I’ve been thinking about this for a while. A way to write regularly, in the vein of early blogging, where it was a stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” posts that nowadays have mostly been taken over by social media.

And then I saw the weekly updates posts from Sathya & Thejesh and thought I’d found the perfect format. So here’s to the start of weekly notes.

---

What’s been happening

• Ammu & I went to see Premalu with Pappu yesterday. It’s not one of those great malayalam movies, but it’s fun and a lot of laughs. We went to the CinePolis nearby and had some dinner afterwards from the mall.

• I’ve been paying for ChatGPT for a while now, and have been increasingly using it during programming. I’ve found it great for automating the “menial” writing and programming tasks. This week I found a nice use-case: give ChatGPT the function signature and it’ll output a PHPDoc block with all the @vars and @returns correctly populated.
• I’m reading The Pathan Unarmed, and I’m about a quarter way in. I love that it tries to analyze how the Pathans (the same group of folks who gave us the Mujahudeen) turned non-violent for a brief period between 1931-1947. It’s a wonderful relic of south Asian history, a tragic and a cautionary tale, and a reminder that Muslims (just like Hindus) are not a monolithic block. The author is an ethnographer, and not a historian so this is not like the narratives I usually read and is more of an analysis, but I’m finding it interesting nevertheless.

• I went and smacked my car sideways into a post the week before last. The side door became stuck and it was hard to open it. The car’s still in the service center, and I’m hopefully getting it back next week. Insurance should cover all costs ??

Links of the Week

• Groq (not to be confused with Elon Musk’s stupidity) gives a glimpse of what’ll happen when these generative AIs can work in a blink.
• The longer video rendition of Hayao Miyazaki’s thoughts on an artificial intelligence should be a must-watch (& not the shorter ones going around on Twitter). He gives context for his harsh comments, and in a way it’s also so sad to see the reactions of the team that built this. Especially the way it ends:

Q: What is your goal?

Team: We would like to build a machine that can draw pictures like humans do.

Q: Would you?

Team: Yes.

Subscribe

You can subscribe to my weekly notes by typing in your email here. Thanks!