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> Very specifically pointing out "free bus rides to women" which is very famous in India and associated with a state not run by the BJP (i.e central ruling party)

I am a pretty political/ideological person. I never try to hide that. But I support the government when I think they are right, and criticize them when they are wrong.

I guess you missed my point about cash handouts to women? That BJP governments are doing right now? My very first comment is a criticism of the government's current step! You want me to criticize the cash handouts and spare the free bus rides?

> I mean someone can say this with straight face in India today? Ffs :D

Say what with a straight face? Someone who managed to deal with the excise department but is unable to handle the GST department beggars belief. Which is what all those articles were about. Excise/sales tax/vat/GST are all the same people. Their nature is not going to change because the law changed.

> "engaging"

I am "engaging." It does not mean I have to sing the tune you expect. This is why I specifically said "But this is a different topic more suitable for a different thread," because talking about the politics of it eventually leads to flamewars and tone policing.

> article by India Today.

It is an opinion piece. About Islam on the Indian subcontinent. If the RSS is brought up, people need to know the context of their origin. About what happened on the subcontinent in that era.

Businessmen were able to navigate all this mess and were suddenly unable to handle GST? Please!

Again, we are a large country and implementation is more often than not a shit show. The bureaucracy is extremely corrupt and the politicians in charge of ministries cannot tame them. They literally say to businessmen: "The minister will leave after the election next year. I will still be here."

> But GST inspectors (many of them have seen the good old days of sales tax and VAT, and obviously don’t want to let go of their power to extract bribes) harass such firms on flimsy grounds like ‘why don’t you have a company’s nameplate clearly displayed’ that can create nuisance in residential areas. [from the Print article]

This is very common low-level harassment. very little you can do about it except rewrite the laws to make such things non-actionable.

Article 311 of the constitution makes it next to impossible to fire public servants. This is why all the corrupt/non-performing officers get transferred, not sacked![1]

[1] 311. Dismissal, removal or reduction in rank of persons employed in civil capacities under the Union or a State (https://indiankanoon.org/doc/47623/)

Under Indian law, companies must spend 2pc of their net profit on CSR activities (corporate social responsibility). Ask banks to use that money. The Indian banking sector made a combined profit of $40B this year. 2pc of that is $800M. Close to the $1B number.

> You've got to draw the line somewhere!

Draw it in the farm sector! They do not have to pay income tax on their income, get subsidies on fertilizers, free electricity, guaranteed prices for their crops. Small farmers cannot take advantage due to average holding size, and large farmers laugh all the way to the bank!

Needed. I run a business. The previous tax system was horrific in its complexity and corruption.

> Demonetisation

Implementation could have been better. But there is too much cash in the system for my comfort. Things must be digitized. We must ensure people pay their rightful share of taxes.

> unnecessary COVID restrictions etc

Hindsight. I remember how the media was blaming every single death on the government and making videos of funerals. We saw the best and worst of humanity during that period.

> He has also weakened all social welfare programs of the previous government by reducing funds or introducing restrictions designed to sabotage it for the intended beneficiaries

Have you looked at the subsidy bills? Have you looked at the finances of the state governments? You know Modi was against the rewadi culture and then had to get into competitive cash giving? I absolutely hate it. But that is the cost of doing politics in India.

Cities provide free bus rides to women, and run buses in competition to metro routes, making metros nonviable. This is such short-sighted behavior. I do not know what to say.

> fascist ideology

I do not agree with the criticism. At all. This is fairly typical of the nominal left in India and outside. Will paint with a large brush. To understand the RSS, you must go back to Hindu-Muslim relations in British India, to stoning of Hindu processions in Nagpur of the 1920s (which continue across India to this day), to the Moplah massacres and forced conversions of Hindus, and even farther back.[1]

My biggest problem with the RSS is the hubris in the top echelon and deep anti-intellectualism. Bhagwat's "same DNA" theory is a laugh riot.

But this is a different topic more suitable for a different thread.

[1] Pakistan: A 300-year-old project that Jinnah completed with Partition (https://www.indiatoday.in/opinion/story/partition-india-paki...)

Yeah. Let banks fund this out of the 2% of NP they must use for CSR activities if they have to.

> he too subscribes to the anarcho-right political ideology of transferring wealth from the poor and the middle-class to the rich

I do not see this. In fact, he is TOO socialist. He was elected on the platform (one of them at least) of "minimum government, maximum governance" and has actually continued to expand the reach of government. The bureaucracy has not been tamed. The government continues to run businesses. Build a sovereign wealth/investment fund like Singapore if you want a share of the growth in the economy instead of running loss-making businesses for decades.

And all the centralization of decision-making. He is more of Nehru/Indira than he thinks he is.

Some P2P is between family/friends. Or you are paying rent etc. But a lot of it is business transactions that move funds from one savings account to another because the auto driver is accepting a payment in his mother's or wife's account or something similar. There is so much friction in the banking system if you have to create a current account that this is pretty common.

The system needs to improve drastically to support the two sides instead of letting it be. Should help your use case as well if that happens

India is forced to subsidize farmers to the tune of $37B JUST for urea. Governments routinely offer free bus services to women, free cash handouts to women, free electricity to farmers (who then use the power to pump out groundwater and grow paddy in areas otherwise not suitable for it). The list goes on.

A $1B subsidy to eliminate friction on the payment front is peanuts.

Syntax is a personal choice. Can always be changed. Architectural choices are difficult to manage later on.

The VM seems to be a stack VM. I have my own python replacement project (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48090665) that I am developing privately for now. LLM-assisted ofc. Started with a bytecode VM and then switched over to a register one. The biggest break from regular language systems was the decision to move to an Erlang-style preemptive scheduler.

If a great writer used LLMs, then the output would be outstanding. Of that I have no doubt.

It is a french door/window. The original story is by Saki (HH Munro), one of the greatest short story writers of all time. He was English. The story is literally called "The Open Window."

> Sorry, I'm not doing all that work for you

Well, you asked. And I gave you stuff that I generated for comparative analysis. I am quite satisfied with the output. Most human writing, including genre writing, is subpar. LLMs are far superior to that. If you want to read only Faulkner and Eliot, then stick to them I guess?

> human writing examples

You must provide a solid prompt. And you must use a strong model. Deciding LLMs suck at writing based on output from Gemini 2 Flash, and expecting writing like Graham Greene is a bit much. The day LLMs start writing like him based on one-line prompts, writers will have no option but to look for other jobs.

Ideally, you should read all 14 exhibits. Each has been produced by a different LLM, some local, others frontier models of the time.

E4 = Claude

E6 = ChatGPT

E8 = Mistral

E11 = DeepSeek V3

E12 = Original

Variations on a Theme of Saki

https://gist.github.com/s-i-e-v-e/b4d696bfb08488aeb893cce3a4...

Padding, though it is probably the wrong word for what the LLM does when it expands the outline, lets you experience the world. The modern 8-episode tv season, for instance, might be technically well done but does not leave you with sufficient time in the world as compared to the 22-episode season with a bunch of filler episodes