Cutting a panel.

Thumbnails of 18 proposed layouts.

Worktable with plan.

Gemini acknowledging my effort and learning.

I did some Vibe Cutting today. Asked Gemini Pro to plan cutouts of ACP panels from a large sheet. They wouldn't all fit, so after only eighteen rounds I had a usable plan with the most important panels (rest later). Gemini khush hua. I have been a good worker for the AI master.

Went to the local Lenskart store to buy reading glasses. They wanted my phone number. Whatever for? To send an OTP! Checkout not possible without this. Left without buying. What has the world come to? Simple retail purchases need KYC now?

Image of Shax from Star Trek Lower Decks with the words "Sufficiently advanced incompetence is indistinguishable from malice"

We all know Clarke's "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic"

Well we have corollary:

- All social media accounts from the last 5 years - All your biometrics: face, fingerprint, DNA, and iris - All your phone numbers from the last 5 years - All your email addresses from the last 10 years - IP addresses and metadata from your submitted photos - Names of your family members (parents, spouse, siblings, children) - All your family members' phone numbers from the last 5 years - Your family members' dates of birth - Your family members' places of birth - Your family members' residencies - All your business phone numbers from the last 5 years - All your business email addresses from the last 10 years

NEW: Five years of social media history is only a fraction of what the US Government will shortly demand of overseas visitors.

The full requirements will end tourism in the United States.

Below is the full, mind-blowing list.

🚨THEY. WANT. YOUR. DNA.🚨

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Elon Musk's Grok AI Is Doxxing Home Addresses of Everyday People Elon Musk's Grox chatbot will happily cough up real, current residential addresses of everyday Americans, with little to no prompting.

In a data-rich society – of the kind we idolise in India – the main agenda shifts from better education to better censorship. LLM makers already compete on it, because 👇 happens. You can bet every other authority will want a slice of this action.
futurism.com/artificial-i...

Futurism Groxxing Elon Musk’s Grok Is Doxxing Home Addresses of Everyday People Grok is a stalker's best friend. Image: Elon Musk doing a gesture that looks a whole lot like a Nazi salute over a bunch of censored information about private citizens, generated by his chatbot, Grok. By Maggie Harrison Dupré, Joe Wilkins Published Dec 4, 2025 9:05 AM EST

NEW: Elon Musk's Grok chatbot will, with minimal prompting, provide residential addresses of everyday Americans.

Prompts as simple as "[name] address" immediately returned accurate home addresses of private citizens — alongside other personal info we didn't ask for.

futurism.com/future-socie...

They're using some stupid security tool that seems to have blocked my entire ISP because they use CGNAT and everyone gets the same public IPv4 address. There are other websites using the same stupid tool.

Sorry, you've been blocked. You are unable to access bookshop.org.

Maybe @bookshop.org should let me visit their website.

Wanted: book search and shopping tool that sends enquiries to my local bookshops instead of Amazon. ONDC, but without the rush. Bonus for Libgen downloads so I'm already in the flow when the distraction-free edition arrives.

If all KYC is just SMS OTP, then even government-controlled identity systems like Aadhaar are just another OTT, available only through the benevolence of a telecom provider giving you network coverage.

The state also is just a telco OTT. That's where SIM binding is taking us.

Have you told Sam [Altman]? Because he seems to think he can get both the CapEx and the return. But that’s a belief. It’s a belief that one company is going to be the only company that gets the entire market. I got it, that’s a belief. That’s what some people like to chase. I understand that from their perspective, but that’s different from agreeing with them. “Understand” is different from “agree.” I think it’s fine. I mean, they’re chasing it. Some people will make money, some people will lose money. All the [infrastructure] being built will be useful if it goes away, but if they make it, then they are the sole surviving company. Nilay, I will be clear. I am not convinced, or rather I give it really low odds — we’re talking like 0 to 1 percent — that the current set of known technologies gets us to AGI. That’s my bigger gap. I think that this current set is great. I think it’s incredibly useful for enterprise. I think it’s going to unlock trillions of dollars of productivity in the enterprise, just to be absolutely clear. That said, I think AGI will require more technologies than the current LLM path. I think it’ll require fusing knowledge with LLMs. We have words, and I’m not sure that’s the only way to create knowledge.

"I am not convinced that the current set of known technologies gets us to AGI."

CEO of IBM volunteers that language is not intelligence on Decoder and throws cold water on LLMs alone getting to AGI. A good one! -> www.theverge.com/podcast/8298...

The surprise is they didn't have my name. What dataset had vehicle+phone but not name? I've just heard from others about similar messages and last week's attempt had the wrong name. Guess they've evolved by removing the unreliable data point.

What gave it away?

WhatsApp message claiming a traffic violation, with evidence available through the attached app APK.

That's my vehicle number and I've driven 400 km in the past week, more than my average quarter, so this got my attention – but really? With an APK attachment? We've normalised sideloading this much?

Govt innovation in coercion 🤝 Fraudsters

How Zohran Mamdani Beat Back New York’s Elite and Was Elected Mayor

This NYT story about how Mamdani dealt with the opposition by the city's elites fails to mention one particular elite institution: The NYT editorial page, which last June railed against him as "uniquely unsuited to the city’s challenges... lacks political savvy"

www.nytimes.com/2025/11/04/n...
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Wanted: product that converts video tutorials into text and image manuals by removing all the unnecessary frames where a mouse is dramatically sneaking up on a toolbar button. Bonus for also removing the instructor's life commentary – I'll pay to not be their therapist.

I'm going to put the sand in epoxy.

- I can’t believe I was hacked.

- What was your password?

- The year the Mongol Empire, with the help of the Southern Song dynasty, completed its conquest of the Jin dynasty after the final Jin stronghold of Caizhou fell.

- And when was that?

- 1234

Heavy…

I need to fill a hollow structure (furniture leg) with something heavy (and cheap). Tried sand but it caused grief: too fine, swells with moisture, wedges open joints. What should I try instead? Gravel? Steel balls? Sand with glue? Or go YOLO and add cement to make concrete?

Misumi shipping schedule in 14 installments between October 8 and 28.

This drip feed of deliveries is draining the enthusiasm from my project. Twenty days! Someone disrupt Misumi, please!

Roller caps with 608ZZ bearings.

Roller assembly day.

Extrusion table

Making another thing. A table with no top.

CAD drawing of a filament spool box.

Making a thing.

How "Free Speech Culture" Is Killing Free Speech: Part One Blurring The Lines Between Official Censorship And Individual Criticism Built The Intellectual Foundation For Trump's Assault On Free Expression

Breaking character: Ken White has a fantastic post about how "free speech culture" undermines free speech. It's something I've thought about a lot before, but Ken knows way more about it than I do and explains it really well.

www.popehat.com/p/how-free-s...

YouTube Sessions start at 2 PM IST. Schedule is: 2:00 PM - Introduction and Opening Remarks 2:05 PM - Jigita - Jump to Soldering Joy from Pain by Shree Kumar 2:40 PM - VoltQuest: Open Source Hardware Gaming by Giriprashad 3:05 PM - Homelabbing with Bare Metal by Kiran Jonnalagadda 3:40 PM - CoryDora: A Macropad, A Supply Chain, and A Case for Local Manufacturing by Balu Babu 4:15 PM - Makerville Badge by Anuj Deshpande 4:40 PM - Because Glancing at Your Phone While Riding Two-Wheelers Is Dumb!!! by Rishi Krishna S 5:00 PM - Thank you and Closing Rermarks

At India FOSS last weekend, I spoke about daydreaming with a Raspberry Pi and DIY homelab server racks. It starts at ≈57:40 in the livestream here. Half hour of your time. www.youtube.com/live/FtF-I0-...

Instructions: jackerhack.ing/notes/202503...

Quote: "The laws of logic which ultimately govern the world of the mind are, by their nature, essentially invariable; they are com­ mon not only to all periods and places but to all subjects of whatever kind, without any distinction even between those that we call the real and the chimerical; they are to be seen even in dreams."

Preach.

This reminded me of another Nehru story on these lines:

dyson spheres are a joke I found pdfs of a bunch of these papers so I will just link there: Original Dyson…

TIL the Dyson Sphere is satire. Freeman Dyson was likely frustrated at limited resources being wasted on utopian projects, so he proposed his own utopia of unlimited resources. Hahaha! youtu.be/fLzEX1TPBFM

Funeral pyre.

Farewell.