained without warning, and based on this - one of the lucky ones who've managed to get out. www.theguardian.com/...

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 18/03/2025

Shouldn't the state bear the costs for reconstruction? Have they been directed to?

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 18/03/2025

I have lots of thoughts, but little to say about this whole Grok thing on Indian Twitter. What I will say is that if it keeps up, then we may get an interesting natural experiment to test a study that concluded conversations with chatbots can dampen conspiracy theory beliefs👇.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 18/03/2025

Every morning, after breakfast, I tell Zoey “let’s go to work (?)”, before walking over to my desk. She immediately brings me her toys. I think…she thinks… this is my job. 😶

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 17/03/2025

<Insert Henry Cavill Witcher Hmmm> Source: michaeljhannon.subst...

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 17/03/2025

"Make podcasts audio-only again" www.bloomberg.com/ne...

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 15/03/2025

Norm breaking in life 🤝 Norm breaking in politics 🤝 Norm breaking with dining etiquette.

Id discovered, after a lot of extreme apprehension about what spoons to use, that if you do something incorrect at table with a certain arrogance, as if you knew perfectly well you were doing it properly, you can get away with it and nobody will think you are bad-mannered or poorly brought up. They will think you are original and very witty.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 14/03/2025

Can imagine this conversation, tbh.

It's not that we hadn't enough to eat at home, it's just that my grandmother always cooked economy joints and economy meat-loafs and had the habit of saying, the minute you lifted the first forkful to your mouth, I hope you enjoy that, it cost forty-one cents a pound, which always made me feel I was somehow eating pennies instead of Sunday roast.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 14/03/2025

One Nation, One Plate's 'Chatte Batte'.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 13/03/2025

“Politicians/political parties/partisans consistently and repeatedly demonstrate that the words ‘opposition’ and ‘alternative’ have very different meanings.”

Screenshot of Page 1 story from today's (2025-03-13) Indian Express about police in Hyderabad arresting two journalists for making a video about the state's Chief Minister based on a complaint made by the Congress party worker.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 12/03/2025

Sorry Bel, i regret to inform you that this timeline didn’t get the memo. No heaven here, just chaos and anomie. But on and on we go.

Lyrics Heaven is a place on earth by Belinda Carlisle:

We'll make Heaven a place on Earth
Ooh, Heaven is a place on Earth

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 12/03/2025

Good piece, this, about Netflix adaptations. h/t Today's Splainer headlines edition. www.nytimes.com/2025...

Hollywood has spent a good century remaking important literature, and I am hardly the first to argue that “the book was better.” But these adaptations suggest something more expansive at work. Thanks to the scale of Netflix’s viewership and its surveillance trove of subscriber data, the company is starting to centralize the world’s moving images under a single umbrella; it is creating a platform where everything has to stream together well, playing to everyone everywhere. Márquez’s book achieved such global success because its sensibility was specific. On TV, it is one of many shows that seem to have been reverse-engineered from the needs of its parent company; it resembles the other things on Netflix more than it resembles anything in Márquez. Its story is dissolved into a world of content which exists, entirely, as its own description — a sign on a tile representing something else altogether.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 12/03/2025

Glad Benedict Evans has said this about Statista. Never understood why it continues to be cited in serious research. www.ben-evans.com/be...

Statista, meanwhile, aggregates other people’s data, makes sure it ranks highly in SEO, and then tries to get you to register or pay to see the result. I think Google should ban this company from the index, but even if you disagree, saying this is the source is like saying the source is ‘a Google search result’. Again, this is an intern-level issue.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 12/03/2025

Crazy, in a different life, we were advising people to avoid this as far back as 2012-2013. www.engadget.com/soc...

The report also suggests that, despite Musk’s assertion there were “a lot of resources” involved, X may have inadvertently left its systems susceptible to a DDoS attack like the one that happened Monday. “X origin servers, which respond to web requests, weren't properly secured behind the company's Cloudflare DDoS protection and were publicly visible,” Wired writes. “As a result, attackers could target them directly. X has since secured the servers.”

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 11/03/2025

Quite enjoyed this section on Arendt in Celine Nguyen's newsletter, who is, for me, also someone I've 'read around' rather than read directly. 1/2

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 08/03/2025

I would read books/volumes on science/‘the scientific method’ failing to self-correct, if I am being honest.

These days, when we find flawed machine learning papers, we don't even try to correct the record. The system doesn't work. In fact, in many fields, studies that fail attempts at replication by other research groups are cited more than those that replicate successfully." The party line among scientists is that science "self-corrects, meaning that the normal process of science is sufficient to root out flawed research, but everything we've seen about the process suggests otherwise.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 07/03/2025

I find it interesting that the Jim Jordan (House Judiciary) Committee subpoenas for "communications with foreign governments regarding ... compliance with foreign censorship laws, regulations, judicial orders, or other government-initiated efforts" don't mention India. 1/3

Screenshot with text from the page: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/chairman-jordan-subpoenas-big-tech-information-foreign-censorship-american

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 05/03/2025

Marking copy to rich people / business owner types in India. I don't know, maybe the phrase "venture capital for civilization" will strike a chord, more than just observing what has been going on for 10-12 years. 1/2

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 05/03/2025

World over, we keep gutting journalism at a time we desperately need it. This is a profession that needs more job security now, but we seem to choosing another way. 1/2

WSJ lays off reporters in San Francisco, New York
March 4, 2025
Posted by Chris Roush
IAPE 1096, the union that represents journalists at The Wall Street Journal, released the following statement on Tuesday:

IAPE members are once again outraged at the news that several colleagues, including six IAPE-represented WSJ reporters, were laid off today in the San Francisco and New York bureaus.

Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones leadership continue to insist the waves of layoffs at bureaus across the country aren’t for cost cutting, but instead part of a restructuring—one which seems to have no end.

Earlier Tuesday, IAPE filed a grievance disputing the separation of some reporters in the San Francisco Technology Bureau into different departments, which may have improperly impacted seniority protection.

Full text from WSJ cuts tech staff, creates tech and media team, March 4, 2025. Posted by Chris Roush
url: https://talkingbiznews.com/media-news/wsj-cuts-tech-staff-creates-tech-and-media-team/

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 01/03/2025

Came across this in a book, and on some days, yeah, it does feel like this: “Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.”

Gradually the waiting began to feel less like waiting and more like this was simply what life was: the distracting tasks undertaken while the thing you are waiting for continues not to happen.

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 28/02/2025

John Mayer: Say what you need to say... have no fear... better to say too much than never say what you need to say... Editor: In 800 words or less. *cries in word count*

Say what you need to say
Say what you need to say
Say what you need to say
Have no fear for giving in
Have no fear for giving over
You'd better know that in the end
It's better to say too much
Than never to say what you need to say again

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Prateek Waghre @prateekwaghre.com · 27/02/2025

The mouth on this one... www.whitehouse.gov/b...

PUBLIC COMMENT INVITED ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ACTION PLAN

Highlighted text:

This Order directed the development of an AI Action Plan to sustain and enhance America’s global AI dominance.

The AI Action Plan will define priority policy actions to enhance America’s position as an AI powerhouse and prevent unnecessarily burdensome requirements from hindering private sector innovation.

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