Recents

These are some of my recent stuffs.

Rust Benchmarking, Jun 25 2025

Libraries

Criterion.rs

Has really good defaults and seems to work out of the box.
The ecosystem around criterion is really good. purely because criterion has been around for so long

Rust iai

Even though it is supported by a lot of ecosystem tools. It hasn’t been in development for the past 4 years. and bheisler is the creator of criterion, so even more reason to use criterion.

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The first animation movie, toy story was made in 1995. At that time this was a break through. It involved a lot of proprietary software (Ray tracing, shaders, motion blur) and decades of research and development. In 2025, for the first time a movie made in open source software (blender) received the oscar.

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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Mar 15 2025

HeLa Cells, as they’re called by the science community. Has been through it all, exposed to radiation, injected with virus, exposed in space, treated with chemical burn. All of modern medicine depends on HeLa cells to create the medicine. HeLa cells are what are used to test vaccines, chemicals, and physics to see hwo humans cells would work under certain conditions, HeLa cells are being manufactured around the world in troves.

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Server Setup, Mar 7 2025

Oh my zsh

oh-my-zsh has hands down been a godsend for me.

for that though we first need to install zsh

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Mobile Dev, Feb 28 2025

Mobile development is probably the most highest abstracted operation possible. because of this there are too many pitfalls that trip up

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Source Code, Feb 26 2025

Bill Gates starts this story from his roots up until the point he found Microsoft and it became a really serious thing. I like that the book closes right after the founding of Microsoft. Because much has been written about that part of the story

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React Native, Feb 22 2025

I’ve worked with React Native before but never professionally.

Recently I’ve been getting into building a complete react-native app

And, that is when you see the dark underside of things.

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Almond, Feb 15 2025

the book starts with a tragedy and ends with a mild happiness/realization.

the protagonist Yunjae is incapable of understanding or expressing emotions because of a problem in his brain.

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Shiptalk, Feb 15 2025

Building a product goes something like this.

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VSCode and shenanigans, Feb 15 2025

Why switch from Intellij

Intellij was my most common IDE but I’m so tired of having to be a second citizen for every single plugin. Intellij needs to do a huge platform shift and become more open or be consumed by vscode. The amount of people who start with vscode is insane.

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Motto, Feb 7 2025

Be intense about the task.

Don’t lose focus on the bigger goal.

Be Fine with being uncomfortable.

All good things take time.

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websites that are interesting, Dec 17 2024

tools

https://linkpreview.xyz/

Weirdnesss

https://cult-escape.com/cult-test/ A site to check if you are in a cult

Site https://www.languagetransfer.org/

https://www.window-swap.com/

Games in arcane places

interesting design websites

Programming weirdness

ML

LLM visualization, https://bbycroft.net/llm
Model visualizer, https://netron.app/
https://chat.lmsys.org/

Scholarly links

http://www.wikicfp.com

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Product Building and fundamentals, Dec 10 2024

Just like any other tech-pilled software engineer. I’ve spent my free hours and days working on side projects in the hope that someday to live Independent to the corporate day job and working on something I own full time.

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Why I Build., Nov 26 2024

I’ve spent all my free time building arcane projects that don’t matter.

Despite being tired, or stressed from my day job. I’ve always had projects that consume all my free time.

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new project

poetry new <project_name>

new shell

poetry shell

setting up

pipx first

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The Practice, Nov 6 2024

Shipping, because it doesn’t count if you don’t share it.
Creative, because you’re not a cog in a system
Work, because it is not a hobby.
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Writing, Nov 5 2024
I write a lot. and I forget a lot.
Taking a lot of notes is part of how I stay sane and get even part of the things that I want to get done.
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Madurai, Oct 25 2024
I lived in Madurai till my first grade. So It’s a really nostalgic town for me. Madurai is a city with a rich 700 years of heritage, and is built around the Meenakshi temple and it’s lore.
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Newsletters and blogs that are interesting, Oct 16 2024
Pg’s Essays
Incredibly interesting if you are into the startup world and are generally curious about how the world operates.
I highly recommend The Submarine and The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius
Joel Spolsky’s blog
Joel’s Essays are super good.
I suggest people start with Strategy Letter 1, 2 and 3
Hardcore Software - Steven Sinofsky
Steven writes, incredibly well thought essays on software and related things
I was very engrossed with his launching windows series
Ribbon Farm - Venkatesh Rao
Venkatesh Rao Writes really long, deep essays.
I started with The Gervais Principle, or The Office According to “The Office”. Set aside a couple of hours before you start reading this. because it is really long and incredibly engrossing.
Sriram Krishnan
I stumbled upon Sriram Krishnan’s blog by reading his memo collection. Took me a day to go through all the memo in his blog. Wish I was taking notes this rigorously back then
I liked the recent group chat one as well
Nabeel Qureshi
I signed up right after reading Reflections on Palantir. Spent a good 4 hours just reading random stuff
Shyam Sankar
Palantir’s CTO, writes very poignant essays which I really enjoy
I really loved The Case Against Work Life Balance
Thinking about things
Really high quality articles, every alternative day.
This used to be the only sponsored Newsletter I signed up for. Highly Highly recommend
Internal Tech Emails
Internal Tech Emails tingles my gossip brain a lot. ngl, it has provided me with some of the most intricate scoops when talking with people.
Work Chronicles
Fun thing that I read almost everyday.
Really love the dedication from the artist
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Organizational Wisdom, Oct 16 2024
What started with Nabeel Qureshi’s Reflections on Palantir led me into an incredibly deep and rich rabbit hole of companies, intensity, operating them and, a whole host of new (to me) industry operators within the palantir circles such as, Tyler Cowen, Shyam Sankar, etc.
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Pittsburgh, Oct 16 2024
Pittsburgh has the quaint old town vibe with its own special antiquated ecosystems. It definitely has the feeling of a once flourising industrial town, now in its midlife crisis trying to find it’s place in the world. I stayed in Pittsburgh from Aug 2023 - Dec 2024. Made really close friends here.
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Awesome incubators/collectives for startups, Oct 15 2024
Socratics
website: https://socratica.info twitter: https://x.com/socraticainfo
Open collective for builders, present in Multiple cities in the US and Canada. Really cool demos from their hackathon
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Photogrammetry/VideoGrammetry or the dark art of capturing 2d and generating 3d models, Oct 11 2024
Capturing
Questions:
Is it possible to go from, photo/video to high fidelity 3d model, with strong support for texture, without losing a lot of details on noise?
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Leaky Abstractions, or How we Understand the world, Oct 2 2024
Languages are a lossy communication framework. You meant one thing, but your friend understood something else. The same words don’t mean the same thing even a few hundred miles apart, etc. It is wildly unfair to try and represent billions of neurons firing together, in sound waves only a few amplitudes higher or lower.
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inertia, Sep 12 2024
Inertia is the best way to keep oneself active and consistent. Any sort of plan, trumps having intense velocity at the task.
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Atlanta, Sep 6 2024
Atlanta is what happens if you put too many white collars in the same space. Downtown was very immaculate and the roads were slick, not to mention wide.
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Bangalore aka Bengaluru, Sep 6 2024
The earliest memory of Bangalore I remember is the LalBagh. And tangy Grilled chicken (For some odd reason). I was in awe of the city. The weather was perfect, the people were nice and the food was amazing.
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Postmortem from building an AI speech coach, Sep 1 2024
The problem
International Students have a hard time understanding and integrating with the culture. This is true even if there’s a good grasp of the language.
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LLMs and unstructured data, Aug 31 2024
Close on the heels of running a batch processing job over 1M documents, I was thinking about how LLMs are changing the way we process unstructured data.
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Solutions vs Feelings, Aug 31 2024
A friend of yours is going through a tough breakup.
What should you do?
I typically start offering solutions and ranting on and on about strategies to attack the problem.
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journal, Aug 20 2024
Journaling is going to become an important thing.
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Tell us about the time you most successfully hacked some (non-computer) system to your advantage, Aug 20 2024
YC is looking for evidence that you are clever. The ability to think out of the box and manipulate large systems to your advantage are critical to gaining an edge on the market when you have no capital advantage (which is usually the case with startups) https://medium.com/@zan2434/y-combinator-applicant-advice-289c58a2ca89
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Unix, Aug 19 2024
If you are on a unix-like environment, ports < 1024 (like 80) will require superuser privileges.
Disk mounting and unmounting
sudo mount -o discard,defaults <diskid> <dir>
you can get the disk id by
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ZSH, Aug 19 2024
Setting up new zsh with oh my zsh
firs installing zsh involves
brew install zsh
While I don’t really trust and run randomly downloaded shell files. This one is quite painless.
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Travelling, Aug 18 2024
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Library of Congress information, Aug 17 2024
Library of Congress is really an incredible repository of content. Just scrolling through library of congress is a fascinating mental exercise.
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Algorithms, Aug 8 2024
Elegant Algorhythms 🎶 are mesemerizing
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Gossip glomers, Aug 8 2024
I reused the functions provided at https://github.com/jepsen-io/maelstrom/tree/main/demo/go for interfaces.
repo: https://github.com/subygan/gg
1. Echo
This was a gentle intro to maelstrom and it’s tools. TBF the message passing using RPC was pretty interesting. Implementing the read() and write() functions and then handing it off to the maelstrom Node made it work.
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ML journal, Aug 8 2024
09.27.23
Tried ML model for face classification with,
        self.backbone = torch.nn.Sequential(
            torch.nn.Conv2d(3,64,kernel_size=7,stride=4),
            torch.nn.Conv2d(64,128, kernel_size=3, stride=2),
            torch.nn.Conv2d(128,256,kernel_size=3, stride=2),
            torch.nn.Conv2d(256, 512,kernel_size=3, stride=2),
            torch.nn.Conv2d(512, 1024,kernel_size=3, stride=2),
            )

        self.cls_layer = torch.nn.Sequential(
            torch.nn.Flatten(),
            torch.nn.Linear( 4096,num_classes),
        )
This model overfit spectacularly, training accuracy after 20 epochs was 95% validation accuracy was 15%. 🤯
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Terminal, Aug 8 2024
Raw mode in a terminal is receiving the raw bytes from the STDIN file. terminal usually gets opened in canonical mode which means input is fed to the program one line at a time, instead of character by character. This can be done by unsetting the ICANON flag. There are a lot of these bitflags
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Right to be Forgotten, Aug 6 2024
This is a (mostly) search engine specific requirement where individuals are protected from the harm of their past actions.
Disparity in countries
Similar to any privacy issue, these countries are divided in the way these laws are implemented. Especially between developed countries such as United States and the European Union.
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Word Embedding Models, Aug 4 2024
My aim for this blog was to keep it as not too technical as possible.
Word embeddings is a way to represent words as a vector. Which lets us do all kinds of trickery like how far a word like “King” is away from “Queen” and how they are related to each other with. Very useful when building applications with semantic understanding.
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Read the Docs, Jul 23 2024
Failing to read the documentation and understanding the code underneath is the bane of all software bugs and I’ve guilty of it on multiple counts
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Shell hacks, Jul 23 2024
number of lines in a file
wc -l file.txt
split file into multiple files
split -l 1000 file.txt
append two files into one
cat file1.txt file2.txt > file3.txt
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Privacy problems and attacks in Machine Learning, Jul 19 2024
Privacy problems and attacks in Machine Learning
Membership inference attacks: These aim to determine if a particular data point was used to train a model. Researchers study how to detect and mitigate such attacks to protect individuals’ privacy.
Model inversion attacks: These attempt to reconstruct training data from model outputs. Understanding these vulnerabilities helps in developing more robust privacy-preserving techniques.
Data reconstruction in federated learning: This examines how malicious participants could potentially extract private information from other participants during collaborative training.
Model extraction attacks: These involve extracting a model’s architecture or parameters, which could be used to launch further attacks or to steal intellectual property.
Data Poisoning in Edge ML: This is a problem where the data that is being used to train the model is poisoned by an attacker. This is a huge problem in edge ML where the data is not curated and is coming from a variety of sources.
Differential privacy techniques: Researchers explore how to add controlled noise to data or model outputs to preserve privacy while maintaining utility.
Secure multi-party computation: This involves developing protocols for multiple parties to jointly compute on private data without revealing individual inputs. Homomorphic encryption: This allows computations on encrypted data, potentially enabling privacy-preserving machine learning on sensitive information. Privacy-preserving record linkage: Techniques to securely combine datasets from multiple sources without compromising individual privacy.
Papers and other readings
Membership Inference Attacks Against Machine Learning Models
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My Stack, Jul 15 2024
I used to deploy everything in an ec2 instance with docker-compose and nginx. Keeps it clean to apply small updates and also take backups. Where I’ll run different postgres containers for different containers, with some volume mapping and a backup container that triggers a backup push.
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Hear from me.
I asked Llama to make a mascot for my blog.
I won't spam. Promise.