S Anand

This week, I learned: Facemorph.me implements face morphing via StyleGAN2 (among the best face morphing implementations I’ve seen) and exposes it via a free public site #ForNow. My reading from The Sequoia of Tomorrow: Money’s in the Bay Area. People, move there. Money’s in a few big winners. Maybe they can find them easy and don’t need to scout? Money’s in speed and fewer deciders. Partners don’t need to wait for and convince each other every Monday. Risky, but faster. Looks like you can use Codex via an API, since the OpenAI Agents 0.22.0-alpha.1 release is available. “This alpha introduces the embedded Codex harness in the OpenAI Agents SDK for JavaScript and TypeScript.” Via Daniel The amount I’m delegating to agents is small but growing. In Aug-Sep, a median session took Codex 3.3 minutes and only 4% of my prompts took 20+ minutes. In October, the median session took 7.5 minutes and 13% of my prompts ran 20+ minutes. ChatGPT image generation will be a separate quota from Codex #ForNow. Armin used Qwen3-TTS to detect voices. I ran a quick benchmark to see how well it did on my transcripts. Answer: Not very good. 32% precision, 84% recall. “Professors nowadays seem to have become professional fundraisers who do a little research on the side.” Also, “Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages.” Paul Graham Looks like we’ve learnt how to get a neuron to fire by shining a light on it. It’s called Optogenetics. Voice remixing is now available in Gemini 3.8 Flash and it did a pretty good job of replicating my voice as well as creating new voices based on a prompt. via X. Qwen3-TTS supports custom voices too and can run on your laptop with just 1.7B parameters. This (interestingly summarized) Machines of Loving Grace suggests factors that bottleneck intelligence (like in clinical trials, ) - and hence become the focus: People move slowly or impose constraints. Data isn’t available. Nature (biology, chemistry, engineering) works only so far. Nathan Baschez sees agents factories as the next step beyond “All employees use agents”. These are shared workflows maintained centrally that the organization can get work done with. That packages context (skills, prompts, docs, data) along with environment (tools, permissions). The main advantages are centralization (few experts/owners enable everyone) and execution (acting in the real world). WACZ seems to be the modern way to archive websites. Unlike MHTML, it can handle multiple pages. In the last 10 months (Jan-Oct 2026), I prompted Claude, Claude Code, ChatGPT, and Codex about 12,000 times. On average, I talk to AI ~40 times a day. That’s 80% of my “Talk to AI 50 times a day” recommendation. I still have some way to go. Phone spam marketing has reached an elevated level of obnoxiousness. I get calls from automated recordings often. But today, Airtel Black call me and put me on hold for two minutes. Wow! Then the music stopped and the line just hung. So, they put me on hold and ghosted me. And the reason I picked up the call was because their Internet was down - so a triple whammy! Not only have I started enjoying tea a lot, I quite look forward to it. Even to the point where a high point of my day is when someone serves me tea, unasked. As my daughter commented, I’m getting old. wacli is a CLI interface for WhatsApp. Unofficial, and works well #ForNow. There’s no clear, good, ChatGPT search / export CLI that I am comfortable with #ForNow. ChatGPT Mistakes I made Week ending 08 Nov 2026 ...

Students of my course were given an assignment. Submit a picture story (no words) that others will understand and like. Explain others’ picture stories and rank them. Here are the results. Firstly, why this exercise? Because it teaches three skills I believe are important in the AI era: Creating unique content Communicating with clarity Marketing your ideas This is exactly what they were evaluated on. Uniqueness: How similar was their story to others'? Understanding: How well did others understand their story? Preference: How much did others prefer their story over others'? Here are some stories I enjoyed. Click for details. ...

Note: This continues my nasty habits series: licking, scraping, and nibbling - in which I mentioned fiddling with nails. There are three irreplacable possessions in my room: My phone, because it authorizes lots of services. My laptops, because they have un-backed-up data. My toenails, because the good ones are rare. Here are two good ones I’ve had for a few months. The ones best for fiddling are from the toe thumb. They typically have: ...

I was reading Asterix on my flight from Brussels to Dubai when I remembered a colleague’s request. I typically convert my workshops into narratives like this and this. They wanted another event converted. Usually, I have the full transcript of my events. In this case, I just had a few paragraphs of notes. Far from enough. On the other hand, I was reading Asterix. And AI’s my magic potion. So I figured: Why not create a comic story? Using real faces? While reading Asterix? ...

Using the same approach as specification and verification I looked at how I review agents, i.e. what I comment on after they share an output. This page features the 28 review techniques I use. Some interesting ones: Show your style: I tell it why it doesn’t sound like me, and how I would have written it. Real example: “Still not in my style - revise more in line with these principles.” Pause and resume: Tell it not to exceed the usage limits. Real example: “We are at 96% usage of the 5h limit - so pause now and we can resume in a few hours.” More like this: Tell it what you liked and go in that direction. Real example: “Looks good. Give me 10 more.” Take the best of each: Give it other models’ output and pick the best from each. Real example: “Here is ChatGPT’s response. Take what’s better, drop what’s worse, follow up on new ideas this gives you, and revise your response.” Say “I meant…”: Clarify your real intent. “Sorry, I meant round off the 95% activity window in EACH namespace.” These are based on ~6.7K real responses. Skim through them and if you spot something interesting, test it out. If it works for you, share it with others.

This Thursday, I flew Indigo from Singapore to Chennai. I had no WiFi and got a lot of (slightly difficult) reading done, such as: Machines of Loving Grace Against the Personal Theory of Agents Paul Graham’s The Top Idea in Your Mind How I Built the Most AI-Pilled Company in the World Catching up on Simon Willison’s blog Actions from a long pending book cluster summary (The Beginning of Infinity, Conjectures and Refutations, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, The Fabric of Reality, and Enlightenment Now). Several tweets, blog posts, and ChatGPT / Claude chats. I also drafted prompts to run later. In a disconnected flight, I’m less distracted because: ...

I conducted a session on Wed, 04 Nov 2026 at ED5518: Data Visualization for Engineers - Department of Engineering Design, IIT Madras, Chennai. Speakers: Anand S Summary: A live-lab class on testing visualizations and phone apps: commit to an answer before discussing, check that a chart is true and that it works for its audience, use AI as a different kind of reviewer rather than a stand-in for people, and ask busy people “A or B?” ...

The Innovation team has been experimenting with 3D interaction, audio, video and AI agents. Three things struck me: We can manipulate a 3D molecule with our hands, or try different furniture in a virtual room, using a browser. Sound search can find things a transcript never records. And a small specialist model can diagnose a machine at a tiny fraction of an audio LLM’s cost. AI can help us improve videos and business decisions when its suggestions are checked against evidence, not just written convincingly. New ways to interact and create Hold a 3D molecule in your hands (Sujal). At our Innovation Team meeting, I used hand gestures in front of my camera to manipulate a colourful 3D ATP synthase molecule: pluck, slice, scale, rebuild and explore its parts. The browser recognizes the gestures; a paired phone can also control the scene. It is related to Sujal’s remote 3D pottery experiment. ...

Since agents do most of the work, specification (telling it what to do) and verification (making sure it did it right) is more important than execution. This is what I’m often asked about. Of the ~600 questions people asked me this year, half were deciding what to do / ask for and every sixth question was about checking if it worked. I checked. For example: “What should we ask agents to do when we only have a dataset and no clear use case?” ...

I conducted a session on Mon, 02 Nov 2026 at TDS Course Ideation — Open Design Meeting, Sep 2026 - Remote. Speakers: Anand S Summary: In the fourth open TDS design meeting, the teachers ask what is left to teach once an agent can read and solve the exam — while doubling a spending cap students are forecasting, finding only eight drawings that fool every AI guess, and admitting a marketplace rewarded trading over usefulness. ...