Recent content on Ashwin's blog
A series teaching you about AI, written for Product Managers (PMs). I’d recommend engineers give it a read (and subscribe!) too, as an easy way to stay abreast of the latest developments in the space. One specific post that I enjoyed reading is this one that chronicles the history of LLMs. Recording the present may seem mundane at times, but over the years it provides great value by allowing…
Laugh tracks So it’s been a little less than a year since I started trying to do comedy. And let me share what I think the milestones in a stand-up comic’s career look like. There’s one track that goes: Your first open mic Your first 3-minute set Your first 5-minute set or your “tight five”. Your first 10-minute set Your first 20-minute set Your first 40-minute set…
A friend suggested that I allow users to login to hunchle.com without a password. This seemed fairly simple to implement, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I was allowing users to login with emails and passwords already, so removing a password was all that might be needed, right? And I had AI to help! Turns out, wrong! First, I had to streamline the new experience so that it worked for both…
Miles vs Cash-back Calculator Miles vs Cash-back Calculator Miles per dollar Cash-back rate (%) Investment return (%) Devaluation rate (%) Years Redemption rates — CPP (comma-separated) CPP Devaluation Initial Miles Value Breakeven Year Miles @ End Cash @ End
CAGR Calculator CAGR Calculator Enter any 3 values to calculate the 4th. CAGR = Compound Annual Growth Rate.
Tools and pages I’ve built when inspiration struck. One-offs Cash vs Points - Miles vs cash-back calculator with breakeven analysis (11 Feb 2026) Lichess - Visualize rating progression over number of games played (07 Jan 2026) Clean Logs - Tool to remove file:line prefixes from log output (13 Nov 2025) Values - Personal values and life philosophy (05 Nov 2025) Lennon or McCartney - Beatles…
I looked up what the latest AIs had said about my father , my mother and the male ancestors on her side of the family . It’s incredible how many things individual people can do. As a constant presence in “my” home for the first 18 years, whatever they did or achieved was just lost in the mundane swings of time that constitute daily life. It’s good to have a retrospective…
With AI advancing rapidly, one of the most asked questions these days is, “Are software engineers still needed?”. I have some answers! I love optimizations and performance engineering, and decided to dig into my codebase (with Claude Code) to find possible improvements in this domain. If you’ve worked with these tools, then you know that for an inquizitive person, there is…
Click the buttons to rewrite the article in the style of different authors
For as long as I can remember, I’ve found I’m happiest when surrounded by friends. From my early childhood, all the way to adulthood, I spent a lot of time with friends and placed a huge amount of importance on friendships. Throughout my school years, I mostly picked my subjects and activities based on what my friends did - whether it was quizzing, or choosing computer science as the…
Any researchers who want the prompts and/or links to the chats can contact me =) I went through the Formula 1 EOY quiz on Mr V’s Garage’s YouTube channel and decided to put some AIs through the test as well. For the LLMs, I gave each of them just 1 shot at the questions. These all use the free versions of the LLMs. Here is how I fared, and how the AIs fared (x indicates incorrect, v…
This is my now page . It tells you what I’m currently focused on. What I’m working on Improving Hunchle . In-progress: Writing explainer articles. On-and-off: Working on an AI course. Backlog: Working on a language-learning course. What I’m learning AI (LLMs from the ground up). What I’m reading Tracked on StoryGraph . I prefer this to GoodReads as this is actively…
Intro/Disclaimer: Trade at your own risk! Just like women think “I’m special” and “This time it’ll be different” when it comes to relationships, men think the same way when it comes to stock trading. Warren Buffett’s advice has remained the same for years: Most people should simply dump their money into an index fund that tracks the market and forget about…
12/02/2025 Jensen’s talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business ( link ). My takeaways I find Jensen very interesting. He has SRK-like mannerisms, and probably a similar level of charisma (the latest silky, gray-haired Jensen, the Jensen from the mid-2000s, maybe not). He speaks very well, by which I mean he says mostly profound things with very little fluff and is able to talk and…
I like playing sports. I created an app to notify me when courts are available. General design I had built this a few months ago and was able to get it running from my laptop. I don’t have my notes from back then. Adding notifications What I wanted now was to get it running on a remote server and also to give it the capability to provide notifications. For notifications, I settled on…
None of these are particularly revolutionary, but it helps to have them listed so you can use them actively to your benefit (rather than hoping these tools fall into your hand). Line on a spectrum Many things that seem black-or-white are simply just different lines on a spectrum. Think of the spectrum as a horizontal line, and the “line” as a point (or a vertical line that you…
Intro Disclaimer: There are some generalizations below, and so all the disclaimers for generalizations apply. Some of those being: these are inferences being made on a set of observations so the inferences may be completely wrong, and by definition a generalization means this does not apply to all individuals in that society. The irony of a Malayalee working in America may not be obvious to many.…
I don’t think concerts are worth going to. Over the years I’ve attended concerts by Muse, Iron Maiden, John Mayer, and others. But, over the past few years, I’ve increasingly felt that the experience of attending a concert isn’t worth the price I’d pay. I’d rather spend time trying out escape rooms, joining sports leagues or if we want to stick to live…
A laundry list Started doing stand-up comedy. You can read more here . The first two weeks after I quit, I did a lot of chores - both for the household and myself. Started reading about company and business valuations. Now I understand P/E ratios, the PEG model, how to use discounted cash flows to estimate a fair stock price & compare it with the implied P/E ratio and how to determine the health…
Kerala As an NRI, your dollar goes a lot farther in India. On trips back to India, my sister usually finds great resorts for us to enjoy. I’ve since realized many friends within India travel to Kerala as their go-to quick vacation destination, and so, I thought it’d be useful to provide a Malayalee’s guide to vacationing in Kerala. And if at least one person in your party speaks…
The green card blues If you’re an Indian in the US (or thinking about moving to the US), you likely know the problems with immigrating to the US. By virtue of being born in the most populous country on Earth, the employment-based green card route is effectively closed to Indians. However, there isn’t a clear way to know how long the wait may be. And if you don’t know how long,…
For a lot of my career, I never really understood software design. It was always presented as something more associated with SDE2s, or higher and not so much with SDE1s. I had no idea what to make of it or what to do with that information. The first few design documents I wrote seemed inane. There was something to be done, and we all knew what we wanted to do, but it looked like I had to formalize…
DISCLAIMER: None of the below is financial advice or recommendations for anyone beyond myself. Please do your due diligence (and don’t sue me, thanks!)! What EB-5 is a program where you invest some money (800K$ minimum) and in exchange may be eligible for a green card. One of the key issues with the EB-5 visa program is that it is currently backlogged for Indian citizens. However, some…
Zuckerberg has written a post on “personal superintelligence” here . Most of it is just fluff - for example, “superintelligence” is never defined*, so it looks more like a PR piece. However, there are a couple of lines worth commenting on. If trends continue, then you’d expect people to spend less time in productivity software, and more time creating and connecting.…
My love for stand-up Click to expand; feel free to skip I've often thought of myself as someone who loved making people laugh. I'd played that role at school, though I'm not sure others remember me that way. In college too, I was delighted when others were laughing - whether with me or, occasionally, at me. I’d been watching stand-up since around 2007, when Russell Peters was all the rage.…
Time for a blog post detailing the difficulty with creating a fun-to-play trivia app ( www.hunchle.com ) Generating questions is hard A good quiz app needs good questions. That should be obvious, and your #1 priority, but when I initially built Hunchle, I decided to focus on other features ( adding AI hints , streaks, share results, and thinking of whether I should include ads: I didn’t).…
I used AI in a big way to build Hunchle . I figured it would be useful to write this post to share my experience and to document what coding with AI looks like today. There were two major ways I used LLMs in Hunchle, a trivia app: 1. Generating questions In an ideal world, I’d generate 30,000 questions by myself, custom-crafted the way I like quiz questions. However, that was more of a time…
If you’ve been following along, I’ve been using LLMs for a while, as detailed here and here . I learned a lot about the world of LLMs and I’ve tried to capture that here. Recently, motivated by Thorsten Ball’s excellent “How to build an agent” guide, I decided to jump in and get my feet wet building AI agents with AI (LLMs). Hello, nice to meet you! Like any…
At the outset, this may seem an absurd conclusion. To make my point, I’ll need to go into a little bit about how social networks came to be. It won’t take long. Back in the mid-2000s, we had a bunch of social networks pop up. Hi5, Orkut, and of course, Facebook got a foothold on Dubai’s “interwebz”. Possibly due to its simplicity or due to the exclusiveness stemming…
Over the last few months, during my short foray into management, one of the most common questions I got during 1:1s was, “Why did you decide to become a manager?” I have since realized that many more people silently harbor this question, and so I thought I’d do my share of public service by going into why I made the change and what I learned from it. As an engineer, I’ve…
2025 Marriage Penalty / Bonus Heatmap Approximate 2025 U.S. Federal Marriage Penalty / Bonus Simplified model: wages only, standard deduction, and a stylized childless EITC-like credit to produce penalties at low, equal incomes (for 2025 brackets). Positive values are penalties (more tax when married), negative values are bonuses. All numbers approximate, not tax advice. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs…
Continuous Activity Actogram - Sleep Analysis Continuous Activity Actogram Visualization of computer activity blocks over a continuous timeline. 🟢 Green = Active/Awake, 🔴 Red = Sleep, 🟡 Yellow = Untagged gaps (click to tag)
Sleep/Awake Duration Analysis Sleep/Awake Duration Analysis Sleep Duration Mean Std Dev Awake Duration Mean Std Dev Sleep Duration Distribution Awake Duration Distribution
Intro Around 7 years ago I wrote “A guide to finances” which some of my friends found helpful. Now, everyone is likely at a different point in their lives, so I thought I’d write the follow-up. General overview Write down what your ideal life looks like and calculate how much that would cost per year. Let’s call that THE_GOAL. Once you have THE_GOAL, divide that number by…
Chat Statistics Chat Statistics (Anonymized) Messages per Hour Characters per Hour
What is it I just finished playing NAND game which gets you to build a computer starting from simple relay circuits. As you build components, you get to reuse them. Over time, this means you have an arsenal of components that let you eventually build a computer. I think this is similar to a course Nand2Tetris that I’d started years ago but never finished. I skipped the software lessons, but…
Adding to my list of what I’ve used AI (read as “LLMs”) for. For my previous post, click here . Travel-related ChatGPT was quite helpful answering questions about the areas I was visiting in Europe. For example, I was confused by all the buildings and names, and sought help in the form of the question: “What was the Domus Flavia part of?”. ChatGPT answered that it was…
Our trip to Cancun Day 1 Landed on Friday afternoon. Took the ADO bus from the airport. It was like 8$ per person to get to the city. Withdrew ~2000$ in pesos from an ATM at the airport. Don’t choose to convert when the ATM asks. Check online for which ATMs are good to use (in terms of exchange rate). We stayed in the city, near where the ADO bus drops you off, near the intersection of…
Brief list of what I’ve used AI (read as “LLMs”) for. What I’ve used AI for Laziness I could have googled things in this section and figured my way around it with a little effort. Writing code to use features that I know exist, but am not proficient at: I asked it to mock static methods using Mockito. This was a feature introduced in the newer versions of Mockito, so I am…
Disclaimer 1: This is my understanding, if you spot something wrong, please assume best intentions and let me know, thanks! Disclaimer 2: All uses of the word male/men/female/women here are subject to the caveats I’ve tried to detail below. I had to write this post as the topic of sex and gender (in sports) has popped up yet again this Olympics :) Firstly, sex and gender are not the same. A…
This is a post about watching sports, but it is written not only for those of you that watch sports or are sport-curious (those that think that they may want to watch sports but aren’t sure). This is also a post for anyone who likes to watch movies, or shows, or read books. Lastly, this is also a post for those of you who hope that your spouse may share the couch as you plop down to watch…
“Don’t meet your heroes,” I’ve heard. “People are imperfect” I counter. Here are a few people I look up to, with the reasons I look up to them stated. They may have flaws, but the flaws are not why I look up to them 1 . I admire them mainly for the good that they do, and for choosing – in what seems like a batshit crazy move to many - not to prioritize profit 2…
Cluster headaches I’ve always thought it would be a better use of time to do research on conditions rather than simply pray. In one case, after doctors had near given up on figuring out what was causing a family friend’s son’s high fever, said family friend read up and suggested that his son may have dengue to the doctors. Turns out he did - doctors had not tested for dengue…
Written after the fact, but here are a collection of my monthly reviews for 2023: July June May April March February January As evidenced by the short list, I couldn’t keep up after July
The initial signs Unfortunately, on the last day of a trip to Alaska, I started feeling a throat infection coming on. This was, however, not to be a simple throat infection. A few hours after I’d gotten back home (a day later) a fever of 102.3 had built up. A citizen scientist A day later, I decided this might be a good opportunity to chronicle the progression of the disease, and collect…
The S T P Back in June, I heard one of my friends talking about doing the STP with a friend. “Oh, can I join?” I asked. “Yeah, of course, man!” came the reply and in a second I had signed myself up for a 200+ mile bike ride with little idea of how hard 200+ miles would be. As I read up on the internet, I grew more and more terrified, sure none of this would go well for me.…
Can you tell the time? Totally normal clock face Nope, you aren’t looking at a programmer’s attempt at being funny . This was the official clock app on Android. This was actually an attempt at improving an earlier iteration, which for some godforsaken reason stuffed the hours from 13 to 24 into the clock face displaying 1-12: Why settle for one clock face when you can have two?…
Over the last couple of years there has been a lot of talk about decentralization of the web. I seem to think we already had a decentralized web - back in the early 00s. Before the rise of centralization, everyone had their own little corner of the web. Blogs/spaces/forums were common and even if you didn’t own the domain name, no one was trying* to run a business off of content you provided…
The case for the curmudgeon Ever notice that one guy on the team always complaining about stuff? That’s a curmudgeon! While today there are calls for more positivity in all spheres of life, I’m going to make a case for why having a curmudgeon on your team might actually be a good thing. Firstly, a curmudgeon ends up creating a safe space for others on your team to raise concerns. If a…
Here’s a list of some cool blogs I think are worth a read: Software engineers Approximately in the order I’d recommend them in Julia Evans Marc Brooker Joel Spolsky Steve Yegge Cindy Sridharan Vaidehi Joshi - not really a blog, but the basecs and baseds series. Dan Luu Unranked (haven’t gotten to yet): Carlos Arguelles (haven’t gotten to it yet) Brandon Rhodes explog.in…