Kiran Rao

Mobile app developer @ Somnox

Website: https://kiranrao.in
GitHub: https://github.com/curioustechizen

Last Notes

2026-08-14 10:53:56 UTC

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what are you talking about? You're a Founder, CEO, CTO and employee all rolled into one, of a startup. I shall not accept any objections to that statement.

2026-06-11 02:41:33 UTC

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related: This also shows in what potential employees look for in a company. The biggest lie an engineer or manager is fed early on is that "scale" = "impact". Engineers get on stage proudly touting their billion scale product. It doesn't matter that the scale is basically putting pixels in front of people to squeeze ads out of them. It doesn't matter that often that scale is because of monopoly (people are not using those products out of choice).

2026-03-19 12:42:36 UTC

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now what happens is a batch of tasks is released at some random time and it is first come first work on it. So freelancers scramble to work on it. Even though they're paid by the hour, they try to complete tasks quickly because that way they get more tasks.
Quality is down the drain. AI annotation companies don't even care. People with decades of experience are competing against college students.
It is a very depressing situation.

2026-03-19 12:38:29 UTC

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oh this AI training space is such a mess. My wife is into linguistics for Indic languages. Initially there were lots of tasks that paid well. The task was also interesting (RLHF etc).
Then AI training companies stopped caring about quality. Tasks dried out. Within a year, pay dropped to 1/3rd of the original.
They started pitching freelancers against each other. They would have huge talent pools (hundreds of freelancers)
[Continued ... ]

2026-02-21 04:20:17 UTC

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absolutely. One parent was like "Madam my son doesn't say his morning prayers in the pooja room. It would be nice if you could call in the morning and monitor. He doesn't listen if I scold him".
I mean ... Whatt??!! Don't teachers have their own personal lives? These are the same people who mindlessly chant "Acharya drvo bhava" and then treat teachers with scant respect.

2026-02-20 17:27:10 UTC

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after attending a few Parents Teachers meetings at my kids' school (mind you this is in a Tier 3 town), I've come to the conclusion that parents are the reason the education system in India isn't where it ought to be.
Parents literally pressured the teachers into increasing the homework load because "otherwise the kids spend their time doom-scrolling". As if the teachers are responsible for handing the*₹ single-digit age kids a mobile phone!

2026-02-09 02:14:16 UTC

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I feel they're also playing on the lack of a network among translation professionals. I wonder if organizing a union or other such network would help. For example some platforms have hundreds of freelancers on their rolls. When a task comes in they unleash like 200 tasks on a first come first serve basis. This creates competition and distrust between the talents and benefits the platforms.
Has this been your experience too for English-Hindi and Hindi-English?

2026-02-09 02:05:52 UTC

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my wife does all kinds of Kannada language roles (translations, voice overs, QA of existing work etc) on various freelance platforms. The quality of incoming AI generated work that she needs to review is appalling. Businesses seem to have given up on quality. They'll accept anything that is AI generated. This has the additional benefit for them that they can offer dirt cheap rates ($3-4 per hour, and even for high quality voice that requires a professional studio, $10 per hour)

2025-12-28 17:35:07 UTC

That is quite a read: Penpot's AI Whitepaper: https://penpot.app/blog/penpot-ai-whitepaper/
As with everything else they've done, @npub1rfc…7tmz has yet again taken the road less traveled!