CMS of explosion.fun

Author: reubenroyk@gmail.com

  • Memory of Ammachi

    Yesterday Ammachi passed away.

    Around 3-4 weeks ago I spoke to Ammachi on a Whatsapp video call, she asked me how my studies were going and if it were time for exams. I explained that I’d graduated and that there were no exams left and spoke for a bit before switching to speak to other relatives. A few minutes later, Ammachi again came on call to ask me if how my studies were going and I had exams to attend.

    Her memory had deteriorated and was now having trouble recalling events of even just 3 minutes back.

    Two-three weeks ago she fell on her way to the bathroom, this was probably the starting.

    Two weeks ago she was found in bed, unconscious and not responding to calls. Doctors found blood in her head and suggested we not do surgery since she wasn’t fit enough for it.

    Some days later she was released from the hospital, nothing had changed, she was unconscious as before, breathing and body perfectly functional but unresponsive to stimulus.

    Everyone knew that the end was probably near for her. Parents did uprashima. A prayer the priest does when we believe the person won’t make it.

    And yesterday she passed away, in her sleep. At 88 years of age.

    Time tends to erase the memory of your loved ones. How saddening that is.

    So I thought I’d write down all I can remember of her, so that it may be remembered a short while longer.

    She was perhaps a bit unlike every other granny.
    She:

    Once threw a sickle at my fathers shin when he was young, and had caused trouble.

    Would create bitter gourd juice and make chachan drink it. It was painful to watch him drink it.

    Once cooked a squirrel that fell from a a tree and died. No one else but her tried the squirrel. Everyone felt bad for the squirrel, she thought it was delicious.

    At one point child me for some reason thought sambar and uppumavu was a good combination, she went and made sambar specifically because I mentioned this and started giving me and my brother this combination. The sambar was just good.

    My mother used to claim that Ammachi was able to cut through vegetables faster than anyone else she knew or had seen. I never got to see this for myself. Ammachi later had far too much time on her hands and liked to take her time cutting vegetables.

    Cutting vegetables, watching overly dramatic Indian tv serials and eating fruits were something of a passion of hers.

    Fruits would always go bad when she wasn’t around, never when she was however. Walk for a bit through the house. Banana. Walk walk walk. Banana. Repeat with new fruit etc.

    When Ammachi was around, demand for fruit would go up dramatically. There was a sense of “If I don’t eat a fruit now, there won’t be any left!”.

    She loved pindi, which is the stem of Banana Trees. Pindi and all the other vegetables she used to eat was often considered the source of her health. And boy was she healthy, for her age. Even my parents were seeing troubles in their blood test, my grandmother wasn’t.

    The Indian drama shows she used to watch all had grannies that were far less healthy and needed a wheelchair to move around in. So did many of the people around her. She however was, pretty much fine.. She coveted the attention the worn out grandparents were getting from their children and grandchildren. And she’d pretend to be more sick than she actually was. We could all see through this guise though.

    Recently though, we could tell that she wasn’t pretending, her age had caught up to her.

    She would bring me bugs she had killed or had found dead somewhere. Thinking back on it now, kid me would have likely found this interesting. We usually reacted with ‘Why is she bringing me this dead bug? Throw it out!’.

    Sometimes she would find dead people in the local news paper charama column and come show them to me. “Look this person died! He/she was xyz of xyz. You don’t know them?”. These little things went unappreciated, some stupid feature at work going to production always got priority. “Aaah yeah I don’t know them..”, “Ammachi, someone somewhere died, it doesn’t concern me”. Now looking back.. that feature could have waited, I could have made some time.

    I created an Instagram account for her to doom-scroll on. ‘ammachi80years’. A kids account with age restrictions turned on, specifically made for her. It worked, but the touch screen and the plethora of features in android confused her and a week later, she switched back to her indestructible nokia phone. Android came with too many feature for her to shoot herself in the foot with. A missed opportunity, could have been infinite dopamine and her window into modern society. She didn’t have a infinite social media feed educating her.

    I told myself and her that I’d get her books to read, to help her kill time. Time to kill, is something she had too much of. I never did this truly, never got her those books from the library. Something always took priority over this.

    I knew I was at least in part fix her boredom issue, and it’s awful that I never got around to it. There was always tomorrow. Tomorrow is gone now. Ammachi has permanently left us.

  • Super Cube

    Super Cube

    I’m so sure the animators didn’t care about the story much at all and just wanted to show off their new animation skills in this series. And if so it worked.

    I also feel there might have been a strong use of AI in the development of this series, not to discredit it of course. It just does feel like a lot of AI was used in developing this. The mistakes seem very AI like.

    Here are some samples:

    In one scene, the protagonist is running up the stairs to rescue someone and gets kicked by the enemy and falls. He catches on to the staircase to prevent himself from dropping all the way. In this process the railing of the staircase vanishes. I just don’t see how actual animators would have missed this, but it does seem perfectly plausible for AI, and I’ve seen similar issues when I attempted AI video generation myself.

    Another:

    Protagonist jumps to avoid enemies kicks and does a backflip, but becomes a ball mid-jump. Why add a ball mid-animation. It would have been easier still to rotate the image of the person than to import in a stupid looking ball. Makes no difference for AI though. It’s all just slop.

    Another:

    Here the enemy is slightly taller than the protagonist, but sometimes enemy becomes really big like a monster kaiju thing. Seems unlikely humans would animate this way, looks like AI to me.

    So much of this looks like, the animators gave jobs to AI and AI came back with this, they eventually gave up and screamed ‘Fuuuuck!!’ and just uploaded it.

    And that I believe is the right thing to do. Most people won’t even notice these things. If they dump all their effort making a few minutes of animation and no one pays any attention to any of it. My god, would it be a waste.

    I feel like they kinda just gave up mid-way though, since the protagonist really wasn’t as powerful as they animated him to be. It felt like, fuck it, I’m gonna make this the coolest animated fight around.

    Good work though, since that got the animators hired to work on Jujutsu Kaisen I guess. One of the fights just looked a lot like the jujutsu kaisen, and I googled it. Yes, the same artists did work on jujutsu kaisen season 3 as well. And they did an even better job there. It was really good.

    Was the show any good? Not really..

    It was engaging though. Not worth recommending to anyone though.

    I only really watched it since it resembled DICE, another manhwa I’d read in the past. That was pretty good.

  • [C] – CONTROL – The Money and Soul of Possibility

    [C] – CONTROL – The Money and Soul of Possibility

    The idea of the story was good, but the implementation was bad.

    The overarching story is maybe money is that which gives you power to do things and influence things. And they use the real world as a template to show you how money can influence the world. The story uses several techniques and standard practices from the real world that several nations use and people use to show you how money really flows, how devaluations impact the economy and how too much money in in one or two people’s hands can have a Possibly really negative impact on the world when handled poorly.

    But all of that is about the idea of the story. The implementation itself was so much worse.

    The story did a poor job of explaining what’s happening, why certain people are leveling up, if they are leveling up The pacing was way off. In some situations it moved too quickly, some moved too slowly. Most things move too quickly.

    Something the storytellers did poorly was explaining what was happening like metaflation hyperinflation, deflation. They assumed you would either already know or figure out what was happening, which is not a bad way to do things but they did far too little hand holding for anyone to make sense of this. The anime watching audience is not primarily economist so it’s maybe a bad idea to create a series targeted at economists. I’m not saying that that is what they did, but it did seem as if that is what they did. Even assuming you are an economist, you still would have a hard time understanding the series because there are just so many things that they did a very poor job of explaining. It felt extremely rushed. Even the parts that don’t concern any economics. They just did a bad job of explaining things.

    It felt as if the manga would have probably been much longer and much better explained, and the animators did a poor job and just crammed everything into one season. While doing a horrible job of explaining anything including the power structure. And now we have this.

    They also had some romance in here which was just really weird. And also in this extremely rushed series, why would you even have that?

  • Devil May Cry Season 2

    Devil May Cry Season 2

    Devil My Cry season two is almost the direct opposite of season one. Everything is done very well. Every single aspect is preposterously better than season one.

    This show with season 2 is extremely cool. It would have been a loss to not have seen it.

    I also didn’t mind the lady character being protected by plot armor in this season. It wasn’t too much. Season 1 had probably a 100 instances where Lady/Mary should have died and stayed alive because of plot armor. It was much more reasonable in season 2.

    There were also several different points of view and people who wanted to influence how things work, including the president, who was really a side character, but still held some influence. This was also quite cool.

    You can also tell they just went off the books with this season. Every episode was over 30 minutes long, nothing like normal anime. The intro music was much shorter than what you’d see in normal anime. Several episodes don’t even have a Japanese sub version you can watch.

    This is a fantastic show.

  • Devil May Cry (2025)

    Devil May Cry (2025)

    The show was so lame. Soo laame.

    There was soo many scenes of the main characters attempting to look or sound cool and it all came off as laame.

    They’ve unsuccessfully took great inspiration from The Matrix, Dredd and several other movies and shows.

    This show is clearly made for kids. Everything is much too predictable. Animation and CGI is meh. Dialogues are actually bad.

    I thought this show was cool 0% of the time.

    There’s this one highway scene where Dante is riding a motorcycle and hunting demons, the demons being attacked verbally says ‘Dante is so cool’, so they were letting you know that you were supposed to think that that motorcycle scene was really cool. It was not.

    The dialogues are laughable.

    A lot of anime are these days created to sell the manga better, draws more attention to the manga. Perhaps this one was created to draw attention to the game. So even if the show is bad, the corporation ends up making money. Although that doesn’t seem to be the case here.. Capcom and Netflix don’t seem to have any such partnership in place. So then this is just a bad show, the end.

    Although purely out of interest for the Devil May Cry franchise, I might entertain the idea of watching the original show and the Madhouse version from a decade ago.

    But this was was lame as hell.

  • Backrooms

    Backrooms

    I liked it!

    Whatever is happening, there’s enough there for a part 2, perhaps much more.

    The friends who went with me thought it was kind of mid-tier. Honestly, it was maybe between mid and good or really good. Was more confusing than much else.

    I’m still excited for part two or three.

    Something else that is interesting is how all the influencers were super excited about how Backrooms was doing really well when none of the Marvel or Disney movies were doing too well at all. But then movies like Spider-Man came out and they were doing really well as well. And so did several other big budget movies. So it’s actually entirely possible that the movie industry itself had declined and is now in a recovery phase. It’s all speculation. I think it’s fun when influencers get it wrong, which is most of the time.

  • Unmadham

    Unmadham

    Exciting. Thrilling. Suspenseful. Decent story. Has several good elements of a scary movie. I went in expecting nothing and was quiet impressed.

    There was always this confusion between if the MC was possessed by ghosts or if he was schizophrenic.

    Acting was good. Jokes landed really well.

    The MC is attempting to write a thriller movie script and get it approved for a movie. This whole angle really added little to no value. MC could have been a really honest police officer and we could have had more time for the main story.

    My guess is, the lead actor has been doing several such movies, so the writer director angle helps differentiate these movies from his other movies.

  • We Built an AI Auto-Grader That Outperformed Humans. Here’s What It Means for the Future of College.

    We Built an AI Auto-Grader That Outperformed Humans. Here’s What It Means for the Future of College.

    As a Graduate Teaching Assistant at Arizona State University, my baseline job description was standard: teach labs, hold office hours, and grade. But if you put a team of software and AI engineers in a room with hundreds of repetitive worksheets, quizzes, and pre-labs, they’re going to do what they do best: build an automation engine.

    My team and I set out to build an end-to-end AI Auto-Grader System integrated directly with Canvas. By the time we were done, we hadn’t just saved ourselves hours of manual labor—we discovered that the AI actually graded better and more objectively than human graders ever could.

    But getting there required bypassing massive data privacy hurdles, re-engineering data pipelines, and confronting a glaring question about the fundamental value of a modern university degree.

    The Architecture: Canvas, OpenRouter, and Excalidraw

    The core premise was straightforward: pull student submissions from the Canvas LMS API, grade them using LLMs, and push the scores back to Canvas alongside detailed feedback.

    To maximize accuracy, we didn’t just throw raw prompts at an API. We built a structured grading schema engine. The system ingested the master answer key, examples of partially correct answers, and explicit rubrics on how to allocate partial credit. We primarily relied on OpenAI LLMs for inference, with a fallback routing mechanism to OpenRouter to handle rate limits and test alternative open-source models.

    To prevent the AI from being overly punitive, we also engineered a programmatic grading balancer. The function calculated the delta between the highest achieved mark and the maximum possible mark, automatically normalizing the curve across the cohort to ensure fair evaluation.

    Bypassing IT Hurdles Without Storing Data

    Our biggest bottleneck wasn’t the AI—it was compliance. The ASU IT software approval team enforces strict quality and privacy standards. The primary directive: The software absolutely could not store student information.

    Grading a student without holding state or keeping a database of their records forced us to build an ephemeral data pipeline. Initially, we had to resort to pulling raw PDFs from Canvas, running inference in memory, pushing the grades, and immediately wiping the data context.

    To bypass the brittle nature of OCR on random student PDFs, we built a custom frontend. Students entered their answers directly into structured fields, which supported digital drawings via an integrated Excalidraw canvas. When a student hit submit, this data was cleanly embedded into a standardized PDF format and auto-pushed to Canvas, giving the LLM a pristine, structured document to evaluate in real-time.

    The Discovery: Why AI Graded Better Than Us

    When we compared the AI’s performance against human grading, the results surprised our professors. The AI was objectively superior in three core areas:

    • Absolute Objectivity: Human graders are prone to fatigue, cognitive load, and accidental bias. An essay graded at 11:00 PM after a long day looks different than one graded at 9:00 AM. The AI evaluated the last paper with the exact same baseline logic as the first.
    • Hyper-Detailed Feedback: The bottleneck for human TAs is time. We can only write so many paragraphs of explanation per student. The AI, however, provided massive, highly nuanced, and descriptive feedback on why a mark was deducted and how to fix it.
    • An Actionable Feedback Loop: Because the comments were so detailed, students actually used them to improve on subsequent labs. It turned grading from a punitive metric into a genuine learning tool.

    The Existential Question: If the University is AI, Why Pay for the University?

    The success of this project was supported by ASU, and the faculty loved the efficiency. But as engineers building this reality, it forced us to look at the horizon.

    If an AI auto-grader can evaluate technical work more accurately and provide better mentorship via feedback than a human expert constrained by time, the role of the traditional educator changes fundamentally. Teachers and graders will either become prompt architects and supervisors, or find themselves increasingly obsolete in the administrative loop.

    This shifts the existential crisis down to the consumer—the student.

    If the primary value of higher education has historically been access to expert evaluation, structured feedback, and curriculum delivery, what happens when that entire stack can be run locally or via a cheap API? If a student can deploy an open-source agentic pipeline to guide them through a textbook, test them, grade them objectively, and explain their mistakes for pennies, why pay tens of thousands of dollars for a university degree?

    We built a tool to solve a logistics problem in a university lab. In doing so, we might have just caught a glimpse of how the traditional university model unbundles itself from the inside out.

  • Wistoria: Wand and Sword

    Wistoria: Wand and Sword

    It’s not a bad show. It’s not an incredible show either. There is no Need for you to watch the show. The story is only very slightly different from most of the other series of this genre that you’ve already seen. It’s okay.

    Character development: I unfortunately cannot tell the women in this series apart. They all look mostly the same.

  • Odd Taxi

    Odd Taxi

    What an incredible show. I did not expect it to be anywhere nearly good as it turned out to be.

    Unfortunately, everything I have to say about the show will probably be considered spoilers so I can’t say anything.

    I had several questions at the beginning about the world building. Like I see a bunch of animals? Some of them are carnivores, some of them are herbivores, but they I guess they all can eat anything they want they don’t seem to be restricted in their dietary preferences which they confuse me, at the beginning. Animals seem to also be able to eat meat I mean where does the meat come from? Are they killing other civilians to acquire the meat? What about birds? Do are birds included in civilians or they just k normal birds? What about fish? Um all of these things did confuse me.. But I can’t any more.

    Other than that the show just feels realistic. It doesn’t feel like a made-up story told to entertain. It feels like something that could actually happen.

    It’s funny, it’s enjoyable, it’s entertaining, it’s thrilling and the story is well told, well put together and the characters are all interesting and you grow fond of them quickly. It’s a very good show.