Logs '25

Date: 2025-06-21 Last Modified: 2025-06-21 Status: Finished Tags: thoughts, links, reading

Oct 25 ‘25. Been reading the series Exiting Modernity by Meta-Nomad.

Oct 14 ‘25. Read a decent write up on Alec Radford. For anyone who know’s the field, the man is a prolific researcher. His work spans Audio (Generative Audio), Speech (Whisper) , Text (GPT1, GPT2) to Vision (CLIP).

I’m still not up to do much work today. So, I have instead been watching a series of videos on the Secret History by the Predictive History YouTube channel. I especially liked the death by bureaucracy which ties in to the theme of various sources I have been reading from (longer rant incoming soon). To start off, watch Poverty Inc.; you will see how majority of the aid actually goes towards servicing the bureaucracy that exists to get the aid. Although quite informal, read to get a gist of unproductive people read Geohot’s post here.

Oct 13 ‘25. Travelling without a destination to get back to has a strange effect, you don’t feel entirely stable to think of things required beyond a couple of weeks of survival. I’m reminded of something that J. Bronowski mentioned in his magnificent book, The Ascent of Man, “Civilization can never grow up on the move.” The write up here captures it pretty well. An excerpt below:

It is not possible in the nomad life to make things that will not be needed for several weeks. They could not be carried. And in fact the Bakhtiari do not know how to make them. If they need metal pots, they barter them from settled peoples or from a caste of gipsy workers who specialise in metals. A nail, a stirrup, a toy, or a child’s bell is something that is traded from outside the tribe. The Bakhtiari life is too narrow to have time or skill for specialisation. There is no room for innovation, because there is not time, on the move, between evening and morning, coming and going all their lives, to develop a new device or a new thought – not even a new tune. The only habits that survive are the old habits. The only ambition of the son is to be like the father.

Oct 9 ‘25. Simon Sarris’ essay Breadcrumbs is quite interesting. An excerpt:

“One aspect of life, somewhat neglected in the digital age, is the desire to see and be seen. We should not only desire that others find us, we need them to. We need jobs, relationships, friends, and all other kinds of connections. Though it sometimes feels that these connections are assigned at random, it is never true, they are always the product of someone’s efforts. Trivially, hiding in a basement yields zero connections.”

Oct 7 ‘25. Rereading Challenging the Difficult LessWrong series by Eliezer Yudkowsky. Pieces that I especially like are, “Trying to Try”, “On Doing the Impossible”, “Shut up and do the impossible” and “Final Words”.

Oct 6 ‘25. I’ve been watching the ongoing video book series - Manushyarariyan 2 by Maitreyan, while I have more to say about the content and production, I’m really enjoying it! If you speak Malayalam (or don’t mind the English auto-tune) check it out! After a long time, I feel like I’m listening to someone who thinks freely, that’s getting rare. A few links:

Oct 5 ‘25. I’ve been on the move these days, crashing on a friend’s couch. It’s been revelatory as to how little I need compared to how much I own. Packing things up for a long move always involves pruning the excess that accumulates as a result of staying at a place for too long. In a related note, I found shipping luggage through Hermes in case of a long distance move within Germany to be quite useful. It’s relatively cheap, compared to hauling it across state in a train or hiring a moving van if it’s confined to two suitcases.

I read an article in NY Times, covering comedian Kunal Kamra’s current situation. It reveals just how far the current govt. has gone to curb dissent. They take out your knee caps (means of making a living) one by one. From the article, “They shut the bigger venues, I went to the smaller venues. They shut the smaller venues, I’m working on YouTube,” he said. “If they shut YouTube, I’ll figure something out."

Few other interesting links to check out:

Sep 5 ‘25. It’s been too long since I’ve been cooped up, to read or think about something interesting. But I had to share this Ran Prieur take on “motivation” and recognizing when to do and when to let go. I was also following a lot of exurb1a content - his story, narration and editing skills are amazing! My favorites are: and then we’ll be okay and recently the now deleted Losing You.

I have been recently thinking about how politically unaware I am, and I don’t mean politics as we see it. I meant, being aware of the Constitution of The Republic of India. All new laws passed, all moves to ammend the constitution, all the news, there’s no framework to think about them - how do we know they are unjust, how do we know what’s the value of a vote. Once you read through, and perhaps accept the constitution, then this framework provides a way to think about the country as a whole, no longer to think in terms of cultutral, linguistics, religious or caste based lenses. The remanants of the old world.

Jul 7 ‘25. Some links on ML and CS concepts, well illustrated. Amit’s writeup on REGEX and Self-supervised learning. Kudos on the blog design, really feels like a good technical blog. Aman.ai’s primers on KNN’s, Clustering, and Speech Processing and Shuzhan Fan’s post on ResNet’s and SVM’s.

A special note to self: Skills are what help you bring your ideas to life - no matter what (supposedly) brilliant idea you have - if you ain’t got the skills, it may not see the light of the day.

Jul 5 ‘25. Some links to follow and some mistakes that made me dive deep into what are iterators. Link1 - Biyani, Link2 - PG’s tour of Python Internals, Link3 - Iterators in C++, Link4 - Py Iterators in C, Link5 Iterators in C++ and Link6 - History of Iterators. To be continued.

There are two things I realized today - when learning, you need to follow your intuitions to the end, to figure out if they led you down the right path or not AND - you need to learn how to get your intuitions / ideas into the real world. Figure a way to express them, and test them, that is part of getting good at your craft.

Jul 3 ‘25. Found out about some of the computer vision & ML work netflix has put in to analyze edit videos to produce higher quality content and search on their platform. High-level explanation behind Match-Cut is quite interesting. Especially how they went from the segmentation x IOU technique for frame matching to Optical flow x cosine similarity for action - matching. I really love how fluidly the scene is transitioned, with instant understanding of the content.

I realised something else, in terms of thinking about how you would use the varied things you’d learn in a course - say concepts like cosine-similarty and IoU, what prbably helps is looking closely into tasks & tools. Tasks are the part of the problem you are trying to solve, say similarity search between two frames OR similarity search between actions of two frames and tools are what aid you to do this - IoU for finding similarity between two different areas; which is suitable if you are comparing masks from segmentation VS cosine similarity to identify similarity between two vectors; suitable for the vector field output provided by optical flow.

Jul 1 ‘25. Turned 27, moved to Munich - ready to be poor ;). Mostly, open questions about wealth, money and paper currency is on my mind. Watched another video on paper money, still lot’s to understand, but this one is more on the role of Central Government banks (in context of UK’s Bank, but obviously applicable to India & The US) - 97% Owned.

My main thought is, if you can’t trust “numbers in the bank”, bond’s and stocks (I hope you’ve read Value of Nothing), then what is left. You can’t buy commodities and just store them somewhere safe (Or can you ?).

I used to think that wealth would mean “assets being held”, or “large sums of money” or vaguely “that big company / startup / business”. But in reality, as David would say - wealth is a set of physical transformations that we can affect.

A knowledge of and ability to control your means of production of food, water, and electricity for example, is wealth. An economy essentially is exchange of goods and services such as above (that go way beyond the basics). It’s also, an attempt at improving life by solving problems, winning over nature - that’s what market’s respected.

The finance sector was born and it destroyed the very map used to keep track of this exchange. It was a way to keep in check, problems, that would cause excessive spending on defence, on waging wars, on jacking up asset prices to sell to the sucker that held it till the end, and it’s now paper floating around.

Well, Wealth, Urban Mobility design, building inter-generational stability and wealth was on my mind. As an aside theme. Also see - WTF Happened in 1971. I mean just look at this chart!

Also found another short story by the Ted Kaczynski to be quite interesting - Ship of Fools.

Ultimately, grateful for the opportunities so far and cautious of the opportunities to win over nature. And get insanely good at things.

Jun 22 ‘25. Should be studying for an upcoming exam, but went into a rabbit hole on how Fragile money really is. Some interesting links, like this cartoon on How Money Works was the first trigger. If you are looking for serious adult explanations look at the series Hidden Secrets of Money.

Jun 21 ‘25. In personal news, I’m moving to Munich, to work as a student and to work on my Master’s Thesis with Nexustec.eu, more on that later.

As part of moving, I was curious how cycle friendly is the city, the distance from where I live to the office is about 10 kms via cycling. Almost 40 mins of travel time one way. Found some links on Cycling around in Munich city - which is overhauling it’s cycling infrastructure! Munich - touring through the city - 1 and Munich - touring through the city - 2 show a good deal of what is the city currently like for cycling and what are their plans in the future.

Re-read, the value of nothing. The source was from one of George Hotz’s video, the longer rant on economics, american empire, china, bitcoin etc. is quite good.

Jun 20 ‘25. Started reading Maitreyan’s book Manushyarariyan - മനുഷ്യരറിയാൻ. Quite a few interesting ideas and avenues to explore.

Recently got hooked to watching the life of two canadian’s in a Japanese country side, if not for supposed peace I experience seeing the videos, it was definitely worth it for the aesthetic value of each frame shot. Kudos to that!