Aam Naagrik

[Sachin Naik @sachindn]

Are we becoming a dumping ground for cheap electronics?
Something we learnt the hard way these past few months.
Customers started returning our UPS units, saying backup wasn't enough. We pulled every returned unit, charged it, loaded it up, and ran it down. Full backup, every single time. On our bench, nothing was wrong.
This went on for almost 3 months. Honestly, a wild goose chase. We suspected our design, our battery batches, everything except the actual problem.
The actual problem: The humble 12V 2A adapter powering the router. After about a year of use, even at a small 1A load, these adapters don't give 12V anymore. We measured 10.4V on some.
Our UPS sees 10.4V and thinks the power has gone. And switches to battery. Sits on battery the whole day while mains is perfectly fine. So when a real power cut comes, there's nothing left. Customer is right no backup. But the UPS was never the problem.
We thought fine, let's just source good adapters for our customers. Turns out most "Made in India" adapters are SKD kits — the cheapest possible design imported from China, assembled here. Nobody checks whether it still holds voltage after a year, because nobody's testing it after the return window closes.
So here we are, building our own 12V 2A adapter now. Yes, with Chinese components; that's just the reality of electronics today. But the design is ours. Stable voltage for years, low ripple, proper protections. Boring stuff nobody prints on the box.
A 200 rupee part quietly killing the devices around it, and the device maker takes the blame. And this isn't just our story; it's happening across categories.
We badly need stricter standards on what gets imported and assembled here. Otherwise we're just the last stop for the world's worst designs.
If you build hardware in India, I am sure most of you would have faced this too.

[Millie Marconi @MillieMarconnni]

A Japanese engineer invented the QR code for one job, tracking car parts on a Toyota line, then his company chose to give the patent away for free, which is the only reason it ended up on every restaurant table on Earth.

His name is Masahiro Hara. The company was Denso Wave, a parts supplier owned by Toyota.

In 1992 the problem landed on his desk, and it was not glamorous. Workers on the factory floor were drowning.

Every car part had a barcode, but a barcode can only hold about twenty characters, so to track one component they had to stick five or ten barcodes on it.

A worker would stand there scanning a single part ten times in a row. Some of them were scanning close to a thousand barcodes a day. The job had stopped being about building cars and turned into pointing a scanner at stickers all day long.

And there was a second problem nobody upstairs cared about. This was a factory. Oil got on everything. A smudge of grease across a barcode and the whole thing became unreadable, and the line stopped.

Hara was asked to make the scanner faster. He looked at it for a while and realized the scanner was not the problem. The barcode itself was the ceiling. A line of black bars can only hold information going one direction, left to right.

He decided to build something that held information in two directions, up and down as well as across, so it could store hundreds of times more in the same little square.

Then came the part that sounds made up but is not.

Hara played Go on his lunch breaks, the old board game with black and white stones sitting on a grid. He was staring at the board one day and it clicked.

The grid of black and white stones was already a way to store information in two directions. That was the shape of his code.

But building the code was the easy half. The hard problem was speed, because the whole point was to be fast, and a scanner wastes most of its time just trying to figure out where the code is and which way it is turned.

The fix came to him on a train. He was looking out the window at buildings, and one building stood out from all the others because of its shape against the sky. That was the idea.

He put three little square targets in three corners of the code. The moment a scanner sees those three squares, it knows instantly where the code is and how it is rotated, even upside down, even at an angle.

Now here is the detail that shows how far he was willing to go. Those three corner squares only work if nothing else on the page looks like them.

If a magazine ad or a cardboard box happened to have the same black and white pattern nearby, the scanner would get confused and grab the wrong thing.

So Hara and his tiny two-person team went and surveyed printed material. Magazines. Flyers. Cardboard boxes. Piles of it, for days, reducing every picture down to its ratio of black to white area, hunting for the one ratio that almost never shows up in print anywhere. They found it. One to one to three to one to one.

That exact rhythm of black and white is baked into every corner square of every QR code on Earth, and it is there because it is the pattern the printed world almost never produces by accident.

Then he solved the oil.

He built the code so it carries a backup of its own information, spread mathematically across the whole square. You can tear off, smudge, or scratch out up to thirty percent of a QR code and it still scans perfectly, because the code rebuilds the missing piece from the copy it kept of itself.

A worker could get grease on a third of the label and the line would keep moving. This is the same math that lets a scratched CD still play and lets a spacecraft send data back across the solar system without asking to repeat itself.

He finished in 1994. He named it Quick Response, after what it does for the person using it, not after what it is.

And then Denso made the decision that actually mattered.

They held the patent. They could have charged a fee on every single scan, and given how many billions happen now, that would have made someone unimaginably rich.

Instead they announced they would not enforce their rights to collect royalties, and they published the specification openly so anyone could use it. Hara later said it was not even a big argument inside the company.

That one choice is the whole story. A code that costs nothing to use is a code everyone builds on. Airlines put it on tickets. Phone makers built readers into cameras.

Then a pandemic hit and the world needed a way to hand someone information without touching anything, and the free little square that a Toyota engineer built for greasy factory workers was suddenly on every menu, every payment, every door.

Hara still works there. He has said, more than once, that he never imagined it would spread this far, and that the part he is proudest of is that it got used to keep people safe.

The man built it to survive oil on a factory floor. It ended up surviving everything else too.

You have scanned his work a hundred times this year. Now you know whose it was.

[Aam Naagrik @loonyplanet]

@killersam64 @SoldierNationF1 @SushilS27538625 Sirs, for the original one, you will have to visit the Regt. which both of these fine officers commanded. You will see the original idea and the original Comdt’s Cupola in its glory.
PS : The credit goes to another fine officer who commanded the same Regiment.

[महावीर, ಮಹಾವೀರ, Mahavir @Mahaveer_VJ]

Ottapalam, Kerala : a small town in Palakkad, but what happened there is a masterclass in crisis management.

A moving bus caught fire & you can see a 60 second display of citizen bravery.

10th Second: The bus doors opened. People started coming out.
30th Second: A local bystander came Not with a phone to record a reel, but with a fire extinguisher.
35th Second: 3 to 4 more people with fire extinguisher.
50th Second: Every single soul is off the bus. Safe. Unharmed.
60th Second: The visible flames are dead.

And note
NOT A SINGLE PERSON WITH A MOBILE IN HAND.

[Priyanshu Ratnakar @0xratnakar]

the impact ai summit in delhi was a perfect demonstration of why india keeps losing in tech

and i’m tired of pretending it wasn’t a disaster.

let me paint the actual picture:

> cash-only payments at a “digital india” upi ??
> pm visit → main hall cleared for hours, everyone else just stood around doing nothing
> exhibitors locked out of their own stalls
> 3-hour queue just to enter
> a founder’s product got stolen during the summit
> no wifi at an ai event.
> can’t take your keys if you came via car/bike
> no laptop/camera at tech event
> people were asked to sit on the ground
> speaker lineup with consultants/bureaucrats who’ve never shipped a real product
> the registration system crashed multiple times. people who registered weeks in advance couldn’t get in.

vips walked past massive queues while founders and builders stood outside in the heat. 🤡

and 27 countries witnessed all of this live

networking areas? no space to stand.

many demos didn’t work because there was no stable internet. 5g??

this is what happens when optics matter more than execution.
when innovation becomes photo-op

the sad part is india has insane talent.

founders building world class products.
engineers and researchers doing real work.

leave India for a sec, im at network school and the youngest crowd is all Indians.

but we keep shooting ourselves in the foot with performative nonsense.

the west isn’t winning because they’re smarter.
they’re winning because they care about details.

because they respect builders.
because their tech summits actually work.

same story when @sama came to india last time.
boomer uncles asked the dumbest questions.
and when he said it’s hard for india to build foundational models, we took it on our ego.

rn, every founder who attended left embarrassed.

imagine international delegate left with stories about our “infrastructure.”

many friends and young builder lost a little more faith.

this wasn’t just bad planning.
it was a signal of what we value.
and clearly, it’s security theater and photo-ops over builders.

we can do better.
we have the talent.
we have the market.
we have the potential.

what we don’t have is execution and respect for the people building the future.

maybe one day we will do better. till then if you’re a founder, ignore the noise. keep building.

[MN @NizzUtd]

An elderly woman in Kozhikode, Kerala, bravely stopped a scooty rider from misusing the footpath and sent him back to the road.
Her civic sense and determination truly deserve appreciation.

[Priyanshi @pricatttt]

*Animals husbandry scam 2.0"
Build 1000 dog detention centres, hold animals in 70×40 blocks like disposable waste, waste 1000s of crores & call it "welfare". Human safety comes with ABC, not impractical & corrupt relocations.Send your email now! (Add name)
https://t.co/0ynIRGgtOg

[Aam Naagrik @loonyplanet]

@airindia @TataCompanies @JM_Scindia @DGCAIndia @MoCA_GoI

[Aam Naagrik @loonyplanet]

@airindia @JM_Scindia @MoCA_GoI
What pathetic way to handle your customers. AI 1830 cancelled at last minute due to hydraulic issue. Old, families with young kids stranded. Air India staff on ground has no clue ..

[Aam Naagrik @loonyplanet]

Absolutely unprofessional behaviour @airindia

[Aam Naagrik @loonyplanet]

@airindia @JM_Scindia @TataCompanies @SingaporeAir @narendramodi Sirs, if this is how your plans are going to be implemented on ground, god help us. A technical issue can happen anywhere, but if this how flag carrier of the country behaves, we are going backwards.

[Pallavi U Dar @DarPallavi]

"As long as a stray dog of my country remains without food, my religion will be to feed and take care of him. All else is either non-religion or false religion.”

Profound words by Swami Vivekananda 🙏
#savedelhincrdogs2025
#SaveDelhiNCRDogs

[Aam Naagrik @loonyplanet]

@ragarwal @dracula_empathy @BharatVigil @DeepikaBhardwaj @adgpi @flyspicejet One of the most unprofessional airline in India. For past 6 odd years, never was in an unfortunate position that I had to fly with them. Hope it stays that way.

[Rohit Agarwal 🇮🇳 @ragarwal]

@dracula_empathy @BharatVigil @DeepikaBhardwaj @adgpi @flyspicejet #BoycottSpiceJet

https://t.co/TNMcMrAVkH

[Aam Naagrik @loonyplanet]

@BluSmartIndia Aren’t there enough illogical rules in this country that you are also adding to it?
Please train your drivers !!

[Aam Naagrik @loonyplanet]

@BluSmartIndia
my present drive is quickly becoming a headache inducing agony. Your driver won’t go beyond 60 on expressway, where the speed limit for cars is 80.

[Aam Naagrik @loonyplanet]

@BluSmartIndia - in his attempts to keep under the speed, he is constantly braking, tossing the passenger sitting behind.

[Upword @upword_]

We have called out this inane propaganda on 'breast tax' many times before. Yet it persists to serve the insidious agenda of caste-based electoral politics. Share this video widely and let the truth be heard as many times as they try to kill it.

[Not A Number @myhiddenvalue]

He found out who owns BlackRock