Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Nov 28, 2025 Fri, 28 Nov 2025 14:47:37 GMT
A rounded dark banner with a star-filled background. At the center is the nihil.codes pixel-style logo with the text ‘Audacious Experiments’ and a link below that says ‘Explore the Lab →.'

My site has a fun new interactive banner to show off nihil.codes. Take a look :)

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Nov 28, 2025 Fri, 28 Nov 2025 14:36:02 GMT
A dark futuristic homepage of nihil.codes with a starry sky and a 3D wireframe terrain. The nihil.codes pixel-style logo appears on the left. Center cards highlight two projects—Jottings.me (microblogging) and Meld (gradient generator). Below them are palette and style toggles, with dark/light mode options and footer links.

nihil.codes has a new skin! Completely redesigned with threejs. Take a look!

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Oct 27, 2025 Mon, 27 Oct 2025 14:23:23 GMT

Sugar withdrawal is quite something.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Oct 22, 2025 Wed, 22 Oct 2025 05:49:22 GMT

Apple Music needs a Picture-in-Picture mode for Live Lyrics.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Oct 20, 2025 Mon, 20 Oct 2025 07:15:31 GMT
An screenshot showing AWS Health page with an issue impacting multiple services.

After all that networking wrangling, DynamoDB being down in us-east-1 gave me a minor-panic.

Update: AWS says there are issues with multiple services. There goes my morning's productivity streak!

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Oct 20, 2025 Mon, 20 Oct 2025 05:04:32 GMT

Spent two tense days wrangling a complex Cloudflare–AWS networking setup. Multiple customer-owned hosted zones converging into a single SaaS domain with automated verification, certificate provisioning, and dynamic routing. Claude Code came through this morning. Impressed.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Oct 17, 2025 Fri, 17 Oct 2025 13:12:15 GMT
I've been thinking

I've been thinking. Seating, in general, sucks! More thoughts will follow.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Oct 8, 2025 Wed, 08 Oct 2025 04:38:18 GMT

Do hyphens, en dashes, and em dashes pose a fundamentally contradictory challenge to monospace font designers?

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Oct 7, 2025 Tue, 07 Oct 2025 08:56:47 GMT

It's genuinely good food when it doesn't allow you to be bothered by how shitty the place is.

Rahul's (my brother) insightful yardstick.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Oct 7, 2025 Tue, 07 Oct 2025 08:53:09 GMT

Apple’s Spatial Scene does again what Live Photos did for photos: adds another dimension to memories.

Only gripe: mirrors break the illusion. Reflections stay flat, glitching like a game whose graphics engine is just slightly off.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Sep 28, 2025 Sun, 28 Sep 2025 04:44:59 GMT

Some movies fade once you “know.” The genius of Arrival is that rewatching it isn't redundancy. Every viewing becomes an act of homage that mirrors the film's own architecture.

Those who know, know.

The short story it is loosely based on—Story of Your Life, although quite different from the movie, is also worth a read.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Sep 22, 2025 Mon, 22 Sep 2025 11:23:59 GMT

AutoMix on iOS 26 Apple Music is surprisingly very good!

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Sep 22, 2025 Mon, 22 Sep 2025 05:55:13 GMT

Claude Code requires extra instructions and hooks to do documentation lookups for swift/iOS frameworks. It constantly fails to check typealiases, misses braces when refactoring, and needs to be shown the newer way to do things, given how swift and iOS changes each year. For now, I have made it map out common pitfalls into a file so it doesn't keep failing, looking up repeatedly, and fixing for the same things. For any parameter or type outside of this map, it does a documentation search before proceeding.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Sep 15, 2025 Mon, 15 Sep 2025 13:43:02 GMT

A pedestrian-friendly horn would go a long way in India. Sure, reducing honking is the real fix. But inside AC cars, horns are muffled; outside, they're deafening. The class divide echoes loudest in decibels.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Sep 15, 2025 Mon, 15 Sep 2025 06:53:06 GMT
Live Activity on macOS 26 shows Zomato food order arriving in 14 minutes with a scooter rider icon.

Live activities on Mac is a welcome addition

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Sep 13, 2025 Sat, 13 Sep 2025 17:22:44 GMT
Screenshot of an iPhone running iOS 26 showing the new glass interface effect with chromatic aberration. The blurred overlay with rainbow fringes distorts part of a blog page titled ‘Entropy and Intelligence: A Personal Manifesto’ by Vishal V. Shekkar. The glass panel also displays iOS controls like a flashlight and camera shortcut, emphasizing the colorful edge refraction effect.

Color fringes, refractions, and distortions. Beautiful chromatic aberrations on iOS 26!

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Sep 9, 2025 Tue, 09 Sep 2025 06:24:33 GMT

Hipster breakfast 101: watermelon & cantaloupe cofermented coffee + dill pickle seasoned dosa.

Breakfast is now a think piece.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 28, 2025 Thu, 28 Aug 2025 07:14:25 GMT

And yet, as the world changes, I am neither stuck in time nor rushing to catch the first wagon. I prefer to stand with one foot forward and the other lingering behind. In that spread, in that gradient, there is a kind of depth—holding context from what was while venturing into what is becoming. It brings with it discomfort, the ache of missing what once was, but that is simply the cost of change.

Remembering is how we soften that cost, how we keep the past alive even as we move forward.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 28, 2025 Thu, 28 Aug 2025 06:59:39 GMT

Taking a flight has always felt like one of the last rituals of the human condition where disconnection was still possible. There is something quietly bittersweet about it. The last texts sent, the goodbye calls made, the soft “I will miss yous” offered before the world slips out of reach. Then comes the waiting: loved ones tracking your path across the sky, sending their messages only when they imagine you’ve landed, when they believe you’ve found your signal again. For a few suspended hours, life allows a rare interlude, an enforced distance, a pocket of solitude in an always-available world.

But with the spread of onboard Wi-Fi, even this gentle distance, this small modern human ritual of absence, is beginning to vanish.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 28, 2025 Thu, 28 Aug 2025 05:42:22 GMT

I wrote about a man I saw on the streets, walking by himself, enjoying an ice cream. We shared a quick glance and a smile. It's a quick one. Read below.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 26, 2025 Tue, 26 Aug 2025 04:54:38 GMT

When I was little, our 40-year-old house felt haunted in ways only a child can believe. If anything so much as shifted or creaked on its own, I'd freeze in terror. My mother reminded me of that today, as we sat in the very same house, now older and renovated but still full of memory. She looked at the robot vacuum gliding across the floor and said, “Isn't it strange? Back then, an object moving by itself was the scariest thing. Now it's just everyday life.” In her words was the weight of a whole generation of change.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 25, 2025 Mon, 25 Aug 2025 05:38:01 GMT
An image showing about 9 bags of coffee from CoRo, Moonwake, Coffee and Water Lan, and Hydrangea roasters on a black Ikea stand with grass at the background. All beans are sourced from the americas.

Latest coffee haul from the americas!

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 21, 2025 Thu, 21 Aug 2025 09:08:05 GMT

AI coding tools are the new LEGO for adults. They are so much fun, and have truly shortened the gratification loop for hobby projects!

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 20, 2025 Wed, 20 Aug 2025 05:14:38 GMT
A terminal styled window showing a hashed file name for main.css and main.js

Jottings.me now supports cache-busting and custom tags in headers!

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 19, 2025 Tue, 19 Aug 2025 16:23:39 GMT

Some people buy land, some others buy domain names.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 19, 2025 Tue, 19 Aug 2025 04:34:58 GMT

There’s a quiet joy in a product that feels right in your hand—solid, balanced, with just the right heft.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 16, 2025 Sat, 16 Aug 2025 16:30:57 GMT

(3/3) At the foundation are two levers: compute and the supply chain that feeds it—energy, water, bandwidth, silicon. Models will commoditize; differentiation shifts to orchestration, data, and the scale and efficiency of compute. In industrial-revolution terms, more compute is simply a larger labor force—only this time, the workers are digital.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 16, 2025 Sat, 16 Aug 2025 16:25:40 GMT

(2/3) That moment marks the birth of an AI-native operating system—AIOS. The intelligence allocates and controls compute across local devices and the networked cloud. Interfaces stop being fixed artifacts. Each “OS” is generated for the person using it, shaped by their goals and the resources at hand—not by a handful of vendors or a static FOSS baseline. Hyper-local. Hyper-personal. Whatever the user needs, within what the system can supply.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 16, 2025 Sat, 16 Aug 2025 16:23:10 GMT

(1/3) The era of live, fully AI-generated app experiences is close. You state an intent; the system comprehends it, plans the work, queries and fuses data from many sources, and responds in whatever form fits best—text, voice, visuals, or something new. Caching won’t just store outputs. It will preserve entire execution graphs: the plan, the data stitching, and the interface itself.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 16, 2025 Sat, 16 Aug 2025 08:16:14 GMT

Do you want a personal microblog just like mine? Jottings.me is live! 🚀

Reach out to me to reserve your username and get your own microblog!

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 15, 2025 Fri, 15 Aug 2025 06:39:58 GMT

Jottings now emits 3 feeds! Follow for updates! RSS 2.0: /rss.xml Atom 1.0: /atom.xml JSON Feed: /feed.json

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 15, 2025 Fri, 15 Aug 2025 06:01:59 GMT

You can’t be a market purist and anti–walled gardens. Pick a lane. Enclosure, lock-in, and moats are features of unchecked capitalism, not bugs.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 14, 2025 Thu, 14 Aug 2025 16:28:53 GMT
Me holding a plate of Mysore masala dosa right outside Vaibhav Food Canopy, Mysore.

15 years of Vaibhav Food Canopy and I'm still convinced they make the best Mysore style masala dosas on the planet. Seriously life-making stuff.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 14, 2025 Thu, 14 Aug 2025 16:21:02 GMT
App icon of NextHub

NextHub v1.1.1 is out! Finally has support for dark and tinted icons along with the default light icon

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 14, 2025 Thu, 14 Aug 2025 12:26:53 GMT

Record player ✔️ Film cameras ✔️ Theremin (🤞🏼soon) My transformation into peak analog aesthetic is proceeding exactly as the algorithm predicted.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 14, 2025 Thu, 14 Aug 2025 05:23:04 GMT

Klein bottles are even cooler!

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 14, 2025 Thu, 14 Aug 2025 05:21:59 GMT

Möbius strips are cool!

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 13, 2025 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 18:36:40 GMT

Straight roads are for getting somewhere; winding roads are for living.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 13, 2025 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 18:21:39 GMT
A screenshot of the Live Logs header section of the ControlHub app.

ControlHub v1.1.0 is now live on the App Store! Biggest new feature: Live logs! 🚀 Download on the App Store

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 13, 2025 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 17:55:04 GMT
Soft pastel gradient background with blurred circles of pink, orange, teal, yellow, and green blending into each other. Generated on Meld.

Check out Meld. It's a dynamic, multi-parameter, random mesh gradient generator built for grins and giggles. Works on browsers except Safari. Make as many wallpapers as you want! Check it out at meld.nihil.codes

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 13, 2025 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 16:16:36 GMT

Meet Jottings: my tiny corner of the internet for quick thoughts. My own microblogging platform, if you will. No likes. No retweets. No trending hashtags. No algorithm trying to engage you. No performative threads. No strangers screaming into my timeline.

Just me, jotting down whatever crosses my mind. The only echo chamber here is my own—and I like it that way.

Think of it as my blog Musings' scrappy younger sibling—shorter, sharper, and with no filter.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 13, 2025 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 15:54:10 GMT

What's even better is having a team of subagents on claude ranging from architects, product spec managers, specific technology exprts, debuggers, auditors, network engineers, and more, each specifically configured to use Opus or Sonnet based on need.

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 13, 2025 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 14:15:19 GMT
A screenshot of the Terminal app on Mac running Claude code in the model selection mode. The selection options now contain the new "Opus Plan Mode"

Claude code's Opus Plan Mode is a welcome addition!

Jottings of Vishal
Jottings of Vishal
@vishalvshekkar
Aug 13, 2025 Wed, 13 Aug 2025 12:55:36 GMT

Hello, world!