Udhay Shankar

Semantic ablation: Why AI writing is boring and dangerous opinion: The subtractive bias we're ignoring

"Semantic Ablation" is my new favourite phrase.
www.theregister.com/2026/02/16/s...

WinGet is Windows' best-kept secret—here's what it can do for you You need to start using Windows' overlooked package manager.

I don't know who needs to hear this, but if you use Windows 11, you can update all your apps at one go with a single command. www.howtogeek.com/winget-is-wi...

An old laptop at home still boots, so I spent an evening putting Linux on it (Xubuntu, if you're curious). It struck me how painless the actual installation was, and how much effort I had to put into the prep work. Quite a difference from the first time I installed Slackware in 1996.

Hollywood Is Losing Audiences to AI Fatigue Entertainment about or made with artificial intelligence has been missing the mark with viewers over the past year.

There appears to be a distinct lack of fecal matter here, Mr Holmes.

www.wired.com/story/hollyw...

How Does India Cook Biryani? A large-scale dataset and VLM-based pipeline for analyzing procedural differences across 12 regional Indian biryani variants using 120 cooking videos.

When food geekery meets code geekery.

farzanashaju.github.io/how-does-ind...

STRETCHY NOODLES Ramen was brought by Chinese immigrants to Japan in the late 1800s, and it soon became a staple of their culinary culture. After the instant variety was created in 1958, it also grew in popularity in....

#TIL that 'ramen' and 'lo mein' are basically the same word.

www.etymologynerd.com/blog/stretch...

QotD: "If there is anything new about Silicon Valley's triumphal AI push, it is the extent to which its exponents are no longer asking whether anyone wants what they're selling and simply asserting its inevitability."

To quote @edzitron.com, "Here’s A Diagram Of How Unbelievably Circular All The Money In AI Compute Has Become"

I will be moderating this session. Hope to see you there!

Bengaluru Traffic: ORR, Sarjapur Roads Over Capacity Traffic Study: ORR and Sarjapur Road face severe congestion, with vehicle flow exceeding capacity. Discover solutions to ease Bengaluru's peak hour gridlock.

No shit, Sherlock.
www.deccanherald.com/india/karnat...

QotD (referring to the AWS outage, but can refer to many other things also):

"Once you reach a certain point of scale, there are no simple problems left."

Oh, definitely with headphones. Bluetooth headphones suffer from much worse sound quality than wired ones. Plus, of course, the need to keep them charged.

QotD: "Ethernet: because cables are ugly, but packet loss is uglier."

Programmers Using AI Create Way More Glaring Security Issues, Data Shows AI has proven repeatedly to have issues with accuracy — and using it as a coding assistant creates more security problems, too.

Hanlon's Razor.

futurism.com/ai-coding-se...

#MorningMusing : Removing the first letter from both words in the phrase "trick troll" yields a phrase that means roughly the same thing.

Nudge theory in action.

www.business-standard.com/health/skipp...

Here's the post it reminded me of (hi @rohitkhare.bsky.social )

dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/...

The Trust Quotient (TQ) Wherever there is autonomy, trust must follow. If we raise children to go off on their own, they need to be autonomous and we need to trust them. (Parenting is a school for learning how to trust.) If ...

This is basically Part 2 of a train of thought that @rohitkhare.bsky.social started a few decades ago. (link in comments) kk.org/thetechnium/...

In a first, Google has released data on how much energy an AI prompt uses It’s the most transparent estimate yet from one of the big AI companies, and a long-awaited peek behind the curtain for researchers.

"...the median prompt—one that falls in the middle of the range of energy demand—consumes 0.24 watt-hours of electricity, the equivalent of running a standard microwave for about one second."

www.technologyreview.com/2025/08/21/1...

China cut itself off from the global internet on Wednesday : Great Firewall took out all traffic to port 443 at a time Beijing didn't have an obvious need to keep its netizens in the dark

Probably a test of some kind.

www.theregister.com/2025/08/21/c...

MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing There’s a stark difference in success rates between companies that purchase AI tools from vendors and those that build them internally.

This is not surprising. Without:

⁍ Training (of the humans using it);
⁍ Training Data (for the models); and
⁍ Use cases (of actual pain points);

this will just be another hypefest that will wither in the face of the inevitable backlash.

Why Indian cricket doesn’t deserve Jasprit Bumrah The fickle fans and rent-a-quote experts have been exposed by their insensitive criticisms of a player fighting his body to do his best for the country

Can't really argue with this. One only hopes the political appointee coach doesn't overwork him into premature retirement. indianexpress.com/article/spor...

SEO Is Dead. Say Hello to GEO. Search-engine optimization now feels dated. Generative-engine optimization is all about trying to trick AI chatbots.

If the MSM has picked up on it, has it peaked? :)

nymag.com/intelligence...

Art imitates life imitates art...

This seems to be the first case of a company developing a feature because ChatGPT is incorrectly telling people it exists.

www.holovaty.com/writing/chat...

Researchers have demonstrated that it is possible to detect cancer-specific DNA fragments in the bloodstream more than three years before a clinical diagnosis.

aacrjournals.org/cancerdiscov...

One of my favourite lines seems appropriate here: "what are you optimizing for?"

(I mean that you should ask this person this)

Microsoft Retires Legendary 'Blue Screen of Death' After 40 Years of Frowny Faces Meet its mournful replacement: the black screen of death, which won't have the same sad face.

I sure don't mind a change
I sure don't mind a change
Yeah, I sure don't mind
I sure don't mind a change
I sure don't mind a change

But I've fell on black days
I've fell on black days

Just read an article where the writer had to use AI to filter out the flood of AI generated job applications he was getting. I am wondering what the net utility value is.

Essential-Web v1.0: 24T tokens of organized web data Data plays the most prominent role in how language models acquire skills and knowledge. The lack of massive, well-organized pre-training datasets results in costly and inaccessible data pipelines. We ...

24T tokens of organized web data arxiv.org/abs/2506.14111

#TIL: Add swearing to your Google request for AI-free results.

"How to paint a fence" will return AI summaries & recommended results, in addition to actual results.

"How to paint a fucking fence" will omit that & focus on actual results.

Not sure why, or how long this will last, but here we are.