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 · 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

000

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."
"

000

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.

000

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..?

100

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."

010

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

010

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""

100

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

000

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

010

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

000

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."

010

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

000

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

100

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.

030

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.

130

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."

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 09/01/2026

Got this notification from Google, and I was surprised to learn that the official Google Material Design 3 guidelines actually recommend you to have 30% corner radius. Looks way too playful

An update from Play store which mentions that the corner radius for app icons on Google Play is increasing from 20% to 30% on March 31st, 2026.

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 06/01/2026

Building a time tracker extension for Firefox. Always wanted to hack around with web extensions and the current SOTA LLMs are making it much easier to tinker with your ideas. I've been using these tools like a Luddite though. Here are my reasons for doing so. (1/n)

Screenshot of a work-in-progress time tracker Firefox extension. Shows overall time spent at the top, followed by a list of URLs in decreasing order of time spent in each of them.

100

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 12/12/2025

I have nothing but great things to say about OpenObserve. It's one of the few tools in the space which actually deliver on the marketing copy. I've been self-hosting it for logs, metrics and traces at my startup and apart from the initial set up, I've hardly had to tweak things to make it work.

A screenshot of the OpenObserve dashboard, shows 6.9 billion events, 8.81 TB ingested size

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 12/12/2025

LinkedIn is Indian uncle personified. How is it that despite universally hated, LinkedIn is still the de-facto king of professional networking. Network effect reigning supreme?

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 10/12/2025

The only wrapped I look forward to in December

Screenshot of AntennaPod wrapped which showcases my Top 5 podcasts from 2025. They are:

1. The Seen and the Unseen
2. Acquired
3. Lex Fridman Podcast
4. The Changelog
5. Everything is Everything

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 24/09/2025

An incredibly moving portrayal of two gay men in rural Maharashtra

A movie poster for the film "Cactus Pears". Shows two men with their eyes closed.

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 23/09/2025

Didn't imagine that an extension that I mostly created for myself would be useful to 30 other users as well

A screenshot of a Firefox extension that I'd created named "Zen Twitter/Blesky". Shows 2 reviews and 31 users.

100

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 16/09/2025

"Technicolor maximalism at display. Every shot feels controlled and patient and you can feel the craft shining through. The story is immaterial, maybe even treated as a crutch to let the visuals speak some narrative. Oh, the visuals." www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/cinema...

A poster for the film "Jugnuma/The Fable (2024)". Shows a happy family under an open sky.

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 15/09/2025

This is what happens when you chase markets and money and lose sight of WHAT THE HELL are you building

A funding news for an astrology based startup in India, uses AI

010

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 06/09/2025

A pet peeve of mine - useless changelogs The inverse is also true; I love people who care enough to write good changelogs, even if short ones. Just let me know WHAT "bugs were fixed" and "enhancements were added"!

A screenshot from a changelog of a software update which says:

"New in this release: we've fixed bugs and added various other enhancements."

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 24/08/2025

I'm building a native android app for Logseq. Logseq, the desktop, is an amazing app and has been my daily driver for the past 3 years. However, I found the mobile app to be extremely lacking in performance. Here's my attempt at making a better companion app 1/n

A screenshot of the bare-bones markdown reader app for Logseq, shows my graph's today's journal entry

140

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 21/08/2025

GitHub started spamming the personal feed by including all the releases + any PRs closed in *all* of your starred repos. I consume my feed using RSS so it became a mess. Thankfully, FreshRSS includes a way to mark an article as read automatically if it contains certain keywords.

FreshRSS setting to mark an article as read, includes my settings to remove GitHub's spam

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 18/08/2025

Reddit's product design for notifications is a classic case of user hostile design pattern. Who thought it would be a good idea to have a user go through all of the subscribed communities, individually, and turn the notifications off for each of them?!

Reddit's notification settings, showing you have to turn off notifications for each community

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 17/08/2025

Wish every documentation site gave such an easy option to inject in LLMs

A screenshot of y-websocket library's documentation hosted on GitBook which shows a "Copy Page as markdown for LLMs" button

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 24/07/2025

Matt Levine understands Sam Altman

A paragraph from a recent piece by Matt Levine says:

"I have described Altman's marketing approach as "business negging." If you say "our product is good and will make the world a lot better," that is sort of ho-hum; everyone says that, so your audience will discount it. But if you say "our product will probably make the world a lot better but could destroy humanity, tee hee aren't I a little rascal," that's exciting! People are drawn to danger, and if you go around warning people that your product might destroy humanity then that strongly suggests that you think it's powerful."

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 29/06/2025

I just want to download my insurance policy - why should I have to download an app to do that? How is this not illegal?

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 02/06/2025

This is what I was waiting for, for so long! I'm gonna prune the shit out of my Discover feed now.

Bluesky's screenshot of a post getting disappeared from Discover when you mark "See less like this"

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 02/06/2025

A great way to think about Prisons and how unfair our society treats prisoners

A screenshot from Changelog's Zulip discussion around prison reforms:

"I have been thinking about this for the last couple of days and a thought occured to me. A child is born in your town in a hospital not too far away from you, maybe the same hospital you were born in. Is raised in your culture and traditions, goes to public school just like you did. Watched the same TV shows as you, listened to same songs we all do, and participated in the same culture as we all do. One day this person is arrested for whatever reason. Society doesn't look at this person and say "how have we failed this person, what did fail to provide him or her that they had to resort to crime or drugs. What kinds of messages did our culture and education system feed them which resulted in this etc". Instead society says "this person failed us, they chose to harm our society. This is an affront to our society and they must be punished harshly as possible." I think this is at the core of what's wrong with our so called justice system. Note: It's obvious the justice system in the USA is collapsing rapidly but this notion applies to most other countries as well."

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 25/05/2025

How the hell have we normalized this?

A screenshot of a comment from Lobste.rs which says:

"I had some plans to finish one of my projects with data pipelines (using local environment), but russia decided to shell Kyiv with ballistic missiles and drones this night, so most of the night was quite awful; dogs were shocked, humans crying, all that stuff. No direct hits (at my building), but one was quite close in the neighbourhood. So l'll put some effort in pinging my colleagues and getting some sleep afterwards. Data pipelines - optional."

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 20/05/2025

Google AI Studio randomly decided to give language lessons

A screenshot from Google AI Studio showing marathi language in logs

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 20/05/2025

Not something to boast about Amazon, when the marketing saying "delivery in 10 mins"

A screenshot of amazon now saying the order got delivered in 39 mins

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 04/05/2025

I think this is a pretty accurate description of Philosophy

A quotation from the book "A history of western philosophy" by Bertrand Russell, which reads:

"Philosophy, as I shall understand the word, is something intermediate between theology and science. Like theology, it consists of speculations on matters as to which definite knowledge has, so far, been unascertainable; but like science, it appeals to human reason rather than to authority, whether that of tradition or that of revelation. All definite knowledge-so | should contend-belongs to science; all dogma as to what surpasses definite knowledge belongs to theology. But between theology and science there is a No Man's Land, exposed to attack from both sides; this No Man's Land is philosophy. Almost all the questions of most interest to speculative minds are such as science cannot answer, and the confident answers of theologians no longer seem so convincing as they did in former centuries."

010

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 02/05/2025

Another great piece by @restofworld.org, and another reminder of rampant toxicity in India's startups restofworld.org/2025/bhavish... I keep wondering why is it that this industry rewards "move fast and break things" and not people obsessed with quality and thoughtfulness.

110

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 29/04/2025

Waiting for Aider benchmarks to hit before I start downloading these insane (on paper) models

Screenshot of the latest Qwen3 models comparison across benchmarks with other closed/open source models

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 22/04/2025

I've only ever written two poems in my life, both ~5-6 years ago. Yet they still comfort me whenever I go back and read them. "Fear" in 2020: www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/scared... "Deference vs Indifference" in 2019: www.siddharthagolu.com/posts/defere...

Screenshot of a poem which reads:

"I’m scared.

No, not because there’s a pandemic going on,
even though that itself is enough
to make one lose their mind.

There’s another deadly virus crawling
its way into my whole being.
Slowly eating away at my sanity,
feasting on my thoughts,
mutating inside my head as if a colony of ants was given
an open invitation to a room full of sugary syrup.

I’m disintegrating.

Funny how the same thoughts,
who once used to tell me there’s an ocean of possibilities out there;
are slowly drowning me into the same pool,
replacing me, devouring me
bit-by-bit
as if my feet are tied with stones of expectations
and I keep swimming to the bottom, mistaking it for the shore.

Splash. Splash. Splash.

I see people making art, saving lives, reading books, writing novels,
cooking food, running home marathons -
resolving to turn this gloom into resilient happiness.
And I can’t help but feel disgusted
at my curled up crying self in the bedroom corner,
struggling to tell apart midnight from noon."

A screenshot of a poem which reads:

"There used to be a time
when things used to be simple.
I’d wake up, rub my eyes, sit up straight, close my eyes,
And pray that He will continue to guide me
as He had done the previous day.
There used to be a time
when I used to love the aroma
of the stick when it burned,
lighting up my day with the secret enchantments,
as if the secrecy itself was the source of my happiness.

There used to be a time
when coming home after a bad day,
I’d sit on my bed and join my hands and close my eyes
and quietly shed a tear.
The statues didn’t move or speak or whisper,
but I felt assured that somehow those little stones
were the only ones who listened to me
and answered back.

But now,
I wake up and lie on my bed for hours,
watching the fan complete circles after circles after circles,
as if I was stuck in the middle while everyone else around me
kept going through life as if it was such an easy task.
But now,
The smell of the burning stick nauseates my senses,
the secret spells make me mad,
the constant enchantings feel as if someone lit a person on fire
while they were sleeping.
But now,
when I come back home after a bad day,
to the empty apartment echoing with silence so loud
I worry my neighbors will start complaining -
Even crying for hours doesn’t help."

010

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 11/04/2025

Finally finished Volume III of The Complete Story of Civilization - Caesar and Christ. Took ~30 hours to finish this one. I was reading Proust's Volume III (The Guermantes Way) alongside this one, finishing these two feels like the end of an era. Will write up my thoughts on the book in some time.

A screenshot of a time tracker application showcasing the amount of time it took me to read the book "The complete story of civilization: Caesar and Christ"

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 17/03/2025

Noticed a dramatic increase in these kind of emails in the past year

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 14/03/2025

Working on a 3rd party vendor integration and this is what the response json looks like. This should be a case study on how NOT to name variables.

a screenshot of an api response which has weird and inconsistent variable naming

000

Siddhartha Golu @siddharthagolu.com · 12/03/2025

Anki's website just had a design facelift, and it looks so much more beginner friendly and "modern". Kudos to the team! apps.ankiweb.net

A screenshot of the new landing page of Anki

000