What did I do last week ?

I know I have been missing in the last few weeks from a lot of places. Its mainly due to burn out, I realized that I was not able to come up with new ideas or sit down and write something for newsletters or work. My advisor and friends suggested I take some time off and try to change my routine.

I did agree to them and took some time off and have been trying to experiment with things like change my work environment and switching places of work. It worked before and I hoped it’ll work now as well. Until it didn’t, which got me to thinking…

What may be the reason behind this?

One reason I could think of was Information Fatigue. With so many things going around mainly in terms of AI development and new tools being introduced, its really hard to catchup and keep track of things. One day you see some announcements like there is OpenClaw which can do daily tasks for you, you see there is Vectorless RAG that performs better than RAG, or something like querying a LLM twice with the same prompt improves model responses by a significant extent 🤯

Hence, I decided to take things slow and process them one by one. That has been slow (obviously) but it has been helping me process things better than rushing through information and just being focused on deadlines or task completion.

Interesting things this week

I recently upgraded to the new MacBook M5 Pro and have been experimenting with running LLMs locally. I thought why not try and build some tools which utilize local LLMs rather than spending API credits.

Other than that I experimented with customizing my thermal printer to some more extent and going a bit over the board with my daily to do list. I am now printing my daily tasks as physical tickets and scratching them off as I complete them 😆

The code is open source at: https://github.com/narenkhatwani/thermal-printer-mischief

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I also got to explore the bakeries around Chinatown in NYC with my friends. We decided to do a bakery crawl and ended up going to five bakeries: Taipan, Fay Day, Mei Lah Wah, Golden Manna Bakery, and Sponges Cafe

I hope to get back with more newsletters in the upcoming weeks and build some more tools in public (open-source)