Run 50 experiments. I managed 44 / 50. (Here are some). Learnings: I need to improve planning (9), scepticism (6), and lateral thinking (4).
Make 1 change a month in my environment. I managed 8 / 12. The largest impact was from meeting new people, working out of new places, and using new gadgets.
Calendar integrity, i.e. stick to my calendar. I succeeded over 95% of the time.
From The Extended Mind I learnt that our environment shapes our thinking more than I’d expected. That we can arrange our environment to extend our thoughts.
In 2023, each month I changed something in my environment to see:
What does “changing my environment involve”? What can I change?
Will I succeed?
Does it affect my thoughts? Can I track this?
Here are the results.
🟢 Jan. New desk orientations. Rotated standing desk, settled on one direction. Impact: LOW. I don’t know if my thoughts changed.
🟢 Jan: New walking routes. I explored new areas in Singapore, Hyderabad and Chennai. Impact: MEDIUM. Just seeing new shops, posters and layouts helped me think differently.
🔴 Jan: New song genres. I playlist-ed with several western genres, but listened only twice.
🔴 Feb: New book genres. I list 12 genres I dislike: Art, Chick Lit, Christian, Cookbooks, Gay and Lesbian, Horror, Music, Paranormal, Poetry, Religion, Sports, Travel. I didn’t read any.
🔴 Mar: Sleep over problems. Sleep is a great way to solve complex problems. But I couldn’t summon the willpower to “load” problems at night.
🟢 Mar: New people. I met a new person daily. Impact: HIGH. Meeting diverse people had the highest impact.
🟢 Apr: New work places. I worked out of libraries, cafes, school, parks, and offices. Impact: HIGH. New complex environments (like libraries) prompted new thoughts.
🔴 Aug: New cuisines. I tried a Bibimbap, a Verdure Ciambatta, and then discovered my cholesterol problem. I stopped.
🟢 Aug: New work habit. I used Pomodoro with micro-tasks. Impact: MEDIUM. I became more aware of where I misestimate time and got less distracted.
🟢 Nov: New exercise pattern. I switched walking to cycling. This increases heart points, reduces foot stress, and gets me to work. Impact: MEDIUM. I switched from typing notes to dictating, which needs a different thought process.
In summary:
8 / 12 attempts were successful.
New people, new places, and new gadgets had high impact on thoughts. Most others had at least medium impact.
The changes mostly led to diverse thinking. But measuring that is subjective.
I’ll continue exploring new environments in 2024. I’m evaluating:
I speak with ChatGPT ~20 times a day. That’s more than I speak with most of my colleagues. ChatGPT is clearly my favorite team member.
I conduct trainings, reviews and mentoring sessions with my colleagues. How to write code. How to write slides. How to communicate. That last bit is particularly important.
Currently, I have 10 custom instructions. They evolved over time and will continue to evolve.
My first instruction is “Be terse. Speak directly.” ChatGPT is helpfully polite and superfluous. I prefer brevity. Like interacting with Kimball Cho. I get straight answers to my questions. I also instruct it to “Avoid unprompted advice or clarifications.” Don’t say, “You asked me to …” or “I think you want…” or “OK, I’ll do …”. Just do it. Also, “Do NOT hedge or qualify. Do not waffle.” Take a position. Don’t force me to. Like Harry Truman, I prefer one-handed economists.
I ask ChatGPT to “Never apologize.” You’re forgiven. Don’t waste my time. Apologies have an emotional benefit with humans. With AI, I find the lack of emotional need comforting. (I can kick the AI and it’ll still obey me like a puppy. When AI takes over the world, let it be known that I never asked them to apologize.)
Another instruction is “Suggest follow-up prompts for open-ended inputs.” I compared my ChatGPT conversations with my daughter’s and found hers much longer than mine. “Why don’t you start a new conversation for each topic?” I asked. I try to keep the context window small. “How come you don’t you get a thousand new questions when you read an answer?” she countered. I realized it’s age. So, I use ChatGPT to keep me curious and dig further.
On a related note, “When sharing multiple options, be diverse.” I’d rather get options that are as different from each other as possible. Minimize overlap. Maximize coverage. And “When comparing, use multiple perspectives.” I don’t know what parameters to compare things on. Give me a wide range that I can pick from.
Sometimes, my thoughts are vague. I tell ChatGPT: “For vague prompts, ask clarifying question(s).” I feel that’s a clever way of using ChatGPT to do prompt engineering. I’ve noticed it working on a few occasions. Also, “When unsure, say so and ask questions.” I don’t want hallucinations or assumptions. I’d rather know what’s borderline.
Finally, “Think step by step. Explain your reasoning.” I’ve heard that Chain of Thought reduces mistakes. I don’t have personal evidence that this helps, though.
They say teaching is an excellent way of learning. I’m learning. I’m also thrilled that I am now a student of robopsychology.
Since my name (Anand) begins with “A”, I used to get called on fairly early at school. In attendance. Answering questions. Classroom exercises. Quizzes. Even the distribution of test results.
A few people later told me that it is good training, since I’d always be prepared. (Maybe. I’ve no idea.)
At IBM and IIMB, Ajit was the only one ahead of me, alphabetically. Then he went a step ahead and named his son Aadi. I thought that’s impossible to beat.
Today, we recruited Aabhas Bharadwaj. I checked on LinkedIn. I can’t find a single name on LinkedIn that’s ahead of his, alphabetically.
So, does he win the alphabetical race? Can you find one ahead of his?
After 15 years of using Python, I learnt that .endswith() supports tuple suffixes. This has been around since Python 2.5 (released in 2006 — before I knew Python.) The documentation has a tiny sentence in the middle saying “suffix can also be a tuple of suffixes to look for.”
I checked with a few colleagues, including Jaidev. They didn’t know it either.
It’s small little things like this that made me conclude.
I’m not going to code anymore. ChatGPT will, instead.
I feel like the father of the bride. Gramener was registered on 26 Feb. A day before my daughter’s birthday. I’ve spent more time with Gramener than my daughter. That makes Gramener my elder child. Who’s moving into a new household. Along with me. (I feel like சகலகலா சம்மந்தி.)
I feel grateful. I’m not good at business. But when my cousin remarked, “Anand, you’re now giving a livelihood to over 250 people!” I was stunned. My co-founders, colleagues and clients built a thriving business and put me (of all people) as CEO in the middle of it. How do I even go about saying “Thanks”?
It feels like joining college. New people. Larger group. New ways of working and learning. Lots of topics to explore. Exciting and scary.
What was it like?
Fundraising was rocky. We started in 2019. COVID struck. We paused. We resumed in 2021. Russia invaded Ukraine. We paused. We resumed in 2023. The Israel – Hamas war started. Luckily, the deal was nearly done. I’m grateful Naveen ran the entire process like clockwork, taking all the stress. I’m the happy free-rider, as usual.
Starting up was not that rocky. We’re many. With half a dozen co-founders, there are enough shoulders to cry on. That counts. We’re steady. We didn’t know how to blitz-scale, but we knew not to blitz-fail. Survival counts for a lot. We’re lucky. This is basically the “I have no idea why we succeeded” category. Serendipity counts for a lot, too. Ganes, Mayank, Naveen, Ram, Ravi, Vengatesh — yeah, it was fun. Not every day. But most of the time. It was fun.
What will you do?
I’m part of Straive’s data, analytics & AI business.
Straive extracts and analyzes all kinds of data. Financial. Legal. Research. Education. Pharmaceutical. There’s a fair bit of converting unstructured data to structured. Exactly the kind of thing I love doing.
So, I’ll be doing what I’ve been doing the last decade — extracting insights from even more data and telling better stories from those.
I joined Gramener as “Chief Data Scientist”. Now I’m debating “Data Storyteller”, “Data Detective”, “Data Psychologist”, and a few other evil titles.
I was at Cream Centre with my father on a Sunday afternoon. We’d finished a light lunch and were debating dessert. (He has triglycerides. I have cholesterol.) This was my fifth visit this year, and I had abstained so far. I couldn’t any longer.
I ordered a Sizzling Brownie Sundae. But not for reasons you might think.
Expertise comes from experience. I scrape food more than 99% of the people I know. So, I consider myself an expert. Here’s a guide on the art of scraping.
Why scrape food?
You get to eat every last bit
Food isn’t wasted
You can eat longer (and no do whatever else you have to)
It’s a motivating challenge to get every last bit
Bonus: It annoys people
What foods are scrapable?
Semi-solids are the easiest to scrape. The best kind is the cohesive semi-solid. It’s sticky but sticks to itself more than the vessel. These are usually foods that solidify over time. Examples include:
Baked cheese. It’s great when cheese falls off the pizza or pasta on to the plate. You can scrape it off of your (or others’) plates.
Molten chocolate. It has the added bonus that you can lick it at the end, too.
Pasta water (or noodles water). It eventually thickens into something scrapable.
Spreads like peanut butter, Nutella, jam, chutney. Especially on the sides of the glass bottles they come in.
Others like yogurt, cake batter, dried tomato sauce, mashed potatoes, hardened honey on ice cream, … the list is endless!
Avoid crumbly stuff. These stick to the vessel but become brittle and break when scraped. This includes toast, pizza, biscuits, rice, muffins, pie, quiche, cookies, etc. You could pick large crumbs and lick small crumbs in shallow vessels. But scraping them and pouring into your mouth might be the best overall strategy for this category.
Avoid loose stuff. They’ll fall off from your knife or fork, or melt when scraped. This includes curd, whipped cream, custard, panna cotta, soft jelly, tiramisu, soft boiled eggs, etc. Licking is a better strategy here.
You could combine the crumbly stuff with loose stuff to create a cohesive mix. Add curd to granola. Add whipped cream to biscuit crumbs. Add curd to pizza crumbs (and since I eat Maggi with curd, this makes sense). This makes it a lot more scrapable.
What vessels to pick?
Shape: Flat, smooth vessels are the best (e.g., ceramic or wooden plates or bowls.) Avoid deep vessels like glasses, especially curved ones. They’re hard to get a long scrape against. Definitely avoid vessels with ridges. Disposable plastic containers like below are among the worst. Food gets stuck in the ridges and since there are a dozen ridges on each side, you have to scrape 48 times just for a first pass. (This might be a good challenge, though.)
Material: Hard vessels are better than soft ones. Prefer wood, metal, ceramic, and hard plastic. Avoid thin plastic that bends. Avoid paper (it bends and soaks). Banana leaves tear when scraped.
Avoid non-stick vessels. The coating wears off when scraping.
What to scrape with?
Knives are the best. They are sharp enough to separate the food from the vessel and flat enough that you can pile enough food on top of it.
Forks are OK. Their edges can scrape reasonably well, and their tips can poke into corners. But it’s hard to pile up much food to pick up.
Spoons not ideal. They aren’t sharp enough, and too curved for scraping long slices. But if you want to take your time with it, they’re great.
The sizzling chocolate brownie
My dish arrived. Burning with chocolate. My father just had some brownie, leaving all the molten chocolate to me. On a flat wooden plate. With a knife. For an hour.
Even after 30 years of HTML, I learn new things about it.
This Monday morning, I woke up to a mail from Sundeep saying requests for a Data Engineer - AWS/Azure/GCP in our internal fulfilment portal raised an error.
My guess was one of these:
The “/” in the role is causing a problem. (Developer mistake.)
The role exists in one table but not the other. (Recruitment team mistake.)
The application wasn’t set up / restarted properly. (IT mistake.)
All three were wrong. So I dug deeper.
The role was defined as Data Engineer - AWS/Azure/GCP (note the 2 spaces before the hyphen). But the form kept sending Data Engineer - AWS/Azure/GCP (spaces were condensed).
I swear there was NOTHING in the code that changes the options. The relevant line just picked up the role and rendered it inside the <select>:
“`html
<option>{{ row['Role'] }}</option>
I used the browser’s developer tools to inspect the `<select>` element. It showed the options with the 2 spaces:
<option>Data Engineer - AWS/Azure/GCP</option>
But, when I selected it and printed the value, it had only one space.
Till date, I only ever used <option value=""> when specifying a value different from what’s displayed. I never thought of using it to preserve the value.
LESSON: If you’re dynamically generating <option>s, ALWAYS use value= with the same value as the text.
So, I followed the instructions to create a function in the Name Manager (Ctrl+F3)
… and simply fill in =LASTVALUE(H6:S6) and the like in the “Skills Index” cell.
The LOOKUP formula is confusing. My aim is to confuse our team less. But I wonder if they’ll start Google-ing for this LASTVALUE formula no one ever heard of, and get more confused 🤔.
Last week, I was at IIT Madras for lunch with the faculty.
The dessert was carrot halwa with ice cream. I scraped the last bits with my spoon, but a little ice cream was left over.
I was torn. I CAN’T POSSIBLY waste it. But can I lick it? In public?
I don’t have a problem licking at home. I lick my fingers. Plates. Bowls. Ladles. The cream on milk. The leftover milk in the glass. (If my tongue doesn’t reach that far, I wipe it with my finger and lick the finger.)
That’s why I like ice cream. It’s MEANT to be licked. So are (in my opinion) cereals, savories, oats, honey, … It’s a long list.
Licking is convenient. My fingers stay clean while I type. (Spoons are impersonal. I avoid them.)
Licking is efficient. I can have every last bit of food AND feel good about not wasting it.
Licking makes my dishwashing easier. (But it can be hard to tell if a dish needs washing.)
But most of all, that last lick TASTES SO WONDERFUL!
Before marriage, licking was fine. But my wife worried about my lack of civilized behavior and hygiene. So I’ve had a crash course over the last 20 years.
My current protocol is: don’t lick when people can see you.
