Kiran Jonnalagadda

Google just got a DISCOM licence for its Vizag data centre hub. Read that again. Google. Got an electricity distribution licence. In India. For the first time, a tech giant is not just a customer of the grid. It is a regulated utility. The same legal authority that lets Tata Power sell electricity to a Mumbai apartment now lets Google supply its own data centre. This is not a story about cheap power. This is a story about who controls infrastructure. Vizag is going to host hyperscale AI workloads — single buildings drawing more electricity than entire small towns. The traditional DISCOM model assumed customers and utilities were separate. AI workloads broke that assumption. Also note who quietly approved this: Andhra Pradesh. The state betting hardest on data centre investment is also the one rewriting the regulatory book. The next time someone tells you data centres are 'just servers,' remind them they now come with their own utility licence.

@sahilk I use them everywhere. They have great holding power but need technique for removal from painted walls: never pull it away from the wall. That'll peel. Stretch it along the wall instead. Stretching releases the hold, but you have to be slower than the paint's own hold on wall.

Anyone's used these 3M hanging strips for large frames on standard painted walls (not the glossy types)? 👀

So, NetNeutrality issues are gonna blow up again in India in 4-5 months (or less). Jio's up to something, TRAI seems turned. Very 2014 vibe. Consider this an early warning. Someone else will have to pick up the gauntlet. Am tired of having to push back on shit all the time.

A Satire (of sorts) I want to be clear about what I am. I am a screenwriter. I make up fiction for a living but not as good as Hindol Sengupta. When the Iran-Hormuz war broke out I did what any professionally curious person does. I fell into a rabbit hole. Asymmetric warfare. Drone swarm doctrine. Hypersonic missiles. Precision strike theory. The kind of reading that starts at 11pm and ends with your wife screaming at you at 7 in the morning, asking "Milk finished last night, did you Zepto it?" I am not a strategist. I am not a geopolitician. I have no institutional affiliation, no think tank letterhead, no professorship. And yet. Hindol Sengupta is executive dean at O.P. Jindal Global University's school of international relations. He has the credentials, the platform, and the institutional weight. He published a piece in Sunday Guardian titled: India's Great Nicobar Project is the Dragon's Nightmare. I read it and regretted it instantly. Two to three IQ points, gone. Then the embarrassment set in. Not second-hand. First-hand. I am an Indian. Chinese scholars reading this are not cringing. They are laughing. A kind of self-assured laugh because this piece made them feel safer. Since Iran demonstrated what a determined state can do to a critical maritime chokepoint, a certain kind of Indian commentator has discovered a new hobby: imagining India doing the same to China at Malacca. Sengupta's piece is the most fluent example of this genre. It is confident. It is sweeping. It makes sounds like, and I say this with affection for the form, Dhan ta tan. The dragon is desperate. The vice is tightening. India closes the tap. Dhan ta tan. Two questions lodged in my head as I read it. Just two. I am a screenwriter, not a strategist, so I kept it simple. First: how do you defend a forward island base against a peer adversary with long-range precision strike capability? Second: Iran-Hormuz worked because Iran was operating from its own mainland, with compressed geography and an inexhaustible resupply chain. Does India have anything comparable for an island sitting 1,400 kilometres from the mainland? Sengupta never asks either. His piece moves in one direction only, from geography to complete dominance, the type of dominance kids discuss in class 3 as they buy new cricket bats, without a single sentence about vulnerability or what happens on Day 2. Because if he asked, the answers would destroy his conclusion. Let us start with the word Sengupta uses in his very first paragraph. He calls Nicobar not a strategic inconvenience for Beijing but an existential threat. Existential. The survival of the state. Imagine China in a post-apocalyptic scenario, red sun shining at the horizon, Chinese citizens shuffling around like zombies, their will to live broken by a single Hindol Sengupta op-ed. From an island that currently hosts nothing. Defended by nothing capable of intercepting modern Chinese missiles. Supplied through a single corridor 1,400 kilometres long. I write fiction for a living and even I would hesitate. The tap, the pipe, and the several other pipes Sengupta writes: "India's fortified presence at Great Nicobar would allow it to effectively close the tap on China's economic lifeblood." Malacca handles 82,000 ships a year. It is the busiest shipping lane on earth. Closing it would send global commodity markets into freefall within days. The US, EU, Japan, and ASEAN would be on the phone within a week. India's own economy, which depends on the same lanes, would be screaming within a month. Imagine an 80s policeman in khaki shorts, waving his baton while managing traffic at a red light. That is the visual I got. But leave that aside. Just ask the geographic question. Malacca is not the only door. The Lombok Strait, the Sunda Strait, the Ombai-Wetar passage, all navigable, all viable. These routes add roughly 1,000 to 1,500 kilometres per voyage. Costly. Inconvenient. Not impassable. Closing the tap assumes one pipe. There are several. Hormuz is landlocked on one side. It is literally one pipe. Geography works there. Hindol's common sense doesn't. Iran held Hormuz under maximum pressure sanctions with nothing left to lose. India is a $3.5 trillion economy with global trade ambitions and a non-alignment posture it has spent decades building. Even the fantasy works for weeks at best. Sengupta mentions none of this. The dragon is desperate. Dhan ta tan. Permanent. Like a target. He writes: "These things, once built, become permanent features of the strategic landscape." Yes. Permanent features with fixed coordinates, known infrastructure, and predictable supply corridors. In military terminology this is called a target list. See, I may have forgotten to buy milk, but I learned a few things. He also describes "a dual-use airfield capable of hosting nuclear-capable bombers." The airfield is under construction. It currently hosts nothing. What Sengupta celebrates as permanent is not yet built. And when it is, here is what permanence actually means in 2026, in the world of asymmetric warfare. China's DF-17 hypersonic glide vehicle travels at Mach 5 to Mach 10, maneuvers to evade interception, and has been confirmed accurate to within meters of a stationary target. It is simply hard to understand what Mach 10 is. Let me put it in simple terms. For the fastest things we use the metaphor of a bullet. It went like a bullet. The fastest commercially available bullet travels at around Mach 3.8. We are talking Mach 10 here. That is nearly thrice the speed of the fastest bullet. Your brain cannot fathom this speed at close range. At a comfortable distance, Hindol can write this piece and enjoy moderate intellectualism. No currently deployed Indian system credibly intercepts it. Not S-400, which was not designed for this threat. Not the DRDO ballistic missile defense program, which is designed for slower trajectories and years from deployment at a remote island anyway. You do not need a large warhead when your target has known coordinates and cannot move. Iranian missiles that threatened Hormuz were fast. China's are a different category entirely. A screenwriter who spent three weeks reading about this knows it. Apparently, a professor of international relations does not. The vice with one jaw Sengupta uses the metaphor of a vice, India tightening it around China's Malacca dependency. A vice requires both jaws to be secured. Hindol possibly has a missing jaw and is on a liquid diet, so he doesn't understand how grinding or locking works. India's other jaw: no hypersonic intercept capability, a submarine fleet that cannot credibly deny these waters to Chinese strike assets, a single resupply corridor 1,400 kilometers long that is itself a target. China doesn't need to contest the island. It severs the supply chain. Mines the corridor. Hits Port Blair's fuel infrastructure. Nicobar doesn't fall. It ends up in a wheelchair, writing sad poetry about being left alone. But the vice tightens. Because Hindol said so. Dhan ta tan. Desperate? Try the trade deficit. Sengupta writes China is "desperate to stop" the Nicobar project. Desperate. If China is truly desperate, it has an instrument it hasn't bothered to use yet. India imports over $100 billion annually from China. Pharmaceutical APIs. Electronics. Solar components. Industrial machinery. Inputs that Indian manufacturing cannot replace in any realistic timeframe from any alternative source. China does not need missiles to hurt India. It needs an export ban. You don't need a knife to scoop things; you need a spoon. Elementary, dear Sengupta. The supposedly desperate adversary holds India's supply chains in its hand and hasn't squeezed. That is not desperation. That is a country that knows it has options and is in no hurry to use them. What India actually has, and what is being destroyed to get it. What India has at Nicobar is a peacetime traffic signal. What Sengupta describes is a wartime weapon. He never explains how one becomes the other. That gap, between a flag planted on strategic geography and an operational military capability that can survive an adversary's first strike, is the entire argument he failed to make. I know this is a satire, but I am losing my sense of humor now. But seriously. A UNESCO-recognised biosphere is being destroyed. The last significant leatherback sea turtle nesting ground in the Indian Ocean is disappearing. The Shompen tribe, one of India's most isolated indigenous communities, is being displaced. Concerns raised formally by scientists, including the former ISRO chairman who chaired the original environmental committee, have been ignored just as formally by the government. Dead turtle babies are not funny. Destroyed ecosystems are not funny. Green vanishing from satellite images is never funny. So, no satire here. Sengupta mentions none of it. The dragon is desperate. We won, na na na na na. Who is this really for? Indian strategic commentary of this kind is essentially melodrama. Written to make a particular reader feel that the country's rise is inevitable, that adversaries are scared, that geography is destiny. The gap between the story and reality has a way of closing. Usually at the worst possible moment. Posturing is great if you are Dharmender. Not when you are Arun Govil. But Sengupta's piece is something more specific than cheerleading. This is a professor using institutional credibility to dress up ruling party talking points as strategic analysis. This is a clown dressed in a business suit with a detachable red nose. The Great Nicobar project is a government priority. The narrative that it terrifies China is government myth-making. Sengupta delivers both, fluently, without a single uncomfortable question. Sengupta is a Sarkari bard singing Sarkari narrative in op-ed form. This is how the ecosystem works. You don't need a cheque. You need a conclusion the regime finds useful. The professorship follows. If you are going to be a sycophant, at least construct an argument that survives basic scrutiny. As they say, even if you sing a bad song, at least make the words rhyme. At least ask how the base gets defended. At least reckon with the hypersonic threat. Build a case worth taking seriously before you expect to be taken seriously. I am a screenwriter. I fell into a rabbit hole after a war broke out. I spent a few weeks reading things I had no professional reason to read. And I came away with more questions about this project than a professor of international relations apparently thought to ask. That is funny, in a way. Because it is not even intelligence. It is common sense. It stops being funny when you remember that this writing shapes policy expectations, budget allocations, and diplomatic postures. That the gap between the story and the reality is not just an intellectual embarrassment. It is a strategic liability. That is not a professor's failure. That is a propagandist's occupation. None of you probably laughed reading this satire. I understand. But I can guarantee you one thing. Every Chinese analyst and scholar who read Hindol's op-ed was laughing. He set out to frighten them. He ended up entertaining them. Which makes him funnier than me, despite trying his very best to be the exact opposite.

@CoraCHarrington Finally a good menswear look. Karan Johar wearing a custom Manish Malhotra outfit inspired by Raja Ravi Varma's art. The embroideries look handmade.

The president of the United States posting from an official government account an image of the chair of the Federal Reserve being thrown in the trash. There are no words or precedents for this.

The Iranian navy, which has been destroyed eight times, closed the Strait of Hormuz again, because the United States for the seventh time won the war that wasn’t a war, so the United States can open the Strait of Hormuz that was open before the not war. The not war that started to get the uranium that was completely obliterated, so that the Iranians can’t build the nuclear bomb that they weren’t building for the not war that the United States started. Then the United States which has nuclear weapons threatening to use nuclear weapons to prevent Iran from having nuclear weapons because having nuclear weapons is dangerous. If the United States saw what the United States is doing in the United States, the United States would invade the United States to liberate the United States from the tyranny of the United States.

don't feel bad, guys, the techno-optimist manifesto guy doesn't understand what an LLM is either

Nothing can prepare you for what *actually* caused the vision loss.

A lot of the responses to this image have used it to argue that China had the technology to explore the world, chose not to, and thereby missed the great age of European expansion through cultural sclerosis or bureaucratic timidity. The argument has the comparative outcome right, but the structural picture it implies is wrong, and the actual story is more interesting than Twitter's little morality play would suggest. Zheng He was a Muslim eunuch admiral of the Yongle Emperor of the Ming dynasty, who between 1405 and 1433 (the original poster say "14th century", which is wrong) led seven enormous diplomatic-tributary expeditions across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia, India, Arabia, and the East African coast. The voyages involved fleets of over 250 ships and 27,000 personnel, with the largest treasure ships running probably 200 to 250 feet long, several times larger than anything contemporary Europe was building. The purpose wasn't commercial. The voyages were prestige projects designed to enroll foreign rulers in the Ming tribute system, with the Chinese state distributing more wealth in gifts than it received back. They projected the Yongle Emperor's status as the cosmic center of a world order that extended to the African coast, and they were one element in his broader program of grand imperial assertion that included the construction of Beijing as the new capital and the campaigns against the Mongols. After Zheng He's death on his seventh voyage, the program was discontinued. The largest treasure ships were broken up, the shipyards were closed, and the technical knowledge of building vessels at that scale was lost within a generation. The standard explanation for this is that Confucian officials, suspicious of foreign contact and hostile to the eunuchs running the program, persuaded the emperor to abandon it. The actual reasoning, though, was less ideological. The voyages cost enormous sums and did not produce an economic return commensurate with their cost. The empire's strategic threat lay overland on the Mongolian steppe, where naval power was useless, and the post-Yongle state was already running deficits the agricultural tax base could not sustain. The bureaucracy that argued against the voyages was making a budgetary case rather than a cultural one. The Tumu Crisis of 1449, in which the emperor was personally captured by Mongols at a battle the Ming should have won, vindicated the people who had argued that the empire's military attention needed to be on the steppe. The deeper question is why the Ming did not subsequently develop a global navy and colonize the world the way the European states would. The answer is structural rather than cultural. The European maritime expansion was driven by Ottoman closure of land routes to Asia, by the search for precious metals to fund European debt, by Christian missionary imperatives, and above all by competitive pressure among rival European states forced to match each other's overseas capabilities. None of these conditions obtained in the Chinese case. China already had access to the goods Europeans were crossing the oceans for. It had no debt crisis overseas gold could solve. It had no missionary religion. And it had no rival of comparable resources whose maritime expansion would have forced China to respond. For the Ming to have undertaken European-style colonization would have been the strategic equivalent of Rome at its height pivoting to Atlantic exploration. The technology was available but the incentives were not. The framing that China was sclerotic for not colonizing the world treats European maritime imperialism as the default trajectory any healthy civilization would have taken. The reverse framing is at least as defensible: European colonization was the response of small, capital-poor, militarily-pressured peripheral states under specific competitive and ideological conditions, with consequences the responding states themselves often could not predict or control. China's continental imperial form, sustained for two thousand years across multiple dynasties, is the historical norm. European maritime imperialism is the historical anomaly. The Ming made a defensible decision to remain the historical norm.

You know what really bugs me these days? We can't own anything anymore. Everything is a subscription. Adobe, Notion, Spotify. You don't just buy things once, you keep paying every month. You literally have to pay for everything forever. Isn't anyone else bothered by this?

@OrevaZSN I don't mind paying for YouTube Premium because that's not my content, but I will not pay for any new apps that lock access to my own data. The hardest to wind down is going to be Google Workspace. Way too much locked up there.

@OrevaZSN Yes, and I'm now eliminating all subscription apps from my life.

whoever installed this outside the met gala is ICONIC.

Age verification is going great

2026

“The Price of the Modi Years” by Aakar Patel

“You take water, and just the way you compress it — a little bit faster, a bit slower, up and down, at the right timescale — and then you can find this completely unexpected behavior,” said researcher Marius Millot. quantamagazine.org/physicists-dis…

Never underestimate how much time and effort you can waste by trying to automate a process you do not understand manually.

An Arab scholar in 1011 was placed under house arrest in Cairo for 10 years. He used the time to invent the scientific method, prove how vision actually works, and write a 7-volume book that Newton studied 600 years later. I read about him last night and could not stop thinking about it. His name was Ibn al-Haytham. The book is called the "Book of Optics." The textbook story names Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes as the founders of modern science. All three of them came 600 years after Ibn al-Haytham. All three of them studied his work directly or through Latin translations. The man who actually invented the scientific method was working alone in a single room in Cairo while Europe was still in the Dark Ages. Here is the story almost nobody tells you. He was born in Basra around 965 CE. By his 40s he had a reputation across the Arab world as one of the most original minds alive. Then he made the mistake that almost killed him. He claimed publicly that he could regulate the flooding of the Nile. The mad caliph al-Hakim of Cairo summoned him to Egypt to do it. Ibn al-Haytham took one look at the river and realized the project was impossible with the technology of his era. The caliph had executed dozens of scholars for less. So he faked madness. The caliph believed him and put him under house arrest in his own home in Cairo for the next 10 years. Most people would have lost their actual mind. He used the time to invent science. Before him, knowledge worked one way. You quoted authority. If Aristotle had said it, it was true. If Galen had written it, it was correct. The role of a scholar was to memorize and defend the ancient Greeks. I Ibn al-Haytham broke this completely. He wrote a sentence in the Book of Optics that quietly destroyed 1,400 years of intellectual culture. "The seeker after truth," he said, "is not the one who follows his natural disposition to trust the writings of the ancients. The seeker after truth is the one who suspects them, questions them, and submits only to argument and experiment." That single sentence is the foundation of modern science. He wrote it 600 years before the European Renaissance. The second thing he did was build the actual machinery of experimentation. He insisted that no claim about the physical world was acceptable until it had been verified by an experiment anyone could repeat. He gave detailed instructions for every experiment in his book. He told his readers, in writing, not to take his word for any of it. Build the equipment. Run the tests yourself. Verify or destroy my claims with your own eyes. The third thing he did was use the method to overturn one of the most settled questions in physics. The Greeks had taught for centuries that vision worked because the eye emitted invisible rays. Ibn al-Haytham proved them wrong with a darkened room, a small hole, and a wall. The first camera obscura. He showed that light from the outside world enters the eye, the exact opposite of what every Greek thinker had taught. Two hundred years later his book was translated into Latin in Spain. Roger Bacon cited him. Kepler cited him. Galileo's work on the telescope was built on his optics. Newton's foundational work on light rested on his framework. Walk into any physics department today. Ask who founded the scientific method. Almost nobody will say Ibn al-Haytham. The man who invented the way humanity actually knows things did the work under house arrest, with no funding, no laboratory, and a paranoid caliph next door waiting for an excuse to kill him. He did it anyway. Most of the world is still pretending it was someone else's idea.