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  • Introversion isn’t real

    Introversion and Extroversion Might Not Be What You Think

    We’ve all heard of introverts, extroverts, and now, ambiverts — people who fall somewhere in between. But what if these labels don’t fully capture what’s really going on? What if your “vertedness” has less to do with your personality and more to do with what you’re talking about?

    Here’s the thing: many people who call themselves introverts seem to come alive when talking about topics they’re passionate about. I’ve had phone conversations with self-proclaimed introverts that lasted for hours — full of energy, laughter, and zero social exhaustion. Yet, these same people would be considered introverts in more general social settings. Why is that?

    It’s often said that introverts need alone time to recharge after social interaction, while extroverts gain energy from being around others. But I’m not convinced it’s that simple. Maybe introverts just need conversations that matter to them. Or maybe anyone would feel drained if the topic didn’t interest them.

    Think about it. An introvert might feel completely drained after small talk about the weather or sports they don’t follow, but light up when the topic turns to video games, anime, philosophy, or science. Suddenly, they’re animated, talkative, and far from shy or quiet. And guess what? They’re still not exhausted afterward.

    Now flip the scenario. Imagine an extroverted football fan dropped into a room full of people passionately discussing the latest anime series. That same extrovert might suddenly go quiet, unable to contribute or stay engaged. The social energy they usually thrive on isn’t there anymore. They’re the quiet one now.

    So what’s really going on here?

    It seems that our ability to connect, engage, and enjoy social interaction depends heavily on how much we relate to the topic being discussed. If the subject is meaningful or exciting to us, we’re energized, regardless of whether we think of ourselves as introverts or extroverts. If not, we’re likely to withdraw, get bored, or feel drained.

    This even plays out in real-world scenarios. Consider someone who moves to a new country. They were the life of the party back home, constantly social and upbeat. But now they barely speak the language, don’t understand the local culture, and have no connection to the popular sports or media. Suddenly, socializing feels like work. They’re tired after every conversation. Have they become an introvert? Or are they just out of sync with the topics and cues that used to make connection easy?

    Maybe the idea of introversion and extroversion is more flexible than we thought. Maybe your social energy depends not just on who you’re with, but on what you’re talking about and how much it aligns with what matters to you.

    If that’s true, then perhaps being an introvert or extrovert isn’t a fixed trait, but a reflection of how easily you can relate to the conversations around you.

  • People Love Numbers and Stats

    Having good tracking and feedback leads to great progress.

    I’ve noticed that people work really hard on tasks when it is very evident exactly how something can be changed or improved or if there is at least an illusion of such evidence.

    In school, children are measured on a number of parameters, test scores, athletic performance, debate competitions etc. Improving those metrics are associated with success, so kids attempt to improve those metrics and they very often are successful.

    People who trade shares on the stock market tend to increase their portfolio over time, adding money to the portfolio when they can. Few quite buying shares on the stock market, some invest passively, but most after starting to invest, keep investing. I am suggesting that this is also because there are numbers indicating the users success in the stock market and a somewhat evident path to success on the stock market.

    Let’s consider a more negative example, gambling, people who take up gambling often continue despite knowing full well that they are losing a lot of money in the long run. Here again, there are metrics showing you exactly how well you’re performing and what strategies you may try to improve your chances at winning.

    Another example in fitness, biking/running vs weight training, if you join a run club or biking club and go for a couple of events, you’re likely to continue going. Your gym membership on the other hand, is very easy to quit. Most users buy a gym membership at the start of a new year and quit before January is over. While there are those who quit running too, the likelihood is far greater for your weight training. Why is this? One answer is community and accountability, which is fine. But another reason is tracking and feedback. Fitness trackers are very good at recording your runs, your exact cadence, run power, heart rate, distance ran and various other metrics. This lets you keep track of your performance and helps you attempt to improve these numbers. If you did a very long run, but you didn’t know how far you’d managed to go, then it isn’t as interesting.

    So I think people can thrive with good statistics and clearly evident pathways to improve their life. But this is almost entirely missing in adult life. There is no manual or handbook to live life. Nothing telling you what next step to take to advance your life. Most of the growth in a person’s life happens during School and University. Then growth stagnates. If this is because there are no clear success indicators, couldn’t we put those back in?

  • CEO’s Affair turns into Great Marketing?

    CEO’s Affair turns into Great Marketing?

    Recently Astronomer ex-CEO Andy Byron was caught on camera having a mistress unknown to his wife. The internet went crazy about this, and we had thousands to maybe millions of people discussing how he was wrong to cheat of his wife etc.

    But really it doesn’t matter to anyone. Why do you care about a strangers relationship? Around the world millions of people get cheated on, and that hasn’t mattered in the slightest, then how come this became the talk of the country (even though everyone lost interest quickly after)?

    In this article we explore that, at least that’s what I wanted to do. Maybe I’ll do that once I get the time. Bye!

  • Narivetta

    Narivetta

    Well I wish I could rate this a little higher but these are the ratings.

    The pacing was a bit uneven. While the overall flow wasn’t bad, certain scenes got a little too much time, detracting from the central narrative. A significant chunk of the film is spent on the protagonist’s romantic life and his struggle to find meaningful work, plot points that ultimately have little to no bearing on the main story once it kicks in. Similarly, scenes depicting hazing within the police force and elaborate chase sequences seemed more like filler than substance, adding to the runtime without enriching the plot. All of this felt like a missed opportunity to explore the far more compelling theme at the heart of the film: the violation of Adivasi rights.

    On a positive note, the character development, particularly of Varghese, played by Tovino Thomas, was done quite well. Tovino convincingly portrays an oppressive (dirt-bag) police officer who gradually transforms after realizing he is just as vulnerable to injustice as those he once oppressed. Some scenes are genuinely powerful in highlighting how dehumanizing and prejudiced his views of the Adivasis were early on. But there wasn’t enough background laid to show that Varghese, the character played by Tovino was a scummy person initially. So the belligerent nature on display by Tovino in later scenes often stood out and did not seem in character for Varghese.

  • Building a Fitness app myself, since AI couldn’t handle it

    In my last article on coding with AI, I was very impressed by the output produced by AI code gen tools and the speed at which these tools allowed us to prototype. Here is that article for reference: https://www.explosion.fun/blog/post/rebuilding-my-website-with-ai/

    This time I was much more bullish on the capabilities of AI tools, and I employed them during the making of my React-Native Fitness application. Though these tools were markedly less effective in this category. React-Native I suppose forms a significantly smaller pie of ‘all the code in the world’ than web development or NextJs does.

    I can see this being a real problem for any subset of programming that doesn’t get as much attention as NextJs. Perhaps programmers would still have a job in the AI driven utopia future.

    I should delineate how I used AI for this experiment and the tools I utilized. I started off with Augment Code, an AI coding helper said to be as good as Cursor AI. When I used it though, I didn’t think it was, so I switched to Windsurf – a strong Cursor competitor.

    Windsurf though has apparently lost it’s place after OpenAI acquired Windsurf, since Anthropic had stopped supplying Claude to Windsurf. Windsurf was so much worse at programming without Claude. Later Anthropic agreed to be present on Windsurf again, though as users we would have to BYOK (bring your own key) to use Claude on the Windsurf editor. So I found myself deleting Windsurf a few hours after the experiment started.

    I decided I would stick to Cursor’s free tier or just do it myself. The free tier was doing much better than Windsurf was performing.

    I used Stytch, Google’s AI UI design platform to design a few panels and they came out really good. They provide an option to copy paste the design onto Figma, though that feature didn’t work as smoothly as I would have wanted.

    Right around this time, Google released their Gemini CLI to the public and made it Open-Source. So I figured I would try it out since it managed to design UI panels really well. Maybe it could do the app quite well too. Gemini CLI did not manage to contribute meaningfully to the application.

    The poor performance of AI code gen tools in making mobile applications was giving me confidence about the future software job market. I pray my confidence lasts.

    Is AI Net Negative?

    I’ve programmed some more.. the code base grew.. I let the AI run rampant on the code base and now the AI tools have no idea what’s going on.

    Here is a panel and some other artifacts the AI created. At the top you can see a white bar with (tabs) written in within it. That shouldn’t be there.. So I asked Cursor/Claude why it was there. After some analyzing it agreed that it shouldn’t be there.. AI added that and now didn’t know how that got there.

    It was something similar with every component AI had built, everything needed re-writes, large scale re-writes. I believe it did contribute significantly at the very start, but it can only do the absolute basics.

    I just have trouble seeing this as the reason for the current decline in hiring.

  • Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines

    Makeine: Too Many Losing Heroines

    Visually Stunning, But Lacking in Substance

    Makeine delivers shockingly high-quality animation for a series that hasn’t quite broken into mainstream popularity. Some shots are so incredibly beautiful, it’s hard to believe this much talent was dedicated to a show with such a simple premise.

    Early on, the series is packed with humor and creativity. Each episode felt fresh, with clever editing and use of music that made the viewing experience genuinely fun and engaging. But as we grow accustomed to the characters, the novelty begins to wear off, and so does the comedy.

    It almost feels like the creators started running out of ideas. Once the character introductions and basic development were done, the absence of a compelling overarching plot became impossible to ignore. The episodes became less engaging, and while the animation remained impressive, the team seemed less experimental and more reserved with their visuals as the series progressed, almost like they were losing interest in the show.

    It’s still a good show, but it could have been amazing with a better story. There’s still so much potential for deeper character development, a melancholic character development arc could add so much value to the show. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like the show is headed in that direction.

    Often times, the show begins to introduce more characters with interesting personalities at this point, perhaps to keep engagement high, but it would be so much cooler to send the main character through an emotional arc now. His character is perfect for such an arc.

    Complaint

    I couldn’t tell which name belonged to which person, sometimes first name would be used and sometimes second name would be used. It is nice that the show doesn’t over-explain and lets the viewer figure things out as the story is progressing, but it was confusing.

  • Rebuilding my website – With AI!

    I’ve been trying to replace myself with AI since chat-based AI tools first started coming out. When ChatGpt came onto the scene, I was so excited! Sam Altman and every LLM model company CEO told us that AI would replace all jobs and that our productivity would skyrocket.

    I loved it. Finally I could replace myself with AI and sit around collecting money, I thought. Spoiler alert! It couldn’t do it (yet). So you can understand my disappointment.

    LLMs have come a loong way since they first hit the market, so I decided to test their capabilities by attempting to rebuild my portfolio/blog with AI. Cause if it can help millions of students complete their complex assignments, it should be able to do my Website too.

    I decided to use a CMS since I wanted the ability to edit articles from my phone as well. This choice I made would later cause many problems and extra work. The CMS I chose was Headless WordPress with GraphQL.

    I started with Microsoft Copilot integrated into VS Code. I can pick and choose the model that I want Copilot to use. Having seen LM Arena Benchmarks and the latest Google I/O event, I knew Google’s Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview was the model for me. .. 3 prompts later, I erased all the code made by Gemini and switched over to Claude. Claude is considered status quo for a reason, I suppose. Claude Sonnet 4 was doing so well; it did almost exactly what it had been told to do and was a great aid in coding my blog. It even does kinda alright at CSS styling now.

    I was able to get so much more done and so much more quickly that I found myself giving more and more control over to Copilot. Eventually, when a new bug surfaced, I didn’t even bother using my brain, it went straight to Copilot. Three days of copilot use later, I felt markedly stupider. I could feel my competence dwindling with every task I attempted to outsource to Copilot. Soon, I predict I will be able to swap out my brain for an API/MCP layer to Claude or Gemini or something. Yay!

    However, it kept making much more code than was necessary and kept adding CSS rules in all the wrong places. The more I used AI code gen, the more messy my code base seemed to get. But the work was getting done, though the pace seemed to be slowing down bit by bit.

    Copilot now would add CSS everywhere and make quite a mess. It was creating new style tags within the HTML file and adding some rules there, sometimes it would do inline styling, sometimes it would add within the right CSS styles file, and sometimes it would create a brand new .css file and add some rules there (and it would often fail to import that new file). Eventually, Copilot reached a point where it could no longer figure out the mess it had created. Copilot faired a decent bit better with Javascript code, though it still needed significant oversight from the developer.
    All of this was making quite a mess, but since the priority was speed and not quality, I continued to ignore these issues. I thought I could just clean up once the project functionality was completed.

    Eventually though.. copilot became a net negative in my project, where not using Copilot and just doing the task myself would have saved me hours, and would have left me feeling a teenie bit smarter. I found myself having to utilize my brain again, what a buzzkill.

    Then I found a problem, that I should have found at the very start of the project. Since my data was coming from a CMS and not simply hard coded into the repository, routing and generation of static pages would be annoying and difficult to code. I could either do all that work or switch over to NextJs and save me a lot of time in the future.. . I made the difficult decision to switch over to NextJs.

    For the conversion of my code base to NextJs code I decided to try out the famous/ infamous Cursor AI, an AI coding platform that has been all the rage recently. Code the “Agentic” way! Okaay!
    I was only trying it out because ThePrimeagen, prominent youtube influencer personality and coding “Guru” was also trying it out and he did not hate it, interesting.
    So I load up Cursor AI Pro and ask it to convert my repository to NextJs, it suggests a couple of huuge changes, I reject all of its suggestions and start a fresh repository, and now AI works great. Incredible even!

    Right off the bat, Cursor was doing waay better than Copilot. I would ask it to do something and it would go way beyond that and fill in parts that I had forgot to mention as well. Over and over again Cursor surprised me by building fully functioning feature, and doing them better than I had envisioned. I loved how Cursor would make code completions and display them like a PR; this gave me exceptional control over what was going to get committed and what was going to get rejected.
    Y Combinator execs were saying that these days, people prompt to get whole modules written, and then if it didn’t work for some reason, instead of fixing the minor bug or two, they delete all that code and prompt again. I could now understand what they meant, it was possibly faster to do so in many cases.
    With NextJs and AI governing my every move, the project now had decent small components and okaay structure. And I managed to complete the bulk of the work in mere hours instead of the multiple days it would usually have taken me.

    As happy as I was with the speed with which AI was enabling me to push forward in my project, there was also a fear growing in me of being replaced by this AI. Only days ago had I regained confidence in not being replaced, after Copilot had shown me how much of a let down it was and a waste of time it could be. And now a much more competent competitor had arrived, Cursor AI. It had done better and faster in so many scenarios that it scared me a bit.

    But..

    As the codebase grew, Cursor started to struggle, even with simple tasks. For example, I needed to add category filters before rendering the review scores. It was a straightforward feature, the kind of thing any competent dev tool should handle easily. But this is where Cursor began to fall short. Each attempt it made got me about 90% of the way there, but always with small bugs or logical missteps. I’d fix those bugs, test the code, and then run into a different issue. This cycle repeated for over a day. Eventually, I gave up on the AI and did it myself. It took me maybe 30 minutes.

    That was quite a let down.

    I began to resent Cursor a little. It had started off so strong, shockingly strong, and now it felt like it was wasting my time. Still, I had to remind myself: it was incredibly useful for the boilerplate, repetitive stuff. I just hadn’t found the right balance yet.

    So no, AI isn’t replacing web developers just yet. Especially not the ones building non-trivial applications. But it is changing how we work, and fast.

    Pros of AI Coding tools:

    You’re stuck on bugs for much shorter spans of time. This makes AI tools a great tool for acquiring new skills.

    Starting a new project in an unfamiliar programming language or framework is now easier than ever.

    “Agentic” isn’t simply a buzzword, it does make a significant difference.

    Cons of AI Coding tools:

    These tools work best with small context windows, though this should get much better over time.

    These tools are still bad at generating novel code, the likes of which it hasn’t seen before.

    The job market is gonna get even worse.

    Introducing a small deviation from the norm, a WordPress CMS made many things much harder to work with

    Summary

    For those wanting to build something cool of their own, it is now easier than ever and it will likely get easier still. For those attempting to break into the development job market, perhaps the ladder has been pulled up away from under your feet. With learning programming having become so much easier, there would be a lot more people trying their hand at it now. And there is a whole generation of programmers coming, who are still in the pipeline, since they are too young to enter the work force. The market for programming jobs is brutal right now, and it could get a lot worse soon.

  • Severance

    Severance

    Good show, very enjoyable.

    Not binge watch material, you might fall asleep if you try, and I mention that as a positive. It’s great to see a good show that doesn’t get you all riled up.

    You could watch an episode or two after work before bed, and successfully stop watching and actually go to sleep. This is quite unlike other shows, which would add cliffhangers and keep you wanting the rest of the story, keep you up all night.

    But I want to bring your attention to another aspect of this show and perhaps many others that I find rather concerning. While this show was popular and a while after as well, I noticed many references to this ‘Severance’ on News programs, podcasts and various other programs. The hosts would bring up the show or refer to it seemingly at random, as though it weren’t an ad that Apple had paid for. This could be manipulation of the public, the viewer, to artificially make the show more popular.

    Ayn Rand in her book ‘The Fountainhead’ describes a person ‘Ellsworth M Toohey’ and his gang of influential people who attempt to steer pubic opinion by manipulating that which gets printed in the news papers. In the book they together write false reviews and artificially improve the ratings of bad shows. The reader of column, an ordinary person, not wanting to sound stupid goes along with the reviewers and claims that the bad show is good, great even.

    Along with this, you ask your influential friends working in print media or news to add subtle references to your garbage show, so that people will come watch it and artificially raise demand. I guess this is called marketing now. Though you do have to declare when an ad is an ad.

    While Severance was a very good show, I did feel as though something similar was tried in this case. So many subtle references to the show every now and then, so that you feeling FOMO would want to watch the show, and maybe get an Apple TV subscription.

    Those are all just unproven hypotheses though.

    Should you give the show a watch?: Yes. It’s a very good show.

  • Dredd

    Dredd

    One of the coolest lesser known movies ever.

    I wish this movie scored more, but oh well.

  • Falimy

    Falimy

    Funny.

    Very funny.

    Give it a watch.