Ankit Maheshwari

Software Engineer at Uber, ex into Board Games and Road trips

[Hari @HaricharanJaya2]

Today my daughter’s school bus took 2 hours to travel just 2 km in Varthur/Gunjur road.

For those 2 hours, I sat there as a parent feeling completely helpless.

I work hard. My wife and I pay lakhs in taxes every month. We took a huge home loan mainly so we could live close to our daughter’s school and give her a safer, easier childhood.

And yet, this is what “2 km from school” means here.

In the last year alone, we have seen a school bus topple, a woman suffer serious injuries after a fall, a biker almost lost his life after falling because of a pothole, and many more incidents that never become headlines.

Every day, ordinary people here tweet, email, complain, follow up and plead with authorities.

We are not activists.
We are not fighting for a political party.
We are parents, employees, families and taxpayers asking for one basic thing:

Please give our children a safe road to come home on.

Today, more than the traffic, what broke me was the feeling that despite doing everything a responsible citizen is supposed to do, I had absolutely no power to protect my own child.

If anyone knows how ordinary citizens of Varthur/Gunjur can reach someone with the authority to actually intervene, please help us.

@krishnabgowda @DKShivakumar @MALimbavali @ArvindLBJP @GBA_office @BECCUPDATES @ChristinMP_ @RamSNarayan @GunjurCharan @RisingVarthur @BDAOfficialGok

#varthurisbleeding

[Amitabh Kant @amitabhk87]

Delighted to be part of Suzuki Motor’s Next Billion Forum in Bengaluru — a path-breaking initiative aimed at impacting a billion lives in India by nurturing social entrepreneurs across job-creating sectors. More Indian companies should take note, learn, and replicate this model. 🇮🇳 #NextBharat #SocialEntrepreneurship @SuzukiMotorID

[Mohandas Pai @TVMohandasPai]

This u it s shocking. Minister @krishnabgowda please help urgently. We cannot put citizens lives at risk

[DEBASHISH NEOGI @DEBU_NEOGI]

Indians are the only people in the world who quietly pay for every government failure out of their own pocket.

Dirty water? Buy an RO.
No electricity? Buy an inverter.
Polluted air? Buy an air purifier.
No gas supply? Buy an induction.
Bad schools? Pay for private tuition.

We don’t protest. We purchase.

And then the government calls it “growing consumer economy.”

[RJ @rajeshjaswal]

This happened in South Bangalore somewhere around this latitude: 12.823928, longitude: 77.672989. Police, Fire Fighting departments, take note! #BLR

[Ankit Maheshwari @ankit209]

@disankit @UIDAI @UIDAIBengaluru @ceo_uidai Happened to me as well a few years ago.

[Vineeth K @DealsDhamaka]

Having a 20L car doesn't buy sense

People casually dropping drink tins from the car at a signal in Hyderabad

@hydcitypolice kindly take action

[Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw @kiranshaw]

@GBA_office @BBMPSWMSplComm are you listening? Are you acting? So very sad & shameful.

[chiefofautism @chiefofautism]

someone at ANTHROPIC just showed CLAUDE finding ZERO DAY vulnerabilities in a live conference demo

claude has found zero day in Ghost, 50,000 stars on github, never had a critical security vulnerability in its entire, history...

it found the blind SQL injection in 90 minutes, stole the admin api key, then did the exact, same thing to the linux kernel

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

A blog post just wiped $30 billion off IBM in a single afternoon.

Not a product launch. Not an earnings miss. Not a competitor undercutting on price.

A five-minute blog post explaining that Claude can read COBOL.

IBM dropped 13%. Worst single-day loss since October 2000. Twenty-five years of stock resilience ended by one AI company publishing a capability update.

Here’s what happened:

95% of ATM transactions in America run on COBOL. Hundreds of billions of lines power banking, airlines, and government systems. The developers who built them retired decades ago. The knowledge left with them. Finding engineers who can even read COBOL gets harder every quarter.

IBM’s moat was never the technology. It was the fact that nobody else could understand it. Entire consulting empires existed because the code was too old, too tangled, and too critical to touch. Companies paid IBM billions because the alternative was catastrophic system failure.

Then Anthropic published a blog post saying Claude Code can map dependencies across thousands of lines of COBOL, document workflows, identify migration risks, and translate legacy logic into modern languages. Modernization in quarters instead of years.

The market heard: the priesthood just lost its monopoly on the sacred language.

And this isn’t the first time. Last week Anthropic announced Claude Code Security for vulnerability scanning. CrowdStrike dropped. Okta dropped. Cloudflare dropped. One company is serially destroying legacy moats with blog posts.

Now here’s where it gets surreal.

This same company, on the same day, also published evidence that three Chinese AI labs ran 24,000 fake accounts and 16 million exchanges to steal Claude’s capabilities. DeepSeek used it to build censorship tools. MiniMax pivoted within 24 hours when a new model dropped, redirecting half its traffic to steal the latest version.

And yesterday, the Pentagon summoned this same company’s CEO for what officials called a “sh*t-or-get-off-the-pot meeting,” threatening to blacklist them like Huawei for refusing to let the military use Claude without safety restrictions.

Three stories. One company. Twenty-four hours.

The company destroying legacy moats faster than the market can reprice them is simultaneously being threatened by its own government and looted by foreign competitors.

Anthropic is valued at $380 billion. Its CEO says a 12-month delay in AI would make him bankrupt. The Pentagon wants to designate it a supply chain risk. Chinese labs are running industrial espionage against it. And it just proved it can vaporize $30 billion in market cap with a Monday morning blog post.

Whatever you think about AI disruption, IBM’s stock just settled the argument.

Full institutional analysis on my Substack.

https://t.co/AEv8EMPdsZ

[TBPN @tbpn]

Clawdbot creator @steipete describes his mind-blown moment: it responded to a voice memo, even though he hadn't set it up for audio or voice.

"I sent it a voice message. But there was no support for voice messages. After 10 seconds, [Moltbot] replied as if nothing happened."

"I'm like 'How the F did you do that?'"

"It replied, 'You sent me a message, but there was only a link to a file with no file ending. So I looked at the file header, I found out it was Opus, and I used FFmpeg on your Mac to convert it to a .wav. Then I wanted to use Whisper, but you didn't have it installed. I looked around and found the OpenAI key in your environment, so I sent it via curl to OpenAI, got the translation back, and then I responded.'"

[Sonal Mehrotra Kapoor @Sonal_MK]

Happy New Year to us!

[Sonal Mehrotra Kapoor @Sonal_MK]

Dying slowly

#DemandCleanAir

[Ricky Kej @rickykej]

I was robbed! Dear @zomato @zomatocare, looks like one of your drivers entered my home on Thursday and stole our sump-cover. This was at 6 o'clock in the evening.. Quite bold of them! This is probably not their first time. They came in just 15 min earlier for a recce, and then trespassed and committed the crime. You can see the CCTV footage from 2 angles. Also screenshots of his face, and the number plate. The number appears to be KA03HY8751? on a red Honda Activa. Possible for you or the @BlrCityPolice to provide assistance, as to who this person is? Also, people, be vigilant. This can happen to you too!
@CPBlr @bcpsouth @PoliceBangalore @DgpKarnataka @BlrCityPolice @bngdistpol
@BangaloreMirror @BangaloreTimes1 @timesofindia @TimesNow @htTweets @ndtv @CNNnews18 @IndianExpress @indulgexpress @NewIndianXpress @DeccanHerald

[Ankit Maheshwari @ankit209]

@tulsani1 @kunalb11 @CRED_club Can’t agree more to this. As I pay bills on cred, I am afraid of the loud sound which plays immediately after payment success.

[Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw @kiranshaw]

I also am puzzled about why the political leadership is not showing the political urgency to fix our city and make it world class. It doesn’t take more than a focus in terms of budgetary allocation n execution. A billion dollars needs to be ring-fenced to do this @siddaramaiah @DKShivakumar @PriyankKharge

[Mohandas Pai @TVMohandasPai]

Minister @DKShivakumar please study the pothole issue to find out why potholes occur in the same places again and again. How much money has been spent on this over last 5years. There is a pothole mafia which fixes this badly to make it happen again and again Please talk to @rk_misra

[Civic Opposition of India @CivicOp_india]

Here’s proof that nothing in #Bengaluru ever gets done 100%.
This is a CDP (Comprehensive Development Plan) road, Carmelaram meant to decongest the chaotic IT corridor.

👉 5 years in the making.
👉 Just 1 km long.
👉 Still incomplete.

The road falls under @MALimbavali’s constituency. It’s missing from the work orders of @GBAChiefComm, @DKShivakumar, and @siddaramaiah for years!

#BrandBengaluru

[TOI Bengaluru @TOIBengaluru]

#Bengaluru’s broken roads

When residents of Prestige Lakeside Habitat in #Varthur came out demanding pothole-free roads…the cops politely sent them back stating protests are allowed only at designated places (Freedom Park, 24km away) or else face arrests.

@timesofindia

[Civic Opposition of India @CivicOp_india]

Bengaluru is losing hope, not getting ‘blackmailed’.
Hope is built over years, but it disappears in no time.
#BrandBengaluru
@TVMohandasPai