iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 18/09/2026

Everyone's hungry for data. And of course there's now a "AI Data Procurement Executive" role.

An email from a company's sales team offering to pay in exchange for training on private repositories

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 07/09/2026

FastLog's v1.6.0 release is out. A bunch of changes have gone in since the original release. codeberg.org/siddharthago... Here are some highlights: - Multiple graph support - Tag and Wiki link autocomplete - Support standalone usage - no requirement for Logseq desktop if you don’t want to

codeberg.org

Simply update the local and worktree config files.

NFS that have been advanced since the epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC), followed by a score.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 18/07/2026

WhatsApp is slowly becoming a spam infested wasteland. I receive at least 5 promotional messages every day, even from services where I never signed up. Meanwhile Meta doesn't give a flying fuck about user privacy and is happy minting money.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 11/07/2026

The latest release of HeliBoard brings support for contributing gesture data which will be released under an open-source license. HeliBoard has been the best open-source keyboard I've tried so far. Excited to contribute in any way I can.

HeliBoard app screen for contributing gesture data

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 08/07/2026

Rayfish looks pretty interesting: github.com/rayfish/rayf... NAT hole punching via encrypted relays, powered by Iroh. I'm behind a CGNAT, so unfortunately the connection always requires a relay. I've been wanting to self-host Iroh Relay to see how it works in the wild.

github.com

GitHub - rayfish/rayfish: P2P mesh VPN powered by iroh

P2P mesh VPN powered by iroh. Contribute to rayfish/rayfish development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 07/07/2026

It still seems wild to me that the most popular feed on Bluesky runs off of somebody's home computer. And that Discover is still so bad!

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Reposted by Siddhartha Golu

Vale @vale.rocks · 03/07/2026

A thread, because things are feeling rough at present. 🧵👇 I'm not quite sure where to go or what to do. I'm watching my peers slowly burn out, go quiet, quit the industry, or struggle on hoping it'll get better in time. Even if the storm is weathered, what comes out the other side?

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 28/06/2026

It's a delight reading Matt Levine's columns

Matt Levine's column's starting paragraph:

"PR insider trading
Every financial services firm will tell its new employees, in their first
week or two of work, the same thing: "Be careful with our
confidential information. Don't tell anyone outside of the firm what
you're working on. Don't talk carelessly in elevators. Don't leave
your laptop unlocked. Don't even tell your spouse what you're
working on." Every new employee will take that to heart, for a week
or two; they will go home and their boyfriends or girlfriends will ask
"so what did you do at work today" and they will say "I can't tell
you it's a seeeeeeeeecret" and their boyfriends and girlfriends will
be like "aww that's cute." And then they will work there for a few
months, and some of this scrupulousness will get sanded away, and
they will come home after a long day at work and be like "ugh John
Smith at Amalgamated Sprockets is really getting on my nerves, he
keeps demanding revisions on the model for the merger with
Consolidated Widgets that they want to announce next Wednesday,"
and their boyfriends or girlfriends will be like "yeah you
complained about that yesterday too."
"

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 27/06/2026

I think the biggest threat that is not being talked about more is what the AI craze would do to the next generation of programmers. My niece is learning how to program and just asked me how do I *download* Replit. It's going to be a wild ride for anyone learning to program right now.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 17/06/2026

What happened to Spotify's Discover Weekly?

A screenshot of my discover weekly playlist where I had to hide all the recommendations because they were so bad.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 17/06/2026

Agreed. But I'm also concerned about the $14 million/year that it costs them to run Signal infrastructure: signal.org/blog/signal-... Open-source libraries (OMEMO which is based on libsignal) for self-hosted encrypted chats, using XMPP for example, looks to be the only sustainable solution.

signal.org

Privacy is Priceless, but Signal is Expensive

Signal is the world’s most widely used truly private messaging app, and our cryptographic technologies provide extra layers of privacy beyond the Signal app itself. Since launching in 2013, the Signal...

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Reposted by Siddhartha Golu

Aram Zucker-Scharff @chronotope.aramzs.xyz · 15/06/2026

Extremely rough alpha version, but if you ever wanted to make your PDS also a tiny Internet Archive... we can just do things! archiving.at/view/3mmncuc...

archiving.at

Archivers AT

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 15/06/2026

Found this to be an interesting analogy. On the one hand, I do believe AI will lead to a lot of "personal-itch" apps; on the other hand, I also believe that humans are extremely lazy creatures and a ready-made solution will always win over one which requires effort.

A comment on hacker new which says:

I think, is that everyone who needs small
software to manage a todo list or synchronize
files, or whatever "normal" people do, will end up
with bespoke personalized software written by
their own AI
People can't be bothered to cook for themselves,
and often order crappy, unhealthy food that costs
10 times as much just so they don't have to cook.
Now they're going to build their own software
every time they think they need an app..?

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 12/06/2026

Loved reading this: www.personalcanon.com/p/writing-is... Reading it gives me hope that this intellectual hunger is only going to increase the more AI becomes commonplace.

personalcanon.com

writing is an inherently dignified human activity

the case for starting your own newsletter ✦ and reflections on 2 years, 52 posts, and 31,000 subscribers

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 11/06/2026

Added support for mu.social in Zen Social extension: addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefo... For a moment there, it felt like I was in a completely different land, despite being in the same territory. Those numbers really do a number on my head!

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 11/06/2026

Announcing the first public release of FastLog - a native android app for Logseq: codeberg.org/siddharthago... Had lots of fun building this.

codeberg.org

fastlog

An opinionated, fast, native android app for Logseq

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 04/04/2026

Going through the treesitter main branch switch nightmare after updating neovim to 0.12. Fu....

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 19/03/2026

Added Wander to my website at www.siddharthagolu.com/wander/ Such a neat way to browse the small web

siddharthagolu.com

Wander Console - Browse the Small Web

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 19/03/2026

I used to love reading engineering blog of Facebook. Now I just can't bring myself to care about their endless optimisation of the doomed algorithm. Their latest blog post is called "Enhancing social discovery on Facebook Reels". Man I couldn't care less.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 12/03/2026

In search of the best filesystem for cross-platform compatibility (or at least b/w MacOS and Linux), and turns out there's no "best" solution, even in 2026. exFAT is what gets usually recommended, but it trades off on performance on both Linux and Mac and recovery/repairs are uncertain.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 24/02/2026

I've seen lots of people getting disheartened by the impact of AI tools on writing, including myself, and this comes as a good reminder to shift your focus on the first principles - the act of writing itself. vivqu.com/blog/2026/02...

vivqu.com

Writing as fitness exercise

This is the first-part on writing as necessary friction.Jean-Baptiste Oudry (from Getty Open Content)It makes sense that many writers, when faced with the existential dread of generative AI, return to...

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 23/02/2026

Discord going ape shit with their policies was the best thing to happen to XMPP. I'm noticing so many fresh voices in the community chat, trying to adopt and hack around the protocol for different use-cases.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 20/02/2026

I got a taste of how addictive it could be if I just kept the autoplay videos setting turned on. I used to use Twitter sparingly to get the day's highlights for AI world. And today I realized how dramatically my feed had shifted from text-only to videos-only. No wonder TikTok/Reels are addictive.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 18/02/2026

Well put. I wish there were more Wes Andersons out there.

A reddit comment on the thread "why do people consider Wes Anderson as pretentious" which says:

"The problem with Wes Anderson isn't that he has a very specific style (you wouldn't go to a Monet retrospective and complain about how many times he painted water lilies), it's that we don't have a hundred Wes Andersons all pursuing their own styles. As it is, it's like crawling through a desert and finding a fountain that only dispenses your least favorite soda. The problem isn't the soda, the problem is the lack of choice and supply."

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 09/02/2026

Building a web UI which connects to a locally running mlx-audio server and allows you to download the generated speech.

A screenshot of a work-in-progress web UI to generate speech using mlx-audio server

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 09/02/2026

Tested this for a few days, and sad to say, another one of those overhyped launches. It would skip some words consistently and would break the flow for long sentences. I shifted to using Qwen3-TTS instead and the quality of the voices are much better.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 06/02/2026

I'm on the fence about using Agents, and while Mitchell's post was quite grounded and illuminating, I found myself agreeing more with this POV. TLDR: unless you're Mitchell Hashimoto and can work on hard technical problems by yourself, keep the ability to think to yourself.

A comment on HN (Part I) in response to Mitchell Hashimoto's post on his AI adoption journey. It says:

"LLMs are not for me. My position is that the advantage we humans have over the rest of the natural world, is our minds. Our ability to think, create and express ideas is what separates us from the rest of the animal kingdom. Once we give that over to "thinking" machines, we weaken ourselves, both individually and as a species. That said, I've given it a go. I used zed, which I think is a pretty great tool. I bought a pro subscription and used the built in agent with Claude Sonnet 4.x and Opus. I'm a Rails developer in my day job, and, like MitchellH and many others, found out fairly quickly that tasks for the LLM need to be quite specific and discrete. The agent is great a renames and minor refactors, but my preferred use of the agent was to get it to write RSpec tests once I'd written something like a controller or service object. And generally, the LLM agent does a pretty great job of this. But here's the rub: I found that I was losing the ability to write rspec. I went to do it manually and found myself trying to remember API calls and approaches required to write some specs. The feeling of skill leaving me was quite sobering and marked my abandonment of LLMs and Zed, and my return to neovim, agent- free."

A comment on HN (Part II) in response to Mitchell Hashimoto's post on his AI adoption journey. It says:

"The thing is, this is a common experience generally. If you don't use it, you lose it. It applies to all things: fitness, language (natural or otherwise), skills of all kinds. Why should it not apply to thinking itself. Now you may write me and my experience off as that of a lesser mind, and that you won't have such a problem. You've been doing it so long that it's "hard-wired in" by now. Perhaps. It's in our nature to take the path of least resistance, to seek ease and convenience at every turn. We've certainly given away our privacy and anonymity so that we can pay for things with our phones and send email for "free". LLMs are the ultimate convenience. A peer or slave mind that we can use to do our thinking and our work for us. Some believe that the LLM represents a local maxima, that the approach can't get much better. I dunno, but as Al improves, we will hand over more and more thinking and work to it. To do otherwise would be to go against our very nature and every other choice we've made so far. But it's not for me. I'm no MitchellH, and I'm probably better off performing the mundane activities of my work, as well as the creative ones, so as to preserve my hard-won knowledge and skills. YMMV I'll leave off with the quote that resonates the most with me as I contemplate AI:- "I say your civilization, because as soon as we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization, which is, of course, what this is all about." -- Agent Smith "The Matrix""

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 06/02/2026

How is it that even after such a monumental change with `uv`, the python ecosystem is still giving me headaches when trying to run machine learning models?! I've done all sorts of sorcery of using `venv`, `uv tool ...` and yet still facing errors.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 04/02/2026

Matt Levine is always a pleasure to read

Matt Levine's new post on xAI and SpaceX merger

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 04/02/2026

MIT-licensed song generation model released, and honestly this thing is bonkers. The 4 min demo: www.youtube.com/watch?v=yixZ...

youtube.com

ACE Step v1.5

YouTube video by ACE Music

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 03/02/2026

Indian startups are obsessed with 10-min deliveries and block fonts

Three apps in the play store, all have app icons which are block letter on vibrant colorful backgrounds

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 03/02/2026

I was listening to Acquired's Google part 3 episode and the play about Waymo genuinely fascinated me. I couldn't manage to take a ride when I was in Salt Lake City last November, but I've heard unanimously great things about Waymo. Excited about its future!

A HN user posting his experience with Waymo

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 01/02/2026

Love this Bertrand Russell quote

Bertrand Russell's quote which says:

"Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river - small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being."

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 20/01/2026

Github has become a spam inventory now. I keep getting such emails every week. Those inflated star numbers are really doing the work now.

Unsolicited github spam email asking to try yet another tool

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Reposted by Siddhartha Golu

Mikkel Malmberg @mikker.dev · 16/01/2026

Introducing `steve`: a CLI for driving macOS apps. Like playwright for browsers it's drivable by code agents. Tell them to "manually test using steve". → github.com/mikker/steve

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 16/01/2026

I just tried Supertonic 2 on my Mac, and surprised by the quality of the French sounds. I can see this being very useful for my language learning, especially to generate high quality listening materials.

Supertonic running in the browser locally via WebGPU on Firefox

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 15/01/2026

Learnt about @igalia.com today. Honestly surprised to see such a cracked team patiently doing the best hardcore engineering work, and everything is open-source!

Expertise of the Igalia team: Browsers and Client-side Web Technologies, Multimedia, Accessibility Tools and Technologies, Compilers and Programming languages, Virtualization and Cloud, Embedded Linux and Device Drivers, Graphics Pipeline and Rendering Technologies, Linux Kernel.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 14/01/2026

WhatsApp has started inserting ads (!) in status updates. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to be part of Zuckky's shittified universe.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 13/01/2026

I think this is the central problem with community chat apps. I hate Discord to the core, but they got this UX absolutely correct. Zulip does a lot of things correct, but requiring separate accounts for separate communities is my biggest UX frustration.

A comment on Lobste.rs explaining the biggest problem with Slack/Zulip is that they enforce a completely new account per community.

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Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 10/01/2026

I still think about this random reddit comment which changed how I watched movies in theaters.

A reddit comment which recommends that you should sit 2/3rd the way back in the theaters for optimal sound.

The entire comment:

"I learned this from my sound design class where my prof was an audio engineer. He had done work for all kinds of venues and had some crazy wizard level knowledge about audio. He used only two stereo speakers to make a surround sound audio experience. He directed them specifically and placed chairs in specific spots and if you sat in those two chairs the audio was literally mesmerizing. He then got on the whiteboard and used a bunch of jargon that was over my head while explaining in detail why it's better to sit 2/3rd the way back rather than perfectly halfway. Something about soundwaves and how they travel but honestly I can't remember exactly why."

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