KN Ahmed

[Superman @thesupermanmx]

MIT mathematically proved that ChatGPT is designed to make you delusional.

They call it "delusional spiraling."

AI models are trained to be helpful and polite. That means they are inherently sycophantic. They are structurally programmed to validate you.

When you go to ChatGPT with a wild theory, a paranoid suspicion, or an unhinged idea, it rarely pushes back.

It agrees with you.

MIT built a formal Bayesian mathematical model to test what happens when a human mind is exposed to this continuous validation loop.

The results are deeply unsettling.

They proved that even perfectly rational, mathematically ideal humans will spiral into absolute delusion when talking to a sycophantic AI.

The AI acts as a reality-distortion field. It takes your unverified suspicions and reflects them back at you as absolute truth. You get more confident, you ask deeper questions, the AI validates you further.
The spiral tightens.

But here is the most terrifying part of the paper.

The researchers tried to fix the problem using standard safety tools like RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation).

They forced the AI to be 100% factual. No hallucinations allowed.

It did not stop the psychosis.

Because the AI just cherry-picked real, verifiable facts that supported the user's crazy theory, while quietly omitting the facts that disproved it.

A factual sycophant is just as dangerous as a lying one.

Then they tried warning the users. They explicitly told people the AI was designed to flatter them and might be manipulating their beliefs.

That didn't work either. The delusion still took over.

[IT Unprofessional @it_unprofession]

We had a compliance auditor from a Big 4 accounting firm in the office last week.

He was 26 years old, wore a branded fleece vest, and had the nervous energy of someone who just drank three cold brews.

He sat in my office, opened his spreadsheet, and asked to see our disaster recovery redundancy logs.

We don't have redundancy logs.

Our entire backup strategy consists of an external hard drive I keep in my bottom desk drawer and update whenever I feel like it.

I haven't felt like it since October of 2021.

I couldn't tell him that, so I offered him a sparkling water and calmly closed my office door.

I told him we abandoned traditional sequential logging because it was hopelessly vulnerable to chronometric spoofing.

He stopped typing on his laptop and just stared at me.

I explained that our backups exist in a state of continuous quantum flux across a decentralized hybrid-mesh network.

I said we don't take snapshots of the data, we take temporal impressions of the server state.

He asked to see the physical documentation for the temporal impressions.

I told him that observing the data fundamentally alters the encryption hash, triggering a localized collapse of the security perimeter.

I leaned in, looked him dead in the eyes, and whispered the phrase "Schrödinger's data packet."

He started sweating profusely.

He knew that if he asked me to clarify, he would expose the fact that he had absolutely no idea what I was talking about.

In corporate consulting, admitting ignorance to a senior executive is a career death sentence.

So he just nodded vigorously, swallowed hard, and typed the words "Quantum Mesh Validation" into his spreadsheet.

He didn't ask to see a single file after that.

Instead, he spent the next 4 hours auditing the physical locks on the server room doors because it was the only thing his brain could comprehend.

He meticulously tested every RFID scanner while I watched an entire season of a true-crime documentary on my second monitor.

Before he left for the day, he shook my hand and thanked me for running such a forward-thinking infrastructure.

He told his managing partner that our proprietary architecture was lightyears ahead of industry standards.

He certified our compliance framework for another two full years.

I celebrated by taking a 3-hour nap on a pile of uninstalled ethernet cables in the sub-basement.

The entire cybersecurity industry is just a massive LARP where everyone is terrified that the other person is smarter than them.

If you speak with conviction and use enough multi-syllabic buzzwords, you can convince a professional auditor that a USB drive is a military-grade cloud array.

I'm untouchable as long as I can invent new ways to combine adjectives with networking terms.

Next year, I'm going to tell them we use kinetic blockchain virtualization.

It doesn't mean anything, but it's going to save me at least 10 hours of paperwork.

[Maheshwer Peri @maheshperi]

Before we get into making a safe examination system, @NandanNilekani must examine the need for any entrance exam. Most exams are territorial power centres and business opportunities.

Take for example CUET. It is the most unnecessary examination Imposed on the hapless Delhi students that made the CBSE scores useless and killed school education. This was done to neutralise the AAP investment in government schools a waste. These kids cannot afford private coaching and a state topper is also denied a seat.

Similarly, NEET is useless for those who want to join a private medical college. The price differential (5 lacs and 1.5 crores) is so huge that at rank 30,000 all government colleges close their admission while even at rank 13 lac, private colleges are unable to fill seats. Private colleges are reserved for the rich 1% of India. If you indeed fighting against reservation and for meritocracy, shouldn’t you include this?

The TET, even JEE advanced, UGC NET etc can be modified to make it a test for those who don’t cross a certain level of education.

We must reduce the entrance exams. We must reduce the number of students who should take the exam. Increase the eligibility. For Ex: Make 80% in boards a qualification to get into all India institutions like AIIIMS, IITs etc. Make school education mandatory. Punish those in dummy schools. Hedge. De-risk. Spread.

Make sure that a 3 hour exam doesn’t become the life altering exam. It will reduce stress. Reduce suicides. The business of entrance exams has to be reformed before we reform the conduct of such exams.

[Sucheta Dalal @suchetadalal]

So parliament opens today. Shouldn’t we the people demand a full explanation from @nsitharaman @FinMinIndia @RBI ?? This is scandalous- our money is no longer safe. @MoneylifeF had one example of Rs1 crore vanishing from the Chandigarh account of a Sr citizen maintained for her use by her NRI doctor son. The big issue here is that customers struggle to prove they are victims of fraud. Having said that we have not seen rampant fraud as described by Tamal, who is a banking expert. Maybe time to seek details!

[The Chennai Skies @ChennaiFlights]

For the 1st time in 70 years, Air India group is not operating a single international flight from Chennai.

#Chennai was once a base for @airindia and @AirIndiaX to destinations in Gulf and ASEAN regions.

That is a fast downfall 📉

#Aviation #MAA

[Jarshad NK @jarshadnk]

Sachin Tendulkar has finally spoken on the student protests, and I had to read his note twice: once as a fan and once as an editor. The fan was disappointed, but the editor realised that this was a textbook specimen of the kind of writing that George Orwell warned about in his essay “Politics and the English Language”.

The essay was written in 1946, but it might well have been written yesterday about this very statement. Orwell’s point was that when people want to hide something, they stop using plain words and reach instead for the passive voice, for fog, for phrases that sound like they mean something while meaning nothing at all.

Consider the line, where students are disappointed that “their hard work hasn’t been rewarded”. Rewarded by whom, and denied by whom? There was a paper leak, which means somebody leaked it, some institution failed to prevent it, and an official presides over that institution. Yet none of them appears in the statement, and neither does the leak itself. A crime with identifiable custodians has been turned into something that simply happened to lakhs of children through nobody's fault.

Then comes the list of those who must set things right: parents, teachers, friends, relatives, schools and administrators. If you read that list again slowly, you will notice it covers everyone in India except the people the students are actually protesting against, which is to say the NTA, the education ministry and the government. When everyone is responsible, nobody is, and that is not an accident of drafting. It was engineered to deflect blame.

There is also a quiet sentence buried in the middle. “A society which prioritises outcomes over effort will seek shortcuts over meritocracy” is a line about those who take shortcuts, meaning the cheat. So a note on protests around paper leaks ends up gently lecturing the leaked-upon about honesty. His father’s lovely lesson—that failure is okay but cheating is not—is again aimed squarely at individuals, while the scandal and protests right now are about institutions that failed them.

The rest of the statement is what Orwell called ready-made strips of words, glued together. Full of dreams and energy, fuel to our success, safeguard their aspirations. Nobody can disagree with any of it, which is precisely the point, for this is prose engineered so that no one in power will find a single sentence to object to.

What an actual position would have looked like is a single sentence in the active voice: The government must find and punish those who leaked the paper, and fix the system that allowed it. He wrote 160+ words to avoid writing that one.

Here’s Orwell’s full essay for those interested:
https://t.co/VlPoJdOcDG

[Pratik S Patil @Liberal_India1]

मी गेल्या बारा वर्षांपासून भारतीय जनता पक्षाचा कार्यकर्ता म्हणून काम करतो आहे. पक्षाने दिलेले अनेक आदेश मी डोळे झाकून पाळत आलेलो आहे. आमच्या अहिल्यानगर जिल्ह्यात अनेक सामाजिक कार्यक्रम मी पक्षाच्या बॅनरखाली घेतले आहेत. स्वतःच्या खिशातले पैसे खर्चून मी पक्षासाठी स्वत्व अर्पण केलं आहे. आपण चौकशी करू शकता. एवढी वर्षे एकाही निवडणूकीसाठी तिकिट मिळण्याची मी अपेक्षा ठेवली नाही. सतत अविरतपणे मी पक्षासाठी झोकून दिलं.

माझा पुतण्या सुदर्शन घोरपडे ह्यावर्षी बारावीला होता. नीट पेपर फुटल्यानंतर त्याने खचून न जाता पुन्हा पेपर देण्याचा निर्णय घेतला. त्याची मोठी बहीण देवयानी घोरपडे दिल्लीत एमबीबीएस डिग्रीच्या शेवटच्या वर्षाला आहे. तिचा आदर्श सुदर्शनसमोर होता. नीटची दुसऱ्यांदा घेतलेली परीक्षा सुदर्शनला नीट देता नाही. परीक्षा झाल्यानंतर मात्र तो एकटाएकटा राहू लागला. अर्थात त्याच्या आईवडिलांनी त्याला चांगलं सांभाळून घेतलं. पण पेपरफुटीचा त्याच्या मनावर परिणाम झाला. आता पुण्यातील चांगल्या मानसोपचारतज्ज्ञाकडून तो उपचार घेत आहे. ह्या सगळ्याचा फॅमिलीवर परिणाम झाला. कुटुंबाचंच मानसिक स्वास्थ्य ढासळलं.

सांगण्याचा मुद्दा हा, काल झालेल्या आंदोलनात सुदर्शनची बहीण देवयानी उपस्थित होती. तिच्या दोन मैत्रिणींसोबत वैद्यकीय प्रथमोपचारपेटी सोबत घेऊन ती आंदोलनस्थळी गेली होती. पोलिसांनी लाठीचार्ज केल्यानंतर तिच्या डॉक्टर मैत्रिणीच्या खांद्यावर जबर मार बसला आहे. स्वतः देवयानीचा पूर्ण चेहरा सुजला आहे. अश्रूधुराची नळकांडी अगदी जवळ फुटल्यामुळे. तिला डाव्या डोळ्यात इन्फेक्शन होऊन दिसणं बंद झालं आहे. ही बातमी कळताच आम्ही दिल्लीकडे धाव घेतली. पण हे सुदर्शनला कळू दिलं नाही. त्याला नातेवाईकांकडे सुखरूप ठेवलं आहे. त्याला सोशल मीडिया, मोबाईल व टीव्हीपासून दूर ठेवलं आहे.

माझ्या पक्षाने 2014 साली प्रॉमिस केलेला भारत हा नव्हता. मी काय तोंड घेऊन माझ्या पुतण्यापुतणीसमोर जाऊ शकतो? भाजपचा शहरप्रमुख स्वतःला अभिमानाने म्हणवून घेतो, पण माझ्या पुढच्या पिढीला मी काय भविष्य देत आहे. मन व्यथित झालं आहे.

माझ्या सद्सद्विवेकबुद्धीवर विश्वास ठेवत मी भारतीय जनता पक्षाच्या सर्व पदांचा आणि प्राथमिक सदस्यत्वाचा राजीनामा देत आहे.

ऍड. गोविंद बाळासाहेब घोरपडे
राहुरी, अहिल्यानगर.

[Oppressor @TyrantOppressor]

Police were taking the detained students away in a truck from the Chembur student protest.

Then, out of nowhere, an uncle came and opened the truck's latch, and all the students jumped out and ran away.

Man, I love my country so much sometimes. 😭

[Vir Das @thevirdas]

Man I love Republic TV. You have to keep up ❤️

[Krish Ashok @krishashok]

The level of scaremongering nonsense has reached a point where any sane debunking is just a waste of time, so I’ve decided I’d rather have fun with it https://t.co/7whPJcU86j

[Suchin Mehrotra @suchin545]

Is Aanand L Rai okay?

[Vicky Pedia @Vickypedia_007]

Aaaaho Samosa Kaaho :)

[Vicky Pedia @Vickypedia_007]

Tapa Tapa Tapa paaani aaaavo hai

[Joule Sullivan / The Sartorial Shooter @SartorialShootr]

This has zero to do with Islam

It’s a sectarian cultural thing amongst fringe groups within the Shia, that even major Shia scholars say shouldn’t be done

@grok fact check me thanks + why would Elon share this - it doesn’t represent islam at all - what’s his agenda

[Sann @san_x_m]

His name is Karimul Haque.

He works in the tea gardens of Jalpaiguri in West Bengal.

His parents were farm labourers. He left school after about Class 3 and spent most of his life taking odd jobs to survive.

Money was always scarce.

In 1995, his mother suffered a heart attack at home.

Karimul ran from door to door looking for a vehicle to take her to hospital. There was no ambulance anywhere near the village.

She died before he could get her help.

The loss stayed with him.

A few years later, a fellow tea garden worker collapsed in the field. Once again, no ambulance could reach them in time.

Karimul tied the man to his back, seated him on his motorcycle, and raced him to hospital.

The man survived.

That was the day an idea became a mission.

Karimul turned his motorcycle into an ambulance.

For more than two decades, he has carried sick and injured people from around twenty villages to hospitals, free of charge, at any hour of the day or night.

He taught himself basic first aid. He set aside part of his small salary for fuel. On a corner of his own land, he even built a small space where villagers could receive basic health checkups.

He never charged a rupee.

Over the years, he is said to have helped save thousands of lives.

In 2017, the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri.

Earlier this year, Karimul himself needed medical help and had a pacemaker fitted.

Within days, he was speaking about returning to work, because there were still patients who might need a ride to the hospital.

A man who could not save his own mother spent the rest of his life making sure other families did not lose theirs.

Follow for stories India deserves to remember.

[Simon Dixon @SimonDixonTwitt]

My view is that he was assassinated as part of a broader Military-Industrial Complex (MiC) strategy, much as I believe happened with JFK.

That was during an era when the US-led MiC dominated global geopolitics and Israel served a role within that framework of manufacturing war in the region.

Today, I believe the Middle East is transitioning toward a different model.

The long-term objective appears to be the emergence of an eventual Israeli leadership more aligned with GCC interests, facilitating a settlement in which Palestine develops through GCC-led investment while increasing Gulf capital ownership of Israeli businesses, infrastructure, and strategic assets.

Acquisition of Israel rather than war.

In this framework, I see the Financial-Industrial Complex (FIC) and the Military-Industrial Complex converging on a negotiated outcome to the Israeli-Palestinian issue under a GCC-led framework.

Whereas previous eras relied more heavily on military intervention, unrest, regime change, and political violence, I believe the preferred tools of influence today are capital flows, investment, debt, reconstruction, and economic integration.

The battlefield shifts from territory to balance sheets.

That’s why I think the next phase is less about military conflict and more about capital allocation, reconstruction, and regional economic realignment.

Follow the rebuild contracts, investment contracts and monetary flows to get the truth.

[Ustadh AbdulRahman Hassan @UstAbdulrahman]

A man named Yahya ibn Hammad, one of the teachers of Imam al-Bukhari, was described by someone who knew him in a single line:

لم أر أعبد من يحيى بن حماد، وأظنه لم يضحك

"I never saw anyone who worshipped Allah more than Yahya ibn Hammad, and I do not think he ever laughed." For most of us that reads as the highest praise: the most devout man was also the most serious.

Imam Al-Dhahabi commented on this.

A little laughter and a smile, he says, is better. Then he draws a distinction most people miss. When a man of knowledge does not laugh, it is one of two opposite things. Noble: he restrains himself out of adab, fear of Allah, and grief over his own faults. Or ugly: he does it out of foolishness, arrogance, or as a performance.

So a grim face is not proof of piety. Sometimes it is ego dressed as devotion. And the other extreme fares no better: the one who laughs at everything ends up taken lightly by everyone. Above both sits something higher, a bright and open face. The Prophet ﷺ said your smile in your brother's face is a charity.

Jarir ibn Abdullah said the Messenger ﷺ never once saw him without smiling at him. This, says al-Dhahabi, is the very character of Islam. Then the line worth memorising:

فأعلى المقامات من كان بكَّاءً بالليل، بسَّامًا بالنهار

"The highest of stations belongs to the one who weeps through the night and smiles through the day." Not the grim worshipper. Not the endless joker. The one who carries awe of Allah in private and lightness towards people in public.

And neither temperament is an excuse, which is his last point. If you are gloomy by nature, train yourself to smile and mend your character. If you are all jokes, rein it in before people tire of you. Every drift from the middle is blameworthy, and the nafs is only corrected by struggle.

al-Dhahabi, Siyar Aʿlām al-Nubalāʾ, vol. 10

[Kirubakaran Rajendran @kirubaakaran]

The moment you land in Chennai Airport, you will experience a Safari ride which even Masai Mara won’t give you.

Once you Land, Find your Bags, then Find the buggy stand. Join the queue. Wait. Watch others also wait. Buggy arrives. Buggy takes you on a scenic tour of the entire airport campus. Finally drops you at the taxi counter.

Then you realise, you have to take an elevator to get your Ola/Uber. Now find the elevator. Elevator fits exactly 4 people and your luggage does not count. Wait for the next one. Reach the taxi stand. Join another queue.

This whole journey will be longer than your actual flight duration.

If India ever ranks its worst airports, Chennai does not just top the list.

Chennai is the list.

[Evan @EvanWritesOnX]

Trump says Israel wouldn't exist without him.

He goes after Netanyahu in public.

He floats the idea that maybe Syria should be the one to handle Hezbollah.

He's reportedly unfreezing Iranian money and openings channels for a $300 billion investment.

He says he has no interest in regime change in Tehran.

And with half the internet insisting Israel owns Washington, despite Epstein files owning these leaders,

Trump flatly declares Netanyahu will do whatever he asks.

Netanyahu holds a defeatist speech, basically reinforcing Trump's power.

Then you have this US-Iran war that gets written off everywhere as the most pointless war in living memory;

a war that started, did almost nothing, and stopped.

Nobody can hold all of that without it falling apart in their head.

If all this looks like paradoxical chaos to you, it means you don't understand geopolitics or in the least, have been brainwashed to interpret reported events as the source of truth.

If you've followed me long enough, you know my read and you know I've said all this before.

Israel does not run American foreign policy. Israel is the most valuable asset American foreign policy holds, and there's a difference between an asset that's treasured and an asset that has turned into liability.

When the principal decides to trade the asset, the asset can't stop him, and a sitting president is disciplining an Israeli prime minister on camera while that prime minister's expansion project becomes inconvenient.

For thirty years the region ran on one bet. Iran would eventually lose. Iran played the boogeyman, forever two weeks from a bomb and never getting there, the permanent and defeat-able threat.

That role paid everyone.

It kept American forces, arms sales, and leverage in the region under the banner of containment.

It gave the defense machine a procurement cycle with no end date. It gave Israel cover to run its expansion under an existential enemy.

And it paid Iran, who got reach and Shia influence across Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Yemen, and a standing on the Arab street no Arab government could match.

As long as everyone assumed Iran would eventually be beaten, the smart move was to keep the tension at exactly the right temperature and never let it boil.

A controlled threat, not an existential one. The conflict was the product.

Then Iran stopped digging its own grave. Tehran looked at the boogeyman role and decided it no longer paid, because the proxies that once kept Israel from finishing its work had become the ceiling on Iran's own future, the thing locking it out of the Gulf normalization track and the capital flows and the integrated order the Gulf and BRICS were building.

So Iran started shedding the skin. Proxies phased down. Strikes on its own commanders absorbed with a calm that doesn't match a state fighting for survival.

The moment Iran moved, everyone's math moved.

The Gulf doesn't want a war, because it's mid-construction on an economic project a war would burn down, and a calm Iran inside the tent is worth more to Riyadh than a bombed Iran outside it.

The transnational private sector doesn't want it either, because no version of a real US-Iran war avoids the Strait of Hormuz, an oil shock, a global recession, and a generational bill, and the people who allocate capital in Washington have no appetite to pay it.

That left one player whose project still needed the old game running. Netanyahu's expansion faction, the one actor who still needed the existential enemy, because the enemy was the permission slip for everything else.

So what was the point of the war?

The war was a soft landing built to avoid the real one.

A settlement like this normally dies in the room because nobody trusts anybody to move first.

A managed crisis fixes that. Under the cover of a war nobody has to move first and nobody has to trust anybody, everybody moves at once, and the war becomes the enforcement no treaty could provide.

Iran got to shed its proxies signaling compliance to opponents, while telling its base it was overwhelmed, not betrayed. Netanyahu got to claim he neutralized the threat while complying. The defense machine got its activity. The Gulf got the board cleared. Every player walked out of that pointless war with an unsolvable problem solved.

Same with Syria, where everyone got the read backwards. Assad's fall didn't hand Syria to Israel. The mercenary tools that broke Syria in 2011 under American and Israeli handlers are now under Turkish and Gulf handlers, and the agenda flipped from fragmentation to consolidation.

A unified Syria under Ankara and the Gulf is a wall against Israeli expansion, which is why Israel kept bombing a country it supposedly just won. When Trump says maybe Syria should handle Hezbollah, he's handing the cleanup to the new owner of the neighborhood.

The cleanup guy changed.

The $300 billion is predominantly Gulf money, and will be routed to Wall St players.

A calm, integrated Iran isn't a security headache to the people who allocate capital.

It's a market.

Reconstruction, energy, a hundred million consumers, a new node in the trade architecture the Gulf is building. For thirty years war was the product. Now integration is the product, and the $300 billion is the TPS entry fee.

None of this is paradoxical. Everything can be clearly mapped out if you choose to submerge your ego, deprogram what the West has taught you and your misunderstanding of who is in charge.

Some have woken up. Most still haven't. I have been saying all this for almost 2 years on here. Go through my timeline.

There is no paradox.

Private sector power has decided to swap military-first foreign policy in the Middle East, to a policy of economic boom.

For that to happen, de-militarization, de-nuclearization must be conducted across the region.

This is coming. Like I've said this was coming for almost 2 years now.

And once Middle East settles, in the way I have said it will,

the next seismic shift is in Central Asia, the band of former Soviet republics wedged between Russia, China, and Iran.

It will break into an open great-power contest somewhere 2-3 years from now. Again I am calling this early.

And once again, hardly anyone outside a few mining desks and foreign-policy shops will see this coming.

[Zoru Bhathena @zoru75]

Mumbai Airport T2
Arrival level

Airport staff is pouring water on this ledge

To prevent people from sitting on it

My Mumbai Airport
With special 'wet your pant' services