Reflections on IndiaFOSS 2.0

TLDR; A conceptual and technical framework for resource discovery on the WWW using decentralised, open, machine-readable indexes as the building block, free of eroding quality and gatekeeping by BigSearch™ and BigPlatform™, whose goals are not quality, but revenue.

The nth-order effects of the recent CrowdStrike fiasco [1][2][3] will unfold over time. As it stands, it is apparently the single biggest global “tech outage” ever, which has already disrupted everything from airlines to railways to hospitals to financial systems amongst numerous others—globally.

In an earlier post (2021) , I argued that much of the “powered by AI / ML” labelling and marketing out there was bogus and disingenuous. That AI / ML technologies were getting commoditised to the point of being as simple as pip install, where most organisations would not need to do any serious R&D to be able to use these technologies, enough to...

It took me several seconds to parse the casual quip “But, aren’t you folks web2?”. I probed further and they continued—“Isn’t Zerodha[1] web2? Why don’t you convert it to web3?”. For the next few minutes, I struggled to explain how technologies, processes, people, regulations, laws, industry, and the entire legal and societal foundation that...

“It’s 2022. Why hasn’t someone done it already!?”, I find exclaiming frequently when stumbling upon things and ideas that are relatively simple and so obvious that they should exist, but for some reason, don’t.