This week: a good movie, a great book, and a couple of nice TV shows.

For folks not in the know, this is a weekly stream of consciousness zero-agenda “here’s what’s happening” or “here’s what’s interesting” post. Read my first entry from last week.

What’s been happening

• One of the good things about being back in my hometown is the opportunity to spend time with parents. This week we went to see a movie together. Here’s all of us:

• The movie that we saw was Bramayugam, and unlike last week’s Premalu, this is indeed one of those genre-defining Malayalam movies that is coming out nowadays. The movie is shot in a 2:1 aspect ratio entirely in black and white, and it’s got the same feel as Schindler’s List in that it seems to take us back to a day and age that is forever lost now. I won’t spoil much about the story, but it’s a must watch. The music especially is loud, haunting, and perfect. It’s also one of those movies that can only be made in Kerala: unlike Premalu, this is definitely serious cinema without even a female lead, but it grossed ?50 crores nevertheless. Just take a look at this poster:

• I’m continuing to read The Pathan Unarmed, but it’s slow going. It’s been a while since I read an academic book such as this, but it’s filled with facts. Do you know that Hindu Kush literally means “Hindu killer?” Or that in Afghan Pathan culture, homosexual relationships were increasingly common, and this was true in every culture, including the Spartans that worshipped masculinity and controlled access to women? Its particularly poignant how the book quotes from E.M. Forster’s Maurice to illustrate British-Indian homosexual relations:

• I got my car back after service and repair and it’s nice to see it looking good now. Thank god for insurance as the repair costs (even with a relatively moderate ding like this) was over ?1lakh. I also bought and installed a couple of door visors for the Jeep.
• I’ve been learning German for a while and this week we finished watching a couple of excellent German TV shows. I can’t follow any of the language yet except for a few words and simple sentences, but it’s nice to hear the language spoken. Anyways Schlafende Hunde (Sleeping Dog) and Liebes Kind (Dear Child) are both excellent shows on Netflix. The portrayal of psychosis and homelessness in the first one is amazing, and Dear Child has a good suspenseful story with an impactful ending.

Links of the Week

• I really like the “web development in an app” app kitten. So instead of installing a bunch of npm dependencies each time, you just create a bunch of files and then run kitten which has all the batteries included (& can be independently updated). Web development has become increasingly complex (& sometimes needlessly so), so a return to a PHP-like development experience is definitely appealing. I don’t like the technology choices here though. While htmx sounds ok, a version with sqlite for the DB and tailwind for styling would have been great to have. Also, there doesn’t seem to be any authentication!
• I think this idea of starting off with GPT-4, collecting input and output prompts and then switching to a fine-tuned model based on an OSS stack has a lot of promise for all AI companies. See OpenPipe that seems to have productised this.

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