Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

May 11, 2025

VibeCon – the biggest vibe coding conference!

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,Humor,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 1:51 PM

Took me a few seconds to figure this out. Register for VibeCon – the biggest vibe coding conference! .

VibeCon - the biggest vibe coding conference! Register now: localhost:3000/registration
VibeCon – the biggest vibe coding conference! Register now: localhost:3000/registration

The funny part is that a lot of folks who are ‘Vibe Coding’ will not get the joke here…

Source: Mastodon: @leyrer@23.social

– Suramya

May 9, 2025

OpenAI site can’t figure out how to allow users to change their password’s

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,Humor,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 9:56 PM

Changing passwords regularly is a good way to ensure that your accounts are secure. Yes I know about the new NIST guidelines on password changing but I disagree with it. If you are using a password manager (and you should be) then changing passwords on a regular basis is not a hard thing to do.

In any case, I noticed that the password on a bunch of my accounts had not been changed in a while so was updating them; one of the accounts is on OpenAI that I had created when it had launched but not really used much after that. After logging in I spent a few minutes trying to find the option to change my password but couldn’t find it, finally had to go to the FAQ’s to find out how to change the password and I saw the following:


Instructions on how to reset the password

How to reset your ChatGPT password

  • Log out of your account, or open a private/incognito browser window.
  • Go to the ChatGPT home page
  • Click Log in.
  • Enter your email address and click Continue.
  • Select Forgot password? on the password entry screen.
  • Follow the instructions in the password reset email you receive.

They really don’t know how to implement a simple change password functionality… I mean this is not something I expect from a billion dollar company. I have seen this on sites created by startups but never at a large company. Although, if their site is created using their AI code generation then that would kind of explains this. 😉

– Suramya

May 3, 2025

AI is not going to take your job even though VC’s keep claiming that is the case

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 9:49 PM

99% of what we see about what AI can do is basically hype, especially stuff from VC’s (Venture Capitalists) or other leaders in companies that have invested in AI. Then you have people like Marc Andreessen who seem to be living in an alternate reality all together because that’s the only explanation I have for them making statements like the one below. I mean it is an interesting take that your super power AI will be able to generate actual art like paintings, books and poems etc but not be able to be a VC because ‘it (being a VC) is more art than science.’ I mean if it can generate actual art (that doesn’t suck) what is stopping it from doing a VC job even if it more ‘art’ than science? After all you are claiming that it can perform other intangible skills so why not your job?


Marc Andreessen says when AI does everything else, VC might be one of the last jobs still done by humans. It's more art than science.
Marc Andreessen says when AI does everything else, VC might be one of the last jobs still done by humans. It’s more art than science.

The funny part is that an AI can actually do a VC’s job more easily than create art that that people like. I would love to have an AI that actually works. I mean, I am a Sci-Fi fan, so yeah I would absolutely geek out about AI in real. Unfortunately what we have now is nothing close to being intelligent and that just sucks.

– Suramya

February 25, 2025

India’s First Vertical Bi-Facial Solar Plant installed on the Delhi Metro

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts,Science Related — Suramya @ 9:46 PM

India is working hard towards reducing our dependency on fossil fuels and moving to alternative/renewable power source. As part of this effort we have been aggressively installing more and more solar plants across India. The Delhi Metro installed India’s First Vertical Bi-Facial Solar Plant last week. The new 50kW vertical solar plant at Okhla Vihar Metro Station features bi-facial panels that capture sunlight from both sides, enhancing energy generation efficiency.

India added a record 25 GW solar capacity in 2024 which is a 204% jump from previous year. Part of it was due to the commissioning of projects that supposed to go online in 2023 but got delayed and went live in 2024. Even with that being the case this is a great milestone and the total generation capacity for India has topped 100GW, putting India in the top 3 countries worldwide for Solar power production.

Solar and other green energy sources are awesome. They allow you to generate power without creating harmful byproducts like coal or petrol based energy generators do. Unfortunately this means that Coal and Oil industries are completely against them and constantly create posts, advertisements and ‘research’ that show how bad the renewable energy sources are. Basically it is a constant bombardment of FUD (Fear Uncertainty & Doubt) to cause people to distrust the technology.

The following comics keep showing up in my feed and it is typical of how people portray green power and electric vehicles. According to them there is no point in getting an electric car or a green power alternative because they all use coal/gas fueled power plants in the background and that can’t be further from the truth.

In fact, the main reason ‘people’ (read oil/coal companies) don’t want us to switch to renewable is explained very well by the following comic:

Solar Power isn't feasible because we can't own the sun
Solar Power isn’t feasible because we can’t own the sun

One (valid) cause for concern is that it is expensive to setup, which is true but not the whole story. We setup a solar power plant at my parents place in Delhi and while it does take up space it is not as bad as people make it sound. One set of panels actually makes a great share in front of the room on the roof, the other is on top of that room so helps keep the temperature in that room down and with the temperature in Delhi hitting 52.8 Deg C it is not a small consideration.

The setup we have is for a 10kwa solar panels and it costed us ~4,50,000 lac. Based on our regular usage we will recover the cost in about 4 1/2 years (its been almost 4 years since we set it up).

There is a pretty good subsidy for Solar being offered by the Indian government at the central level so it is a great time to setup a Solar power plan wherever you can. My cousin has also set it up in UP and it is a big help over there because they are no longer dependent on the power company for power.

With the new more powerful panels nowadays the time taken to recover the cost of the setup is down to a few years. To be fair, the process of generating the solar panel does create waste that is a pollutant but that is minuscule compared to the waste generated by a coal/gas power plant.

– Suramya

January 22, 2025

ELIZA Resurrected using original code after 60 years

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,Computer Software,My Thoughts,Science Related,Tech Related — Suramya @ 10:41 AM

If you have been following the AI chat bot news/world then you would have heard the name ELIZA come up. Eliza was the world’s first chatbot created over 60 years ago by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum and was the first language model which a user could interact with. It had a significant impact on the AI world (Actual AI research not the LLM wanna be AI we have right now) and was the first to attempt the Turing test. It was originally written in a programming language invented by Weizenbaum called the Michigan Algorithm Decoder Symmetric List Processor (MAD-SLIP) and the pattern matching directives were provided as separate scripts. Shortly after the initial release it was rewritten in LISP which went viral. Unfortunately the original code in MAD-SLIP went missing till recently soon after that.

One of the most famous ELIZA scripts was called Doctor that emulated a psychotherapist of the Rogerian school (in which the therapist often reflects back the patient’s words to the patient). Much to his surprise Weizenbaum found that folks attributed human-like feelings to the computer program. Wikipedia explains how the software worked:

ELIZA starts its process of responding to an input by a user by first examining the text input for a “keyword”.[5] A “keyword” is a word designated as important by the acting ELIZA script, which assigns to each keyword a precedence number, or a RANK, designed by the programmer.[15] If such words are found, they are put into a “keystack”, with the keyword of the highest RANK at the top. The input sentence is then manipulated and transformed as the rule associated with the keyword of the highest RANK directs.[20] For example, when the DOCTOR script encounters words such as “alike” or “same”, it would output a message pertaining to similarity, in this case “In what way?”,[4] as these words had high precedence number. This also demonstrates how certain words, as dictated by the script, can be manipulated regardless of contextual considerations, such as switching first-person pronouns and second-person pronouns and vice versa, as these too had high precedence numbers. Such words with high precedence numbers are deemed superior to conversational patterns and are treated independently of contextual patterns.[citation needed]

Following the first examination, the next step of the process is to apply an appropriate transformation rule, which includes two parts: the “decomposition rule” and the “reassembly rule”.[20] First, the input is reviewed for syntactical patterns in order to establish the minimal context necessary to respond. Using the keywords and other nearby words from the input, different disassembly rules are tested until an appropriate pattern is found. Using the script’s rules, the sentence is then “dismantled” and arranged into sections of the component parts as the “decomposition rule for the highest-ranking keyword” dictates. The example that Weizenbaum gives is the input “You are very helpful”, which is transformed to “I are very helpful”. This is then broken into (1) empty (2) “I” (3) “are” (4) “very helpful”. The decomposition rule has broken the phrase into four small segments that contain both the keywords and the information in the sentence.[20]

The decomposition rule then designates a particular reassembly rule, or set of reassembly rules, to follow when reconstructing the sentence.[5] The reassembly rule takes the fragments of the input that the decomposition rule had created, rearranges them, and adds in programmed words to create a response. Using Weizenbaum’s example previously stated, such a reassembly rule would take the fragments and apply them to the phrase “What makes you think I am (4)”, which would result in “What makes you think I am very helpful?”. This example is rather simple, since depending upon the disassembly rule, the output could be significantly more complex and use more of the input from the user. However, from this reassembly, ELIZA then sends the constructed sentence to the user in the form of text on the screen

Now after over 60 years the original code written in MAD-SLIP has been resurrected by Jeff Shrager, a cognitive scientist at Stanford University, and Myles Crowley,an MIT archivist, who found it among Weizenbaum’s papers back in 2021. Which is when they started working on getting the code to run, which was a significant effort. They first created an emulator that approximated the computers available in the 1960’s and then cleaned up the original 420-line ELIZA code to get it to work. They published a paper: ELIZA Reanimated: The world’s first chatbot restored on the world’s first time sharing system on 12th Jan where they explain the whole process.

ELIZA, created by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s, is usually considered the world’s first chatbot. It was developed in MAD-SLIP on MIT’s CTSS, the world’s first time-sharing system, on an IBM 7094. We discovered an original ELIZA printout in Prof. Weizenbaum’s archives at MIT, including an early version of the famous DOCTOR script, a nearly complete version of the MAD-SLIP code, and various support functions in MAD and FAP. Here we describe the reanimation of this original ELIZA on a restored CTSS, itself running on an emulated IBM 7094. The entire stack is open source, so that any user of a unix-like OS can run the world’s first chatbot on the world’s first time-sharing system.

You can try it out: here.

Source:

– Suramya

November 7, 2024

Artificial Intelligence is not a reason to stop using your natural Intelligence

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 6:59 PM

The more I see posts about some of the proposed use cases for AI the more I feel that some people just don’t want to use their brains and want to outsource all thinking to the ‘AI’. The latest example that triggered this post is screenshoted & Quoted below:

See BlockQuote Below the Image

Though malloc is a very useful function in c, it is not without its problems. The biggest is that it can be confusing for some to decide how much memory to allocate, needing complicated statements with sizeof . To solve this I propose a new alternative to malloc that utilizes the power of modern developments in Al, mallocPlusAI . The usage is simple.

int* x = (int*)mallocPlusAI(“Enough memory to store up to 5 integers”);

mallocPlusAI takes in a character array which is forwarded to a ChatGPT instance alongside an initial prompt “You are a memory allocator for a computer, and you need to tell me how many. bytes of memory I would need to accomplish a certain task. Make sure to give your response as only a whole number of bytes, do not provide any other text. Here is what I request: “

So instead of doing something like the following

5 * sizeof(int) + allocation overhead

Because apparently it is too hard to type 5 * sizeof() * Allocation Overhead, we will call an external API which brings the following downsides:

  • Which has a cost associated with it
  • Adds another layer of complexity & dependency to your application
  • Each ChatGPT query consumes an estimated 2.9 Wh of electricity, nearly ten times more than a standard Google search
  • Opens an avenue for attack where the remote prompt can be modified by a malicious actor to return incorrect values of size potentially causing the application to crash or leak data

Can someone please explain to me why you would use something like this instead of spending 2 mins thinking about what size of memory to assign?

– Suramya

October 24, 2024

India’s Renewable Energy Capacity Hits 200 GW accounting for 46.3% of total power generation

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:19 PM

India has been pushing heavily in the renewable Energy field to make itself less reliable on Oil and other fossil fuel imports. Earlier this month we hit 200 GW Milestone and renewable energy now accounts for 46.3% of total power generation in India.

This is awesome news and something we should be proud of. My parent’s place in Delhi is running on Solar (well everything except the AC’s are on Solar) and my cousin’s farm and hour is almost 100% on solar now as are most of the houses in their village. The same is the case in a lot of villages in India especially in UP (others as well but I have not seen them all personally). A lot of the street lights etc now run on solar as well and there was an ongoing project to use the excess power generated by the panels put on the highways to power the villages on route as well.

The top 4 States Driving India’s Renewable Energy Capacity are as follows:

  • Rajasthan 29.98 GW
  • Gujarat 29.52 GW
  • Tamil Nadu 23.70 GW
  • Karnataka 22.37 GW

UP is not there in the top 4 yet as they started a bit late but there is an extensive push there for solar and I know other states are also exploring Solar, wind and other renewable energy sources as well. In addtion The Government of India has introduced various measures and initiatives to promote and accelerate renewable energy capacity nationwide, aiming for an ambitious target of 500 GW of installed capacity from non-fossil sources by 2030.

Source: NDTV: India’s Renewable Energy Capacity Hits 200 GW Milestone, Accounts For 46.3% Of Total Power

– Suramya

October 23, 2024

Auto adjusting Desalination system that works with renewable power

Filed under: Emerging Tech,My Thoughts,Science Related — Suramya @ 10:41 AM

Having drinking water is a problem in a lot of places on Earth due to various reasons. One of the solutions for this is to extract drinking water out of sea water/salty water. Unfortunately, the traditional methods of doing this require a lot of power and that causes other issues. Plus, that means that we can’t setup the desalination plants in locations where they are most needed as these locations don’t usually have reliable power either. One solution is to use renewable energy such as Solar to power these plants but the traditional setups expect constant power levels which isn’t always possible due to weather conditions.

Around a 100 years ago we developed reverse osmosis and electrodialysis, which are two membrane-based desalination technologies. Reverse osmosis requires a lot of pre-treatment and thus not sustainable everywhere, which is why MIT researchers led by Jonathan Bessette decided to go with electrodialysis instead.

What makes their approach really interesting is that their setup runs on renewable energy (Solar Power) and automatically adjusts the quantity of water being processed depending on the weather conditions instead of expecting constant power levels. So if it was a sunny day with clear skies then the setup would process more water, and if it was cloudy the quantity being processed would reduce automatically.

The two most important parameters in electrodialysis desalination are the flow rate of the water and the power you apply to the electrodes. To make the process efficient, you need to match those two. The advantage of electrodialysis is that it can operate at different power levels. When you have more available power, you can just pump more water through the system. When you have less power, you can slow the system down by reducing the water flow rate. You’ll produce less freshwater, but you won’t break anything this way.

Bessette’s team simplified the control down to two feedback loops. The first outer loop was tracking the power coming from the solar panels. On a sunny day, when the panels generated plenty of power, it fed more water into the system; when there was less power, it fed less water. The second inner loop tracked flow rate. When the flow rate was high, it applied more power to the electrodes; when it was low, it applied less power. The trick was to apply maximum available power while avoiding splitting the water into hydrogen and oxygen.

The prototype unit they setup was the size of a shipping container and over the 6 months trial period it desalinated around 5,000 liters of water per day—enough for a community of roughly 2,000 people. The team is now working on productionalizing the solution and selling it commercially.

Their work was published in Nature: Direct-drive photovoltaic electrodialysis via flow-commanded current control, earlier this month.

Looking forward to people building on top of this effort and having such units available for purchase.

Source: Mastodon: https://mstdn.social/@kevinrns/113341185649409458

October 22, 2024

Tech is not a replacement for human contact

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 6:35 PM

The more I read about the kind of products these so call ‘AI Founders’ are coming up, the more I feel that they all need some serious therapy. The latest example of this is intouch.family which is an AI powered chatbot that calls your elderly parents so you don’t have to. I mean seriously? The official description is:

InTouch is a subscription service for seniors which regularly calls and keeps company to your parent, evaluates their well-being and alerts you if assistance is needed.

I get that we are all busy and it sometimes gets hard to call people and keep in touch, but anyone who thinks that AI is a replacement for the human touch especially in keeping up relationships needs to get their head examined.

I am quite bad at remembering birthdays and anniversaries except for close family and friends. When I was in college I thought that it would be nice if I could automate wishing folks Happy Birthday without having to actually wish them myself. So I wrote a program where I fed in all the birthday’s and the idea was that at a random time during the day it would email them a message wishing them. I even had a lot of enhancements planned, like use the ‘Poet’ program (it generated poems, based on certain criteria) and add it as part of the message to make it more personal. Spent a few days creating the program and it worked perfectly.

I was about to start using it and then realized that the whole point of wishing folks on their birthday was to keep in touch with them, not discharge an obligation. Especially if you have not talked to someone for a while, wishing them allows you to initiate a conversation. So I ended up changing the software to email me a reminder (This is in the days before Google Calendar and other reliable online calendars) so that I could call/email/text the person wishing them.

The whole idea behind technology is to make human contact easier, not to replace human contact. Telegrams allowed us to send urgent news quickly, then came phones that allowed us to talk to people who were far away, then we had VoIP/Voice Calls that allowed you to call without massive bills. Then came video calls such as zoom/Whatsapp etc that allow you to see the person you are talking to as well as hear them. In the near future we will have VR calls where you will feel that you are in the same room as the other person.

Unfortunately, most of the ‘AI’ services we see are being created/marketed as a replacement for human contact instead of as an aid to it. For example, instead of making friends to talk to, someone has created a AI ‘friends bot’ that you can share stuff with. (can’t find the link right now) Another genius created a whole social network that contains only AI bots that respond to your posts and create content.

I know making new friends can be scary at times but you need to find out what works for you. The stereotypical nerd who is anti-social is not something you want to aim for because that is absolute nonsense. You need to work with others if you want to succeed in life. If you are on the spectrum it can be harder for you to make friends but you need to see what works for you. One of my close friends is like that and we stay in touch over chat and emails as I know that they prefer non-verbal communications. With others I call or email or meet face to face. At one point a lot of my existing friends became busy with life (Got married/had kids etc) and I had to go out and make new friends so I started hiking and joined groups where we would go out for weekend trips or hikes. Ended up making new friends and actually met my wife in one of these trips. (Which was awesome!) I also have a lot of online friends that I have never met face to face (but I hope to when I can) and we email/message each other all the time.

Tech is awesome but nothing beats the human touch. Use Tech to enable/improve your connections/interactions but don’t make it a replacement for them.

– Suramya

August 27, 2024

MIT Researchers publish AI risk database exposing 700+ ways AI can be risky

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,Computer Software,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:44 AM

AI (or rather what is call AI right now), is not really intelligent but it does have a lot of risks associated with using it. We all know about the Deep Fakes and the hallucinations etc but those are not the only risks of using generative AI. The researchers at MIT have cataloged the over 700 risks of using generative AI.

The risks posed by Artificial Intelligence (AI) are of considerable concern to academics, auditors, policymakers, AI companies, and the public. However, a lack of shared understanding of AI risks can impede our ability to comprehensively discuss, research, and react to them. This paper addresses this gap by creating an AI Risk Repository to serve as a common frame of reference.

This comprises a living database of 777 risks extracted from 43 taxonomies, which can be filtered based on two overarching taxonomies and easily accessed, modified, and updated via our website and online spreadsheets. We construct our Repository with a systematic review of taxonomies and other structured classifications of AI risk followed by an expert consultation. We develop our taxonomies of AI risk using a best-fit framework synthesis. Our high-level Causal Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies each risk by its causal factors (1) Entity: Human, AI; (2) Intentionality: Intentional, Unintentional; and (3) Timing: Pre-deployment; Post-deployment. Our mid-level Domain Taxonomy of AI Risks classifies risks into seven AI risk domains: (1) Discrimination & toxicity, (2) Privacy & security, (3) Misinformation, (4) Malicious actors & misuse, (5) Human-computer interaction, (6) Socioeconomic & environmental, and (7) AI system safety, failures, & limitations. These are further divided into 23 subdomains. The AI Risk Repository is, to our knowledge, the first attempt to rigorously curate, analyze, and extract AI risk frameworks into a publicly accessible, comprehensive, extensible, and categorized risk database. This creates a foundation for a more coordinated, coherent, and complete approach to defining, auditing, and managing the risks posed by AI systems.

They have published a paper on it: The AI Risk Repository: A Comprehensive Meta-Review, Database, and Taxonomy of Risks From Artificial Intelligence that you should check out. They have also made their entire database available to copy for free as well.

Check it out if you have some free time.

Source: Boingboing.net: MIT’s AI risk database exposes 700+ ways AI could ruin your life.

– Suramya

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