https://www.suramya.com/blog
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A camera is a camera and a screen is a screen, till recently they couldn’t be both simultaneously. But last month researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, have created a new type of pixel that can do both at the same time. This hypercharged pixel, called a Fourier pixel, can generate and sense arbitrary light fields and tap into a pixel’s full potential for carrying information by manipulating light’s intensity, oscillation phases, and polarization. Meaning it can display an image and act as…
People who know me know that I am not really active on Social Media, and by Social Media I am referring to the sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Instead I use Mastodon which is an open source equivalent of Twitter and Pixel which is an Opensource version of Instagram. I don’t use Facebook or Twitter because it doesn’t show me what I want to see, which is updates from friends. Facebook is basically trying to show you stuff that keeps you on the site for as long as possible and it also…
In a historic first, on 18th July India’s first private orbital launch named Vikram-I, successfully lifted off from Sriharikota and has successfully placed multiple technology demonstration payloads into orbit. These payloads include two satellites named SCOPE & Grahaa which were injected to a Low Earth Orbit along with others that carry out various in-orbit experiments. This is a phenomenal achievement by Skyroot Aerospace Private Limited which was founded in 2018 by two ISRO scientists.…
AI (or rather LLM’s) use is becoming more & more common and one of the issues with it (amongst many) is that when you ask it to summarize/process/or whatever something you have to upload that content to servers that are outside your control, then to make things worse a lot of these services use the data uploaded to further train their models. It is not illegal because they have put it in the user agreement that you allow them to use the data in anyway they want. Once the model is trained on…
Recently an Amazon executive revealed that she had rejected a candidate who showed up to an interview in a T-Shirt that said “I’m too Hot for a Job”. This caused a lot of noise on social media with folks either supporting her or calling the interviewer out for rejecting the candidate for no good reason. I am in the former camp and would have rejected a candidate if they came for an interview dressed like that. I personally love quirky T-Shirts and about half of the T-Shirts I have have some…
There is a reason John Scalzi is one of my favorite authors in the world. He is outspoken about issues that are close to his heart and like most authors he is not a fan of AI. In fact he has a clause in his contracts that all artwork, translation etc on his books will be done by actual humans instead of AI. The creative crowd doesn’t like AI because the models are trained on media & text without licensing and thus without paying the original creator and the content it creates is actually quite…
India has a lot of knowledge and information hidden in scrolls, manuscripts that are unfortunately poorly documented which makes it hard to locate and preserve this knowledge in an organized way. Earlier this year the Ministry of Culture launched the Gyan Bharatam National Manuscript Survey that aims to identify and document these manuscripts located across India. Once the we have a national ‘Manuscript Presence Map’ that shows where these documents are located, what they are about and in what…
A few days ago a new political party emerged in India called ‘Cockroach Janata Party’ following remarks attributed to the Chief Justice of India during a court hearing and apparently rapidly gained traction online through memes. I am going to talk about the political aspect of it in a bit but first want to talk about the branding of the party. When a new party/organization is formed people try to get a brand image that points to what the party wants to do. For example, when AAP (Aam Aadmi…
After Photoshop was released in 1990 and more and more people started using it to create fake/morphed photos in the subsequent years there was a big panic about not being able to trust photo’s as evidence or logging of truth because they could be modified and it was hard for the average user to quickly identify fake images. But over the years a whole lot of people put their minds together and created guidelines that folks could use to see if a photo was edited or not. Now a little over 3…
One of the biggest problems with any of the renewable power sources is that we need batteries to store the power generated so that it can be used when the solar/wind etc is not able to generate power for whatever reason (its night or no wind etc). Battery capacity limits the amount of power that can be stored and the charge time required limits how much power can be stored. Another major issue is that the current generation of batteries are Lithium based which is a rare mineral and mining it…
I have talked about Vibe coding in a lot of my posts about AI and I just realized that some of the readers of my Blog Posts might not actually know what it means. ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) recently shared a Tech Brief on Vibe Coding (AI-Assisted Software Development, or Vibe Coding: Benefits and risks of AI-driven Software Development) that gives a good high level overview along with the benefits and risks associated with the practice so I am sharing it here. You can…
Was talking to a friend working in a startup with an AI focused product and asked him how is AI helping them. He answered that it allows them to make releases faster. You should have seen the look on his face when I asked “so what? Are the releases bug free? Do they solve the business requirement without errors?” It blew his mind when I asked this and he told me they can now release the fix faster. The above behavior is typical when you talk to AI proponents. The main selling point for them is…
Asha Bhosle died over the weekend after being admitted to a hospital on Saturday after allegedly suffering from exhaustion and chest infection. At 92 years she was one of the greatest singers of multiple generations with only her elder sister Lata Mangeshkar coming close (or surpassing her depending on who you ask). She sang over […]
Thinking of getting this as a gift for Surabhi for the next Rakhi. 😀 Wanna take a nap? Sure, let me get you a pillow. Do you think I will survive gifting this? – Suramya
