Category: Personal

Nothing to write in my prelude for this week.

What I’m reading?

• Courage to be Disliked by Fumitake Koga and Ichiro Kishimi (10%)
• The 6:20 Man by David Baldacci (8%)
• Will our next users be AI agents? The future of content delivery with Fabrice Lacroix, founder of Fluid Topics (podcast) by Tom Johnson
  • “Writing for AI agents requires a new approach. Concepts like minimalism may be insufficient, as implicit knowledge (what we assume human experts know) must be made explicit for machines to understand.”
  • “The technical writer’s role is expanding from pure authoring to orchestrating and curating knowledge from many different sources for ingestion into a central system.”
  • “The mindset is shifting from simply writing documentation to engineering a knowledge base that can be reliably used by both humans and intelligent machines.”
• Don’t Ignore Your Moral Intuition About Phones by Cal Newport
  • “We hesitate to take a strong stance because we fear the data might reveal we were wrong, rendering us guilty of a humiliating sin in technocratic totalitarianism, letting the messiness of individual human emotion derail us from the optimal operating procedure. We’re desperate to do the right – read: most acceptable to our social/tribal community – thing, and need a chattering class of experts to assure us that we are.”
  • “When it comes to children, however, we cannot and should not abdicate our moral intuition.”
  • “Data can be informative, but a lot of parenting comes from the gut.”
• Stop Snorting Narrative by Tanvi Bhakta
  • “When I went to college, I had the internet again. It was scary how easy it was to substitute reading for social media – especially something like Reddit, which is mostly text based and allows for rabbit holes that felt exactly like reading a less rigorous Mary Roach book. I stopped reading long form almost entirely in those 4 years.”
  • “Like most of us, I’ve been struggling with some form of dependence on social media for the better part of a decade. But when I make the effort to remove myself from them, my life doesn’t get better. It isn’t the social media that is the problem, it is my desire to consume narrative. Stories are fundamental to who we are as humans2, and I am old enough that I know how to substitute for the internet. The exercise, then, is not to merely stop doing the thing that is hurting me. It is to answer a few fundamental questions for myself:
    • What does rest look like for me, to actually feel restored?
    • What activity do I fill my time with, to actually allow for thought?”
• The new KSRTC bus designs are plain sad by vadakkus
  • “All expectations that everyone had have shattered into a thousand pieces. The design is bland and outdated in every sense of the word. It renders the buses invisible on the road. In these modern times of AI-driven design where everything pops and sizzles, these are just… lifeless. Sad. (More photos here). These are no Aanavandis. These are plain terrible!”
  • “Malayalees love to hate KSRTC, but it is also very closely intertwined with the Malayalee pop culture ethos and identity. It is an integral entry in the lineup of icons that reminds them of home, an emotional connect that is manifested by the brand.”
  • “Most KSRTC well wishers would implore KSRTC and the honorable transport minister to please, please reinstate the existing KSRTC livery for Fast Passenger and Super Fast buses. Well changing the livery was tried once, two decades ago, and it didn’t work out. Please let it be your legacy that you rebuilt the brand value of the organisation rather than having changed it for the worse. Or even better, please restart body-building at KSRTC workshops.”

What I’m writing?

I am back on X and Mastodon again. I am also back on Tumblr. All of these are linked above if you visit the blog.

What I’m Watching?

These are interesting insights into how GenZ is thinking. I am also reading more about Gen Alpha and Beta, as these are the generations my children belong to. Gen Z is an important bunch, though.