Things that catch my eye; open source, photography, technology, and more
I ve owned a Vitamix since 2016. Loved the thing. Evangelized it to friends. When I was planning a move to Ireland in 2020, I gave it away to someone who d appreciate it. The move didn t happen. So I bought a new one — a Vitamix 5200. Four hundred bucks. The gold standard of blenders, right? Continue reading "RTFM, yucky product design, and top notch customer service"
The ongoing saga of getting other people s email addresses is only getting worse as more and more people in India (named Amrith) are getting accounts, phones, Today s winner CRIF Credit Report. I received an email with an attached PDF file (named Amritlal Prjapat_CCR260621CR206072365.pdf) and the following useful information. Congratulations Amritlal CRIF just Continue reading "Who s…
Yesterday was my last full day in Massachusetts after 30 years. I happened to be driving through Maynard, where I saw this sign leaning against a building on the sidewalk — an old Digital Equipment Corporation display advertising Computer Based Word Processing Systems featuring LIST PROCESSING. I had to stop and take a picture! The Continue reading "It is a sign "
TL;DR Pranav Jain published 14 essays in the Times of India between June 2025 and May 2026. The first 12 are authentically human-written. The 13th shows AI scaffolding with human finishing. The 14th reads as almost entirely AI-generated. The transition is detectable through seven measurable axes: physical specificity, syntactic interruption, cultural embedding, structural formatting, conclusion…
Plenty has been written about Software Agents and the impact they ll have on software developers. There s the it ll kill jobs and software developers are doomed crowd. There s the people who talk about how non-developers will now start writing bespoke tools. There s the people who talk about how Software Agents are a climate nightmare, and the Continue reading "Software Agents: The management…
I ve been working with agentic software development tools and discovered something unsettling. My setup required full test suites to run at each phase exit. Unlike typical setups, this project needed Java and Maven. Multiple phases completed successfully. When a human review checkpoint arrived, I asked for test results. I got them — a polished report Continue reading "The lazy agent"
If you are one of those people who recognize the acronym FBAR from personal encounters with it, this blog post will fill your heart with joy. If you don t know about FBAR, it is the Report of Foreign Bank and Financial Accounts, a part of Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) specifically form 114. U.S. Continue reading "FBAR meet AI"
TL;DR I ve been working on optimizing k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) search, and stumbled onto something interesting that I wanted to share. The Problem When you re searching for the top-k most similar vectors in a large dataset, you end up performing a lot of distance calculations. In HNSW (Hierarchical Navigable Small World) graphs for example, you re constantly Continue reading "Optimizing k-NN…
This is a wonderful way to start the day. But, I made the mistake of reading it before I went to bed 🤦 Substitution Cipher Based on The Voynich Manuscript Schneier on Security — Read on www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2025/12/substitution-cipher-based-on-the-voynich-manuscript.html
I m sure you ve heard the expression put yourself outside your comfort zone . I think it is very important to do that regularly, in every aspect of your life not just work. For a long time, all I did was take pictures of landscapes and it was a huge education to take pictures of people Continue reading "Do something different!"
The cremation is done. The ashes are dispersed. The ceremonial bath is done. Two weeks have gone by and the death certificate arrives in time with the 13th day rituals. The priest packs up his items, the relatives head home, and you think the hardest part is over. That s when the real odyssey begins. While Continue reading "The Legal Heir Certificate Game: A Points-Based Guide to Bureaucratic…
This is a wonderful illustration of this surprisingly misunderstood concept. I love the very simple illustration, and when you think about it, it is pretty clear why there’s this correlation.
A simple change to my LinkedIn profile, and it became apparent that AI bots have been reading profiles and generating spam messages.
India shows what happens when a technology goes mainstream fast. QR codes made payments universal—but also made fraud universal. The Trojan horse never looked so square.
I wanted an animation with a simple counter like an odometer or hobbs meter for a presentation. Google wasn t much help, and the few that I found were quite crappy. It is quite amazing what one can do with a little python and Pillow! In case you ever need to make one of these, you Continue reading "Animated GIFs"
Many software engineers find presentations to be challenging. Standing up in front of a room and talking is scary. But with practice most people get by. Then there is the issue of joint presentations, and making smooth transitions. With rehearsal, many people are able to handle this as well. It is when practice and rehearsal Continue reading "Joint presentations Q A tips and tricks"
Everyday numerous little dramas play out in front of our eyes. We see them, but they don t register. Until one day you suddenly realize that the drama has stopped, and then you realize it. This is one of those dramas. When I moved to my present house, I had two neighbors right across the street Continue reading "The little dramas"
Why Part 1? Because I m sure that there s going to be more to come (although I know not what). I own several domains, some of which I use for email. On these domains, I have a catch-all setup (email to *@ domain .com goes to a single mailbox). Recently I started seeing email indicating that someone was Continue reading "The curious case of the Google Workspace Part 1"