Since atishayokti brought up NPTEL where MOOCs are still going strong (30m enrollments, 5m subscribers and almost 2B views on Youtube), I dug up this video where Prof MS Ananth of IIT Madras told the fantastic story of how it came together: youtube.com/watch?v=LV-QoG…

“If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter.”

If you want to *actually* learn X64 assembly, (and not in a meme-way): Watch Chris Rose. A hilarious Australian who goes to the most esoteric depths of x64 ASM, often filming while on a beach. I wouldn’t be in this career if it wasn’t for him.

Based on some of the responses to my NPTEL remark — thinking of curating some of my favorite courses from the platform. What are some of yours?

This is why AI will not end well. Borrowing trillions to finance rapidly depreciating assets to try to replicate what the human brain does on 15 watts of power and sugar as fuel. Best to keep it in the research labs for now.

Be there if you like to talk shop about manufacturing, embedded systems, PCBs, FPGAs, 3D printing and more!

Books. Man pages. Pen and paper. vi editor / dumb unix terminals. You learned slowly, but in depth. It was fun, because computers were still magical. Current generation has huge advantages, but tough for them to really focus and learn in depth.

New fastest shortest-path algorithm in 41 years! Tsinghua researchers broke Dijkstra’s 1984 “sorting barrier,” achieving O(m log^(2/3) n) time. This means faster route planning, less traffic, cheaper deliveries, and more efficient networks - and a CS curriculum revamp =)

At Rainmatter–Zerodha, we’re keen to meet people building or passionate about Deeptech in India. The last 15 yrs were consumer apps. The next wave is Deeptech moats. If we don’t build this now, we’ll be depending on others for what matters most. Who should we talk and learn from?

Torturing animals in the name of industrial-scale food production is a depravity that needs to end, sooner the better.

Being brilliant along one axis (e.g. programming) does not give you a license to have your bad behaviour towards others tolerated. I've been fortunate to receive critical but kind feedback from utterly brilliant engineers, delivered in a direct manner but with grace. This made me

Photos I Took of Theyyam Ritual In Kerala, India.

Well, it lasted for a very long time right? For most people, safest bet is to chase whatever is popular at that point of time.

The average CSE (sorry, now it is called AI) student will still go and ask chatgpt to write yet another stupid little web/mobile app for him, and complain that AI took his job ☹️

I’m starting to believe that (current) AI systems pose risk to humanity not because they are super intelligent, but rather because they are super stupid in ways we can’t know upfront.

A lot is said about 28nm fabs being built. Besides the obvious reasons of fab tech being super hard to rapidly reach SOTA levels, the reality is that a lot of imports today and in near future will be for much older process nodes. This is a great move, as long as this happens and

We are coming back a full circle. Looks like we had to learn a lot of stuff "by-heart". That's why I generally don't diss the Indian education system too much. It has its faults, but it also has a lot of things going for it.

4th consecutive DebianDay in Thrissur ✨. Today we learnt that all South Indian Bank ATMs (bank hq is Thrissur btw) runs Debian.

Correction: There are multiple OEM vendors for ATMs deployed by a bank. They use different vendors to prevent monopoly and central point of failure. One of the OEMs use Debian. This means almost all banks in India have Debian based ATMs in some places.