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Watkins wrote his magnum opus on The serpent-slaying myth. You might also like ML West's Indo European Myth and Poetry. So the heroic poetry, mannerbund, the specific characteristics of the King of the Gods who is often associated with both wisdom and war, guest hospitality norms, shared characteristics of epic mythology, the myth of stealing mead / ambrosia. There certainly existed a PIE religion.

I don't question your credentials but I also think many things deemed to be IIr innovations may not even be. IIr came through CW -> Sintashta after all and BMAC influences are overstated. For instance, Soma may have a root in this region, but the myth associated with theft of divine intoxicating drink and it's function as the mead of poetry must predate the specific IIr Soma cult.

The "lord's prayer" in Vedic sounds very out of place due to the choices of inflected forms and some stems even reminiscent of classical Sanskrit.

Without going into depth of that, here's something actually more inspiring (actual excerpt from Rig Veda).

    tvā́m ugrám ávase carṣaṇīsáhaṃ rā́jan devéṣu hūmahe

    víśvā sú no vithurā́ pibdanā́ vaso amítrān suṣáhān kr̥dhi

> We call for help, the fierce, ruler of clans of men, king of Gods (Indra)

> All of us that is weak, strengthen it. Make the enemies easy to subdue

(The acute accent is an udatta - high pitch, vedic is a pitch accented language. I would expect IAST with accents, not whatever randomly capitalised things it threw at me).

as a ~~south asian~~ (stupid label) Indian, some knee-jerk reaction is justified because people tend to believe in exaggerated time scales (for instance, based on projected dates of astronomical events in the Hindu Epics, which predates the bronze age and the war chariot), whereas the westerners don't have a religious attachment and speak a realistic timeline for Homeric epics.

If we are speaking of the classical times: yes, India was on-par with the greco-roman and chinese world; left a cultural imprint on east and south-east asia and traded with the western world too. But the rise of pacifist religions, being in a nice position to be attacked from central asia, and internal strifes basically rendered it useless in the last millenium. Huge population, uncontrolled urbanization and a corrupt education system is the bane of this century. If we don't solve that, no amount of classical civilization is going to help. Germanic people were considered primitive by the greeks and romans, now look where they are!

There's no manufacturing sector to employ them if you displace them from agriculture. They'd be displaced into gig economy. This would just increase the population of a handful of metropolitan cities which are already congested. India should fix its cities first.

I have thought about it.

Present iteration of LLMs are, despite what normies would believe, aren't optimised to provide correct solutions. They are optimized to __sound smart__.

This may be just an undesirable artifact of the RLHF process. But the end result is same. They try (?) too hard to sound smart.

Last generation LLM writing was too obvious in its soulless journalistic nature. But the current generation LLMs do all the following things to appear smart; From the lowest levels to highest level

- use clever writing styles and punchlines. Not X, it's a Y'ed Z. (Though it's not funny and makes no sense).

- Overstuff the technical terms, most often using a +. "Add a shim + iptables rule + signal handler".

- Over engineer the low level design. (Eg rather write a function to do some complex parsing when a way exists to avoid it altogether. Write tricky bash script and parse the output for what could be achieved by stdlib in few more lines).

- over engineer the code flow: this is rather because they're clueless and can't step back. But I have fun seeing the LLM come up with 4 5 levels of branching and then extract it into a function, whereas a human would step back and try to avoid the branching.

- over engineer the high level design: well your mistake is letting the word soup machine lead the design. It will add all and kitchen sink with need bullet points and + marks. Only a pleb not sufficiently educated in the matters of computer science will be impressed with such Markdown kitchen sink designs. It's fine to rely on LLM for brainstorming and discovering how to do A, B and C. But if you outsource the job of design, it's instincts (!) to sound maximally smart using bullet lists and + marks will kick in.

For one thing I am under 25 and I get my views from here the orange site.

dhee (https://dhee.apratiratha.in, https://github.com/mahesh-hegde/dhee).

An application to read Rigveda Samhita, and potentially other old indic texts in future. Inspired by University of Cologne's vedaweb.

> A great poem is “about” a specific person or moment embedded in a particular culture, composed in such a way that it reaches across time and distance to resonate with readers outside that culture.

Why is this a criteria?

The following piece of metrical poetry from the Rig Veda, is of high importance to me, a bunch of vedic revivalists and connoisseurs scattered across the descendant cultures, perhaps to Indo-europeanists and comparative mythologists who study this in academic manner, even when translated into English. But I don't think most people outside this culture would ever relate to this.

    Now, verily, will I declare the exploits
    mighty and true, of him the True and Mighty.
    In the Trikadrukas he drank the Soma
    then in its rapture Indra slew the Dragon.

Now perhaps the LLMs can produce something which sounds lot like this, probably even in old Indic if they're trained enough on it.

But it will never have the allure of the old indic hymns, because there's no riddle to solve, no real riddle that the machine has hidden in the words. When reading the above hymn, whether in sanskrit or English, whether it's me or an indologist like Jamison or Watkins (who wrote "How to Kill a Dragon" on Indo-European poetics), we are trying to imagine the same thing the original writer had imagined.

In case of LLM, it's just a sequence of words that sounds cool. It may have no meaning.

You might find the reading list on my blog interesting, though it's more about long form articles than books.

https://mahesh-hegde.github.io/readings

I have built https://dhee.apratiratha.in (https://github.com/mahesh-hegde/dhee) with AI assistance.

It's a website to read and analyze the Rig-veda.

It's not fully "vibe coded" but lots and lots of AI usage.

SW:

- Architecting larger scale applications

- A project which is related to fundamentals (like compilers, OS) rather than run of the mill web development.

Not SW:

- Motorcycle internals and general repair skills

- Ancient sanskrit grammar

It's true that ancient Indians had some interesting insights into astronomy and natural sciences (recognizing the heliocentricity as early as the aitareya BrAhmaNa, and some ideas about electricity) and have some evidence about Indo-Aryan warfare being evolved with variety of weapons.

But it would sound like boomer uncles to claim that there is mention of space travel or nuclear weapons in our epics. The astra-s are simply figments of imagination.

I was surprised to see the mention of ritual drink of Vedic people.

It turns out to refer to a drug in fiction which is named after the Vedic ritual drink.

Original Vedic "soma" is indeed more like a drink of inspiration and ecstasy, with myths similar to the norse "Mead of poetry".

"somasya tA mada indraS cakAra" - "In the exhilaration of soma, Indra has done these great deeds" - is a rig-vedic refrain.

> You can reach Bangalore in an hour for most of things.

* Then it takes 2 hours to reach your office in Bangalore.

* It just postpones the actual problem. Gradually the tier-2 towns will get crowded too.

* It means your local tier-2 town won't develop, and economy will be centred at these metropolitons.

> I do have relatives who live in far villages and have not travelled and seen the world(In fact not travelled more than 100 km radius from place of birth)

This was literally where I grew up before I got education and become software engineer.

Its not a good thing and we should not glorify it.

Villagers in India are malnourished, the education is not upto par with cities, and the life is stagnant there. There's no opportunity to carve out your own niche or achieve glory in life.

oTOH, The metropolitons like Bengaluru or Delhi are highly populated and make life difficult unless you live inside a posh gated society. The competition there to get highest TC job and grind till you break down just to own a house is also not healthy. Not to even mention pollution and health hazards.

We should focus on developing tier-2 and tier-3 cities. They can be developed on par with western cities in cleanliness and infrastructure as long as we can keep the population density low.

Idk about the modern meaning of virtue but doesn't "virtus" in roman mean something like "bravery" and "manliness". (Probably cognate to sanskrit "vIryam"

You foreigners read first few paragraphs of wikipedia article about caste and never stopped talking about it.

In practice most of Brahmins have been peasant agriculturists, teachers and clerics for centuries, and temple priests have been deservedly pretty poor unless they also had inherited land.

The current PM of India is from what is considered as "other backward caste".

Just noting it, so that your overly reductive american journalism won't convince you that India is a feudalist society where 5% "temple staff" rule over the 95% peasants or whatever. The caste system is mostly limited to ritual avtism and some nepotism (which happens among boomers across all castes but younger ones don't care).

The kind of cope certain people come up with to justify the faults (and lack of basic living standards) of a civilization are insane.

India is not a "karma" society, India is a 'jugaad' society where everyone does just enough to get by. The lack of civilizational will power to fix things which slightly harm the entrenched elite is very well known. (case in point - the recent stray dogs issue where the life of common man was put in danger because some rich animal welfare aunties protested against it).

Thankfully Indian gen Z at least accepts these problems. Look at the memes on the gen Z spaces. Internet has let them know that living standards can be much better and other countries have risen from similar poverty levels. So there's some hope.

You can't keep doing this 'india is not for beginners' forever.

> people who shouldn't be talking about CS.

Dijkstra said computer science is about computers as much as astronomy is about telescopes.

I am not sure I agree with that, but it's definitely not about text editor choice.

I have a .vimrc file with LSPs and whatnot. But it was from 3 years back. These days I use VSCode and IntelliJ (depending on language) because they do so many things out of the box. I would say the choice of editor is the least consequential thing in one's understanding of "CS" and programming methodologies. On the other hand, using debuggers, profilers, monitoring tooling can have a real impact on how you solve some problems.

FWIW I would be skeptical of tech bros claiming they sped up 80% response time on microservice handling 5000000000 RPS. But I will be even more skeptical when they say "analyzed and implemented business requirements into maintainable and high performance code".

More generic, grandiose and oft-repeated someone's claims are, more skepticism is warranted.

Well, in this case, no one knows the technical details.

Please quantity those contributions in "technical management". Otherwise it sounds like a boilerplate excuse non technical people will use.

Because connections and social signalling matter more than ideas among the rich of the world. Only some people can get such disproportionate advantages.

What does one do to be considered as "driving force" et al?

> much more limited vocabulary

These days in my generation (Gen-Z) more youth watch movies and television series in English. Yet I find many of my more urbanized peers roll their eyes when I use a figure of speech i.e a metaphor.

In contrast, I picked up my language from technical books, blogs and documentation - and they sometimes find my choices of wording rather rude and insensitive.

I think I had to be more conscious about picking up the language because I did my early schooling in local language, and picked up reading English books on my own. For them it was natural in an urban environment. However, the urban english is "just enough" to get by. Since it is the "bureacratic" language (Indian schools too are as bureacratic as it can get), they had to be polite and standardized.

> However, as I understand, higher education is all conducted in English...

That english is way more limited, and higher education is way more mechanical than you folks have in the west.

> Is English language literature not widely read in school?

It depends on the quality of the education. I had the lower tier schooling (government-funded and similar). The English included is just rote-learned rather than understood - in high school we were expected to produce approximately same sentences as given in the textbooks, and any creativity in answers might lose grades!

There are better boards (school systems) like CBSE and ICSE, which are expensive and higher level. I have a few friends from ICSE who have much wider vocabulary than me. In the next generation, you will see Indians with better language skills, since most elite Indians now flock to these schooling systems.

Apparently this revert thing is common across Indian corporate, but non-existent in other places, eg: academia.

I am Indian and I was confused when I first saw that phrase in a corporate setting. Only revert I knew was git revert.

I know that that Vedics didn't have writing. But the runes and Vedic "brahman" (sacred verse) serve the similar magico-religious function. Odin is also associated with poetry.

> “taken together, they strongly indicate that Óðinn, although not exactly the same as the god that we know from the Nordic sources, has roots reaching far back in time, probably as early as the Indo-European era

A reader might be interested in Kris Creshaw's "The One-eyed god" which reiterates Odin's similarities with other Indo-european analogues, specifically Apollo and Vedic Rudra.

Indeed, much of the Odin's acts and characteristics find similarities in the deeds of Rudra or Indra in Vedic myth. The Vedics even had a conception of afterlife similar to Valhalla, where the most excellent people and fallen warriors reach Indra's realm, carried by Apsaras.

Indra is also god of sacred verse, "vipratamo kavinam", which is similar to odin mastering the runes, giving a dual priest-king and warrior king function.

The efficacy of "several great deeds" is emphasized for both. Eg: The Havāmal: "140. word following word, I found me words, deed following deed, I wrought deeds.". The Rig Veda (1.101.4) - Praised, he is firm at every deed of his.

These people all have cushy jobs already. You haven't seen how people optimize for TC in the Indian market. There's a certain scale after which petty dishonesty starts to have a bad impact on overall environment and turn it into low-trust.