FIELD NOTE / Media Infra
The hidden 6 MB Lambda trap: compression after the limit is too late
Why API Gateway compression can make large responses look safe in testing, then still fail when Lambda enforces the raw payload limit first.
Read the noteEngineering notes from building VideoDB systems and AI agents.
Notes on video infrastructure, retrieval, streaming, editing, research, side projects, and agents from the team building VideoDB.
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Operations
Stop paying the TCP/TLS tax: connection pooling for Python services
Replacing bare requests calls with a shared session is not glamorous. It is table stakes for production services that call the same hosts repeatedly.
Frontend Performance
One CORS header that removed hundreds of milliseconds from repeated API calls
A practical note on preflight caching, custom auth headers, and why OPTIONS requests quietly dominate app latency on slower connections.
Operations
A Postgres backup is not real until you restore it
A short operational checklist for dump validation, restore drills, row checks, and the habits that make backups useful under pressure.
Build Systems
How we made Python ML containers smaller and faster to deploy
Slim bases, same-layer cleanup, CPU-only PyTorch, pinned wheels, and the unglamorous work of keeping deploys fast.
newsletter
Newsletter / Video agents · model watch · VideoDB updates
The VideoDB Dispatch #001
Agents are turning work into video. Plus model watch, Gemini video-understanding research, and VideoDB updates.
research
Research archive
Research at the edge of video, vision-language models, and agents.
Published work, preprints, talks, research references, and exploratory research projects from the VideoDB team. More will be added here as they are shared.
arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.11177 / 2026/4/13
Do Thought Streams Matter? Evaluating Reasoning in Gemini Vision-Language Models for Video Scene Understanding
Benchmarks how internal reasoning traces affect video scene understanding in Gemini models, including where quality gains plateau and how tight budgets increase compression-step hallucination.
Read on arXivarXiv preprint arXiv:2502.06445 / 2025/2/10
Benchmarking Vision-Language Models on Optical Character Recognition in Dynamic Video Environments
Introduces an open-source benchmark for evaluating VLMs on OCR tasks in dynamic video environments across 1,477 manually annotated frames.
Read on arXivSystems 9(3), 53 / 2021/7/13
Modeling the Spread and Control of COVID-19
Presents an agent-based extension of epidemic modeling for confined spaces, comparing black-box and glass-box views while simulating lockdowns, social distancing, hygiene, quarantine, and hospitalization policies.
Read on MDPIIEEE Transactions on Computational Social Systems 5(1), 277–288 / 2018/1/17
Agent-Based Modeling of Emergency Evacuations Considering Human Panic Behavior
Models emergency evacuations with agents whose panic behavior is shaped by psychological and physical factors, then uses simulations to identify bottlenecks and compare evacuation strategies.
Read on IEEE XplorePyCon India talk / 2015
Solving Logical Puzzles with Natural Language Processing
A practical talk that starts from rule-based NLP features and WordNet, then motivates distributed word representations and deep learning for solving logical puzzles from natural language.
Watch on YouTubeResearch archive / Ongoing
Chitrakāvya
Rebuilds Sanskrit picture-poems as computational artefacts, connecting śloka, geometry, knight's tours, palindromes, and early algorithmic thinking.
Visit archiveResearch blog / Ongoing
Emergence
Explores multi-agent systems, collective intelligence, alignment, swarm behavior, and computational models of consciousness.
Visit blogside projects
VideoDB Side Projects
Small projects and experiments from the team.
Utilities, creative experiments, and independent projects built by people on the VideoDB team.
By Ashish
Cool QR Codes Studio
A no-login QR code studio for turning links or text into customizable, export-ready QR codes with scanability checks.
Visit project →
By Ashish
makememes.site
A code-first video meme generator built around reusable templates, a meme bank, custom text overlays, and VideoDB-powered source videos.
Visit project →