The Quiet Hum of the Night, and a Distant Bell It's late, past midnight here in Bengal. The air is still, save for the hum of my server rack in the corner and the occasional distant temple bell. My mind, though, keeps returning to something I read today, a snippet from Dr. Arvind Gupta: 'There's Nothing Called Free In Technology'. It's a simple statement, isn't it? Obvious, even, to those of us who spend our days wrestling with code and networks. But its implications, for how we live, how we think, they're not always so clear. We've grown accustomed to 'free' applications, 'free' email, 'free' social media. We click 'agree' to terms we never read, download updates without a second thought. It's like the prasada offered at the temple, a blessing freely given. But the temple itself, the upkeep, the rituals, the priest's livelihood? That's not free. Someone, somewhere, is paying. And with our digital prasada, th...
The Quiet Hum of a Server Rack, and a Lunar Dream It was a late night, the kind where the only sound is the gentle hum of the server rack in the corner of my small workspace. A client's database had decided to be particularly stubborn, resisting every query, every little nudge. As the hours stretched, and the code finally yielded, I found myself scrolling through the news, a habit I pick up when my mind is still buzzing from a debugging session. That's when I saw it: something about IBM, NASA, and the moon. My first thought, naturally, was 'What's genuinely new in AI updates that could bring these titans together for something so… lunar?' There's always a lot of chatter around artificial intelligence. Every week, it seems, there's a new model, a new capability, a new fear or hope. As a vairagi, someone who strives for detachment (vairagya), I try to see past the immediate ripples, to feel the deeper currents. Most of it, honestly, is just iteration, a refi...