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Udhay Shankar

@ushankar.bsky.social
237 followers 122 following 92 posts

Connector. Conversation starter. Counselor to entrepreneurs. Founder, The Goa Project. www.digeratus.in

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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 16/09/2026
This was inevitable, but keeping it completely free for so long is what made the near-total ubiquity possible. www.livemint.com/money/person...
livemint.com
UPI is no longer free for all as conditions apply | Mint
NPCI has announced merchant discount rate (MDR) on a host of UPI transactions, effective 15 October, while keeping it free for some. Here's what has changed.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
I am a bit of an audio snob in that I prefer wired headphones to wireless ones, for reasons of sound quality. However, when there is construction activity (a jackhammer going full blast right outside my window) then ANC becomes a sanity saver.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 17/08/2026
This is clever, and interesting - especially for people who are old enough, or geeky enough, to assume that 'crypto' means 'cryptography'. 😀 declaude.org/watermarking/
declaude.org
How AI text watermarking works
A gentle visual guide to how a statistical mark hides inside generated text, and what erases it.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
The Phone in Your Hand: a part-by-part teardown of "the most intricate machine you’ve ever held". everythingmachine.io/phone/
everythingmachine.io
The Phone in Your Hand
A layer-by-layer teardown of the most intricate machine you’ve ever held.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 07/05/2026
BUT HER EMAILS
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 01/05/2026
Fully Homomorphic Encryption is mainstream now? 😮 spectrum.ieee.org/the-fog-clou...
spectrum.ieee.org
The Fog, a New Encrypted Cloud Platform, Rolls In
It keeps data encrypted all the time—even while computing
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 25/04/2026
Reverse engineering Google's watermark. github.com/aloshdenny/r...
github.com
GitHub - aloshdenny/reverse-SynthID: reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection
reverse engineering Gemini's SynthID detection. Contribute to aloshdenny/reverse-SynthID development by creating an account on GitHub.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 20/03/2026
My latest (and unfortunately more widespread than ever) annoyance: email that appears to be written by an LLM, featuring extreme verbosity and over the top gushing.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 22/02/2026
"Semantic Ablation" is my new favourite phrase. www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/s...
theregister.com
Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is boring and dangerous
opinion: The subtractive bias we're ignoring
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 18/02/2026
I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you use Windows 11, you can update all your apps at one go with a single command. www.howtogeek.com/winget-is-wi...
howtogeek.com
WinGet is Windows' best-kept secret—here's what it can do for you
You need to start using Windows' overlooked package manager.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 08/02/2026
An old laptop at home still boots, so I spent an evening putting Linux on it (Xubuntu, if you're curious). It struck me how painless the actual installation was, and how much effort I had to put into the prep work. Quite a difference from the first time I installed Slackware in 1996.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 06/02/2026
There appears to be a distinct lack of fecal matter here, Mr Holmes. www.wired.com/story/hollyw...
wired.com
Hollywood Is Losing Audiences to AI Fatigue
Entertainment about or made with artificial intelligence has been missing the mark with viewers over the past year.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 17/01/2026
When food geekery meets code geekery. farzanashaju.github.io/how-does-ind...
farzanashaju.github.io
How Does India Cook Biryani?
A large-scale dataset and VLM-based pipeline for analyzing procedural differences across 12 regional Indian biryani variants using 120 cooking videos.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 13/01/2026
#TIL that 'ramen' and 'lo mein' are basically the same word. www.etymologynerd.com/blog/stretch...
etymologynerd.com
STRETCHY NOODLES
Ramen was brought by Chinese immigrants to Japan in the late 1800s, and it soon became a staple of their culinary culture. After the instant variety was created in 1958, it also grew in popularity in....
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 08/12/2025
To quote @edzitron.com, "Here’s A Diagram Of How Unbelievably Circular All The Money In AI Compute Has Become"
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 15/11/2025
I will be moderating this session. Hope to see you there!
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 25/10/2025
No shit, Sherlock. www.deccanherald.com/india/karnat...
deccanherald.com
Bengaluru Traffic: ORR, Sarjapur Roads Over Capacity
Traffic Study: ORR and Sarjapur Road face severe congestion, with vehicle flow exceeding capacity. Discover solutions to ease Bengaluru's peak hour gridlock.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 23/10/2025
QotD (referring to the AWS outage, but can refer to many other things also): "Once you reach a certain point of scale, there are no simple problems left."
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 13/09/2025
QotD: "Ethernet: because cables are ugly, but packet loss is uglier."
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
Hanlon's Razor. futurism.com/ai-coding-se...
futurism.com
Programmers Using AI Create Way More Glaring Security Issues, Data Shows
AI has proven repeatedly to have issues with accuracy — and using it as a coding assistant creates more security problems, too.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 09/09/2025
#MorningMusing : Removing the first letter from both words in the phrase "trick troll" yields a phrase that means roughly the same thing.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 07/09/2025
Nudge theory in action. www.business-standard.com/health/skipp...
business-standard.com
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 04/09/2025
This is basically Part 2 of a train of thought that @rohitkhare.bsky.social started a few decades ago. (link in comments) kk.org/thetechnium/...
kk.org
The Trust Quotient (TQ)
Wherever there is autonomy, trust must follow. If we raise children to go off on their own, they need to be autonomous and we need to trust them. (Parenting is a school for learning how to trust.) If ...
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 23/08/2025
"...the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second." www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/21/1...
technologyreview.com
In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses
It’s the most transparent estimate yet from one of the big AI companies, and a long-awaited peek behind the curtain for researchers.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 22/08/2025
Probably a test of some kind. www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/c...
theregister.com
China cut itself off from the global internet on Wednesday
: Great Firewall took out all traffic to port 443 at a time Beijing didn't have an obvious need to keep its netizens in the dark
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 21/08/2025
This is not surprising. Without: ⁍ Training (of the humans using it); ⁍ Training Data (for the models); and ⁍ Use cases (of actual pain points); this will just be another hypefest that will wither in the face of the inevitable backlash.
fortune.com
MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing
There’s a stark difference in success rates between companies that purchase AI tools from vendors and those that build them internally.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 10/08/2025
Can't really argue with this. One only hopes the political appointee coach doesn't overwork him into premature retirement. indianexpress.com/article/spor...
indianexpress.com
Why Indian cricket doesn’t deserve Jasprit Bumrah
The fickle fans and rent-a-quote experts have been exposed by their insensitive criticisms of a player fighting his body to do his best for the country
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 09/08/2025
If the MSM has picked up on it, has it peaked? :) nymag.com/intelligence...
nymag.com
SEO Is Dead. Say Hello to GEO.
Search-engine optimization now feels dated. Generative-engine optimization is all about trying to trick AI chatbots.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 30/07/2025
Art imitates life imitates art... This seems to be the first case of a company developing a feature because ChatGPT is incorrectly telling people it exists. www.holovaty.com/writing/chat...
holovaty.com
Adding a feature because ChatGPT incorrectly thinks it exists | Holovaty.com
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 21/07/2025
Researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to detect cancer-specific DNA fragments in the bloodstream more than three years before a clinical diagnosis. aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscov...
aacrjournals.org
Detection of Cancers Three Years prior to Diagnosis Using Plasma Cell-Free DNA
AbstractTo explore how early cancers can be detected prior to clinical signs or symptoms, we assessed prospectively collected serial plasma samples from the Atherosclerosis Risk in Communities study, ...
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 30/06/2025
I sure don't mind a change I sure don't mind a change Yeah, I sure don't mind I sure don't mind a change I sure don't mind a change But I've fell on black days I've fell on black days
cnet.com
Microsoft Retires Legendary 'Blue Screen of Death' After 40 Years of Frowny Faces
Meet its mournful replacement: the black screen of death, which won't have the same sad face.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 29/06/2025
Just read an article where the writer had to use AI to filter out the flood of AI generated job applications he was getting. I am wondering what the net utility value is.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 25/06/2025
24T tokens of organized web data arxiv.org/abs/2506.14111
arxiv.org
Essential-Web v1.0: 24T tokens of organized web data
Data plays the most prominent role in how language models acquire skills and knowledge. The lack of massive, well-organized pre-training datasets results in costly and inaccessible data pipelines. We ...
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 19/06/2025
#TIL: Add swearing to your Google request for AI-free results. "How to paint a fence" will return AI summaries & recommended results, in addition to actual results. "How to paint a fucking fence" will omit that & focus on actual results. Not sure why, or how long this will last, but here we are.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 13/06/2025
I sat down with Sandeep Balaji and Pushkar Singh of the Building in India podcast recently for a wide-ranging conversation about (heh) building a startup in India. Give it a watch here, and feel free to forward it far and wide if you think it is useful.: www.youtube.com/watch?v=1H-Z...
youtube.com
VCs Secretly Look For Founders With This ONE Skill | Udhay Shankar
YouTube video by Building in India
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 12/06/2025
The progeny : "The entire credit card business is based on people going into DEBT! Why would they DO that?" A demo of 1. Admirable clear headedness 2. Amazing naïveté 3. All of the above Discuss.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 11/06/2025
For those following the latest Meta privacy controversy. Here's a somewhat technical explanation of how they are evading Android's sandbox restrictions, and how it could lead to VERY LARGE liability. www.zeropartydata.es/p/localhost-...
zeropartydata.es
“Localhost tracking” explained. It could cost Meta 32 billion.
You just can't finish off Zuckerberg.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 10/06/2025
Moore's Law. Kryder's Law. Edholm's Law. These are the what that enabled business to move to the cloud. That also implies your business is at the mercy of someone else's server infrastructure. And when (not if) it goes down, there's not a whole lot you can do. www.moneycontrol.com/technology/c...
moneycontrol.com
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 09/06/2025
Coming back into town after a couple of weeks, started the car, which was throwing up scary messages about battery failure. Turns out the system needed to be rebooted. So the first law of tech support still holds. ("Most problems can be fixed by turning it off and on again.")
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 31/05/2025
This is tomorrow, 5:30 pm IST.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
For me, there's an easy answer: Judas Priest's Painkiller.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 18/05/2025
This sounds like the line about putting a humidifier and a dehumidifier into the same room and letting them fight it out. www.newscientist.com/article/2480...
newscientist.com
Chemists discover 'anti-spice' that could make chilli peppers less hot
An analysis of compounds in chilli peppers has revealed chemicals that seem to negate their heat-giving capsaicinoids. This explains why the Scoville scale for measuring spicyness isn't always accurat...
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
You may have heard of the tale of a car engine that wouldn't start when the owner bought vanilla ice cream but was OK with other flavours. Here's a similar story of Janet Jackson crashing laptop drives. devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/...
devblogs.microsoft.com
Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers - The Old New Thing
Not an artistic judgement. Just a technical one.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 05/05/2025
"Fraud is a necessary business expense". Put another way, it is often preferable to tolerate (some amount of) false negatives in order to drive down false positives. In the legal world, this is known as 𝗕𝗹𝗮𝗰𝗸𝘀𝘁𝗼𝗻𝗲'𝘀 𝗥𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼 www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/opti...
bitsaboutmoney.com
The optimal amount of fraud is non-zero
Counterintuitively, businesses, customers, and society prefer having fraud to what they'd need to do to not have it.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
The pain is real.
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Reposted by Udhay Shankar
Peter G @zigzackly.bsky.social · 26/04/2025
At the TGP Sessions, we’re doing an open gallery — like an open mic, but for visual artists — and want to feature artists at the early stages of their careers and dedicated amateurs too. Please help us reach more people? thegoaproject.wordpress.com/2025/04/18/s...
thegoaproject.wordpress.com
Screen share: you
Eligibility You must be in the early to middle stages of your art journey, and you must be over 18. A simple way to look at it would be to understand our intent for these open sessions: to give a p…
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Reposted by Udhay Shankar
The Goa Project @thegoaproject.bsky.social · 18/04/2025
We continue our series of open platforms for early- to mid-career practitioners. After poets, storytellers, and musicians, the next one is for visual artists. Please see thegoaproject.wordpress.com/2025/04/18/s... And don’t forget to register! bit.ly/TGPSessions
On a yellow background, a faint wave pattern runs down the right side.
On top, in a yellow rectangle: Showcase
Below, the headline: Screen share
Below, a subhead: An open gallery for visual artists
Next, the session date: 4 May
Next, a circular window, and a name: You
And below that, a descriptor: An up-and-coming artist
Below, at centre, the logotype for The Goa Project Sessions, which has the words ‘The Goa Project’ in white text next to a stylised sunset-and-water image, and next to that, the word ‘Sessions’ within a stylised video camera image.
In a black strip at the bottom: Once every four weeks on Sundays, 5:30 p.m. to 6:30 p.m. IST, on Zoom.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 20/04/2025
via Bruce Schneier: NIST just released a comprehensive taxonomy of adversarial machine learning attacks and countermeasures. nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/ai/...
nvlpubs.nist.gov
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 17/04/2025
QotD from @scalzi.com that echoes some of my thoughts about engaging in 'debate' online with all but a small selection of people (not all of whom agree with me, but are known to be high SNR). If you're not familiar with the term "Gish gallop" I encourage you to look it up.
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Udhay Shankar @ushankar.bsky.social · 10/04/2025
Everything is securities fraud, as Matt Levine reminds us. economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/interna...
economictimes.indiatimes.com
'Great time to buy!': How Trump's 'buy' tip on social media before his 90-day tariffs pause made money for investors
Stocks were teetering on Wednesday morning when Donald Trump posted, “THIS IS A GREAT TIME TO BUY!!!” on Truth Social. Just hours later, he announced a 90-day pause on most tariffs, sending markets so...
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