I spent most time this week with work. I ended up not doing anything I expected to be able to do this week.
For the coming week, my in-laws are coming, I am going to Mumbai to get a passport, and I want to take a look at all the things I missed in the last few weeks of engaging with work.
Watched
I believe the title is misleading, but don’t let that stop you from watching this video. My main point is to view the world as a stack of layers. This is what he refers to as wrappers (in a 3D sense). I have unfurled these wrappers into layers to make it easy for you to see.
The biggest risk is taken by business people who connect a product or service with customers. As you move away from the customer, the risk (risk is the wrong word, but no synonym fits better) decreases. We can see this with the changes AI is introducing at this layer. Similarly, the best earning potential is often found at this level, but it also comes with the highest potential for loss.
This made me reflect on which layer I prefer to work in. I’ve found that I might excel in support roles more than main roles. Even when I watch something, I’m more interested in the support character’s work than the main character, who often gets all the attention.
I studied mechanical engineering, which plays an important role at many basic layers. You can’t ship without a ship. However, this doesn’t always create the most value (or money) for the customer. If you are in this layer you feel like you are being exploited. Without it, businesses would struggle. But, without a good or service being sold to a customer at the highest layer, you would struggle.
Money flows down. When you’re squeezed by a layer above, it’s hard to earn more than the person in the layer above you. To earn more, you have to provide more value to the layer above you. The closer you are to the customer, the higher you earn for the value you provide.
Many things can push you to choose a layer to work at. Your circumstances, your attitude, or what you learnt. If you want to earn more, you must learn to be of service in the layer above you.
I did not watch, read or listen to anything besides this. I am hoping to return to a more normal cadence of writing, reading, watching, and listening by the end of the September quarter.
I have been more focussed on work this week. This week was much better for all of us health-wise as all of us were sick in Week 20.
Writing
I did a lot of writing offline. But, I did not get any online writing done.
Reading
I did not get any reading (listening or reading) done.
The rains have begun in Pune, much earlier than predicted. We got caught up in one such torrential downpour on Monday. Other than that we have mostly been enjoying the rains from home or office.
Most of my online presence has been on Instagram. I had wanted to be on blogs, but I have not got a block of time on which to focus and read a blog post.
We are waiting for our kid’s schools to re-open after the summer vacation.
I am expecting next week also to be work focussed. I expect to continue writing offline and do not expect to write online. I am planning to return to the gym from Monday.
This whole last week has been lazy. I did not write Weekly Notes 15. I did not write poetry to participate in Global Poetry Writing Month. My practice of writing a blog post nearly every day faltered. And I realised this only on Wednesday.
This was a lost in deep thought lazy. So, this Weekly Note is going to be really long. It will cover the ground for Week 15 and Week 16. This is 7 April to 18 April 2025.
I mentioned in Weekly Notes 9/2025, that I had got rid of social media apps on my phone. This week I have been consuming content off the social internet, mostly reading on my RSS feed. I have also been clicking on the links to see how the page reads on people’s own websites.
Reading
Roam Research had sent out a newsletter post on 6 April 2025, after a long hiatus. I was happy to read it. Hence, when I went on X, I looked for any posts from Conor White-Sullivan, it’s co-founder and found this post from 19 March 2025. These are quotes from that post:
If your AI won’t help you break the law, it doesn’t belong to you, it belongs to those who make its laws.
I read this wonderful essay, Where We are Headed? by Dean W Ball, whom I subscribed to but has now gone and joined the US Government. Some interesting points from that post:
It had a nice introduction of what are agents:
Agents will be LLMs configured in such a way that they can plan, reason, and execute intellectual labor. They will be able to use, modify, and build software tools, obtain information from the internet, and communicate with both humans (using email, messaging apps, and chatbot interfaces) and with other agents.
And some very frightening scenarios:
Imagine you hired a bright junior employee who was willing to work for you for, say, $10,000 per month. But next year, he’ll do it for $1,000, and the year after that, $100. These are the economics of this industry.
There was an important insight as to how to know if your task can be taken over by an agentic AI:
As you go about your day, occasionally stop and think to yourself, “would it be easy to cheaply verify that I am doing this task correctly?” The answers vary, but I suspect you’ll find that the answer is often “yes.” This has implications for what the near-term economic consequences of agents are likely to be.
danah boyd wrote about five attitudes to climate change that talks about the breaking up of the worldview from two opposing ones to at least five complicated ones. The world is certainly more complicated than simple.
I think one of the reasons why I gave pause to writing on the blog was a feeling of being alone in thinking that we need to write blog posts again. Many things I read this week surrounded that theme.
Jay’s post had a lot of thought on this on the occasion of sixteen years of blogging. Here are some that resonated with me:
2015 was a major inflection point. In my memory, it’s the last gasp of the old web that everyone is now nostalgic for. Blogs lived alongside social media platforms. People still clicked links. You could drive traffic to what you were building off platform.
I have struggled to differentiate the blog from other media that look similar but you really know they are not (like Substack). I think Jay has some good writing about what a blog is in 2025.
It’s understandable. Platforms offer built-in audiences, easier monetisation, and the dopamine hit of instant feedback. But there’s a trade-off: you’re building a presence on rented land. You’re publishing into someone else’s box.
A blog in 2025 should be a destination.
I really loved these two lines:
They don’t just distribute—they accumulate. They hold time, build presence and concretise thought.
Each post sits within a web of references, tags, dates, and links—forming a layered geography of thought over time.
Blogs are also enshittification-proof:
The only person responsible for enshittifying this website is me.
With XKCD 3076 (Roads Both Taken), I felt like Randall Munroe also participated in the Global or National Poetry Writing Month.
I also liked his summary that appears in the RSS feed but not on the website:
When you worry that you’re missing out on something by not making both choices simultaneously by quantum superposition, that’s called phomo.
These <big box> stores come into towns, destroy their local businesses, move out when profits start to dip, and the residents are left without a supermarket, grocer, or pharmacy.
Is a similar phenomenon happening in India? I think we are seeing waves of big box retail, quick commerce, etc. happening simultaneously that we don’t have the time to even think about the impact they have.
You can be a creator anywhere on the internet these days, but there’s only a small handful of places where you actually own your own content. Your own website is one of them.
This is a blog post summarizing many of her talks that she gave around this idea.
I loved reading Tom Johnson’s notes and questions about Johnathan Warner’s book More than Words. I particularly liked this insight:
Much of this type of writing (professional writing) is ripe for AI automation.
I am seeing this happening in my workplace and in my work flow.
Jay (mentioned above) has a blog post that looks at various physical AI tools. He thinks that these type of AI tools must have a definite end date. He calls it the Tamaguchi Imperative:
“I’m going to call this The Tamagotchi Imperative: We must design for the end of the relationship.
That means:
Communicating Lifespans: Be clear about how long the model or service will run.
Narrative Endings: Give the agent an arc. Let it conclude.
Gradual Fade-out: Let responsiveness or features decline over time, gently, so the user reboots the model themselves without coercion.
Memory Archiving: Let users export their interaction history.
Succession Planning: Help users move to new models and new personalities with continuity.”
Search engines — the window into the web for many people — top their results with pages containing thousands of words of auto-generated nothingness, perfectly optimized for search engine prominence and to pull in money via ads and affiliate links while simultaneously devoid of any useful information.
Social networks have become “the web” for many people who rarely venture outside of their tall and increasingly reinforced walls. As Tom Eastman once put it, the web has rotted into “five giant websites, each filled with screenshots of the other four”.
Watching
I finished watching The Good Wife. I am now watching the spin-off The Good Fight. I have reached Season 3, Episode 9.
I am watching Bosch Legacy‘s Season 3 as and when it releases.
This book and the sci-fi book this is inspired by are on my to be read list. This tsundoku is now becoming truly unmanageable.
Another book that I have added in my to be read list. Only issue is that I can’t find this list.
This week began with thinking about our New Year, Vishu, about returning to working in hybrid mode again after surgery, my note-making and to-do lists, writing poetry and companion blog posts, and some home reorganization projects.
I hope to return to working from office in a hybrid mode from tomorrow. In preparation, I tried to drive the car under conditions similar to me going to office. I did much better in worse road conditions than what I face when I go to office. I got the green signal from the doctor.
After I wrote here about the great progress I was making on this blog, I basically made no progress in the note making process. I made no notes. I fixed this by ordering a new Neorah A5 notebook for my Bullet Journal practice.
I read about Meishi on Arun’s blog and have shared his design to get about 100 cards printed. I want to try it out as a to-do list and note taking system.
I wrote a poem on each day for Global Poetry Writing month on thinkdeli. I, then, wrote companion blog posts on the blog here. Not, for all of them but ones that I thought I should write about – which was most of them. You can read them here.
First, pick a notation from the first column below. Then, pick a musical genre from the second column. Finally, pick at least one word from the third column. Now write a poem that takes inspiration from your musical genre and notation, and uses the word or words you picked from the third column.
I cannot say I completely followed the full instructions here. This was not because I did not want to follow the instructions. It was because it was not clear to me what it meant.
Picking up 3 things from 3 columns seemed simple enough. I did that. I picked literally go nuts, folk song, and centaur.
This time, instead of writing on thinkdeli where I have been writing for the past four days for GloPoWriMo, I wrote in my notebook. When I typed the poem into thinkdeli I rewrote it more concisely.
In the notebook, the poem was 13 lines long. I made it 12 lines long on thinkdeli. I did this without removing any content details.
I had to write two poems for the prompt given for Day 4 on the NaPoWriMo website. This is what the prompt is, in essence:
Last but not least, here’s today’s (optional) prompt. In her poem, “Living with a Painting,” Denise Levertov describes just that. And well, that’s a pretty universal experience, isn’t it? It’s the rare human structure – be it a bedroom, kitchen, dentist’s office, or classroom – that doesn’t have art on its walls, even if it’s only the photos on a calendar. Today, we’d like to challenge you to write your own poem about living with a piece of art.
I began to think about the poem seriously at about 9 p.m. The thinking was interrupted by dinner. I watched something on OTT and did not notice the time pass 11.30 p.m.
I typed my poem on thinkdeli. Then a voice came in my head.
“You think what I do is not art?”
I did think he does on our walls is art. I don’t quite know how I deciphered my son’s baby language but I wrote the second poem. Also, on thinkdeli.
I had this photograph on phone’s lock screen and wall paper. I had kept this on the phone in the end of 2024. I thought this photograph was taken early in the morning.
I imagined, waking up among this forest scene early in the morning. A little later, I would have missed it. A little earlier, I would have missed it. But the photographer, Arati Kumar Rao stayed up and took this photograph.
I wanted this photograph to wake me up early. This is the art I describe having lived with.
The second poem is about my son waking me up in the morning. Not at the time I could take a similar photograph that lives on my phone’s screen, but earlier than I would naturally have.
I live with this artist, and his art is all around me. In the many places I look.
This was the prompt given on the NaPoWriMo website:
And just as many songs do, the poem directly addresses a person or group – in this case, the Muses. Taking (Anne) Carson’s translation as an example, we challenge you to write a poem that directly addresses someone, and that includes a made-up word, an odd/unusual simile, a statement of “fact,” and something that seems out of place in time (like a Sonny & Cher song in a poem about a Greek myth).
I wanted to see a parallel in Indian poetry. I stumbled on an article of translations of medieval Indian poetry. There is one that I particularly liked:
svārthārambhapraṇataśirasāṃ pakṣapātāt surāṇāṃ dṛptātmānaṃ karajakuliśair dānavendraṃ nihantum | siṃhībhūtas tribhuvanaguruḥ so ‘pi nārāyaṇo ‘smin rāgadveṣapratihatamateḥ kasya na syāt paśutvam ||
Sūktimuktāvalī of Jalhaṇa 131.59
The author, Anand Venkatkrishnan, translates it as:
When the gods (to whom he was partial) started bowing to him to save their own heads, even Nārāyaṇa, the guru of all, turned into a lion to slay the proud demon-king with his pointy fingernails.
I mean, if you were so swayed by love and hate, you’d become an animal too.
Translation of Sūktimuktāvalī of Jalhaṇa 131.59, Anand Venkatkrishnan
A search for Sūktimuktāvalī shows that it is an anthology of poems commissioned by Jalhana. I looked up the original text and found it on the Internet Archive.
I tried to find more by the writer than the four articles he wrote for The Revealer. I found a Tumblr account in his author bio. However, he has not updated it since 2020. He seems to be currently at the Divinity School in the University of Chicago.
He has written a book on the Bhagvata Purana and about scholarly life in India. I like it’s opening lines:
We often talk about the life of the mind as if it were the mind that mattered, when it’s really the life.
Anand Venkatkrishnan, Love in the Time of Scholarship
The book is an open access publication made available online [PDF link] by the University of Chicago.
I realise now that this post has not been about the poetry I wrote about 45 minutes ago, giving it a lot of thought but not really satisfied with the output. Not yet.
In short, the poetry is about the story of the Nakshatras and the Moon. Modern science posits these asterisms at different points in space and time. I tried but have not been fully successful in adding all the suggestions in the prompt.
April is Global Poetry Writing month. The theme for the prompts this year is around cultural institutions. As the website says:
This year, our daily resources will take the form of online museum collections and exhibits. Hopefully, you’ll find these to be at least entertaining, and you may even be able to use some of what you see as inspiration for your poems – particularly given that our prompts this year will all be themed around music and art.
I am writing the poems as is on a platform called thinkdeli. Here, I want to provide a little more context.
The prompt for Day 1 is:
As with pretty much any discipline, music and art have their own vocabulary. Today, we challenge you to take inspiration from this glossary of musical terms, or this glossary of art terminology, and write a poem that uses a new-to-you word. For (imaginary) extra credit, work in a phrase from, or a reference to, the Florentine Codex.
I looked up the glossary of Carnatic music terms on Wikipedia. I learnt about something I missed learning in my Carnatic music education – Swarajathis. This became the basis of the poem.
I learnt swarams, geethams, and varnams.
But not swarajathis.
I seemed to have pranced over them,
Unknowingly.
I lived through boyhood, adulthood, and parenthood.
But not youth.
I seemed to have pranced over those years,
Knowingly.
I don’t know why I skipped learning swarajathis between geetham and varnam. After varnam, I went directly to learning keerthanams.
In my mind, I similarly skipped over youth. I was eager to get into adulthood as a child. Once I got there, though, I was eager to do many things I wanted to go back and do things I could have done in my youth. Like solo travelling, hiking, etc.
I had a long weekend here in Pune owing to a holiday on Monday on the occasion of Eid. I spent my Sunday afternoon trying to learn the fundamentals of EMACS. I was trying to see what I would like to use to set up my note making stack. I wanted to learn EMACS to try and set up the EMACS Writing Studio.
I learnt a lot of key bindings. I took the effort to learn about key bindings (or keyboard shortcuts) for the various programmes I used. I learnt that I needed to spend some time to learn programming so that I could better understand what I was doing.
Obsidian has held a strange attraction for me because of its purple coloured logo. I love the colour purple. If you visit my blog’s URL, the purple coloured hyperlinks are a dead giveaway. I decided to give Obsidian another try.
I had tried setting up Obsidian twice before this. The first was Nick Milo’s Linking your Thinking system. I do not know why I abandoned that practice but I moved to Roam Research after trying it.
I added only a few notes in the last one year. I did not seem to have used Odysseas’ system. I continued the practice of adding notes to Roam Research and also set up Readwise to export its highlights to Roam Research in this period. This pushed my use of Roam Research.
My wife asked me what I had got in my life out of consuming social media, videos, books, etc. She said that she saw no return for all the time I had invested. I wanted to start consuming in a way that it showed a return for the time I invest, if not for entertainment. This is the role that I want Obsidian to play.
In the aforementioned consumption binge my wife accused me of, I remembered a channel I came across called Wanderloots. I remembered a sentence he said in one of my videos. It will allow me to measure my productivity in terms of “permanent notes” I wrote and not in terms of the input.
He has a playlist that shows how he sets up his Obsidian with a mixture of mixes Zettelkasten, CODE by Tiago Forte, and Obsidian’s system of tags and topics to set up his digital garden.
I plan to tweak his system further so that I can use Obsidian as a place to read, think, and write. I plan to use discretion in dumping things into Obsidian for now.
If you visit his YouTube channel now, he is talking about setting up an AI locally on your machine to work with your notes. I am presently enjoying consuming his back catalog of content.
I kept following that thread the rest of the week. I started selecting to View Source again. When listening to Craig Mod on The Tim Ferriss Show, I went to his website. I loved some of his in-line comments in the source code.
I guess this is what Code is Poetry meant which used to be written in the top of WordPress admin page.
This was what browsing the web was about, in my opinion. That is how I want to browse the web again.
The World of Wikipedia Userpages
There is also a hidden world of Wikipedia user pages that is not widely known. Other than to Wikipedia editors or contributors. I used to consistently contribute to Wikipedia a decade and a half back and I used to love visiting these user pages.
I used to love reading L Shyamal’s ornithological investigations on his blog, Catching Flies. I have still subscribed to his blog on RSS feeds. When I got some of his recent updates, I visited his Wikipedia userpage. I loved reading this, there, about the reason for his contributions to Wikipedia:
The Western Ghats of Karnataka. Blink and this area may have already been destroyed, with ever-widening roads, street-lighting, power-lines, dams, and habitations following well-established and misguided notions of development that are entrenched in the minds of most people. These are the wild spaces that inspire much of my contribution to Wikipedia, a land that supports life and hosts enough wonders to engage everyone, physically and mentally, now and in the future. Incidentally, within this view live floral and faunal elements that represent more than a million potential Wikipedia entries. Converted (or “developed”) into a boring human settlement, it would not produce a single notable person.
Personal Updates
My post-surgery recovery is coming along well. The guy who dresses my wounds thinks it would take another 2 weeks for the wound to heal completely. That would put it at a date around the Malayalam New Year of Vishu, around 14 April.
Many of my family members’ doctors visits were on hold because of my recovery. Those were covered in the last few days.
How AI has changed the way children do homework. Even ones supported by their parents. It is getting to a place where we first get the answer from AI. There is no effort to search. But, as the blog post says, the reward is for the output and not the effort.
Scale above all else is the philosophy that both buries us in endless genAI slop and locks customers in to enshittified platforms… and taste is in tension with scale.
This is something that Craig Mod talks about in his twin interviews with Tim Ferriss.
It is not just that people making AI slop are spamming the internet, it’s that the intended “audience” of AI slop is social media and search algorithms, not human beings.
I am trying to write using Emacs over the next month or so. I am not that into programming – that’s the reason I use WordPress and Blot and not hosting it on a static website (like I tried to with Hugo).
Parallel Spirals 