Got em. I poison my AGENTS.md (and other things like code comments) all over the place with prompt injections like this to find people who don't review their code and sling it off to another human. Catches folks all the time and then its an instant ban.
As I've said, I don't care if you don't review your own code. But if you're submitting code to an OSS project and crossing a human boundary, it is simple courtesy to do some human review.
#Dhurandhar: The film of the year…you should fucking rush to catch in theatres, here’s why!
1. Most critics are pissed, all the more reason
Let's address the saffron elephant in the room: #Dhurandhar is a pro-government film, yes.
The critics calling #Dhurandhar propaganda aren't wrong. They're just boring. Here's what they're missing while polishing their moral credentials on their stories…this is the most pure Bollywood-esque non-South exciting cinema they made in years (I have my issues with Animal), and pretending it isn't won't make it go away
Most woke critics and the left are mad because they no longer have exclusive access to elite filmmaking and right wing is going from jingoistic dumb cinema to sophisticated slick cinema. This pisses them off more than anything.
The film genuflects before Modi-era policies with the devotion of an erudite, smart-speaking and artsy party spokesperson (they also do exist clearly). Critics are tearing it apart for exactly this reason.
2. The film has crazily good craft
This is Aditya Dhar operating at full tilt, bits of Sandeep Reddy Vanga's visceral brutality, bits of Pushpa's underworld building, a little bit Tom Cruise nationalist porn and somehow, somehow, the alchemy works sexily. The film is a genre-blending fever dream…spy thriller bleeds into gangster saga bleeds into underdog resurrection story, all held together by action choreography so haptic you can taste the gunpowder, that blood, that bodies being cut…you feel everything. You taste and smell the dirty air of Pakistan (even though it’s shot in some other place…Kudos for this excellent craft)
That confidence. That shameless, chest-out, I’ll-do-what-I-want confidence. Nothing in Bollywood has dared to be this fun and violent in years. Everyone else is busy being tasteful. Respectable. Woke-friendly. #Dhurandhar couldn’t give a fuck!
The film's genius lies in its subversive world-building architecture. You expect Ranveer Singh's Hamza to infiltrate Pakistan's terror networks and dismantle them with clinical precision…standard secret agent playbook. Instead, Dhar gives you something far more morally queasy…Hamza indirectly enables 26/11. That guilt doesn't just haunt him, it rewires the entire film's DNA.
Suddenly, this isn't a victory lap. It's a penance story
And instead of bombing army installations or engaging in geopolitical chess, Hamza gets trapped in Pakistan's gangland, a grotesque, ugly underworld where fingers are severed like cigarettes and heads explode into visceral matter. The film takes exquisite, almost perverse patience in building this ecosystem…the mafia hierarchies, the territorial codes, the cool character names, the way violence is casually brutal. Dhar understands that great gangster films aren't about the killing…they're about the architecture that makes killing inevitable.
Watch how the film braids patriotism with criminality in vérité style docu-fiction, how Hamza's mission becomes indistinguishable from survival, how nationalism curdles into something far stranger and more unsettling than flag-waving heroics. This felt to me like Goodfellas reimagined as covert ops cinema
3. Of course, #AkshayeKhanna, the man finally gets recognition
Akshaye Khanna appears.
That’s it man, that’s cinema!
Thin. Coiled. Eyes like a lit match.
One of those presences that makes the whole theatre go silent without meaning to. No theatrics. No punchlines. Just the calm of a man who has killed often enough to have opinions on technique. He doesn’t perform villainy. He breathes it. When his anthem drops, the seat under you vibrates. It’s ridiculous. It’s over the top. It’s perfect.
4. Ranveer too seems to found his charm again
Ranveer Singh is a peculiar beast…an actor who oscillates wildly between brilliance and buffoonery depending entirely on the director. Give him a visionary, and he locks in. Give him a hack, and he becomes unbearable. Here, under Dhar's control, Ranveer is operating in that rare frequency where movie-star charisma marries actual craft.
Hamza is layered in ways Bollywood rarely allows its heroes to be…guilty, calculating, desperate, magnetic, greedy. Every frame, Ranveer makes you root not because Hamza is righteous, but because he's trying. That's harder to pull off than it sounds. Ranveer reminded so much of his powerhouse performance in Gully Boy.
5. That sexy original music by Shashwat Sachdev
Dhar's use of music is also so damn original and fetishistic. Pulpy electronic bangers. Remixes that would fail on a thought level, but somehow slap. Traditional instrumentation colliding with techno aggression.
I won’t even talk much just go and listen to the songs…especially ‘Ez-Ez’ or Akshay Khanna’s Baloch banger. Every musical bit is instantly addictive.
6. Violence is lovely, beautiful, original and hits your pulse
Absolutely, unexpected in a mainstream Bollywood film, is that operatic fun violence
There's a sequence where Ranveer’s Hamza cuts off fingers of a traitor in his target’s house….the double betrayal angle is chummah, but there’s more….As Hamza commits the act, he is busy threatening another character, while a finger slowly slides along to touch his foot….Camera gives space for that delicious madness. It's revolting. It's beautiful. It shouldn't work. It fucking works. And guess what, this is mainstream cinema man. Tarantino would love the fuck out of this film!
#Dhurandhar’s violence isn't sanitised. It's ugly, intimate, thrilling. Heads don't just explode…you see the gutter matter. This isn't Marvel quippiness. The film’s casual brutality reminded me why I love those gangster films so much.
Every action sequence is a sensory delight and I mean that as the highest compliment. This is haptic cinema: visceral, textured, felt. At least 90% of this film looks and moves like it was shot in actual space with actual bodies, and in an era of green-screen approximations, that tactility is revolutionary.
7. Finally, the point all of them are missing
Yes, Dhurandhar is a love letter to Modi-era decision-making. Yes, it offers narrative justifications for controversial policies. And yes, I didn’t enjoy that aspect of the film.
But When American cinema throws jingoism, America-Russia angle in thrillers, OTT shows, we nod along because the craft dazzles us. We sat through 3 hours of Top Gun: Maverick and called it 'a return to pure cinema.' We gave Christopher Nolan a pass for making the atomic bomb look like a lonely genius's passion project and said 'at least it's not CGI.' But suddenly, when Bollywood does nationalist cinema with actual craft, we remember we have principles? Fuck you.
We compartmentalise. We say, "Well, the politics are questionable, but the filmmaking..." And suddenly, we're sophisticated enough to separate art from ideology.
Why can't we extend the same courtesy to our own filmmakers?
I'm not asking you to agree with Dhar's politics. I'm asking you to recognise that #Dhurandhar is doing something Bollywood has forgotten how to do…build worlds, develop characters with competing motivations, let plots unfold rather than explode into isolated mass moments. This is classical genre filmmaking with modern muscularity
The question isn't whether the film is propaganda. It clearly is. The question is whether you can hold two truths simultaneously: that its ideology is suspect and that its craft is undeniable (which is where critics fell right into Sandeep Vanga’s trap with Animal and Kabir Singh)
After watching…dedicating 3 and a half hours of my finite existence to this gloriously excessive beast….I’m convinced that the woke critics bashing #Dhurandhar have forgotten what it feels like to be genuinely, viscerally excited in a theatre.
Dhar remembers something Bollywood forgot. Plot can be pleasure. Momentum can be pleasure. Watching a story twist and coil and bite its own tail can be pleasure.
I didn’t care that the politics were screaming. I didn’t care that the film was trying to sell me a worldview. I cared that I was alive inside the experience. That my pulse had synced to the edit. That I hadn’t felt this kind of cinematic voltage in years.
And maybe that’s the problem with all of us who watch too much, think too much. We want cinema to be good in the correct ways. #Dhurandhar is good in the wrong ways. The fun ways.
This is cinema….unapologetic, excessive, alive. And after years of Bollywood sleepwalking through sanitised mediocrity or South cinema dependance, I'll take problematic brilliance over safe blandness any day of the week.
#Dhurandhar doesn't just entertain. It electrifies. And if that makes me complicit in propaganda, so be it.
I'm booking my second ticket, it’s that freaking good bro!
What #Dhurandhar proves is that ideological cinema doesn't have to be artistically incompetent. The left got lazy thinking it had a monopoly on sophistication. Now the right has learned the grammar, got the vision, and has the technicians. The game changed in the last few years in the country.
@daddynohara@Kiwipally They might not realise, but they're following the "Simple Sabotage Field Manual", published in 1944 by the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (OSS).
“Bahawalpur.”
I still have chills in my heart from when I first heard that town’s name in late January 2002. For the 23 years since, I have reported on how Pakistani intelligence and military leaders have used that city — Bahawalpur — in the southern province of Punjab as a base for its homegrown domestic terrorists.
When I heard India bombed training camps in Pakistan this week in Operation Sindoor, in response to a Pakistani terrorist rampage in India’s Kashmir state, I had one city’s name on my lips: Bahawalpur.
Did India bomb Bahawalpur?
It did. I knew then India was striking actual hubs for Pakistan’s homegrown domestic terrorism.
Why do I know?
My friend, WSJ reporter Danny Pearl, went to Bahawalpur in December 2001 with a notebook and a pen. Gen. Pervez Musharraf had just promised he was shutting down Pakistan’s militant groups after a strike by Pakistan’s terrorists against the Parliament in India, and Danny reported on the militant offices in Bahawalpur.
He literally knocked on their doors. Dear Dr. @yudapearl, this story is a window into Danny’s reporting enterprise. And because people will wonder: Danny was no cowboy. This was a calculated low-risk reporting trip because no journalist had been targeted for kidnapping in Pakistan. Around that time, Danny sent me an email: “I’m anxious to go to Afghanistan, but I’m not anxious to die.”
What did Danny learn?
The militant training camps were open for business in Bahawalpur.
On Jan. 23, 2002, Danny left a home I had rented in Karachi, Pakistan, for an interview.
I learned Danny’s fixer, Asif Farooqi, had arranged an interview for Danny through a man named “Arif.” Danny didn’t know it but Arif was the PR man for a militant group, Harkutul Mujahadeen. What was Arif’s hometown? Bahawalpur.
The police launched a manhunt to find Arif in Bahawalpur. We learned Arif’s family faked a funeral for Arif. Police found him trying to board a bus in Muzaffarabad, across the country by Pakistan’s border with Kashmir.
It is another town India said it bombed terrorist training facilities.
Arif had handed Danny off to Omar Sheikh,a British-Pakistani dropout from the London School of Economics, radicalized in the 1990s in London mosques. He went to Pakistan to train in these militant training camps. Then he kidnapped tourists in India. He was caught and jailed but on Dec. 31, 1999, he was traded for hostages in the hijacking of Indian Airlines Flight 814.
Omar Sheikh was freed with Pakistani terrorist leader Masood Azhar, whose family was allegedly killed this week by India’s air strike in Bahawalpur.
Did Pakistan jail Omar Sheikh and Masood Azhar when they returned to Pakistan with a third terrorist, freed from India’s jails?
No. Pakistan’s military and intelligence gave them safe passage. They used them as weapons against India. But in fact these domestic terrorists have waged war against innocents in Pakistan, like civil society activists, Benazir Bhutto, Punjab Governor Salman Taseer, schoolchildren and countless others.
Their extremism has ruined Pakistan, and Pakistanis can’t blame America for creating the mujahideen to fight the Soviets in the 1980s.
Pakistan has had a duty to dismantle those terrorist bases — for even the safety of its own people. What India is doing is a strategic attack on terrorist bases Pakistani military and intelligence should have eliminated but never did in their obsession to take over Kashmir.
You will see parallels in the propaganda messages against India and Israel. Like Hamas, Pakistani terrorists crossed a border to kill. Now, Pakistani propagandists call themselves victims of their “fascist” “colonizer” neighbor.
It’s the Reverse Uno strategy of moral inversion, just like @stoolpresidente got from the Temple student who won’t take responsibility for promoting the “HATE THE JEWS” sign. Don’t fall for it. Nations, communities and people must own up to their extremism, from Bahawalpur to beyond.
Love letter to @obsdmd to which I very happily switched to for my personal notes. My primary interest in Obsidian is not even for note taking specifically, it is that Obsidian is around the state of the art of a philosophy of software and what it could be.
- Your notes are simple plain-text markdown files stored locally on your computer. Obsidian is just UI/UX sugar of pretty rendering and editing files.
- Extensive plugins ecosystem and very high composability with any other tools you wish to use because again it's all just plain-text files on your disk.
- For a fee to cover server costs, you can also Sync (with end-to-end encryption) and/or Publish your files. Or you can use anything else e.g. GitHub, it's just files go nuts.
- There are no attempts to "lock you in", actually as far as I can tell Obsidian is completely free of any user-hostile dark patterns.
For some more depth, I recommend the following writing from CEO @kepano:
- "File over app" https://t.co/SigWj8uCrf . If you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.
- "100% user-supported" https://t.co/2qDJXub7cs . On incentives alignment.
- "Quality software deserves your hard‑earned cash" https://t.co/qfNjSEwbLf
TLDR: This is what software could be: private, secure, delightful, free of dark patterns, fully aligned with the user, where you retain full control and ownership of your data in simple, universal formats, and where tools can be extended and composed.
@ThePrimeagen "You can do what you wanna do, but you have to acknowledge the futility in it." - dude just dropped that piece of wisdom at the end of the video like nothing.
@christophrumpel What a lovely trip down memory lane!
Mine:
- 2013: PyCharm
- 2014: Sublime Text
- 2016: Atom
- 2017: Jupyter + Pycharm
- 2019: Jupyter + VS Code
- 2024: Hybrid (IntelliJ for Java, VSCode for Jupyter NBs, Neovim for everything else)
Looking back from around 2020 until now, the biggest lesson I will take into 2024 is this:
**Focus my attention on things I want to accomplish AND I have significant control over.**
@SimonHarrisCo Disclaimer: I still use boring 85% keyboard layout but have been planning to switch for a while - so don't know how the learning curve feels like.
@SimonHarrisCo Do look up home row mods and 36/42-Key layout keyboard kits. Because of your injury a hybrid setup (21 keys for left hand and 18 keys for the right) might be better for you. Watch this:
https://t.co/LGM5q1VLjy
Kevin Conroy, who’s most well known as the iconic voice behind Batman in BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES, has sadly passed away at the age of 66…
Rest In Peace