I started this week with a plan to get a lot of things done. Life, had other plans. It dropped me in the Hospital for the third time this year. I was discharged on Friday.
Unlike my other Hospital stays this year, this one was marked by an absence of phones and a lot of time spent staring at ceilings. I thought I would read some books but I got nothing done.
It’s good to be back home and able to write, even on a mobile device. Not yet back to 100%.
I missed many events in Pune that I had hoped to attend. I wanted to take my daughter to see and meet the Pune urban sketchers community and also see some of the stationary they had on offer.
I have been thinking of using mostly Instagram, Facebook, Substack and Mastodon through most of next year. I am not thinking of it as a rule.
I got a lot of work done in the past two weeks. But, I had recurrent health scares that kept me away from writing. This weekend I was really busy with several home improvement works. Hence, the delayed post here. But, better late than never, as had been the case in the last few weeks.
I am currently reading Oh, Life Relax Please by Swami Sukhabodhananda and listening to Consider Phlebas by Iain M Banks. I went to the library after a long time. I donated Jatan Mehta’s book Seven uni verses among several other books to the public library here. There are many more books that I plan to give away.
I also attended my first in-person event in a long time. The talk was on geology of the Himalayas by Suvrat Kher. I have been reading his blog, Rapid Uplift for a really long time. His latest blog post, Landscapes: PIndari Glacier Trail formed a part of the talk. I also had the chance to meet some of my friends there, whom I had missed meeting because of the surgeries.
I started reading blog posts on Readwise again. I have also removed X, Mastodon, and Instagram apps on the phone.
I used to write my Weekly Notes in a structured way, tracking my reading and writing progress. This time, I want to write it in a more free-form style, similar to how I did for Week 42.
My parents visited and took the kids to Mumbai during the Diwali holidays. It was our first time home alone. You might expect us to get a lot done without the kids, but we mostly just relaxed and did nothing special.
I am disappointed with my recent book choices. I didn’t read Between Worlds, which I wanted to. I read more on my mobile than anywhere else. Between Worlds is just sitting on my shelf after I read the first two chapters.
I have been following several accounts on X that focus on manufacturing in India. While there are traditional manufacturing companies, these new-age creators showcase impressive manufacturing processes through engaging videos. We imagined these processes in our heads. I will share a few videos in another blog post.
It was interesting to see how India’s manufacturing limits its space program and how ISRO built up its capabilities, helping the program grow. This serves as a useful model for other sectors in India. For instance, the Semi Conductor Laboratory (SCL) in Chandigarh could apply this approach to build the capability of the Indian semiconductor industry, leveraging SCL’s experience being an ISRO Center.
“Mariner 4 used Canopus, a bright star in the constellation Carina, as an attitude reference, its star tracker camera locking onto the star after its Sun sensor had locked onto the Sun. This was the first time a star had been used to provide second axis stabilization, its brightness (second brightest star in the sky) and its position well off the ecliptic making it an ideal referent.”
“…we’ve also just had a first in terms of autonomous navigation through the work of the New Horizons team. Without using radio tracking from Earth, the spacecraft has determined its distance and direction by examining images of star fields and the observed parallax effects. Wonderfully, the two stars that the team chose for this calculation were Wolf 359 and Proxima Centauri, two nearby red dwarfs of considerable interest.”
“That its consumers are also its customers is a huge advantage over commercial over-the-air broadcasting, which entirely serves the advertising market.”
Mukherjea suggests investing 50% in Indian stock market and 50% in the US market for the equity portion of your portfolio which I found interesting.
New songs dropped from Agam this week.
Dharmesh Shah mentions many interesting technical notes on ChatGPT.
Thinking of buying a new car. So, started listening to this on financial rules for buying a new car.
My son watches this and has caught on many Malayalam words from this one. He has also picked up counting in Malayalam from 1 to 10, saying left and right in Malayalam etc.
I realized I was not listening to podcasts that I usually would. I have downloaded PocketCasts to fix that. I have also downloaded the X and Tusky app for Android to access X and Mastodon. Thus ends my social media detox.
Matt D’Avella is someone I started following when I was into minimalism. Good to see that he is still trying to hang in there.
I have been trying to explore solarpunk and lunarpunk themes in my story writing. I haven’t written much this year. That’s something I hope to fix at this year’s NaNoWriMo.
I’m seeing many finance YouTubers and podcast hosts talk about cryptocurrency again in India. Most of the stuff that I have watched had been sponsored by the cryptocurrency exchange, CoinDCX. Another cryptocurrency exchange, Binance, which had decided to not comply with India’s Financial Intelligence Unit (FIU) guidelines for cryptocurrency exchanges and had left India is also returning with a India Blockchain Yatra.
Mukesh Bansal’s solocast on fasting.
Madhu Kela, knowingly or unknowingly says in this podcast, “China is an autocracy, India is a bureaucracy”, although he corrects it to democracy before he completes.
“One of things happening in culture that I think we can all feel intuitively is that increasingly media mediums are playable. I don’t mean ‘gamification’, and I don’t simply mean ‘engagement’ (but metrics inside of systems are certainly part of it). But the sense that people – Gen Z and Gen A, are literate in exploring systems. They poke at the rules, bend them, maybe even break them and see how the system responds far more than millennials did. We played the game, but didn’t fully appreciate that culture is an emergent property of a system’s design.”
“gamification (In my opinion) is mostly about obedience theatre.”
“Gamification is used to make you feel like you’re playing when you’re really just complying.”
“Code writes the rules. Rules shape incentives. Incentives shape behaviour. And behaviour becomes culture.”
“This is why playability matters. Not because everything is a game, but because we are all beginning to think like players, and this changes how we should understand agency inside of systems.”
“There’s a lot more we can say about both of these challenges, but in short they make doing solarpunk both harder and more necessary. The more cyberpunk the world gets, the more useful solarpunks become. The more material reality is buried under layers of digital abstraction, the better it feels to actually get your hands dirty.”
“Almost nobody is visiting homepage after homepage. Readers almost universally read content from a central feed of information.”
“Email newsletters are, at their heart, another version of this model. By subscribing to a publisher’s newsletter, you’re adding their content to your reverse-chronological feed of information.”
“If AI lives in the browser, as it does in products like Dia (and soon in Chrome), you can query not just one information source, but every information source you visit through that browser.”
“publishers are better off considering how they might embrace emerging standards like Model Context Protocol (MCP) into their offerings so that their information can be consumed.”
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.
Parallel Spirals 