Quantum Computing has tremendous potential to change the world of computing forever but there are significant challenges that need to be addressed. One of the challenges is that in order to function as a superconductor the system has to be kept between 0.01 to 0.015 Kelvin or -273.14°C. As you can imagine this is hard to do and obviously impractical for consumer / commercial devices.
We are a step closer to solving this problem as Researchers from Louisiana State University have developed a material that can demonstrate quantum weirdness at room temperature. This material is basically a thin layer of gold on a glass chip and is carved with microscopic patterns that act like artificial atoms which carry Quantum states. The crystal chip can distinguish them and move them from one point to another without requiring cryogenic cooling. Which opens the door to practical quantum technologies.
Crucial to the new material’s room-temperature operation is the way it shifts the focus from electrons and atoms to photons (particles of light). This overcomes the usual atomic-level disruption that heat brings with it. The material is what’s known as a plasmonic metacrystal: ‘Plasmonic’ because the light traveling over it makes ripples of electrons known as plasmons, and ‘metacrystal’ because it’s an artificially created crystal. The tiny slit patterns etched into the material act as artificial atoms (meta-atoms), which dictate how different photon groups pass through (the quantum behavior).
“By engineering the distribution of meta-atoms in the plasmonic metacrystal, we can systematically dictate which quantum statistics are allowed to pass through the structure,” says physicist Riley Dawkins. “So, our crystal essentially acts as a statistical filter on quantum states.” That means as light enters the chip and travels across the gold surface, it’s manipulated by the meta-atoms — and by tweaking the size, shape, and spacing of the slits, different end results can be produced at the quantum level. In practice, this means that certain quantum states of light can be transported with less disruption.
The findings have been published in Nature Journal earlier this month.
A camera is a camera and a screen is a screen, till recently they couldn’t be both simultaneously. But last month researchers from ETH Zurich in Switzerland, have created a new type of pixel that can do both at the same time. This hypercharged pixel, called a Fourier pixel, can generate and sense arbitrary light fields and tap into a pixel’s full potential for carrying information by manipulating light’s intensity, oscillation phases, and polarization. Meaning it can display an image and act as a camera at the same time. The paper on the team’s findings was published in Nature.
This technology when matured could pave the way for camera–display devices that both display images and act as a camera. One interesting use case would be full functional invisibility. For years we have seen invisibility cloaks, invisible cars and cloaking tech on the movie/TV screens, but most efforts to recreate them have not been successful so far. With this new technology it might soon be possible to have cloaking tech available for use. (At least on the visual spectrum)
Digital cameras and displays use picture elements (pixels3) that perform a single function: detecting or emitting light intensity. To exploit the full information content of electromagnetic waves, more advanced elements are required. This has driven the development of multifunctional components that, for example, simultaneously detect and emit intensity or extract intensity and spectral information. However, no pixel exists that both senses and generates optical wavefronts with full control over amplitude, phase and polarization, limiting bidirectional control and feedback of sophisticated light fields. Here we present a route to such pixels by demonstrating a versatile platform of miniaturized diffractive elements based on Fourier optics. We use plasmonic surface waves, which propagate coherently and efficiently across metallic surfaces. When these plasmons are launched towards wavy microstructures designed with simple Fourier analysis, arbitrary and background-free optical wavefronts are generated. Conversely, incoming light can be sensed, and its amplitude, phase and polarization can be fully characterized. By combining or superposing several such components, we create multifunctional ‘Fourier pixels’ that provide compact and accurate control over the optical field. Our approach, which we extend to photonic waveguide modes, establishes a scalable, universal architecture for vectorially programmable pixels with applications in adaptive optics, holographic displays, optical communication and quantum information processing.
As with all technologies there is potential for misuse as well because every screen becomes a unobtrusive camera which increases the ability for performing surveillance. Imagine having a TV with this functionality. Then imagine hackers gaining control of the screen to record personal movements. Then imagine an authoritarian government doing the same constantly. This was explored in the novel 1984 by George Orwell.
The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it; moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision which the metal plaque commanded, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment.
People who know me know that I am not really active on Social Media, and by Social Media I am referring to the sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Instead I use Mastodon which is an open source equivalent of Twitter and Pixel which is an Opensource version of Instagram. I don’t use Facebook or Twitter because it doesn’t show me what I want to see, which is updates from friends.
Facebook is basically trying to show you stuff that keeps you on the site for as long as possible and it also tries to push Incel, misogynist, white supremacy and Flat earth conspiracy theories to you. You might think that I am yet another doomsayer who is ‘anti-capitalist’, anti-tech etc but this statement is based on personal experience. I have a Facebook account that I created over a decade ago for testing scripts that would push posts to Facebook automatically. I have never used it for surfing content or liked any account/post etc from it. A few days ago I was changing the passwords on all my accounts and logged into the site for the first time in a while using this account. What I noticed was that the site was pushing accounts that were either trying to teach you to pick up girls, posts on flat earth, Cockroach Janta Party and then pro-trump posts. It shows you how they are pushing a certain agenda and a majority of the posts seem to be auto generated AI slop.
In any case, as I have posted earlier all posts on this blog are auto published on Mastodon and all comments/likes etc are synced back here automatically. Basically the site is a full fledged node on Mastodon. I use the official plugin called ActivityPub to achieve this and it has worked fantastically so far. The same folks have recently released a plugin called ATmosphere that does the same thing for BlueSky. BlueSky is the unofficial successor/replacement for Twitter and a lot of folks who were active on Twitter migrated to BlueSky when Twitter was taken over by Musk.
I do have a blue sky account but am not super active over there. I keep the account alive because a lot of folks I like to follow are active there. Till recently the only way I could Federate the blog posts to BlueSky was to push the post to Mastodon, where a bridge account posted it to BlueSky and then I would manually republish it. But all that is in the past now. With the new plugin I installed yesterday the Blog posts are auto posted to BlueSky directly under my account there automatically and when people on Bluesky reply, like, or repost what you shared, those reactions show up as comments on the post you made and approved comments left here on this Blog are sent right back to Bluesky as replies under the original post. This way I can remove the manual steps for BlueSky and hopefully this will showcase the stuff I post to a wider audience and get more visitors to the Blog :).
This post will be the first (non-test) post that gets published to BlueSky and Mastodon simultaneously.
In a historic first, on 18th July India’s first private orbital launch named Vikram-I, successfully lifted off from Sriharikota and has successfully placed multiple technology demonstration payloads into orbit. These payloads include two satellites named SCOPE & Grahaa which were injected to a Low Earth Orbit along with others that carry out various in-orbit experiments.
This is a phenomenal achievement by Skyroot Aerospace Private Limited which was founded in 2018 by two ISRO scientists. Skyroot became the first private Indian company to successfully reach the space in first attempt making India the third country in world after USA and China to have rocket launch by private company. The really cool fact about this is that the average age of the company staff is 28. So much for the youth today not doing anything new…
Skyroot Aerospace had earlier conducted a sub-orbital launch of a test rocket, Vikram-S from Sriharikota on November 18, 2022. Subsequently, Vikram-I was developed as a 4-stage rocket with 3 solid stages and a liquid stage, which can launch small satellites to LEO. ISRO& IN-SPACE provided handholding and support to this venture by facilitating this launch. ISRO provided access to the solid motor casting and static test facilities at SDSC, Sriharikota. The first stage solid motor was cast and tested at the facilities in SDSC. The second stage motor was also validated at the static test facility in SDSC.
The liquid engine used in the VIKRAM-I upper stage (RAMAN-I)was also tested at the LPSC test facility. During the pre-launch operations, all support was provided for the vehicle stage preparation, material handling, transport of stages to launch pad, trajectory analysis and vehicle integration on the First Launch Pad (FLP). ISRO’s safety team was ensuring safe operations by the Skyroot team at SDSC on a 24×7 basis.
IN-SPACe, the regulation & promotion agency for space activities in the country, played a major role in establishing a seamless mechanism for Non-Governmental Entities (NGEs) like Skyroot Aerospace to access the facilities of ISRO and provide the necessary technical consultancy, mission readiness reviews and launch clearances. ISRO & IN-SPACe congratulates the team at Skyroot Aerospace for the successful maiden launch of Vikram-I launcher. This launch has paved the way for similar ventures and opens up the gates to global commercial opportunities.
Hats off to the team at Skyroot and looking forward to more such achievements from them in the near future.
AI (or rather LLM’s) use is becoming more & more common and one of the issues with it (amongst many) is that when you ask it to summarize/process/or whatever something you have to upload that content to servers that are outside your control, then to make things worse a lot of these services use the data uploaded to further train their models. It is not illegal because they have put it in the user agreement that you allow them to use the data in anyway they want. Once the model is trained on data you have uploaded then it is possible for others to extract this data with a specific prompt. This happened to Samsung back in 2023 where an engineer uploaded internal source code to ChatGPT and another user was able to download it.
So the stakes are quite high when scientists are asked to peer-review papers that can contain significant breakthrough’s. Secondly a good peer review evaluates a paper and a lot of times identify issues that the author needs to address before publishing. Using AI for this can significantly degrade the quality of the review and this was identified as an issue by multiple publications.
The 40th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) has strict rules banning peer reviewers from uploading papers they are reviewing to AI chatbots but they are allowed to use AI chatbots for background research. This is pretty normal nowadays but they went a step further to enforce this policy and catch illicit AI use by deliberately concealing instructions for large language models (LLMs) in papers sent out for peer review. These instructions instruct LLM’s to use specific phrases in the review report allowing the organizers to identify the reviewers who breached policy.
The instructions tell an LLM to use telltale phrases—such as “This work addresses the central challenge” and “The claims of the paper”—in a peer-review report. Some researchers have already been caught trying to sneak secret messages into their papers in a bid to game AI tools into giving them favorable referee reports. Many publishers ban the use of AI in peer review.
Most people are in favor of this action but there are some who have been pretty vocal about not liking this action. They claim that “Designing a trap that presumes bad faith corrodes the relationship the whole system depends on,” and “You do not build a healthy reviewing culture by treating your reviewers as suspects.” I have a feeling that folks in this group are the ones who were previously using LLM’s in their review and are not happy about being caught. Is this a perfect method to catch folks who are cheating? Of-course not, but it is better than what we had earlier.
Some of the justified criticism against this method is coming from reviewers who found the embedded prompts in the paper and assumed that they were put in by the paper authors (there have been multiple cases where authors put in hidden prompts in their papers to give them favorable reviews).
Recently an Amazon executive revealed that she had rejected a candidate who showed up to an interview in a T-Shirt that said “I’m too Hot for a Job”. This caused a lot of noise on social media with folks either supporting her or calling the interviewer out for rejecting the candidate for no good reason. I am in the former camp and would have rejected a candidate if they came for an interview dressed like that.
I personally love quirky T-Shirts and about half of the T-Shirts I have have some saying/joke on them (At one point it was more than 90% of my T-Shirts) but I have never worn them to work, or even to meet people who I know on a professional basis. At one point a few years ago I remember complaining that I wasn’t able to wear any of my T-Shirts because of this, which is when I started getting T-Shirts that were more neutral and less quirky. The reason for that rule is quite simple, there is a time and place for everything and a Job *Interview* is not where you wear such clothes. I have worn a suit to pretty much all my in person interviews and I wear a formal shirt for Virtual video interviews.
People supporting this girl say that if the company dress code allows it then it is hypocritical to punish the person for it during the interview but I look at it differently. Yes the dress-code might allow it but even then I would question the judgement of a person who came into the office in a shirt that says “I’m too hot to for a Job”. I can’t even imagine wearing something like that to work forget a job interview. Maybe in a non-corporate environment something like that would be ok but not at a major company for a white collar job.
You are judged by what you wear and during an interview every gesture & action of yours is being scrutinized and judged. I remember reading about a company who asked their receptionist about each candidate and how they treated her and factored that into the hiring process. Please note that I am not saying that you should only go to interviews wearing a suit. I do that because I am comfortable in it and most of the companies I worked for in the past decade and half have been banks where formality is expected. But even when interviewing at a startup, I would suggest wearing a formal shirt or at least something neutral without any slogans/jokes/weird artwork etc. You have a lot of competition for the position and it would be a shame to loose it because of what you wore.
“This isn’t about dress codes. It’s about understanding context. You don’t wear swimwear to a wedding. You don’t wear a tuxedo to the gym. And maybe, just maybe, you don’t show up to an interview wearing a T-shirt that literally announces you’re too good for the thing you’re interviewing for,” she added.
According to Jain, the issue was not that the candidate chose casual clothing or failed to wear traditional business attire. Rather, it was the message displayed on the T-shirt that she felt sent the wrong signal during a job interview. The slogan, she argued, suggested a lack of seriousness about the opportunity and created an impression that the applicant considered herself above the role she was seeking.
The flip side of this is that the hiring manager/HR should also refrain from overly judging people on what they wear. For example rejecting someone because you didn’t like their brand of shoes or clothes would be wrong. It might not be what you would wear but as long as it is not shabby or offensive I feel it should be ignored. However, depending on the position someone is interviewing for, the right dress could potentially make or break the deal.
I recommend researching the company in advance before the interview so you know what to expect and if you don’t then you are taking a risk. I had a candidate who missed their interview with us because the company security didn’t allow them inside because they were not properly dressed. This was at a bank where we weren’t allowed to wear jeans to work and this guy showed up for the interview in Bermuda shorts, slippers and an artfully torn T-Shirt.
Remember, if you are too formally dressed then you can always take off the tie or the blazer and look more casual. I did that at a Startup meet in France where I was the only one wearing a tie at the event so I took it off and it was good. It it was the other way round where everyone was wearing a tie and I wasn’t then I would have been in trouble.
Long story short, an interview is not somewhere you show up wearing T-Shirts with jokes or torn clothes or Artsy look (unless you are applying for an art position) it is where you are expected to put your best foot forward.
There is a reason John Scalzi is one of my favorite authors in the world. He is outspoken about issues that are close to his heart and like most authors he is not a fan of AI. In fact he has a clause in his contracts that all artwork, translation etc on his books will be done by actual humans instead of AI. The creative crowd doesn’t like AI because the models are trained on media & text without licensing and thus without paying the original creator and the content it creates is actually quite bad, Plus the suits (management) want to fire all the creatives so that they can use the scholastic parrot to create stuff without having to pay for it.
John had the perfect comment explaining why the creatives dislike the people who pop up in their feeds when they complain about AI saying that there are legit uses for it:
John Scalzi on AI
I don’t know how to explain to the people who pop up when creatives complain about “AI” to say there are legit uses for it just how much they sound like someone saying “Well actually fire is used to make bread” when people are talking about an organized arson ring burning down their fucking houses
7:23 AM · Apr 11, 2026
India has a lot of knowledge and information hidden in scrolls, manuscripts that are unfortunately poorly documented which makes it hard to locate and preserve this knowledge in an organized way. Earlier this year the Ministry of Culture launched the Gyan Bharatam National Manuscript Survey that aims to identify and document these manuscripts located across India. Once the we have a national ‘Manuscript Presence Map’ that shows where these documents are located, what they are about and in what condition they are in the government can then start prioritizing their preservation and digitization based on content, need and condition of the documents.
These will then be available to future researchers and scholars across the world in digital form similar to how various museums and libraries in the world are making their catalogs available digitally globally.
The Gyan Bharatam National Manuscript Survey will be conducted through a four-stage framework:
The first stage focuses on the identification of manuscripts and their locations through submissions on the digital platform, leading to the creation of a national manuscript presence map.
The second stage involves physical verification by experts and state authorities.
The third stage includes detailed cataloguing and metadata creation, such as identification of language, script, and subject.
The final stage focuses on conservation support and high-quality digitisation of manuscripts to enable long-term preservation and research.
I think that this is a great initiative by the government and having all this information in a central database will allow us to cross-reference across various sources and showcase the rich and extensive history of Indian Knowledge to the future generations. This is especially important because for too long we have been put down by various external (and some internal) so called experts who claim that India was nothing before it was colonized. Where as in reality India was one of the most productive and knowledgeable country in the world till it was systematically looted with our knowledge and past whitewashed to the point where it was almost forgotten.
A few days ago a new political party emerged in India called ‘Cockroach Janata Party’ following remarks attributed to the Chief Justice of India during a court hearing and apparently rapidly gained traction online through memes. I am going to talk about the political aspect of it in a bit but first want to talk about the branding of the party. When a new party/organization is formed people try to get a brand image that points to what the party wants to do. For example, when AAP (Aam Aadmi Party) was formed they named themselves as the representing the regular man (Aam Admi) and their symbol was a Broom because they claimed to be looking at sweeping the corruption clean from the country (what they actually did is a whole other story).
This new party decided to call themselves Cockroach janata party. A cockroach is something that no sane person wants in their house, if you find one in a house you know that is is not cleaned properly. I don’t know anyone who would say something like ‘oh I want more Cockroach’s in my house’. So why would you choose an insect that pretty much every human would hate finding in their houses?
Cockroach’s breed in dirty houses with food left in the open or garbage not taken out regularly (found this out the hard way when I got an infestation in my house). Is the party saying that they want India (Bharat) to go back to the ‘good old days’ of corruption and dirty cities without public toilets? (India went from 38.70 per cent population having access to toilets in 2013 to 87.5% having access in 2025). There is a lot we need to improve but we have come a long way since 2014.
The founder of the party Abhijeet Dipke used to work with AAP Communications, doesn’t stay in India (He lives in Boston) claims that the name was chosen because of the quote by Chief Justice Surya Kant during a Supreme Court hearing where they supposedly called the youth of India cockroaches & parasites but claimed later that he was misquoted. (If that quote is accurate then action should be taken against him). Abhijeet on the other hand is known for his pro-Pakistan takes on Section 370 and during the CAA protests. Other folks pushing the party are similarly not in India and are happily staying Abroad but still push the anti-India narratives.
The ‘party’ claims to be a popular platform that is giving voice to GenZ concerns but if you look at the founders, the follower metrics and the actual real life impact/reach it doesn’t seem to be there. Most of the noise generated by the party is coming from the usual Anti-India groups followed by folks from Pakistan and Bangladesh. The ‘party’ appealed everyone to assemble in front of the Bangalore Town Hall and even with 20 million followers on Instagram & 200k followers on Twitter, exactly 0 people showed up for their protest. In contrast when Anna Hazare protested in Bangalore in 2011 with his India Against Corruption (IAC) movement over 87,000 people were there supporting him against the corruption we saw in India. (I was there in Bangalore at the time and saw the support they have).
Cockroach Janta Party has 20 million followers on Instagram.
CJP has 200k followers on Twitter.
They appealed to everyone to assemble in the front of Town hall Bengaluru.
The number of GenZ reached in the front of the Town Hall: 0
In the past few weeks, we have seen multiple attempts to malign India starting with the Norwegian journalist who claimed that Modi didn’t answer questions during a briefing but walked out when given the option to ask questions in an actual press conference. Then we have the whole drama being created about a casual mutually respectful joke between two leaders that are comfortable enough with each other to joke with each other. Look at the video below, does it look like any of the participants are disrespecting the other?:
Modi Gifts ‘Melody’ Toffee to Giorgia Meloni During High Stakes Italy Visit | ‘Melodi’ Diplomacy
In contrast, apparently Nehru lighting a cigarette for Mrs Simon and hugging/kissing foreign diplomats/heads of state is all ok and in the best of manners and diplomacy. I can only imagine the ruckus that would have been raised if Modi had kissed a foreign head of state or hugged them.
Nehru, Prime Minister of India lighting the cigarette for Mrs Simon, wife of Deputy High Commissioner of Britain, 1960.
After their miserable showing in West Bengal and barely adequate showing in Kerala & Tamil Nadu the opposition parties are at this point literally throwing things at BJP/Modi/India to see what sticks. The same person who is complaining today that India doesn’t have a good AI ecosystem when compared to China was protesting shirtless in the AI summit back in February.
This is the latest attempt by Congress, AAP and others to try to get GenZ to revolt against the government. Online followers & bots can be bought to create a buzz but the actual humans in India know what is what when they see this absolutely transparent attempt to hurt Bharat’s image on the international stage. Some more facts about about the claim that Modi is a Dictator are easily countered by facts comparing Congress actions and BJP actions.
Nehru dissolved 7 state governments when he was the Prime Minister.
Indira Gandhi dissolved 49 state governments when she was the Prime Minister.
Rajiv Gandhi dissolved 6 state governments when he was the Prime Minister.
Narasimha Rao dissolved 11 state governments when he was the Prime Minister.
Manmohan Singh dissolved 11 state governments when he was the Prime Minister.
After 2014, the Modi government has not dissolved a single state government…
But, is Modi a dictator? Who says? A sticker government! Long live Bharat..
There are so many such examples that it would takes a series of posts to cover them all. But I will end this post with just a statement that BJP & Modi have a lot of room for improvements and I don’t always agree with their policies but when compared to the other parties such as TMC, Congress, AAP and others I will take BJP over them anytime. Atleast they are trying to improve the country (and in a few cases making themselves richer while at it) as opposed to the others who seem to be in it for just making themselves richer.
After Photoshop was released in 1990 and more and more people started using it to create fake/morphed photos in the subsequent years there was a big panic about not being able to trust photo’s as evidence or logging of truth because they could be modified and it was hard for the average user to quickly identify fake images. But over the years a whole lot of people put their minds together and created guidelines that folks could use to see if a photo was edited or not.
Now a little over 3 decades later AI generated images are becoming more and more prolific and it is hard for average users to identify real images vs generated ones. Hany Farid, who is known as the Godfather of digital forensics has been looking into this problem and has created a guide that can be used to determine whether a photo or video has been manipulated or deepfaked over at Science.com: Reality Check, where he talks about various techniques that can be used to identify fake images using examples.
It is a pretty well written article and I highly recommend everyone read it so that you have some idea on how to identify fake images.
BroadFSC on What is Vibe Coding?: “Your analysis on Vibe Coding is thorough and sheds light on the pros and cons of this emerging technology. One…” May 7, 12:04
