kbkartikayboycheerfullookingatyougrassybackgroundjustl7a9d4e5a-2795-4ccf-a7dd-96531502c382 Hi, I am Kartikay. Welcome to my little corner of the i...
What do you do to know yourself better? Mediation? Long walks of self-reflection? Maybe you end up finding yourself in the warm embrace of a charming cult leader who smells like heaven(pun intended). The last place I ever thought I would find myself is through video games. I bought a gaming pc 8 months ago. A childhood dream of mine, finally made possible. Over these 8 months, I have played…
I have a 2-litre steel bottle, a water purifier with a slow water flow, and a curved sink right beneath my purifier. Together, these 3 make the trifecta that effectively measures my mental health. I have had phases in life when I would happily stare at the water stream, content and present at the moment. Then phases where I would be impatient, maybe fill it partially or be angry at it and this…
I came across this game called - 'No Man's Sky'. It had a bad launch but it is truly epic right now. Basically, each player can explore a universe with 18 Quintillion possible planets. Each with its own flora and fauna. Its own geography. It sounds incredibly cool. Being a cs guy I was interested in the algo that makes this work. It is something called 'Procedural Generation'. At its core,…
I came across this YouTube video once, it talked about 20 hrs of deliberate practice. The idea is to give something 20 solid hours to start with. You will be surprised how good you get at it. It was mostly concerning hobbies like 'playing guitar' or 'chess'. I have found the idea useful in the context of computer science a lot. Especially learning new technologies. Just give 20 hours of focused…
Doing hard things is important. Nothing worthwhile comes easy. And lets be honest. It feels good to hit the bed at the end of the day when you know you worked hard. That self satisfaction is indescribable. But how to do hard things? The answer is 'deliberate mental training'. When I was young I would get lazy, feel bad about myself and then get the work done. If I generated enough momentum it…
Flow is a state of extreme focus. A sort of getting lost in the work. The hours and minutes pass by and you don't even notice. It is the best state to do some good deep work. Over the years I have experimented with flow on and off. I started with it inspired by books like : Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Deep Work by Cal Newport I started because I wanted to…
Say you want to be a YouTuber. Why? You love the fame and the money. Want to rub it in the face of that high school bully. Maybe you just want to share your passion with a lot of people. Whatever the reasons, if you set the goal as "I want to be famous and make money through YouTube" you are likely setting yourself up for failure. Why? It is an outcome goal. It focuses on the end goal rather than…
Over the years I have gotten bad at spelling. It is not terrible but enough to make the 12-year-old me who used to win spelling bees and stuff gasp in horror. There are a lot of factors. The main one was that I stopped caring. After school, most of the work I have done is programming or writing things online. Everything has a spell check. I stopped bothering about being correct. It is funny how…
The myth of Sisyphus is this devious king who did a bunch of things to annoy the gods. Gets punished by having to move a rock up a mountain. Only to have the rock fall down once he reaches near the top. Having to start all over again in an endless loop. A meaningless task of hard labour. Eternal misery. “One Must Imagine Sisyphus Happy” is a phrase in Albert Camus’s philosophical essay "The Myth…
How do you approach a new field optimally? I am exploring ml systems in my free time these days and had to answer this question for myself. The typical method would be to find the people working in the field and question them. Go through opensource codebases and crawl through some Pull Requests. Lurk around the discord channels and gauge the vibe. Read some of the latest papers in the field, they…