Blog Posts

Being Human: An observation of the work culture around us

A manager at an Indian bank reportedly said this to an employee who was asked to give up their holidays to meet targets. When I read it, I didn’t feel shock. The pattern recognition part of my brain started to itch . Most managers will never say that sentence out loud. Plenty of workplaces are built on it anyway. Here’s a number to sit with: 83% of Indian IT professionals report burnout. That comes from a March 2025 survey by

Continue Reading

Taming LibreOffice’s Quadratic Table Layout in an RTF→PDF Pipeline

How we turned a conversion that couldn’t finish in 2 hours into a 4-minute job — with a 40-line preprocessing function, no new infrastructure, and no loss of fidelity. The symptom Our document pipeline converts statistical reporting output — RTF listings produced by SAS — into PDF and HTML using headless LibreOffice. It worked fine for years, until one class of files started blowing through a two-hour task timeout: Same size. Same producer (SAS). Same converter. Fewer pages in the slow

Continue Reading

How I Cut My OpenClaw Costs by 94% After Anthropic Killed Claude Subscriptions

The Problem: Anthropic Locks Out OpenClaw Users On April 4, 2026, Anthropic announced that Claude Pro and Max subscribers can no longer use their subscription with third-party AI agent frameworks like OpenClaw. If you want to keep using OpenClaw with Claude, you now need to pay separately through their “extra usage” pay-as-you-go billing — and users are reporting 10x to 50x cost increases compared to what they were paying before. Boris Cherny, Head of Claude Code at Anthropic, justified the move by saying “Anthropic’s subscriptions weren’t

Continue Reading

When thinking atrophies

Are you using GPT to think for you?  In the past, humans would think and machines would do the task. Now machines are thinking and humans are doing the task. Are we gladly giving away a part of what makes us human for a little bit of convenience or time saved?

Continue Reading

Adding a custom filter to Airflow logs

Recently I tried to add a custom logger for our Airflow deployment in kubernetes. Since we allow our logs to be shown to our customers we cannot have our secrets and other kubernetes config be shown to the users. On pod failure we get a dump of the entire pod config and that is what we want to remove today Note: Our logs are sent to S3 and remote logging is enabled for our version of airflow 2.5.0, so whatever

Continue Reading

Site Footer

Sliding Sidebar

About Me

About Me

Hey, I am Thomas Ashish Cherian. What I cannot create, I do not understand.

Social Profiles