Apex Technologies

 If last time we spoke about chatbots that flatter your opinions, today we’re talking about something far more intimate, the mirror that flatters your face. Beauty filters. They don’t announce themselves anymore. They’re just there. Integrated into the camera. A swipe. A tap. A silent “correction.” The lens that quietly erases a life lived on your skin. The software that says, “Don’t worry, I’ll fix you before anyone sees you.” https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/HyDC3vMOGe https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/the-mirror-that-only-compliments-ee13ffae614e On the surface, it feels harmless, even fun. Who doesn’t enjoy a glowing version of themselves once in a while? But something deeper is happening. We’re no longer capturing memories. We’re curating identities. Across the world, young women are living inside a parallel visual universe, one where every photo is edited before it ever meets another human eye. A study from City University of London found that over 90% of young women edit their ...

 From UPI to IndiaAI, the Modi government’s bet is clear: build the rails at home, then let a billion Indians run on them. The same logic must now guide India’s push for sovereign AI. From digital rails to intelligent rails In one decade, India quietly did something extraordinary. It turned abstract ideas like “digital inclusion” into hard infrastructure. UPI made instant payments feel as ordinary as sending a text. Aadhaar brought the invisible into the formal system. CoWIN stitched together a nationwide vaccine drive without collapsing under its own weight.   https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/Byba36yufl https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/why-india-must-build-its-own-sovereign-ai-models-1cd360d96a9a These were not just tech projects. They were acts of statecraft. And they carried a clear message: when you build the rails yourself, you decide who rides, at what price, and on what terms.   Artificial intelligence is the next set of rails. Only this time, the stakes ar...

 Whether you're a coding genius, a gadget aficionado and/or a tech business owner, blogging can help you connect with like-minded enthusiasts. It can help you stay at the forefront of the digital world and help others make informed tech choices.  Tech blogs can cover a wide range of topics: software development, hardware reviews, cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, programming languages, industry trends and much more. And thanks to today’s website builder tools, starting a blog is easier than ever, even if you don’t have advanced design or coding skills. So, if your passion revolves around technology, give blogging a shot. Keep reading for tips on how to get started.  Starting a blog should feel exciting, not overwhelming, right? With the Wix Blog Maker, you get everything you need to create, design and grow your blog from scratch–without needing a tech degree. Use Wix’s intuitive tools to share your ideas with the world.  https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/r1r3eVpDMg h...

 Five steps to get from idea to polished result I’ve been working in the open source community for almost 5 years now, building and promoting developer tools including Meteor and Apollo. In that time, I’ve found that blogging is one of the most effective ways to spread ideas. A blog post doesn’t take as long to prepare as a video or conference talk, but is easy to consume and can reach a ton of people. I’ve also personally gotten a ton of benefit out of writing: it has helped me organize my thoughts, teach people about technologies I love, and get my name out there. https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/Hko2ykhwMe https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/how-to-write-a-great-technical-blog-post-a3cf72955b79 Since publishing my first blog post ever in 2014, I’ve ended up writing 68 posts so far here on Medium, some with over 50k views and 1000 fans, and edited many posts for my friends and coworkers. Over that time, I’ve picked up a few strategies for taking a post from concept to publication. In ...

 Technical blogging is something I’ve been doing for a long time. This blog, alone, goes back 7 years but I had a few other blogs on different platforms. In this post, I want to highlight a handful of things that have really worked for me and that I’ve learned over this past decade+. Technical blogging has accelerated learning, grown my network, and given me opportunities that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Here are some things to keep in mind if you’re planning on starting technical blogging! https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/Hyy80KcPGg https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/12-tips-for-effective-technical-blogging-4940c52b88bb Be consistent There are so many important tips here that it was hard to know which one I should put first. But this is the one that I think has earned the right to be the top one. Consistency is key. When you get into a good technical blogging routine you will find that, over time, your catalog of technical publications becomes quite large. Growing your network a...

 Let AI do the stuff and you be the creative director Imagine walking into a room full of people. You don’t just see faces; you sense the mood. You know who is stressed, who is excited, and who is waiting to speak. You “read the room.” Until now, Artificial Intelligence has been great at reading text and recognising images, but it hasn’t really understood the context—the “vibe” of the room. https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/rJZlO4YPMx https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/the-era-of-the-thinking-ai-how-gemini-3-changes-everything-552b4b3ddf1e With the release of Gemini 3, Google isn’t just updating its software; it is trying to bridge that gap. Released on November 18, 2025, this new model represents a massive shift from AI that “knows stuff” to AI that “thinks and acts.” Here is what Gemini 3 means for you, your job, and the future of our society, explained in simple terms. From “search” to “deep thought” For the last few years, we’ve grown used to chatbots that answer questions instantly...

 Come December 10, 2025, Australia will effectively turn into a “real-life technology laboratory”. From that date, children below the age of 16 won’t have access to major social media sites like TikTok, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and others. While the rest of the world has been talking about doing something to counter digital toxicity, Australia has truly walked the talk. Both Houses of their Parliament passed the Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Act 2024 on November 29, 2024. The law received Royal Assent (the final stage of becoming an Act of Parliament) on December 10, 2024. https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/HJVN49UDzl https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/digital-clean-up-australia-as-a-blueprint-for-global-change-a3340983043e The one-year waiting period for the law to kick in was deliberately provided to allow social media companies to put in place the required age-verification systems. The onus on big tech Interestingly, the onus of compli...

 AI is here – here to rewrite the rules. And India’s credit ecosystem stands at the cusp of its most significant transformation yet. Traditionally plagued with laborious processes, the industry has come a long way, especially post-Covid. The country’s gold-standard digital ecosystem has been a major driving force towards digitisation and inclusiveness.  The next few years, however, would be decisive and test the industry’s future-readiness. https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/H1qXIHHPfe https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/access-to-accuracy-ai-to-take-credit-to-where-its-due-cbb7741b846d Agility of using technologies like AI at scale would be one of the biggest catalysts of long-term growth as it holds the potential to truly transform processes, operations and experience. Taking formal credit to credit-starved segments:A key challenge for several large consumer segments in India is the lack of access to formal credit. This includes first-time borrowers along with  micro and small...

 From heatwaves and floods to cyclones and glacial risks, disasters are becoming routine. Artificial Intelligence offers India a chance to shift from reacting after losses occur to preventing them before they happen. “The real promise of AI is not faster response after disasters, but smarter decisions before losses occur.” https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/HJTbMeVPze https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/why-ai-may-be-our-best-defence-against-disasters-0754940bebfd Disasters no longer arrive as sudden shocks. In India today, they feel more like a slow, relentless tide. Heatwaves stretch for weeks, floods return year after year to the same neighbourhoods, cyclones intensify over warming seas, and mountain hazards threaten communities far downstream. Climate change has transformed disasters from rare interruptions into a permanent development challenge. The real question facing policymakers is no longer whether disasters can be predicted. It is whether losses can be prevented. This is where ...

 India’s push towards frictionless, digital-first air travel has an unexpected casualty: the South Indian name. Digi Yatra, the biometric-based airport entry system, promises speed, convenience, and a glimpse of a high-tech future. Walk up, let the camera recognise your face, and pass through without fumbling for documents. In theory, it is elegant. In practice, it falters over something profoundly human and deeply Indian – how we name ourselves. https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/ryfAEizDMx https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/when-technology-forgets-our-name-73551ffe2ce1 For millions of South Indians, initials are not abbreviations or casual shorthand. They are a culturally embedded naming convention. The initial may represent a father’s name, a village, or a lineage. It is not always meant to be expanded casually, because expansion itself can be ambiguous or situational. Yet modern digital systems insist on doing precisely that: expanding, standardising, and flattening what they cannot ...

 Meta’s most popular LLM series is Llama. Llama stands for Large Language Model Meta AI. They are open-source models. https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/rkmrchcIMe https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/the-llama-series-of-models-from-meta-64a4c3d99028 Llama 3 was trained with fifteen trillion tokens. It has a context window size of 8000 tokens. There are 8- and 70-billion-parameter models. Both are pre-trained and instruction-tuned. The 8-billion-parameter model has a knowledge cut-off of March 2023, and the 70-billion-parameter model has a knowledge cut-off of December 2023. A model’s parameter count is the number of weights in its artificial neural network architecture. The knowledge cutoff (also called data cutoff) is the last date at which new data was included in the model’s training corpus before training was finalised. The context window is the number of tokens the model can consider in a single interaction, including the prompt, any prior turns (that are still in scope), and sometim...

 The geopolitical struggle of the twenty-first century has a quieter face and a louder hum: it runs on racks of processors, pulses through fibre networks and energy grids, and is negotiated as much in standards committees as in diplomatic backchannels. By November 2025, the competition for AI dominance no longer appears as a string of isolated technological choices; it resembles the deliberate architecture of a new alliance system. Nations are forming strategic partnerships that secure compute capacity, advanced chips, specialised talent, regulatory harmonisation, and legal protections. This is not mere market rivalry. It is a reordering of global influence in which infrastructure, law, and capital have become the front-line instruments of statecraft. https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/SJc74OFIfe https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/the-politics-of-intelligence-artificial-and-strategic-7446ee3efb6d The scale of the stakes has never been clearer. AI is no longer an experimental supplement t...

 Every morning, millions of Americans engage in a quiet, collective ritual. We wake up, often pull a smartphone from our nightstands or from under our pillows, and seamlessly navigate a digital atmosphere. We stream real-time data, query secure cloud networks for our work email, and prompt artificial intelligence models to predict our needs and optimize our work. We tend to view this seamless landscape as an inevitable consequence of corporate progress, as monuments to Silicon Valley technology companies and American exceptionalism. https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/rknWDfOLMx But if you strip away the sleek branding and examine the raw physics, the foundational research papers, and the patented microchip architectures running our modern world, a different narrative emerges. You find a deep, half-century-old legacy of high-skilled immigrant genius. Specifically, you’ll find an “invisible stack” of technology where successive generations of Indian and South Asian immigrants systematically...

 The world of digital cameras, especially the mainstream ones, can be quite drab sometimes. In a bid to pip each other in the mega-pixel (MP) race, camera manufacturers have churned out products of such an average quality in the last couple of years that it is difficult to get excited about photography. It became clear long ago that MPs don’t matter much for ordinary folks, but that did little to stop camera manufacturers from cramming more and more pixels into their devices and touting it as the key feature. https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/BkihR6ULMg https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/a-micro-four-third-promise-88eb4d30d47e The results of the pixel mania are disastrous, to say the least, as far as photography is concerned. It has created a mainstream digital camera market that consists entirely of point-and-shoot cameras, different in just three aspects: physical appearance, MP count and price. This means that for all practical purposes a camera with 7MP that costs Rs 7,000 will more...

 On October 14, Finland made access to internet a legal right. Yes, you read it right. From July next year, access to internet has been ensured by law for the Finns, just the way their right to free speech and right to free movement have been guaranteed. I know most people in India will be surprised, and some amused. At least I am, because every third day I haggle with clerks and glorified clerks at MTNL, one of India’s navratnas, over my broadband connection that conks off depending on the weather. But honestly, those who keep track of all things virtual knew it was coming. By providing for unfettered and effective internet access to its citizens — specifically at the speed of 1mbps that will be upgraded to 100mbps by 2015 — and enacting a law to this effect so that government bodies or broadband service providers do not cut corners, Finland has shown how far internet has come since the early days when it connected a few computers as part of ARPANET. https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/BJ...

 I am going to die within the next 2 days. Why? Well, I kinda forgot to forward a boring forward to some even more boring people. The result: I am as good as dead. Just counting the days, folks. Readers who have often grimaced with pain after reading my torturous attempts at humour will no doubt be rejoicing at the news of my impending demise. Hold your horses, friends. Apparently, there are some doubts about the credibility of these fatalistic forwards. A ray of hope for a dying man, but I cling to it with my entire body mass index. https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/Skp2-0MIMe https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/forward-thinking-and-cyber-blackmail-4c4fafbe3e3b Some of you may just be nodding furiously in agreement. After all, these irritating forwards can well be mistaken for email threats from al-Qaida. Come to think of it, I wonder if their terrorists also get such forwards? What a great way to terrorize the terrorist. If I could get hold of Osama bin Laden’s email ID, I’d definitely...

 I am sure most of you will say “no” and I assume it will be in all honesty and good faith. Yet, the times in which we live, virtually wired to each other, are such that this may not be entirely correct. If record labels — there are four major ones that own rights to over 70% of the music worldwide — are right, almost all of us who listen to music using a computer, laptop, cellphone or a digital audio player (DAP), are guilty of stealing at some point in time. Most people who live digital lives own at least one DAP, or in other words an MP3 player — a tiny gadget that can store hundreds of songs and makes for a perfect companion on long journeys. But we never really give a thought where these songs come from. In a connected world, our music libraries seem to build themselves on their own, with songs coming from myriad sources. Sometimes we get songs in USB drives from friends. Often we download them, casually, and without any copyright mumbo jumbo on our mind, from some Pakistani w...

 As Western models inherit Western philosophy, India has a chance to bring its own intellectual heritage into the global AI conversation. If AI is going to influence how we think, shouldn’t we influence how AI thinks? Artificial Intelligence is no longer just a technological breakthrough. It is becoming a cultural force — one that shapes how we learn, work, communicate, and even make moral decisions. As AI systems grow more capable, the question is shifting from “How do we build smarter models?” to “What values and worldviews should guide these models?” https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/HyNk1Nx8Gl https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/why-advaita-vedanta-should-shape-the-next-generation-of-ai-e082080713bb A recent article from the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy makes a striking observation: philosophy may be the next major frontier in LLM training. If AI systems are going to reason, interpret, and guide human behaviour, then the philosophical frameworks behind them matter as much as...

 As 2025 draws to a close, classrooms around the world stand at a crossroads: advanced artificial intelligence systems are rapidly entering not just the fringes of education, but its core, prompting deep rethinking of the role of human educators. The central, timely question is no longer whether AI will influence teaching — but whether human educators will remain irreplaceable. The answer, based on the most recent data and policy signals, is a cautious but firm yes—provided we reimagine, not resist, the future of teaching. https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/HJPIj0Crfg https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/are-human-teachers-still-irreplaceable-101c5d54174f Educational systems globally face a structural teacher shortage—a gap that looming retirements, increased demand, and expansion of secondary education will likely deepen. Against this backdrop, AI offers real opportunities: adaptive, personalized learning paths, automated assessments, and intelligent analytics that can relieve teachers of...

 Inadelightfully geeky podcast episode, Zerodha founder Nikhil Kamath chatted with Elon Musk, who tossed out some heavyweight existential bombs: “What’s the meaning of life? Where did the universe come from? Why does anything matter at all? What is the ultimate end?” We took those exact questions straight to Grok – Elon’s own AI creation – and asked it to answer them purely from the perspective of Indic Vedanta. Grok delivered. Perhaps Kamath can gently slide these responses across to Musk next time. After all, nothing quite like having your own AI school you on the ultimate nature of reality, Brahmn, and pralaya, the grand cosmic dissolution. https://hackmd.io/@alexaa34/r1GbjYprGe https://medium.com/@alexharris59600/musks-existential-queries-grok-s-vedantic-replies-30eba3964c4c What is the meaning of life? | The purpose of human birth, according to Vedanta, is Self-realisation – coming to the direct, living knowledge that your deepest Self is none other than the infinite, unchangi...