Tanvi Bhakta - DigitalGarden

AI Analogies

Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 GMT

Analogies are powerful learning/thinking devices that shape popular opinion. I'm attempting to collect the ones that pertain to the AI phenomenon that started sweeping the world about March 2024 that particularly tickled me.

This list is in chronological order.

Ai is like plastic (Sohom)
Cursor proponents as drug addicts (https://read.readwise.io/filter/has%3Ahighlights%20AND%20last_opened__gt%3A%221%20week%20ago%22/read/01jzqtw14thk8jtcm62pyfexwt)
Chatbot users as psychic marks (https://softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llmentalist/)
Ai is a microwave https://www.colincornaby.me/2025/08/in-the-future-all-food-will-be-cooked-in-a-microwave-and-if-you-cant-deal-with-that-then-you-need-to-get-out-of-the-kitchen/
Ai is blue food coloring https://blog.foxtrotluna.social/theyre-putting-blue-food-coloring-in-everything/
AI has become the Ozempic of the corporate world https://www.profgalloway.com/the-end-of-the-blockbuster/

Creative processes

Sat, 19 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This garden attempts to document how I approach my various creative activities.

Weeknotes

(July 2025)

I wrote a little Alfred Script to

Create a markdown file with the template of my weeknotes
Put it in the appropriate dropbox folder
Open up iA Writer with this file loaded in.

So I can just Cmd+Space “weeknotes” and start writing.

Screenshot 2025-07-19 at 12.44.51 PM.png

The whole process from start to publish takes about 2 hours every week. That’s a lot of effort! But for now, it seems important so I will keep doing it.

(Feb 2025)

I use the nudge of the weeknote to also update my read/watched/listened to status on Goodreads/imdb/letterboxed etc. I also use the opportunity to send new books to my kindle, schedule plans for the upcoming weeks, etc.

(Nov 2025)

The point of the week note is to catch my friends up on my life. So,

People generally talk about work, life, health, so I try and remember them when I write about it
I always open my calendar app when I’m writing (especially the life update) because it’s a good proxy for what I did over the last week.
I open up my rss feed reader’s history section, and sometimes my browser’s history section to pick out things for my “around the web section”

Blog posts

1. The outline method

Start with an outline
add skin to the skeleton

Some examples: the (unpublished as of July 2025) “opinions on software estimation” post

As I’m adding skin, sometimes I realise that maybe this should be broken up into a series of posts (ex: Stop snorting narrative was born out of a very long rant I had about my journey with cognitive independence.

2. The dump feelings method

Start with a rant
Edit for coherence, acceptability, truth

Reference: https://tracydurnell.com/2023/09/27/how-i-approach-crafting-a-blog-post/

Some examples: [that unpublished post I have about winding up DDD]

Fiction writing

Some tools have really helped:

the thing that deletes the whole item if you stop typing for more than 5 seconds
Adding placeholders for things you want to happen, so you preserve the flow but skip to the thing you really want to write/say

Poetry

Rap

(July 2025)

There’s two different things going on with rap. There’s a story you want to tell, and there’s the way you are going to present that story. These two things exist in all forms of writing, but, well, in rap the form matters more than in the other stuff.

This time, I started with knowing vaguely what I wanted to say. I think someone started me off with a beat, which was very important. It got me thinking that I wanted to tell a story of nostalgia and teenage awkwardness set in the 1980s.

So I came up with a vague story and two verses of it. Then, towards the end of the day we had the game changer.

Prabhanshu pulled out a melody he had made a few weeks ago and... wow, it really came together. I ended up figuring out a chorus and a pre chorus, and on Sunday we added two verses and a rap bridge.

(From /blog/week-of-jul-24th-2025md/)

To add those two verses, we did what I think was novel. We listened to the beat and sort of came up with a flow, and then write utter gibberish to fit that flow. It didn’t make any sense! But it was a record of how the flow could go if it wanted to do so. Then, having confirmed that something sounded good, we played with the rhymes, the story, etc.

The other thing I did that helped lots was steal. The beat was dreamy and Raveena-like, and I couldn’t figure out a flow over it that didn’t just sound like someone was saying a verse. I know Chance the Rapper does similar kind of music, so I listened to a bunch of his songs until I found something with a similar time signature... then I just rapped his verse over my beat to see if that flow would work. And it did! That was a good starting point for me.

The idea is that rap is just metered poetry, right? Of course not, that’s a horrible oversimplification. But we have to start somewhere. So if rap is just metered poetry, I need to write some poetry to a meter and then see if I can put a beat around it.

So I took the beat from the bridge of Sapphire, found that it’s 96bpm via a bpm counter website, memorised the beat signature (is that a phrase?) and wrote some poetry that matches that beat. It rhymes at the end, with some slant rhymes in between, and it’s really sad and dark.

Then I wrote a response to that verse that sounds like Saweetie and is so playful. That one sounds better recorded than read out.

(From /blog/week-of-july-16th-2025/)

Second attempt (April 2025)

I picked a song that was stuck in my head (It was introduction by Faris Shafi, don’t ask), picked a paragraph that I liked, and tried to copy the flow. This song is trilingual. I’m not sure why, but the lines that came to me were in Konkani, not English. It was one verse of pretty shit struggle rap, but I was quite proud of it.

Very first attempt (April 2025)

We played a beat (a slick, clipping thing) on a loop, and tried to come up with a few lines that would go with it. After like twenty minutes, I barely had two lines that were usable. I had a few more rhyming pairs that I thought sounded cool? That’s it.

This was a humbling experience. I was fairly confident that I could do something with this because I had had most of the writing exercises we did until that point come... straightforwardly, if not easily, to me.

Pages on this website

Start with a need (for example, something I’ve had to tell people repeatedly)
Attempt to make it exhaustive

Examples: /work, /care

Digital Gardens

If I want to collect and publish an ongoing note series on something somewhere, I’ll probably start a digital garden.

Things I wish I had started digital gardens for:

Driving
Tango
Drumming
Learning Mandarin

This post started out as a prompt from IndieWebClub #6

process optimization

Mon, 14 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

This garden will contain notes for various hacks, scripts, systems, and configurations I build/tweak/deploy to make some part of existing in a world with technology easier for me. Here, I document a few optimzations to make my life easy.

Headings that don't have body text are yet to be started. Sometimes things will be in progress, and marked as such.

This is by no means an exhaustive list, merely a list of notes for things I tackle in this realm starting July 2025

Technology devices

[ ] Add tasks to my todoist via voice commands (google assistant)

I want to be able to add tasks to todoist in specific without having to touch a device. This is mostly for when I am driving, but I suspect will be quite useful when I have a cat sitting on my lap with the phone too far away, etc.

There isn't a native todoist <> Goggle Assistant because google wants everybody to use it's subpar tasks app instead. But you can ask it to add something to a list, and it will add the thing to a list on google keep.

Enter this script someone has written and so kindly made available to the rest of us: keep2todoist

The workflow is simple

You create a note on keep.google.com titled "Task".
You say "Add an important task to the task list"
Gemini will connect to keep and do the thing
This script will check that particular note every M minutes and create a new task for that list in todoist via the todoist api
Ta da!

It needs to be hosted somewhere and requires a lot of extremely private credentials so I should be doing this myself as opposed to asking for a friend's box. Will update details here.

[ ] Set up Dropbox sync so my writing can exist on all my devices

My dropbox sync can also be source of truth for my obsidian vault
So far the only time I use vault (and not ia writer) is when I need to serach through all my notes
Dropbox sync stopped working suddenly, why?

[ ] Write a script to add this site as the referrer for links I give it

[ ] Write a script to return archive links of links I give it

[ ] Write a script to frontmatter-ify exports from mataroa

Car

[ ] Phone calls I make move the screen away from navigation

This happens when I

Place a phone call
The person answers
The call is cut

Obviously this is really dangerous because I need navigation to see where I am going, and when the screen gets captured by the phone app I am wildly pressing a touch screen device with only half an eye on the road trying not to add 20 minutes to my commute by missing a turn.

Consuming the web

Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

There exists a web to consume outside of the Big Four of social media. Here is my process of figuring out how to consume it.

RSS Readers

July 8th, 2025

The PWA for miniflux is not very well designed and a little slow. I want to use an app that makes me feel good. REALLY dislike the idea of paying a monthly subscription for a reading app but it might be my only option. I'm trying Reader from Readwise for a month, after which I'll try inoreader for another, and then pick between the two.

Exporting your feeds from miniflux will preserve feed categories, yay! It will not preserve read/unread states for articles, boo.

~ April 2025

Focus Reader's UI feel glitchy + It kept unsyncing articles I had already read. I suspect there was an issue with how it was talking to miniflux. I didn't spend too much time debugging it; just decided to use the PWA for miniflux on mobile instead.

~ late February 2025

After trying a bunch of different feed readers I've settled on Focus Reader for android. Not ideal but I suppose it will get the job done.

~ early February 2025

Using a friend's miniflux instance, seems reasonable. Moved most newsletters from email to rss via kill-the-newsletter. Maybe now I will actually read them.

Books

I just exported all of my data from Goodreads to Storygraph. Here's my profile, send me a friendo!

The importer ported over all my shelves well, and all my reviews etc. But I mostly use goodreads as one of my few remaining forms of social media. I see what friends (especially long distance friends) are reading, text them about it, and am able to exchange conversations around ideas instead of events or people. Since there isn't exactly a "friend importer" on storygraph, I'm going to have to slowly look people up and nudge them over.