Sugavanesh B

Developer / Engineer / Travel / Music / Movies / Geo-politics

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[Irushi @Im_IrushiK]

Opus 4.8 is insane, nothing will be the same after this model 💀

[The Paperclip @Paperclip_In]

This is a photograph of Albert Einstein with an unassuming Indian man you probably haven’t heard enough about. He spent his life working on one idea: women should be able to live with dignity and make their own choices. Thread.

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[Krzysztof Iwanek @Chris_Iwanek]

One of the cool pieces of news to emerge during those last, dark weeks is that nearly 30 inscriptions in Tamil Brahmi were found in the Egyptian Valley of Kings. This discovery means that apperently Indian travellers, likely merchants, had been coming to Egypt in the ancient era.

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

It is hard to communicate how much programming has changed due to AI in the last 2 months: not gradually and over time in the "progress as usual" way, but specifically this last December. There are a number of asterisks but imo coding agents basically didn’t work before December and basically work since - the models have significantly higher quality, long-term coherence and tenacity and they can power through large and long tasks, well past enough that it is extremely disruptive to the default programming workflow.

Just to give an example, over the weekend I was building a local video analysis dashboard for the cameras of my home so I wrote: “Here is the local IP and username/password of my DGX Spark. Log in, set up ssh keys, set up vLLM, download and bench Qwen3-VL, set up a server endpoint to inference videos, a basic web ui dashboard, test everything, set it up with systemd, record memory notes for yourself and write up a markdown report for me”. The agent went off for ~30 minutes, ran into multiple issues, researched solutions online, resolved them one by one, wrote the code, tested it, debugged it, set up the services, and came back with the report and it was just done. I didn’t touch anything. All of this could easily have been a weekend project just 3 months ago but today it’s something you kick off and forget about for 30 minutes.

As a result, programming is becoming unrecognizable. You’re not typing computer code into an editor like the way things were since computers were invented, that era is over. You're spinning up AI agents, giving them tasks *in English* and managing and reviewing their work in parallel. The biggest prize is in figuring out how you can keep ascending the layers of abstraction to set up long-running orchestrator Claws with all of the right tools, memory and instructions that productively manage multiple parallel Code instances for you. The leverage achievable via top tier "agentic engineering" feels very high right now.

It’s not perfect, it needs high-level direction, judgement, taste, oversight, iteration and hints and ideas. It works a lot better in some scenarios than others (e.g. especially for tasks that are well-specified and where you can verify/test functionality). The key is to build intuition to decompose the task just right to hand off the parts that work and help out around the edges. But imo, this is nowhere near "business as usual" time in software.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The math on this project should mass-humble every AI lab on the planet.

1 cubic millimeter. One-millionth of a human brain. Harvard and Google spent 10 years mapping it. The imaging alone took 326 days. They sliced the tissue into 5,000 wafers each 30 nanometers thick, ran them through a $6 million electron microscope, then needed Google’s ML models to stitch the 3D reconstruction because no human team could process the output.

The result: 57,000 cells, 150 million synapses, 230 millimeters of blood vessels, compressed into 1.4 petabytes of raw data. For context, 1.4 petabytes is roughly 1.4 million gigabytes. From a speck smaller than a grain of rice.

Now scale that. The full human brain is one million times larger. Mapping the whole thing at this resolution would produce approximately 1.4 zettabytes of data. That’s roughly equal to all the data generated on Earth in a single year. The storage alone would cost an estimated $50 billion and require a 140-acre data center, which would make it the largest on the planet.

And they found things textbooks don’t contain. One neuron had over 5,000 connection points. Some axons had coiled themselves into tight whorls for completely unknown reasons. Pairs of cell clusters grew in mirror images of each other. Jeff Lichtman, the Harvard lead, said there’s “a chasm between what we already know and what we need to know.”

This is why the next step isn’t a human brain. It’s a mouse hippocampus, 10 cubic millimeters, over the next five years. Because even a mouse brain is 1,000x larger than what they just mapped, and the full mouse connectome is the proof of concept before anyone attempts the human one.

We’re building AI systems that loosely mimic neural networks while still unable to fully read the wiring diagram of a single cubic millimeter of the thing we’re trying to imitate. The original is 1.4 petabytes per millionth of its volume. Every AI model on Earth fits in a fraction of that.

The brain runs on 20 watts and fits in your skull. The data center required to merely describe one-millionth of it would span 140 acres.

[Abhiraj Singh Bhal @abhirajbhal]

We’ve just released the latest edition of the Urban Company Partner Earnings Index.

During 9M FY26, @urbancompany_UC service partners earned an average ₹28.3k per month (net, in hand). Earnings scale meaningfully with performance: the top 20% earned ₹42.4k, the top 10% ₹47.4k, and the top 5% ₹51.6k per month, after removing commissions, taxes, fees, travel, and product costs.

These earnings are well above statutory minimum wages and at par with, or meaningfully better than, entry level IT salaries. This reflects a quiet but important shift toward dignified, skill based work that delivers strong and sustainable incomes.

Beyond earnings, all active service partners are covered under group life and accident insurance, including life cover up to ₹10 lakh, disability cover up to ₹6 lakh, and accidental hospitalisation and OPD coverage.

We’ve also partnered with HDFC Pension to enable access to the National Pension System (NPS), supporting long term financial security. In parallel, Urban Company continues to invest heavily in training and upskilling, with a large network of full time trainers and training centres across India. Through our partnership with NSDC, partners receive structured training and Skill India certified digital credentials, with high performers able to progress into full time trainer roles, creating clear pathways for career growth.

More details can be accessed here - https://t.co/LrqjXPGCrH

[Sugavanesh B @sugavaneshb]

@chamath @grok are these estimates inflation adjusted?

[Sugavanesh B @sugavaneshb]

@deepigoyal Few followups -
1. From 2024 to 2025,what's the change in order density and distance travelled by the gig worker? Given that blinkit revenue grew 3-4x in the time period
2. Looks like worker hours are tail heavy. What's the median worker hour ? And what's their pay look like?

[Visegrád 24 @visegrad24]

Russia passes law allowing total internet blackout in the country

Overnight, Russia adopted a new decree granting Roskomnadzor, the state agency overseeing information, total control over the Russian internet.

The regulator is now authorized to:
— Issue binding orders to telecom operators and ISPs;
— Redirect internet traffic through state-controlled technical systems;
— Alter data routing paths;
— Activate filtering, blocking, or protection tools at its discretion;
— Take direct manual control of the entire Russian internet in case of a “threat.”

Roskomnadzor becomes the central command center for Runet, with the FSB and the Ministry of Digital Development assisting.

Authorities frame the measure as a security step meant to ensure the “stability and integrity” of the internet in Russia. In practice, the regulator can now restrict access to any website it deems a threat, and, if necessary, disconnect Runet from the global web entirely.

The new rules take effect on March 1, 2026.

[Shashi Tharoor @ShashiTharoor]

As the hubbub over the New York election of @ZohranKMamdani consumes urban Indians, a reminder that nine years ago I moved a Private Member’s Bill in Parliament calling for directly-elected Mayors in Indian cities, with real authority & accountability as well as control over city budgets. What a difference it could have made to urban governance in our country!

[Shashi Tharoor @ShashiTharoor]

Poor soul has clearly never had a good one. A truly great idli is a cloud, a whisper, a perfect dream of the perfectibility of human civilisation. It's a sublime creation, a delicate, weightless morsel of rice and lentil, steamed to an ethereal fluffiness that melts on the tongue. With the right accompaniments, it is the culinary equivalent of a Beethoven symphony, a Tagore sangeet, a Husain painting, a Tendulkar century. To call such a thing "regret" is to have no soul, no palate, no appreciation for the finest achievements of South Indian culture. I can only feel pity for @Molutty_writes and @SassyDopamine !

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

The Indian Government central budget for 2025-26 allocated 39,929 million Indian rupees of tax payer money to the Ministry of AYUSH (Ayurveda, Yoga & Naturopathy, Unani, Siddha and Homeopathy), an increase of 14.15% from the previous year.

Specific research bodies received significant funding, including 4572 million rupees for the Central Council for Research in Ayurvedic Sciences (CCRAS).

This is what the Ayurveda community is publishing.
Congratulations! Keep it up.

[Crémieux @cremieuxrecueil]

War is bad and I don't support it, but I have to admit I'm getting a kick out of Pakistan's government lying so obviously.

Their government or state media:

- Claimed to knock out 70% of India's power with a cyberattack
- To have nuked New Delhi
- Claimed Arma 3 footage was real

[Dravidian Insights @dstock_insights]

Government School Students Enrolled in Colleges

2021-22: 45%
2022-23: 69%
2023-24: 74%

Impact of Pudhumai Penn and Tamil Pudhavalvan Schemes

[TheLiverDoc™ @theliverdoc]

Have a patient with severe liver injury and jaundice. Liver biopsy shows features of immune mediated damage. She was on an Ayurvedic formulation called Pothin Dravakam.

Pothin Dravakam is a traditional Ayurvedic medicine, specifically a type of "dravakam" (a liquid preparation) primarily used to treat rheumatic pain, joint pain and swelling - for which, in reality there exists zero evidence of effectiveness.

It contains the notable ingredient which is buffalo meat (Pothu) mixed with extracts from various herbs, including Alpinia calcarata (rasna), Ricinus communis (erandam), Sida rhombifolia (bala), and Tinospora cordifolia (guduchi).

The culprit here is Tinospora cordifolia or Giloy (or Guduchi) which is well known to cause herb-induced autoimmune liver injury.

If you or your family/ friends are on any Ayurvedic supplements, please do check for Giloy as a content as it can trigger autoimmune disorder, especially of the liver. The culprit chemical in the plant that causes autoimmune liver damage is "furano-diterpinoids" emphasizing the fact that, "everything natural is not safe."

[Prasanna S @myprasanna]

Do I know any media people? The Thirumangalam, Chennai police station is harassing me for money knowing that I'm a successful founder. The AC and the SI have asked me for 25L to release my friend who has been in custody. Please RT for support. @CMOTamilnadu @PMOIndia

[David Pfau @pfau]

From the other site. It's harder to see the impact here since so many scientists fled, but the NIH cuts are having a real impact. Whole labs are shutting down, careers are ending. Pediatric cancer research ffs.

[Suchi SA @suchi_a]

So, for their convenience, rest of the nation has to learn their language?

[More Perfect Union @MorePerfectUS]

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's new leadership is dropping cases.

Today they dismissed at least four enforcement lawsuits, including cases against Capital One, Berkshire Hathaway-owned Vanderbilt Mortgage & Finance, and a predatory student loan company.