Akshay Lal

Latte Dad | Formerly co-founder at Playment (YC W17)

[Akshay Lal @AKL01]

@BenCrellin This is very helpful!

Inspired by your spreadsheet, I made this lightweight site for viewing the schedule in your local time zone. It’ll update as the tournament progresses.

https://t.co/tMT5mcVNaK

[Akshay Lal @AKL01]

Despite moving 5h30m across the world, This world cup is still going to keep me up at night.

Also, I vibe-coded something so you can check the world cup schedule in your timezone: https://t.co/qyztmpeDXt

[Ben Crellin @BenCrellin]

Here's my World Cup schedule spreadsheet.

It's so difficult to watch every match live from Europe that you could raise money for charity by attempting to do it.
https://t.co/LnlPcr1WE9

[The Kaipullai @thekaipullai]

For everyone who is disappointed that we didn’t finish Pakistan. I have only one question.

What exactly do you mean by “Finish Pakistan”? What do you expect to do?

Do you want to do a WW2 style Operation Sickle Cut, launch armored pincer movements, encircle Pakistani armies and annex Pakistan? Why on earth would you want to do that?

Do you want to add 300 million hostile people, some of whom already think blowing themselves up is their greatest purpose in life? How will you manage them?

Is that how you will finish Pakistan?

Or do you want to nuke them out of existence?

Because let me give you a reality check here. We won’t do that. We can’t do that. Indian citizens cannot morally contemplate, let alone sanction, nuking 300 million people. So that option is out.

Then Someone said, “Let’s split Pakistan into 5 countries”.

Now, Pakistan isn’t some Ikea Furniture that you can assemble or disassemble at your will. As hopeless they may be, they still have a functioning military and a working bureaucracy. They will do anything they can to keep the country together.

With all our might, with all our focus, we can exploit that Faultline, but it will take a lot of money and energy and 10-15 years. Are you ready to wait that long?

Some people said we should do a large-scale attack on all their air bases, military bases, Ports, Military HQ everything. Obliterate them out of existence.

Sounds nice if you are movie general.

In reality if we do that, Pakistan will launch nukes on Mumbai and Delhi. Simple. Because it will be their last resort and they will exercise it.

Obviously, we will retaliate and wipe them out of existence, but are ready to lose our 2 big cities and the lives of 20 million Indians as a price for taking out their military?

I don’t think so.

Finally, what is War? War is nothing but politics by other means. And War without objective is pointless.

Any battle launched should be with a purpose.

Our purpose in this strike was two-fold

1. Send a message to Pakistan that for every Indian your terrorist kills, we will kill 100 of your terrorists. We will take you out even if you are ensconced in the heart of your country. We will come after your terrorists like a wrath of God.
2. If Pakistan retaliates, not only can we handle them, but we will also hit and twist the knife if it comes to that.

We have achieved it. In fact, we have more than achieved it.

We have put the fear of God in the terrorists. Obviously, they will try again, but this time they know we will hit back.

And we have clearly shown Pakistan that we can penetrate wherever we want into Pakistan, while the maximum they can do is look up and shake their fists.

Some people also speak about India being diplomatically isolated.

In this entire exercise, if anyone has been isolated, it is Pakistan.

In the olden days, as soon as something bad from Pakistan happened, most countries used to descend on us, asking us to be restrained, calm, resilient etc.

This time not only did nobody speak, but they also allowed us three days of complete freedom of action where we stuck fear in the hearts of the Pakistani military.

So much so, they had to beg to us to stop.

In international diplomacy, no country will come out and say “Please attack someone else. We are with you” .

They will support you only when you are being attacked. The fact that nobody said anything when we attacked, is a diplomatic success in itself. Just that we don’t see it.

To summarize, as far as Operation Sindoor is concerned

1. We sent 200 jihadis to where they belong.
2. Took out 9 terrorist locations deep inside Pakistan
3. Attacked all major Pakistani Air bases, made a complete mockery of their air defence system.
4. Made them beg for us to stop. I mean if it is a wrestling match, the person who taps out first is the one who loses. Pakistan tapped out. Ergo, they lost.
5. Ensured Indus Water Treaty is now firmly in the dustbin.
6. Have given ourselves the freedom to attack Pakistan as soon as a Terrorist incident takes place.

If this is not a win for us, then I don’t know what is.

P:S: India wants to be an advanced country and has to provide for 80 crore people who are below the age of 30.

We have to focus on industrialization, technological self-sufficiency and agricultural modernization.

We have higher priorities than fighting pointless wars against a country who has nothing and can give nothing.

[Sohan @HiSohan]

Big congrats from team India@ML @lossfunk! 🎉🇮🇳

Absolutely thrilled to see 25 papers featuring brilliant researchers from India accepted at #ICLR2025! 🔥

Massive achievement & testament to the growing strength of AI/ML research in the country.

A thread celebrating their work: 👇

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

Announcement 📢📢

I'm planning to start an AI hackhouse in Bangalore!

It includes:
- Brilliant peer-group to learn from
- Free office space
- Connections (will open my network and my 170k+ followers to you)
- (Still deciding) grants, GPUs

Apply 👇

Please RT for reach!

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

Hello, I have a fantastic Saturday morning read for you. In fact, you'll be engrossed in this the whole day.

As promised, we have published our disruptive project - the unique public-health project funded by @paraschopra to analyze common/well-known protein supplements sold in India.

Citizens protein project: A self-funded, transparent, and concerning report on analysis of popular protein supplements sold in the Indian market @theliverdoc @paraschopra @arifhussaintm

Full paper: https://t.co/EVUCPbzCh5

Popular 36 brands in all.

Here is an interesting fact: You will see that we have published the paper in a general medicine open access journal instead of a high impact nutrition/ sports journal. Well, we did submit this paper to multiple sports/ nutrition journals and not surprisingly, it was rejected from all of those - I wondered why and then found the answer. Many members of the editorial board, including editot-in-chief of those journals were "advisors," "consultants," or "promoters" of certain protein/supplement brands! Lot of conflict of interests for them to peer-review and publish our paper which openly took names and provided transparent analyses. Peer-review publishing is really broken in a sense. But then journals like Lippincott's Medicine provided a neutral ground for us to publish and also we could afford the additional open access fee indepedent of the full funding.

The total cost of funding this project is
INR 700,000 ($8400, by Paras)+INR 192,000 ($2300, by Liver Doc Team)=892,000 ($10700)

Please see the abstract section. Lot of information snippets are provided there. Also please read the whole study, our detailed finding and its implications. Focus on the supplementary files (which can be downloaded) and given at the end of the manuscript online.
Full paper: https://t.co/EVUCPbzCh5

Here is a short summary for protein users:
➡️Best whey - One Science & Ultimate Nutrition
➡️Best medium range whey- Nutrabox
➡️Best vegan protein- Origin
➡️Worst whey brand- Big Muscles
➡️Worst plant-based- Amway
➡️Worst brands advertised as best - Protinex/Ensure/B-protin
➡️Worst protein content- B-Protin, Ensure Plus, Bakson's Protein & Vegan by Big Muscles
➡️Brands that need extreme caution- Protein by Elements/Nutrilite by Amway [fungal toxins]
➡️Herbal blended proteins have more contaminants/pesticides than non-herbal

**If anyone (or a group) would like to indepedently fund [The Citizens Project] testing on other untested but popular brands, please do contact my group at : abbyphilips[at]theliverinst[dot]in**

For a full summary and brands and their coding in the manuscript, you can check this thread:
https://t.co/Ym1xPvqp1l

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

"Because it works b*itches."
Gervais x Dawkins

[Jared Friedman @snowmaker]

(0/25) Here's a list of 25 YC companies that have trained their own AI models. Reading through these will give you a good sense of what the near future will look like.

[Ultima @UltimaShadowX]

I just remembered this Japanese commercial for DBZ: Kakarot and how perfectly it reflects how much Toriyama's work really affected so many people's lives.

May he forever rest in peace.

[Raj Bhagat P #Mapper4Life @rajbhagatt]

Here's a compilation of my #maps which can help you in understanding the #Bengaluru #Water situation a bit better.

Bengaluru is unofficially a hill station which is located nearly a kilometre above sea level.

[India Wants To Know: India's First Panel Quiz Show @IWTKQuiz]

"It took him 24 years & 18000 feet to find himself" - This was the tagline of the film "Lakshya" that released in 2004.

The film narrates the story of an aimless rich youngster who joins the Indian Army and discovers his true goal!

A thread 🧵

[Boyan Slat @BoyanSlat]

Recently, I decided I wanted to read every page of one of my favorite websites, @OurWorldInData.

I’m about halfway now.

Here are the 30 most surprising things I’ve learned about the world so far! 🧵

[Akshay Lal @AKL01]

@_svs_ Blood sweat and Pixels

[Akshay Lal @AKL01]

@championswimmer Researchers have varied opinions. I don’t think there’s any universally agreed upon understanding. This attempt by Meta AI Research is one example to show how far we might be from AGI:

[AK @_akhaliq]

GAIA: a benchmark for General AI Assistants

paper page: https://t.co/XWUT9RmhL8

introduce GAIA, a benchmark for General AI Assistants that, if solved, would represent a milestone in AI research. GAIA proposes real-world questions that require a set of fundamental abilities such as reasoning, multi-modality handling, web browsing, and generally tool-use proficiency. GAIA questions are conceptually simple for humans yet challenging for most advanced AIs: we show that human respondents obtain 92\% vs. 15\% for GPT-4 equipped with plugins. This notable performance disparity contrasts with the recent trend of LLMs outperforming humans on tasks requiring professional skills in e.g. law or chemistry. GAIA's philosophy departs from the current trend in AI benchmarks suggesting to target tasks that are ever more difficult for humans. We posit that the advent of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) hinges on a system's capability to exhibit similar robustness as the average human does on such questions. Using GAIA's methodology, we devise 466 questions and their answer.

[Akshay Lal @AKL01]

@theliverdoc @BeerBicepsGuy Loved the “And it is not about convicing anyone, it is about being educated about/doing what is right” 💯

[Akshay Lal @AKL01]

@WazBLR @IndianFootball @bengalurufc I’d love to sponsor their jerseys. Please DM me.

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

Dear Ankur,

1. These were not my recommendations instead a list of all that I consume. I am pretty sure my thread was in no way endorsing or glorifying the use of these supplements.
Response: I did not see a disclaimer, but instead it was a direct advise based on anecdotal matters that you felt helped you. You could have merely mentioned your lifestyle changes instead of providing links to purchase supplements. That is not how medical science works. Some of the supplements (Ashwagandha and Curcumin) are highly liver-toxic in at-risk groups and causes non-dose dependent liver injury even in healthy people.

2. I work with a certified trainer and it’s possible he is mis-informed. I trust him but would love to understand your perspective for our benefit.
Response: Unfortunately, I am sorry, it is too late now. You should have, as I suggested put up a disclaimer mentioning that these "healthcare advises" were based on your anecdotal and unverified experiences which were supported by only more anecdotal/possibly mis-information from your trainer who is not a clinical nutritionist or a registered healthcare provider.

3. Would you keen to help me understand your pov on some of the things you mentioned in your tweet?
Response: Of course I would love to when time permits. Ideally, you should have spoken to a medical/healthcare provider before the tweet was made for some clarity and empirical evidence on the content.

All I did was damage control. Nothing personal. Public health misinformation destroys lives - you might have done it unintentionally, but please take care in the future.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

31 years ago #Today, Wolfenstein 3D, the first popular game with ray casting, was released.

[read more: https://t.co/3TD9HJ4Yi1]

[The Product Folks 🚀 @TheProductfolks]

PLG is the #1 skill for PMs 🔥

Companies such as Slack, Canva & Zerodha have leveraged it to boost their growth 📈

🚀 Launching Product Led Growth Cohort 2.0 🚀

To join for FREE:

1. RT + Like this Tweet 🔄 ❤️
2. Register here 👇

https://t.co/XPFTqViRoD

[Nirant @NirantK]

1/6 🚨Exciting news for all the AI enthusiasts!🚨

I am thrilled to announce the upcoming Deep Hack on Generative AI on 31st March in Bengaluru! 💻🤖

Remote submissions welcome!

👉Join us for a day of creativity & innovation!

https://t.co/dbtioou5tN