Did CHINA make PAKISTAN do Pahalgam? China May Be Baiting India to Bog It Down in War With Pak

Elon Musk Aiming for "Sustainable Abundance" (ie. everything for everybody)

TRUMP: The Legend of MAGA. First Trailer

 Wow - thanks AI.

We miss you Shinzo Abe-san. You were taken from us too soon.

I felt so touched by that movie trailer, that I even took 30 seconds out of my life to make this Studio Ghibli-style image:

I may just have to insert it into the trailer, for a "Modi-fied" version. We're all Miyazakis now.

But we still don't have a proper animated Mahabharata yet.

Quick notes: Ziroh | Meta whistleblower...

• Ziroh: India startup Ziroh runs AI models on CPUs instead of GPUs. Called Kompact AI, the technology is aimed at bringing AI training and inference to SMEs which cannot afford GPUs... Solve AI for those with accessibility challenges.



• Bombshell testimony: Whistleblower claims Meta helped China develop advanced AI. “The greatest trick Mark Zuckerberg ever pulled was wrapping the American flag around himself and calling himself a patriot and saying he didn’t offer services in China while he spent the last decade building an $18 billion business there”.
  
  China is developing AI models for military use, relying on Meta’s LLaMA model.



• Meta Fights To Stop Potential Breakup Of Instagram And WhatsApp In A High-Stakes Trial



• ‘The Tsunami Is Coming’: China’s Global Exports Are Just Getting Started. A staggering $1.9 trillion in extra industrial lending is fueling a continued flood of exports that could be spread even wider across the world by the Trump tariffs.



• Do Bangladesh a favour: Help the tribals carve out its hills tract.

Rather than spending billions on innovative and challenging engineering ideas we might as well break up Bangladesh and have our own access to the sea . The Chittagong hill tracts were always inhabited by indigenous tribes which always wanted to be part of india since 1947 . There… https://t.co/rcjs6msae7

— Pradyot_Tripura (@PradyotManikya) April 1, 2025




• 'Dukaandari hi karna hai?': Piyush Goyal is right. India needs an ecosystem that better enables deep-tech innovation. India’s venture capital landscape prioritises quick returns over patient capital.
  
  Despite these challenges, India has seen pockets of quality startup success. Space startup Digantara has embarked on a very impactful journey. Likewise, Skyroot Aerospace and Agnikul Cosmos are making strides in space.



• Raag Chhaya Nat: Jayshree Patnekar




• No excuse not to screw the adversary: The greatest flaw in the Indian institutional strategic mindset is that it is not strategic, because it is too set along linear lines. If India trades with China, it cannot also undermine it in various military ways, etc. China believes in just the reverse– that good economic relations is no excuse for not screwing the adversary in every other respect. The twain don’t meet, and is the reason why the Indian government learns nothing and the country is supine, keeps getting it in the neck everytime.
  

  ---

  But the troubling and worrying question is this: Is there any original software written in India? China seems to have these inventors and innovators coming out in droves. They are adding high-octane fuel to the already astounding pace of progress by that country. India is near zero in this realm of technology creation. But, how is it that the even more, bureaucracy-wise, turgid “state socialism with capitalist characteristics” ideology and system in China is now the source of endless and astonishing new technologies?

  ---

  In the sheer mass and the drudgery of the Communist system in China, Deng’s successors still found that the country needed to catch up with the tech front rankers. So, the next thing they did was fast-forward the process by simply getting the very best brains from all over the world via its “Thousand Talents” programme which has spawned its adjunct — “Thousand Young Talents” programme for Chinese youth which is now advancing the economy with technology inventions and innovations.
  
  And here’s India, which has yet to find its Deng.

"Duryodhana! Don't Make Me Angry. You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry."

When Dronacharya turned down Karna's request to be given the secrets of the Brahmastra, we know it's because he didn't want that knowledge to be misused for negative purposes. He and those like him also understood that if anyone and everyone were to get their hands on such powerful knowledge, then this could result in a lot of chaos and harm.

Fast-forward to the current day, and we see the power of AI has the potential to be a great boon to mankind, while also having the potential to cause a lot of chaos and harm. AI could be used to cure cancer, but it could also be used to generate a virus that could wipe out humanity.

In the field of content creation, generative AI has shown its ability to give anyone - even the worst artists - the power to create eye-catching content of their own, personally specified by them. As I'd mentioned in my previous post, we're now seeing a veritable flood of new AI-generated content online as a stampede of aspiring new creators, who were previously without the ability to express themselves, now rush to publish content. For some reason, a lot of this new content seems to be in the form of stories from Hindu mythology.

There's a significant amount of interesting new content out there with unprecedented visual graphic detail. But there's inevitably also a lot of junk being churned out -- a rising tide of it, actually -- and it's only going to increase. Even the lines between art and junk are now blurring more than ever before.

The Incredible Hulk vs The Incredible Bheema

I Trust They Need No Introduction. You Know Who They Are:

People are of course free to make whatever they want to make. AI now makes that easier to do than ever before. But is it really art? Prospective audiences are free to make up their own minds.

What we should want, however, is some kind of signal-to-noise ratio.  This should  at least be a goal for those who'd like to see a more dignified and uplifting representation which is respectful of the important values of Hinduism that make up its heritage. 

And the way to do that is to put out better content that will attract viewers based on its character, rather than on its "biff-boom-pow" action, eye-candy or other shallow qualities. This requires craftsmanship and the skills associated with it. The only way to build up such craftsmanship is to invest in it.

Viewers also need to give their constructive critical feedback to creators. What might also be useful are reviewers who publish their reviews of content being put out online, just as there are reviewers for films, TV serials, music, and other more traditional forms of content.

Meanwhile, take a look at the following to see some of the ways people are making this stuff:

tariff pain, and maybe short term gain

 a quick read on the trump tariffs imposed today. they will hurt, yes, but India didn’t do as badly as feared, and there are medium to long term benefits from competition and reduced protective tariff walls.

https://open.substack.com/pub/rajeevsrinivasan/p/ep-161-trump-tariffs-impact-on-the

AI Being Used by Indian Content Creators to Depict Mythology

Gee, this is looking like a videogame trailer

Here's that same tale done by a different creator-team (as you can imagine, everyone and his brother are now scrambling to re-create/re-tell their favourite tales from mythology and post these online in order to market themselves)

This one looks like an episode:

My comment:  Just as the sage Vyasa needed the help of Ganesha to transcribe the Mahabharat, likewise it seems that Indian content creators need the help of AI to render things like mythology. When there is a gap between aspirations and abilities, then there's the hope that new advanced tools like AI may be able to span that gap.

The voice acting has been gradually improving over previous earlier work which left a lot to be desired:

@ 3:10 -- We get a post-credits easter egg reveal scene, like in Marvel movies, lol 😁  

Move over, Marvel -- there's a new MCU.

MCU = Mahabharat Cinematic Universe

Move over, Hollywood & Bollywood -- here comes Holy-wood.

Here's the work of yet another production house with their own take:

(Production needs more quality control)

Forget Lord of the Rings. or Game of Thrones -- it's raining Mahabharat stories now. There seem to be more studios and storytellers than there are stories available to tell. Should I be welcoming this flood of devotionalism - or should I see its sudden copious quantity as a kind of spam?

Perhaps it's a bit of a self-indulgent use of resources compared to using AI to cure cancer, though

(but oh well, we Indians are known to be pretty self-indulgent... so... indulge away... carry on.)

My first instinct would have been to use a flagship series to help launch a streaming service, like an Indian cultural version of Netflix, so that you build up your own ecosystem around your own hub, instead of having to piggyback off somebody else's. But you can't copyright the Mahabharat, since it's prior art. I'll wink and say maybe someone will start a Kurukshetra channel to show "All Mahabharat, All the Time". Actually, the best thing might be to make our own version of Youtube, which would offer exclusive access to this kind of content. You could offer small previews on the major platforms like Youtube, Netflix, etc -- but to access the full content you should have to show up on our platform to be able to watch the full thing.