Sagar Singh

Building my own neural network.

[Sagar Singh @ArcSagar91]

i am planning to read david deutsch's the beginning of infinity, and ask questions along the way to keep understand it better. Hope to complete it by 27th Dec, 2025.

[Sagar Singh @ArcSagar91]

@KnowledgeArchiv way too mature for his age

[Śaciṣṭha @RiseBharata]

Wealth Inequality In Delhi.

[Arpit Bhayani @arpit_bhayani]

Reading a tutorial and terms like exponential backoff, jitter, and idempotency keys makes sense. Then you build the thing, the API returns a 500, and you watch your system crash.

The happy path is the part everyone writes about. The request succeeds, the response looks like the example, and the system behaves. That is maybe 20% of the actual code you end up shipping.

The other 80% is what you only discover by running the thing under real conditions. A queue that is supposed to be FIFO but is not under load, a dependency that is "always available" until it is not, or a database connection pool that gets exhausted when 3 slow queries stack up during a deploy.

Hence, reading 10 blog posts about a system is no substitute for spending a weekend building it. The bugs you hit while building it (or, better yet, while running it in production) are the actual curriculum. The blog post is just the syllabus.

Reading teaches the happy path. Building teaches the failure modes. So keep coding and keep shipping.

Hope this helps.

[Lxyv @wholyv]

Math behind being 10% better every week

[Sagar Singh @ArcSagar91]

really well written

[Varun Mayya @waitin4agi_]

I really like this article. I think that the capabilities of a country are fully dependent on the local buying capacity and the size of the local economy. Whether physical or digital, the farther away you have to distribute something, the more expensive it is. Local distribution is always much easier but if local buying power is low then companies have to export which carries a bigger distribution cost because you have to compete against locals in other countries who have a much lower distribution cost. Actually it’s not just distribution: it’s everything from consumer insights to feedback to key relationships that are a distance away. So if you do innovate but you have to necessarily export that innovation to make money, you’re at a disadvantage against local players.

One personal example is that India has never made high quality games simply because the local purchasing power is low. If we had a lot more PCs things would be very different. China has roughly 320 million PC gamers and India is about 39 million. So on players alone, China’s PC base is roughly 8x India’s. BUT China’s PC game spend is on the order of 80–100x India’s, even though its player base is only like 8x larger. The difference mainly is monetization as Indian gamers spend much less (core ARPU has run around $0.29/month), so 39M PC players translate into very little premium game revenue. Game Science’s art director Yang Qi confirmed that nearly 70% of Wukong’s sales came from China itself. Knowing a local buying market exists justifies spending. The only way we can justify what we are spending now on UTA is because we found inroads into global markets through content otherwise this would be a money losing exercise.

The other problem is that low purchasing power economies have too tiny a market for early adopters. If you built an OpenAI in India before anyone else 50% of people wouldn’t believe you and 50% of people will tell you it won’t work or doesn’t have use cases. I think you need a crackpot high purchasing power early adopter network with high failure and bullshit tolerance to make truly innovative things and also forgive crazy companies during early mistakes because history teaches us that the best companies all had v0.1s that were not very convincing to the masses.

Thats why it’s critical for anyone who wants this country to succeed to first really create more jobs, more disposable income, even if that means creating the nth packaged food brand (American grocery stores still have a much wider variety of biscuit brands than India for example) or food delivery apps before they take bigger bets. Not because they need the capital themselves to try bigger bets, but so that they can diffuse more capital into the ecosystem via jobs and the rewards of equity ownership such that that cohort of people become early adopters for other innovative companies.

Success comes from satisfying local market demand (sometimes like in the case of Tesla or Ford there is hidden demand and entrepreneurs need to unlock it) and rarely comes from creating something that has no local demand. After studying Chinese social media so much I have a long thesis on why they did well (bans on global social media platforms constrain desire of products to local players only who now get revenue and profit to do RnD. Think about what % of disposable income from India is being spent on global brands where the desire to buy starts on a global social media platform).

Anyway people complaining about India building “easier businesses” are really not spending the mental energy to think second order. And 9/10 times this same type of person will completely ignore local innovation that is almost always happening in parallel but gets less media coverage.

[antoine @antoine_os]

white pill for my nerds:

60fps e-ink display

a random guy outperformed entire eng teams by developing a pixel by pixel driver for e-ink displays that makes it 60fps.

he did that after work for months, launched it yesterday.

the future is bright

[Sagar Singh @ArcSagar91]

@cneuralnetwork cooking. very large space for experimentation, but getting good with fundamentals goes a long way and 6 months is more than enough to master the fundamentals

[Sagar Singh @ArcSagar91]

@0xGreed_ a truly time tested advice

[tobi @tobific]

I've not been posting consistently for the past few days

my wallets were compromised and drained

and i've been depressed and had lost all my will to post or do anything on chain

the worst thing about all of this is i've absolute no idea how this happened, most likely it's a case of a malware in my old windows pc

to make things worse, the wallets hit were all my main farming ones, before the harvest season, they were drained manually and by the time i realised, they were drained except of a few of my NFTs such as sappy and ens etc

even tho most fund was drained, i was able to transfer my nfts to another wallet and i guess that triggered the manual drainer to impose a safe contract on my main wallet smh

even tho all of this happened before the loudio experiment, i still yapped hard cuz i thought it'd recover me something back and i'll not get this chance again to maybe "make it all back" but it wasn't it

my overall portfolio and worst of all, the "pre-rich" bags have taken a massive hit and

now that all the dust has settled down, i've tried to note down all the mistakes i made that could've been avoided & consulted a friend and have taken some steps to get back on tracks

- the worst and worst of mistake i made was i stored too much on my farming wallets & i didn't used a ledger. such a rookie and noob mistake you could say but it's a lesson for me and i've gotten a couple of ledgers, one for storing assets and one for farming wallets

- i had just one laptop pc for years before 2025 (i bought a new mac this year in feb) and used it both for crypto and my personal stuff and didn't cleared it even after transferred most of my usage stuff to the mac

- my farming were too unorganised and messy and wallet keys were stored on notes and stuff, instead of ledger or actual paper

- my workflow was too chill cuz i did all stuff on a laptop, laying on my bed all day, and for that, i've decided to make a proper desk workspace and properly dedicate myself to my brand and me

i realise even tho all of this is too much, i've got no other way to "make it" for me and my family and like most of CT people, i can't talk about to it to my family too cuz they don't know about this hustle at all

but it's okay and i've considered it as kind of a divine intervention to try it all once again, with all might

i'll start again with new farming wallets, building on-chain footprints and giving it all of my knowledge and this time it'll more vigorous than ever

it'll take some time but i'll be posting on full throttle mode back soon and once i've got everything settled in an organised manner, i'll get back on tracks with everything i've got

peace & love to y'all, it's time to go all in

one last godspeed

[Sagar Singh @ArcSagar91]

There Will Never Be Another Anthony Bourdain https://t.co/IkSF6Gk4tn via @YouTube

[Sagar Singh @ArcSagar91]

44 Harsh Truths About Human Nature - Naval Ravikant (4K) https://t.co/eTdFkTSt5j via @YouTube

[Sagar Singh @ArcSagar91]

I just completed the Build a Maze Solver in Python course on @bootdotdev! Check out my certificate here: https://t.co/YiSGjCpngJ
https://t.co/G1XP6uAHD2

[Sagar Singh @ArcSagar91]

async syntax is pretty interesting

[Prof. Feynman @ProfFeynman]

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent, and original manner possible.

[Sagar Singh @ArcSagar91]

foundational ideas need time to understand , or time need to foundational ideas, or ideas foundational to time need.

[Naval @naval]

Operating Systems are the most valuable companies in the world.

[Varun Mayya @waitin4agi_]

the only thing that really matters is health

[Paras Chopra @paraschopra]

Boredom is the price of freedom.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

I wrote a quick new post on "Digital Hygiene".

Basically there are some no-brainer decisions you can make in your life to dramatically improve the privacy and security of your computing and this post goes over some of them. Blog post link in the reply, but copy pasting below too.

Every now and then I get reminded about the vast fraud apparatus of the internet, re-invigorating my pursuit of basic digital hygiene around privacy/security of day to day computing. The sketchiness starts with major tech companies who are incentivized to build comprehensive profiles of you, to monetize it directly for advertising, or sell it off to professional data broker companies who further enrich, de-anonymize, cross-reference and resell it further. Inevitable and regular data breaches eventually runoff and collect your information into dark web archives, feeding into a whole underground spammer / scammer industry of hacks, phishing, ransomware, credit card fraud, identity theft, etc. This guide is a collection of the most basic digital hygiene tips, starting with the most basic to a bit more niche.

Password manager. Your passwords are your "first factor", i.e. "something you know". Do not be a noob and mint new, unique, hard passwords for every website or service that you sign up with. Combine this with a browser extension to create and Autofill them super fast. For example, I use and like 1Password. This prevents your passwords from 1) being easy to guess or crack, and 2) leaking one single time, and opening doors to many other services. In return, we now have a central location for all your 1st factors (passwords), so we must make sure to secure it thoroughly, which brings us to...

Hardware security key. The most critical services in your life (e.g. Google, or 1Password) must be additionally secured with a "2nd factor", i.e. "something you have". An attacker would have to be in possession of both factors to gain access to these services. The most common 2nd factor implemented by many services is a phone number, the idea being that you get a text message with a pin code to enter in addition to your password. Clearly, this is much better than having no 2nd factor at all, but the use of a phone number is known to be extremely insecure due to the SIM swap attack. Basically, it turns out to be surprisingly easy for an attacker to call your phone company, pretend they are you, and get them to switch your phone number over to a new phone that they control. I know this sounds totally crazy but it is true, and I have many friends who are victims of this attack. Therefore, purchase and set up hardware security keys - the industrial strength protection standard. In particular, I like and use YubiKey. These devices generate and store a private key on the device secure element itself, so the private key is never materialized on a suspiciously general purpose computing device like your laptop. Once you set these up, an attacker will not only need to know your password, but have physical possession of your security key to log in to a service. Your risk of getting pwned has just decreased by about 1000X. Purchase and set up 2-3 keys and store them in different physical locations to prevent lockout should you physically lose one of the keys. The security keys support a few authentication methods. Look for "U2F" in the 2nd factor settings of your service as the strongest protection. E.g. Google and 1Password support it. Fallback on "TOTP" if you have to, and note that your YubiKeys can store TOTP private keys, so you can use the YubiKey Authenticator app to access them easily through NFC by touching your key to the phone to get your pin when logging in. This is significantly better than storing TOTP private keys on other (software) authenticator apps, because again you should not trust general purpose computing devices. It is beyond the scope of this post to go into full detail, but basically I strongly recommend the use of 2-3 YubiKeys to dramatically strengthen your digital security.

Biometrics. Biometrics are the third common authentication factor ("something you are"). E.g. if you're on iOS I recommend setting up FaceID basically everywhere, e.g. to access the 1Password app and such.

Security questions. Dinosaur businesses are obsessed with the idea of security questions like "what is your mother's maidan name?", and force you to set them up from time to time. Clearly, these are in the category of "something you know" so they are basically passwords, but conveniently for scammers, they are easy to research out on the open internet and you should refuse any prompts to participate in this ridiculous "security" exercise. Instead, treat security questions like passwords, generate random answers to random questions, and store them in your 1Password along with your passwords.

Disk encryption. Always ensure that your computers use disk encryption. For example, on Macs this total no-brainer feature is called "File Vault". This feature ensures that if your computer gets stolen, an attacker won't be able to get the hard disk and go to town on all your data.

Internet of Things. More like @internetofshit. Whenever possible, avoid "smart" devices, which are essentially incredibly insecure, internet-connected computers that gather tons of data, get hacked all the time, and that people willingly place into their homes. These things have microphones, and they routinely send data back to the mothership for analytics and to "improve customer experience" lol ok. As an example, in my younger and naive years I once purchased a CO2 monitor from China that demanded to know everything about me and my precise physical location before it would tell me the amount of CO2 in my room. These devices are a huge and very common attack surface on your privacy and security and should be avoided.

Messaging. I recommend Signal instead of text messages because it end-to-end encrypts all your communications. In addition, it does not store metadata like many other apps do (e.g. iMessage, WhatsApp). Turn on disappearing messages (e.g. 90 days default is good). In my experience they are an information vulnerability with no significant upside.

Browser. I recommend Brave browser, which is a privacy-first browser based on Chromium. That means that basically all Chrome extensions work out of the box and the browser feels like Chrome, but without Google having front row seats to your entire digital life.

Search engine. I recommend Brave search, which you can set up as your default in the browser settings. Brave Search is a privacy-first search engine with its own index, unlike e.g. Duck Duck Go which basically a nice skin for Bing, and is forced into weird partnerships with Microsoft that compromise user privacy. As with all services on this list, I pay $3/mo for Brave Premium because I prefer to be the customer, not the product in my digital life. I find that empirically, about 95% of my search engine queries are super simple website lookups, with the search engine basically acting as a tiny DNS. And if you're not finding what you're looking for, fallback to Google by just prepending "!g" to your search query, which will redirect it to Google.

Credit cards. Mint new, unique credit cards per merchant. There is no need to use one credit card on many services. This allows them to "link up" your purchasing across different services, and additionally it opens you up to credit card fraud because the services might leak your credit card number. I like and use privacy dot com to mint new credit cards for every single transaction or merchant. You get a nice interface for all your spending and notifications for each swipe. You can also set limits on each credit card (e.g. $50/month etc.), which dramatically decreases the risk of being charged more than you expect. Additionally, with a privacy dot com card you get to enter totally random information for your name and address when filling out billing information. This is huge, because there is simply no need and totally crazy that random internet merchants should be given your physical address. Which brings me to...

Address. There is no need to give out your physical address to the majority of random services and merchants on the internet. Use a virtual mail service. I currently use Earth Class Mail but tbh I'm a bit embarrassed by that and I'm looking to switch to Virtual Post Mail due to its much strong commitments to privacy, security, and its ownership structure and reputation. In any case, you get an address you can give out, they receive your mail, they scan it and digitize it, they have an app for you to quickly see it, and you can decide what to do with it (e.g. shred, forward, etc.). Not only do you gain security and privacy but also quite a bit of convenience.

Email. I still use gmail just due to sheer convenience, but I've started to partially use Proton Mail as well. And while we're on email, a few more thoughts. Never click on any link inside any email you receive. Email addresses are extremely easy to spoof and you can never be guaranteed that the email you got is a phishing email from a scammer. Instead, I manually navigate to any service of interest and log in from there. In addition, disable image loading by default in your email's settings. If you get an email that requires you to see images, you can click on "show images" to see them and it's not a big deal at all. This is important because many services use embedded images to track you - they hide information inside the image URL you get, so when your email client loads the image, they can see that you opened the email. There's just no need for that. Additionally, confusing images are one way scammers hide information to avoid being filtered by email servers as scam / spam.

VPN. If you wish to hide your IP/location to services, you can do so via VPN indirection. I recommend Mullvad VPN. I keep VPN off by default, but enable it selectively when I'm dealing with services I trust less and want more protection from.

DNS-based blocker. You can block ads by blocking entire domains at the DNS level. I like and use NextDNS, which blocks all kinds of ads and trackers. For more advanced users who like to tinker, pi-hole is the physical alternative.

Network monitor. I like and use The Little Snitch, which I have installed and running on my MacBook. This lets you see which apps are communicating, how much data and when, so you can keep track of what apps on your computer "call home" and how often. Any app that communicates too much is sus, and should potentially be uninstalled if you don't expect the traffic.

I just want to live a secure digital life and establish harmonious relationships with products and services that leak only the necessary information. And I wish to pay for the software I use so that incentives are aligned and so that I am the customer. This is not trivial, but it is possible to approach with some determination and discipline.

Finally, what's not on the list. I mostly still use Gmail + Gsuite because it's just too convenient and pervasive. I also use 𝕏 instead of something exotic (e.g. Mastodon), trading off sovereignty for convenience. I don't use a VoIP burner phone service (e.g. MySudo) but I am interested in it. I don't really mint new/unique email addresses but I want to. The journey continues. Let me know if there are other digital hygiene tips and tricks that should be on this list.

Link to blog post version in the reply, on my brand new Bear ʕ•ᴥ•ʔ blog cute 👇