swami kumar

study the science of art & the art of science. develop your senses and learn to see. realize that everything connects to everything else
- leonardo da vinci

[swami kumar @swamusing]

one of the most incredible uses of ai will be to scrape public information to uncover the most egregious discrepancies and downright insanities (read: corruption) of indian public spending

[Malay Krishna @Malay4Product]

This is an unbelievable piece of work by Sarthak and something that requires amplification.

Let me explain what he found, in simple terms.

Sarthak is a Class 12 student from the 2025-26 batch, one of the 17 lakh students whose answer sheets went through CBSE's new On-Screen Marking system.

He spent days reading through CBSE's evaluation tenders, scraped all 576 tenders CBSE has issued, and tracked how the rules changed across three versions of the same tender.

The core finding is that the company that won the contract to scan and grade 17 lakh students' answer sheets is Coempt Eduteck.

Coempt used to be called Globarena Technologies. Globarena was the company behind the 2019 Telangana intermediate exam disaster, where software failures led to 3.8 lakh students getting wrong or missing marks, and 23 students died by suicide.

A government committee found systemic failure and negligence. Six months later, Globarena rebranded to Coempt Eduteck.

So a company with that track record won a contract to handle 17 lakh CBSE students. Sarthak's investigation is about how the rules were rewritten to let that happen.

The tender was issued three times.

> First tender, February 2025. It existed, then disappeared from the public GeM portal. Sarthak scraped all 576 CBSE tenders and this one was missing from the archive entirely.

> Second tender, May 2025. Four companies applied including TCS and Coempt. All four failed the technical evaluation. Cancelled.

> Third tender, August 2025. Coempt won. Between the second and third tender, a series of rule changes happened, and every single one made it easier for Coempt to qualify.

Here is what changed, one by one.

01. The old rules disqualified any company with a history of abandoning work, failing to complete contracts, or financial weakness. The new rules deleted this clause entirely. Coempt's Telangana history stopped being a barrier.

02. The old rules disqualified any company that was "blacklisted earlier." The new rules changed this to "currently blacklisted." Because Globarena rebranded after Telangana, removing the word "earlier" effectively erased their past.

03. The rules required Rs 50 crore average turnover over three years. Coempt's exact average came to Rs 50.86 crore. They cleared the bar by less than 1%. Earlier, a smaller company had asked CBSE to lower the bar to Rs 30 crore for fairer competition. CBSE refused. So the bar was kept high enough to block small players, but sat exactly low enough for Coempt to scrape through.

04. Software maturity is measured on the CMMI scale, 1 to 5. The old rules required Level 5. The new rules dropped it to Level 3. Coempt is a Level 3 company.

05. The cooling-off period for engaging retired CBSE officials was cut from two years to one. This makes it easier to use recently retired insiders to influence the process.

06. The old rules required experience with large projects of at least 5 lakh students each. The new rules removed the student count and counted cumulative answer-book volume across small projects instead. Coempt has many small fragmented university contracts. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS.

07. The old rules required bidders to own their own data centre and disaster recovery centre on Indian soil. The new rules allowed third-party MeitY-empanelled cloud hosting. Coempt runs on AWS and Azure. This helped Coempt and hurt TCS, which owns its own data centres. It also means student data is no longer on sovereign, Indian infrastructure.

08. The old rules required the bidder to own or control the complete source code of its software. The new rules deleted this. Coempt's platform runs on Microsoft's proprietary IIS, which they don't own.

09. A last-minute corrigendum, issued right before bid submission, removed CBSE's own power to blacklist the firm if its software failed catastrophically. So even a Telangana-scale failure couldn't get Coempt banned from future government tenders.

10. The penalty structure shifted from punishing mistakes to punishing delays. The old rules fined the vendor for wrong scanning, merged pages, and unscanned books. The new rules dropped those and instead levied Rs 50,000 per day for delays. This incentivises rushed scanning over accurate scanning.

11. The old rules had a hard accuracy threshold, error rate not to exceed 0.5%. The new rules removed this number entirely.

12. The old rules specified proper book and robotics scanners. The new rules just say "sufficient scanners." The definition was vague enough that, as Sarthak notes, the scanning could be done with a phone on a stand.

13. On the security side, the contract required a VAPT (vulnerability and penetration test) certified by CERT-In before go-live, and a restricted beta phase before launch. The system clearly wasn't restricted, because the other researcher, Nisarga, was able to access it and find vulnerabilities four days before go-live. So the mandatory security audit appears to have been bypassed.

These are more than a dozen rule changes, all between the failed tender and the winning tender, all pushing in the same direction, all benefiting the one company with the worst track record in the field.

The security holes Nisarga found last week now have an explanation. The system was built by a vendor that was specifically allowed to skip the security certification, the source code ownership, the data sovereignty, and the quality thresholds the original rules demanded.

Following things need to happen immediately;

1. An immediate CAG audit of the tender process.
2. A parliamentary debate on the topic.
3. An independent investigation into
> Why the first tender vanished?
> Why the disqualification clauses were deleted?
> Why the turnover bar was held exactly where it was?
> Why the security level was dropped?
> Why the blacklisting power was removed at the last moment?

Sarthak, this is genuinely exceptional investigative work. Far better than most journalists with full resources ever manage. Take a bow. :)

[Lenny Rachitsky @lennysan]

Banger

[swami kumar @swamusing]

@prukalpa theory - temporary 2-4 year blip to babysit and teach exceptions and training agents as agents start taking up more complex customer support issues

[swami kumar @swamusing]

@signulll they were laid back so lost distribution to cursor during wave 1. now for the 2nd wave when claude code exploded, they’re behind anthropic with harnesses leveraging top of line models.

[swami kumar @swamusing]

@prukalpa sharma ji ka beta enters the data world 🤣

so pumped to see this!

[swami kumar @swamusing]

🤦‍♂️"judgement"

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

This is the wildest story...

"I introduced Dario to 22 friends up and down Sand Hill Road and we got 21 no's.... it was such a brutal time getting this company going." @AnjneyMidha

This company today is trading at $860BN on secondary markets... ouch.

[swami kumar @swamusing]

@Rahul_J_Mathur pretty sure there should be a claw for this pdf request (either to pull pdf, or to kick those people asking for it, out from the gc)

[swami kumar @swamusing]

it’s there man. it’s just obscured. the yogic tradition showed us we just need to delete our context.md entirely (aka become “without thought and delete limiting beliefs of the world and pre conceived notions”) and then we discover the true power of the model when we apply the right harness but keep it simple. the super intelligence is there, it’s just stuck operating w a ton of unnecessary context and harnesses that don’t work for this super intelligence.

[signüll @signulll]

humans are state of the art hardware running kinda ancient software.

the wetware is absolutely extraordinary.. 86 billion neurons, all massively parallel, & energy efficient beyond anything we can remotely engineer. the hardware is genuinely best in class.

so then why did super intelligence not naturally evolve within us?

[swami kumar @swamusing]

it’s there man. it’s just obscured. the yogic tradition showed us we just need to delete our context.md entirely (aka become “without thought and delete limiting beliefs of the world and pre conceived notions”) and then we discover the true power of the model when we apply the right harness but keep it simple. the super intelligence is there, it’s just stuck operating w a ton of unnecessary context and harnesses that don’t work for this super intelligence.

[swami kumar @swamusing]

@businessbarista love this

[swami kumar @swamusing]

@mehul @lennysan i meant you should do it - no better way to simulate safety 😂

[swami kumar @swamusing]

1/ this entire thread is the definition of pmf (h/t @lennysan)
2/ i love how much love a home cleaning robot is getting - the joy of seeing people love what you build is just 🤌 incredible job @mehul
3/ idk if they're doing this, but it feels like all this home object navigation data should 100% be going to train self-driving cars?

[Tim Ferriss @tferriss]

Has anyone used Matic (robot vacuum)? If so, from 0-10 (no 7 allowed), how strongly would you recommend and why? Thanks! 🙏

[Sakshi @thesakshishukla]

"hot people" are an advantage for any AI-native company.

here's how to be one:

> not hot as in aesthetic. hot as in the person everyone wants to be around, buy from, work with, and tell their friends about
> closes deals without anyone feeling sold to. the product sells itself because the relationship already did the work
> hosts events that everyone wants to show up to. creates an ecosystem around your product without anyone realising they walked right into it.
> has an information advantage. walks into a room and people immediately want to tell them things
> gets more useful feedback from customers in one conversation (doesn't believe in structuring user research)
> turns customers into participants. they start shaping the product because they feel like they belong to it

[swami kumar @swamusing]

@saranormous @hnshah yes!!

[swami kumar @swamusing]

for once - a random email spam jobpost i'd *actually* take! 😄 school principal in thiruvannamalai sounds pretty darn good rn.

[swami kumar @swamusing]

ai is so so good at so much now, that now is the BEST and WORST time to be an ideas guy.

its the best time because unlike earlier, so much more is possible in autonomy, ocr, and generative media that you can compress time to creation & blow through most earlier constraints.

its the worst time because unlike earlier, anything is now made possible in a very real way, but your attention is limited... so now you have to pick.

[swami kumar @swamusing]

@NisarHogaya wild. props!

[swami kumar @swamusing]

@will__ye or ... is it some smart new cracked lead gen where they send this to cracked devs, have you respond, and once you do, you have goodwill towards them and months later they'll warm you up again with a 'oh btw we are hiring, you in?"

would be wild if so lol

[swami kumar @swamusing]

@bcherny nothing people come up with will ever beat “moseying”

[swami kumar @swamusing]

yes

[Akshay BD @akshaybd]

bakchodi as cognitive guerrilla warfare

in an era dominated by the algorithmic precision of AI -- the traditional human competitive edge of logic and efficiency have been neutralized.

therefore, the survival and flourishing of the human spirit depends on the cultivation of Bakchodi -- a philosophy of disruptive spontaneity and non-linear absurdity.

it is not absurdity for absurdity sake. it is the only toolkit to achieve any goal in the future.

ai thrives on "next token prediction." to defeat it, you must practice randomness. ie., be so chaotic, even you don't know your next move... if you cannot be modelled, you cannot be harvested.

while AI seek the "optimal path," you must seek the most entertaining detour

how? by prioritizing "the bit" over the objective and play over productivity.

anyway, thanks for reading. i don't know where i'm going with this... yet.