lunatechian (lunatech-ian)

Tiny transmitter could help scientists understand surprisingly social wasps

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 16 Mar 2026 15:42:03 +0000

https://spectrum.ieee.org/rf-tags-wasps

An ultralightweight radio-frequency tag designed to be worn by a paper wasp may help scientists get a glimpse at some basic behavioral information that’s long been missing: where do the animals go when they leave the nest?

Getting the right combination of light weight, long range, and positional accuracy was key. Jettisoning the battery was the first step. “Batteries don’t scale,” says Blaauw. A miniaturized battery can’t provide enough current to generate a strong radio signal. Capacitors, which store energy by accumulating charges on surfaces, do better at small scales, Blaauw says. “Really small capacitors can store enough charge now to send a radio pulse,” he says. The capacitor used in the wasp tag weighs just 0.86 mg. A tiny photovoltaic array slowly charges up the capacitor until it has enough energy to generate a radio signal.

AI is for humanity

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Fri, 06 Mar 2026 08:06:07 +0000

Interesting reflection from , John Palfrey after attending the AI summit in Delhi:

In Delhi, the big sessions had thousands. And the man who ran the event told me that more than a million people, mostly from India, had passed through the gates of the massive convention center during the week.

This may sound symbolic but I think it is an important symbol: that AI is about and for all humanity. It is not something that is magical and only to be shaped by wizards. It is a technology that is general — it touches everyone on the planet one way or another, already, with implications for nearly every aspect of human life. I’m not hyping it up; I think this is fact at this stage. The Internet was the same way, sort of, but I think AI will prove another step more consequential.

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.

Postmortem from 2028

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sun, 22 Feb 2026 23:03:46 +0000

From The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis: A Thought Exercise In Financial History, From The Future

What follows is a scenario, not a prediction.

[...]

A competent developer working with Claude Code or Codex could now replicate the core functionality of a mid-market SaaS product in weeks. Not perfectly or with every edge case handled, but well enough that the CIO reviewing a $500k annual renewal started asking the question “what if we just built this ourselves?”

[...]

The interconnected nature of these systems weren’t fully appreciated until this print, either. ServiceNow sold seats. When Fortune 500 clients cut 15% of their workforce, they cancelled 15% of their licenses. The same AI-driven headcount reductions that were boosting margins at their customers were mechanically destroying their own revenue base.

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.

The Governor is Gone

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Thu, 19 Feb 2026 16:26:18 +0000

From AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it

Here's the thing that broke my brain for a while: AI genuinely makes individual tasks faster. That's not a lie. What used to take me 3 hours now takes 45 minutes. Drafting a design doc, scaffolding a new service, writing test cases, researching an unfamiliar API. All faster.

[..]

But my days got harder. Not easier. Harder.

[..]

Before AI, there was a ceiling on how much you could produce in a day. That ceiling was set by typing speed, thinking speed, the time it takes to look things up. It was frustrating sometimes, but it was also a governor. You couldn't work yourself to death because the work itself imposed limits.

AI removed the governor. Now the only limit is your cognitive endurance. And most people don't know their cognitive limits until they've blown past them.

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.

Winter is ending

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 00:09:00 +0000

Steve Woz's interview on his 75th birthday

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 16 Aug 2025 19:51:56 +0000

Slashdot picked up a story about Steve Woz's interview on his 75th birthday.

And Setve Woz dropped by Slashdot to leave this comment

I gave all my Apple wealth away because wealth and power are not what I live for. I have a lot of fun and happiness. I funded a lot of important museums and arts groups in San Jose, the city of my birth, and they named a street after me for being good. I now speak publicly and have risen to the top. I have no idea how much I have but after speaking for 20 years it might be $10M plus a couple of homes. I never look for any type of tax dodge. I earn money from my labor and pay something like 55% combined tax on it. I am the happiest person ever. Life to me was never about accomplishment, but about Happiness, which is Smiles minus Frowns. I developed these philosophies when I was 18-20 years old and I never sold out.

One Weird Trick to Fix Linker Errors on Apple Silicon After Restore

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 04:49:00 +0000

This post might be useful for maybe like 10 people who are running into issues when compiling software on Apple M* machines.

If you run into error like this:

ld: warning: ignoring file '/usr/local/lib/libpng.dylib': found architecture 'x86_64', required architecture 'arm64'
ld: warning: ignoring file '/usr/local/lib/libavformat.dylib': found architecture 'x86_64', required architecture 'arm64'

And you have installed these packages using brew. I verified that these dylibs are definitely for x86_64 and the linker was not going crazy. (use lipo -archs /usr/local/lib/libavformat.dylib)

Well, that was caused because I had installed the new M3 macbook from backup (Timemachine) and the backup was created from an x86_64.

The fix is described here

brew bundle dump --global
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/uninstall.sh)"
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"
brew bundle install --global

This first creates a ~/.Brewfile and then installs back those packages.

Notes on Delhi

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Mon, 28 Jul 2025 02:18:59 +0000

"NewDelhi | 'Delhi is a city of secrets… everything's hidden, you need a good guide’ says US Ambassador"

Came across this Indian Express article about the experiences of the American Ambassador to India and I was surprised on how closely it matches my own experiences and thoughts about Delhi.

If you want to experience humanity at its fullest, this is the city for you.

This is something that stood out. Delhi shows you the full spectrum on humans in a day: You will see people on the streets - ignored by everyone and you will see politicians surrounded by 10s of escort cars. You will see the fashion parade of people haggling for the latest trends in Sarojini Nagar, and then a family dressed in the most traditional on way to attend a wedding. You will encounter pickpockets and swindlers trying to one-up you and you will see a generous man feeding a street dog half his lunch.

Delhi is a city of secrets… everything’s hidden

.. in plain sight. It doesn’t explain itself, but if you’ve lived here long enough, you stop needing explanations. You start reading the city like a layered book—noise and grace, chaos and intimacy, pride and vulnerability, all crammed into the same lane.

For better or worse, Delhi teaches you how to pay attention.

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 22:20:29 +0000

Is there a word for the warm side of a cat's fur after it's been basking in the sun?

this meeting could have been ..

nospam@example.com (Raj Shekhar) — Sat, 19 Oct 2024 07:14:45 +0000

Taken from Twitter