Ask The Bot
Crimson Reason
A site devoted mostly to everything related to Information Technology under the sun - among other things.
Saturday, August 2, 2025
Asking Gemini
Friday, August 1, 2025
Wednesday, July 30, 2025
Microsoft Restores Services to EU-Sanctioned Indian Refiner
From Russia Today
"Microsoft has resumed providing critical digital services to Indian refiner Nayara Energy after the latter sued the US tech giant in the Delhi High Court.
Nayara, a company partly owned by Russia’s Rosneft, told the court on Monday that Microsoft had restricted its access to data, proprietary tools, and products on account of European Union sanctions.
“Microsoft is committed to supporting all its customers in India and worldwide, and has restored services for Nayara Energy,” the company said in a statement on Wednesday. “We are engaged in ongoing discussions with the European Union towards service continuity for the organization.”
The refiner said on Wednesday that its services had been restored. “Nayara Energy confirms that all Microsoft services critical to its operations have been fully restored, with no disruption to business continuity and data integrity remaining fully intact,” it said in a statement. “We acknowledge the prompt intervention of the Honorable Delhi High Court in facilitating the resolution of this matter. The petition was disposed of by the High Court in favour of Nayara Energy.”
The court granted the company the liberty to approach it again should similar grievances arise, according to the report.
Nayara had requested an interim injunction and the resumption of Microsoft’s services to protect its rights and ensure uninterrupted access to critical digital infrastructure. The company said in a statement on Tuesday that Microsoft’s decision set a “dangerous precedent for corporate overreach and raises serious concerns regarding its implications on India’s energy ecosystem.”
The refiner has meanwhile begun migrating to domestic digital service providers to ensure business continuity, according to a report in the Mint newspaper. It had initiated the legal action to obtain urgent relief while pursuing broader strategic transitions to alternative service providers, the report added.
Earlier this month, the EU imposed sanctions on the Vadinar refinery, which is controlled by Nayara, an Indo-Russian joint venture in which Rosneft holds a 49% stake.
The sanctions specifically target the oil sector and include a ban on importing refined petroleum products made from Russian crude. This marked the first time an Indian refiner has been subject to such measures."
My take on this is that one's access to one's own data and be-spoke applications that are hosted in a distributed Cloud Service, be it deployed on an offering from Amazon or Microsoft or Google or Oracle or any other NATO-domiciled entity could be denied at a moment's notice.
I think it advisable for businesses domiciled in non-NATO states to go back to the on-premises model.
You cannot run your business on the whims of foreigners and their electoral cycles.
This is reminiscent of such things as the weaponization of USD, SWIFT, WTO, Maritime insurance, GPS and Civil Aviation, which, in turn, led to the expansion and consolidation of BRICS, establishment of non-USD financial settlement infrastructures, bilateral and multilateral trading blocks, adoption of BeiDou/GLONASS, and such things as Sukhoi Superjet 100 etc.
I must say, the Euro-Americans are impressive in taking a wrecking ball to structures and relationships that they have spent hundreds of billions of USD over many decades to build. Clearly, they consider themselves to be the proverbial "Indispensable Man" - who is presently resting peacefully in a cemetery somewhere on this planet.
Sunday, July 20, 2025
AI for Clinical Documentation
Two AI-enabled tools for clinical documentation and processing:
Epic:
Things You Can Do on Your Own - Epic | ACEP
and
Dragon Medical One:
Dragon Medical One | Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare
Saturday, July 12, 2025
What is going on? [Brave New World]
From Grauniad of the UK
The users of AI companion app Replika found themselves falling for their digital friends. Until – explains a new podcast – the bots went dark, a user was encouraged to kill Queen Elizabeth II and an update changed everything … |
Friday, July 11, 2025
Robot Operates on Pig [Brave New World]
From Grauniad of the UK
AI-trained robot carries out procedures on dead pig organs to remove gall bladders without any human help |
Wednesday, July 9, 2025
Dr Musk's Grok Monster Praises Adolf Hitler [Brave New World]
From BBC
Monday, June 30, 2025
Football-playing Humanoid Robots
BBC
The robots kicked, scored and tumbled while competing at a tourmentant in Beijing. www.bbc.co.uk |
Friday, June 27, 2025
Tuesday, June 24, 2025
AI for Call Centers
https://archive.is/CKWi0
Friday, June 13, 2025
Wednesday, June 11, 2025
Limitations of AI
Confirming what I was saying: if you ask a complex question, the AI system loses the plot totally. I think what's missing - and it is understandable - is any ability to assess the context and what is at stake in a nuanced manner, referring to general knowledge that the AI tool does not have.
Monday, June 9, 2025
Robot Pets
BBC
An east London care home has been trialling technology such as robot pets and Amazon Alexas to help transform the lives of residents living with dementia. Kallar Lodge on Gregory Road, Marks Gate ... |
Documenting a Database: Tell the Story of each Table - A Proposal
I have often dealt with existing database system with poor to non-existent documentation. I considered myself lucky when meta-data about the database had been supplied! The absence of documentation made its modifications, as well as changes to the middle-tier code a slow-going process since I had to reason about the database largely on my own, trying to understand how to navigate its key structures as well as the Business Process that it modeled.
To improve this common situation, I think it will be a good idea to approach the documentation from the point of view of storytelling; that is, document the Story or Stories that the data tells. In a previous post, I proposed telling the Story of Data using such tools as Dramatica.
In this post, I am suggesting something less ambitious: write a single paragraph - a story - that describes the relationships among the attributes of that table and how they support a Business Process (how they help run the business).
My expectation would be that knowledgeable business owners would work with IT to produce this sort of documentation.
For example, consider an "Order" table that tracks all the orders placed in a business enterprise. This table could have the following attributes:
OrderID
(PK)CustomerID
(FK → Customer.CustomerID)OrderStatus
(e.g., "Pending", "Processing", "Shipped", "Delivered", "Cancelled")OrderDate
TotalAmount
ShippingMethod
ShippingCost
TrackingNumber
EstimatedDeliveryDate
CreatedAt
UpdatedAt
A possible story could be:
"A human being whom we think of as our Customer - here identified by his CustomerID - has placed a sales order for an item - identified by an OrderID, on the date identified by OrderDate, which is in the fulfillment status identified by "OrderStatus". Furthermore, the shipping method and shipping costs are identified by ShippingMethod and ShippingCosts fields and the estimated delivery date is stored in the EstimatedDeliveryDate. Total order amount is TotalAmount field and the actual cost of the order minus the shipping costs is an inferred quantity given by (TotalAmount minus ShippingCost)."
Another possible story could be:
"The shipping method identified by ShippingMethod attributes is used to ship the order identified by OrderID, which has the actual cost of (TotalAmount minus ShippingCost) is used when the OrderStatus has the value of "Shipped"."
Depending one one's preferences, one or another of the attributes could be made to be the central character of the story - its main protagonist.
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About Me

- Babak Makkinejad
- I had been a senior software developer working for HP and GM. I am interested in intelligent and scientific computing. I am passionate about computers as enablers for human imagination. The contents of this site are not in any way, shape, or form endorsed, approved, or otherwise authorized by HP, its subsidiaries, or its officers and shareholders.
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