Books. What else?
Tracking all that I read in 2026 January The Switch, Elmore Leonard Not too nasty, which was unexpected. Only the deserving die in this one. Altogether, a serviceable Leonard. 52 Pickup, Elmore Leonard Nasty little crime thriller. SA makes me uncomfortable and the hints of it in this one was more than enough to make me want to never re-visit this again. But it's Elmore Leonard. Of course I…
One of things that make me happy are deep conversations. Happy is the appropriate word, I would think, if I were to describe that experience later to others. At the moment of connection, it’s more accurate to say my attention is narrow and judgement suspended, and I am completely engaged. I am in a flow state. Such conversations are few and far between, and thankfully there are many other…
The little menace woke us up a couple of nights ago with a scream. I saw her sitting, looking into the distance, shaking and saying "I want to go home." The mother, panicking for a brief moment, tried to soothe her. A nightmare. This was a first. As mommy held her I whispered, "it's okay kanna, naan irukken. We will protect you." That, to my surprise, seemingly calmed her down. She snuggled…
You should be in NOR mode about 90% of the time. With coding agents, this is likely to be 99%, or even a 100%. The trick with modal editors is to make it a habit to switch to NOR mode from INS often. Be liberal with that ESC press. You will want to use Helix exclusively to get fluent with it, so make it the default Unix editor. Drop VScode, Zed, TextEdit and any other WYSIWYG editors. Navigation…
Book: The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History Author: Peter Jackson 1. In 1200 CE, the North Indian landscape was dominated by warring Hindu kingdoms, the successor states to the Gurjara-Pratihara polity that had ruled the region with their capital at Kanauj, today in modern-day Uttar Pradesh. Despite not presenting a united front, these kingdoms offered significant resistance to…
Design a Generic Batch Processing System Designing a batch processing system involves handling large volumes of work items with a focus on reliability, fault tolerance, and efficient resource utilization. This system enables users to submit collections of work items for distributed processing with comprehensive progress tracking and failure recovery. Requirements Functional Requirements Users…
Design Stripe Requirements Functional Requirements: Merchant can request payment Users should be able to make payment. Merchant (and user) must be able to view status update - pending, completed etc Non-functional requirements: highly secure no data loss, even on failure. gurantee transaction and hence financial safety. high, bursty volume (10k qps?) Core Entities Merchant Intent What's being…
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To get immediately started with an agent, you don't need this post. But to build a production system of some utility, where multiple people have their hands on the code base, you will need to be more thoughtful about how to use Claude Code (and its terminal-based peers). For smaller projects or solo work, simpler approaches may be perfectly adequate. 1. You will need an agent.md file or…
Book: Genghis Khan: His Conquests, His Empire, His Legacy Author: Frank McLynn I plod through most books. Relatively speaking. History books on the other hand, I devour. Existing commitments take a backseat and we can’t have that. So I don’t read as much history as I could be. Unfortunately for all my resolve, Frank McLynn’s Genghis Khan biography was $1.99, and I had a long flight ahead of me. As…
When I got the message that Appa did not have much time to live, I flew down to India immediately. I had two weeks with him during which I read obsessively. If I had not blocked YouTube and Twitter, that's where my mind would have been. It was as if I did not want to be alone with my thoughts. The last book I read in his presence was Atul Gawande's Being Mortal , which I finished as my…
Book: Living an Examined Life: Wisdom for the Second Half of the Journey Author: James Hollis The Swiss psychoanalyst Jung has had a remarkable afterlife. His concept of archetypes, popularized by Joseph Campbell as the Hero’s Journey, is the foundational narrative structure for many movies, ranging from Star Wars to Thevar Magan to MCU. Jung’s ideas are central to the academic study of mythology…
Appa was the fittest person I knew. Certainly in his age cohort, though he could out-walk me on occasion when I would take him on the trail. He worked out everyday, looking up exercises on YouTube. Strength was a priority. So was endurance. Every morning he would get up, brush his teeth, have his coffee, and then start with his exercises. Sixty minutes, sometimes two hours. He would track his…
Find pdf files in the current directory where the content has the search text. rg --files-with-matches --binary --iglob ' *.pdf ' llama By default, ripgrep will not search binary files like pdf. For other kinds of files, this will do: rg --files-with-matches llama If you just want to find PDFs with “llama” in the filename (not content) Via fd fd -i llama --extension pdf -i tells fd to ignore case.
Key Considerations for ML System Design Data Volume & Velocity : How much data needs to be processed and at what rate Model Training Requirements : Frequency, computational needs, and distribution strategy Inference Latency : Real-time vs. batch prediction requirements Feature Store Needs : How features are computed, stored, and served Monitoring & Observability : How to track system health and…
Notes from two papers on building UI Navigation Agents: Agent S: An Open Agentic Framework that Uses Computers Like a Human Agent S2: A Compositional Generalist-Specialist Framework for Computer Use Agents Agent S: An Open Agentic Framework that Uses Computers Like a Human The framework integrates three main strategies in a closed loop: experience-augmented hierarchical planning, continual update…
REST API Design: Technical Interview Cheatsheet HTTP Methods: Trade-offs Table Method Purpose Pros Cons When to Use GET Retrieve data • Cacheable • Idempotent • Bookmarkable • Simple • URL length limits • Visible parameters • Limited data complexity • Resource retrieval • Simple filtering • Public/non-sensitive operations POST Create resources • Request body for data • No length limits •…
A few days ago I discovered an unopened packet of Red Label on the shelf. Amma had bought it when she was here a couple of years ago. Growing up tea always meant milk tea. It's not just milk and tea, it's also sugar. Without sugar, the concoction is, let's say, an acquired taste. A sweetener, though, transforms it into something more - rainy afternoons, cricket, bicycles and the…
What is a KV Cache? The Problem What the Paper Proposes Results Attention Mechanism Explained Why KV Cache Matters What Are Attention Heads? How Multi-Headed Attention Works Relationship to KV Cache and the Paper's Innovation KV Cache Attention Heads The Core Innovation in the New Paper Model Weights vs. Activation Values During Training During Inference Key Insight I have started using…
You don’t need Harvard to teach you that it’s more important to listen than to talk. You can get straight A’s from all your Harvard profs, but you’ll never make the grade unless you are decisive: even a timely wrong decision is better than no decision. The final thing you’ll need to know is don’t half-heartedly wound problems—kill them dead. That’s all there is to it. Now you can run this goddam…
Book: Reentry: SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Reusable Rockets that Launched a Second Space Age Author: Eric Berger Only the paranoid survive. Andy Grove An institution is the lengthened shadow of one man; Emerson A maniacal sense of urgency is our operating principle. Elon Musk In 2002, private launch services independent of government contracts or largesse did not exist. Blue Origin had been…
Book: The Snake and the Mongoose: The Emergence of Identity in Early Indian Religion Author: Nathan McGovern Na jaṭāhi na gottena, na jaccā hoti brāhmaṇo, Not because of matted hair, family or birth is one a true brahmin, yamhi saccañ-ca Dhammo ca, so sucī so va brāhmaṇo. [393] in whom there is truth and Dhamma, that one is pure, that one is surely a brahmin. — The Dhammapada The primary sources…
Book: The Bhagavad Gita: A Biography Author: Richard H. Davis The Mahabharata is the preeminent epic of India, and one grows up with the stories of the Pandavas and Kauravas, and the adventures of Arjuna and Bhima. While dating the Mahabharata is close to impossible, the oldest layers are thought to capture memories of the Vedic people from the Kuru-Panchala period . The Gita appears first in this…
I finished 33 books this year, 4 of them rereads. I notice that I ended 4 out of the last 5 years with Reflections on Silver River . It was not intentional. Something about the end of the year and the beginning of a new one calls me to that book. Is it the promise of being a better person or the reminder of what is important (hint: the practice, always the practice)? Beats me. My other re-reads…
When you are diagnosed with Stage 4 Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, the standard operating procedure is R-CHOP. It's a regimen where the body is subjected to three chemotherapy drugs, a targeted therapy drug, and a steroid. The treatment lasts 18 weeks, in three-week cycles. The steroid is given orally, and the other drugs via IV. Between sessions, the body is given time to heal while R-CHOP kills…
Book: Be Useful Author: Arnold Schwarzenegger Summary Schwarzenegger, along with Rajini and Kamal, was part of the movie star triumvirate that defined my childhood. Terminator 2 and True Lies would play often on Star Movies. Hollywood movies, for a short while, were essentially Arnie movies. Given all that, I couldn’t help but read this book in his voice. Have a vision, as clear as it can get, of…
Book: Amp It Up Author: Frank Slootman Data Domain had a product, but no revenue. Frank Slootman, who came in as CEO in 2003, eventually led to its acquisition by EMC for $2.4 billion. He then joined ServiceNow in 2011, a company bootstrapped with $7 million dollars 8 years prior, operating out of San Diego. Slootman led it’s through its hyper growth phase, where it became the only second company…
Book: Smoke and Ashes: Opium's Hidden Histories Author: Amitav Ghosh Here are some things I have always wondered about (although never long enough to actually go find an answer): How did the East India Company (EIC) make its money? Cotton and indigo, really? Why are Bihar and UP the way they are compared to rest of India? Bombay, Calcutta and Madras are all colonial cities. Calcutta has been…
Book: Avid Reader: A Life Author: Robert Gottlieb Robert Caro has published six books thus far, including his semi-memoir Working. His first was about Robert Moses and the reshaping of New York city. The next four were about Lyndon Johnson. These five books took him over five decades, averaging one book a decade. More than being just profiles of individuals, they are a study of power and how men…
Book: Fire In The Hole Author: Elmore Leonard Goddamn, EL has become my favorite story teller. In this collection, and in every other book I have read, the backdrop is almost always crime. Murder and death lurk about. But there's also more: a love that foregrounds it, along with strong, and sometimes voluble, men and women. Not to mention cool. They are always cool. Also chicken-brained…
You are trying to put your baby to sleep. Usually that involves turning off the lights and getting your daughter into a drunken stupor with milk. She would roll over after she has had her fill and fall head first into the bed. In a few seconds, she’s asleep. Tonight it doesn’t go that way. She has had her milk but sleep is not on her mind. You see her placing herself on the pillow. Then she starts…
Book: Tabula Rasa: Volume 1 Author: John McPhee This collection is the first of a series on McPhee’s ideas for articles that never ended being published or many times, even written. He’s eighty-eight now, and has been writing for close to seventy years, so there’s plenty to keep him busy for the rest of his life. Which is perfect because that’s exactly what McPhee wants, an old person project. A…
I once visited a friend, K, in Kansas City. I knew no one in that part of the country and did not think I would ever visit it again. I wanted to use K’s brief presence there as an excuse to see the Midwest. I can’t recall now who made the plan - I suspect it was him - but we decided to spend some time at the Ozark Caverns and drive down to St Louis. It would take us six hours to get to St Louis…
Book: Enzo Ferrari: The Man and the Machine Author: Brock Yates As a boy, Enzo Ferrari dreamed of three careers: sportswriting, opera singing, and race driving. He did dabble in sportswriting and race driving. In the end, he didn’t make his mark in any of them. Instead, he ended up with a monomaniacal focus on racing in the Grand Prix, and that’s where he entered into the pantheon of…
Book: The Art of Leadership: Small Things, Done Well Author: Michael Lopp Summary Michael Lopp 's book is about leadership, but it's really about management. There's nothing groundbreaking here, but considering it is from a practitioner in the field for the last two decades, its utility can't be questioned. The book is organized as a collection of strategies - techniques? -…
Book: The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers Author: Maxwell King Find something that you like and spend a life time developing expertise in it. This seems like a recipe for not just a happy life, but outsize returns. Fred Rogers knew early on, in college, that he liked children, and he liked music. He discovered television around this time and was hooked. For the rest of his life,…
There's a lot of drama around TM Krishna (TMK hereon) this past week. I have refrained from consuming more than I need to know about what’s happening, so I may be missing some or even a lot of context. That’s okay because I am going to use the narratives around this incident as an opportunity to finally organize some of my thoughts around Carnatic music, EV Ramasamy, and the role of artiste…
Review: The Price of Time I wanted to understand the changes that led to acceptance of interest in the West and in searching, came across this review of Edward Chancellor's The Price of Time. The danger posed by interest necessitated controls, the most enduring of which was in Deuteronomy 23, which forbade the Israelite from charging interest to his ‘brother’, but permitted it with the…
To block - in honesty, hint - crawlers from scraping your website for ai training data, update robots.txt. User-agent: CCBot Disallow: / User-agent: ChatGPT-User Disallow: / User-agent: GPTBot Disallow: / User-agent: Google-Extended Disallow: / User-agent: anthropic-ai Disallow: / User-agent: Omgilibot Disallow: / User-agent: Omgili Disallow: / User-agent:…
Sometime ago the question of my child eating meat came up with a few friends. I chose to stay silent then, as I usually do. Like Derek Sivers , I am a slow thinker. I often do not know how to justify my stance till I write it down. Or for that matter even know what my position is unless I have chewed on it for a few days, in this case, months. This is an attempt at thinking through my attitudes…
What are 529 accounts? Savings account you can create for your children (or yourself) to be used for the purpose of education. Think of it as another index fund (if you choose to use the money you put in to track the S&P 500). The main advantage is money you contribute can grow tax-deferred. Every state offers at least one 529 plan. Many states in the USA even offer some sort of tax deductions for…
Creating virtual environment To create a virtual enviroment with conda: conda create -n venv pip This will create a virtual env called venv and install pip in that env. It is reccommended that you install packages while creating the virtual env. So if you want to install torch and matplotlib, this is how your command will look like. conda create -n venv pip torch matplotlib To install particular…
Conv2D Convolution is a process in which two signals are intertwined. In image processing, it is used to blur or sharpen images, or enhance edges etc. The first layer in a CNN (a neural network = multiple layers of perceptrons) is always a convolution operation. A convolution converts all the pixels in its receptive field into a single value. For example, if you would apply a convolution to an…
Michael Bloomberg was the mayor of New York when I first heard of him. My sister, a doctor in Staten Island, didn't like it when I asked about him on the ferry to Manhattan. He was, I understood, a very divisive figure. I didn't dig very deep then. The second time I heard of him was in 2020, the time of the presidential elections. In a year where billionaires were very unpopular, he was…
Book: Driven: An Autobiography Author: Larry H Miller Larry Miller is the sort of guy who is the very embodiment of Americana: little formal education, ability to work himself to death chasing the dollar, never takes no for an answer, and almost always succeeds. Even more, he's a devoted member of that very American religion, the Latter-Day Saints. By the time of his death, he owned several…
Book: Revolt of the Public Author: Martin Gurri No book predicted the present moment like this one did, when it was published in 2014. How did we get here, where there is general distate for liberal democracy widely across the world, and even more contempt for the elites and experts who our parents and those before them trusted? This is Martin Gurri's thesis: “An affluent, well-educated,…
Graphs Djikstra's algorithm Time complexity: O(E+VlogV) when a Fibonacci heap is used, or O(E + ElogV) with binary heap. We use a heap/priority queue to add and pop items with smallest weight, that's logV. Space compexity, O(V) to store the vertices. Bellman Ford algorithm Time Complexity: O(V.E). In the worst-case scenario, when all the vertices are connected with each other, we…
Book: Never Split The Difference Author: Chris Voss This is really a book about listening and getting along with others despite disagreeing with them masquerading as a book about high powered negotiation. The core messaging reminded me of an anecdote attributed to Abe Lincoln, who when chastised by a lady for not calling Southerners irreconcilable enemies during the civil war, responded “Why,…
There is this creature in the house. A guest that is here to stay. Mute so far, but oh god, so cute. She makes known her displeasures, of which there are many. Everything of interest is chewed on till she gets bored. Refuses to be contained in the barrier we have set up for her. No. She wants to be out, in the room, in the house. Surveying. Adventuring. Being where she shouldn't be. Attracted…
Article: Gandhi and Liberal Modernity Great essay on Gandhi, which positions his stance on caste as not mere sentimentality or conservatism, but deeply thought response to liberal capitalism. We then considered whether allowing for the very notion of economy as an independent sector of human life that filled Gandhi with anxiety would offer an alternative and more ‘progressive’ way of addressing…