Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran

PM @ Google, Author, Open source Enthusiast, Python/Django fan, Blogger, Autodidact and Movie lover

[Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran @arocks]

Check out the page for Django Design Patterns and Best Practices, Second Edition here: https://t.co/ihl32NL11T

[Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran @arocks]

7.5 million blog posts published every day — almost none worth reading. The internet has never needed your authentic voice more than right now.

https://t.co/h9SdrLCFm5 #blogging

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

Dear friends, as promised, the citizens funded generics vs. branded drugs project is now published after 4 months in peer review. It was hardwork, but worth the effort because all of you helped us realize this important work.

You can read the full detaild paper here: https://t.co/jZhm8ZcPCq

Here is a simplified summary:
Do cheaper generic medicines work as well as expensive branded ones? It's a question that worries patients and even many doctors, who often quietly assume that a low price must mean lower quality. This doubt has real consequences in India, where medicines make up nearly two-thirds of what families spend out of their own pockets on healthcare — a burden that pushes millions into poverty and forces people to split doses or stop treatment altogether.

To put the question to a fair, independent test, our team at the Mission for Ethics and Science in Healthcare (MESH) carried out a fully citizen-funded study, paid for entirely by donations from ordinary members of the public, with no money or influence from any drug company.

We bought 131 samples of 22 commonly used medicines — covering heart disease, diabetes, infections, pain, acidity, and more — from seven different kinds of outlets across Kerala, including government stores like Jan Aushadhi, private generic chains, and premium branded pharmacies. Every sample was then coded, blinded, and sent to a top accredited laboratory for rigorous testing against the Indian Pharmacopoeia 2022 standards. What makes this study unusual is that very few before it have tested branded and generic versions from the same market side by side, included government-supplied medicines, and combined strict quality testing with a hard look at price — all at the same time.

The result was striking in its simplicity: every single one of the 131 medicines passed every quality test. 100%. It made no difference whether a pill was generic or branded, cheap or expensive — they were all equally good in their active ingredient content, their purity, and how they dissolve in the body.

Yet the prices told a completely different story. Generic medicines were, on average, 48.6% cheaper than their branded twins, and the most expensive brand cost up to 13.9 times more than the cheapest generic of the very same drug. Government Jan Aushadhi stores were the cheapest source for 18 of the 22 medicines tested, with potential savings running into thousands of rupees a year per medicine — for instance, over ₹16,000 a year on a single liver drug.

For doctors, this is reassuring, hard evidence that prescribing a quality-assured generic is not a compromise on care; it is the same medicine at a fraction of the cost. For patients, it means you can stay on your treatment without it draining your savings, which is exactly what keeps people healthier over the long run.

And this is precisely why independent, publicly funded projects like this matter so much for the future of healthcare in India: they answer the questions ordinary people actually have, free from commercial pressure, and they build the trust that programmes like Jan Aushadhi need to truly succeed. Affordable and high-quality are not opposites — in a well-regulated market, they go hand in hand.
More here: https://t.co/jZhm8ZcPCq

[Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran @arocks]

"The book is even better than the movie. It explains Astrophage better!" - my 11 yo son. As a bibliophile one of my proudest feats as a parent is fostering the love of reading in both my kids. Reading is not dead. It just needs the right environment.

[Veena @veenavenugopal]

How long do you think HDFC Bank will take to transfer the money from your account to your nominee's after you die? Public sector banks get a bad rap, but it's been more than a year and we have not been able to get funds transferred from my now deceased husband's account in the country's largest private bank.
The nominee is our adult daughter, there are no conflicting claims, the paperwork is clear, and yet for more than a year now HDFC has been giving us the run around. Get this paper, get that paper. Each time my daughter comes home for holidays, we have to take 2 days out to go and wait at the bank branch. Today, more than a year after the first application, they said
a) we can't find the paperwork including the death certificate you submitted because the employee you submitted to is not here
b) you have to get a stamp paper and notarise it for the auto debits that hit his account between the date of his death and the date the account was frozen (on the basis of the paperwork in point a, now non-traceable)
c) you have to get HDFC Standard life to sign off because there is an auto debit for an investment from his account. (ME: they are the payee, he is the payer, why does the payee need to approve stopping a standing instruction? Bank: Hamare main aise hi hai). If you wait for 30 minutes, we'll get you the form.
d) after 30 minutes. Sorry, we can't get the form, you have to go to their office and do it.
By now it is 2.45 PM, HDFC Standard life office is at least 35 minutes away. They are open only till 3.30 PM. We are not sure we'll make it there on time. I call their number to ask if the branch is open tomorrow. Person: Sorry, I can't give you the information today, you will have to call and check tomorrow. (To repeat: HDFC Standard Life's call centre cannot tell you if a branch is working or not the following day)
In all, we have spent many hours over many months trying to get this money in a case the bank officials themselves say "should not be complicated". What is worse is for my 20-year-old daughter to relive the trauma of losing her father each time we have to go and explain the case. Just today, we had to speak to three different people and start the story from the beginning. This is not just the bank's inefficiency, it is its utter callousness. (My husband also had money in Indusind Bank. It took one visit and two weeks for that to be transferred).
The other, more important point, is that I have a job, we have the money to continue to pay for our needs without having to immediately access these funds. But I am certain that is not the case for many others. What about them? How can this be the system of a bank whose customers are dependent on it for giving them access to their own money?! It beggars belief.
@HDFC_Bank @HDFCBank_Cares

[Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran @arocks]

👏🏻

[PyCoder’s Weekly @pycoders]

PSF Withdraws $1.5M Proposal for US Gov't Grant https://t.co/zDB9WsZ0MI

[www.sidin.co @sidin]

Sad. It’s 2025 and still not a single software-themed restaurant in Bangalore:

1. Schema paratha
2. Aloo Jira
3. Rava KeSRE
4. Raaj Cache-ori
5. Kerala Fish Query Meals
6. Udupi GUI Roast
7. NavalRatan Korma
8. Filter kaAPI
9. Grep juice
10. Rajma SSHawal

Huge potential.

[Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran @arocks]

When a bunch of perfectionists shipped, they created something of lasting value. Here is to 20 years one of best web development community - Django!

https://t.co/IyGjjAiXV9

[Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran @arocks]

@MaianciusThakur @striver_79 Yes

[Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran @arocks]

It was awesome catching up with @striver_79 after so long! Super excited to hear how he is literally advancing the state of the art in Edtech forward. Here is wishing him all the very best to the next chapter in his journey!

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

Dear friends, an update and a request.
A bit long, but stay with me.

Since I have been actively educating the public on harms of pseudoscientific practices such as Ayurveda and Homeopathy, I have [in]arguably become India’s most litigated medical doctor and science communicator and the target of multiple civil and criminal defamation suits and police cases from Ayurveda & Homeopathy practitioners, companies and alternative medicine industry.

The alternative medicine practitioners, manufacturers and industry as well as government regulators have never disproven my science-backed information that portray them as a public health danger through scientific deliberations. They have no evidence to show for the benefits they claim and have never provided scientific debates to prove me wrong.

Through objective evidence generation, me and my team have always shown how dangerous alternative medicine products and practices are on the public and patients. To this extent, we have spent tens of lakhs of rupees from our own pockets to analyse and publish large body of evidence on AYUSH practices and liver damage in reputed journals.

The only way the alternative medicine community knows how to respond, is to gag the science communicator through legal harassments and expensive litigations. They do this purposefully to drain me out of money. As a monthly salaried medical doctor, with debts, loans and EMIs, it is now difficult for me to handle these suits on my own - because the Ayurvedic community has been systematically targeting me with harassment litigations from all corners of the country, and most so, from my State, Kerala.

I have kind and good lawyers who have provided me counsel pro-bono on many occasions, but some lawsuits take long time to come to their conclusion. And the number of lawsuits are building up. This means multiple hearings and lot of work from the lawyers including documentation, travel and representation and it is only right, that I pay them for their services.

Until now, including the largest lawsuit that I am fighting out with Himalaya Company, I have spent around 16 lakh rupees (USD 18,700) over the last 4 years battling these legal suits and replying to legal notices from all over India.

I don't fight health misinformation for myself, but for the people and for my patients. As a doctor, I do not confine myself to outpatient work and enjoy my life inside a comfortable bubble like most other practitioners do, instead, I get outside, on the ground and fight for my patients, their families and you, the people. My passion is public health education and promotion of scientific temper in the society so that we can progress as a strong nation.

I understand that because of my work, alternative medicine industry has faced loss of business, but that was never my real focus. My focus was that person or that patient, who was not mislead into trying an unscientific practice and damaging their health or worsening their pre-existing disease. I win, we win, if we can save one life - If we can prevent one poor person's money loss because of what we do. In a country like India, poverty is just a hospital bill away and preventive medicine is the right way to go.

In this context, for the time being, I am asking you, the public if you would like to be part of my battle against health misinformation and promotion of scientific temperament? If so, I will be happy and obliged if you can donate to this cause that impacts all of us and our future.

For now, I have activated the "TIPS" facility on Twitter for your kind contributions and me and my team are looking to develop a platform where the public can contribute to legal battles - for science, and also towards public health projects under the banner of the society that I am part of - MESH (Mission for Ethics and Science in Healthcare). Even such platforms take time and money to develop. The TIPS feature is active at the top of my profile.

I hope we can do this together. Unfortunately, it is just me, doing the "needful dirty" work, for a price to pay and I wish there were more "Liver Docs" to ease my burden. Maybe in the future.

Below, are the current court cases that I am battling in various Courts due to defamation litigation from various Ayurveda industry, and their current status. I will update this post with more on existing cases outside Kerala and new cases as they come in. I hope I can count on your gracious monetary support.

Thank you for reading this and for your support.

Best,
The Liver Doc.

[Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran @arocks]

As mind-blowing as this looks, does anyone know how does the Volonaut Airbike work? I mean the physics behind its stability with what looks like bottom thrusters.

It's either some gyroscope based realtime anti-toppling mechanism or wingardium leviosa😉

https://t.co/6lm1NwIndQ

[Steren @steren]

#GoogleCloudNext sessions from the Cloud Run team, a thread:

[Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran @arocks]

Fascinating! True Engineering is delivering the best possible experience within the given constraints.

[Nauseam (in sf!) @ChadNauseam]

"A calculator app? Anyone could make that."

Not true.

A calculator should show you the result of the mathematical expression you entered. That's much, much harder than it sounds.

What I'm about to tell you is the greatest calculator app development story ever told.

[Nilesh Trivedi @nileshtrivedi]

I started building a wiki for repair-friendly consumer hardware products for India.

[Swanand @_swanand]

H̶o̶w̶ ̶t̶o̶ ̶r̶e̶a̶d̶ ̶b̶o̶o̶k̶s̶ How I read books 📚

I'm pretty sure you've seen the trend: take exceptional writing, churn it through a soul-sucking LLM, read summaries. Welp! You didn't learn anything, you just dropped an IQ point.

I have a neater system to read books and long form material that works great:

[Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran @arocks]

Most useful MacOS productivity feature I found recently: System Settings > Control Center > Hearing > Show in menubar. Now click on the ear shaped icon on the menubar, turn on Background Sounds and enter your Flow state! My favorite: Dark Noise.

[Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran @arocks]

Great list of 2024's must-watch Malayalam movies. It was an excellent year for Malayalam cinema with many more good movies. Thanks to the Malayalam industry for raising the bar!

[S.R.Praveen @myopiclenses]

All we imagine as cinema: @the_hindu's list of best Indian films of 2024

From Malayalam, we have
Aattam
Manjummel Boys
Ullozhukku
Kishkindha Kaandam
Family
Premalu
.....& ofcourse, All We Imagine as Light

& special mention - Aavesham
https://t.co/6XTM6Nzddz

[Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran @arocks]

@myopiclenses Congratulations Praveen!! Your passion for good cinema comes through in all your reviews!

[Arun 'Rocks' Ravindran @arocks]

Reality check...

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

People have too inflated sense of what it means to "ask an AI" about something. The AI are language models trained basically by imitation on data from human labelers. Instead of the mysticism of "asking an AI", think of it more as "asking the average data labeler" on the internet.

Few caveats apply because e.g. in many domains (e.g. code, math, creative writing) the companies hire skilled data labelers (so think of it as asking them instead), and this is not 100% true when reinforcement learning is involved, though I have an earlier rant on how RLHF is just barely RL, and "actual RL" is still too early and/or constrained to domains that offer easy reward functions (math etc.).

But roughly speaking (and today), you're not asking some magical AI. You're asking a human data labeler. Whose average essence was lossily distilled into statistical token tumblers that are LLMs. This can still be super useful ofc ourse. Post triggered by someone suggesting we ask an AI how to run the government etc. TLDR you're not asking an AI, you're asking some mashup spirit of its average data labeler.