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Gaurav

https://gsood.com

Hardware‑Attested Ad Insertion for Encrypted Video

WhatsApp’s defining security property—end‑to‑end encryption (E2EE)—removes the server’s ability to inspect or modify message content. This essay lays out a technically concrete path to extend monetization to some person‑to‑person video inventory without moving decryption server‑side by combining: * on‑device ad insertion

Out-of-Context: Constrained Tool Based Exploration of Context

Longer context windows have not eliminated long‑context failure. In practice, adding more tokens often makes models less reliable. Anthropic summarizes “context rot” as recall degrading as context length increases. Operationally, recall on search tasks doesn't go down much. However, as context becomes longer, models struggle when the

When the Fix Is Another Distortion: Quotas as Second-Best Engineering

Chattopadhyay and Duflo (2004) (hereafter C&D) contains a formal model that builds a world where a striking normative implication becomes possible: “welfare” (in the paper’s narrow sense) can rise when you ban half the people from running for office. The paper says this pretty directly: “...reservation may

First, Assume No Elections

Dixit, Grossman, and Gul (2000), hereafter DGG, study a setting in which two groups repeatedly divide a fixed surplus over an infinite horizon. The basic setup is as follows: * Two groups, $A$ and $B$, each with concave utility over their share of a pie normalized to 1. * In each period,

Targeted Model Editing

Pretrained generative models (LLMs, text-to-image, etc.) are used as general-purpose engines and then "aligned" toward specific goals: lower toxicity, higher truthfulness, removal of certain objects or styles, domain specialization, and so on. In practice, we rarely want to rebuild the whole model. The real objective is more surgical.

Shipping Fuzzy‑Joined Data

A growing share of empirical work relies on "data products" that integrate multiple administrative and survey sources via fuzzy joins. Researchers typically receive only the final merged panel and treat each cell as if it were directly observed. But upstream, the data producer has made substantive decisions—how

Chaotic Flows: LLMs in Low‑Tolerance Workflows

When you add an LLM to a workflow, you change both the upside and the downside. The net effect is easiest to express as a shift in the workflow's value: $$ \Delta \text{Value} = \Delta \text{Benefit} - N \sum_i f_i \cdot \Delta p_i \cdot L_

Stable LLM Inference

A mathematical function gives the same output for the same input. LLMs do not. Not even at temperature = 0. Determinism matters for reproducibility, debugging, and for keeping pipelines stable. Without it, identical prompts can yield divergent completions, making experiments irreproducible and systems brittle. We can intervene at three broad layers

Identifying Assumptions

One of the reasons why I specifically look at Muslims is, as compared to other marginalized groups in India—let’s say the Scheduled Castes or the Scheduled Tribes—is primarily because there have been political reservation norms for the Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. There is a plethora of