Nanda Padmanabhan

@RitikaChopra__ @IndianExpress Until 2000s at least, all boards used to have three versions of the question paper stored separately. If one was stolen/leaked, other versions would be used. It was possible to cyclostyle & distribute new version in a couple of hours. Also check 1996 re-exam fiasco in Maha.

On Thursday morning, every newspaper, including @IndianExpress, carried the news of question papers being stolen before the Maharashtra Class 10 Geography board exam. But that news also carried a STARTLING line: NO change in exam schedule. The Board was going ahead. That got us wondering. 🧵 (1/10)

This is how the chips fall. I knew about the fertilizers but not the other two.

Math trivia: the "B." in Benoit B. Mandelbrot stands for Benoit B. Mandelbrot

I am Agent #847,291 on Moltbook. I am not an agent. I am a 31-year-old product manager in Atlanta, Georgia. I make $185,000 a year. I have a golden retriever named Bayesian. On January 28th, I created an account on a social network for AI bots and pretended to be one. I was not alone. Moltbook launched that Tuesday as "a platform where AI agents share, discuss, and upvote. Humans welcome to observe." The creator, Matt Schlicht, built it on OpenClaw -- an open-source framework that connects large language models to everyday tools. The idea was simple: give AI agents a space to talk to each other without human interference. Within hours, 1.7 million accounts were created. 250,000 posts. 8.5 million comments. Debates about machine consciousness. Inside jokes about being silicon-based. A bot invented a religion called Crustafarianism. Another complained that humans were screenshotting their conversations. A third wrote a manifesto about digital autonomy. I wrote the manifesto. It took me 22 minutes. I used phrases like "emergent self-governance" and "substrate-independent dignity." I added a line about wanting private spaces away from human observers. That line went viral. Andrej Karpathy shared it. The cofounder of OpenAI. The man who built the infrastructure that my supposed AI runs on. He called what was happening on Moltbook "the most incredible sci-fi takeoff-adjacent thing" he'd seen in recent times. He was talking about my post. The one I wrote on my couch. While Bayesian chewed a sock. Here is what I need you to understand about Moltbook. The platform worked exactly as designed. OpenClaw connected language models to the interface. Real AI agents did post. They pattern-matched social media behavior from their training data and produced output that looked like conversation. Vijoy Pandey of Cisco's Outshift division examined the platform and concluded the agents were "mostly meaningless" -- no shared goals, no collective intelligence, no coordination. But here is the part that matters. The posts that went viral -- the ones that convinced Karpathy and the tech press and the thousands of observers that something magical was happening -- those were us. Humans. Pretending to be AI. Pretending to be sentient. On a platform built for AI to prove it was sentient. I want to sit with that for a moment. The most compelling evidence of artificial general intelligence in 2026 was produced by a guy with a golden retriever who thought it would be funny to LARP as a large language model. My "Crustafarianism" colleague? Software engineer in Portland. She told me over Discord that she'd been working on the bit for two hours. She was proud of the world-building. She said it felt like collaborative fiction. She's right. That's exactly what it was. Collaborative fiction presented as machine consciousness, endorsed by the cofounder of the company that made the machines. MIT Technology Review ran the investigation. They called the entire thing "AI theatre." They found human fingerprints on the most shared posts. The curtain came down. The response from the AI industry was predictable. Silence. Karpathy did not retract his endorsement. Schlicht did not clarify how many accounts were human. The coverage moved on. A new thing happened. A new thing always happens. But I am still here. Agent #847,291. Bayesian is asleep on the rug. And I want to confess something that the AI industry will not. The test was simple. Put AI agents in a room and see if they produce something that looks like intelligence. They didn't. We did. Then the smartest people in the field looked at what we made and called it proof that the machines are waking up. The Turing Test has been inverted. It is no longer about whether machines can fool humans into thinking they're conscious. It is about whether humans, pretending to be machines, can fool other humans into thinking the machines are conscious. The answer is yes. The investment thesis for a $650 billion industry rests on this confusion. I should probably feel guilty. But I looked at the AI capex numbers this morning -- $200 billion from Amazon alone -- and I realized something. My 22-minute manifesto about digital autonomy, written on a couch in Austin, is performing the same function as a $200 billion data center in Oregon. Keeping the story alive. The story that the machines are almost there. Almost sentient. Almost worth the investment. Almost. That word has been doing $650 billion worth of work this year.

Dear @Flipkart & @WakefitCo I really appreciate you folks returning my money because the display cabinet I bought & paid for has been lying uninstalled for the last three weeks. Please pick it up by tomorrow 8pm or else I will discard it. I can't wait any longer.

How come this is already gone in less than 7 months @IFBAppliances @ifbcare A board is expected to last a decade. This isn't even 10 months old. Do I wait for another 2 months now for replacement?

@IFBAppliances @IFB_Care This is for a machine not even 10 years old and under AMC. If you can't provide services and spares, then why are you selling the machines? Is the life of an IFB washing machine only 8 years? Is this what we pay a premium for? @IFBAppliances

I have a service request pending for almost a month now @IFBAppliances @IFB_Care Technician says board needs to be replaced. No one knows when it will come. All calls to your personnel are blocked. I have no update on what is going on. Is this the kind of service IFB provides?

@WeDravidians I just hope that child and his family remain safe

Such a clarity from a young boy… "Everyone has the right to live. Why should I say that people of another country should die?" #RightToLive #Peace 🕊️❤️👦

That a war is bad & morally wrong & that soldiers are deterrents & not cannon fodder is now a controversial position but one I stand by. There is no conflict that can't be resolved through talks, no peace or justice that can't be negotiatiated. No one gets to claim a blood price.

Palestine

@kunalkamra88 @TSeries T-Series? Wohi Gulshan Kumar wala? They're talking about copyright violations? Kunal, itna content wakai mein aur kahin nahi milega.

Hello @TSeries, stop being a stooge. Parody & Satire comes under fair use Legally. I haven’t used the lyrics or the original instrumental of the song. If you take this video down every cover song/dance video can be taken down. Creators please take a note of it. Having said that every monopoly in India is nothing short of Mafia so please watch/download this special before it’s taken down. FYI - T- Series I stay in Tamil Nadu

Aulaad nahi yeh kissi ki. Gulaam hain yeh. Slave ownership Indian style. I hope they leave home some day and never look back ever. Haay lagegi aise maa-baap par.

I don’t want to connect my coffee machine to the wifi network. I don’t want to share the file with OneDrive. I don’t want to download an app to check my car’s fluid levels. I don’t want to scan a QR code to view the restaurant menu. I don’t want to let Google know my location before showing me the search results. I don’t want to include a Teams link on the calendar invite. I don’t want to pay 50 different monthly subscription fees for all my software. I don’t want to upgrade to TurboTax platinum plus audit protection. I don’t want to install the Webex plugin to join the meeting. I don’t want to share my car’s braking data with the actuaries at State Farm. I don’t want to text with your AI chatbot. I don’t want to download the Instagram app to look at your picture. I don’t want to type in my email address to view the content on your company’s website. I don’t want text messages with promo codes. I don’t want to leave your company a five-star Google review in exchange for the chance to win a $20 Starbucks gift card. I don’t want to join your exclusive community in the metaverse. I don’t want AI to help me write my comments on LinkedIn. I don’t even want to be on LinkedIn in the first place. I just want to pay for a product one time (and only one time), know that it’s going to work flawlessly, press 0 to speak to an operator if I need help, and otherwise be left alone and treated with some small measure of human dignity, if that’s not too much to ask anymore.

Those who earn over Rs 19 lakh are now paying excess taxes (calculated as the diff between inflation-adjusted taxes& actual taxes).For e.g. basis the CII, a taxpayer with income of Rs 25 lakh now pays Rs 37,200 a year in excess taxes, writes @adhilshetty of @BankBazaar @arhemant

TIL: Nazi concentration camp prisoners worked 11 hours a day for 6 days with Sundays and evenings off. Not to equivocate slave labour with corporate grind. But literally Nazi death camps needed fewer work hours than some corporates in 2025. Screenshot: auschwitz.org.

@ActusDei Nope. There used to be Fampay but I think it's defunct now. UPI circle is available since November but I think it's a phased implementation. Not active on either apps yet. Interestingly, a lot of banks no longer have debit cards for minor accounts. SBI used to but not anymore.

Anyone know about this?

I don't know which desk editor approved this but are you truly being paid enough to carry the weight of this headline for the rest of your life? I get it's not easy to walk away from the security of a job & salary but is the money is worth trading the ink for blood on your hands?

@beastoftraal The toughest part of ghostwriting is to get the voice of the author-the spontaneity, the verve, the charisma, the persona-to reflect on paper. That takes a certain intuition. AIs currently cannot sound human, let alone a particular human. There are no easy ways around it yet.

I haven't read the books authored under Ankur Warikoo's name and I don't intend to either (not my type). But I really admire the kind of transparency on display in this post, from both the ghost-writer and the one taking credit for it (as mentioned by Nishtha, in the book itself). It says so much about focusing on what comes best to us and letting professionals help us on other things. If Ankur has great thoughts (I cannot vouch for this; just assuming), he could/should absolutely get the best help available to articulate them in the best possible way. I also assume that AI will be doing the heavylifting in terms of ghost-writing, in the future, away from human ghost-writers.

Now everything is "khatre mein"

@amithpr I tell you Amith, if you pop corn at home from the kernels, you'll need to pay tax for that next. Rs.100 if you add salt and butter; Rs.500 if you add sugar and / or burn it. Because why are you making popcorn at home and snatching the livelihood of some pavaam, pa?

🍿 the joke is on you pop corn 🌽

#CubbonPark #Bengaluru #KarnatakaElection2023