Vishnu Santhosh – Engineer, Writer, Technologist, YouTuber

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Latest — 02 Sep 2025

Stop using YouTube like a Caveman

If you’re still dragging your mouse just to pause or rewind, you’re bleeding seconds of your life. And seconds add up. Hours gone - not from watching videos, but from using YouTube the slow way. Here’s the secret: hit SHIFT + ? That opens YouTube’s hidden shortcut menu.

More issues

LinkedTime: Free Tool to See the Original Date of Any LinkedIn Post in Seconds

I’ve been posting on LinkedIn for the past two years. When I tried to move some of my best posts to this site, I hit a roadblock. LinkedIn doesn’t show the original publishing date for older posts. For content creators, recruiters, and researchers, this is a real pain.

The Pandora’s Box.

In celebration of World Photography Day 2025, the Department of Communication, University of Hyderabad (UoH), organized a campus-wide photography contest for all photography lovers. It ended with a vibrant photo exhibition on campus from August 19–23. I submitted one of the most ridiculous memories from 2019 - our all-night

The Guy With A Book.

A small story from my last flight. The plane had just landed. The guy two rows ahead of me shut his book. Slipped it into his bag. I only caught a one-second glimpse. Yellowish-orange cover. Bold black letters in ALL CAPS. Two rows. Short words. Something like: DO / DON’T

Android users, listen up !

Here’s a hidden Android trick that cleaned up my messy gallery - without deleting a single file. I’m a screenshot person. The fastest way for me to save something is a quick 45-degree swipe to screenshot. I use it for everything. It helps me avoid the context switch

Beyond Instructions: GPT-5’s An AI Upgrade You Didn’t Ask For.

GPT-5 I’d call it a Mixed-Fruit Jam. Because right now, OpenAI is losing ~$2.25 for every $1 they earn. Unit economics? Broken. So they’ve reached for an old playbook - the Free Candy strategy: Hand out incredible features for cheap or free, make you dependent. Slowly fence

The Red Nub Problem

Some designs are so good, they last decades. Others are so good… they vanish. Think of the manual transmission in cars, Vim in coding, or tiling window managers on Linux. They have a learning curve, yes - but once you’ve mastered them, they’re faster, cleaner, and more precise

From Commands to Collaboration

With older LLMs, prompts were like precise commands to a stubborn child. But modern models, like the new GPT-4o, behave more like collaborators. They work better when given them: The why (background) The how (examples) The goal (framing) Why the shift? The expanded context window (128K+ tokens) allows deeper understanding.

A Modern Tortoise Story

JPEG didn’t start as the Internet’s favorite. In the early days, NCSA Mosaic - one of the first web browsers - only supported GIFs. But by 1995, JPEG slipped into Netscape… and never looked back. So, why did that happen? Because it aged gracefully. Unlike GIFs, which fall

You Need Much Less Knowledge Than Time.

For years, I thought I had to collect every fact, every note, every detail - just in case. But no matter how much I stored, I still felt overwhelmed. Always behind. Until I realized: “I was storing everything. But I never had time to actually use it.” Output doesn'