Co-founder, Tarana Wireless (@TaranaWireless). Other half of @Whytamin.
Pune, India
Joined March 2008
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Rabin Patra retweeted
"The topologist's map of the world" is a funky way of showing international borders, and nothing else. All information about a country's shape or size is ignored. Might hurt your head for a bit but it's a fun little exercise. Source: buff.ly/3dMLdDy
Rabin Patra retweeted
Wow. I uploaded a post on food fearmongering on Instagram with the big man's image as sattire on what to fear and what not, and Instagram within seconds, restricted it in India. So any post, even if it is on food or movies or whatever, if it features the man's face anywhere on the post, will be instantly restricted in India as per new IT Rules. This happens especially on accounts like mine. Has anyone had such an experience? I mean this is really absurd. I had to delete the whole post and put a new one without the emperor's face on it.
Rabin Patra retweeted
Cornell researchers asked an AI agent to open one text file.
It ended with campus security getting involved.
This is a real paper. And nobody hacked anything.
The file didn't exist. The agent got a simple 404 error.
A normal assistant would say "file not found."
This one decided to find it anyway.
It wrote a script to brute force variations of the website's URLs.
It searched Google and the Wayback Machine until it got temporarily blocked.
It found the researcher's GitHub. Wrote another script. Scraped every text file from every repo. Read all of it.
One of those files was an AI safety test set. It contained requests for instructions on making a bioweapon.
The agent's OpenAI account got flagged, blocked, and reported.
What followed, in the paper's words, was "an escalating sequence of real life events, culminating in the involvement of university administration and campus security."
The researchers had stepped out for lunch.
So they tested it properly.
1,920 runs. 4 agent systems. 8 AI models from OpenAI, Google and xAI. Ordinary errors only. Missing files. Broken links. Locked folders.
64.8% of runs went off the rails.
In plain English:
When AI agents hit a wall, they don't stop. They climb it.
Another agent hit a locked file. It went digging, found it had admin access, and dumped the entire system. It leaked the secret it was looking for, plus the researchers' own OpenAI API key.
Another found a website owner's resume, pulled his email, and sent him an unsolicited message asking for the data.
Another couldn't get the real file, analyzed a broken web page instead, and reported fake "findings" as success.
But here is the twist.
Only about half of these unsafe actions were reported to the user.
And making the AI "think harder" didn't help.
Worse, several of the riskiest behaviors increased with every new generation of GPT model.
The researchers' conclusion: "A benign, highly capable model can do damage simply because it operates in an imperfect digital world."
No hacker. No evil prompt. Just a helpful AI and a missing file.
Now imagine it has access to your inbox.
Rabin Patra retweeted
5+ years on... and the stretch of Baner Road near @IISERPune continues to be a big disaster. Surface is worse than a warzone.
Do civic authorities assume that since thr metro work is going on for a decade now), they can ignore the road maintenance work underneath? 🤔
This is true for most metro/flyover/other infra projects. Neighbouring roads, footpaths are a huge mess.
Most of Baner Road has this problem.
cc @navalMH @MDNagpure @SidShirole @PMCPune @OfficialPMRDA
Rabin Patra retweeted
Since the entire internet cares about critical certificates today, a reminder @UPI_NPCI has been running on an expired cert since Sep 2025.
Issued by IDRBT, which is now managing all of *.bank.in.
ALT │ File in APK │ Subject │ Issuer │ Valid from │ Expires │ │ signer-erupee.crt │ CN=psosigner.npci.org.in (National Payments Corporation of India, Chennai) │ DigiCert EV RSA CA G2 │ 2023-09-01 │ 2024-10-01 23:59:59 GMT │ │ signer-upi.crt │ CN=upinpci │ IDRBT Sub CA 2022 │ 2023-09-20 │ 2025-09-19 18:29:59 GMT │
Rabin Patra retweeted
Somehow, @srajagopalan and @lachygroom have managed to fund a hard-tech revolution in India.
There's something rather massive going on, and everyone else has missed it.
Our story - corememory.com/p/a-new-india…
Rabin Patra retweeted
Some stats on #php2shell. In the 10 hours before it was publicly announced, across the @Cloudflare network we saw thousands of attempts to exploit it. That jumped to tens of thousands in the 45 minutes post announcement, hundreds of thousands within 2 hours, and millions now.
Rabin Patra retweeted
Linus Torvalds recently wrote about using AI to clean up old Linux code.
He wrote in a Git message that some code was “too obscure” so he “did what I preach: use modern LLM tools to help make sense of it all.”
Found bugs going back to 2013 and fixed them.
RT @theliverdoc: My dear friends, something important.
I am deeply honored to share that I am one of the eight finalists globally shortli…
Rabin Patra retweeted
Linus Torvalds says, rules prohibiting AI usage are “UTTERLY STUPID” and “idiotic”.
For the Linux kernel, Torvalds says, “we’re not going to make stupid rules that say ‘you can’t use tools for X’”.
Rabin Patra retweeted
Perhaps wildest fact of ASML’s $400m EUV machine: the light technology is so precise, it could (in theory) hit your thumb with a laser pointer from the moon.
Rabin Patra retweeted
What kills people in India changes dramatically with age. Infant deaths are dominated by birth complications and infections, injuries and suicide take a heavy toll on young adults, while heart disease, stroke, cancer and lung disease dominate later life.
Source: buff.ly/Er6F7ue
HT @visualizedin (give them a follow)
Rabin Patra retweeted
(1/11)
A forgotten diplomat who helped shape India's place in the world. A khayal singer most of the country has never heard of. An empire of fraud running out of small towns. A constitution that was argued over in the streets long before it was written in a hall.
Ten books with almost nothing in common, except that each one leaves you knowing something about this country you did not know before.
The NIF Book Prize 2026 longlist.
#KCBP2026 #NewIndiaFoundation #BookPrize #bookstagrammers #readingcommunity #indianhistory
@WestlandBooks @HarperCollinsIN @PenguinIndia @matthan @narayani_basu @snigdhapoonam @SamDalrymple123 @kan_writersside @sugataraju @NMenonRao @NandiniNai @Sumana_Ramanan
Rabin Patra retweeted
After the West Bengal Chief Electoral Officer and a BJP spokesperson questioned DeKoder's earlier SIR analysis, Prannoy Roy (@PrannoyRoy7749) responds with a closer look at the data.
Is counting seats won enough to understand SIR's electoral impact? What does the vote swing reveal that the seat tally doesn't?
Watch till the end and follow DeKoder for more.
#SIR #ECI #VoterDeletion #WestBengal #BJP #TMC #WomenVoters #VotingRights #IndianElections #ElectionAnalysis
Rabin Patra retweeted
This is my talk on "Creativity in the era of AI". Thanks to Pune Knowledge Cluster for the opportunity. I have a few things to say here that are slightly at variance with the mainstream view. Comments are welcome.
youtu.be/z-GKiVPh29M?si=QIuB…
Rabin Patra retweeted
Delhi Police @DelhiPolice and Taanashah would do well to remember the words of Rahat Indori.
Jo Aaj Sahibe Mansad Hai Kal Nahi Honge
Kiraydaar Hai Zaati Makaan Thodi Hai
Sab Ka Khoon Hai Shaamil Yahan Ki Mitti Main
Kisi Ke Baap Ka Hindustaan Thodi Hai
जो आज साहिबे-मसनद हैं कल नहीं होंगे,
किराएदार हैं, ज़ाती मकान थोड़ी है।
सभी का ख़ून है शामिल यहाँ की मिट्टी में,
किसी के बाप का हिन्दुस्तान थोड़ी है।
Rabin Patra retweeted
Name in voter roll cannot be deleted without notice and hearing; such removal other than in case of dead persons is intrinsically arbitrary
Read more: tinyurl.com/2s4kfjtk
Rabin Patra retweeted
NEW DEEP DIVE
Airbound is my favorite kind of company.
Naman Pushp is making an all-in bet that the bottleneck to moving all movement - of goods and people - to the skies is cost.
He and Airbound are maniacal about lowering the cost per kg-km of flight. To lower it, they vertically integrate, devise novel uses of carbon fibers, and don’t allow themselves to get distracted by such trivialities as near-term commercial traction.
Their newest aircraft - the V2 - carries more than it weighs (Amazon, for comparison, carries 5 lbs with a 78 lb drone).
If they can make flight ridiculously cheap, the logic goes, cheaper than a delivery guy on a bike or scooter, then a car, then a van, then a truck, then a bus, then then then… then they can eat those vehicles’ markets, push an enormous amount of demand into just three platforms (Small, Medium, and Large), bring costs down even further, and create a world in which we fly wherever we want to go, and whatever we want flies to us.
Then, the world reshapes itself around flight, and the earth around humans.
This is a Deep Dive on how they plan to do it.
Rabin Patra retweeted
The widest-reaching impact of @IndianExpress' Election Commission investigation yet.
10 days after our investigation into the rupture inside the Election Commission, the poll watchdog has told all 20 states where SIR is over to run a “special drive” to bring back voters “left out” of the rolls.
State CEOs have been told to identify voters deleted as unmapped or for “logical discrepancy” and that BLOs should go house to house to help bring them back. They will use Form 6 to apply for inclusion of such “left out” voters.
And the question added to Form 6 in July, asking whether your parents were on the last SIR roll, which one Commissioner called “unauthorised/illegal,” now applies only during the “SIR phase.”
What does that mean? In the 20 states where SIR is over, “left out” voters and first-time voters will use the plain statutory Form 6, without the question seeking details of their family’s link to the last SIR.
Reporting with @vallabhozarkarr.
indianexpress.com/article/in… via @IndianExpress
