At the @IndianExpress Adda, I was asked about electoral spending.
It’s a subject that often leaves me both shocked and disillusioned. As a society, we need some honest introspection.
Democracy cannot place all responsibility on politicians alone. If we expect higher standards from our leaders, we must also expect higher standards from ourselves as voters.
@VoyageBliss Had a similar experience yesterday but the logic is that in a train journey people get on at multiple points and what seemed empty at the first station is already sold out. They work with the info available at the time of booking. Late bookings usually get this more (obviously).
@bookwormengr Yes, indeed. I was surprised. Kudos to the civic authorities there. But it came with some angst around how much Indian citizens are cheated in India (where does all the money go).
There are media reports that Tamil Nadu government has explicitly told public work contractors and real estate builders not to pay any money for their party and quote only actuals.
President of the Tamil Nadu PWD Engineering Contractors Association, has publicly confirmed that contractors are now being told they no longer need to pay any commissions or bribes.
Real estate builders sources also confirm the development.
If this is something which is implemented and maintained, huge progress in terms of probity in public life.
Let's wait and watch.
“I’ve been stabbed,” Nowak can be heard telling officers.
“I don’t think you have, mate,” one officer responds. Nowak repeatedly told officers that he could not breathe. He was handcuffed and informed he was under arrest for assault before eventually losing consciousness.
Farmers have figured out that the cheapest pesticide is a strip of flowers.
When you plant wildflowers through a crop field, not just around the edge but in strips running through the middle, you get ladybugs, lacewings, hoverflies, and parasitic wasps living in the field instead of visiting it.
They eat the aphids, the caterpillars, and the mites for free, all summer long.
In controlled trials, fields with tailored flower strips had leaf-beetle numbers 40 to 50% lower and crop damage cut by around 60%, enough to drop below the threshold where spraying was even considered worth it.
The flowers attract a standing army to our fields.
We spent decades engineering chemicals to kill the insects eating the crop, when the insects that eat those insects would have worked for the price of seed.
68% of India's pharmaceutical raw materials come from China. Not finished drugs — the actual chemical compounds that go into making them.
One supply chain hiccup and your local pharmacy runs out of paracetamol. We found this out during COVID. We said never again. Three years later, 68%.
🚨 How the TanStack npm attack actually happened:
1. Attacker opened a normal-looking pull request (#7378) on the TanStack repo.
2. GitHub automatically ran CI tests on that PR.
3. Code inside the PR stole the workflow's GitHub Actions Cache write token during the test run.
4. The attacker used that token to plant poisoned files in the shared build cache. The PR could be closed afterwards. The poisoned cache stays.
5. The official release workflow later pulled from the cache, baked the malicious files into the build, and signed and published 84 malicious package versions to npm.
Terence Tao - "AI tools are like taking a helicopter to drop you off at the site. You miss all the benefits of the journey itself. You just get right to the destination, which actually was only just a part of the value of solving these problems."
Judit Polgar - "I always felt that intuition is very important in chess, but I get my intuition through my experience. And many times I think that this is the biggest danger for youth, that they don't have the experience because they don't spend enough time doing."
Elites from two different fields voice the same opinion.
[1] https://t.co/XRDSSPjpQ8
[2] https://t.co/fQzPT3D3f4
@HDFCBank_Cares HDFC Bank has truly pathetic customer service. Online ReKYC says successful but still not done. Two visits to the bank branch and still ReKYC not done @RBI