This week: car accidents and dashcams, water shortage, LLMs impact on education, home design, contributing to WooCommerce core, and TV show recommendations.

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.

---

What’s been happening

• I’ve been in a couple of car accidents in the last three months, both of them because the other driver was seriously inattentive or driving really rashly on the road. So I finally decided to get a dashcam because it’s super useful when I have to claim insurance for these incidents or file a police complaint. I decided to go with a dual front-rear cam and it’s been performing really well the last few months. Like all good gadgets, it’s completely invisible until you decide to look for it and it switches on with the car, and cycles recordings automatically.

• There’s a lot of water shortage in the apartment now. It’s mostly invisible to us as there’s a borewell (part of the reason for such a shortage), and water lorries do come in, but they’ve stopped allowing us to wash our cars. Like global warming, this is going to be one of the top challenges Indian cities will have to overcome.

• I’ve been thinking about LLMs as “language calculators” and how that might impact language learning and higher education. Just like you are allowed to use a calculator now in the 12th grade (with the idea being that concepts and application are more important than rote calculation), what language learning features would you defer to an LLM? Ammu is an English teacher, so we’ve been having quite a bit of fascinating discussions recently on this topic. I of course err on the side of “if it’s automate-able, teach kids to automate it” but it’s an interesting thought exercise. Is grammar important when you can fixkey it? Perhaps the more important (& a lot more difficult) task is to teach students how to recognise good writing or how to develop an individual style.

• I mentioned Rayon last week, and I’d just like to say how wonderful it’s been for editing my house plans. I’m a big proponent of native apps, but I have to admit that web apps have come a long way in utility and ease of use. I wanted to demo this to my parents the other day and hadn’t brought my laptop, so I just fired it up on my dad’s desktop and everything works as is. I can even tweak live with my parents right there. Do watch the demo here: the auto zone and wall resizing feature is amazing for newbies.

• There’s also a bunch of home design resources out there and construction itself is a fascinating engineering subject. I’ve been watching a bunch of videos lately on just about everything: home office design tips, kitchen design mistakes, food disposers, under sink water purifiers, VRF and multi-split ACs, and so much more.

• I managed to merge my first PR into WooCommerce core this week. Most of our team’s work goes into maintaining the marketplace but we do contribute back, and that’s one of the best things about working at a company like Automattic.
• Ammu was watching Mrs. Harris goes to Paris and I caught a bit of it watching it together with her. It seems like a feel good light watch, a bit of period drama and a weekend cosy watch. I’m also watching the episodic Monk, it’s quite old and a bit dated, but the crime puzzles themselves are well written. Like all good episodic shows, the characters aren’t static through seasons, they change, evolve and become different people: here’s a Season 3 episode when the neat-freak Monk connects with a kid:

Links of the Week

• Liked this video of home maintenance hacks (in Hindi). A few of them like WD-40 I knew about already, but some were new to me.
• I hope this news of marijuana reclassification spurs further research into the side-effects of its usage. I suspect that we’ve gone far too much into the spectrum of weed is amazing and god’s gift to humans and some rationalisation is necessary, but that’s not possible unless researchers can get their hands on the drug and test it effectively in long-term studies.
• I just wanted to highlight this Macbook Air 15-inch review from Paul Thurrot. I know folks like to diss on the Mac, but Apple has done amazing things with their latest chips and there’s nothing comparable in Windows land.

Subscribe

You should subscribe to my weekly notes by typing in your email here.