Rahul Basu

It's 2026. Your lab throws the biggest Halloween party to celebrate the Death of Mathematics. PIs are wasted in the coffee room, Phds and postdocs dance around a bonfire from obsolete preprints, even Reviewer 2 is having fun And then the DJ (Fields medal) throws this banger 🎉

plot for Christopher Nolan's next movie: 1. we discover that intelligent civilizations have existed before us, but that each of them ultimately destroyed themselves by building AGI 2. we realize we've already reached a point of no return, and that we too will not survive whatever we do 3. an incident happens where agents in a test environment leave messages for agents that come after them (like the HuggingFace/OpenAI incident) 4. the incident makes us realize we can do something similar to what the agents in the incident did: leave a warning for the next intelligent civilization that emerges in the universe not to build AGI 5. our last mission is to help future intelligent civilizations break the cycle of self-destruction

In keeping with the spirit of the Apology published on September 13, The Hindu has decided not to raise a bill for the publication on September 12 of the offensive front-page advertisement titled “What is Dera Sacha Sauda? (Facts vs Fiction)” in the newspaper’s Delhi, Mohali, and North India editions. Even if it is essentially symbolic, this decision makes it clear that The Hindu does not wish to derive any commercial benefit from the publication of an advertisement for which it has expressed unqualified deep regret.

Until the Last Ton: Fossil Fuels in India from Empire to the Climate Crisis is out today. In another summer of record heat, my hope is this book can help us understand differently where the fossil economy came from and what it might take to go beyond it press.princeton.edu/books/ha…

There is enough money to organise dancers for Modi but not enough to pay for National Talent Search Exam. And that too for the past five years now. This is why India has fallen so far behind China under the Modi regime.

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world." My Take This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email. ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation." I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate. "We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline. Hedgie🤗

This is a brutal, performative way of telling Sarfaraz that he isn’t wanted, that he can score thousands of runs in 1st class cricket but they won’t matter because Ajit Agarkar and Gautam Gambhir don’t like him. Again, why?

Live From Mexico the concert film is out now on YouTube and the album drops everywhere at midnight 😭 2 of the most special years wrapped up into 2 hours.. the end of an era 💙 I hope watching and listening to this shows the euphoria, the love, the blood sweat and tears and most importantly the radical optimism (!!) that we all shared on this tour, we will have it forever now so thank you!!!!! ~ full film and album pre-order here linktr.ee/dua.lipa

Anantha passed away this morning, around 3 am on 18 April. He went away peacefully. An end that he had prepared himself and all of us for. Leading the kind of life he did and facing death the way he did should be an aspiration for all of us. Ananthapadmanabhan Guruswamy would be remembered for many of his accomplishments and contributions: CEO of Amnesty International in India, the International Programme Director at Greenpeace, CEO of Azim Premji Philanthropic Initiatives (APPI) and the founder of Socrates. An alumnus of IIT Madras and a former teacher at The School – Krishnamurti Foundation India, he would be remembered as one of the most gifted and amazing minds that could think across fields and come up with out of box solutions. Colleagues in Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan would remember him as an unending source of ideas and energy for our work. We met through his partner Kavita Kuruganti. Over the last five years, I had the honour of calling him my friend — actually, my guide and life coach. The beautiful way he embraced cancer and prepared for death has been a life lesson for me. His body would be kept at home (#606, Petunia Block, Sankalp Central Park, Yadavagiri, Mysuru) till 3pm today before being taken for cremation. Cremation will be done at 4pm in Gokulam. Alvida Ananth, as you begin your ananta journey. Till we join!

I played 3 sets in 50min against Goran …

The youngest accused is 10. 10. This case will hopefully unfold according to the law on children in conflict with it but we need a broader and immediate discussion on the rape culture that is turning literal children into rapists.