Recent content on keerthanapg
Summer in my backyard Warm coffee in my belly The sun simmers on my chest Filling my bosom with love The sun smiles at me from afar My pug flashes her puppy eyes from my lap Newly sprung summer flowers beam from around And so I sit in my backyard on a carefree sunday The wind hums a sweet little song Caressing my wild hair like would a lover Guiding falling leaves and pollen my way
The truth is absolute and immutable. The beauty of physics and our world is that The truth is traveling at the speed of the light cone, Sights and scenes of exactly what happened and was said Scattering from one end of the universe to the other Never to be muted Perennially out there to be seen for those that want to see The truth remains true Regardless of whether one hundred or one million…
Opinions presented in this article are that of the author alone and does not represent those of her employer. As the new year drives in, let’s look back at some of the technological bets in self driving and where we are at with them today. Just last week Waymo and Cruise announced they are scaling to 3+ cities in the US, fully driverless. Waymo in Phoenix and SF, and Cruise in Phoenix, SF and…
It’s going to be okay It’s going to be okay because I will make it so I have cut chords with people who didn’t care I have moved on and I am okay I can do it a million more times And still be okay Why just okay? I will thrive. I have said so many good byes I have lost both people, money and places I am still okay, I am happy even.
Edit: This was cross posted to EA forum, and is a heavily downvoted post in their community. You can see the discussion here A lot has been talked about SBF/FTX/EA but this coverage reminds me that is time to talk about the toxicity of the culture within EA communities, especially as it relates to women. EA circles, much like the group house in Bahamas, are widely incestous where people mix their…
Chapter 2: Flutterings of a Mechanical Heart Read Chapter 1: Household Reflections The San Francisco Bay Area is a melting pot for machines like me. Our owners are like restless children, easily enchanted by technology, devices and their upgrades. Rob prides himself on being an early adopter and gets the new iPhone the day it releases to show off to his discord buddies. Jenny is a software…
Question about literal effective altruism. Let's say you're a random person in a non-western country, and you go around visiting various rural communities where means are limited, offering direct help. What help / intervention would be most effective for your time and money? — Catherine Olsson (@catherineols) July 8, 2022 I spent 2 years organizing a volunteer community around and working…
Preparation time - 1 hour Cooking time - 10 minutes Ingredients: Beef flank - 1 pound Corn starch - 1/2 cup Olive oil - 1/2 cup Scallions - 5 Soy sauce - 1/2 cup Brown sugar - 3 Tbsp Ginger - grated - 1.5 tsp Garlic cloves - 4 grated Roasted red chilli - 10 How to: Cut the beef into thin slices Marinate the beef for 1 hour with 2 Tsp corn starch, 2 tsp olive oil and 2 tsp soy sauce After one hour…
Preparation time - 15 minutes Cooking time - 10 minutes Ingredients: Beef flank - 1 pound Corn starch - 1 Tbsp Olive oil - 1 Tbsp Broccoli - 0.5 pounds Soy sauce - 6 Tbsp Brown sugar - 2 Tbsp Ginger - grated - 1.5 tsp Garlic cloves - 4 grated Sesame seeds - to garnish Hot water - 1/2 cup Sesame oil - 2 Tbsp Black pepper powder - 1/2 tbsp How to: Cut the beef into thin slices Cut the broccoli into…
There are many paths on the road to AGI. Nando de Freitas recently wrote that “Scale is all you need” following the release of Deepmind’s Gato paper. Larger and larger transformers, with language interfaces doing supervised learning on large datasets is one such touted path. While Gato trains and evaluates on data from physical robots, there is a larger paradigm on getting to AGI that fully…
Sourced from Google Images If all you need is inside of you If desires, like threads of entanglement, Spawning from your heart Can be cut, and let go Like a forgotten coffee cup on a subway If feelings can be let go Like fragrance emanating from a flower Without leaving it any less fragrant Than before If memories can stay on Like frozen bugs in a heart of amber
So I chanced by this post on LessWrong titled “Reward is Not Enough”. It is a rebuttal to the arguments presented in the paper “Reward is Enough” by Silver et al, which hypothesises that intelligence and its associated attributes are a result of reward maximization of an agent acting in its environment. Given the popularity of the LessWrong Forum, the pseudo-persuasive…
I have a happy orchid plant One that blooms white with a purple hue Standing against my window nonchalant Shining against the sun effortless And then one day I decided to move My happy orchid sat in a box Waiting to see the light But for a while it was left forgotten In the darkness, while I sorted my affairs It stood biding its wait As dust settled on its glossy green leaves
Aubrey de Grey, Michael Rae Currently reading, stay tuned.
For a full list of publications, check my google scholar page. Gemini Robotics On-Device Visual language action model that runs locally on device Blog TechCrunch Gemini Robotics: Bringing AI into the Physical World Visual language action model for robot control based on Gemini VLM Paper MIT Technology Review, Wired, TechCrunch AutoRT: Embodied Foundation Models for Large Scale Orchestration of…
Michael E Porter Rating 2/5 This book was written more than 40 years ago and is textbook MBA material. Porters five forces analysis is a useful tool in any case study paradigm. Most of the book reads like common sense to me probably because much of its content has percolated into popular knowledge over the decades since it was written. I also think that its content has not particular suitable to…
Matt Ridley My rating 4/5 Matt Ridley’s How Innovation Works is best consumed as an audio book. The book traces the history of innovation in several industries including energy, public health, transport, food, communication and computers. The later half focuses on deriving rules about innovation given the history. Among the stories of innovation, a case that stuck with me was the state of…
Cal Newport My rating: 5/5 Deep Work is a book about focusing. Given the barrage of distractions in today’s world, ranging from push notifications, social media and the expectation of responding fast to emails and work group chats, it becomes harder to do the type of work that requires deep focus. The first few chapters talk about what deep work is and part 2 is about a few tips to get…
Amir Levine, Rachel S F Heller My rating: 4/5 Attached is a book on relationships, especially romantic relationships. It explains the evolutionary advantages to having a partner and how childhood experiences trigger different attachment styles. Broadly, the book proposes that there are three types of attachment styles: anxious, avoidant and secure. The former two roughly account for a quarter of…
Eric Fromm Rating 1/5 This is a highly recommended book on relationships. The core tenet is that western individualism dictates that if you focus on being the best version of yourself, love will follow. However, this book argues that that is far from enough and one needs to be good at loving to find and keep love. While that advice is useful, I felt that the book was fraught with homophobia and…
Colin Bryar, Bill Carr My rating: 4/5 Working Backwards is a business book on the story and culture of Amazon. The first part deals with the culture of Amazon ranging from hiring, organization, in house communication and metrics of achievement. Amazon culture places a lot of stress on its 14 leadership principles. A quote that stuck with me was : every company has a culture, if you don’t…
Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappé My rating: 5/5 I picked up “On Palestine” at the height of the Israel Palestine conflict in May 2021. It is an interesting summarization of Zionism and the history of Israel and is very poignant and concisely organised. The first part deals with the past, present, future of the conflict and context from within Israel and its relationship with the United States.…
Benjamin Todd Rating 3/5 If you’ve read Doing Good Better, you can totally skip this book. It expands into the research the 80000 hours organisation has done regarding careers and their impacts, so this book would be useful for young people looking to start a career or older folks looking to pivot/doing a reality check on their impact. Sometimes, the book reads like a curated webpage, which…
Frank Richmond Rating 2/5 Skip and read investopedia. The last chapter on greeks and options strategies is actually useful though. The book, at times is very procedural.
Originally posted on Medium Silence Like an ocean that leaps and bounds Like a dragon that kicks and breathes fire, alive Like a wide chasm between us Our hearts are so far, far apart Closed to each other Though for a second we were so close Like a bridge out into happiness Like a hand that appears while drowning But now I’m puzzled Standing on a vast mountain range Looking into caves very strange
Originally Written here June 22, 2013 “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.” They have been special to me, and yet again, I stumbled upon these lines, as I sat up overnight to finish off David Baldacci’s thriller First Family. To talk of the book, a good plot, but the literature was just, mediocre. It seems like a…
Hi I am Keerthana! I do research at Google Deepmind: I spend a lot of my time thinking about how to get scale robotics and build general purpose intelligence in the physical world. The topics where I think I am an expert at are robotics, artificial intelligence and self-driving. I just wrote and published a textbook on “AI for Robotics”. I am on the look out for my next side project.
Bill Gates My rating 5/5 This book was released around a month ago and is the most up to date compilation of issues and challenges surrounding climate change. What I love about this book is that it is markedly different in tone than what many climate activists advise - no angry rhetorics or morally high sounding stances. Crossing the Atlantic in a boat is not an option for everyone and asking the…
Cognitive Revolution Podcast, March 2024 Hosted by Nathan Labenz Neural Information Processings (NeurIPS), 2023 Speaker at 6th Workshop on Robot Learning International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML), 2023 Panelist at Interactive Learning with Implicit Human Feedback Workshop moderated by Anca Dragan Watch recording of Panel 1 Watch recording of Panel 2 Cognitive Revolution Podcast, March…
Chris Burniske Rating 3/5 I picked up this book because there are way too many keywords thrown around about cryptocurrencies and blockchain and you never know what you don’t know. Far from a comprehensive guide to “bitcoin and beyond”, this book could be summarized as “Bitcoin is great. Yields are great. You gotta invest”. While the initial few chapters go into…
Originally Posted on Medium Sourced from Google Images Tied up angel, wings battered Shackled by the ankles I lay rotting in the dirt Among worms and spiders Helpless and desolate Like a forgotten ghost in the ceiling But then I mustered my will, Chewed up the chains And through the broken attic window I climbed Cut my wings on the glass Yet jumped into the moonlight And took flight into an…
Barack Obama Rating 4.36/5 Since I am from India, I found the book interesting only up until the point Obama became president. Until that event, the book describes in erudite passion Obama’s youth and his journey to the presidency. His conviction is admirable and his courage/confidence is worth envying. What struck me most was his sense of idealism and how much he stood by it over the years…
Morten T. Hansen Rating 3.79/5 This is a fairly useful book. I picked it up as I started my first job to be able to get better on managing work. Most insights from the book are derived from a fairly generalised and large survey of workers in the United States. These derivations are also quite practical to be put to use in daily life and helps you anticipate outcomes of organisational decisions and…
David Graeber My rating: 4.02/5 David Graeber wrote this book after his very famous essay by the same name. It draws on several anecdotes and responses he received after writing the essay. However, a peculiar thing to note is that despite being an anthropologist from Oxford, this is not based on original research but one could note that some research is cited to support the assertions made in the…
Served with a side of boiled rice. Horse Gram Stir Fried: Originally Written here Ingredients: Horse gram — 1 cup Salt — 1 tbsp Water — 2 cups Green chillies — 4 Red chilli powder — 0.5 tbsp Olive oil — 2 Tbsp Garlic — 3 cloves Curry leaves — optional Preparation: Boil the horse gram with water and salt in a closed container / pressure cooker until cooked.
Originally Written here A closer inspection of the ‘Rally for Rivers’ fanfare Recently, Dr Rajendra Singh, who has spend decades working on community involvement in water management, winner of the Magsaysay Award and the Stockholm Water Prize, nicknamed the ‘Waterman of India’ called out the ‘Rally for Rivers’ movement. To quote, ‘this ‘Rally for Rivers’, is not for rivers. It is for the land, for…
Originally posted on Medium Image source : here Pacing through a glass castle of mine That is shattered in all but a second At once when one is hit in the face by the chilling storm outside How can you be mine but yet never have been mine Feeling threatened in the most primal way I’m alone, irrevocably so, irreversibly so Even when engulfed in your arms Listening to your heart beats so close
Originally posted here Sometimes it can save a lot of time to stop and think if ML/DL is indeed the right approach to solve your problem rather than realising that after throwing a ton of data at a network without getting anywhere and potentially being outperformed by a simple classical algorithm. Here’s where ML shines: When the inputs are noisy When the solution cannot be described in human…
Originally Written here (This is a creative variant of a German Easter speciality known as Hefezopf) Ingredients: Flour — 400 gms Yeast — 2 tbps Sugar — 1/2 cups Butter — 2 Tbps Water Baking soda — 1/2 tsp Jam — ~10 tsps Walnuts — 1/3 cups Chocolate — 1/3 cups Raisins — 1/3 cups Mix the flour, yeast, sugar, butter, baking soda and water to create a smooth dough and let it rest for an hour.
Originally posted on Medium Source: Google Images I have a faceless portrait One I’ve been holding close For far too long Etched over years, touched over every now and then With each new dawn The lines grow clearer A faceless portrait hanging on a pedestal Across my hallway Waiting to come alive. Beaming with pride and Embellishing the sides I only need a face to completion. So I set out to find…
Originally posted on Medium Sourced from Google Images I walked down the road Through alleys and corridors In search of you TRying to catch your eyes in the crowd Sliding past glass windows for a sign Of you Your voice still rings in my ears, As if playing with them constantly Much like your lively, restless spirit Your thoughts are fresh in my mind They emerge from me Become a hundred fireflies
Hans Rosling, Ola Rosling, Anna Rosling Rönnlund My rating: 4.36/5 This book, written by Swedish physician Hans Rosling and published posthumously is an optimistic and fact based take on human development with a focus on health and medicine. Primarily written for a western audience this book assumes the prevalence of a premise of western superiority and then seeks to demolish it. As someone from a…
O.V. Vijayan Rating 4.11/5 I picked up this critically acclaimed classic to better understand Malayalam literature and life in rural Kerala. It is not one big epic but a collection of incidents set in and around a village that is 10 minutes from my home in Palakkad. The writer exercises abundant subtlely in his narration and bounces forth from reality and imagination so much so that much is left…
Originally posted on Medium Clicked by Tom Eliasson, from Google Images If the moment is beautiful, is consistency necessary If the eyes align, why do the stars need to If happiness can precipitate in the now, who cares if the past and future are unmade If the timeline is a mist, so what, if today is stark clear in a happy, mad hue Can we count our sins after today, losing,
Originally Written here This is a traditional Malayali desert. Expected time: 30 minutes Ingredients: Milk: 750mL Water Sugar: 2 Tbsp Rice: 2.5 Tbsp Ghee: 0.75 Tbsp Cashew: 50 grams Cardamom: 1 tsp Procedure: Melt the ghee and saute the rice and cashew in it for 1.5 minutes on high flame. Pour the milk, add sugar and cardamom and cook on low flame until rice is well cooked. Stir continuously.
Kevin Simler, Robin Hanson My rating: 4.02/5 The first few chapters are very insightful and exciting, especially the part about subtle interactions and deceptions we consciously and subconsciously have cultivated as a society. However, towards the end it gets fairly repetitive and embarks on the same points for far too long. All in all, great read about human psychology.
Originally Written here This summer, I donated ten inches of my hair to Pantene Beautiful Lengths that make wigs for people suffering from cancer. In the US alone, every year about 100,000 people take chemotherapy for cancer treatment and undergo hair loss. The process of donating is fairly simple and easy though it’s important to keep a thing or two in mind. Before - After What to note: Talk to…
.. and why this affects every Indian woman Originally Written here Source On September 28th, 2018, the Supreme Court of India ruled that women be granted entry at Sabarimala 6. Among other things one should note: Can the temple do as they please? It is been found that Ayyappa devotees do not constitute a religious denomination and as such are not immune to outside interference 1. The temple is a…
Originally posted on Medium Sourced from Google Images Do I ever cross your mind? If only as a brief flutter Do I ever make you wind? Your words, if only a stutter Do you ever think about me? Just one thought, if only, in your day I wish it was my hands that you reached out for I wish it was my lips that felt your kiss I wish it was me that you woke up to
Originally posted here Part 1: Household Reflections It is an ordinary day for me. Rob and Jenny have left for work and I stroll the living room in a pointless trance, accompanied by a droning whizz of my motors. There is not a lot to life if you’re a cleaning robot. Unlike my cousins at the manufacturing shop, I do not go to the moon, I do not explore far away adventurous mines and be a hero…