Last week: reflections on language learning, Achan’s birthday, a Beatles’ visit, Rikuoh, and the kutty thevangu.

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

• Some of Ammukutty’s friends came over last Sunday. We had a pretty good time just chatting and having a few drinks. It’s only after they left that we realized we didn’t take any photos. Time flies when you are having fun. One thing I think both of us miss is hanging out with friends more: paradoxically, it’s in larger cities that we find more of our school and college friends, almost everybody has moved out of our hometown.

• I really don’t understand Duolingo’s strategy of not teaching any grammar or structure at all. It’s been 500+ days learning German, but I still trip up on a welches vs welche for example. But a quick Kagi search reveals that things are much more complicated than the simple digest that Duolingo provides me every day. Perhaps that’s why? Somebody recommended Pimsleur to me for more serious language learning.

• It’s going to be Ammukutty’s Achan’s 70th birthday soon, but since that fell on a weekday, we took both of them out to one of my favorite beach places in Kovalam: Beatles cafe. We also bought Achan a gold chain (and I realized gold is seriously expensive now), which I think he liked. I didn’t think he liked the food much though, but he loved the ambience.

• I keep wanting to use Remotion somehow. It’s such a cool idea: use React to build videos. Customize and generate these videos on the fly for every user.

• Grokked XState a lot more this week after getting the help of Pavan and Praveen to refactor a rather convoluted root state machine we have at Chronicle. It’s one of those tools that doesn’t really have a lot of documentation about it on the internet. XState (especially v5) needs a good set of “best practices” listed down somewhere. I want to build this inside the company, and if there’s enough consensus, I’ll share it outside as well.

• I’ve been watching Rikuoh off and on and I really like how both sides of Japanese industriousness is portrayed on screen. It has a bit of a feel good flavor, but most days, it’s the perfect thing to watch after work.

• Ammukutty showed me a social media video of a kutti thevangu (a slender loris) and I went down a bit of a rabbit-hole trying to figure out how a lemur-like creature can possibly exist in India. And it turns out it’s a fascinating story of continental drift & a fantasy continent, and how the closest relative to the loris is in Madagascar of all places.

Links of the Week

• I’ve been re-reading The Path of Ascension, and it’s a good power-fantasy trip. I like Matt and Liz’ dynamics, and the world is pretty well fleshed-out.

• I want to try out Reviewstack or similar stack-based diff tools like ghstack. I’ve always naturally gravitated to this kind of a code flow, but doing it manually on Github is a pain. I do wish they supported this flow natively though.

• I was playing around with a command-line llm tool, and it’s pretty cool how many circumstances you can use it in.

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