@gurupanguji

Ocarina of Time remake looks fantastic

Wed, 09 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Nintendo announced the new Ocarina of Time remake and golly - it looks fantastic. I am very excited to play that with my son. We had a wonderful time playing both Breah of the Wild and Tears of Kingdom. He also really enjoyed playing most of the previous series via the official Nintendo emulators.

Whatsapp is rolling out Private Processing

Wed, 02 Sep 2026 12:00:00 +0000

As predicted, Whatsapp is introducing Private Processing. I need to confirm what’s going on in the background exactly, but if I were to guess, it’s likely running on-device models to start processing your messages. If that’s true, then the timeline will go something like this - they will tweak the model and learning and signal gleaning for the next few weeks. Then they will introduce a T&C update which will change it from opt-in to opt-out.

Update: Turns out Private Processing is just more cloud execution, but now with your consent to process more of your messages.

I still think the end game is on-device processing to glean signals for better ad-targeting. LLMs, for all their benefits, have also made the surveillance, ever easier and more dangerous in the hands of bad actors.

🔗 They don’t make ’em like Sublime Text anymore

Sun, 09 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Sublime Text is still around. The last stable build was released May 2025. There are dev builds as recent as July this year. I don’t know who develops it and I don’t care. All I know is that I can place my text cursor and read the surrounding code without a bombardment of popovers, pop-unders, pop-left-and-rights, pop-inlines, pop-in-and-out-too-fast-to-sees.

Source: They don’t make ’em like Sublime Text anymore

I lol’d at this. It’s true that design of text editors is moving to a high-density-information upon every cursor movement to give the user “the complete context” of their code.

I sense it’s coming from a state of ever more “generated code” and to give the user a semblance of control over that. I don’t think it’s necessarily successful in either of those efforts.

That said, I do think that I find a zen moment with Zed. In fact, Zed, after removing AI / agents and all that crap and modified with some sane settings updates is what gives me a modern Sublime Text. :)

It’s funny to me that Cory just decided to go back to the original. I’ve not installed Sublime Text on my device since 2024 and I was recently pleasantly surprised to find my wife still using it.

Watermelon Man and Koro Sensei

Sat, 08 Aug 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Is it just me or does Koro Sensei from Assassination Classroom look like the album art of Watermelon Man’s Head Hunters album?

🔗 One step at a time

Fri, 07 Aug 2026 12:30:00 +0000

We were on a challenging hike recently, and a few of us got to talking about what a lovely analogy hiking is for life.

Source: One step at a time

Along the way, you cross paths with all sorts of people, each on their own version of the journey. And the encouraging thing is that almost no one’s in competition. They’re on their path, you’re on yours, and there’s a quiet warmth in the nods you exchange.

Source: One step at a time

inessential: New NetNewsWire Crash in iOS 27 Beta Has Made Me a Bit Salty

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Here’s the thing: iOS app development (and Mac, but to a lesser extent) is just constant churn. I thought I was getting a year off this year! But nope. There’s always something.

Source: inessential: New NetNewsWire Crash in iOS 27 Beta Has Made Me a Bit Salty

This is a valid point. Combined with the fact that most of iOS developers also really care about situations like this, the churn is very real.

Earlier, Apple used to justify these kind of breaking changes - just sharing that thinking - goes a long way changing it from a churn to being part of a better future. =|

Summer vacation

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Blog is on a summer break until Sep 2. I plan on enjoying my time off and figuring out next steps in my personal and professional life.

Wishing everyone peace of mind and good vibes.

You can change your dream

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Growing up, I wanted an impressive life.

I was ambitious, smart, and capable. Yet, what I wanted to be - was just impressive.

Wise people will already to start to see a problem.

It’s a lack of clarity.

I was lucky enough to be interested in technology. I was genuinely excited and smart to understand it well and had a natural inclination towards understanding complex systems.

This got me on a path that was lucky to be in the right place at the right time with the right skills that allowed me to build a career of impressive accomplishments at some of the greatest companies in the world.

By every external metric, I lived a comfortable life, did wonderfully exciting things. Yet, I remained unsatisfied.

What did I do?

I thought satiation will be achieved with more accomplishments.
I started buying things to satisfy more hedonic pleasures
Starting indulging in luxurious experiences

Wise people will once again see the folly of my beliefs.

The dissatisfaction never left.

And that’s all because of a lack of clarity, knowing what I want.

Reading through Stoic and Hindu philosophy, I now question if it’s even the want that’s at the root of the discontent.

Seneca said:

It is not the man who has too little who is poor, but the man who is always after more. … Natural desires have a limit, but those which spring from false opinion have nowhere to stop.

Closer to home, Anthony de Mello said:

You don’t have to add anything in order to be happy; you’ve got to drop something.

Epicurus said:

If you wish to make Pythocles rich, do not add to his store of money, but subtract from his desires.

Epictetus said:

Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.

Marcus Aurelius said:

Very little is needed to make a happy life; it is all within yourself, in your way of thinking.

These are all parallels to Hindu philosophy as well. Hinduism states our true nature - is Sat-chit-Ananda: complete, perfect and blissful. Suffering / discontentment and the resulting dispassion: vairagya is a result of latching our happiness to external, changing things. The way to attain peace then is to drop attachments and aversions: raga and dvesha.

The Gita, Upanishads and the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali all talk about giving up material desires, not to covet and practicing contentment (_santhosha).

Put another way - it’s the want that’s the cause of discontent. Doing something is usually a path to bliss as your mind is focused on the action - which in itself is a state of contentment.

But attaching outcomes to it now makes that doing a means to an end - a want.

It’s because I gave up my job and prioritized trying to find clarity that I had the time time, the energy and the effort to attain the clarity.

And it’s because of my job that I now have the time and the wherewithal to spend time to attain clarity.

All I can say is that I am glad to be on the path to better understanding this. Practicing it going to be the story of my life for the next half.

I can only pass these learnings on to my son and hope that he has a chance to assimilate and practice some of these earlier than I did.

And I hope that I leave him with the thought that it’s okay to change your dream as you will still end up learning things that are very important.

सर्वे भवन्तु सुखिनः । सर्वे सन्तु निरामयाः । सर्वे भद्राणि पश्यन्तु । मा कश्चिद्दुःखभाग्भवेत् ॥

Sarve bhavantu sukhinah | Sarve santu nirāmayāḥ |
Sarve bhadrāṇi paśyantu | Mā kaścid duḥkha-bhāg-bhavet ||

A video on LaTex

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Source: im sorry

This is a video after my own heart. In the early aughts, I learned how to write LaTex because I thought I was going to go to graduate school and then get a doctorate. I was also inspired by The Art of Computer Programming and inspired by Knuth and others really wanted to study in Stanford.

So, I wanted to learn how to typeset my papers very well. But then I learned html, discovered markdown and never really went down the path of academia.

However, LaTex is what gave me the itch to typeset, which led me to learn about desktop publishing, learn about font rendering, adore a Mac, and the rest as they say is history.

Btw, what Angela says about the separation of content versus formatting - this is a sneakily important thing that’s critical for the writing process. It’s also what I particularly like about writing in Markdown.

How The Watchmen Inspired Comic Sans

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Did you know that Comic Sans is heavily based on the lettering of dark, gritty comics like Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns.

Source: How The Watchmen Inspired Comic Sans

I highly recommend you immediately click through and check the work done to put Comic Sans within the context of those comics to see how well it does there. I have a new lens to look Comic Sans from.

Consider. Mind. Blown.

More support for Helium

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

I generally try and avoid Chromium-based browsers. I use Vivaldi quite a lot, because I’m keen to encourage European-based development and because (especially in its latest release) it’s super-customisable. But I’ve found something else, and it may become the Chromium-based browser of choice for me.

It’s Helium, and it’s about as stripped back as you can imagine. There’s no password manager, because you should be bringing a secure one of your own. There’s no mail client, AI integration, crazy sidebars… and of course, no Google.

But what there is is a light, clean browser which comes out of the box with support for uBlock Origin, still the best blocking software and – completely coincidentally I’m sure – an extension that can’t be run in browsers which stick to Google’s Chromium source code. Helium’s developers have said they are going to keep supporting it as long as humanly possible, and I believe them.

The only downside? There’s no way of syncing your settings across devices, and no mobile app. But given how clean and fast it is, I’m prepared to live like a barbarian and set up my own extensions.

Source: Ten Blue Links, “this one’s for you, Ian” edition

It’s validating to see people I respect start appreciating things I’ve been supporting. In this case - Helium.

Remember: the web and the browser are still fundamentally technology that you can mould to your liking.

My AI Model Tier List for mid-2026

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Gemini is… weird. I have it (via GitHub Copilot) on every machine I use and have reached for it on almost none of them. It rides along in my agent containers “for kicks”, it’s the third pane in a Copilot side-by-side I mostly use to confirm I prefer the other two, and I can’t remember it ever fixing any of the stuff I handed over to Codex–I’ve never found a reason to start selling out to Gemini with actual money.

This leaves Gemini in the least useful category: a model I have everywhere and no reason to choose. It has one strength I’ve pinned down, and an unsurprising one–architecting Go packages–but I’ve never had the patience to see it through a whole project because nothing it did made me want to keep going.

The joke, of course, is that it’s the model everyone is going to use without choosing it: Apple Foundation Models are derived from Gemini, so half the people who’d never install it are running it by proxy. Nobody picks Gemini.

Source: My AI Model Tier List for mid-2026

This is so interesting as Gemini is my go-to model for most of my coding needs. I like GPT set of models too. Maybe I don’t have complex coding needs like these other people do - but my site, my personal projects, the apps that I am building - all of them use gemini. It’s done python, Swift, Kotlin and typescript code with no issues and working in a way that I like to write code in.

It could just be the novice coder in me that doesn’t see bad code or I somehow write requirements and am able to get the best out of these models. But Gemini is my go to. I am trying mistral - specifically devstral’s generous free tier as my agent to see if that is better. Let’s see.

Re: FreshRSS vs My Own Feed Reader A fierce competetion

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

After modifying FreshRSS, I found myself using it more for blog post reading. On the main page, I only see a list of posts from my subscribed feeds with no eye-catching features (graphics). So, they all look the same and I can go through them one by one.

What I learnt from this experiment is that for skimming through a large number of feeds, Sigmarootpi Times is a better choice. After all, news websites are designed to make you click on something, if not everything. However, for reading every single new post a distraction-free reader is more suitable. I will be using both.

Source: FreshRSS vs My Own Feed Reader: A fierce competetion

The golden age of “personal software.”

Re: How Not to Disagree

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

It is important to acknowledge the frustration people may be feeling. You should even share your own. But you also can’t let people linger to the point that it becomes debilitating. Instead you can share the process that led to the decision. You retain agency by making your team the owner of the change.

Only when your team feels agency can they work effectively. Only once they trust you will the follow you. Only once you commit can you truly lead.

Source: How Not to Disagree

I get where Boz is coming from. However, this only applies if you put on blinders that this applies where “management” is one monolithic layer and the person Boz addresses has a team under them.

I want to steelman Boz’ argument first: what he is suggesting - not to have the victim mindset - is spot on. This is the classic - disagree and commit - made famous by Amazon. As an ex-Amazonian, I get the reason why Boz is going there.

However, disagree and commit ONLY works if the management itself is trustworthy. Every time management pushes the “commit” lever without giving the “disagree” side of it enough leverage, whether we like it or not, management / leadership loses credibility.

There are only two paths: a) management is right and then the team and the team leader can be lauded for disagreeing and committing; b) the second path is where the direction / decision leads to either neutral / negative results. In this case, management / leadership lose trust with that entire team that’s been forced to commit.

Worse, if they don’t admit their role in pushing that team, trust is forever broken.

P.S. This is why being Clueless is the worst place to be and it should NEVER be an end state for a career.

Signal allows Android phones to be linked as secondary devices (beta)

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Last week we found the first indications of support for phones as linked devices in the source code of Signal for Android.

The new functionality allows users to use their Signal account on an additional Android phone, without registering a separate phone number. The linked Android phone synchronizes chats and messages with the primary device, allowing users to access their conversations from multiple phones.

Source: Signal allows Android phones to be linked as secondary devices (beta)

Finally. This is particularly welcome as it was the one feature that prevented some folks I know from giving up Whatsapp. If you’d like to sign up for Signal beta on Android, it’s a fairly simple process.

The indie web is the tree of life in Dead Forest Theory

Sat, 18 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

The cozyweb has ceased to be merely hidden. It is becoming causally disconnected. The public internet is no longer a hostile commons shared by everyone. It is increasingly the empty space separating an archipelago of informational black holes. The Dark Forest is transforming into the Dead Forest.

Source: Dead Forest Theory

Zombie publics are highly visible precisely because they possess relatively little interiority. They are optimized for outward radiation rather than inward development.

Source: Dead Forest Theory

Nearly every civilization has imagined a cosmic tree: the Norse Yggdrasil, the Indian Kalpataru, the Mayan Ceiba, the Persian Gaokerena, the Biblical Tree of Life. Their details differ, but they share a common structural intuition. The cosmos is not fundamentally a collection of disconnected places. It is one living organism whose branches connect many domains without erasing their differences. The tree is neither a centralized empire nor an archipelago. It is a common living medium.

The public internet briefly approximated such a structure. We mistook it for a permanent feature of technological civilization. It now appears more likely to have been an unusually low-entropy historical accident.

Source: Dead Forest Theory

The first concerns media.

The next public medium cannot simply optimize engagement more efficiently than its predecessors. Nor can it merely federate today’s cozywebs. It must possess intrinsic anti-cozy properties: mechanisms that continuously regenerate encounters between strangers without collapsing into algorithmic extraction or culture-war dynamics. Publicity itself must become renewable rather than exhaustible.

The second concerns politics.

The internet cannot recover a public if politics remains organized around permanent mobilization. A society in which every public utterance is interpreted primarily as coalition signaling cannot sustain common causal space. Any successor public must make disagreement productive without making identity existential. It must allow for mutual co-existence in citizenship rather than a condition of endemic armed activism.

The third concerns artificial intelligence.

Today’s models increasingly thermalize the fossil public. A future public intelligence would instead require access to continuously renewed living culture without simply consuming or exposing it. This is not merely a data problem. It is a civilizational design problem. Intelligence must become metabolically coupled to public life rather than archaeologically dependent upon its remains.

The fourth concerns institutions.

Public institutions once served as long-lived repositories of common knowledge whose legitimacy exceeded that of any particular community. Most now either retreat into cozy interiors themselves or perform zombie publicity in order to remain visible. A new arborescence requires institutions capable of producing genuine common reality rather than merely broadcasting legitimacy.

The fifth concerns public life itself.

Zombie publics cannot simply be replaced by better influencers, healthier discourse, or more responsible platforms. The problem is ontological rather than behavioral. Public life must once again become a place where significant interiority can develop rather than merely be represented. People must once again possess reasons to conduct meaningful portions of their intellectual, artistic, scientific, and civic lives in public.

Source: Dead Forest Theory

The task, then, is not to restore the internet we lost. It is to preserve enough living matter outside the horizons that another cosmology remains possible. The myths of Yggdrasil and Kalpataru remind us that civilizations have long imagined worlds held together by living connective tissue rather than by force or by isolation. Whether technological civilization can grow such a tree again is the defining grand challenge of the twenty-first century.

Source: Dead Forest Theory

This was the first vgr article that I found really hard to read through. Maybe I am getting dumber. However, I posit that this wasn’t fully human written. Please correct me if I am wrong, Venkatesh.

However, after a couple attempts, I got through. VGR presents a strong case on why the internet - in its current state - one that’s driven by SEO, large platforms like facebook, instagram, tiktok, etc - is a rotting corpse (apologies for a morbid metaphor).

He ends with:

Dead Forest Theory suggests that this forest cannot be saved, but holds out the possibility that a new one can still be planted before it dies.

I believe that the indie web is the seed of life that’s planted.

Connecting it back to the comparison of the death of the Google Reader versus Google+, there’s also an argument to be made that VGR’s metaphor - of a blackhole that’s about to collapse on itself - while brilliant - is actually wrong.

The blackhole converts everything that’s matter into nothing. However, in this dead forest that VGR proposes, the open protocols of the web continue to live and connect.

Granted that it’s still not driving attention, interaction and contribution like the cozy-web but that is no different than when majority of the interaction wasn’t digital.

So, rather than a blackhole, continuing the metaphor of tree and organic life, the current dying web is a line of evolution that is mutating itself to its detriment.

However, beneath that, the content, the things that people still publish on the web - still exist. I am not trying to say that we can recreate the web of yore. I agree with VGR - that’s dead.

The new web is still built on the same open principles. The question is - can we create a new set of interaction mechanics on top of that can arrive at more helpful, thriving mutations than the current web.

Built for Exactly One

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

A month ago, this website moved to a custom engine that I built myself, one I call Jot. Why did I create it? Because I got tired of almost. Almost the right editor. Almost the right publishing flow. Almost the right feature set.

Each option did something I liked. None did everything that I wanted.

So I built exactly what I want and nothing more. The biggest difference from everything I have built before? No customisations. For my whole life, I have been building stuff that I want others to benefit from. So, I allow customising every feature I add. And only add those that can be customised.

Source: Built for Exactly One

Excited for the author. This realization of being able to make exactly what you want for yourself is quite exciting. When you love tinkering like I do, this ability to suddenly do something really well for yourself - is a superpower.

Like with any superpower, there’s a dark side to it too - and that’s prioritization. Sometimes you shouldn’t be tweaking the right tool for yourself - especially if the end goal is trivial compared to life’s priorities.

I am really good at prioritizing for work - and i am only just learning to do that for my personal life. I know that sounds strange, and I cannot justify it. But, better late than never.

Frame - the first Linux Assembly X server

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

On my quest to own my software, one foundational piece kept itching… the X server. The underlying graphics engine, the thing that puts pixels on the screen. X11 is 4 million lines of code, a beast very few can claim they understand. So I did the reasonable thing. I wrote my own, in Assembly.

It is called frame. No dependencies, no libraries, no garbage collector. No hot paths, no unnecessary wakeups. When it is idle, it sits still. It shuts up unless spoken to. My kind of software. It clocks in at some 20 thousand lines, and it already runs my whole desktop plus Firefox and GIMP whenever I need that. It is still young, and there is a long list of X protocol left to chew through. But it boots, it draws, and I am typing this on it.

Source: Frame - the first Linux Assembly X server

This is truly admirable. While this is aspirational, I don’t know if I can fully embark on this path. I’ve only started on the GUI apps.

A few days into GrapheneOS

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

It is important to remember that all apps on Android are sandboxed, regardless of which profile they’re installed in. For most use-cases, using secondary user profiles to further isolate apps is unnecessary. However, isolating apps to different profiles does have a few advantages, some of which are listed below:

Apps cannot communicate with apps in other profiles via inter-process communication (IPC).

Apps cannot discover which apps are installed in other user profiles.

In cases where apps don’t support multiple logins, profiles can be used to get around this kind of limitation.

All profiles have their own unique encryption keys, even if they share the same PIN or password.

It’s possible to end secondary user profiles’ sessions, putting their data at rest (a reboot is necessary to put the owner profile’s data to rest). This also stops apps from running in the background.

The owner profile can control secondary user profiles’ access to: continue running while other profiles are in the foreground, phone calls and SMS, and installing apps.

Each profile has its own set of contacts, files and media directories. Apps in different profiles, which have been granted the necessary permissions, can only access data from that profile. The Storage and Contact Scopes features in GrapheneOS allow users to choose exactly what contacts, files and media any app can access, providing a more convenient way of achieving isolation of these data types.

Each profile has its own VPN setup, so even if two profiles are running at the same time, they can use servers in different countries, using different VPN providers, or even no VPN at all.

In some rare cases, some apps will not work when used in a secondary user profile and will require you to use them in your owner profile.

Source: Best User Profile Setup on GrapheneOS

I am really enjoying using Helium as my browser of choice. It uses ungoogled-chromium as its base and adds some niceties to make it a daily driver browser.

I wanted a similar experience for my phone as well - where I can make it more of what I want it to be - and less appliance. My primary drivers are: control over tracking; control over resources - these devices have excellent processors with very low power capabilities, yet barely last a couple days left alone. This suggests to me a lot of activity that I don’t want happening. I wanted more control.

I didn’t do a ton of research - but GrapheneOS seems to be a reasonable choice here. Similar to ungoogled-chromium, it seems to be starting off AOSP without any google services - and then runs everything in a sandbox.

They had an easy WebUSB based installation and honestly in under 30 mins, I had recreated what I had in my Pixel with stock google-OS to now running GrapheneOS.

It’s Day 1 and I am only installing apps as I need them to try and keep it as light as possible. So far everything I’ve needed to install - signal, bluebubbles etc work fine on the sandboxed Google Play Services.

I read that there are issues with Google Wallet requiring highest level of Play Integrity, which GrapheneOS will not pass. I’ve not installed it yet. Let’s see if life can be lived without Google Wallet. That would be a first for me in a very long time.

🔗 Better Models: Worse Tools

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 12:00:00 +0000

Armin theorizes that this is because more recent Anthropic models have been specifically trained (presumably via Reinforcement Learning) to better use the edit tools that are baked into Claude Code. This has the unfortunate effect that other coding harnesses, such as Pi, may find that their own custom edit tools are more likely to be used incorrectly.

Claude’s edit tool uses search and replace. OpenAI’s Codex uses an apply_patch mechanism instead, and OpenAI have talked in the past about how their models are trained to use that tool effectively.

Does this mean third-party coding harnesses like Pi should implement multiple edit tools just so they can use the one with the best performance for the underlying model the user has selected?

Source: Better Models: Worse Tools

This is an awful trend if this sticks. Models were supposed to be generic - however, if this trend continues, third party harnesses will once again face hurdles with the frontier models.

One can hope that frontier labs are smart enough to know that this is a terrible long term trend as a generic coding model has far better payoffs in the long term than a first party harness lock-in.