putting engineering scenes @puttingscenes
Joined June 2007
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Pratul Kalia retweeted
A lot of folks have asked for Spend management limits on @Cloudflare for some time now
I've spent the last three months rebuilding our billing usage platform to enable this for our product catalog starting with Workers and Durable Objects and I'm pleased to give you a quick sneak peek 🫣
Shipping on Cloudflare for humans and agents shortly along with an engineering deep dive on how we did it
Send me or @irvinebroque a DM if you want to try it early
Pratul Kalia retweeted
In 2004, India’s official count said the Sariska Tiger Reserve in Rajasthan had 16-18 tigers. But, visitors had not seen one in months.
The truth: Sariska’s tigers had been poached to extinction.
What follows is the stunning story of how a supposedly, “poor country” mobilised to save the tiger. From rebuilding its counting methods, camera traps, statistics, satellites and an app.
This is the story of how a country that has learnt to lived with tigers for millennia, learnt again how to protect it.
Issue 7: How India Actually Saved the Tiger, written by @sonakshi_geog, edited by @fahadmh , tracked, counted & built by @AltCarbonIndia
altermag.com/articles/how-in…
It's easy to look at this as "apple shipped a new interface paradigm and for the first time ever, gave us a way to turn it off" but →
1/ this is an add-on interaction surface
2/ turning it off does not reduce the experience in any way (yet)
Pratul Kalia retweeted
Isn't it blasphemy? What do cockroaches have to do with the Ramayana?
Has Hinduism become such a joke, that anyone can start a new tradition of their own to satisfy their political masters?
STORY | Delhi Ramlila to burn 30-foot 'cockroach' effigy alongside Ravan
A 30-foot-tall "cockroach" effigy will go up in flames alongside those of Ravan, Kumbhkaran, and Meghnad at a Ramlila in the national capital this year.
READ: ptinews.com/story/national/d…
Pratul Kalia retweeted
A los 90 años falleció Margaret Hamilton, pionera de la computación.
Acuñó el término "ingeniería de software" y quien programó el software que llevó al hombre a la Luna en el programa Apollo.
"Cuando se me ocurrió el término de ingeniería de software, nadie había oído hablar de él, al menos en nuestro mundo. Fue una broma constante durante mucho tiempo. Les gustaba bromear con mis ideas radicales. Fue un día memorable cuando uno de los gurús más respetados del hardware explicó a todos en una reunión que estaba de acuerdo conmigo en que el proceso de construcción de software debería considerarse también una disciplina de ingeniería, al igual que el hardware. No porque aceptara el nuevo 'término' en sí, sino porque nos habíamos ganado su aceptación y la de los demás en la sala como un campo de ingeniería por derecho propio."
Pratul Kalia retweeted
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models
“I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that.
“With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor.
“You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something.
“That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’
“I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
$ANET Andy Bechtolsheim says AI has made optics demand about 10 times bigger in five years and the industry is only at the "very beginning"
"So I guess I don't need to tell you that AI has been driving this incredible increase in demand for high-speed optics, which is probably now 10 times bigger than it used to be five years ago..."
"And what I want to talk to you today is that we're not at the end of this journey, but rather the very beginning. There's easily another order of magnitude increase in bits needed for the next generation kind of data centers."
"So what I want to talk about first is what's happening at the data center level, and how we as an industry have to get together to solve these problems of this very rapid and high demand growth as fast as possible, since AI can't wait."
______
For full set of takeaways to Andy's AI Datacenter and Optics lecture: firesidealpha.substack.com/p…
Pratul Kalia retweeted
I can’t call someone a dumb fuck at work, so instead I say, “walk me through your thought process”
Pratul Kalia retweeted
Michael Moritz on the importance of storytelling in business.
My conversation with Michael Moritz, one of the great venture investors of the last 40 years.
Michael joined Sequoia in 1986 and co-led the firm with Doug Leone (@dougleone) from 1995 to 2012. His investments include Google, Yahoo, PayPal, and Stripe.
His new book, Ausländer, traces his parents' escape from Nazi Germany and helps explain his lifelong interest in what shapes exceptional people.
We discuss:
- The infamous Steve Jobs profile
- Why Don Valentine hired him
- The question he finds most revealing when interviewing people
- Monomania and the cost of greatness
- Why he has never felt good at anything
- Writing, journalism and AI
- What he learned about himself writing Ausländer
I'd recommend watching this one if you can. Michael was incredibly thoughtful and reflective throughout, particularly when talking about his parents, childhood, and the more difficult parts of his personal story.
Enjoy!
TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
0:53 Family History & Identity
7:03 Survival & Outsider Instinct
18:53 Studying Exceptional People
33:50 Self-Doubt & Success
41:17 Steve Jobs & Obsession
52:50 Joining Sequoia
1:03:22 Leadership & Alex Ferguson
1:08:25 Elon Musk & AI
1:17:12 Becoming Who You Are
Pratul Kalia retweeted
The Mythic Society, Bengaluru, is pleased to present 𝐏𝐚̄𝐫𝐚𝐦̣𝐩𝐚𝐫𝐢𝐤𝐚 𝐒𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐥̤𝐚𝐠𝐚𝐥̤𝐚 𝐍𝐚𝐤𝐬̣𝐞̆ 𝐁𝐡𝐚𝐦̣𝐝̣𝐚̄𝐫𝐚 — a living digital map of the Bengaluru region's inscriptions, hero stones, and ancient temples.
For the first time, more than 6,000 monuments spanning over a millennium of history are brought together on a single interactive platform: 4,301 inscriptions, 1,470 hero stones, 439 ancient temples and 10,500 photographs across Bengaluru and the neighbouring districts of Kolar, Tumakuru, and Mandya. The platform draws upon foundational historical scholarship — including Epigraphia Carnatica and the Mysore Archaeological Reports — corroborated and expanded through intensive field surveys: 31 contributors, over 300 days in the field, and more than 8,000 square kilometres surveyed on foot across Bengaluru Urban, Bengaluru Rural, and Ramanagara districts. Each record integrates ground photographs, verified epigraphic readings, and high-resolution 3D scans.
While engineered to research-grade standards for historians and epigraphists, it is designed with equal care for the curious explorer. You can search by place, deity, dynasty, or historical period—whether to conduct comparative palaeographic research or simply discover the forgotten history standing a few hundred metres from your doorstep.
This map is the work of the Mythic Society's Bengaluru Inscriptions 3D Digital Conservation Project — and continues to grow with ongoing surveys.
Explore it freely at: nakshe.mythicsociety.org
Glad for proof and completely not surprised. I've been feeling this for a year now -- The more technical you are, the more fun and productive it is to work with a strong model.
China published the most uncomfortable paper on vibe coding.
ETH Zurich tested 100 developers in a controlled, commercial-grade vibe coding environment to see who actually succeeds.
The findings are brutal.
The researchers tracked computer science achievement, written communication skills, and general cognitive reasoning.
They wanted to see what actually predicts vibe coding proficiency when you never touch a line of source code yourself.
Two major predictors emerged.
Written communication proficiency mattered. The ability to structure thoughts and articulate intent unambiguously in text directly impacts what the AI builds.
But that wasn't even the main takeaway.
Computer science achievement was a massive, dominant predictor of success.
Even when researchers controlled for general intelligence and reasoning skills, CS background still heavily dictated who built working software and who completely crashed.
In fact, CS knowledge contributed roughly twice the unique predictive variance of writing skills alone.
Why? Because vibe coding isn't about writing code. It’s about debugging logic.
When an AI agent builds a complex application and quietly breaks an edge case under the hood, a non-technical user looks at the glowing UI and assumes it works.
They don't know what questions to ask. They don't know what logic to challenge. They lack the mental models to recognize architectural catastrophe.
You can prompt your way past syntax.
You cannot prompt your way past a fundamental lack of engineering intuition.
The hype told us that learning to code is dead because language is all you need.
The data just proved the opposite.
To truly master the vibe, you still need to understand how the machine thinks.
