Tag: Technical Writing for AI

  • Weekly Notes 45/2026

    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.

  • Weekly Notes 28/2025

    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.