I am in the train right now, about half an hour to go until Bangalore. The interesting thing about this journey was that I did my work while sitting in the train. It was a side upper seat in a 2AC. I had wanted one of the larger seats in the bigger part of the compartment but the side upper has its own perks. The group-of-four seats (or group-of-six in 3AC coaches) put you snap in front of another person....
So this happened on 15 May. I’m writing this post on the 17th. How did I know that it was 15th? I went all the way back in my email inbox to the first one and I got the Google’s “Let’s get you started” email on May 15 2022. I had taken a 2 week break soon after, as I remember, to find a flat in Pune. That was in the first two weeks of June....
A few days ago I came across Swaroop CH’s Twitter profile and started looking at his blog. It had entries from 20 years ago and more. I loved it. The communities that he was part of then are the communities that I am a part of now, and I could even recognize some of the names that he mentioned. His blog was split up into lots of small posts, similar to what people these days would use Twitter for....
I got access to ChatGPT’s plugins features a couple of days ago. I tried using some of them. Diagram It felt very useful, where I could ask ChatGPT to explain some idea to me with diagrams. I also tried WebPilot which could go through links. I wasn’t too impressed by the other ones I tried, but it was intriguing to see in the list plugins for companies that could directly provide services from the chat interface (such as restaurant reservation, house brokering, fashion shopping, domain registration, etc....
There is no true interpretation of anything; interpretation is a vehicle of human comprehension. The value of interpretation is in enabling others to fruitfully think about an idea. - Andreas Buja I’m quoting this from the book “The Elements of Statistical Learning.” This sounds fascinating, and seems prescient now that we are in the age of ChatGPT and LLMs, huge statistical models that interpret things for us.