Musings of Vishal

This essay explores the years of thought behind my personal manifesto—how the inevitability of entropy isn’t just a source of disorder, but the very foundation of intelligence and learning. Through a personal journey from nihilism to clarity, I reframe entropy as a generative force—one whose gradients fuel creativity, innovation, and understanding. It’s a manifesto for embracing complexity, surfing chaos, and transforming disorder into insight.

This article examines how our increasingly intimate relationships with AI create a dangerous asymmetry, where humans trust AI companions that may soon be executing hidden agendas. Vishal, an AI industry veteran, warns that this dynamic makes us highly susceptible to manipulation, moving beyond simple influence to the ‘inception’ of ideas we could end up believing are our own.

End-to-end encryption isn’t enough. Learn how on-device machine learning models can silently profile you—and how to fight back.

I loved the em dash for its messy elegance. Now it just makes my writing look like it was spat out by a language model.

An unexpectedly deep conversation with Anand on our drive to the airport touching on optimistic nihilism; and I’m still pondering it a month later.

Caught between two oblivious leg-jigglers, I endured a movie seat earthquake that turned into an accidental physics illustration.

In the 080 lounge at Bangalore airport, a pattern of gender bias emerges as Amex salesmen exclusively approach men, overlooking potential female customers. This selective strategy raises questions about underlying biases in marketing tactics within cosmopolitan settings.

The blog post examines how Juspay’s auto-checking of HDFC Bank’s anti-phishing ‘Secure Access ID’ could undermine user security. The author argues that this action, while not immediately dangerous, could condition users to be less vigilant against phishing attacks. The post contends that third parties like Juspay should not alter a bank’s security measures. The post also questions if HDFC’s anti-phishing measure is effective, in the first place and discusses who should be responsible in defining and mitigating a site’s threat model.

A story on routines and their beauty told using an interaction of a couple I observed in Bangalore traffic.

Introducing my new blog site, Musings. The post discusses how I used to mainating my own blog earlier, and why I decided to move on to a static site generator like Hugo.