October 26, 2024

Daily Log Digest – Week 41, 2024

2024-10-13

Podcasts #podcasts:

• Is turning into a B-school the natural next step for liberal arts pioneer Ashoka University? #india #education - Good discussion on the relatively recent trend in Indian education, of a liberal arts degree.
• Transcript: Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly and the GLP-1 economy #pharma
• All the news and science from the 2024 Nobel prizes – podcast | Science | The Guardian #science #nobel - Good recap of the Nobel prizes in science. I especially liked the bit in the podcast where the host mentions how the Nobel season is kinda busy for science journalists because they have to be on their toes tracking the work of the prize winners and also making sure they are writing and presenting their work in an accessible manner.
• MUBI Podcast | "The Devil’s Backbone": The Creative Resurrection of Guillermo del Toro on Notebook | MUBI #cinema #spanish - This podcast is quite infrequent but it is extremely high quality. I have enjoyed many episodes. This one is a great history overview of Guillermo del Toro's movies. I have watched and enjoyed many films from him, but never stopped to think about his impact and legacy

Met folks for a 2hr no-yap reading session at 3W CMH: #books

• Finished a few pages of Wild Women: Seekers, Protagonists and Goddesses in Sacred Indian Poetry: Subramaniam, Arundhathi: 9780143464907: Amazon.com: Books - Read some awesome poems from poets Akka Mahadevi, Sule Sankavva (a former prostitute) and Kalavve (a twelfth century Dalit poet)
• Also started Amazon.com: Convenience Store Woman: A Novel eBook : Murata, Sayaka, Tapley Takemori, Ginny: Kindle Store - This book was recommended to me by somebody at Blue Tokai HSR. I saw them reading Mieko Kawakami's Breasts and Eggs, a book I had started reading but did not finish. I am huge fan of Mieko Kawakami's other book All the Lovers in the Night, so seeing that book piqued me enough to talk to that person. The conversation went to many different places, and ended with this recommendation. I will reserve my thoughts on the book to when I have read it fully

Got introduced to the Stremio ecosystem thanks to Cyril. It seems like there might be way to streamline my media watching workflow a lot more with this, than my currently duct-taped version that involved Seedgator, rTorrent and scripts that download files using wget.

2024-10-14

A great way to start the day, reading Ava's birthday post: 28 things I’ve learned - by Ava - bookbear express #self-improvement

My top 5:

• Write online! You will meet some of the most precious people in your life that way. It’s worth the fear and discomfort a hundred times over.
• Love is not this huge complicated puzzle you have to solve. The situation itself can be extremely complicated, but love tends to be very simple. You don’t have to pretzel yourself constantly.
• You are so wrong about psychedelics. Psychedelics are going to change every aspect of your life for the better.
• You love to work hard. Sometimes that’s a useful quality, and sometimes it’s just a way to cope with your anxiety. You need to learn to pause and not try to fix everything all the time. Sometimes gritting your teeth and forcing yourself through it is the easy way out, and doing what you actually want to is the scary thing.
• There are so many people in the world and so many of them are incredibly talented and beautiful and nice in ways that make you feel insecure about yourself. Try to draw confidence from who you are instead of worrying about what you aren’t. You are a subject, not an object.
• You are a deeply obsessive person and love hits you like a train. Sometimes this feels purely alienating, but the extent to which you let your passions consume you is your best quality.

I lied and put 6 down because I could not choose 🤷🏽😊

Love this book cover: Book: Alice’s Adventures in a differentiable wonderland - Simone Scardapane - The book PDF is free to download and looks really interesting. I find the idea of approaching neural networks as compositions of differentiable primitives, and building them as a type of differentiable programming quite intriguing. #neural-networks #ai #ml #books

!https://debugjois.dev/images/alice_neural.png

A comprehensive intro to Typst, a new typesetting system written in Rust: Exploring Typst, a new typesetting system similar to LaTeX - jreyesr's blog - something I have been meaning to play with. I have been a longtime typesetting nerd, and one of the highlights of my life is getting Lua bindings for a font shaping library into LuaTeX, a popular typesetting system in the scientific community (details here) #typesetting

TIL - niche construction, courtesy of video: We could make every human on Earth rich and happy—if we decided to | Agustín Fuentes - YouTube

But humans, for better and for worse, we reshape the world in a pace and pattern that nothing else does. So, when we talk about niche construction in humans, we're not just talking about making buildings or dams or using fire to heat things. We're also talking about ideas, faiths; beliefs about death and afterlife; about morals and ethics; about economics and justice. All of those things shape how we act. So, what we have to recognize then is the human capacity to create, to imagine, to live in incredibly complex societies, to build amazing technologies, is a double-edged sword, right? On one hand, it slices through all our challenges and makes us capable of doing a lot of stuff. On the other hand, it slices through bodies and lives and hopes and dreams. And so the same capacity that makes humans, in my opinion, amazing, makes us awful. We have the capacity to be the most amazing, compassionate, incredible organisms on this planet. At the same time, we have the capacity to be the worst, cruelest, most violent organisms- and it's that dynamic process that makes us human. What we can do is think technologically, biologically, ecologically, and ask questions about sustainability. And maybe to do this, we might want to listen to peoples around the planet, who are not the major contributors to the problems. It's just that we've been trying one system, a particular mode of economics and technology, and yeah, it's sort of gotten us into a bad place. So maybe, just maybe, we need to think culturally, a little bit more expansively, to do a better job of biologically and ecologically engaging with the world. Now, many people will just say, "Well, it's just nature." Right? The fact that some people are rich and some people are poor, it's just nature. The fact that in some cases men are violent to women, it's just nature. There's never just nature: It's always history and politics and culture and experience and biology and bodies and brains and hormones and diets- all mixed together. So, anyone that says things are the way they are because of human nature, doesn't know what human nature is.

☝🏽 Found here from the On Humans Substack: How We (Literally) Construct Our Worlds - by Ilari Mäkelä

This was probably the most profound sounding thing I said today 👇🏽

2024-10-15

Podcasts #podcasts : - BBC World Service - The Food Chain, How much water should I drink? #water - Busts some common myths about drinking water that seem to have taken hold among a section of wellness and fitness conscious folks - Transcript: Fashion loves Ozempic. Should we talk about it? #fat #fashion - The Politics of Pleasure w/ Eric Wycoff Rogers and Zarinah Agnew | Listen Notes #hedonism #pleasure #sex - Really fascinating conversation that I would love to read a transcript of sometime if I manage to get around to it. The idea of critical hedonism is very potent. Do read the show notes for a great overview. - 082 - Thinking Beyond the Brain: Exploring the "Extended Mind" (Part 2) | Listen Notes #fitness #brain - The core idea of this series of episodes on the book Extended Mind is that - what we consider our thinking mind, isnt just locked inside our brains, but is actively influenced by our body and our environment. A lot of common advice to live well, like exercise, being in nature etc follows from that. - Is Hollywood Screwing Up Male Characters? - The Ringer - TIL Luffy is a commonly cited character when men (in certain specific age group, I guess?) are asked about their role models in pop culture. - Podcast #1,029: Treat Your To-Do List Like a River, and Other Mindset Shifts for Making Better Use of Your Time | The Art of Manliness #self-help #productivity - I never miss a podcast featuring Oliver Burkeman. Not a ton of new stuff that I otherwise haven't heard before, and this was essentially an avenue to promote his new book Meditation for Mortals. Nevertheless, I enjoyed it as always.

Debrid

A random conversation at 3W cafe introduced me to the magical world of Stremio and Debrid servers to watch popular media online.

To set some context, my current media consumption workflow is quite effective, but a bit bespoke and clunky. It essentially involves: - A seedbox hosted at Seedgator - 1337x to search for torrents: 1337x | Free Movies, TV Series, Music, Games and Software - nzbgeek to search usenet forum downloads: Geek - rtorrent on seedbox for torrent downloads: GitHub - rakshasa/rtorrent: rTorrent BitTorrent client - sabnzbd on seedbox to download stuff from usenet forums: SABnzbd - The free and easy binary newsreader - and finally a duct-taped script that uses wget and fzf to choose and download the files from the seedbox on to a PC connected to my TV.

Enter debrid servers into the picture. Here is a nice definition from GitHub - debridmediamanager/awesome-debrid: 🆓 Download and stream in an instant

Before: Debrid services are web apps that provide premium access to multiple file hosts (or one-click hosters, OCH). This enables users to download or stream content from various sources through a single account, often at higher speeds and with fewer restrictions. They are also referred to as multi one-click hosters (MOCH).

Now: Apart from being able to download from OCH, Debrid services are becoming more and more popular lately because of being able to instantly finish downloading a torrent and providing an HTTPS (!) link to download or stream a video inside it. The concept is similar to a shared torrent seedbox although not all Debrid services support seeding. The difference of this and Usenet is with a Debrid service, you don't need a different software to download content and it supports streaming a la Netflix. Other Debrid services like Real-Debrid also supports video transcoding without any additional fees.

Mind blown 🤯!! Why did I not know about this before 🤦🏽‍♂️.

In the conversation mentioned above, a friend demoed a combination of Stremio, Torrentio - Stremio Addon and Real-Debrid: All-in-one solution that just worked seamlessly. There is a guide on reddit that provides dead simple instructions to set it up: Stremio + Torrentio + Debrid: A How-To Guide

Here's an explanation of how my new simplified media consumption flow works: 1. Search media to watch in Stremio. 2. Stremio queries its addons for available sources. 3. The Torrentio addon searches for torrents of the requested media. 4. Torrentio sends the magnet link to the Real Debrid service. 5. The Real Debrid service downloads the torrent to its cloud servers. A lot of the time the media is already cached because of previous users. 6. Real Debrid creates a streamable link from the downloaded content. 7. This streamable link is sent back to Stremio. 8. Stream the media directly through Stremio.

2024-10-16

Podcasts #podcasts:

• In 'Revenge of the Tipping Point,' Malcolm Gladwell revisits his own ideas : NPR's Book of the Day : NPR - I have mixed feelings about Gladwell's work, but it was good to hear from him directly.
• An Economics Nobel for why institutions matter for growth : The Indicator from Planet Money : NPR #economics
• What Milton and Helene reveal about the future of hurricanes – podcast | Science | The Guardian #climate - Climate change is exacerbating the extreme effects of hurricanes.

Finished Season 1 of Colin from Accounts. Loved it: Colin from Accounts (TV Series 2022– ) - IMDbtw

2024-10-17

Talked to a lot of people on Twitter DMs, which does not happen often.

AI Tinkerers Meetup

I gave a talk about podscript at the AI Tinkerers Meetup. It was some good public speaking practise after a long hiatus. Initially, I thought about going in and doing a spontaneous talk. But as I waited for the event to start at the nearby coffee shop, I decided to do a quick dry run and realised I would go over the 5min limit quite easily. So I cut down some material and tightened up a few things. Practising the talk definitely helped and I could feel it in the audience reaction during and after the talk. It felt very validating. Some folks came up to speak to me after, and after that I summoned up the courage to speak to some others as well. Told them all to follow me on X for the best vibes 😊.

2024-10-18

TIL there is a BuyItForLife subreddit.

For practical, durable and quality made products that are made to last.

Found a great thread for the best review sites: What review sites do you trust? Wirecutter, Consumer Reports, etc? #reviews #purchases

Long thread on a 4-stage guide to learning ML: https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1821614668516839777 #ml #learning

2024-10-19

Have been a bit behind on updating my podcasts, so am gonna just add all the ones I didn't add the past few days #podcasts: - ‘Nobody Wants This’ Review: Fake Podcasting, Icks, and a Hot Rabbi - The Ringer - Good analysis of the show. It's probably not the kind of show that deserves an episode-by-episode breakdown, so it was nice to have one episode that touched upon the key themes. - Theobroma's dilemma: how to continue scaling while staying true to the 'artisanal' identity - The main topic was kinda mid, but the Thu Daybreak podcasts have a segment called Daybreak Unwind which have been top class so far. This time the segment was on Indian folk songs. - Transcript: Culture Chat — The FT takes on ‘Industry’ season 3 - The vibe of this episode was very different from the episode recaps (on three different podcasts!) and reddit forums that I normally track. Some of the takes seemed off-base as well. - Nobel-Prize Special | Daron Acemoglu on Why We Should Celebrate Humanity | On Humans Podcast ~ Science & Philosophy of What It Means To Be Human - A repost of snippets from a 2023 podcast episode which is relevant now because Acemoglu just won the Nobel. I posted a ChatGPT summary of the transcript below

Darren Acemoglu on the On Humans podcast

Summary of key themes generated by ChatGPT

• Inclusive Institutions and Technological Progress: Acemoglu revisits his earlier work in Why Nations Fail, emphasizing that inclusive institutions enable technological advancements that benefit society. However, he adds a new dimension, focusing on the direction of technology as a critical factor in today’s economy.

• Power Structures and Technology: While technological adoption is key to prosperity, Acemoglu stresses the growing issue of power concentration in the hands of tech elites, particularly in Silicon Valley. This “persuasive power” shapes societal views on technology and inequality, sometimes to the detriment of the public good.

• Automation and Inequality: The conversation highlights how automation has contributed to wage stagnation for a large portion of the U.S. workforce, particularly men without college degrees. Acemoglu argues that automation, if not balanced with new opportunities for human skills, can lead to further societal divides.

• Prohuman Technological Change: Acemoglu advocates for “prohuman” technology, which enhances human capabilities rather than sidelining workers. He praises Germany’s approach to using robotics in a way that complements human labor, contrasting it with the U.S. model where automation often displaces workers.

• The Role of Unions and Institutional Design: A cooperative relationship between labor and management, as seen in countries like Germany and Sweden, allows for better integration of technology and human labor. This contrasts with more conflictual labor relations in the U.S. and U.K., which hinder such collaboration.

tmux config for undercurls

Pull of the Undercurl #tmux

The article contains some .tmux.conf incantations to better support undercurls. It also talks about updating the terminfo on macs. I should try that to improve the rendering of fonts on my neovim/tmux setup on mac.

audio transcription using Gemini models

podscript currently doesn't support Gemini, so I am keen to add support. As part of the research, I read the README in this repo: GitHub - SouthBridgeAI/llm-transcription-study: Useful resources for LLM-based Diarization and Transcription. #audio #transcription #gemini #google

It seems like unlike ChatGPT, Google Gemini accepts audio files as input and can transcribe the audio and even generate diarization.

Found this repo in a much bigger thread on audio transcription which has a lot of wonderful insights:

4-stage guide to machine learning

I have posted a link to this Twitter thread before (twice, it seems!). But today I actually got around to reading it: https://x.com/justinskycak/status/1821614668516839777

The thread is well worth reading in full, but I wanted to extract the key resources mentioned for easier recall: - Introduction to Algorithms and Machine Learning by Justin Skycak - Coursera ML Specialization by Andrew Ng - Course 1: Supervised Machine Learning: Regression and Classification - Course 2: Advanced Learning Algorithms - Course 3: Unsupervised Learning, Recommenders, Reinforcement Learning - Understanding Deep Learning (along with a X Thread with the highlights, and a HN discussion - Deep Learning for Coders: Practical Deep Learning for Coders - Practical Deep Learning

no-yap reading session

successfully completed another my second no yap reading session in 3W CMH. Rutvi joined like last time, and this time Swayanshu joined as well.

I read parts of the following books:

• Amazon.com: Convenience Store Woman: A Novel eBook : Murata, Sayaka, Tapley Takemori, Ginny: Kindle Store - Finally finished it. I need to collect my thoughts around, but I am not sure if I will get around to writing them down. But there is no doubt in my mind that this was an absolutely phenomenal read.
• Amazon.com: Moscow X: A Novel eBook : McCloskey, David: Books - Promising spy thriller that I discovered, I believe in the Financial Times books section.
• Colored Television (A GMA Book Club Pick): A Novel - Kindle edition by Senna, Danzy. Literature & Fiction Kindle eBooks @ Amazon.com. - This novel started out quite funny, but I wasn't sure the pacing was enough to sustain my interest. I set it aside for now, but maybe I will pick it up some other time.