Pratul Kalia
13.1K posts
Pratul Kalia
@prxtl
putting engineering scenes @puttingscenes
Katılım Haziran 2007
202 Takip Edilen1.6K Takipçiler
good version number
Cloudflare Developers@CloudflareDev
We're partnering with @moondreamai to bring their latest ultra-fast vision model to Workers AI. Use Moondream 3.1 to query, caption, and return object coordinates or bounding boxes in images — vision requests complete in less than a second. A natural partnership leveraging Cloudflare's inference at the edge for real-time vision use cases. Read more: developers.cloudflare.com/changelog/post…
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The most fundamental appliances in our kitchens are ones that adds heat to solids and liquids. We don't even notice them anymore. My own appreciation for the miracle came from reading the story of Thomas Thwaites and how he went on to build a toaster from scratch and failed. Anyhow I have been interested in electric kettles and their continuing evolution and how being able to heat water precisely is just so cool.
Why am I telling you this because I need to justify preordering another electric kettle because... look at that thing....:-D Tell me I did the right thing Chat. Tell me I needed an electric kettle.
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Pratul Kalia retweetledi
I think if you’re not interested in the history of a field, you’re not really interested in that field
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TIL @claudeai runs a live channel on youtube "music for thinking and building" youtube.com/watch?v=tRsQsT…
YouTube
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Do i know anyone @Cloudflare who can get me into the artifacts private beta? @threepointone maybe?
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@ponnappa 💯 It’s annoying (and sad) because the non deterministic, sycophantic nature of llms does not lend itself well AT ALL to the exacting mindset one needs to produce great software
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Pratul Kalia retweetledi
tl;dr spicy take:
most late zirp/COVID vintage junior programmers are mediocre, and will remain so because they are "soft" - and computers otoh are unfeeling and unforgiving, and therefore programming is exacting. this seems to be disproportionately the 2018-2024 cohort (v broadly). not those from before, and not those after (though it's still early for the latter).
I'm increasingly convinced this cohort is soft.
soft and delulu.
computers are not soft.
production is unforgiving.
good tech leads are tough bosses.
there are exceptions of course and these exceptions are self evidently so, demonstrated by their code in prod. but the vast majority all behave like they and their mid skills and mid code make them the same as the elite of their cohort.
long take:
programming is hard because computers demand (literally) perfect articulation of a plan of execution in (literally) unambiguous grammar.
inconsistencies are relentlessly rejected by the machine. consistent but wrong plans will be faithfully executed to a T, and will fail consequently.
a programmer's life is one of overcoming endless, continuous failure and rejection in the face of something that you can't externalize your failures onto. the machine never fails. only the programmer does.
leading teams of programmers consequently presents rather unique challenges. the craft is exacting and unforgiving. and so the leader has to be also.
of course, competent 1st degree leaders of programming teams are hard to mint. and the huge explosion of entrants into the field during zirp has worsened the problem enormously, because the likelihood that a new professional programmer has worked under a competent lead is vanishingly small and dropping each year. agents make this worse - but that's a problem for next year.
I'm now seeing early signs (becase I currently operate at a tiny scale) that the vast majority of today's junior programmers are mediocre at best _because_ they have never worked with competent seniors, and especially, competent leads who own the bar on the craft for their team. the ones who demand taste, discipline and ownership.
and equally, for some strange reason, this cohort expects their leads to be soft and cuddly? and when they run into a competent lead who holds them accountable, the reaction is to say "nobody understands me. nobody appreciates what I bring to the table. boo hoo". and these are self evidently not 99.99th percentile devs. not even 99.5th. I mean isn't it obvious that if one were that good one would be in Stanford or MIT or core conrtib on Linux/eqiv or on a hardcore GOOG/OpenAI/Anthropic team.
I don't think this will end well for this cohort. I hope I'm wrong. I don't think I am.
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Pratul Kalia retweetledi
I don’t know why people have an issue with AI being non-deterministic when human beings are… exactly the same?
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Pratul Kalia retweetledi
The folks dunking on Indian IT industry without building anything have the same energy as our uncles who used to opine on how India can win test matches in Australia.
Sitting on their armchair, potbelly and all, drinking tea they didn't make.
With no idea how it feels when a leather ball thuds into your ribcage at 150 kmph.
Don't be that uncle.
Play.
Build.
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Pratul Kalia retweetledi
We recently added a job board to Hard Problems, which has great design jobs related to health, climate, and education all around the world. I think it's already one of the best job boards around for designers who want to make a positive impact. Please RT. hardproblems.com/jobs
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Thank me later, but here are a few more obvious categories that should be disrupted, for anyone hunting for physical startup ideas -
1. Water purifiers - Kent and Aquaguard have been milking the same model for 20 years. Service + filter replacement pricing is a racket.
2. Kitchen chimneys and hoods - Faber/Elica/Glen own this, all overpriced, no Indian premium brand has emerged.
3. Ergonomic chairs for WFH - Featherlite, Godrej still own this.
4. Air purifiers - Big one. Philips/Honeywell/Dyson at premium, nothing serious from India despite the air quality problem being our problem.
5. Helmets - Studds/Vega owns it, Indian companies - but safety + design is wide open.
6. Oral care - Oral-B still owns it, lot of white space
7. Air Fryers - owned by philips, wide open
8. Vaccum - Euerka + Dyson, more households will pick it up with onset of Prontos of the world
9. Mixer - Preethi, Sumeet etc, all old guards , at least this one atomberg has gotten into along with fans
10. Phone - Apple, well!
Anand Lunia, IndiaQuotient@anandlunia
Thank you, everyone. We funded them pre launch and it just blew up. For more such results, drop one of us at @IndiaQuotient a mail before you launch.
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Who doesn't love a good sales story! So cool!
Akshay Kothari@akothari
We're finally shedding the .so (thank you Somalia!), and using the .com for @NotionHQ. And for this beautiful moment, I want to share a fun story: Back in 2018, I had just joined Notion, and one of the first things @ivan asked me to do was figure out how we could own notion.com. I had never done a big domain purchase before, so I reached out to a few domain brokers to understand the landscape. We tried different brokers, kept things anonymous, and attempted to surface a price the seller might consider. A year went by… nothing. Meanwhile, it was pretty clear this was only going to get more expensive as we grew. We needed a different approach. A fellow founder connected me to a broker who took a very different tack. Less transactional, more long-term relationship builder. He spent months getting to know the domain owner. Turns out owner was a fellow entrepreneur in the west coast… and a huge Grateful Dead fan. So we figured, why not get creative? Something beyond just price. So I called up our investor Ronny Conway and asked if there was any way he could help set up a private meeting between the domain owner and the Grateful Dead. Ronny is one of those people who somehow makes impossible things possible. A week later he calls me back: “New York City. Halloween. 15 minutes after the concert. Done.” The broker went back to the owner with an offer: some cash, some equity, and a private meeting with the Grateful Dead. That got his attention. He didn’t take the band meeting in the end, but he did lean into the equity (great call, in hindsight). We shook hands, and a few weeks later, the deal was done. I’ve been waiting years for the day we move our product to notion.com. Looks like 2026 is finally the year. Safe to say I’m unreasonably excited about this update!
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