How to Raise a Genius: Lessons from a 45-Year Study of Supersmart Children Pioneering mathematicians Terence Tao and Lenhard Ng were one-percenters, as were Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and musician Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga), who all passed throu … | Continue reading
I’ve had Perplexity Pro for over a month now and I’ve dived deep into it. I’ve made it my primary search engine on my computer’s Chrome browser. I’ve downloaded their Mac and iOS apps and given them a prominent place on my digital yard. I’ve started using it for every search unde … | Continue reading
I struggle to journal or otherwise write privately: I don’t find myself a worthy audience. Source: se acercan tiempos oscuros (el finde) | yours, tiramisu This is what I struggle with too. I feel like people who are successful at journaling every day must really enjoy being told … | Continue reading
I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do a Novel writing month, but I have signed up for writingmonth.org with the idea that I want to write at least 10,000 words in my journal (this blog counts) and another 10,000 words at least for office work. For office work, I’ll only count wor … | Continue reading
Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Go … | Continue reading
My MacBook is getting very tired so I want to mainly use it for music to get the most life out of it. Source: Colin Walker – Sep 9, 2024 Say, Colin, doesn’t it make sense to try to get base Linux on your MacBook? I’ve heard people say it really gives a new […] | Continue reading
I’ve owned a Steam Deck since April – a birthday gift I deeply desired. In the first few months, I fired up the old favorite of Counter Strike and figured out what else out of my 100 game Steam collection is playable on the Deck. But I couldn’t figure out one thing – what’s the [ … | Continue reading
“I’m really concerned about you.” This is how my wife started the conversation the other day, as she sat in the car. I didn’t know how to proceed, but blood rushed to my face, unsure but embarrassed. “What happened?” “These videos you keep watching… You really need to stop. Go ba … | Continue reading
Here’s another book reading update, since nothing else is happening in my life other than, you know, living life. I finished In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust and immediately realized something was wrong. See, when I track an audiobook in StoryGraph, I do it by percentage c … | Continue reading
Finished listening to Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa yesterday. It’s a sad little story but it’s got its highs and lows. There’s some meta-book discussion, since the story revolves around a used-book store and therefore, used books. There’s even (I think) a who … | Continue reading
Last night I came across a ListenLater.net which has an interesting value proposition – send them text or the link to an article and they’ll convert it into a podcast using AI TTS. The podcast link will be public so you can use it in your favorite podcast player, which is such a … | Continue reading
I’ve started liking Mastodon. After the fall of Twitter, I basically took a break from most interactive social media. Consume, Build, Live. That’s what I was focusing on. Now it feels like I’m ready to Talk again and Mastodon feels like the place to do it. Not a fan of the defaul … | Continue reading
Source: Summaries, Custom Article Actions, Obsidian… I’m glad to be paying for Instapaper. It’s a solid service that works beautifully! I’m glad that after years of banging around uncaring owners, it’s self-owned now, because it can finally work on user-centric features! It’s lau … | Continue reading
I use Obsidian on a daily basis for my office work and frequently for personal notes. Recently, my brother discovered Obsidian and we started talking about setup and usage. So here’s my Obsidian setup, for his reference and mine – My office Obsidian syncs with Google Drive. This … | Continue reading
At the beginning of this year, I thought I’ll get going on two goals – Reading more often, Writing more often For the second goal, I setup a secret public facing blog using the Ghost blogging platform. I tried posting something daily, with the idea being that I’ll just put the ti … | Continue reading
What an absolute shitshow of a book. I went in with great expectations. The first chapter gave me even greater expectations. So much so that even before I was done with that chapter, I had ordered a physical copy of the book from Half Price Books for future reference and rereadin … | Continue reading
I mentioned before that I’m listening to Jenny Odell’s book “How to do Nothing” before. Well, slowly, I’ve inched towards closing Chapter 2. At first, I was irritated by the chapter. After a wonderful chapter 1 where she talked about the Ethics of Care and Deleuze and how she’s b … | Continue reading
I’m really loving listening to Jenny Odell’s How to do Nothing. It’s an insightful book and a pleasure to read. I didn’t go into it thinking of philosophy, but then midway in the first chapter, she starts quoting Deleuze and talking about the Ethics of Care and that’s just perfec … | Continue reading
Yesterday was the first time in the year that I read a percentage point of a book just so I don’t lose my streak. I was tired, needed to get some work done, am currently in between ebooks. So I just picked up a random fantasy novel from Libby and read a few pages of […] | Continue reading
I find it really, really funny that this Nautilus article starts by using some Physics theory to kill Planet Nine and pivots midway to killing Dark Matter. That’s quite the leap! If MOND is correct, dark matter doesn’t exist. Source: The Controversial Gravity Theory MOND Versus D … | Continue reading
I love reading folk classics. They’re simple yet so eloquent. This one was no different. There are some life lessons, some drama, some awesome supernatural elements. It even has a whole thing about filial piety and honoring your ancestors. I only saw this before in the Indian con … | Continue reading
Loved listening to the audiobook. Such an engaging story! With a series of different characters. Loved that the motivations behind the characters was also different than just “being good” or “being bad”. There’s never a need to boil down characters to such base levels. | Continue reading
I started the year with a random fun challenge. StoryGraph hosted a January challenge which simply stated that if you read 1 page of a book or listen to 1% of an audiobook every day of the first month, you get entered into a draw for prizes. I didn’t win (and they handled the ann … | Continue reading
but I don’t think I would like to make my blog mainly about conversing with others Meadow over at their blog I respect that. I follow hundreds of blogs, exactly what Meadow is musing about not doing. But I don’t converse with them all, and certainly not on my blog. My blog sits i … | Continue reading
We went in hoping for an action packed TV show with loads of fun intrigue and fight sequences. We were disappointed. It was an avant garde take on a spy thriller. In between hours of just talking and talking and talking, the protagonists did some action and shot up a house. That’ … | Continue reading
I love blogging. It’s a world unto itself. Sites reflecting people’s personalities, their lives, the ebbs and flows of their writing muscle (or photo posting muscle – I do love photo blogs), the business of their lives. Social media is not like that. Well, some are and some aren’ … | Continue reading
4.5/5⭐️ This one was a little slower and felt a little dragged out. | Continue reading
Playing with new quick notes app called Funnel. Pointed by Agam on his blog. The power of such apps is to quickly get to a writing place. The problem with such apps is that they need a prominent place on your homescreen. My homescreen has been locked to the current set of apps si … | Continue reading
Recently realized that when I backed up some old code a few years ago to my Dropbox account (I know, not the best practice, but whatever), I also backed up a lot of node_modules folders. Sent them all to the trash the other day. Dropbox emailed me after the deletion process compl … | Continue reading
An awesome book! Dark academia, loads of twists and turns, and a page-turner to boot. Some folks have called it the anti-Harry Potter, simply because in Harry Potter, you want to go to Hogwarts, but you do not want to go anywhere near the Institute of Special Technologies in the … | Continue reading
Utterly immersed in the audiobook for Vita Nostra. What a mind blowing book! Calling it an anti-Harry Potter is such a disservice to the brilliance of the Dyanchenkos. | Continue reading
What a pathetic waste of time. Saltburn is a decadent and windy art film. It has a story, yes. But it’s rather linear and further ruined by a rather dull and obvious cast of characters. Ten minutes in, you’ll know who the antagonists are. Midway through, you’ll know what the clim … | Continue reading
Just finished listening to Berlin by Bea Setton. Utterly loved the book. It follows in the tradition of A Year of Rest & Relaxation but is even more funny and dark and has a much more satisfying ending. I adore unreliable narrators and first person narratives with all the narrato … | Continue reading
She said that you have to be willing to disappoint other people in order to be a writer. Source: How Do You Write a Book? What an interesting thought! And so true, not just for writing but for all art, all hobbies, all creativity; heck, even spirituality and meditation. All of th … | Continue reading
In my last post on the topic, I said that when I reached into my memory for alternatives to Goodreads, I remembered only StoryGraph and Literal. This is good. Whatever is sticky is what we use in the end. Recently, it went a little further. Lately, I’ve become a fan of a lot of a … | Continue reading
Not a 2023 roundup post. Just wanted to note that I was trying to finish 2023 with two audiobooks – To Her Credit and Classic Women’s Short Stories. Could not finish either of them. To the point that these are the only books that I picked up in 2023 that I will not finish. “Class … | Continue reading
Huh, I just realized that I’ve basically forgotten what all goodreads alternatives I was using. The only one that stuck properly was StoryGraph and after a little pressure on my brain, Literal. That’s good! That’s what I wanted to do – use a few of these services and let some of … | Continue reading
When I opened my blog today, after quite some time, I didn’t have any idea I wanted to write about. Just an ache to see my space. I’ve been reading my RSS feeds a lot more recently, since I’ve been able to get my homelab going on a new mini pc I bought. I also […] | Continue reading
I was just thinking that WordPress is amazing as a website builder and a blogging solution but really not great as a knowledge base or a digital garden. It obviously supports back links, which seem to be an integral part of digital gardens, and it supports markdown to an extent, … | Continue reading
I can sorta imagine a future where scientists experimenting with genetically modified bacteria looking to solve pollution will create a bacteria which will eat all carbon based fuel instead. We’ll end up with a globally spread bacteria that will force us into a post-fossil fuel e … | Continue reading
I recently purchased an Intel N100 based mini PC with the idea of turning it into a local webserver hosting many services like RSS feed reader, pi-hole, an open source memos app, and a few other smaller open source projects. I currently host all of these on an ailing Macbook Pro … | Continue reading
I was just on Twitter and I saw an ad for the new iPhone 15. It said, quite politely, that the iPhone 15 can take photos of 4x more resolution. Compared to what? Well, it had an image of an iPhone 12 and an image of an iPhone 15. “Oh, that’s so nice”, I thought, […] | Continue reading
I thought that in reading Bird by Bird after Parisian Lives, I’m stepping away from Samuel Beckett. But Anne Lamott brings him back into my musings, with these lines – But a writer always tries, I think, to be a part of the solution, to understand a little about life and to pass … | Continue reading
I’ve been reading listening to “Bird by Bird” by Anne Lamott and two things stuck out – one, I didn’t know Anne Lamott is funny, and by extension, that this book is funny. Two, I love that Anne calls the very first draft of what writers write as “shitty first drafts”. I love it n … | Continue reading
I started listening to Parisian Lives on the third of July and only just finished it. That’s almost three full months of interrupted listening, mostly in my car. But also while doing the dishes and grocery shopping. A couple of things struck me about this book. Firstly, I didn’t … | Continue reading
Watching Dead Poets Society reveals a lot about the viewer. Are they a realist and accept the ending of the film? Are they a romantic and accept the profundity of the lesson the students learn? Or are they a Bollywood aficionado and realize this is where Mohabbatein got most of i … | Continue reading
Built my very first ML model for news classification using data I’ve manually collected and collated over the last year or so. Is 93% accuracy good enough? I should probably test it against existing datasets. | Continue reading