Guruprasad Kulkarni

🍉 Humanist first, then comes the rest 🍉
Views are my own and don't represent anyone else.

[Rahul @sairahul1]

Let me get this straight.

A guy keeps getting weirdly targeted ads on his new Samsung TV.

So he breaks into his own TV to find out why. 1.2M people watch.

42 hours later, OpenAI deactivates his account. Reason: "Cyber Abuse."

His words: "i have never used openai to exploit or find vulnerabilities, only local reverse engineering"

Same week, people on r/claude say Claude now cuts off reverse-engineering write-ups MID-SENTENCE:

"A safety check stopped my response partway through creating the playbook"

The TV is fine.

The guy who opened it is the problem.

[courtneybonneauimages @cbonneauimages]

American families in need have lost their SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) benefits.

The Trump administration is taking food out of the mouths of the most vulnerable American children while your tax money flows to Israel to fund their genocides in Gaza and South Lebanon.

[Sincere Dibya @TheSincereDude]

Remember when PM Modi entered CJI Chandrachud’s living room with state media cameras rolling?

Critics who questioned that breach of judicial aloofness were told it was just "personal faith and civility."

But look at the sequence now: Justice Sanjay Kishan Kaul reveals that CJI Chandrachud operated with deference to the government, pre-vetting judicial names before the Collegium even met. 

Article 50 says the State must keep the Judiciary separate from the Executive.

So, was that televised display of friendship a sign of judicial independence, or a serious compromise of institutional integrity that demands an immediate judicial inquiry?

[Consulting Comedy @consultingcmdy]

Uber CEO: How can we increase our revenues?

McKinsey consultant: Imagine Uber but no car

[Angelo Giuliano 🇨🇭🇮🇹 @angeloinchina]

26 boxes of cancer pills. Carried home from Shanghai.

Debbie Doppelt, 60, had lung cancer with 10 tiny tumours in her brain. The drug that could help, sunvozertinib, is made by Dizal in Shanghai.

Approved in China in 2023.
FDA approval July 2025.
Still not on sale in the US as of mid October.

So her son Max flew to China and bought a supply for about $10,000.

One doctor told the family: "Too bad she's not Chinese ... She could go to a pharmacy in China and buy it."

At least 30 Americans have made similar trips, KFF Health News reports. China accounted for up to 46% of new drugs tested worldwide last year.

Honestly I find this one hard to read. Western media still frames Chinese biotech as a "threat". Patients see it differently, they just need the medicine.

[Md Ismail Šojal 🕷️ @0x0SojalSec]

Claude can no longer “Reverse Engineer Anything.”
Anthropic just quietly killed REA.

But Interesting timing.

After a few viral cases of people using Claude to reverse-engineer Samsung TV firmware and identify data-collection services, Anthropic appears to have restricted those reverse-engineering abilities.

[Tim Pan @mediastorm_en]

My iPhone Duo video went viral, so I'm giving away 100 iPhones on X 😛

[Max Blumenthal @MaxBlumenthal]

Typical Israeli young voter who's obviously indigenous to the land discusses the situation outside a rally for Itamar Ben Gvir

Ben Gvir's "Jewish Power" party will gain seats in Tuesday's election thanks to youth voters

[jasper nathaniel @infinite_jaz]

Picked olives for about ten minutes near al-Mughayyir today before settlers chased us out. First two videos I filmed during our escape. Third video filmed by our lookout: The bottom white car is us; the white truck full of settlers chased us from outpost on top of hill while black car raced down main road and tried to cut us off; after we got away, the settlers tried to cut off a black van carrying a father and young son. These settlers are hunting anything that moves. Final video: Hazem, born and raised in Queens, NY, explains what happened.

[Venkata Satish Guttula 🛰️ @snakeyesV1]

India news: Central Bank of India lost ₹13.96 crore in 187 unauthorised RTGS transfers to 36 banks from Oct 15 to 17, police say. Unknown people allegedly got into the RBI-owned IFTAS Central SFMS server through the bank's core banking system.
The money was customers' funds. The bank first called it a "technical glitch". RBI, CERT-In and NCIIPC have been told and Maharashtra cyber police have a case.
If you bank there, check your RTGS debits from those dates.
https://t.co/wZmSH723rL

[Andrey X @the_andrey_x]

“Two of our terrorists were killed, so we’re gonna destroy entire city blocks and make completely unrelated people homeless”

I don’t think most Israelis understand just how deranged that sounds to the rest of the world

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

In 1941, a Spaniard walked into the British embassy in Madrid and offered to spy on the Nazis.

The British turned him down.

So he went to the Germans instead, pretended to be a loyal fascist, and got hired as a German spy. His plan was to lie to them for the rest of the war.

It worked better than anyone could have imagined.

His name was Juan Pujol García. Before the war he had tried his hand at running a chicken farm and a movie theater. He had no spy training. What he had was a deep hatred of both fascism and communism after the Spanish Civil War, and an incredible imagination.

The Germans gave him a codename, invisible ink, money, and orders to go to Britain and recruit spies.

He didn't go to Britain.

He went to Lisbon, Portugal, and made everything up.

Using a tourist guidebook, maps, magazines, newsreels, and a British railway timetable from the library, he wrote long, detailed reports about life in England. Military movements. Morale. Ports.

He'd never been there. He made mistakes. He didn't understand British money. He once reported that dockworkers in Glasgow would do anything for a liter of wine.

The Germans loved him anyway.

Then British codebreakers reading German messages noticed something strange. The Germans were hunting for a convoy that didn't exist, based on a report from some agent in Britain they'd never heard of.

The British went looking for this mystery spy. They found Pujol. In 1942 they finally took him on and brought him to London.

Now he had real help. MI5 gave him the codename Garbo, after the actress, because they thought he was the greatest actor in the world.

Together with his British handler, Pujol built a fake spy network for the Germans. It eventually had 27 imaginary agents. Each had a name, a personality, a job, and a backstory. A Welsh nationalist. A Venezuelan student. A Greek sailor. Some of them recruited their own imaginary sub-agents.

When they needed to explain why one agent had gone quiet, they killed him off. They even put a fake obituary in a Liverpool newspaper. The Germans reportedly paid a pension to his widow.

Who also didn't exist.

Then came D-Day.

Hours before the landings, the British let Pujol send a message warning the Germans that the invasion was coming in Normandy. It was timed so it would arrive too late to matter, but it made him look brilliant.

Three days later he sent the most important message of his career. Normandy was a trick, he said. The real invasion was still coming, at Calais, led by a huge army under General Patton.

That army was fake too. But the Germans believed him.

German forces that could have been rushed to Normandy were held back near Calais for weeks, waiting for an attack that never came.

The Germans were so grateful they awarded him the Iron Cross.

A few months later, King George VI made him a Member of the Order of the British Empire.

He's one of the only people known to have been decorated by both sides of the war.

After the war, afraid of revenge from surviving Nazis, he faked his own death from malaria in Africa and disappeared to Venezuela, where he lived quietly running a shop.

For decades the world thought he was dead.

In 1984, a British writer tracked him down. Pujol came back to Normandy for the 40th anniversary of D-Day and met veterans who had landed on the beaches.

Some of them thanked him.

[اسد @zarathustra_3]

Shoes on while praying, three prostrate instead of two and salaam towards the left only. These are hired actors who didn’t bother to research the role they were supposed to play.

[Ali Abunimah @AliAbunimah]

Church bells rang out today across Jordan and Palestine to honor the victims of this horrific massacre at the church in Karak. We must all be united in horror against this savagery, whichever hands are behind it.

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

Elon Musk just called Hitler a socialist again and every time he does this Grok corrects him and points out that he was a fascist.

Never deleting this app.

[Sarah Wilkinson @swilkinsonbc]

The israelis mark Palestinian homes in the Ein Deir Bahha district of al-Khalil with a black ‘x’ after forcing owners out at gunpoint in the night

[Furkan Gözükara @FurkanGozukara]

Naomi Klein: "There is no such thing as New Gaza. What there is in Gaza is an apocalypse. But then you have Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff and Donald Trump going up the mountain to Davos in January and presenting their PowerPoint presentation... It's ludicrous."

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

Genocide is still on.
Principled action - from states, companies, institutions and people - is needed to stop it.
Worldwide strike- Oct 30.

[Power to the People ☭🕊 @ProudSocialist]

French police just charged at protesters in Paris and started violently striking people entirely unprovoked according to an eyewitness on the ground:

“I’m here, the protesters didn't do anything. The police charged without any reason when we were just singing.”

The state is always violent, whether we are peaceful or not. It solely exists to serve capital, fund wars, and ensure the people obey the very system that’s rigged against us.

[liam cunningham @liamcunningham1]

Mainstream media are only touching on this. The protests are huge.