The week: LitRPG reading, temple transformations, house architect selection and AI advancements.

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 reading the Dawn of the Density God series, and Book 1 was a great read. Book 2 was less so, but I still like how the LitRPG mechanics work in this one.

• I’ve been thinking about this for a while, and thought I should jot it down this week. A lot of our temples, which used to be grand, majestic, peaceful and spiritual are being converted to concrete monstrosities with loud jangling bells. I visited what used to be one of my favourite temples near my house after about 10 years or so and discovered it’s received the same treatment. They’ve chopped down the huge banyan tree that used to be in the front, made all the walkways concrete, installed loudspeakers and what seems like a million loud bells, and wrapped up even the sarpakkavu in concrete. I think folks who do these kinds of renovations mean well: they are taking care of an old, ageing temple, but they simply don’t understand what makes a space great or even useful. Temples used to be our third spaces, but instead they are now a place to show overly overt devotion. And sadly, there are only a few of our old temples left: spaces where we can go and actually feel spiritual. I’m unsure what can be done about this, but it’s just another way the old brand of Hinduism is declining in India.

• We met the architects for our house this week. Ammu and I sat down and watched house videos done by a bunch of them, spoke to a few friends and visited a few homes, and finally selected the fine folks at Urbane Ivy. What we liked about them: warmer tones, liberal use of wood, local materials, and an expression of empathy that came across in their designs. There are a lot of interior designers out there who seem to want to make the house like a hotel room: bright, polished, and at least to me, insanely unliveable. Anyways, Nancy, Nikhil, and Vishnu came over this week and we had a good, long discussion. I had written up a bunch of things, drew a rough sketch with Rayon, and now they’ve started their work. It’s nice to see this taking shape.

• I just wanted to say that I’m blown away by the OpenAI GPT 4o demos. The Math Tutor demo especially was eye popping: conversations with multiple folks, interpreting speech, vision and interactive drawings, and the emotional nuances in the AI voices. Two observations: one, are we really in exponential growth and closer to the singularity than before, and two, are we humans also just word completing machines++? What will GPT 5 look like? Or 6?

• Drove to Kochi and back again this week. Again 500 odd kilometres, and 12+ hour combined drive. It was raining a bit this time too, and that made it worse. Our IVF embryo transfer is scheduled for the last week of this month. ??

• I’ve been reading the Raising Human Beings book off and on. I pick it up every time we start IVF and get into the groove and have dropped it off again each time it’s failed. A couple of friends recommended that book to me, and I’ve now reached the point where I can say it has got some interesting ideas. I wonder how it’ll work in practice.

• We watched Aavesham late night yesterday. Initially we thought we’ll just watch for an hour and then go to sleep early, but we stayed up quite late (until 2 AM) and finished it. It’s loads of fun and FaFa again shows how versatile of an actor he is. Malayalam has also been blessed with a whole lot of great supporting characters, and this film exploits them to the max. The Malluminati song is also in a loop in my head now:

Links of the Week

• Got exposed to Home Assistant for home automation. Maybe it shouldn’t be remarkable that an open source solution is the gold standard if you want customisability and compatibility across every smart device. I’m hoping though that Matter changes this.
• One life hack that I want to pass on: if your white toilet has hard to remove yellow water stains, these pumice stone scrubbers work wonders.
• I resonate with a lot of advice in this video about how eating well is monitoring your glucose levels and not counting calories.

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