Magpie Log
Archives
Search...
Log in
Subscribe
The last days of summer
September 6, 2026
Summer is at a close, I see some leaves have already turned yellow from the window in front of me as I write. This is probably the last weekend one can spend...
Back to Prague - Mater Urbium
August 30, 2026
I travelled to Prague this week, in fact still not in berlin yet. I am right now stuck in a train back from Prague waiting for the faulty locomotive to be...
Reading about Jinns & LLM memory
August 23, 2026
Hi! LLMs have a way of inserting themselves in discussion every other week. For me, this was a lot at work this week. A few weeks ago, I mentioned how we are...
Race to build things
August 17, 2026
I wrote this post yesterday morning when it was supposed to go out. But buttondown, my publishing platform, temporarily flagged and disabled my account just...
Bike rides
August 9, 2026
Whenever I go for a bike ride near my place, specially during summer, I am immediately transported into another world. Something that is 5 minutes away, yet...
Deterministic work 'for' the LLM
August 2, 2026
I generated a lot of code this week. In my opinion there are two ways to go about working with LLMs. 1) You do the same work as you used to do pre-AI, just...
Trying to form habits
July 26, 2026
Habits can be hard to develop, but can also be then equally hard to let go. Or rather, you get beholden to the habits. Which is a good thing, if it is a good...
Local first everything
July 19, 2026
I was at the LocalFirstConf last week. It was Amazing! The excitement and the passion about the technologies and tools that people presented was quite...
Fable, or just a new attempt
July 12, 2026
Last week, I finally resolved an issue with my AT-proto personal data server that I faced since more than a month. It started when I tried to move my PDS...
6 months old!
July 5, 2026
I talk about my foray into twitter, completing 6 months of writing this newsletter, and share reading material and a project
AI's creep is worrying
June 28, 2026
It is a well proven fact at this point that working with LLMs/AI has a detrimental cognitive affect on humans. Students perform worse than their peers,...
Anticipatory Nostalgia
June 21, 2026
It is fine to not finish books. No hot take here. In fact, outside the passionate readers community, I don’t think it is even a take. People regularly just...
Memories of rain
June 14, 2026
Is it raining these days where you live? My wife and I were walking to the market yesterday in a light rain, not quite a drizzle, or a mizzle, but a shower,...
A standard podcast record
June 7, 2026
I’ve been working on a spec & standard. Actually, it is a lot of copying of existing ones. Specifically podcasting2 from Podcast Index, and Apple’s iTunes,...
Uneventful
June 2, 2026
I have been thinking about what to write this week. Not much from work that is relevant for the post here, nor from outside that is worth mentioning. Apart...
How much can you learn?
May 24, 2026
I used to believe that I was not built for complex concepts of science or engineering. That I was simply not smart enough. At work, I was fearful of the...
Ramen and movies in Düsseldorf
May 17, 2026
You are supposed to maximise outdoor time when in a new city. At least that’s how I think. But that’s not what I ended up doing on my trip to Düsseldorf this...
Onboarding humans
May 11, 2026
There is no single format that ensures a good onboarding of a new team-mate. No one size fit all. But there is an ethic that can work for all. At least...
Deliberation vs Action
May 3, 2026
I saw an interview of an businessman this week who said something to the effect of ‘educated people analyse took much and fear committing’ in the interview....
Blow horn and use dipper at night
April 29, 2026
If you’ve been to or lived in the subcontinent, you know what this is. Trucks suggesting/requesting/demanding that you blow the horn are ubiquitous. The...
Older archives