lunatechian (lunatech-ian) (Entries tagged as link)

The power of trust in global Influence

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:02:43 +0000

From the Bloomberg opinion piece: America Is Depleting a More Powerful Weapon Than Its Missiles (the answer is: belief in the truth of what the leader of the US tells the world about the war, peace and everything else.) an interesting tit-bit:

Contrary to the illusion held by many Americans, the BBC is not a government-run body, it is an independent corporation administered by trustees and funded by public subscription. Throughout World War II, millions of people in occupied Europe risked their freedom to hear its news. The penalty for those caught listening by German detector vans was deportation to a concentration camp.

The magic words with which its impeccably modulated announcers began their reports — “this is London” — resounded across the globe. After 1945, the BBC habit persisted. Tens of millions of people — especially in Africa, the Middle East and parts of Asia — even now prefer the Beeb’s foreign language news to the local variety, rigorously censored by their own governments. Voice of America has never achieved quite the same authority or reputation for impartiality, but it has been nonetheless useful and influential.

Don’t let the llm rush you

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 18:47:43 +0000

Sage advice from scripting.com

A bit of general advice about using ChatGPT et al, never let it rush you. You do the thinking, it does the stuff you ask it to do. If you’re not careful it’ll quickly start giving you orders.

Archive.today CAPTCHA page executes DDoS

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 21 Feb 2026 16:20:35 +0000

Mind blown by this sneakiness

Wikipedia editors are discussing whether to blacklist Archive.today because the archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a blogger who wrote a post in 2023 about the mysterious website’s anonymous maintainer.

Checking on the In a request for comment page on Wikipedia

Over 400,000 pages currently contain over 695,000 links to Archive.today

In January 2026, the maintainers of Archive.today inserted malicious code in order to perform a distributed denial of service attack against a person they were in dispute with. Every time a user encounters the CAPTCHA page, their internet connection is used to attack a certain individual's blog.

ops is not a dirty word

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 02:24:11 +0000

From https://charity.wtf/2026/01/19/bring-back-ops-pride-xpost/

What’s wrong with operations? Ops is not a synonym for toil; it literally means “get shit done as efficiently as possible”. Every function has an operational component at scale: business ops, marketing ops, sales ops, product ops, design ops and everything else I could think of to search for, and so far as I can tell, none of them are treated with anything like the disrespect, dismissal and outright contempt that software engineering

Using llm to understand large codebases

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 01:45:49 +0000

From Martin Fowler :

One attendee is an SRE for a Very (Very) Large Code Base. He was less worried about people not understanding the code an LLM writes because he already can’t understand the VVLCB he’s responsible for. What he values is that the LLM helps him understand the what the code is doing, and he regularly uses it to navigate to the crucial parts of the code.

There’s a general point here:

Fully trusting the answer an LLM gives you is foolishness, but it’s wise to use an LLM to help navigate the way to the answer.

The Hidden Tax on Indian Ambition

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 05 Feb 2026 19:13:00 +0000

Photo by Lukas Kienzler on Unsplash

I spent years losing time I'll never get back. In Bangalore, 117 hours a year stuck in traffic. In Delhi, 76 hours. That's nearly three full days annually spent breathing exhaust fumes, watching productivity evaporate, and feeling ambition slowly suffocate in gridlock.

This isn't just my story. It's the story of millions of Indians trapped in cities that generate wealth but can't govern themselves.

Last week's Economic Survey finally said what we've all been living: India's cities are "economically central but politically peripheral." The top 10 cities hold roughly 9% of the population but generate nearly 28% of GDP—a 3× output multiplier. Yet they raise less than 0.6% of GDP in own-source revenue. They can't tax. They can't borrow. They can't plan their own futures.

The survey's conclusion is damning: "Global cities compete; Indian cities comply."

We've Built a System That Punishes Success

Here's what that compliance looks like in practice: affordable housing in the top eight cities collapsed from 52% of new supply in 2018 to just 17% by 2025. People who build India's economic engine can't afford to live near where they work. So they move further out, where housing is cheaper and commutes are brutal. The congestion gets worse. The tax base hollows out. The cycle repeats.

Meanwhile, the Economic Survey gently suggests cities should "prioritize the movement of people, not vehicles." What it should say is this: we've turned our roads into parking lots for single-occupancy cars while buses remain inadequate and metro coverage stays patchy. First-mile and last-mile connectivity is still an afterthought. Other global cities introduced congestion pricing decades ago. We're still debating it.

Informality Isn't the Bug—It's the Only Thing That Works

The survey notes that "informality is not an aberration but a structural outcome of rapid urbanization under constrained formal systems." Translation: our formal systems are so broken that informal systems have to fill the gaps.

Door-to-door garbage collection covers 98% of wards today. Impressive statistic. But when informal sanitation workers left Gurugram during a labor dispute, garbage piled up overnight. The entire system depends on invisible labor that we refuse to properly integrate or compensate. We'd rather pretend informality doesn't exist than acknowledge that it's the only reason our cities function at all.

We're More Urban Than We Admit

Official Census data from 2011 claims India's urbanization rate is around 31%. Satellite data tells a different story: some regions are functionally above 80% urban when you measure actual settlement patterns instead of administrative boundaries. We're governing 21st-century megacities with frameworks designed for towns.

The Economic Survey concludes that cities need fiscal power, planning power, and enforcement power to move from managing growth to benefiting from it. I'd go further: until cities can tax properly, borrow meaningfully, reform land use, integrate transit, and take political ownership of outcomes, nothing will change. And nothing is changing.

Why I Left

I left India because I got tired of watching ambition collide with dysfunction. Tired of living far from work because that's where housing was affordable. Tired of infrastructure expanding while institutions stayed broken. Tired of hearing about potential that never materializes because the system is designed to disperse power and avoid accountability.

India will keep producing globally competitive talent from structurally constrained cities. And that talent will keep leaving—not because India lacks opportunity, but because its cities can't translate economic productivity into livable realities. Until that changes, the brain drain isn't a failure of ambition. It's a rational response to urban failure.

They’re our servants, tools

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 02 May 2013 18:48:49 +0000

"You can see that our real problem is another thing entirely. The machines only do figuring for us in a few minutes that eventually we could do for our own selves. They’re our servants, tools. Not some sort of gods in a temple which we go and pray to. Not oracles who can see into the future for us. They don’t see into the future. They only make statistical predictions—not prophecies. There’s a big difference there, but Reinhart doesn’t understand it. Reinhart and his kind have made such things as the SRB machines into gods. But I have no gods. At least, not any I can see."

— The Variable Man, by Philip K. Dick

in today's odd news: Scientists use Calvin Klein cologne to lure jaguars

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:16:07 +0000

Biologists Rony Garcia and Jose Moreira from the Wildlife Conservation Society's (WCS) Jaguar Conservation Program rely on Obsession for Men, a cologne known for its complex scent, to help lure jaguars in the Central American country.

Note that this scent works on jaguars. There is no research of its effects on cougars .

The discovery that Obsession for Men acted as a magnet for jaguars was the result of an experiment by the WCS's Bronx Zoo in New York. The WCS was looking for ways to get cheetahs in front of camera traps, and, after several years of testing with different fragrances, found spraying the musky Obsession For Men near the heat-and-motion-sensitive cameras drew the cats for longer than other scents.

Links:

Scientists use Calvin Klein cologne to lure jaguars at Yahoo! News

casio's g-shock watch

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 16:46:38 +0000

New entry at my site - a review for my watch, Casio's G-Shock MT-G Atomic Tough Solar Watch, which I love. Read more here

Higher Order Perl

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 22:25:53 +0000

I am in love with the book Higher-Order Perl, especially the technique in the Chapter 2: Dispatch Tables.

GPL still matters

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 15:48:35 +0000

Today morning I came across this piece of writing - Does GPL still matter?. The whole article is based on a few anecdotes from CEOs and marketing droids. They have gotten quite a few points wrong in the article.

GPL is a developer friendly license. The basic premise of the GPL is that the user should not subtract from the freedom he gets when redistributing software. GPL is not restrictive. It merely insists that whoever takes from the common pool must contribute back to the pool.

I would like to point to these 2 articles in support of GPL -

nice facebook error page

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 06:59:00 +0000

So, if your user agent is curl or lynx, you will get this facebook error page.

You are using an incompatible web browser.

Sorry, we're not cool enough to support your browser. Please keep it real with one of the following browsers:

Mozilla Firefox
Opera
Safari
Microsoft Internet Explorer
Flock

ILUG Bengaluru Meetup - Saturday 21st February 2009

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 22:12:07 +0000

Linux User Group, Bangalore have a meetup at the ThoughtWorks office on Saturday 21st February 2009, 4:30 PM onwards. The details of the meeting are here. There are 2 talks lined up- "Introduction to the Android Platform" and "Device Mapper - How it works and why you should be using it". And there will be a key signing party as well.

Go, check it out and help revive the LUG meetings at Bangalore.

good joomla template

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 06:09:06 +0000

Check out SpaceGlow joomla template by Bernard Esterhuyse. It is nice, however, more importantly, it is GPL-ed. I have been checking put a lot of joomla templates for my site, but all the joomla templates that I came across shared an important defect. Even though the template authors mentioned that the template was GPL-ed, they usually had a link to their own sites in the template, along with the request (or order), not to remove that line.

The Spaceglow template is really GPL-ed. This will allow me to hack it up further.

RIP John W. Backus

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:34:22 +0000

The "B" in "BNF" is gone. NY Times has a nice artilce about him and his noteworthy quote is tucked in at the end

Innovation, Mr. Backus said, was a constant process of trial and error.

"You need the willingness to fail all the time," he said. "You have to generate many ideas and then you have to work very hard only to discover that they don't work. And you keep doing that over and over until you find one that does work."

Link: John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies - New York Times