Posts and commentary from srinathkrishna.com
Came across this blog today and this paragraph amused me a little. A potentially reasonable reaction to these limitations would be to say “LLMs have improved a huge amount over the past year and thus future improvements over the next year will likely make them much better at writing good documentation and maintainable code.” But if you accept my staircase hypothesis, that reaction is a lot less…
I’ve always been fascinated by the requirement for “unification” and “a single thing” to answer all questions in the western world. The western world has embraced monotheistic regions in the last 3.5 millenia, if you trace back to the origins of Judaism. While Europe and likely the Americas were rich with pagan gods, we all know how fast monotheistic regions have taken over. I’ve likened this too…
Peter Gostev of arena.ai shared his experiences generating 3d worlds today. I highly recommend you to watch this. Granted, most of these are voxel art but some of these were quite mindblowing. For e.g., the water texture especially in some of those generations was quite accurate. I also personally enjoyed the Mt. Vesuvius/Pompei recreation - I fondly remembered being obsessed with knowing about…
At times when I feel incredibly frustrated or fatigued that I feel I should just become a recluse, I think of someone like David Attenborough . He turned 100 a couple months ago and still carries on with the same enthusiasm that he had when he was 20! Sure, he’s physically much weaker but mentally astute and curious. I was reading about him on Wikipedia and came across this quote If I was earning…
One of Descartes’ foundational contributions to Philosophy is cogito, ergo sum which translates to “I think, therefore I am”. LLMs are fascinating and helps you learn and understand things a little more by sort of pointing you at the right direction if you know what you’re looking for. In a world where we’re optimizing for speed and max throughput where Software Engineers are purely acting as a…
Life is incredibly rich! And we owe this richness to the differences that exist between us as a society! We don’t expect us to wear the same clothes around the world, eat the same food, like the same movies and speak the same language. One of my biggest fears of an LLM driven society is homogenization. LLMs are an incredible capsule of our society. We have a lot of information distilled in these…
Cory Doctorow termed this word in 2022. This is a word that represents the state of much of software today. Not just the end state, but often intermediate states and workflows/processes that lead us there. And I fear LLMs without the right mindset might get us there sooner. While an abundance mindset is good, it’s often the decadence mindset that leads us there. On a daily basis, I come across…
I read this fascinating post by Armin Ronacher on the perils of using agents. This is something that hardly anyone bats an eyelid to - the rationale is if something is messy, I’ll throw it out and write it again. We are going to enter weird times where we’ll have an army of new engineers who are likely to know how to prompt but not really how to think. Some senior engineers might end up here too.…
I’ve been enjoying my break from work and using this time to overwhelmingly use LLMs for writing code, learn how others use them and explore what my thoughts are. The Ralph Wiggum phenomenon by Geoff Huntley or agent loops more generally, inspired me to write this post. There’s a bit of a self-discovery involved as I use these tools more and more and that’s something I wanted to write about since…
TIL about Hinton’s Paradox where Geoffrey Hinton’s prediction in 2016 that we won’t have any more radiologists in 5 years isn’t just true but also that we have now more radiologists than ever. And of course, AI has integrated into every workflow of radiologists. And this reminds me of another fantastic article that I read last year about how Cancer has a surprising amount of detail by @owl_posting…
Adam Wiggins , the founder of Heroku announced today that he’ll be researching on how to combat the information overload that we all have to deal with on a day to day basis as part of his time at Ink & Switch . I’m super stoked about this tbh. Adam is an amazing researcher with a keen eye for solving problems elegantly and I’m looking forward ot seeing how this evolves.
Admittedly, this is controversial but I’ll die on this hill, nevertheless. People have long careers and work for a bunch of companies over time. A lot of people put the ex-$prev_company tag on their profiles. I like to think that they do it for visibility and to boost the possibility of their profile showing up to recruiters (if they’re searching for new roles). I don’t really blame them - it’s…
The first casualty to agent driven development is Tailwind which is laying off 75% of its workforce since traffic to its docs have reduced, in spite of it being the most prominent CSS framework. This is not good and there are many more in the boat and we’ll see a few happening through 2026. I also chanced upon this linkedin post by marcj who is switching entirely to closed source. And I don’t…
I love talking to LLMs to understand my worldview and there have been instances in the past year where I’ve had the LLM literally roast, critique and challenge me with interesting conversations. I’ve also had a few conversations thinking about abstract things in life. I realize that some of these conversations are very intriguing and I’m beginnig to share these in conversations .
I love all the wonderful stuff that people share on socials about what they built over the holidays. AI assisted coding has certainly opened up the possibility that people who have a specific itch and had no idea how to solve it now have this magical tool to solve their usecase. I’ve long enjoyed writing simple CLI tools with the UNIX philosophy in mind since I started writing code. These could be…
Everyone knows that LLMs are inherently non-deterministic and harnesses, MCPs, RAG, skills etc. all try to paper over this. But this non-determinism is a feature. And the developer community is slowly beginning to embrace it. This was well elucidated by Martin Fowler on his recent podcast on The Pragrammatic Engineer. He akins this to the field of mechanical engineering with engineers building…
After ~4 years, I wrapped up my time at Stripe just before this year’s BFCM.
Every interaction with the LLM to generate tokens requires subsequent prompting for tweaking. One-shot is doable but is it efficient? Consider this - you want to generate a blog with multiple pages and you prompt your way through over time. And unless you, the prompter are prudent about reducing code-duplication, the LLM will always tend to duplicate code. It’s very likely that LLMs of today don’t…
This tweet from Andrej Karpathy has been doing the rounds and I felt this quoted tweet from rahulgs was on-point based on my experience working with LLMs. The frontier is moving quickly for writing code at the least and the more harnesses and tools you provide for your engineer and the more context you provide your models, the better it is going to get over time. Security is still an very…
Of course, everyone is talking about this tweet by Andrej. I do feel this at times - there’s just a lot to keep up and honestly the best way I’m making progress is learning a thing or two every day and accepting that I can’t be knowing everything in one-go and trusting my future self to figure it out. Having a bunch of pet-projects/problems to work on and putting these tools to use to work on…
What matters?
I recently got an Elgato HD60X from FB Marketplace in the intent that I’ll be streaming more. This device is truly magical and sleek.
After about 8.5 years, I visited Tiruvannamalai again during my visit to Chennai in 2025. The last time I visited was in January 2017 - in fact I did my first Vipassana session in Dhamma Arunachala . I have a lot of fond memories of this place and I enjoyed my time at both Ramanasramam and the Arunachaleshwarar temple after the meditation session.
After ~5 years, I decided to move on from Salesforce last week. Before mentioning where I’m heading to and what led me to that decision, I wanted to take a moment to write about my time at Salesforce and reflect a bit.
I turned 33 earlier this year. Not a huge number by any margin. I aspire to grow older and wiser over time and live as long as humanly possible .
As with anything else in the world, change is a constant. Moving on from the world of Hugo and Golang, this is my attempt in trying to blog more as I move to Zola.
Where do I even start? It’s been more than 5 days since the dreadful news came on Friday morning that SPB Sir is no more. I’ve been trying my best to process this loss - I personally do not know him, I haven’t met him, he doesn’t know me, but yet where did all this relationship begin? ( tere mere beech mein kaisa hai ye bandhan )
I’m proud to admit that I’m bitten by the Rich Hickey bug. As many in reddit convey, I strarted watching a video or two during my commute to work and a lot of things made so much sense that I decided to give Clojure a try. Of course, I’m not at the level where I want to run my fingers in Rich’s Bob Ross like hair. :P What are my first impressions? There are many positives already about Clojure.…
I recently had the opportunity to catch a series on HBO. No it’s not Game Of Thrones! :) On a side-node, I haven’t seen a single episode of GoT and don’t intend to, especially after everyone lambasted how bad the series was.
If you’re a cricket fan, you better had been keeping track of what happened at the World Cup this year. It was one of my favorite world cups since 2003 and I kept a tab on the scores and games for almost all the matches. This was also the first world cup since 2003 where I had a subscription for viewing the world cup. (I had the subscription for 2011 when in India but since the World Cup happened…
I take public transport to work. It’s something that I’ve been doing for about 6 months now. This might not be newsworthy to many folks and if you’re living in a metropolitan area like New York City or Hong Kong, taking public transport to work is an integral part of one’s day.
This was a book by Haruki Murakami in conversation with Seiji Ozawa, the former director and conductor at the Boston Conservatory of Music. The original book is in Japanese and the version I read was translated in English by Jay Rubin.
The article talks about how to better use the pomodoro technique for productivity.
Finally mustered some courage and got over my laziness to create a post on a statically hosted blog. I had been having a (largely idle) wordpress blog for a while now. In fact, I remember getting there from a long route from static HTML back in those days, a custom wordpress site and a tumblr site.
As far as finance is concerned, bankruptcy is probably the lowest point in a company or an individual’s life. The dictionary defines bankruptcy as such,
The title of this post is part of a quote by the famous 13th century Persian poet, Rumi .
Over the last few years, I feel the word “blog” and “blogging” are being slowly phased out thanks to the explosion of social media (and the associated ADHD). Like any millenial who grew with the web from the late 90s, I’ve explored many platforms online for writing (ranting) over the years and as with any media, viewership dictates whether a medium thrives or not. I hope this post would make a…
I’m a huge fan of Spotify and have been using the Premium feature quite regularly since December 2014. The reason why I chose Spotify over other available services during that time were
A couple of days before, I was perusing through my Feedly as part of my daily routine and an article about Idea Debt came up through Hacker News. It was a rather 3-4 minute read article that I put off and it lay there as a tab not to be returned to until today. I’ve had this habit of opening tabs of articles from different sources only to determine that they’re pretty long for me to read at that…
Occasionally, people stump into a perilous pit only to be surrounded by pessimistic and dismissive emotions. Almost every human would have gone through this phase at least once in their lifetime. There’s no single reason that led to such self doubt but a series of incidents which would be pretty hard to trace back.
The festival of Bhogi (போகி) in South India is celebrated on the last day of the month mArgazhi (மார்கழி). The first day of the next month, thai (தை) is celebrated across Tamil Nadu with much fanfare and is also well known as the festival of Pongal (பொங்கல்). Pongal is also known by other names such as Sankaranti across India.
I happened to come across T. M. Krishna’s talk about his latest book – A Southern Music – A Karnatik Story . I’ve been looking forward to read it but haven’t got a chance yet, but came across this interview of sorts where he outlines what has gone into the book. I started viewing the video but after a good 10 minutes into it, I realized that this needs to go into writing too. So here I am…
Of late, I feel people have waned away from blogging thanks to more contemporary social networks some of whom insist on limiting you with 140 characters. While microblogging has been successful, I myself have been very erratic in using it as I have been with every other service. (Talk to me of ever being an early adopter and not being a constant user.) That has been the case with Twitter,…
I recently subscribed to Netflix for the sake of House of Cards and one of the first videos that I saw was a TED talk by Dr. Amy Cuddy. When there are people who despise TED talks, I personally like some of them, if not all. I find them interesting because it is an avenue to know about people and how they are touching others’ lives. This talk by Dr. Cuddy is one that I found interesting and worth…
The long weekend spent in Santa Barbara bore fruit, thanks to my pal, Karthick Santhanam. During our drive over Camino Cielo, we were dumbstruck, partly by the beautiful mountains and partly by Dr. L. Subramaniam ’s virtuoso on the violin. For people who don’t know about this acclaimed artist, he is one of the pioneers in the world of music and is one of the very few artists who is adept with both…
Thanks to one of my friends, I got my Google+ invite on June 30th. I woke up and found an invite in my inbox and immediately, I signed up. Having seen the screenshots and videos of it, I assumed it to be better than facebook and the rest.
Greetings! In today’s world, anything without an “i” as a prefix, hasn’t got much value to it. The ahambhaavam (sense of I – ego) has an altogether different meaning these days. It’s all about whether you possess a coveted iDevice or not and if you don’t, or if you are even remotely nonchalant about its existence in your neighbour’s pocket, you’ll be looked down with disdain. It’s hard to not be…
Ever since I started watching cricket (the 1996 world cup), I’ve always dreamt of India winning it. I wanted to cherish the emotions and feelings that would’ve ran through Kapil’s Devils in ’83. And here it is! After 15 years of wait (for me), the World Cup has come home.
Pictures showing the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, on April 20, 2010. Gulf of Mexico – Oil Spill
All these years you wanted to watch cricket, but you had exams of all sorts scheduled perfectly alongside the matches and all that you can do is peep in occasionally to watch that bottom bar for the score and if you overstay your welcome in to the TV room, you experience a bad feeling about tomorrow’s exam and your legs automatically take you to the study room!