Rams

Part 3 of my programming series is up. #CodeNewbie braincells2pixels.blog/fundamentals-o…

Let's go!!

@bubbleboi Did you read them in original form or English translations? Links to your sources please.

I’ve been reading the Vedas a lot recently, and what’s stood out is how it doubles as an encyclopedia as well as a religious text. Astronomy, medicine, mathematics, metallurgy, linguistics, are all woven through hymns and rituals as one body of knowledge. Simply calling it “religious” forces it into a Western category that didn’t have the apparatus to recognize what it actually was. It’s closer to a tradition of formalized epistemology in which metaphysics, observation, and language form one continuous inquiry, which as a result led Indian civilization to develop along a fundamentally different path because of it. You can see the effect most clearly in the sciences. Around 600 BCE, the Vedic record describes a surgical procedure that matches modern rhinoplasty and is still foundational to reconstructive surgery today. Centuries before Western Europe stopped treating eclipses as supernatural, Indian scholars had calculated the circumference of the earth within 0.2% and explained eclipses as shadows. Centuries before Plato and Aristotle rejected atomism, the Vedic tradition already held that matter is composed of indivisible particles combining into binary and triatomic compounds, transformable by heat. The first formal rules for zero and negative arithmetic appear in the Vedas, along with infinite-series derivations of π, sine, and cosine centuries before Newton and Leibniz. The interesting question is how did they get so much right, so early? My best guess is language. The Vedic tradition is unique compared to other oral traditions as it demanded letter-perfect oral transmission across generations. Around 500 BCE, scholars composed a generative grammar of Sanskrit called Panini so rigorous it anticipates Backus-Naur form, the notation that defines programming languages today, by 2,500 years. Sanskrit is recursive, rule-based, and built to minimize ambiguity. It reads more like mathematics than English. When you think in a language built like that, the precision of the language becomes the precision of your reasoning. The West didn’t formalize this until much later. Kant argued our categories of understanding shape what we can know, Wittgenstein wrote that the limits of language are the limits of one’s world, and Kripke showed that naming doesn’t just describe things, it constitutes what they mean and how we can reason about them. All three touch the same insight which is that thought is downstream of language. The Vedic tradition operated on that insight thousands of years earlier. To the point that they built a whole language first and used it to think clearly about everything else after. I find that all really fascinating.

@ponnappa Would Audiobooks qualify?

reading this as i add a "3 transformative books you've read" mandatory field to the candidate profile in join.realfast.ai because there is an insanely strong correlation between those who don't read longform and who those who steer agents to slop

@AjeyGore And yet every technical interview wants you to design the most scalable, multi cloud architecture in under an hour.

You don't need microservices and queues from day one! you actually don't need them for before massively scaling, can you please make sure that you can run things in ONE SINGLE VM, you will save money, time and thank me later.

Anytime I write switch in go, I think of @goinggodotnet learned from him the elegance of using switch instead of if then else if ... 🙏🙏

@axios is something going on with newsletter feed? No newsletters since Saturday 😭

@adii_kris Portal? 🤔

Every road in Blr is dugout for unknown reasons you take a turn and pray there’s no halla 👍

@AjeyGore @garrytan I envy you guys with your 128 gig Macs

@garrytan It works. I have been running agents on my MacBook Pro with 128gb - mostly for coding, but things started moving towards far better outcomes recently.

Downloading now... 1M token context window with supposedly usable coding agent capability all on a 128GB Macbook Pro is 🤯

@NTanjore Thank you so much for the recommendations. I unfortunately can't read Tamil.

@IDispose Namaskaram You can try Mahabharata by Bibek Debroy- it is a ten volume true translation of the Mahabharatam from Sanskrit. Another one is by Kisari Mohan Ganguli which is available on archive.org If you can read tamizh there is a similar 8 volume translation.

. @NTanjore do you have a recommendation for an English language authoritative version of Mahabharata? Ones I have come across cover the main story but the complexity and interweaving of other stories are missing.

Enabled voice mode in Claude code. Asked it to "Add a readme file" It responded with "Kidney failed?" 🤦🏽 Quit before it could do further damage.

What is Kalki waiting for? Or is he prophesied to show up after the current destruction?

Sometimes I wonder if the people claiming earth is flat and it's turtles all the way down saw the depiction of Vishnu's 🐢Avatara. 🤔

@hashnode @IpseetaP Thanks for fixing my issue.

@IDispose @IpseetaP No, you didn't lose access to your blog. Your Hashnode account is probably tied to a different email than the one you're using for magic link sign in. That's how magic links work. Can you DM me your Hashnode blog or username? We'll confirm the email in our system.

It was a mistake hosting my blog on @hashnode I can navigate to my blog URL but cannot sign in. It sends a magic link but then treats it as a new sign up. Magic links sound fancy but I should have stuck to using a userid/ password 😭

@hashnode @IpseetaP I have tried ALL email addresses I have access to including the one from 2020 I have the original welcome to hashnode email

@hashnode @IpseetaP Can't DM. The blog is braincells2pixels

@IpseetaP @hashnode Yes, I went back to the original email I got in 2020 to confirm I was using the right email. That's what makes it frustrating. Did I just lose access to my blog? Let this be a warning to others. If magic link fails, you lose your access 😭

@IDispose @hashnode That's frustrating 🫤 One thing to check, are you using the same email you originally signed up with? Magic link logins can create a new account if the email is different. Worth trying that first.

@ponnappa Time flies my friend. Thanks for everything you do to elevate everyone. I am learning so much from insights and stories you share.

@IDispose 20 years already wow

In 2007 wanting to jump into blogging wrote a post on 501 Dev, an expression heard from a friend, but likely coined by @shanselman. Tagged him & hanselmanned (/dotted) @ponnappa In nearly 20 yrs since, Sidu has become a legend from C42 to @realfastai