ॐ • Translation Technology • Machine Intelligence • Global Collaboration • Music as Meditation • Wonder and Awe • Stuff : Opinions are my own
San Francisco
Joined May 2008
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K Vashee retweeted
So this is what Sa Re Ga Ma means???
I had no freaking clue. Blows my mind. Why don't they teach us such amazing things in school?
Also not surprised that Do Re Mi was simply ripped off.
K Vashee retweeted
Millions of 3-year-old laptops get blamed for being "slow" when the hardware is barely the problem — it's almost always what's silently running underneath.
A student was about to spend $900 on a brand new laptop because hers took 4 minutes to boot and constantly froze mid-assignment, right when deadlines mattered most.
Her older brother, who builds PCs on the side and has fixed dozens of laptops for friends, sat down with her laptop for 8 minutes on a Sunday afternoon.
He didn't reinstall Windows.
Didn't add RAM.
Didn't recommend an SSD upgrade.
Didn't suggest buying anything at all.
He changed 8 settings.
Boot time dropped from 4 minutes to 20 seconds. Chrome stopped eating 90% of her CPU in the background. Word stopped freezing mid-sentence while she typed.
Same laptop. Same specs. Same age. Same everything.
"Your laptop was never actually slow. It was just never cleaned up past the day you bought it — and nobody, not the store, not Microsoft, not tech support, was ever going to tell you the fix was free."
🧵 Here are the 8 settings he changed:
K Vashee retweeted
Steve Jobs planned every detail of his own memorial service, including the small brown box each person would be handed on the way out.
Hundreds of the most powerful people in business and technology took theirs home and opened it.
Inside was a book written by an Indian monk who died in 1952.
His name was Paramahansa Yogananda.
He was born Mukunda Lal Ghosh in Gorakhpur in 1893. He sailed to America in 1920 to speak at a religious congress in Boston, and stayed. He spent the next 30 years teaching meditation to Americans at a time when almost nothing was known there about Indian practice.
In 1946 he published Autobiography of a Yogi.
It has since been translated into more than 50 languages.
Jobs first read it as a teenager. In 1974, at 19, he travelled to India partly because of it. According to Walter Isaacson, who wrote his authorised biography, Jobs read that book again in India, and then read it once a year, every year, for the rest of his life.
That is roughly 37 readings of one book by a man who was famously impatient with almost everything.
The memorial service was at Stanford in October 2011. Marc Benioff, the head of Salesforce, was there. He described opening the box afterwards.
He said he thought, this is going to be good. He knew it was a decision Steve had made, and that whatever was inside, it was the last thing he wanted them all to think about.
It was Autobiography of a Yogi.
Benioff's reading of it was direct. Steve's last message to us, he said, was here is Yogananda's book. Actualise yourself.
Jobs was not a religious man in any conventional sense. He told Isaacson near the end that he was about fifty fifty on God.
His sister Mona Simpson said in her eulogy, printed in the New York Times, that the day before he died he told her he was going somewhere better. His last words were 3 repetitions of the same phrase.
Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.
A monk from Gorakhpur wrote a book in 1946. 65 years later, the man who built the most valuable company on Earth used his own funeral to hand it to everyone he knew.
K Vashee retweeted
Surya Namaskar awakens your inner fire.
Chandra Namaskar invites calm, cooling and balance.
One energises. The other soothes.
Balance both and let your practice flow with the rhythm of nature.
#ChandraNamaskar #HathaYoga
Not all humans-in-the-loop are equal newsletter.chiefmartec.com/p…
K Vashee retweeted
Speaking fluent English while your grandmother's tongue dies in your mouth is not progress. It is the most successful colonial experiment in human history.
They didn't just take your land. They took the language you used to name it. Every time a child grows up fluent in English but mute in their mother tongue, the colonial project wins—silently, generationally, completely. This is not about rejecting English. It is about understanding what was stolen before you decide what to keep.
There are over 2,000 languages and dialects spoken across Africa. Linguists predict that by 2100 more than half will be extinct—not because Africans forgot them, but because Africans were punished for speaking them.
This was not accidental. Lord Macaulay said it in 1835 in his infamous Minute on Indian Education, but the same blueprint was applied across Africa: create a class of people “Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, opinions, morals and intellect.” Replace the mind. Control the continent forever.
Here is what they never taught you: African languages are not primitive. Yoruba has a tonal complexity that English cannot replicate. Xhosa uses click consonants that modern linguistics still struggles to fully map. These were not simple tongues. They were sophisticated systems of thought.
When you lose a language, you don't just lose words. You lose a way of seeing the world. Concepts, medicines, histories, philosophies—entire civilisations of thought—exist only in those languages. When the language dies, the knowledge dies with it. Permanently.
The most disturbing part: many Africans today voluntarily finish what colonisers started. Parents refuse to teach their children their native tongue. “It limits them,” they say. This is not practicality. It is a trauma response dressed as ambition.
Some will say English opened doors. And they are right. But ask yourself—who built those doors? Who decided which language unlocks opportunity and which one marks you as less than? Accepting that system without questioning it is not intelligence. It is submission.
You were not born ashamed of your language. That shame was installed through beatings, policy and generations of conditioning that told you the coloniser's tongue was civilisation and yours was noise. Thousands of Africans today cannot hold a full conversation in their ancestral language. That is not a coincidence. That is a designed outcome.
Ask yourself: if your language disappeared tomorrow, what exactly would be lost? And who benefits from you never asking that question?
K Vashee retweeted
Indian Subcontinent served as a major hub for the early dispersal of modern humans!
Is this hidden from you? 🔥
Indian Subcontinent was the foundational population center for all non-African humans!
It shaped the gene pool of West Eurasia (Europe, Iran), East Asia (China, Japan), and Oceania.
This is map of Human Genome Project, published by National Geographic.
Key evidence: mtDNA haplogroups M & N (and Y-DNA C/D/F) show highest early diversity and basal branches Indian Subcontinent, consistent with a rapid coastal expansion from Africa via Arabia.
The map draws from recombinational (LD/recombination clock) analyses tracing this pathway and subsequent splits to Europe/West Asia and East Asia/Australia.
Supporting literature: Macaulay et al. (2005) *Science* on single rapid coastal settlement; Armitage et al. (2011) *Science* on early Arabia/India signals; recent whole-genome studies (e.g., Kerdoncuff et al. 2025) confirm the primary ~50kya OOA wave explains most Indian genetic variation as an early Eurasian crossroads.
The entry to India happened in 75,000 to 55,000 BCE. mtDNA M, Y-DNA F.
Migration from East Africa (via Bab-el-Mandab strait, into Arabian Peninsula), into southern coastal Iran, and then entry into India (Gujarat). This is also called the "Southern Route" of human migration from Africa.
Humans exited Indian Subcontinent in two outward paths.🔥
1) through west towards Iran, Central Asia & Europe in ~45,000 to 35,000 BCE. mtDNA U, Y-DNA R1.
This is supported by the basal Eurasian ancestry found in ancient Near Eastern genomes and a "genetic trail from India to Europe".
2) through east towards Iran, China and South East Asia in 50,000 to 40,000 BCE. mtDNA M, R; Y-DNA C, K2b.
Y-DNA haplogroups C, D, and K found in East Asians, Papuans, and Aboriginal Australians derived from it.
--×---x
Then what happened to the "Northern Route" also known as the "Levantine Route" (via Sinai and Israel into West Asia)?
North via Sinai Peninsula to Levant (Israel, Jordan) to Anatolia to Eurasia
Dating: ~100,000 BCE (older).
No genetic continuity between those early Levant humans and later Eurasians! Died out or were absorbed by Neanderthals. No trail of mtDNA M or N (which all Eurasians descend from) through this route!
So, it’s often called a "failed migration".🔥
All non-African humans today descend from mtDNA haplogroups M & N, and Y-DNA haplogroups C, D, F. These are not present in the early Levant fossils. Their oldest surviving branches are in India, Southeast Asia, and Oceania, not the Levant.
Ancient Eurasian genomes do not match the 100k-year-old Levantine fossils genetically.
Modern human genetic bottleneck (~60–70k years ago) aligns better with the "southern dispersal model"
The Levantine route do reflect an early exploratory dispersals of Homo sapiens. But it is a dead-end.
The "southern route" , in this National Geographic HGP map, remains the strongest model.
K Vashee retweeted
An Indian engineer in Bengaluru got tired of potholes destroying his car.
So he built an app with Codex that detects them, finds who is responsible, and files a complaint.
Here is how it works. He installed a dashcam with GPS and an accelerometer. The app records everything while he drives.
A vision model classifies every pothole by size. Small, medium, large.
But here is the clever part. Most Indian roads are under warranty.
The contractor who built them is legally responsible for fixing potholes for free.
His app searches through 2,900 government contracts, finds the exact tender number, identifies the officer responsible, attaches the photo and geolocation, and generates a ready-to-file complaint.
One drive to work. 12 potholes detected. 12 complaints ready.
--
vc: @gkcs_
K Vashee retweeted
In 1996, during A Night in London, Mark Knopfler played “Sultans of Swing” and time stood still.
No showing off. Just pure storytelling through six strings. The greatest musicians never need to shout to be heard. And today, at 77 years old, the magic is still there. #DireStraits
K Vashee retweeted
When I learned about the Samavartana ceremony in ancient India while researching on India's educational heritage, I was simply mindblown by the verses from Shikshavalli in Taittiriya Upanishad that were chanted. And I thought why the hell are we not chanting these very verses when students graduate today? So much meaning, so much depth! But then I realized this ceremony was designed for Brahmacharis who have led a life designed for learning deep truths. Imagine a graduation ceremony culminating in a sacred bath for the student! All the same it made me feel good to see IIT Delhi including these chants at their recent convocation. We are still far from decolonization but perhaps even the symbolism of a timeless ceremony should be appreciated. More than anything it is fun to see the leftists frothing at the mouth over the 'Hindu' chants at an IIT convocation.
K Vashee retweeted
Everyone says America is the most powerful nation.
Almost no one tells you why.
And the answer...
Is far more haunting than most people can imagine.
After 1945, America built something extraordinary.
It built a system.
A system that can enter any country...
without crossing its border.
Imagine America wants to change the regime of any country.
America does not arrive with a missile.
The first arrival is quieter.
Diplomats meet ministers.
Journalists.
Business leaders.
Professors.
Activists.
Opposition figures.
Most conversations seem harmless.
But slowly, Washington learns where power lives.
Who is angry.
Who is ambitious.
Who can influence the street.
Who may govern tomorrow.
Then comes the second layer.
USAID.
Slowly they are inside Health.
Education.
Governance.
Dollar moves through local contractors.
Universities.
Local organisations.
Media projects.
Legal groups.
Election programs.
Influencers.
Podcasts.
Slowly, Influence grows.
Then comes NED.
NED has 4 core institutes.
NDI = democratic politics.
IRI = political institutions.
CIPE = business networks.
The Solidarity center = labour networks.
The government still stands.
But the networks around it are changing.
Then comes the language.
Corruption.
Freedom.
Justice.
Election.
Dictatorship.
Some accusations feel true.
Some will be exaggerated.
But repetition turns allegations into atmosphere.
The story leaves the country.
It reaches global newspapers.
Then comes Social media.
A symbol appears.
A colour.
A slogan.
A clenched fist.
A joke about the ruler.
Then Gene Sharp Theory takes over.
198 methods of resistance.
His central insight was terrifyingly simple.
A ruler survives because institutions obey.
Break that obedience...
And power begins to evaporate.
Then comes CANVAS.
It teaches movements how to organise.
How to reduce fear.
How to use satire.
How to make the government look absurd.
Police arrest a protester.
The video travels worldwide.
Police ignore the protest.
The movement grows.
Every response becomes a trap.
This is called ‘a dilemma action.’
Now the country begins to shake.
Investors become nervous.
Money leaves.
Its currency falls.
Then comes sanctions and tariffs.
Credit becomes expensive.
The street grows louder.
The elites grow quieter.
And somewhere behind closed doors...
The security forces begin asking one question.
Will this government survive?
That is the real turning point.
Then comes the CIA.
Propaganda.
Election interference.
Support for friendly factions.
And regime-change operations.
If a country's government falls...
The story does not end.
A face arrives.
Election advisers arrive.
Constitutional experts arrive.
Security reform begins.
All backed by the CIA.
The new government needs dollars.
Now the IMF and World Bank enters.
Loans arrive with conditions.
Privatisation.
Market access.
That is the haunting genius of American power.
It can apply pressure across ten domains...
At the same time.
K Vashee retweeted
Absolutely.
I’ve been saying this since the very first LLM was unleashed upon the world.
I think this is the most important concept to understand right now: LLMs can’t jump.
OpenAI says an internal version of Astra, its next major model, has solved ten major open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science.
This is extraordinary.
And I don’t use this word lightly.
During my PhD in mathematics, I worked on a problem closely related to Gromov’s conjecture. For decades, constructing a non-sofic group—an infinite group whose finite pieces cannot be approximated by finite groups—was a dream shared by many of us.
Now Astra appears to have done it.
This is not a toy result. This is serious mathematics.
But it is not “the most significant day in the history of mathematics”, as some have claimed.
This claim confuses scale with kind.
Astra has solved difficult problems inside existing conceptual worlds.
Calculus, topology, and scheme theory created new conceptual worlds.
They did not merely answer questions. They changed which questions mathematics could ask.
Induction finds patterns. LLMs are extraordinary at it.
Deduction follows implications. Using symbolic AI tools, LLMs are becoming formidable at traversing chains of logic that humans missed, abandoned, or could never afford to search.
But abduction is different.
Abduction invents the right concept, the right representation, the right question.
That is the jump.
Current LLMs can fill the gaps of knowledge left by humans.
But they can’t jump beyond the external boundary of existing knowledge.
*
Full paper in the first reply
