Wishing everyone a Happy Diwali from Pune!
It’s been 5 weeks since the last Weekly Notes. So, this is a mix of both a catch-up and a weekly note for this week.
Catch-up
In the Weekly Notes 40/2026, under the entry for September 30, I mentioned that the Logan broke down. I had initially left the car at the Auto Pro NX garage. But, they just wasted time and did not work on the car. I then took it to S K Motor Works. They began work on it around October 2. Work continued till October 20.
It took more time for fault finding than it did to fix the issue. The issue was with the heart of the car, its Electronic Control Module (ECM). Once the fault was found, the fix took hardly half a day. I have since driven the car to work multiple times. I still don’t trust it on long drives yet.
In the Weekly Notes 40/2026, in the entry under October 3, I mentioned that I was doing a capstone project for my AI for Technical Writers course. I completed the course. I got certified. Here is my presentation of the project to my instructors and course mates:
I watched Season 1-7 of The Mentalist. It left me with two habits that I am grateful for. The serial’s main character, Patrick Jane repeatedly raids the kitchen where the murder has taken place and makes himself a dip tea. I haven’t graduated to electric or gas kettles but have taken to having dip tea. Another character in the series, Kimball Cho reads paper books while on stakeout and during downtime. I loved his paper reading style. I got back to reading again after a small two-week slump.
I finished listening to Parinamam by M P Narayanan Pillai. I haven’t been able to write a note about it here nor pick up another Malayalam novel on Storytel. There is some block there.
Monday, 2 November
It had rained all night. Some of the rain had spilled into the balcony. When I went to drop my daughter off at the bus stop, there was a lazy drizzle. Not enough to open an umbrella but you would get wet if you didn’t open one. Nature’s reminder about the importance of compounding.
This was an interesting weekend. I got two different ways to think about AI. Venkatesh Rao wrote an essay titled Experiments with Monstrousness. This is a maximalist way of letting AI work with you and change you. He also titles it as a re-introduction post for himself. You get to see how his thinking on things have changed as a historical arc that bought him here. His motto for this era is “Be Slightly Monstrous” and adopting AI freely and letting AI transform him.
Cal Newport brings in a slightly more moderate nuance. He thinks about how a normal person can think about technologies like AI and react to them. He suggests a 4C Framework (Choosing, Configuring, Changing, and Complaining) to handle this.
Tom Johnson, who is a technical writer at Google, is experimenting to see how an agent would see a web page. His experiments find that improving the accessibility of your website as mentioned in web standards, also improves readability of your website by an agent. This is important in technical writing because people are asking LLMs to do things or how to do things questions.
There was a spat on X (formerly Twitter) between the founders of Pixxel and GalaxEye over how Pixxel was structured as an entity (in India and the US) and its implications. Aihik Sur writes about this spat for moneycontrol.com.
I wondered on X about building a lower-powered version of LVM-3 to loft navigation satellites for India.
Tuesday, 3 November
While I was exploring Venkatesh Rao’s essay yesterday, I was reminded that he was working on Blygs, that he calls a decentralized social publishing and conversation protocol. It has me interested. He suggests setting one up with the help of an AI. This makes me wonder about the question Tom Johnson asks above about how AI sees the documentation website.
I finished watching the last season of the Mentalist.
Since this is the first Diwali in the new home, we put the lights up early. Totally forgot about NaNoWriMo this year.
Wednesday, 4 November
I enjoyed Hiran’s post about his trip to Jaipur and Ajmer. They are interspersed with his sketches. I also love his website re-design.
Thursday, 5 November
Both my kids had their last day of school as the School closed for the Diwali vacations. Schools will reopen on the 16th of this month.
Pattu from freefincal.com shared a video on why he has changed his mind about index investing being a better option.
Friday, 6 November
I discovered another personal finance writer on freefincal.com. I enjoyed reading his writing. His name is Avinash Luthria.
I also saw another way of looking at AI. This time from the financial transactions that are reported and the segments that make up AI. They also discussed which country contributed to which of these segments. When you look at this through the technology lens, it is difficult to separate what is working and what is not.
I asked on X about what was to be a sounding rocket launch of Catalyx Space to test their re-entry heat shield. This has not happened and they replied that it will happen soon.