I have been looking for sources of true motivation, trying to escape anxiety-driven performance. My daily experience is that of a person hijacked by a todo list, every waking hour of the day. There is very little respite. I looked for answers in Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity and Zen teachings. My default social media diet causes enough FOMO that I do not stick to better habits. So I decided to get back to therapy. What I found there is my anchor. ...
Consciousness is software might be obvious to some, particularly the readers of David Deustch. Its implications are profound in today’s AI hyped world. Software is generally speaking accomplished by a series of abstractions. The real hardware in silicon world is a mixture of quantum mechanics (electrons storing bits, logic gates doing computation). The semiconductor chip itself has some software to make it do the computation using what is called as the instruction set architecture. Then come different programming languages and how the translation happens between human readable code and computer instructions. The abstractions don’t end there. To make something really useful you will need an operating system. Finally at the top sit applications which contain all the “useful” bits (I’m ignoring the differences between services and applications as it doesn’t matter in the context of this write up). ...
In my professional life I’m part of a team/org that builds camera products. I spent some time in my graduate school days learning about image formation and cameras. Modern digital cameras are highly complex systems there is a lot going on inside a simple looking digital device. I was listening to the excellent Dwarkesh Patel podcast episode: “Sarah Paine: How Imperial Japan Crushed Tsarist Russia and Qing China.” There are several threads running in this excellent analysis but the TLDR is: ...
Video Analytics is a broad term for technology that can analyze video frames and either alert user/client to specific things it’s learned to recognize such as a person walking, or alert when ‘unusual’ activity is detected. There is a lot of work that needs to happen to accomplish these goals. It’s helpful to think about how to build systems that can do analytics so that we can reason about its components. ...
I have been wanting to write for a long time. I have been putting it off. Sometimes, my reason is that I don’t have much to say about a topic. If it’s scientific computing, then my mind goes “there have been many books written on it already” or “what do I know about Fourier Transforms that hasn’t been said already?” Other times, the reason is I don’t have a good title for my blog post. My mind goes: “How embarrassing it would be if my blog becomes famous and I have a lame title?” I haven’t kept track, but I have spent dozens of hours of my life thinking about the title of a yet-to-exist blog. That’s just silly. I know it, but I keep doing it still. It usually happens when I have an epiphany. That sends me down a spiral about how that one insight is the thing upon which my blog (and life, why not?) will be based. ...
What does David Deustch mean by errors are everywhere? If I sit and come up with a theory to explain something, it will have errors. The parts of the theory that are wrong. The only known way to rid the theory of errors is to come into contact with reality. In my field (software and technology) the way to do that is by implementing the software/algorithm. Errors are part of every form of knowledge from religion and philosophy to economics. Discovering errors might sometimes take years especially if the knowledge is kept secret. This also means we don’t have to judge people for errors in their knowledge- they didn’t know any better. ...
Created: March 25, 2024 9:13 PM Tags: Personal Property: 1 I am trying to effect some behavior change in myself. My goals are: to be less anxious to be less driven by anxiety and more by joy and purpose to take control of my time I have been observing myself over the last few months to notice any patterns that lead me to my current mode of being anxious and anxiety driven and reached the following conclusions. ...
Imagine that you are one of the contestants on the reality show Alone. You make several attempts with your skills to acquire food, but time after time, you fail. Now, let’s modify the premise slightly: you have knowledge of how the other contestants are doing. You see that some contestants are struggling like you, but some are doing better. They hunted down a rabbit or deer and caught fish. You start to copy their strategies. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t. Every time it doesn’t, you try to explain why it didn’t work. Almost all the time, you blame yourself. You tell yourself that you could have made a different choice, stuck to your strengths, or done something else. You need to decide what to do next. Now you’re in a predicament, and any decision you make could lead you back to the same frustration-blame cycle. This can drive you crazy. ...
Created: March 26, 2023 5:11 AM Tags: Mind Dump, Planning Property: 1 I’m writing down a realization that came to me just now. It’s that I have been holding onto an unsaid truth that I’m inferior. It probably started during my early childhood when I realized I couldn’t speak English when other kids could. I have been using this as a chip on my shoulder to motivate myself to achieve things. But, achieving things doesn’t bring any comfort. Maybe it makes my wounds worse. Maybe because achieving things is not what I care about. It makes me a person who I don’t want to be. I care about being creative and free spirited. I find stories from Feynman’s books inspiring for this reason. The anecdote that Shannon was goofing off riding unicycle and making pointless machines appeals a great deal to me. My baggage is getting in the way of my aspiration to be a goofy and creative. ...
Created: July 16, 2021 2:28 PM For the longest time I have been thinking about blogging. It feels like my mind naturally drifts towards questions like: what should I name my blog? What are some topics I want to talk about? Sometimes I daydream about having regular readers, maybe someday getting invited to talk about my experiences. This tugging I feel towards writing/blogging or creating something is not an everyday thing but it comes and goes. It’s gone on long enough that I’m finally going to start doing something about it. ...