A history in Making for the Indian Aerospace 🔥
India is set to enter a new era of private spaceflight as Skyroot Aerospace prepares to launch Vikram-1, the country's first privately developed orbital rocket, from ISRO's Satish Dhawan Space Centre (SDSC-SHAR), Sriharikota. The launch window is open from 12 July to 4 August 2026 under Mission Aagaman.
🔹 India's first private orbital rocket mission
🔹 Launch Window: 12 July – 4 August 2026
🔹 Launch Site: SDSC-SHAR, Sriharikota
🔹 Rocket: Vikram-1 (4-stage orbital launch vehicle)
🔹 Payload Capacity: Up to 350 kg to Low Earth Orbit (LEO)
🔹 Mission Goal: Validate in-flight performance, propulsion, guidance, and stage separation systems
🔹 Payloads: Multiple domestic and international customer satellites
🔹 Milestone: Marks India's first attempt by a private company to place satellites into orbit after ISRO's decades-long leadership in space launches.
Meta burns $2.65B a year on AI tokens. at $300K for a Meta engineer, that's enough to pay ~9,000 engineers for a full year.
now ask yourself: since the layoffs, has Meta shipped anything that feels like 9,000 engineers’ worth of output?
Indian students are DIYing a semiconductor fab at IIT Bombay.
In just 10 months they've built:
1. A DLP-based lithography machine.
2. A tube furnace to oxidise silicon.
3. A DC plasma sputter.
Total cost: ₹30 lakh.
Here's a rare behind-the-scenes look at HackerFab IITB.
This is big: all access to Mythos and Fable AI models disabled for everyone outside America.
First thoughts:
1. Technology is the ultimate weapon. National sovereignty, national security, all of it is now about technology.
2. Globalization is dead and Bharat must find her own way ahead.
We must keep these two ideas in mind.
What can our government do right now? Ensure that orgs in India embrace smaller models, both Indian and Chinese open source ones. With a bit of effort, we can make them work. Anyway, why pay money to people who don't even want to sell to you?
We must deepen our R&D. Sarvam has been on it and we have been on it but remember that the latest models cost not only huge GPU budgets to train, the GPUs themselves are restricted. So we can't afford the scale of money (of the order of $100+ billion to even get in the game!) and even if we could come up with the money, we can't get all the GPUs. I would not like to ask the government to fund tens of billions of dollars on this anyway - the money has far better uses.
Zoho has been pursuing alternative R&D approaches that are far, far less expensive but by its nature cutting edge R&D takes time and we are patient. I am confident we will get there.
Any remaining people in India who have delusions about globalization should wake up now.
This 4,500-year-old terracotta dice from the Indus-Saraswati Civilization is a powerful reminder of India’s living heritage. Dicing is also mentioned as a popular game in Rig and Atharva Vedas (two of the four sacred Vedic scriptures).
From symbols and craftsmanship to rituals, yogic practices, and collective memory, numerous elements of ancient Indian civilization continue to thrive in the daily social and religious life of Indian society across regions and communities.
Civilizational inheritance is not just about geography or ruins, it is defined by living customs, symbols, rituals, and unbroken cultural consciousness. India is the enduring living continuity of the Indus-Saraswati Civilization.
#IndusSaraswatiCivilization #AncientIndianHeritage
Researchers from IIT Madras and IISc Bengaluru have solved a chemistry puzzle that remained unanswered for over 70 years.
As reported in The Indian Express, the team led by Prof. Sundargopal Ghosh and Stutee Mohapatra from the Department of Chemistry, IIT Madras, along with Prof. Eluvathingal Jemmis from IISc Bengaluru, has synthesised a carbon-free molecule that mimics the iconic ‘sandwich’ structure of ferrocene.
Using osmium and boron-based rings instead of carbon, the breakthrough marks the first stable carbon-free version of the molecule — something scientists worldwide had long attempted to achieve.
Published in the prestigious journal Science (https://t.co/zqkL1CSqz6), the discovery could open new pathways for designing advanced materials with unique chemical and structural properties.
Read more: https://t.co/DhPSJbAGJ9
@IndianExpress@iitmadras@iiscbangalore@amitabhsin
@jamesob@esrtweet You don't need a lot of deps, AI can handroll custom implementations for your small use case instead of adding a lot of external deep dep trees.
Thats how I use it.
In the age of AIs, Rust is the new assembler, and that's how I'm using it.
I don't particularly like Rust. I have never hand-coded a single line of the language, and probably never will. Rust's developer and advocate community contains a lot of crazies I don't want to be anywhere near.
Nevertheless, I've shipped two Rust projects so far, I expect to have a third out soon, and I'm planning on a fourth.
Why? Since I'm doing all my coding with LLM assistance now, none of the things I dislike about Rust matter much anymore. I don't need to know how to write the language, only to read it enough to understand control flow and spot obvious bogons. And I don't need to deal with the crazies, because my robot friends are smarter than they are.
Rust has four properties that make it a good target nowadays:
1. LLMs are good at generating high quality Rust code.
2. Memory safety, memory safety, memory safety.
3. Rust is anal about things like lifetimes that other languages aren't. This means that LLM-translating out of it into a future language that I might like better should be easy, because it's a more exact specification of intended behavior.
4. Repeating: LLMs are good at generating high-quality Rust code.
Am I going to use it for everything? Oh hell no. I have a bunch of very nice Golang code that doesn't need to be moved to Rust because Golang is a better fit for its problem domain. And I have a bunch of small Python scripts that don't need to move either.
But over time, I expect almost all of my C code will in fact move to Rust. Because memory safety, memory safety, memory safety.
Someday, maybe, there will be a language with Rust's virtues that I don't dislike. At which point I will cheerfully translate all my Rust stuff out of Rust. Interlanguage translation is easy and cheap now.
I don't necessarily have to like the shape of a tool to recognize when it's good for a job.
Hello you fine Internet folks,
Today's article is on the new SPEC CPU 2026 benchmark, which is the newest set of CPU benchmarks from SPEC, and we compare the 2026 suite to the 2017 suite.
Hope y'all enjoy!
https://t.co/RYf6pZ8xy1
What hardware actually powers open-source AI?
Not benchmarks.
Not vendor marketing.
Real-world community usage.
We’re launching @huggingface Hardware:
→ trending GPUs & CPUs
→ VRAM distribution
→ inference hardware trends
→ what the OSS AI ecosystem really runs on