design | psychology | economics | culture | science | public policy | tech | meta-learning | truth seeking
Bangalore
Joined January 2009
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One of the most powerful ideas on writing, "show, don't tell" was executed so well in this movie.
No dialogues, no narration, no tell.
Not an 🍎 to 🍎 comparison because it was a feature film not a "writing" per se.
Still, the genius was in removing the "human language" dimension and relying only on visuals, expressions, music, and real animal sounds.
Anshul Khare retweeted
I think many of us working in tech tend to forget that the reason software engineering vs other engineering fields pays (a lot!) more, is a lot more flexible (WFH/remote), and has better perks:
Because this field changes much faster than other engineering fields. The premium is because fewer people are able/willing to pick up new technologies, methodologies so quickly.
But the field had ~10-20 years of stability, and so lots of folks forgot this is why a premium exists. And that AI is just another tech wave: software engineers who pick it up and master it will generally fare better; those not will struggle a lot more.
Anshul Khare retweeted
So basically, today PHP got two critical bugs that let anyone run code on your server without even logging in, which is bad, and then the details leaked before the patch was even out, which is worse, and it works on WordPress and MediaWiki and Magento and Joomla and Laravel, and Censys says like 1.5 million servers are running a version with no fix, so the NSA was like "take your system offline," and the FBI was like "take your system offline," and CISA and the UK and CERT-EU were all like "take your system offline," and then the Prime Minister of Japan, the actual Prime Minister, posted at 5:55 in the morning telling 48.8 million people to take their system offline, so everyone took their system offline, like the Dutch cybersecurity agency took its own website offline, and the Dutch parliament went offline, and the Port of Rotterdam went offline, and Finland and France and Denmark started pulling government sites, and Wikipedia went down, and Archive.org went down, and Asana and GOG and Something Awful went down, and the University of Vienna's webmail went down for some reason, and that's just PHP. Because GitLab also dropped a CVSS 10.0, which is the highest score they give out, for a bug that's been there since 2014, so that's every self-hosted GitLab for twelve years, and then LiteLLM 1.107.0 got hijacked and shipped a credential stealer and a remote access trojan in every single wheel and the Docker images, including latest, and you didn't even have to import it, just installing it was enough, and it's the second time this year, and then Railway paused every deployment on the entire platform because someone got into the environment variables, so now everyone has to rotate every secret they've ever stored there, and TiDB Cloud said someone was walking around inside with stolen credentials for basically a month and an extortion group says they took 10.6 terabytes, and Zeabur got breached for the second time in two months and is just shutting down, like the whole company, and Node.js patched remote code execution and a TLS bypass, and CISA says Plex is being actively exploited, and someone took over 300 Tor exit relays to steal SSH passwords, and SafePay ransomware has hit over 600 critical infrastructure orgs, and India's biggest bank filed a data loss incident, and Japan has been in an official state of emergency in cyberspace since October 9, which honestly explains the 5:55 AM post. Oh, and eMudhra, a certificate authority that's issued over 60 million certificates, whose entire job is proving websites are who they say they are, was supposed to be using private keys that are random numbers over a hundred digits long, and one of them was 4. Just 4. And the others were like 66 and 237. Anyway, it's Wednesday.
Anshul Khare retweeted
The original key generation was flawed - rather than any issue with the produced signatures. [...] The 8 impacted keys all used integers less than 256. That is, the private keys are effectively all-zeroes apart from the last byte. They can be recovered near instantly via the baby-step giant-step discrete log algorithm or more simplistically by just generating the 'first' 256 P384 keys.
bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bu…
Anshul Khare retweeted
Living longer and better doesn't require anything remotely complicated.
I'm 63 and have been an orthopedic surgeon for 30 years. The people who do best aren't doing anything crazy or exotic. They just refuse to let their lives narrow and acting accordingly.
Here’s my Twitter book …
- Don't smoke
- Keep alcohol modest or absent.
- Move
- Move more
- Keep moving
- Push and pull heavy things
- Sleep 7 hours.
- Have friends
- Keep moving.
- Find a reason to get out of bed in the morning!
- A sense of purpose is key.
- See your friends in person.
- Keep moving. For real benefit- consider 500+ min/wk. Sure… 120 min/week works. But my goal is vastly higher.
- Eat real food that you cook.
You can read books that say something else. You can try one of a thousand supplements or research grade injectables. Won’t matter one bit for most of you. Might hurt some of you.
Simple works really well.
Form the habits… they will largely determine your destiny.
There are no shortcuts.
There are no shortcuts.
Anshul Khare retweeted
Some observations about the "total" automation of software engineering:
1. There are more software engineers now than in 2025, and demand is growing.
2. Software engineers have never worked harder than they do now.
3. They largely don't write code anymore, agents write ~100% of the code.
4. The bottom line of the companies that employs these engineers and agents (i.e. the terminal purpose of all this code) is typically not budging as a result of AI adoption.
This is why you have to think in terms of systems. Automating one aspect of a system creates its own friction and moves the bottlenecks elsewhere.
Anshul Khare retweeted
Although, while this is great for ToB, it feels bad to lose another independent voice of reason (kinda when Karpathy joined Anthropic).
It highlights @ponnappa's point that we should expect all the best tech talent in the US to get sucked in by the AI labs. When that happens, who will help the rest of the world (including large enterprises) adapt to AI?
Anshul Khare retweeted
Your greatest advantage over LLMs is your long-term memory. You can efficiently move new information into your weights. They can't. They basically have dementia and use an elaborate system of sticky notes like that movie Memento.
The way you hardwire information into your long-term memory is by doing your damn reps. If there's knowledge that you need to build on top of, then you better do your manual reps until mastery. Otherwise you'll never consolidate it into long-term memory and you'll never be able to incorporate it into your systems thinking.
Imagine if everything you know about your best friend was not hardwired into your brain, but rather dumped into some markdown document system that gets bigger and bigger as your relationship gets deeper and deeper. Even with a million token context window, that would place an extremely shallow limit on your relationship with them.
That is today's reality for anyone trying to use LLMs in any serious capacity. When you are doing something serious, you are developing a relationship with it that is as deep as a human relationship with a true best friend. You go through so much shit together, you have thousands of inside jokes, millions of things that nobody else knows, uncountably many bytes of rich context... all with this serious thing that you're doing.
The only system that can absorb and integrate all that information is your literal biological brain. The information in your biological brain is what determines the ceiling of your capabilities.
The lack of "doing things by hand" has become a prevalent and structural crisis in software engineering. This is true for both junior and senior software engineers, btw.
Problem solving is hard; you only get good at it by solving enough problems, running into walls, making silly mistakes, making your fundamentals strong, etc. You need to do repeat this process several times to get good at it. Repetitions increase retention of a skill and make learning last longer by physically strengthening the connection between brain cells through neuroplasticity and signalling the brain that this information is important enough to keep.
Combining repetitions with deliberate focus and feedback makes you understand what "good" actually looks like.
Why?
When you first start learning a skill, you can't see your mistakes because the brain is overwhelmed with the new information. Over time, repetitions lower this mental tax, and now you can observe the work objectively. This is what helps in building a mental model where you know what a perfect execution sounds, feels, or looks like. Unless you know what "bad" looks like, you can't claim what is "good".
Now, when you use AI to generate solutions, the psychological + physical friction that forces the human brain to adapt is bypassed. You just accept AI output because it "feels right" without even understanding it deeply. If you do this all the time, how will you build intuition? This is also a type of "brain-rot".
I am not being a Luddite asking you to abandon AI but simply urging you to use it judiciously:
> Ask conceptual questions to AI ("why does this framework use this pattern?")
> Come up with an approach to solve a problem, then ask AI to find loopholes in it. Debate its output with your understanding.
> Use Socratic debugging. Ask it to walk you through the root cause of a bug without giving a solution.
> Write the code yourself and ask AI to generate a few obscure, adversarial unit tests for that code. Fix the failures.
> If you are learning a new concept, implement it 100% manually. Ask AI to only do things that you have mastery of.
> ... so on.
I personally do coding/design by hand everyday for 1 hour at least to keep my intuition strong.
Don't fall to the tech Twitter doom and gloom of "software engineering is dead" and build your learning muscle.
Anshul Khare retweeted
the most dangerous thing you can do online to harm your mental health is no longer doom scrolling, its talking to llms about your feelings
Anshul Khare retweeted
Track effort daily.
Track consistency weekly.
Track progress monthly.
Track transformation yearly.
Anshul Khare retweeted
ERPNext just crossed 40k stars on GitHub. On to 50k! ⭐️
github.com/frappe/erpnext
Anshul Khare retweeted
If you explained agriculture to folks in SF, you'd blow so many minds. It's... self-replicating, recursively self-improving nanotech for the physical world. And it's all open-source!
One instance can turn into hundreds of seeds, that turn into hundreds of instances. Next thing you know you have trillions of them. It's super-exponential
Anshul Khare retweeted
To generalize from the Kasparov & the math debacle: as a rule, all performative skills will be destroyed by AI. A computer will always outperform a human, so chess is no longer a skill.
Same w/mathematical acrobatics.
What's left is what makes us human.
