Tag: blogging

  • Weekly Notes 16/2025

    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.

      Manuel Moreale’s People and Blog series with Matt Webb was a great interview where what Matt said resonated with me very deeply.

      My eyes were wide when I discovered the web. (And then View Source.)

      Matt Webb has also written a prehistory of the week notes.

      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.

      Ruben Schade had this remark on the blog post about how South Park got big retail wrong:

      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.

      Sophie Koonin had this blog post encouraging more people to have their own weird version of a personal website (love the url!). This had another quote that reinforced my belief that I want to go back to blogging.

      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.”

      More calls for leaving the walled gardens of social media, from Molly White:

      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.

      That’s all folks!

    1. A challenge of blog questions

      Thejesh tagged me in a challenge of blog questions. I enjoyed reading his replies and I have never been tagged in such a challenge.

      Why did you start blogging in the first place?

      I started blogging because I was tired of crafting websites from HTML and I was not good with CSS. I loved the fact that I could choose a background and start writing. The focus moved from making to writing.

      There were times that I missed the making and tried to go back to it. There were times when the ghost of designing got into me and I would spend hours crafting my website. But, I felt that writing is where I should focus my energies on writing.

      What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

      The blog is presently hosted on WordPress. I think the reason is the same as the one above. I loved twiddling the controls behind the scenes of various blogging platforms. I realized, like above, that I should focus my energies on writing. So, I decided to stick to WordPress.

      I have hosted my blog posts on Blogger, LiveJournal, Tumblr, Posterous, Vox, Roller, Ghost, Blot, and finally on WordPress.

      How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

      I write my posts on two platforms. Most of the posts that you read here are on WordPress’ native Gutenberg editor or Visual editor.

      I write some of my posts using WordLand. I am using this tool to write the posts in my Status Updates category.

      When do you feel most inspired to write?

      Whenever I am not sleeping. I don’t think I can survive without writing.

      Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

      I usually only read once more after I complete writing. I let my thoughts simmer before I write the draft.

      What’s your favorite post on your blog?

      Some of my posts that I love are about things I do with my daughter (1,2) or ones about note making or Indian Philosophy.

      Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

      I am twiddling with the controls in the WordPress admin panel all the time. This is based on curiosity and not on anything as sophisticated as a plan. Making a blogroll is an area of interest.

      Who’s next?

      I want to tag these people not because they would take part in a challenge like this but because I would love to hear about how they write and think about the art of blogging.

    2. Weekly Notes 45/2024

      I felt like this was a rich week for me. I got a lot done at work and it has reached a steady cadence. Below, you will find what I did when I was off work. Summarizing it here leaves me with a good feeling about going into the weekend.

      Health

      In the beginning of the week, I was interested in learning about health supplements. I asked the question whether I needed it or not. The answer came out to be – only a few simple ones – Vitamin D3, Seacod, and Calcimax-P. I buy these for the kids anyway, so not too much of an additional cost.

      Newsletter Nerd

      I have been interested in building a newsletter on the side. I am working with Saurabh at C4E to build a health and health-tech newsletter. While my space newsletter will remain free, I am spending the next six months or so writing for a business. I want to be able to help you to build your own newsletter at the end of this.

      Community

      In the late 2000s, you could get on X and find a person who was interested in something that you were and work together. I was wondering how this happened now. The answer seems to be on the cozy web on WhatsApp and Telegram.

      I am part of a few such communities but discovering these communities is hard.

      Shephali Bhatt wrote about how the community is the conduit for creators in The Economic Times. A week ago Kommune had also put out their report, Consumed, that spoke of these trends, among others.

      Pranay Kotasthane of The Takshashila Institution wrote an X thread on what makes a great digital community that is worth reading.

      One of the communities that I looked at again was the IndieWeb community. I like reading Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs series. I hear Jeff Triplett’s appeal to publish and write more on blogs:

      PS: Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

      I have been fortunate to join the community at thinkdeli where I have been writing the first draft of my novel publicly. More on this below.

      I tried to read two of David Deutsch’s book and did not get it. If you have a book circle that is interested in reading his work, I would love to join in. Please leave a comment on this blog or reach out to me on X or Mastodon.

      Reading

      There is some issue with the Audible billing that I have not been able to fix. I re-listened to Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman again.

      I have been reading two books on writing, as I write:

      • On Writing by Stephen King
      • Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

      I have been reading Finding the Oasis by Sandeep Mall as a way to look at health, wealth, and relationships in an integrated way.

      I read Spacecraft Navigation – A Mini Guidebook by Sumana Mukherjee. This helped me revise some of the concepts regarding satellite and spacecraft navigation. I discovered this via her LinkedIn post. I enjoyed reading about how interstellar spacecrafts navigate.

      Writing

      I went back to Zettelkasten again. I still have the stacks of notecards at home which my daughter borrows from me sometimes for her own creative endeavor.

      I had gone through several rabbit holes in the past – starting from the book by Sonke Ahrens. I then went on to watching YouTube videos of Scott P Scheper. He held my attention for a while.

      The latest writer who has captured my attention is Bob Doto. I am still reading through his writings on the Zettelkasten. Doto’s book A System for Writing is very expensive.

      These are the links to the novel that is titled, Green Earth, Grey Moon, and Red Mars.

      Tumblr tells me that I have posted 1000 notes there.

      I want to return to writing the space newsletter with a refreshed format.

    3. Hello world!

      The United States is celebrating its independence day today. I am embarking on yet another blog. My first blog had my name on it and was on Blogspot. It was a Tibetan blog talking about alternative services to those provided by Google that first turned my attention to WordPress. I have since used Drupal, Tumblr, Vox, LiveJournal and the self-hosted WordPress. At the end I am back here again.

      It has been a journey where I have learnt a lot. In the meanwhile, I moved away from being a mechanical engineering undergrad to being a banker. No MBAs were involved. In the end, I use my most favourite of the names of blogs I have used thus far.

      Parallel Spirals is my imagination of how I see myself following these various parallel interests that I spiral down into once in a while.

    4. My Experiences at BlogCamp Mumbai

      While Mumbai has had a fairly good frequency of BarCamps in the recent past, BlogCamps have been few and far between. I don’t even remember how many blogcamps there have been so far. I was happy to hear the announcement for the BlogCamp at the BarCamp I attended the week before last.

      Getting to the BlogCamp was an interesting task in itself. I turned to Google Maps to suggest me a good way to get to the venue at Vidyalankar Institute of Technology in Wadala. The route that it suggested took me via a bus route that left me at a place called Shanti Nagar and had me traversing through the slums of Wadala and along the outer boundary of the Institute to reach the venue. Hmm.

      The crowd wasn’t as big as BarCamp but more importantly, it was an interesting crowd! We started the morning with a session by Rakesh Kumar on content strategies for your blog. He suggested that there were more ways to add content than just text – images, slides, video, visualisations etc. were now possible and made content more interesting and easy to comprehend for an attention deficit audience. He suggested ideas for having a time table for what to write about in the coming days. He suggested doing guest posts on other people’s blogs and also inviting guest bloggers on your blog to encourage a more diverse set of opinions on your blog. He suggested having a tone for your blog would be worth considering and building on.

      Rakesh really got the audience involved and the audience did have many questions. I think this set the stage for a very interactive BlogCamp, overall. I’ve hardly seen audiences involved in the talk as much as in this BlogCamp. Quite different.

      Ashutosh Bijoor was the second guy. He dazzled us with a beautiful set of pictures from forts and caves from near Mumbai. They travel to these places on their cycles beginning at Andheri or Thane. After breezing through Mumbai’s history and geography, Ashutosh told us a little about the group that he started. They call themselves the Mumbai Historical Sites Cycling Association (MuHiSiCA) and was started because the Archaeological Survey of India speaks only to organisations and not individuals. They research on places, cycle to forts and caves in and around Mumbai, clean them up, takes photos and then blog about it.

      We then had a talk on Video Blogging by Mihir Joshi. Mihir has a YouTube-based talk show called The M J Show where he talks to musicians and some Bollywood celebrities. He went to a digital content company called Ping Network to help produce the content for his shows. He suggests that companies exist that are looking for such content and are ready to provide help with production. He said that it was a route worth considering besides Doing It Yourself which always exists as an option if no one is willing to take you on.

      After a lunch consisting of Mountain Dew, rice, dal and potato curry, we went back in for a session on Indic blogging by Nikhilesh Ghushe.He started with getting the audience to get the Hindi equivalent word for words in English. Through the example, he sought to establish the nuances that one is able to achieve through the Indic languages. He said this provided the basis for some experiences and understanding that English gets rid of. He suggested that we miss a lot of this nuance even during consumption of English language news which does not understand nuance. He also says that not reading Hindi literature means we’re missing out on a large chunk of literature ourselves. Nikhilesh writes poetry on his blog and admits that Hindi is much better for poetry than prose. During a brief description of the history of Hindi literature, Nikhiles says that upto about the 1830s, Hindi did not have prose – only drama and poetry.

      The next session was by Alexander Gounder on SEO. In earlier BlogCamps, I have heard a hatred being expressed for people who do SEO for their blogs. Alex’s talk today seemed to suggest that the SEOers have adopted a more organic route on things now. The talk was way too technical for me for a nuanced reproduction here. I will link to any post that explains this better.

      The next session was by Mahafreed who did a session on Vine. Vine is a way to produce 6 second videos and upload them online. They’re like a Twitter for videos. Not interestingly, Twitter has acquired them. Placing a limitation on a technology helps bring out creativity and I think this is what makes Vine very interesting. We also co-developed the idea for a Vine.

      The last talk was by Anubha Bhat on why people should blog and on her own personal experiences of having kept a blog since about 2007.

       

    5. Blogging in Malayalam

      Note: I wrote this on my earlier blog hosted as http://parallelspirals.blogspot.com. I recovered the text from the WayBack Machine. This post appeared on February 20, 2011 as per the time stamp. I’m trying to collect here again all my old writings spread on various blogs.

      This is another project that I have been trying to do for a very long time. It has been a long time dream to write my blog in Malayalam. I started on this curve by trying to write for the Malayalam Wikipedia. I found here Malayalam that I could not easily understand. This led me to try and read Malayalam newspapers once in a while. Finally, reading this blog post over at Gerrard’s blog, pushed me to write Malayalam online.

      I do not much of the concepts that have been talked about on Gerard’s blog. These are things that would be awesome to learn more about. I have put them separately to learn and research about them. Perhaps, it may not be essential to understand all of them before blogging in Malayalam but this is a good starting point.

      Being born and brought up in Mumbai, I have been practicing to write in Hindi and English primarily. I do speak in Malayalam daily at home but do not write as often as I could. This has made me feel sorry sometimes and also feel a sense of contribution to the death of a language. It may not be as the same many other Indian languages with nearly 36 million people speaking the language world-wide but it could very easily get there.

      One of my efforts on having these thoughts was to try and write Wikipedia articles in the Malayalam Wikipedia. The thing was that I was not really sure about Malayalam spellings. I knew the alphabet set to read Malayalam but not really write it well. Perhaps it is a great way to reconnect with my grandmother as well.

      So, I’ve written a blog post today without any help from anyone. I’ve written it using Google Transliteration and have not paid any special attention to the spellings. From tomorrow, for every alternate day, I hope to write something on the blog and begin the curve to improve my Malayalam.

      February 21, 2011 is being celebrated as International Mother’s Language Day. I hope you do something to begin speaking, reading or writing in your mother tongue.

    6. SEDS-Earth blogging

      EDS Earth, the international chapter of SEDS has decided to do a bit of an experiment. They’ve asked people from 5 chapters (initially) to write a blog post every week. We haven’t tried such a thing yet. Let’s see how it works. Want to know where the SEDS blog is? Here it is – http://blogs.seds.org/sedsearth.