Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

September 10, 2025

AI Darwin Awards nominations are now open

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,Humor — Suramya @ 3:35 AM

The original Darwin Awards celebrated those who “improved the gene pool by removing themselves from it” through spectacularly stupid acts and reading through the candidate list would make you seriously doubt the ability of humans to survive. Now thanks to evolution we have evolved beyond having to make bad decisions ourselves and now have the ability to let machines make bad decisions on our behalf. To celebrate this achievement, Nominations are now open for the first AI Darwin Awards (2025). From the AI Darwin Awards website:

Nomination Criteria

Your nominee must demonstrate a breathtaking commitment to ignoring obvious risks:

  • AI Involvement Required: Must involve cutting-edge artificial intelligence (or what they confidently called “AI” in their investor pitch deck).
  • Catastrophic Potential: The decision must be so magnificently short-sighted that future historians will use it as a cautionary tale (assuming there are any historians left).
  • Hubris Bonus Points: Extra credit for statements like “What’s the worst that could happen?” or “The AI knows what it’s doing!”
  • Ethical Blind Spots: Demonstrated ability to completely ignore every red flag raised by ethicists, safety researchers, and that one intern who keeps asking uncomfortable questions.
  • Scale of Ambition: Why endanger just yourself when you can endanger everyone? We particularly appreciate nominees who aimed for global impact on their first try.

Winning Criteria

Our distinguished panel of judges (and the occasional rogue AI) evaluates nominees based on:

  • Measurable Impact: Bonus points if your AI mishap made international headlines, crashed markets, or required new legislation named after you.
  • Creative Destruction: We appreciate innovative approaches to endangering humanity. Cookie-cutter robot uprisings need not apply.
  • Viral Stupidity: Did your AI blunder become a meme? Did it spawn a thousand think pieces? Did it make AI safety researchers weep openly?
  • Unintended Consequences: The best nominees never saw it coming. “But the AI was supposed to help!” is music to our ears.
  • Doubling Down: Extra recognition for those who, when confronted with evidence of their mistake, decided to deploy even more AI to fix it.

Current nominees are listed at 2025 Nominees and are hilarious. I mean it is better to laugh about this stuff than cry (or scream) so…

Be sure to submit your candidates for the AI Darwin Awards 2025 at the link above.

Source: The Register: AI Darwin Awards launch to celebrate spectacularly bad deployments

– Suramya

September 9, 2025

Surveilling Your Children with hidden AirTags

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:13 AM

Skechers is making a line of kid’s shoes with a hidden compartment for an AirTag. The idea being that the parents should monitor their movement 24×7. I really don’t get this mindset where instead of talking to the kids and setting boundaries about what they are allowed to do and what they are not, parents put in more and more surveillance systems on the kids to monitor and control their actions and behavior.

Before anyone starts, I know I don’t have any kids but I have enough nieces & nephews that I am tangentially aware of what goes into caring for a kid. When I was a kid, the rule we had to follow was that we had to be home before dark and tell parents where we were going to play. If we shifted locations, one of the the parents was notified so that they could keep the rest of the parents in the loop if required/asked. This was with the expectation that if we abused the trust and broke the rules we would no longer be given such freedom. Almost the same rules are in effect for Vir & Sara as well and they work great. This isn’t to say that there aren’t random checks being made to ensure the kids are not doing something they should not be doing. But the idea is that they are being allowed to make their own mistakes and learn from them.

The more we try to control kids the more they will figure out ways to get around the restrictions. It is better to let them have some freedom (with limited restrictions) than for them to go behind your back completely. I am a supporter of Parental controls on devices (in a limited manner) so that we can block access to certain sites/media etc that is age inappropriate like violent movies or horror etc. But that doesn’t mean that you don’t sit with the kids and explain to them why certain content is blocked till they are older. If you do it without explaining then the kids will find a way around it (I would…) and you won’t even know about it.

I used to watch movies with my elder cousins and watched a movie called ‘100 Days’ when I was about 12-13 years old. It is a thriller where one of the characters finds a skeleton of a murder victim in the wall. The movie scared me so much that I went around the house tapping the walls to see if there were any hollow areas in the wall. Then my mom sat me down and explained how a skeleton is nothing to be scared about as it was just like the pit inside the mango that allowed us to keep shape and stand-up. Then they explained why I shouldn’t watch such movies till I was older and guess what I understood and didn’t try to bypass.

If something is forbidden without explanation then people will try it when they are away from supervision. I saw it a lot during college where folks who came from conservative or restrictive backgrounds went crazy with their new found freedom outside their parents control and I still see it in our new hires from colleges. The allure of the forbidden is quite strong unless you explain why it is forbidden…

The more self reliant you make your kids the better off they will be later in their lives (doesn’t mean that you don’t do anything for them and let them figure out everything themselves…) Excess of anything is bad and that includes freedom as well. I traveled from Delhi to Muzaffarnagar (about 150 kms) by bus alone when I was around 15 years years old. That gave me confidence that I have till now about traveling alone… This is not to say that there weren’t any guardrails around me at that time, both the driver and the conductor in the bus were told to keep an eye on my during the trip (and they were known to my grandparents). Similarly, Vir & Sara have flown from Bangalore to Delhi alone (after being registered with the airline as child travelers) and they both are quite confident as well.

I do want to make it absolutely clear that I am not advocating for complete freedom without any controls or limits. Obviously there needs to be some limits and controls for the kids otherwise they will be too spoilt. But like all things there needs to be a balance and putting a hidden tracker on them is way off from being a balanced approach.

– Suramya

September 8, 2025

Using WiFi signals to measure heart rate without wearable’s is now possible

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 2:23 PM

Currently WiFi is one of those technologies that is pretty much prevalent across the world, you go to the smallest (inhabited) island in the middle of nowhere and you will get a WiFi signal. Which is why folks have been trying to use it for various tasks such as identifying people or as motion sensors etc.

Building on that researchers at University of California, Santa Cruz have created a system that allows them to measure the heart rate using the signal from a household WiFi device with state-of-the-art accuracy—without the need for a wearable. The system called “Pulse-Fi,” was published in the proceedings of the 2025 IEEE International Conference on Distributed Computing in Smart Systems and the Internet of Things (DCOSS-IoT).

Non-intrusive monitoring of vital signs has become increasingly important in various healthcare settings. In this paper, we present Pulse-Fi, a novel low-cost system that uses Wi-Fi Channel State Information (CSI) and machine learning to accurately monitor heart rate. Pulse-Fi operates using low-cost commodity devices, making it more accessible and cost-effective. It uses a signal processing pipeline to process CSI data fed into a custom low-compute Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) neural network model. We evaluated Pulse-Fi using two datasets: one that we collected locally using ESP32 devices named ESP-HR-CSI Dataset and another containing recordings of 118 participants using the Raspberry Pi 4B called EHealth, making it the most comprehensive data set of its kind. Our results show that Pulse-Fi can effectively estimate heart rate from CSI signals with comparable or better accuracy than hardware with multiple antenna systems, which can be expensive.

The ability to monitor the health of any person remotely without the cost of a wearable or extra sensors is pretty groundbreaking. I can see it in use at hospitals, elderly care and nursing homes etc. However, as with all technologies there is a downside as well. Once we have the ability to monitor the pulse of anyone remotely, I can see the various security and government agencies around the world falling over each other to get it implemented as widely as possible. Imagine having this at an airport where you can monitor for abnormal heartbeat or increase in pulse rate to watch out for a suicide bomber (never mind the poor nervous flyer who got tackled out of nowhere or the person nervous about their first date). Offices with sensitive data or intelligence agencies will end up using it as a non-stop lie/threat detector.

But that is still in the future as the technology is still in an early stage and it is not clear how accurate it will be when used in a crowded location.

Source: ucsc.edu: WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed

– Suramya

September 4, 2025

The future of web development is AI. Get on or get left behind.

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,Humor,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:31 AM

Saw this article The future of web development is AI. Get on or get left behind while surfing the web and I was initially annoyed because I thought it was yet another article on how AI is solving all the world’s problems but then when I saw the post, I loved it because it exactly showcases the Hype cycle which is what the modern tech industry has become…


The future of web development is Blockchain AI. Get on or get left behind.

– Suramya

September 3, 2025

Tell me you don’t read books without telling me

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 3:09 PM

Reading books allows you to explore and experience life from a different perspective. Some of it can be fun other times not so much but it does make you grow as a person. But that is not for everyone, so it is no surprise that there are ‘TechBros’ out there that think that since they already know everything they can ‘read books’ by asking chatgpt to summarize them for you.

pro tip: you can basically read >100 books per day by asking chatgpt to summarize them for you.
pro tip: you can basically read >100 books per day by asking chatgpt to summarize them for you.

What these folks don’t get that reading a book is not just about getting that information into your head, it is also about the experience. It allows you to imagine how the book plays out in your mind and it is the ultimate in expanding your horizons. So obviously people who have no imagination and don’t care about expanding their horizons think that reading a summary of the book is the same as reading it.

Don’t listen to such people, go out and read books. As many as you can.

– Suramya

September 2, 2025

Finland inaugurates world’s largest sand battery delivering 1 MW of thermal power

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts,Science Related — Suramya @ 12:56 AM

When I first read that Finland has inaugurated world’s largest sand battery, the fist question I had was “What is a sand battery?”. Is it a new battery that uses Sand somehow instead of Lithium-Ion or similar tech to product power? Then I read up more about it and the answer is even cooler. As per Wikipedia, this is a Thermal battery, using sand as a heat storage medium to power generators using stored power. The following diagram has a good explanation on how the tech works:

How Sand Batteries work. 1. Electricity is generated by Wind Turbines or Solar (or other power generation sources) 2. 30% of the energy is used to power the local infrastructure 3. The remaining 70% is stored in the Sand battery, heating the sand up to 600-1000 Degree C. 4. The stored energy is used to generate power or provide heating during winter months when solar energy is weaker.
1. Electricity is generated by Wind Turbines or Solar (or other power generation sources)
2. 30% of the energy is used to power the local infrastructure
3. The remaining 70% is stored in the Sand battery by heating the sand up to 600-1000 Degree C.
4. The stored energy is used to generate power or provide heating during winter months or at night.

Pic Source: Drishtiias.com: Solar Batteries

The advantage of using Sand for storing heat is that it is cheap and a very effective medium for retaining heat over long periods of time. Once the energy is stored as heat it can then be used to heat homes, or to provide hot steam and high temperature process heat to industries that are often fossil-fuel dependent.

Polar Night Energy said the battery has met expectations in its first months and exceeded guaranteed efficiency targets. It has replaced the area’s old woodchip plant all summer.

A sand battery stores clean electricity as heat in sand or other solid materials. The Pornainen unit stands nearly 13 meters tall and 15 meters wide, delivers 1 MW of thermal power, offers 100 MWh of storage, and contains roughly 2,000 tons of crushed soapstone.

Polar Night Energy said the battery can participate in electricity reserve markets, charging according to electricity prices and Fingrid’s reserve market signals. Its storage capacity allows consumption to be optimized over days or weeks and helps balance the grid.

Finnish Minister of the Environment Sari Multala said thermal storage improves energy system flexibility and reduces industrial emissions.

I can see this tech (once it matures) being used in areas that have a large temperature fluctuation on a daily or yearly basis like deserts. During the day we can charge the reservoir up and then use it at night to heat homes. In a way it is a larger application of how the traditional homes in desert areas are built using mud.

Source: @janrosenow.bsky.social

– Suramya

August 28, 2025

ISRO completes the first Integrated Air Drop Test for Gaganyaan Missions successfully

Filed under: Astronomy / Space,My Thoughts,Science Related — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

India’s space program has been very active over the past few years and following the success of Chandrayaan-3 & Aditya missions, India became the 4th nation to dock two satellites in space earlier this month. The next major mission ISRO is planning is the Gaganyaan mission. Gaganyaan (“Orbital Vehicle”) is a crewed orbital spacecraft intended to be the basis of the Indian Human Spaceflight Programme. The first of three flight tests prior to the inaugural of crewed mission is planned for December 2025. But before that there are multiple tests & launches planned for testing the equipment and earlier this week, ISRO successfully completed its first Integrated Air Drop Test for Gaganyaan Missions. An air drop test recreates the final leg of a spacecraft’s journey back to Earth by dropping the spacecraft from a height to test various systems under different circumstances.

In Gaganyaan missions, parachute-based Deceleration system is employed during terminal phase of Crew Module (CM) descent to reduce the touchdown velocity of Crew Module to an acceptable limit for safe landing on sea. The parachute system and its layout, for IADT, was same as that of Gaganyaan missions. It comprised of four types of parachutes viz. Apex Cover Separation (ACS) (Ø 2.5 m – 2 nos), Drogue (Ø5.8 m – 2nos), Pilot (Ø3.4 m – 3 nos.) and Main parachutes (Ø 25 m – 3nos.).

In IADT-01, the simulated Crew module (~4.8 t) with Parachute system was released from an altitude of about 3 km using Indian Air Force’s Chinook Heavy lift helicopter. The deceleration system initiation began with firing of ACS Mortar which deploys the Ø2.5 m ACS parachutes, which is followed by the separation of Apex cover. The deployed ACS parachutes then decelerated the Apex cover and prevented it from re-contacting the descending simulated CM during the test. The Ø5.8 m Drogue parachutes were then deployed using Drogue Mortar, which provided first stage deceleration to the simulated crew module. After first stage deceleration, the Drogue parachutes were released using pyro-based parachute releasers. This was followed by firing of three Pilot Mortars, which ejected and deployed the Ø3.4 m Pilot parachutes., which then independently extracted and deployed the three Main parachutes of Ø25 m diameter.

Now that we have successfully cleared the first integrated drop test, work on the second test mission in the third quarter of 2025 is moving at a fast pace. This second test will simulate an abort scenario to demo the crew escape system for the Gaganyaan. After this, in Q4 2025 the first uncrewed mission Gaganyaan-1 will take place, which will carry an unpressurised crew module to space and back. Two more uncrewed test flights are planned in early 2026 for additional testing of equipment which will be followed by a crewed mission in Q3/Q4 2026.

Looking forward to more successful missions by ISRO.

– Suramay

August 27, 2025

By extrapolating statements by prominent AI proponents it looks like the AI bubble might be nearing its end

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 1:33 AM

We are in the middle of an almost unprecedented tech-bubble for AI and now it looks like the bubble is nearing it end. The reason I say that is now instead of companies trying to sell us AI as the cure all for everything we have reports coming out with stories that are strikingly different in tone from the ones a few days ago.

For example, Sam Altman is now telling people that the “investors are overexcited about AI models. ‘Someone’ will lose a “phenomenal amount of money.”. The head of Amazon Web Services Matt Garman is now telling folks that “Laying off engineers for AI is the dumbest thing companies are doing”. Then we have the report from MIT that states that 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing.

There are multiple such stories that are now coming out now and it feels like a push towards gaslighting the world about how the same people were not the ones who pushed AI as a cure all and replacement for the humans in pretty much every industry and aspects of our lives. AI systems were nowhere close to what the hucksters were claiming to be possible and in a lot of cases we found out that the demo’s were faked with developers in the background doing the actual work.

The impact of this burst is going to be brutal especially in the Tech Company side as they moved away from their core competencies and crammed ‘AI’ into their products regardless of whether folks wanted it or not. That being said, not all is bad because once the hype machine dies, people who have been actually working on interesting AI or Machine learning models will emerge from the shadows of the hype and we should see some good progress down the line. This is similar to what happened during the DotCom collapse (I caught the tail end of that during college) where the companies that were built on hype & lies collapsed but the infra created from them was absorbed by others who had actual useful products.

Lets see how things go from here… At the very least we should soon start seeing more and more people getting hired to fix the code created by the vibe-coders.

– Suramya

August 26, 2025

Building an app that no one uses is useless

Filed under: My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:27 AM

A quote that all of us have heard multiple times is If You Build It, They Will Come. This has launched countless applications/websites/solutions over the past few decades and very few of them actually had people come and use it. But due to confirmational bias people only remember the successes and thus this quote is still used actively in Business schools and by the Startup community. The latest example of this was shared by @nixCraft earlier, where a person spent $300k on an app no one uses.

I’m about to lose my mind and my investor’s money.Developer swears it’s ‘technically perfect’ but I can’t get a single doctor to adopt it. Two years ago we raised a seed round to build a patient management app for primary care doctors. Hired this boutique dev shop, spent 18 months and $300k building what they call a “technically superior solution.” The app works flawlessly. Zero bugs, clean UI, integrates with major EHRs, HIPAA compliant, the whole nine yards. Our developers are genuinely proud of it. But here’s the problem: doctors hate it. We’ve demoed it to 50+ practices. Same feedback every time. “It’s nice but it doesn’t fit our workflow.” “Too many clicks.” “We already have a system that works.” Meanwhile I see these basic-looking apps with terrible UIs getting massive adoption because they solve one specific pain point really well. Starting to think we built the app WE wanted to build instead of what doctors actually needed. Like we got so caught up in making it technically impressive that we forgot to make it useful.

I am awestuck that they managed to spend 300k over 18 months without realizing that no one wanted their solution and then instead of trying to figure out why people don’t want their solution they stuck to their guns and lost even more money.

One of the first things I learnt when I started programming was that your job is to solve problems for the customer, not showcase amazing technology. (If you can do both then that’s awesome). If you look at the quote above, the part in Italics pretty much explains why this app failed. In short the creator was so busy creating a “technically superior solution” that they forgot to create an app that the user actually wanted.

Earlier in my carrier I had the opportunity to work with a NGO that was working with various startups to create technology to help blind people and something they said really stuck with me. He told me that most companies try to create a system that mimic’s how a person would see the world and then translate that into something that a blind person could use and most of these attempts failed miserably because that is not what blind users wanted. They wanted technology that allowed them to interact with the world using their way. We are so used to having the ability to see that we think that if a person can’t see then we need to create something that allows them to see. But that is not what the users are looking for so the tech failed. The one company that had a promising solution spent a good amount of time talking to the prospective users of their technology and then built a solution that addressed specific pain points. Unfortunately, I didn’t stay in touch with the team but I am sure they are doing well because they are solving user problems.

The world’s most awesome and superior technology is of no use if no one actually uses it. We have been trained to think of users as ‘necessary evil’ and their are thousands of jokes around that make fun of users as being somehow clueless and stupid, some oldies call them lusers (a play on the word losers and users). But keep in mind without these users the systems we create are of no use. If you are not solving a business problem (or user pain point) with your solution then you might as well not build it in the first place.

There is one caveat here, you should always find out what problem the user is trying to solve and not just build what the user is asking for without digging into it. A lot of times people will come to you and say that I need XYZ, but when you dig into the problem they are trying to solve you realize that a different solution would be more effective in solving that problem instead.

This is why we need people from the product team to work with the engineering team together to understand what the user wants and how best to deliver that to the user.

– Suramya

August 25, 2025

Japan opens its first osmotic power plant

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts,Science Related — Suramya @ 9:00 PM

As the world is trying to move away from fossil fuels more research is being done on other sources of power generation. Osmotic power generation is one of new latest technologies on the block and Japan has launched its first osmotic power plant, making it the second Osmotic power plant in existence worldwide. This was the first time I heard about Osmotic power so did a bit of research on it as it sounded shady, turns out that it is actually a thing and under experimentation world wide. The Japanese plant is expected to generate about 880,000 kilowatt hours of electricity each year which is the equivalent of powering about 220 Japanese households.

Osmotic energy is a lesser-known form of energy generation that captures the energy generated from the natural salinity gradient between freshwater and saltwater.

This type of energy – also known as “blue energy” – is generated through the natural phenomenon of osmosis. This occurs when water moves from an area of lower solute concentration (freshwater) to an area of higher solute concentration (saltwater) across a semipermeable membrane. When freshwater and seawater meet, a natural gradient in salinity is created, prompting ions to migrate from the saltier side to the less salty side in pursuit of equilibrium. The movement of water and ions generates a pressure differential that can be harnessed to produce electricity. The process resembles a “silent lightning strike” occurring continuously at the confluence of rivers and oceans.

The concept has been around since the early 1970’s but due to the inefficiency of the membranes required, implementation was considered impractical but advances in membrane and pump technology are reducing these problems. That said this technology is still not as scalable as other renewable technologies (as of now) so I doubt that we will start seeing Osmotic power plants being setup all over the place that soon. One option would be to put these plants up near water desalination plants so that the waste water from those plants can be used to generate electricity more efficiently in the Osmotic power plant (With the increased salinity of water used, the plant is more efficient.

It’s nice to read about all these efforts to reduce our dependency of fossil fuels.

Source: The Guardian: Japan has opened its first osmotic power plant – so what is it and how does it work?

– Suramya

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