Visruth Srimath Kandali's Website
Chekhov’s Gun essentially says that unnecessary details should be penalized—more directly, if a gun is introduced in Act 1, it should be fired by Act 2 or 3. However, it is possible to, perhaps, misunderstand this narrative principle and apply it unnecessarily. I’ve seen this extensively in cheap media (most often television), where the MacGuffin gets some ridiculous backstory to “justify” it…
I n accord with my new, standardized theming which I’ve since adopted across various sites (mostly software projects), I have updated the formatting and typography of this site too. I updated the types to match my theme; headers are now set in Valley Sans , body in Alegreya, and monospaced text in Commit Mono . There are some other new goodies too. As you may have noticed, I added dropcaps…
Demo I’ve been meaning to make my own theme/branding to use across my various pkgdown sites, and ever since learning about _brand.yml I have wanted to use that as the core. A brand file declares styling that gets picked up nicely across most of the Posit ecosystem, to varying degrees . I tried writing this up myself in Spring but got busy and frustrated very quickly. I got access to Claude…
I’ve been stuck on a problem I ran when trying to integrate mori with mirai —specifically, if a user has a compute profile with mixed remote and local daemons, what is the cleanest way of mori sharing arguments to just the local daemons and copying data to the remote ones. Beyond researching this, I’ve not made any major changes. I extended the report’s section on mori a little but still need to…
See the previous GSOC post for some background. Or, you can read my notes and such here . So far, I’ve been focusing on writing up our motivation and doing some simple experiments and improvements. You can find all that in the repo, primarily in the in-progress report I’ve been working on. I will probably spin out what I’ve learned and been writing about parallelization in R into a post here,…
I arranged a portfolio , designed to show the breadth of my photography. The tail end of this collection are more “photos of beautiful things”, more accessible. I still like those shots, but they are less say, satisfying , than the others. I also realized that the repository for my website wasn’t open, so I fixed that. Its nothing interesting; I keep all my full res shots in the content…
I ’m excited to be accepted into the GSOC 2026 cohort, continuing to work on loo , but this time focusing on parallelizing loo . I did GSOC last year as well, also working on loo . This year there were 1,141 accepted contributors from a pool of 15,245 (23,371 proposals), working out to an acceptance rate of around 7.5% (4.9%). Again, this was the only proposal I submitted. In case you aren’t…
I finally mirrored some repositories on my tangled , motivated in part by the ridiculousness of GitHub lately. I should’ve probably written about some of the packages a while ago; bootstrapper is a package to bootstrap making other R packages, mostly according to my sensibilities of what new R packages should have. It updates steps in GHA and such as well. voucher is a R interface to Mitchell…
This is my final report for CSC 369: Introduction to Distributed Computing at Cal Poly. Introduction N ow that Stack Overflow (SO, or just “Stack”) is dead, it is time to perform an autopsy. Stack was infamous for being an impenetrable forum, filled with–to keep it PG–obnoxious people who were often technically correct and reveled in proving it. Constantly. So how did Stack’s culture and community…
tl;dr: I want science fiction artificial intelligences like Olivaw et al., and I want to reserve the term AI for that kind of intelligences, not for LLMs. Y ou’ll find people saying Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) will come tomorrow, every day, since AlexNet it seems. Look! it can talk. Look! it can draw. Look! it can code. Look!- Look, I don’t care. I like LLMs, I use them, and I do think…
We took a coach to LA. T he bus pulled into a parking lot attached to the hotel; we only had to be outside, breathing the (perhaps poisoned) LA air for about 50 meters before we would be able to enter the relative safety of whatever Hampton Inn-esque institution we were to be housed in. I had wiled away most of the ride—either reading or napping or chilling or just listening to music—just…
9/10 Published in 1908 by Natsume Soseki. As always, spoilers. I delayed this review in part because I have little to say, but I do want to record what little is there. I really like Sanshiro—I picked it on a whim, seeing a translation by Jay Rubin of Murakami fame (to me), and an introduction by Haruki (also of Murakami fame), as well as a neat little cover art that the Penguin Classics version…
Pardon the self-aggrandizement—though such an apology probably should precede most pieces in this collection anyway. I love buying books. I’m not too particular on what kind, so long as they are good, and generally hardcover. As I have mentioned, I have built up a little library holed up in my room in college, slowly growing it over the first half of three years I’ve been here, in the flat. I love…
Last year I said that transformers will be gone in a decade (2035), but didn’t say anything of substance beyond that. I still don’t have much substance, but I’d like to posit a counter architecture/model structure which may serve to be useful. I read some AI papers, but not all, so its most likely that this idea has been implemented, tested, and empirically shown to be terrible but I’ve not read…
Every so often I forget how much of a pain using my old PH-1 (rooted, LineageOS 20—yes I know I should update) as a server is and give it a go. This round, I’ve skipped the aged Linux-Deploy and wanted a cleaner solution. I’ve found this guide before but it never worked. In the age of LLMs, I just passed the error I always got and Gemini told me the solution—the guide installs the chroot to…
T here are two forms of regret: regret due to a shift of values, and regret due to a change of information. Regret only exists post-hoc, i.e. you can only regret an event which has passed, something you have already experienced. Let us say at every juncture, you have a set of mutually exclusive actions you may take 1 . Further, let us say that you have some black box which outputs an ordered set…
I learnt coding in Python, some years ago, but I stopped coding soon after. I worked in Python on and off until Freshman year, when I suddenly knew R—I must’ve learnt it at some point but have no memory—and have been working more seriously in R ever since. This is a not a post on the language wars (see Claus Wilke’s piece if you want something closer to my views on that), but I do think R is…
Simple: 1 fun ( args ) Blog post done. In a sense, this tongue-in-cheek response is completely accurate, but the nuance which has been buzzing about my head is that args bit—so, a slightly more descriptive and less inflammatory title for this piece may be: “How to Pass Arguments to Functions in R ” but whatever. So what’s the nuance? Well, the main thing I’ve been thinking about is when you can…
I took a general education course with my roommate in Winter Freshman year, History 202: “United States History Since 1865”, practically the first course we took together. We had technically both taken an elective in high school together, but that hardly counts; frankly, that was barely a class at all. Until that quarter, I had only taken two courses with one of my friends before—primary school…
I n second year, I moved to a small flat. It is some 660 square feet, a number too small and big to mean anything; it is big enough for me and my roommate to each have our own sizable rooms, but small enough for us to hear each others voice if we spoke a bit loud over the humdrum noises of the quiet street we overlook. We are in the first set of units, the block closest to the street, and the…
I’ve been too lazy to type this out for a while, so this tiny post has been delayed by almost a month I think. I happened upon this neat little not-so connection between umbrage and “throwing shade”—umbrage has two (kinda three) main definitions 1 : Annoyance (typically at a slight) Shade (weakest definition) Suspicion I was aware of the second definition but not the first, so when I happened upon…
I’ve been thinking about revising my piece on intelligence for a long while, but I’ve decided finally to opt not to replace it wholesale and instead write about things I wish to update as they come. This particular piece is focused on intelligence , as prior defined, and is a stronger and more versatile construction of the idea as I’ve been using it. Introduction I ntelligence can be construed as…
Goodhart’s law is a somewhat famous statement, essentially saying that “when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure”. I’ve thought that this naturally implies a construction as a fallacy, and just wanted to write it down. Goodhart’s fallacy, I posit, is the fallacy of appealing to a measure without verifying its capabilities of measuring your target. A simple example I…
I have a very uncommon (first and last) name. My given name is uncommon in America, of course, but it is also uncommon in India—I’m no “Gupta” (which is a last name, FYI) or “Dhruv” or “Aaditya” (typically, “Aditya”), dime a dozen overflowing, spilling onto the streets and crowding out the phone books. Of course, I am not the only person with my name, that would be pretty ridiculous. I’d say there…
Introduction D ifficulty is a difficult thing to pin down. I had to expend a good bit of effort to write this piece, counter to my usual method of writing ad hoc . I’ve settled on a tripartite construction of difficulty: effort, time, and familiarity. Effort is what I think the colloquial usage of difficulty is reduced to. Effort is a measure of expended, concentrated energy—e.g. through thinking…
O ne of these woeful college spring days I happened upon a two meter high beach ball on my way home. It was down a long stretch of road which longues through the middle of campus, a high-activity walkway as it were—anchored at one end by our gym, and at the long other by a small food court. I was walking home from math down this route when I saw it, some 20 meters away. It was rolling slowly, like…
T o begin, I wish to address the title, which I picked because I like alliteration even though it pains me to abuse terminology. Memorization vs Caching might be a better title, but clearly doesn’t have the same ring to it. The key difference being that “cache” makes it explicit that you eject things at some point—usually on some heuristic like Least Recently Used—but I’m getting ahead of myself.…
Eagle eyed readers may notice changes in the look of the site. If you are reading through RSS, I’d suggest viewing the webpage. So, I swapped to Astro, aping my writing site which I’ve folded back into my main site. The look is far more aesthetic, and feels much nicer to read on I think. I moved some things around, but should have functionality parity—except for search. I have more control over…
9/10 Published in 2004 by Haruki Murakami. One of Murakami’s best, and entirely unlike most his oeuvre. Spoilers. I will maintain that Murakami isn’t one of my absolute tippy-top favorite authors—those halls are crowded by Pratchett, Dumas, Dick, Le Guin, Asimov, Foo, & friends—but he is remarkably consistent. I started Ann Patchett’s Run and it’s extremely boring. I sort of expected that, having…
S o recently, this paper from OpenAI has been going the rounds, talking about hallucinations. I’ve only (barely) skimmed the paper, but the section which seems to be the most pertinent happily is the first one, and I’d strongly encourage you to read it first. “Ternary truths” is something I thought about for a while—I blogged about this way back in January . I didn’t end up writing anything back…
You have alighted upon a break in the book, a section of peace and quiet where my role is (thankfully) diminished and I bring you to some stories and happenstances which did not merit their own chapters alone and so have been collated in these Interludes. Chronologically, I am putting them at the end of the summer, right before the next school year starts. This Interlude is about high school,…
9/10 Published in 1951 by J.D. Salinger. Spoiler review, as usual. I had totally missed out on Catcher in the Rye —I had heard the title being thrown about in passing, but I never read it when I was younger and consuming classics. I got a copy for under a dollar at this great used book store one of my friends told me about in the Bay Area; it’s a very worn out paperback, with the cover creased…
8/10 Published in 2023 by Haruki Murakami. The City and its Uncertain Walls isn’t anything new; but it is perhaps Murakami’s best rendition of his formula, and that alone makes it well worth a read. Spoilers for this book and Hardboiled Wonderland and The End of the World , and vaguely every Murakami book. I ’ve been reading a lot of Murakami, and I’ve skipped writing up any thoughts on a good…
Introduction T his summer I worked on the loo package as part of the Google Summer of Code 2025. The loo package is widely used to cross-validate Bayesian models and has over three million downloads and several thousand citations to date. This project is under Stan , which is sponsored by the NumFocus organization. My goals for the project were to create extend the package API by creating a…
I have moved my fiction writing from this site to a new one which you can find by hitting Writing at the top menu. Whilst the blog isn’t super formal (it is a blog after all) it also isn’t that personal, and is mostly focused on professional work, i.e. Statistics, Computing, etc. With this in mind, I decided to divest my personal writing (call it Prose if you wish) and shifted it into a new…
Inside every old person is a young one wondering what happened — Terry Pratchett (Moving Pictures) I turned 20 recently. I don’t feel older, of course—who ever feels older on their birthday—but I can feel a Rubicon crossed, deep down; a Rubicon whose effects are yet to bear, effects which I can feel well up, creeping up the edges of my heart; I can see them consume me in recent futures. 20. Two…
In the summer of ‘24, I toured France with the school’s symphony. This is a collation of some memories from that trip which are worth mentioning. To set the stage, let me explain where I stand in the symphony. It’s not extremely pertinent, but it does contextualize some things, so I’ll be brief. The symphony is pretty big, numbering close to 100 I think, and this trip was taken with the choir…
I t all started when I stepped away from my PC for a few minutes to drink water or eat food or something, I can’t even remember at this point. I know I was working on something before and was planning on coming back and continuing so I just locked GNOME and walked away. When I come back, I find that the system has hibernated so I attempt to wake it but this fails. This isn’t new—whenever my system…
6/10 Published in 2017 by Haruki Murakami. Spoiler for Commentadore, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle , The Great Gatsby , (mildly) The Picture of Dorian Gray . You should read all of those if you haven’t (though the Wilde ends far poorer than it starts). I found this to be remarkably uninspired. Not long after I started Murakami’s catalogue, I’ve bifurcated his books into two. One group are the…
6/10 Published in 1971 by Fredrick Forsyth. Spoiler review. I first heard of “The Jackal” being used as an assassin’s name in Robert Ludlum’s The Bourne Ultimatum . I enjoy the Bourne movies for what they are (pure thrillers) and was unaware that moniker was inspired indirectly through this Forsyth novel . The book is a slow burn; the first 200 or so pages I was wondering why I bothered…
Ok finally met with mentors again and made some progress. Short meeting cause we couldn’t meet on our regular meeting time since I had a doctor’s appointment, but productive nonetheless. I got some of my code verified, and I need to implement weights for all the measures, which hopefully shouldn’t be too bad? Skipping the energy measure for now as that one is a bit more involved—I didn’t…
I posted this as a reply on BlueSky sometime recently, but I’m a touch baffled by the lack of consumer facing stats space/diffusion/hybrid models. NVIDIA pops out a new Nemotron (hybrid MAMBA Transformer) model every so often, but I usually see limited discourse online. I could be following the wrong people—reading the wrong articles—but I really think these releases would be more pervasive. The…
7/10 Published in 2014 by B.J. Novak. I was surprised when Jin said he purchased a BJ Novak novel. I had him confirm it was the guy from The Office, which I think is a very common response from anyone seeing the book. It’s a series of short stories, most all comedic—some allegorical. I found the stories to be very hit-or-miss though; there were plenty of them which I didn’t care for at all,…
I f you navigate to search you can see the lunr.js powered search. I’m very pleased with this, and I think it looks great. It has a decent amount of features I’d say; the search functionalities are mostly detailed on the search page itself. External links are marked. I think this is missing some but I’m not sure why; will check it out later. Double whammy: I wrote some shortcodes to list files…
I just learnt that Canvas is open source under AGPL3 ?? That’s super cool. I was looking into their API to see if there is an automated way to batch create assignments and idly clicked on a little link which opened to the source code which was a pleasant surprise. Aside on the interrobang (!?): I’m starting to use this a bit more and I’ve taken to it. I initially wrote the title with just a ?,…
T he bathroom was putrid, rancid, rank—practically by definition. The tiles were chipped; chiselled into walls were the names of long-dead teens who thought they would rule the world, or at least this miserable pocket of it. The lighting didn’t help. Yellowing bulbs fizzed and lit the room unevenly; their shaky visages flickered in and out. Nary a small soul could manage to do their business in…
Mostly just penning some ideas that have been floating around in my head. I can’t think of a semi-synonym for stats that starts with R to complete the trilateral alliteration which was saddening :( R eproducibility is more of a hot topic with every passing year it seems (as I’ve ascertained through literature review, not experience), but I still feel like the discourse isn’t radical enough so to…
I wrote about swapping to Linux a while ago, but I’ve been using NixOS on-and-off for a bit since then. After my confs, I’ve taken to sitting down and configuring my setup far more seriously. I installed Zed a while ago, but didn’t do much with it. I’ve set it up further now, and hooked it up with GH Copilot and trying the agent stuff I keep seeing everywhere. It’s pretty good actually! I’ve been…
Finally done with conferences and taking a short break to recover and relax. I severely underestimated how taxing this would be—but it was very fun! This was my first useR! and I liked it a lot—my kind of crowd for sure. I learnt a lot, but nothing that can be directly applied to {loo} .
The past couple weeks have been wild. I was sick (still feeling a bit off), then presented at JSM and explored Nashville for five days before flying out straight to Durham, almost being unable to check-in to my hotel, useR! conf-ing for most the day and writing my slides up by night, and presenting tomorrow (~12 hrs from now). I’m very tired, but I’m also very excited! 10 days or so is exhausting…