Recent content on Gautham Shankar
social media is one of the worst things that has happened to humanity. everything was fine until youtube and the old facebook. the algorithm has deteriorated the human mind. llms and chatbots pose an even greater threat. we don’t need more echo chambers, we need more connection. that was the thing with movies and books. they showed us there is a story behind everyone. they showed us we are…
I’ve been using Obsidian for all my writing lately, and it’s been a game changer. The local-first model means everything lives as plain text on my machine, and with the Minimal theme, the interface stays clean and distraction-free. My vault lives in iCloud (Dropbox or Google Drive work too), so notes sync seamlessly across devices - I often start drafts on my phone and finish them…
Time is not just numbers on a clock - it’s slices of our life that we give away. When we work, we’re not just trading hours for money; we’re trading pieces of our existence that we could have spent with family, friends, or pursuing what we truly love. Our life is actually just a series of such hours - moments that we’ll never get back. We often think we have infinite time…
Here are some of the side projects I’ve been working on: Bookmarksheet is a Chrome extension that allows you to add your favorite web content to Google Sheets with a single click. Quickdeck helps you create slides faster. It automatically generates slides from your existing content, allowing you to format them using Markdown. Write is a minimalistic web application designed for focused…
Masters of Doom, by David Kushner, tells the story of the two Johns - John Romero and John Carmack; and how they created Doom and Quake - which revolutionised computer games, giving rise to the gaming culture as it exists today. I’m not a gamer. What, or who caught my interest was John Carmack - a legend in the field of technology and programming. Also, I love to read on how makers make.
AI should help me find words to my thoughts, and should not do the thinking for me. Once I start to use AI to think for me, what I write is no longer my work. It isn’t authentic. Writing, or any other art for that matter, is a deeply personal affair. It looses its meaning the moment I outsource it. I understand and crystallise my thoughts as I write; I gain clarity.
I love the moments of silence in company of people dear to you - a lover or perhaps an old friend. It is comforting and serene, where there is no urge, no compulsion to fill the void with words. Instead, it is a gentle quiet that wraps around like a warm blanket. There’s a lingering feeling of sweet melancholy, the feeling of being together yet in our own worlds. These moments are liberating, the…
some envision a future where ai renders humans obsolete; many remain unconcerned, going about their everyday lives. i prefer to strike a balance, staying at the forefront of developments and figuring out how to stay relevant. in its current form, ai is a tool that helps people be more efficient. it can help people and industries become insanely productive by acting as a co-pilot. however, there is…
morning cup of coffee, evening cup of tea. afternoon nap after a full lunch. siesta. smell of rain. sound of rain. petrichor. reading by a window, lying on the bed. watching the washing machine wash. working hard on important things. a clean room, a bed that is made. feet in water. or sand. or both. first rays of sun on my face. finding words to my thoughts. reminiscing with friends.
Have you ever caught yourself thinking that a certain achievement or possession will make you happier? And when you finally attained it, did it bring the lasting happiness you expected? This question led me to discover the concept of hedonic adaptation. Hedonic treadmill, also known as hedonic adaptation, is the observed tendency of humans to quickly return to a relatively stable level of…
about six months ago, i started contemplating the purchase of a new bike. my existing ride was sufficient, but i longed for a more powerful machine - one that brought me joy beyond mere commuting. i wanted to buy the perfect bike for me, just that i had no clue on what it meant. i began observing bikes on the road, getting excited when i see a bike which suits my taste and my head nodding sideways…
i recently published bookmarksheet, a tool for adding your favorite web content to google sheet in a single click. why build it when there is a plethora of bookmarking apps out there? honestly, i wanted to build something to overcome my builder’s block. i wanted to prove my ability to create something independently. i just wanted to build, and build i did. surprisingly, i find myself using…
I love the beach for its gentle breeze, caressing my face. I love it for the setting sun, painting the sky in vivid colours. I love it for the endless waves. But I love it more, for the moments it holds. A child holding the hand of her father, feeling the sand under her soft feet for the first time, her eyes wide with wonder. Friends, their laughter against the sound of waves rising and receding.
I have two great passions in life - writing and building. I’ve spent the the past few years doing the latter, but I’ve neglected my love for writing. Writing helps me articulate my thoughts. It’s where I discover and develop my inner voice - the very essence of who I am. I live life at a more leisurely pace when I write. I’m more attentive to the smaller, simpler joys of…
This is a checklist for setting up a VPS for a nodejs application using pm2 and caddy. [ ] SSH into the server. If you are using a cloud provider, you can find the public IP address in the console. You should either have the server’s private key or your local machine’s public key should be added to the server’s authorized keys. Here we assume the second case. ssh…
Uses a public-private key pair. As the name implies, public key is shared and private key is kept secret. These keys are generated at the same time using an algorithm and are mathematically linked. The keys are used together in one of the following ways: Encrypting with public key Used for sending messages only the intended recipient can read. Bob encrypts a plaintext message with Alice’s…
DKIM DKIM allows the receiver of an email message to check if that message was authorized and sent by the sender responsible for the domain. A sender adds a private key on their mail servers and signs the message. The receiving server checks the public key stored in the TXT of dkimselector_domainkey.domain.com to validate the private key added by the sender. Suppose we are using SendGrid to send…
In functional programming paradigm, you achieve the program objective using pure, deterministic functions. Pure functions Output is solely a “function” of their input. Given a specific input, it will always return the same output. Does not cause any side effects. Eg. It does not modify global variables. In short, pure functions acts ( reading + writing ) only on stuff that is local to…
The third time today it struck me I ain’t so naive. A falling feather or an autumn leaf on a wuthering day finding it’s way, sometimes carried away. Soaring high and stooping low in an act of let go.
“It’s a Punaar Puli”, he would say. A fragile man in his late 70s, Achachan was always sure of everything. “No, it’s a Kodam Puli Acha " my mother would tell him. “I planted it here, wouldn’t I know?” We all were at our ancestral home to spend the summer holidays. This was the third time in five days since we came here that the exact same…
Her fluttering hair, soaked in the ocean air. Distant smiles o’er a squeal of surprise as the sea waves rise and recede. The sudden glimpse of a faraway memory like a gentle sea breeze to put a disturbed mind at ease.
A biscuit dip with a stiff stiff grip but the biscuit slips Oh, a luckless " blip " The perfect dip now a sunken ship. [Dedicated to tea and biscuits]
LLMs such as GPT-3 / ChatGPT are trained on generic web data. They can be used to tailor an answer based on context by supplying the context along with prompt. We cannot use the entire documentation as context as it is too large to fit in a single prompt. It may also lead to bankruptsy from the OpenAI charges. So we split the documentation into sections and associate each section w/ its embedding.