Writing is an involved process. A rough overview is as follows:
The problem with that process is the last bullet right there. It makes the worth of a word in the moment diminish than the act of etching something down in stone.
I find most sources of information these days (since several years) to be too noisy compared to the actual signals of wisdom you expect from a popular source.
Rarely, I’ll pull up the news application on my phone and consume a whole bunch of generic, and some domain specific news.
Other than state of the art research in a technical domain, which is based upon a corpora of established citations, most other “new” stuff is noise.
ESDS Software Solutions Ltd. (where I work currently) was lately the technical facilitator for the School Education Department of the Government of Maharashtra, towards conducting a state level slogan competition, the winner of which was rewarded by a lunch with the chief minister of Maharashtra.
One of the records (total of 3) they were going for was the most number of handwritten notes uploaded to a bespoke platform in 24 hours.
Speech and the word written, are potential expressions of a thought. Each one of us enjoys a different mix of how we best convey ourself.
Ever since I began blogging when I was 19, I’ve been prioritising descriptiveness over precision. I feel I’ve entered a mental state where I value the distilled value of the transmission more than the exhaustiveness of the message.
I also notice a rift between the way I speak and the way I write. Not to say that any one of them is superior than the other but I could use an exercise in convergence - projecting them both onto a common ground.
This is a brief update on the nootropics post in which I initialized my current stack and promised for a review down the lane.
I’m back on a controlled dosage of caffeine - 80 mg (dawn) + 80 mg (afternoon). Each cup is supplmented with 100 mg of L-theanine and also dump in 5+ grams of creatine in the dawn. Both do their job well and will continue them this cycle.
I’m an AI Research Engineer and that involves messing around a little with python. I’ve spent the past 4 years perfecting a disciplined, minimal, but enabling setup.
This is a tour of my trusty set of tools, in the hopes that it will help you find the same CLI zen that I’ve been enjoying for a while now.
I start my work sessions off by ssh’ing into my remote compute cluster.
I’ve been formally delving into epistemology and relevant lateral root domains recently and have been re-encountering several ideas that I’d previously casually explored with intrinsic motivation.1
This isn’t my first accidental implicit intersection of thoughts with core philosophical theories like constructivist epistemology and ontology.2
Given my natural inclinations towards personal interdisciplinary research, apart from my core specializations, I do deliberately maintain an extensive scaffolding around several domains that I plan to build foundations in soon. This allows me to generalize over multiple realizations of similar concepts in different epistemological clusters and identify some interesting patterns.3
I partition my days in phases of different mindsets that allow me to cater to my varying epistemological hungers. One of them is a daily ninety minute ideation hunt and feast that helps keep my skills sharp.
The laws of thermodynamics do form a formidable devil that really does mess up your ordered habits if you do not inject in the necessary energy from time to time.1
As a way to sharpen the intellectual axe, I envision myself going on domain hunts to allot myself a new class of game to look forward to during minor breaks from my usual, comparatively conventional endeavors.
Some-days, I wonder that I’m born half a millennia too late into this world given the extent of novel societal tendencies that I’m not fond of.
Although, the notion of Batman didn’t exist then, given a choice, I’d probably consider time traveling to an intellectually simpler life when much of what the present science and engineering entails was just beginning to be discovered and invented.
Research options then weren’t thresholded by who’s packing heavier compute but rather open to all that could observe patiently and portrayed the will to ask, sceptic-ize and act according to their whims.
Two days ago I found myself scrolling mindlessly for half an hour and I decided I need to decide for real as to how I’m going to deal with this issue.
The problem with such a habit is that it is very convenient, engaging and it slices into precious time that I’d rather spend doing something more difficult and rewarding like reading.
While devising a strategy to deal with this behaviour, I concluded that videos themselves (long and short form) are the culprit to these new time sinks that I’ve been experiencing.
I’ve been building up my vimrc again because emacs’ tramp mode just wasn’t cutting it when it came to speed for my remote work environments.
I’ve been a vim user for around 4 years now and having read some books partially and sampling a lot of blogs and conference recordings over this span, I decided I should commit and formally invest into a definitive resource to get me upto speed and beyond.
I’ve decided to increase my frequency of writing on the main blog to get more reps in and converge onto my style quickly than if I continued with long form content only.
I’m also going to practice being more concise, and blogging a little more on technical aspects as well.
My usual blog post goes to around 1500-2000 words and that isn’t helpful for covering some minor writing prompts I’d like to explore.
I couldn’t have asked for a denser review of such a technical and diverse domain. It’d been more a year since I graduated (majored in computer science and minored in artificial intelligence) and so I decided to brush up on some basics and consolidate what I’d studying since the past ~4 years.
I also picked up the book to systematically populate my org-roam buffer and have my root node rooted here in the braindump.
To know thyself, is the beginning of wisdom
Socrates
All of us create content, every moment, tuned to varying extents of influence and permanence.
It’s intent that separates us all into different leagues of
producers.
Let me explain via a hierarchical build up of selected formats of content with
varying intensity.
Note that the list isn’t exhaustive by any means and I’ve deliberately
excluded works of larger scale (movies, video games : they have the
potential to be the most influential kind of content out there).
Nootropics are cognitive enhancers, boosting brainpower and mental abilities, while ergogenic variants focus on elevating physical performance, creating a powerful combo for unleashing your potential.
I’ve got my core habits dialed down now (sleep, exercise, nutrition) and have some good routines in place to actually start converging upon a diet that suits my goal of clocking in stable, moderately high levels of physical and mental performance throughout the day.
I’m in a phase now where minor tweaks and changes won’t be held back by poor staple habits.
I was initially reluctant on using generative AI for my writing process.
That being said, I was quite aware of the potential of large language models (generically addressed as LLMs in here henceforth) - especially true in the case of content creators and/or eccentrically curious individuals.
I, therefore, decided to clarify how I’ll be using generative AI for my ideation process.
Before we get onto that, as promised by the title, distilling the over-arching skills needed to extract good insights from a conversation with an LLM (an el-el-em; please don’t read it as large, please..).
