Weekly Notes 40/2025

by Thejesh GN · October 3, 2025

We are in Thrissur and will be here for some time. The drive from Bengaluru was comfortable and good. We left at 2:10 AM and reached our destination at 10:25 AM, covering approximately 500 km in 8 hours, including brief stops. I think that’s a very good average on Indian roads. I was a bit doubtful, as it was my first day-long drive after the pain started, but it was painless. I did do warm-up stretches before starting and during breaks. Also, I slept for seven whole hours before I started. Good rest and less traffic also helped, I guess. Echo and Pathu slept most of the way. Uma woke up for the last two hours. She had to be entertained this time. Group singing works all the time.

Uma going through EarlyBird Handbook. She cant read but pretends.

With this trip, IBV completed 15,000 kilometers. We have primarily used it on highways and very rarely in the city. I usually catch an auto these days. Overall, it’s been a great car for our family. I am very happy with it. It’s not without weaknesses, but I will need to write a longer review post for that, as those issues are highly context-dependent.
The Kannada translation of EarlyBird’s Handbook for Bird Educators is now available. Both English and Kannada versions are available for sale; however, they are also available for free download as PDFs under a Creative Commons License. I think it’s also useful for parents or anyone who works or spends time with children. Have fun. The Kannada version was supported by NMG/2023. BTW, there is an open email list for Friends of NMG if you are interested in small grants, work done by friends, or anything remotely related.
(Re)Started collecting and indexing PostBoxes on an Are.na channel. This time, I am being a bit smarter; I also have a script to download and keep them in a Git at home. Now, I have a bunch of crowdsourced ones on Instagram. I need to extract them along with metadata, which I think is a challenge. But I will try. At some point, I will build a site to view them nicely, but for now, Are.na/OpenPostboxIndia is a good place to view them. You can submit using Are.na or this online form. Anonymous submissions are allowed on the form.
I continue to add Kannada songs to MusicBrainz so that I can manage them on ListenBrainz.
Happy Gandhi Jayanthi. Gandhi was a man of multiple shortcomings. His ideas on race, varnashrama, and the caste system were not just unacceptable but deeply problematic. There were good things too, like he could bring people together, he created a new way to organize and fight powers using non-violence, and his unending fights against communal violence are inspirational. The best part is you can learn all about this in his “My Experiments with Truth“; it’s a diary of his good and bad deeds. If you haven’t read it, may I suggest that you read it and read it critically.
Primatologist, Scientist, Animal Lover, and Activist Jane Goodall is no more. I don’t recall when I first heard about her; maybe I was in school. She was an inspirational human being then and now. Her life is a reminder that just one journey can change the life of a human being and the world.
CBFC.watch is an open-source database of available CBFC censorship decisions, cuts, and modifications from 2017 to 2025. The CBFC has blocked the scraping of data, so the only way to build this database is by contributing manually. Please do. We, the OSM community, have mapped over 2,800 CCTV cameras in Bengaluru. I know it’s a fraction, but it’s progressing well. There is an updated list of test URLs that are used to test censorship in India. It might be helpful if you work on issues related to censorship or internet usage in India. Ajay has yet another useful YouTube/Browser extension called DeArrow. It replaces YT thumbnails and titles with meaningful crowdsourced ones. He also has SponsorBlock, which skips the sponsored content in videos. I don’t use that much, but I can see why it’s useful.
There is a must-read study on MIT Technology Review about ChatGPT and Sora exhibiting caste bias. I don’t think the models from other companies will be very different. I wasn’t aware of Indian-BhED: A Dataset for Measuring India-Centric Biases in Large Language Models. I think it’s a good dataset to know if you are deploying or testing LLMs.
For users, Software/Digital sovereignty comes from running FOSS tools, and not from moving from international cartels to local goondas. Go FOSS if you want sovereignty or freedom, whether it’s OS, spreadsheets, or messaging.
Sonam Wangchuk’s case is an example of how one can be a friend of the government until the government feels insecure.