If I’m So Wise, Why Am I Still Confused?

Why is it easier to give advice to other people and still be very confused about our own situations? Seems counter intuitive, because we have more context over our own lives, so we should be able to arrive at perfect advice for ourselves. But things are often not that clear. There are several reason for this I think, where biggest one being our own biases. Our emotions are deeply intertwined with our personal situations. This makes it hard to be objective. Fear, anxiety, self-doubt, or even wishful thinking can cloud our judgment and lead us down paths that aren't truly…

Insights about LLMs

PS: highly unstructured and unedited draft. But too good to keep to myself. Insights from dwarkesh patel's podcast With longer context, gemini was able to learn an obscure human language, completely in context. During inference, attention operation is linear with respect to context length. The quadratic nature is a problem while training only. Longer context yields better problem solving ability. Predicting the next token becomes easier with longer context. In that respect, it is already superhuman. Superhuman context allows it a working memory that humans don't have. It may have interesting implications. This is unique to LLMs. More learning is…

Writing for Clarity

Imagine trying to solve a massive jigsaw puzzle in your head. Not gonna happen, right? You need all the pieces laid out in front of you so you can move them around and see how they fit together. That's exactly how writing for clarity feels. You start with jumbled thoughts that barely make sense, but as you write, new ideas emerge and connections become clearer. Before you know it, you've got a complete picture – and a much clearer understanding of your own thinking. The more I use writing to clear my head, the more it becomes second nature. Whenever…

Life’s Work

If this is the only thing you ever accomplish in your life, would you still do it ? This is a question you can ask yourself to verify if what you are working on is your life's work. It's a very high bar, so it's ok if the answer is No. But try to move in a direction of yes. It's usually not clear when you start working on something. But as you go deeper, and the answer remain a no for years on end, it's time to re-evaluate things.

Why Work On Ambitious Projects

Human life is an impossible occurrence. The universe had to exist for billions of years, and then countless generations of evolution and survival led to you being here. You shouldn't even exist with these odds. Yet you do. So, don't waste it doing mediocre things. You should want to do equally impossible things, that are worthy of those odds. Think of this from another perspective. There's a game you've been waiting to play for several years. When it comes out, would you not play that game at the highest level possible? Of course, you would!You would not want to play…

A list of good tech blogs

An ongoing list of tech blogs that I find interesting: https://stripe.com/blog/engineering https://www.uber.com/en-IN/blog/engineering/ https://tech.urbancompany.com/ , https://ucblogger.medium.com https://zerodha.tech/ https://nadh.in/ https://dev.37signals.com/ https://longform.asmartbear.com/ https://world.hey.com/jason https://world.hey.com/dhh https://www.joelonsoftware.com/ https://ai.googleblog.com/ https://www.notion.so/blog/topic/tech https://blog.cloudflare.com/

Introspection for Self Alignment

I think it helps to look at your life from time to time from a perspective that shines a light on your day-to-day actions and their underlying values and principles. Thinking about where they come from and whether they are aligned with your current objectives. I introspect a lot so I end up doing this at least once a month whenever I'm idle. But whenever I do this, I find a few things that need tweaking and it feels like I'm debugging my own source code. It usually goes like "Hmm, this one behavior I have is strange. Not sure…

Exploring AGI and its Impact on Work

The recent advancements in generative AI have led me to think about the future of work and what it means for humanity. Given these developments, it's important to consider what kind of work will be meaningful and relevant for us in the future. While it may take some time for the impact to fully take hold, it is important to start considering now what our role as humans should be in a world where machines can create new knowledge. In exploring this question, I came across the book "Beginning of Infinity" by David Deutsch. This book provides valuable insights into…

Setting up PHP on AWS Lightsail with Git CI/CD

There were a few roadblocks to get this working, so here are all the step I took to set it up. Hopefully this helps others as well. Why Lightsail ? App was growing beyond what a shared hosting provider could handle. We had strict reliability needs and could no longer rely on our shared hosting provider i.e. bigrock. Their maintenance processes overwrote our php configs, and would break our system silently. It kept breaking our git based deployment system. We were facing daily downtimes on our main app which is written in PHP using codeigniter framework. We use it for…

Writing as a Problem Solving Tool

Writing is a very underrated but effective tool to solve the toughest problems of your life. I often get surprised by the thoughts that come out of me when I finish writing. I usually don't have an idea of what I'm going to write. It's just a vague sense of direction that I feel I should write about. It's like I see a thread coming out of my mind, and then I just start pulling on it, and the length of the thread and the colors it takes are all unknown until it all unravels. Once it's done, I'm left…