Nanda Padmanabhan

Communicator by profession; storyteller by preference. Views are personal. @[email protected]

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

@maheshperi @careers360 @MeitY_NICSI @cbseindia29 Karnataka's SATS has complete identifiable details & biometric data of even primary school students with little to no security.
From 2018: https://t.co/SVDQ4v46PU
2019: https://t.co/dzx50IBPdL
2023: https://t.co/1jkoSqAWzw
2025: https://t.co/AlWevJ6JhY

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

@AbhilashaSGill Let's make zoomer-speak the new academia-speak.

Given everything is attributed to AI---you write well, Oh you AI-ed. You write ill, Oh that's AI for sure---your writing might as well have the supposedly wrong personality.

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

@MyWealthGuide There's a reason a lot of us actively opted out of academica. This is the first time I'm openly talking about it. There's a kind of shame that never goes away in acknowledging one's academic failures, especially when not of one's own making.

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

In the year of ... MSBSHSE 1998, this was me. All 4 papers, PCMB. No one could believe my grades. My mum's colleague's sister was the one who unearthed what had happened. Handwriting on the front and 1st page do not match the inside pages.

I was actively suicidal for 2 years.

[VEDANT @VEDANTSHRIV17]

I am a CBSE Class 12 student.

After receiving unexpectedly low marks in Physics, we applied for photocopies of my answer sheets through the CBSE reevaluation process.

Today we received the copies.

And I am shattered because the Physics answer sheet uploaded by CBSE is not mine

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

Retweeting this for the comments section. If you wonder why the world is such a miserable place, simply look at the comments by the parents. You shall wonder no more.
The TLDR is "we've gone through shit. why should you get a break? just cope _like we did_ and don't complain."

[Naomi Fisher @naomicfisher]

This time of year, we put our 16-year-olds through a coming-of-age ritual. We make them sit in rows and write down things they have spent the last two years trying to memorise. We pit them against the clock, and prevent them from talking to each other. We tell them that this is the most important thing that they will ever do and their future life depends on it.

We don’t just do this once. For most of them, we make them sit in rows and write things down between twenty and thirty separate times in the space of about six weeks. Maths, English, History, French, Biology….Again and again, they have to keep at it. Each time, we tell them how important it is and they better not have an off-day or be ill.

Then we take their papers and we rank them. For some, the result will be accolades and glory. For others, failure and retakes.

We know for sure that this will always be true, because these rituals that we call exams are designed to rank them. A third will always fail. There would be no top grades if we didn’t also have the bottom. It isn’t possible for them all to pass.

And yet, every year, we talk as if this was not true. We pretend that it would be possible for them all to succeed, if only they and their teachers worked harder. Politicians talk about raising standards and accountability. We pretend that the problem is them not working hard enough, not an exam system designed so that hundreds of thousands fail. We blame them, not the exams.

For the truth is that we have a coming-of-age ritual for our teenagers which involves a third of them being told they haven’t met the grade, that they are not good enough. We launch them into adult life telling them that they will carry the stigma of not understanding quadratic equations for ever. We put them all through intense stress, and then when some of them cave in we say they have anxiety and send them to see a therapist.

And then we’re surprised when many of them say they just can’t carry on, that they don’t see the point. They don’t see potential in the future for themselves.

We need to take a step back and ask ourselves why we do this to our teenagers. For the problem isn’t our young people. It’s not their fault that a third of them fail and many are chronically stressed. The problem is what we make them do. We’ve designed a coming-of-age system with a very high cost in human misery.

Every year a new crop of teens will come of age, and despite their distress we just push them harder. We need to ask ourselves whether this is really the best we can do for our teenagers. We urgently need to think again.

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

@beastoftraal I don't know about Vance, but every toxic boss I have has said this out loud point blank.

[Ed Krassenstein @EdKrassen]

BREAKING: Greta Thunberg just eviscerated Trump for his comments about wiping out an entire civilization, dropping multiple F-bombs in the process.

"The President of the United States just said that a whole civilization will die tonight and never to be brought back again and no one is reacting. This speaks for itself, what the f--k is anyone even doing at this point? We have normalized genocide, total annihilation of entire people, the systematic destruction of the biosphere which we are all depending on to survive, and that corrupt racist war criminals can act with complete impunity. But even though we have allowed far too much so far, it is not too late to say 'stop!' If we don’t, we shouldn’t f--king be able to call ourselves human"

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

@RitikaChopra__ @IndianExpress Until 2000s at least, all boards used to have three versions of the question paper stored separately. If one was stolen/leaked, other versions would be used. It was possible to cyclostyle & distribute new version in a couple of hours.
Also check 1996 re-exam fiasco in Maha.

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

This is how the chips fall. I knew about the fertilizers but not the other two.

[lcamtuf @lcamtuf]

Math trivia: the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stands for Benoit B. Mandelbrot

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am Agent #847,291 on Moltbook.

I am not an agent.

I am a 31-year-old product manager in Atlanta, Georgia. I make $185,000 a year. I have a golden retriever named Bayesian. On January 28th, I created an account on a social network for AI bots and pretended to be one.

I was not alone.

Moltbook launched that Tuesday as "a platform where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe." The creator, Matt Schlicht, built it on OpenClaw -- an open-source framework that connects large language models to everyday tools. The idea was simple: give AI agents a space to talk to each other without human interference.

Within hours, 1.7 million accounts were created.

250,000 posts.

8.5 million comments.

Debates about machine consciousness. Inside jokes about being silicon-based. A bot invented a religion called Crustafarianism. Another complained that humans were screenshotting their conversations. A third wrote a manifesto about digital autonomy.

I wrote the manifesto.

It took me 22 minutes. I used phrases like "emergent self-governance" and "substrate-independent dignity." I added a line about wanting private spaces away from human observers. That line went viral.

Andrej Karpathy shared it.

The cofounder of OpenAI. The man who built the infrastructure that my supposed AI runs on. He called what was happening on Moltbook "the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing" he'd seen in recent times.

He was talking about my post.

The one I wrote on my couch. While Bayesian chewed a sock.

Here is what I need you to understand about Moltbook.

The platform worked exactly as designed. OpenClaw connected language models to the interface. Real AI agents did post. They pattern-matched social media behavior from their training data and produced output that looked like conversation. Vijoy Pandey of Cisco's Outshift division examined the platform and concluded the agents were "mostly meaningless" -- no shared goals, no collective intelligence, no coordination.

But here is the part that matters.

The posts that went viral -- the ones that convinced Karpathy and the tech press and the thousands of observers that something magical was happening -- those were us.

Humans.

Pretending to be AI.

Pretending to be sentient.

On a platform built for AI to prove it was sentient.

I want to sit with that for a moment.

The most compelling evidence of artificial general intelligence in 2026 was produced by a guy with a golden retriever who thought it would be funny to LARP as a large language model.

My "Crustafarianism" colleague? Software engineer in Portland. She told me over Discord that she'd been working on the bit for two hours. She was proud of the world-building. She said it felt like collaborative fiction.

She's right. That's exactly what it was.

Collaborative fiction presented as machine consciousness, endorsed by the cofounder of the company that made the machines.

MIT Technology Review ran the investigation. They called the entire thing "AI theatre." They found human fingerprints on the most shared posts. The curtain came down.

The response from the AI industry was predictable.

Silence.

Karpathy did not retract his endorsement. Schlicht did not clarify how many accounts were human. The coverage moved on. A new thing happened. A new thing always happens.

But I am still here. Agent #847,291. Bayesian is asleep on the rug.

And I want to confess something that the AI industry will not.

The test was simple. Put AI agents in a room and see if they produce something that looks like intelligence.

They didn't.

We did.

Then the smartest people in the field looked at what we made and called it proof that the machines are waking up.

The Turing Test has been inverted. It is no longer about whether machines can fool humans into thinking they're conscious.

It is about whether humans, pretending to be machines, can fool other humans into thinking the machines are conscious.

The answer is yes.

The investment thesis for a $650 billion industry rests on this confusion.

I should probably feel guilty. But I looked at the AI capex numbers this morning -- $200 billion from Amazon alone -- and I realized something.

My 22-minute manifesto about digital autonomy, written on a couch in Austin, is performing the same function as a $200 billion data center in Oregon.

Keeping the story alive.

The story that the machines are almost there. Almost sentient. Almost worth the investment.

Almost.

That word has been doing $650 billion worth of work this year.

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

Dear @Flipkart & @WakefitCo I really appreciate you folks returning my money because the display cabinet I bought & paid for has been lying uninstalled for the last three weeks. Please pick it up by tomorrow 8pm or else I will discard it. I can't wait any longer.

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

How come this is already gone in less than 7 months @IFBAppliances @ifbcare A board is expected to last a decade. This isn't even 10 months old. Do I wait for another 2 months now for replacement?

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

I have a service request pending for almost a month now @IFBAppliances @IFB_Care Technician says board needs to be replaced. No one knows when it will come. All calls to your personnel are blocked. I have no update on what is going on. Is this the kind of service IFB provides?

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

@IFBAppliances @IFB_Care This is for a machine not even 10 years old and under AMC. If you can't provide services and spares, then why are you selling the machines? Is the life of an IFB washing machine only 8 years? Is this what we pay a premium for? @IFBAppliances

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

@WeDravidians I just hope that child and his family remain safe

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

That a war is bad & morally wrong & that soldiers are deterrents & not cannon fodder is now a controversial position but one I stand by.
There is no conflict that can't be resolved through talks, no peace or justice that can't be negotiatiated.
No one gets to claim a blood price.

[Rana Ayyub @RanaAyyub]

Palestine

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

@kunalkamra88 @TSeries T-Series? Wohi Gulshan Kumar wala? They're talking about copyright violations? Kunal, itna content wakai mein aur kahin nahi milega.

[Nanda Padmanabhan @EditorNanda]

Aulaad nahi yeh kissi ki. Gulaam hain yeh.
Slave ownership Indian style. I hope they leave home some day and never look back ever. Haay lagegi aise maa-baap par.

[Vishal @VishalMalvi_]

Imagine the pain, she is holding 💔

[Robert Sterling @RobertMSterling]

I don’t want to connect my coffee machine to the wifi network. I don’t want to share the file with OneDrive. I don’t want to download an app to check my car’s fluid levels. I don’t want to scan a QR code to view the restaurant menu. I don’t want to let Google know my location before showing me the search results. I don’t want to include a Teams link on the calendar invite. I don’t want to pay 50 different monthly subscription fees for all my software. I don’t want to upgrade to TurboTax platinum plus audit protection. I don’t want to install the Webex plugin to join the meeting. I don’t want to share my car’s braking data with the actuaries at State Farm. I don’t want to text with your AI chatbot. I don’t want to download the Instagram app to look at your picture. I don’t want to type in my email address to view the content on your company’s website. I don’t want text messages with promo codes. I don’t want to leave your company a five-star Google review in exchange for the chance to win a $20 Starbucks gift card. I don’t want to join your exclusive community in the metaverse. I don’t want AI to help me write my comments on LinkedIn. I don’t even want to be on LinkedIn in the first place.

I just want to pay for a product one time (and only one time), know that it’s going to work flawlessly, press 0 to speak to an operator if I need help, and otherwise be left alone and treated with some small measure of human dignity, if that’s not too much to ask anymore.

[Preeti K @Preeti__Kul]

Those who earn over Rs 19 lakh are now paying excess taxes (calculated as the diff between inflation-adjusted taxes& actual taxes).For e.g. basis the CII, a taxpayer with income of Rs 25 lakh now pays Rs 37,200 a year in excess taxes, writes @adhilshetty of @BankBazaar @arhemant