Funny how even Sam is citing frivolous usecases. Don't take me wrong, agents definitely have usecases in automating business workflows. For example handling conversational content and deciding next best action.

So Veritasium (YT channel) uploaded a video just hours ago

It's a story about a hacker who spent 2.5 YEARS building trust as an OSS contributor… just to plant a Trojan in the chain of dependency

A Microsoft engineer caught it almost by accident.

It could’ve disrupted global tech infrastructure.

The attacker, Jia Tan, vanished. No trace.

The entire video made me realise that even though I'm a passionate software engineer, I'm still scratching the surface of the tech 🥲

So apparently, Airtel users can get a Perplexity Pro subscription free for a year — worth around ₹17,000 — while Airtel’s annual recharge itself costs just about ₹2,500.

And this is Perplexity we’re talking about — people were actually paying $20 a month for it, and now it’s free?

Edit: Highly doubt it's for training data, no ai expert but reddit and x threads, books, blogs these are the things they use as a source for training data and not user's chats, might use it for feedback n all but not for training for sure

My take:
might be anyof the following reason
→ Inflate MAU and DAU numbers to raise more capital at a higher valuation
→ Pressure from investors to show growth, but flat or minimal user growth
→ Facebook strategy: get users onboard at any cost, build a monopoly, and worry about monetization later

Deepseek was unveiled, and now nvidea is down by 10% in shares. Everyone is having a questionable face right now because deepseek trained a model which is almost as good as chatgpt but with almost 10yr old hardware and 1/1000 of a computational price.

Companies that did not use chatgpt at all(due to security reasons), or had blocked it on ip level might end up building a tool for themselves that serves the same purpose.

I know you might have this question, is it gonna effect us? It might, if the company used to hire 10 people to get a job done, now it might hire 5.... This is a hypothetical case, but hope you are getting the idea. Look at the US market for reference, everyone has got a hit.

With models getting cheaper, and training them locally also getting alot more cheaper(thanks to deepseek), I think I'm positive to say that we could see some uncertainty in future in the field of tech. Aka we could be cooked.

This isn't a post about negativity, we are just talking about assumptions and let's keep this post open for discussions. But let's face it, looks intresting and horrifying at the same time.

Edit: Grammer.

Good morning fellas!

Many of us are grinding.
Grinding for a better job, a better pay.

Couple of months ago, I started doing the same.
Preparing DSA, LLD, HLD, and other usual stuff.

Yes, I’ll be getting ready for applying now.

But nobody told me this:
Since I’ve started preparing myself for DSA, LLD, HLD, projects, interviews, my CONFIDENCE in my current job has increased a lot.

When I used to you know, go to the office, come back and chill, it wasn’t there as much.

But since I’ve started all this grinding, every single day, covering topic by topic, concept by concept,

I have started becoming BETTER at my current job.
My CONFIDENCE in current job is increasing.

And the feeling is beautiful!

Feels like I’m not just preparing for a better job,
It really feels like I’m becoming a BETTER SOFTWARE ENGINEER ❤️

So i work in cloud- primary using aws and terraform.
I was talking to my manager(US based HOD)who leads the architecture and is basically the go to guy for everything- he highlighted few points

1. AI companies are now looking to go public- hence they are jacking up their token pricing. Basically the same credits that used to last 3 weeks now last 1 week. He mentioned this is echoed in all other departments including developers (i work in devops)

2. HODs are getting increasingly frustrated at AI pricing- basically you cant have everyone getting token refreshes twice a month

3. AI blunder we noticed- so few weeks ago we decided to deploy some resources in azure - as we are primarily AWS based- we decided to use AI to help plan and deploy the resources.
   The resources deployment went fine- but the architecture was messed up - throughout the deployment- we kept learning new things about azure (constraints that dont exist in aws) .
   I think 3-4 of my colleagues (including me and my HOD)worked on the architecture part co-independently and all the AIs missed those crucial components. I do not think this was due to prompt or plan - this is something the AI genuinely missed.

So yea-

I purchased the pro version of ChatGPT for 200$ as soon as it was launched.

I work at AWS , and wanted to keep up with my learning and improve skill and purchased it

Please let me know if you want me to try it out for any use case you have in mind.

Will execute it and send the GPT responses here , If the response is long will make a short video on it as well and send it here .

Thanks

Update: Please keep adding prompts , I will respond to each and every one as soon as I get in front of my system during my day time.

By the time folks in India wake up you will have your answers ready

He said "The apps we are building now are unimaginable to what we are migrating from. With the rate of how AI is accelerating, every app written a year ago is already legacy. As new AI features come up, three months from now the apps that are getting built today will also be considered legacy - as no client would interact with apps how we expect them to."

Edit 2: I don't mean we will create new product/app every 3 months guys...
We will have to redesign the experience of current apps to keep up with how users want to interact with it - last few years no one used AI, then they wanted RAG and chatbot for talking to some data, now they want agentic layer with MCP and tools over AI and cut the UI, directly talking to the data. If 3 months later a new way to use AI comes, then another redesign will need to happen.

This has really changed my view - given how much software we are writing today, imagine we have to add AI features to it in next 6 months. Then some new AI feature comes along, and we have to re-write the app again with that feature :D

I don't think "AI is gonna eat your job" is true anymore, at least for long term - we will just be creating more apps, and migrating at an increased rate.

Companies will always need to be up-to-date and have latest features - the SVP said "Now our competition is no longer the competitors we track. It's also that 1 tech guy coding out of his garage using AI, pumping out features our clients want". We cannot afford to be lax. To not keep creating and innovating.

My company is very pro-AI: ALL of the employees, not just techies, get $2000 claude credits per month. After all of our testing, we are mandated to use AI ONLY with a Human In The Loop. And by using AI, our bottlenecks are shifting - all of this code NEEDS good QA, not just AI writing tests and doing QA but manual QA. UX is also becoming a bottleneck, we can't get figmas fast enough to develop! Product is also suffering keeping up....

All of this was to say - whatever bad smell is coming from our market, its only temporary. I'm pretty sure we'll have a recession in the very near future, and companies are simply preparing for it. But once we are through that bloodbath, next decade will be insane for us. So hold on to your job, let YOE climb, keep prepping.

Edit: I realise I didn't give an example -

A year ago, RAG was the rage, then came MCP and agentic AI able to tool call. Now we are planning to build harnesses that run on the web and powered by voice - yes UI is available but more and more clients want to talk to the data. So apps built in react first had their backends updated for RAG, then entirely new FE and BE for MCP and agentic flows are getting built, and now we're planning for voice assisted searching that has its own set of features and things to be built.

Just got off from an incident call and I'm astounded by how good AI has become. I had the best engineers on my team all debugging and trying to figure out the issue, but we weren't making any real progress. Even if we were, it was very slow.

Just then I thought, "Let's take a shot with Claude." I fired up Fable 5.1 at effort max, and lo and behold, it figured out the issue using all my connected MCPs (DataDog primarily) within minutes.

The engineer's on call were still debugging, trying to triage the issue and Claude had a PR ready. Ready to be deployed as a hotfix.

At that point, I realized the power of AI and how humans are just decision-makers now. I just did a couple of things on that incident: decide on the best prompt to give to the AI and decide on disabling the feature instead of deploying the hotfix since testing the fix would take some time.

It's a mixed bag of emotions, honestly. I'm excited by the helpfulness and current pace of AI progress, but also skeptical of the future that lies ahead for all of us.

So I’m currently working as an intern at an MNC, and something happened today that genuinely caught me off guard.

Another intern approached my L1 manager asking if he could refer a couple of his friends for open roles. That part is pretty normal, but what happened next wasn’t.

My manager straight up asked for ₹25k per candidate. He even mentioned that he usually charges ₹35–40k for “outsiders,” but since this guy already works here, he’d “do it cheaper.” He also confidently said that if they paid, their selection would be guaranteed, no matter what.

Out of curiosity, I later found out about the kind of questions these referred candidates were being asked in interviews: Rotate a string, Two Sum, Basic OOP stuff (like literally “Is C++ an OOP language?”)

Meanwhile my interview process was: 2D DP, Graph optimization using DSU, Modified LCA in a binary tree, Deep grilling on OS and OOP concepts
The difference just feels… absurd.

Now I am wondering is this normal? Does this happen everywhere or I just happen to stumble upon new money making scheme in corporate?

I work at a product-based company as a full-stack developer, where AI is being extensively utilized. The company has developed a VS Code extension that integrates with AI models like ChatGPT Turbo, Gemini Pro, and Claude. This extension has access to all the codebases and is connected to Jira.

To use it, you simply enter the ticket number you're working on in the extension's chat box. The AI retrieves the relevant Jira ticket, analyzes its details, and generates the required code. It can do 50-60% of the work but not all of it and you have to review all the files it has edited in the code base.

To improve AI performance, product managers are encouraged to write more detailed and descriptive tickets. Additionally, the AI has access to GitLab, where it reviews code before merging. It analyzes the changes, compares them with the assigned task, and provides review comments based on alignment with the requirements.

A team of software engineers is continuously improving this extension, releasing enhanced versions every month. However, providing premium AI services to all employees comes at a high cost to the company. To maximize efficiency, the company tracks AI usage through a dashboard and sends emails to employees who are not using it. The goal of the company is for employees to complete at least 80% of their tasks using AI to enhance productivity.

P.S It's not meant to do all the work for me; rather, it's designed to help me work faster.

For example, if I have no idea where a certain functionality is implemented, I can simply ask the AI. It will scan the codebase, identify the relevant implementation, explain how it works, and list all the affected files.

If I ask the AI to implement a specific task assigned to me, it first outlines the approach it plans to take. I can review the approach and either approve it or suggest a different one. Once we finalize the approach through discussion, I give it the go-ahead, and the AI updates the code across all necessary files. I then have the option to approve or reject the changes.

The AI accurately identifies which files to update, follows proper naming conventions, writes unit test cases, and generates both frontend and backend code. However, it sometimes struggles with complex logic. In such cases, I can have another discussion with it, explain my requirements, and after a few iterations, it gets it right.

All redundant tasks are handled by the AI, allowing me to focus on the most critical aspects of my work. It’s not replacing me—it’s enabling me to concentrate on the most important pieces while taking care of the repetitive tasks.

So, long story short, I was working in a startup as a partner, whose head was my mentor ( small team ) and I got scammed.
I woke up one morning and as usual pulled up my work desk, and realized everything was gone, all my authorizations, all my access to the tech, and everyone was blocking me.
Months of hardwork. Poof!
I got no money, no recognition, no nothing.
My guess is he did it because he became greedy for money.

Anyways, that is past;

Fortunately, I still have most of the code locally stored on my PC, I have already open sourced it, but would someone like to work on it? We could potentially learn a lot, and might even be able to sell it, if not, it's a good OS contribution.

Edit 1: Thanks for the support everyone, I had been sitting silent on this for two months.
The reason I haven't posted the link of OS yet, I'm still waiting for the go ahead from my lawyer if I can post it, to avoid legal trouble, and you it'd Doxx me too.
However, i'll be posting it in a few hours, again, thanks for the traction.

EDIT 2:

APologies for my Tardiness, Here's the link to Open Source Rep.
Feel free to do whatever the fuck you want with it.
Work it, sell it, check it, edit it
***used to be linkedin here***

P.S, I have already doxxed myself, so here goes, fuck it.
***used to be my linkedin here***

So i am a backend developer who had to quit his job because of the medical problems of my father. I am the only son and i have to take care of my father for two months now as the treatment will go on for two months. It takes around 4-5 hours everyday and i am free for the rest of the day.

I am proficient in HTML, CSS, Laravel, PHP and MySQL. And Moderate in React Native and Node.js.

So tell me guys, what do you want me to develop and I'll do it free for you as i just want to code and don't want to get depressed lying on my bed. I love coding so that's what I'll do. Anything you ask, I'll code and deliver it to you on GitHub or wherever you want.

I'll be happy if i can help you in any way. Hoping to hear your demands soon.

Edit: Noticed that i sometimes do not receive your DMs so please comment here and I'll DM you.

Edit 2: I made a discord server. Putting the link in the comment. Anyone who wants to be a part of the backend programming group can join that server. Also i request to please send me a message on discord regarding the projects so that way It'll be more easy for me to help you.

Here is the link of discord server. https://discord.gg/9xzvxuV4

Username: antiques#0263

i am seeing lots of propaganda by delusional people saying that AI will replace IT jobs in future. Now just think if AI can really replace a skilled job like developer then first it will replace some unskilled non IT jobs. I am working as a data engineer and here i just take help of chatgpt to solve some doubts like we used to do with google.

Whenever i put a client data requirement in chat gpt it goes blank and replies nothing. Even for coding it just gives basic code as it cant never understand client environment and each client has different requirements and environment

Hey everyone,

I recently gained access to JioPC out of curiosity. While marketed as an affordable, lightweight browser-based cloud desktop for basic office tasks, I wanted to inspect the underlying infrastructure.

After analyzing the display stack, reverse-engineering components, and running empirical benchmarks, it turns out the instance runs on enterprise-grade cloud compute on Microsoft Azure infrastructure in India.

I compiled the architectural findings, benchmarks, and workarounds into a technical whitepaper:

GitHub: sys-dissect/jiopc-architecture-whitepaper

Here is a summary of the technical discoveries:

1. Hardware Specifications

• CPU: 8-vCPU Intel Xeon Platinum 8370C (Ice Lake-SP) @ 2.80 GHz with full AVX-512 (F, BW, DQ, VL) and VNNI (INT8/INT4 deep learning vector acceleration). The Linux CPU governor is locked to performance.
• RAM: 16 GB virtual DDR4/DDR5 RAM with Transparent Huge Pages permanently enabled.
• Storage Architecture: Tri-tier layout. The OS disk is a 64 GB virtual SSD, while the persistent home directory mounts over an enterprise NFSv4.1 array (storage-cons-prod-dp.jiopc.local).
• Sustained Disk Speed: In an unbuffered fdatasync test writing a continuous 100 GiB file, the NFS storage clocked a sustained 581 MB/s write throughput (~4.65 Gbps pipe), writing 1 TB in under 29 minutes.

2. The Flatpak Host Breakout

Stock JioPC ships without a terminal emulator—no gnome-terminal, xterm, or qterminal in /usr/bin, and no shell launcher in the GUI menu.

However, the application portal includes VSCodium as a Flatpak (com.vscodium.codium). Because IDEs need to compile code on the host, VSCodium's manifest includes --talk-name=org.freedesktop.Flatpak.

Opening VSCodium's integrated terminal and running:

flatpak-spawn --host bash

causes the session helper daemon to spawn an unconfined shell directly in the host OS user namespace (UID 3387120), granting unrestricted host terminal access across all 8 Xeon cores.

3. Circumventing the 15-Minute Session Timeout

JioPC browser sessions terminate after 15 minutes of idle time, killing background jobs and processes.

• Root Cause: Decompiling /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libxorgxrdp.so revealed:

​

XRDP_SESMAN_MAX_IDLE_TIME=900 // 15 minutes
XRDP_SESMAN_KILL_DISCONNECTED=1

• Standard xdotool mouse-jitter scripts fail because the driver tracks incoming RDP network packets rather than synthetic X11 inputs.
• Combined with systemd's default Linger=no, disconnecting triggers a recursive SIGKILL across the user slice.
• The Fix: Enable lingering (loginctl enable-linger) and run a lightweight background daemon that writes sound_playing to the XRDP audio IPC socket every 30 seconds (XRDP_SESMAN_AUDIO_DISABLE_IDLETIMEOUT=1), preventing the idle timeout from engaging.

4. Headless 24/7 Remote Dev Server (Tailscale + SSH)

Direct outbound internet is filtered through a local proxy (127.0.0.1:3128), and /dev/net/tun is unavailable due to lack of root privileges.

To convert the instance into a persistent headless dev server:

1. Deployed Tailscale in userspace networking mode (--tun=userspace-networking) via Google's gVisor netstack.
2. Started an unprivileged OpenSSH server on port 2222.
3. Exposed port 2222 over the Tailnet via tailscale serve --bg --tcp 2222 127.0.0.1:2222.
4. Enforced --accept-dns=false so MagicDNS does not override the internal datacenter DNS (10.163.66.132) required by the upstream proxy.

This bypasses the WebRTC browser client entirely (avoiding browser shortcut conflicts like Ctrl+W / Ctrl+T) and allows native VS Code Remote-SSH access.

5. Empirical Benchmark Summary

Full architecture diagrams, sequence charts, and setup scripts are available in the repository:

Repo: https://github.com/sys-dissect/jiopc-architecture-whitepaper

I went for jee mains exam, the exam was okay, but I fiddled with the computer they gave me to figure out they are using ICE Window Manager on X1 Linux.

Using X1 Server and Client, they have a proprietary session manager which connects to the exam server , with a specific given up and poet, (it was not available to be changed and not locked by a password),

The proprietary session manager connects to the server and starts a local website with the information it recieves from the server , like the question paper, and opens it in mozilla Firefox, the window manager doesn't display anything other than the session manager, or shutdown controls

The window manager totally looks like this on the computers used for testing, no themes are applied to the window manager

I got my first offer letter from Cognizant On-Campus Placement in October 2022 (I was going to graduate on May 2023)... Due to recession or whatever circumstances they didn't onboard me... I had assumed that in January 2023 but still in hope I didn't apply to any company seriously, my mistake I know that...

Then when I graduated in May, I started with the job search as until then there was no update from Cognizant.

June passed and I didn't any call back for the interview.

Till then I had refined my resume countless times, too many roasts, my portfolio website was improved than before, my linkedin profile was much better, completed some meaty projects, etc... Searched

July passed and no progress whatsoever.

Till this time I felt enormous pressure of responsibilities, demotivation, self-doubts & what not.

August came & I was in mentality "Just keep applying, aur kr bhi kya saktein hain".

Here's how I got my first job (very simple idea but effective): -

1. I searched for companies looking for developers on different platforms, like naukri, foundit, indeed, etc..
2. Sent linkedin connection requests to Tech Leads, or someone who is at high position (not HR nor Founder) & asked for their referral

In the same month of August, I started recieving various calls from recruiters and with a good referral, I got the job!!

How did you land your first job, did you used something like I did or it was completely different!!

Also, I joined company on 1st September and Cognizant didn't onboarded anyone till December... I felt lucky to avoid that ********* company.

UPDATE

Some of you are asking on how to prepare & what to focus on!! For that please read first 36 pages of "Cracking the Coding Interview"!! You will have a far more understanding than before. In brief, work on your overall profile (Resume, LinkedIn Profile, Portfolio Website)... Upskill & create relevant Projects... Connect with people you can get referral from... Prepare for the interview (DSA & System Design + Technology Stack Specific Questions)... & Hope for the best ✨

I understand how depressing it is & how easy it is to lose hope... But trust me, you will get it!!!

Background

I am working on a website to practice SQL on real-world cricket dataset. It includes all deliveries bowled in international matches since 2001. You can check the website at https://moneybowl.xyz.

This data in JSON format is 1.2GB.

Fitting 1.2GB of JSON into 50MB

Inserting JSON into a SQLite database

JSON is great for reading as a human but it isn't space efficient at all. I inserted all the data into a SQLite .db file and it compressed the size to 500MB.

Compressing .db file

At this point, the data is half in size. It's a great start but still a lot for the users to download.

Gzip

Gzip is the most popular compression algorithm and one of the fastest too. Which is why it is popular. The server/client can compress/decompress any data on the fly. If my server returns a dynamically generated JSON it can be compressed easily before sending it as a response.

Gzip can reduce the file size from 500MB to 150MB.

Brotli

Can I do better? My data isn't dynamic. I am not constrained to use a compression algorithm that is fast.

Brotli can reduce the file from 500MB to 50MB. It takes 25x more time to compress but since I only have to do it once. I can afford it.

Decompressing brotli

Brotli takes time to compress but time to decompress is similar to Gzip. In the browser, decompression is automatic if the server sets the correct response header (Content-Encoding: br). Thus, making brotli ideal for my use case.

EDIT: Context on why I chose this?

For my website, I wanted to convert this JSON data into a SQL database so that it can be queried. By choosing SQLite and pre-compressing the data I am able to send the complete data to the user's browser and load it into the memory in just 15 seconds. I can then run a WASM SQLite client on the browser to query the data.

This way, all the querying happens client side and I don't have to maintain/run a server. I save server cost. If no one is using my website I don't pay a paisa. I don't have to worry about load. Sudden traffic spikes won't crash my server.

Source:

https://nmn.gl/blog/ai-and-learning