So I recalled what I know about learning efficiently and got claude to make me an anki deck. Finally, a use for flash cards that I don’t hate!
The chat: https://claude.ai/share/a7169c89-86b5-4ea0-93a3-0ff042c385c2
The deck: (jk this site doesn’t support file uploads yet)
Got mad at my continued inability to learn kannada. Remembered that I love learning languages, actually, and just hate learning inefficiently. I know to speak and live where immersion is possible. I’ve also picked up a few characters via osmosis.
> Essentially, yes. Having ICs be DRIs is an increase in the scope of what the job is. It means one person has to build the thing, communicate with senior stakeholders, and make the trade-off decisions that get it across the line. In a non-DRI model, the engineer usually handled the first while the engineering manager or product manager handled the other two.
- Quoting James Stanier
I really appreciate all my prior career experience consulting because it really gave me the first two. But I was still insulated from the third because I would present options and opinions to the client but it would ultimately be their call. My role now as an integral employee is to be able to do all this + the social manoeuvring that might be necessary as well.
today in burning tokens to take care of dumb bullshit that significantly improves my life:
There’s two ways links open in apps - a Custom Tab which is implemented by the browser itself, and a WebView which is controlled by the app using the OS’s native browser implementation[^1]. I dislike both, because I want all links to open in places I have total control on them. Android has a default “open links in browser” setting that seems to change nothing, because most apps these days implement Custom Tabs. SO I got the llm to list top 20 apps I use, individually figure out where the settings to turn off the feature in each one is, and then do it.
Other things I’m in the progress of:
- install piko twt
- install piko instagram
- another round of mobile browser tab pruning
[^1]: android engineers more in the know, please correct me on this.
Things I have done today
- got the progress of all my audiobooks from my old phone into my new phone (the full phone backup and transfer hadn’t transferred those)
- got through some insane shenanigans for logging in to act.
- determined that there is no way to talk to a human or create a ticket from the Act app.
- sent an email with my complaint
- pruned a lot of tasks on my to-do list
- added a “quick” tag to all the things that can be done really fast on the couch
- quarterly export from my miniflux to my inoreader.
- chronicled every single discount available on Plum as part of the insurance coverage I have there and determined whether or not it is actually useful to me
(the llm did all of these. all of these things are tasks that are No Fun to me :)
> AI is fun but I will never ever forget - it stands on millions of artists that didn’t get paid for the work they stole, it stands on third world country citizens who don’t get paid enough to moderate, it stands on meta glasses having horrible privacy concerns and generally looting internet archive. I stand on the shoulders on Aaron Swartz and every person that has kept up the piracy network and pirated (yes, you, that pirated romcom movies and girly pop cozy games, even you).
Quoting Santrupti P
> creativity as a universal force where if you don’t act upon it, it would disappear and manifest elsewhere.
Quoting connie.surf quoting Rick Rubin
Rivets are in now?? Or at least poor men’s rivets ie those glue on things (I was nosy and checked the backs)
if we’re preparing for testing tho, it is helpful to do the recall in different spaces. Otherwise, our environment becomes a cue to the recall and that breaks for centralised testing for which there is a destination.
So when you come across a new concept, think about what you need to retain - but look away from the screen.
tests are recall taken to an extreme (affectionate).
when you inevitably make mistakes with recall and testing, it will help you focus on the gaps in your understanding
when we learn, it’s important to focus on retrievability - that is the most important outcome.
so we need to train our brains to retrieve what we just learnt. The best way? recall!
this was surprising to me - its not rereading, or relating to other existing topics, etc.
so it’s easier to form chunks (ie learn better) if your neurochemicals are in the right amounts and easily accessible.
As you get good at chunking, you can also chunk bigger things! ie learn MORE, which doesn’t mean you learn faster but does increase your rate of learning :)
your extremely infrequent reminder to please,
acetylcholine controls your focus, and your synaptic plasticity.
Dopamine controls your ability to start any kind of habit forming activity.
Serotonin increases social bonds and reduces risk taking behaviour.
learning is not an independent thing that you can will into existence. your brain chemistry and your emotions significantly increases or decrease your ability to create these chunks and to store things in your long term memory.
one increases the rate of chunking by
(there is a craft to using metaphors tho! need to go deeper on this)
chunking is the concept that allows us to break down information and then intuit it. The point of a chunk is not to know details, it is to understand the concept ie move it from working memory to long term memory ie increase retrieval and applicability.
so I can start from first principles! And friends, this time I cut myself a lot of slack.
I don’t need to sit down and pay attention to learn. I just got the app, put on the material as an audiobook while chorsing and off we went.
The following is recall of what’s important.
yes - writing is thinking! But I /can/ use llms as a research partner, or on the rare occasion that I care about an essay enough to clean up voice, increase readability etc.
Similarly, learning cannot be llm-driven. It has to be llm augmented. So I am back to this course.
didn’t work because it still felt too mechanical and didn’t have enough context with what I was doing.
brute forcing the learning also didn’t work for obvious reasons.
I determined immediately after using llms that I caNNOT use them to replace writing for me
What I’ve attempted so far: spent several hours doing exhaustive review of my total body of technical knowledge, set up a hermes agent to pick a thing and talk to me about it every day. Made sure to set up variety of topics, spaced repetition, hard and easy mode, etc
I started this in 2018, wrote an essay in 2019, then gave up completely. baby tanvi did NOT know how to learn.
I’ve been daily-driving LLMs for 15 months now. One thing is clear - I need to be able to skim, intuit, absorb, retain, and retrieve more superlatively than ever
Quick thought exercise: My Impossible Bucket List
An impossible bucket list is a list of things you would really like to do or experience but it is literally not possible. Listed below in no particular order.
1. I would like to jump on the clouds. This desire grips me every single time I take a flight in the first half of the day. The clouds look firm, but like they have just enough give. I imagine that I am also surrounded by the mist of the cloud, but it is cooling without being wet. I imagine a ground that is perfectly supportive to my back and one that is not possible to twist an ankle on.
2. I would like to burst into cartwheels on a whim.
3. I would like to enable long term physical activity for a large number of young women.
4. I would like to be able to create and shape material. In the service of - I would like to wear some outlandish and insane silhouettes, but I will not buy them because they wouldn’t be able to be used more than once.
5. I would like to exist in the water. It is a place of so much calm and quiet joy. I don’t mean exist on the surface - I want to walk on the beds of the ocean, several tens of meters deep. I want to feel the sand between my toes and observe schools of fish above me, and walk to a continental shelf and not be afraid. I want to jump off instead, and slowly float down.
It is a bright and early Saturday morning. I have learnt about
- communication via meteor scatter
- the existence of large cannons to frighten birds away at airports
- chicken guns: shoot a chicken carcass at some rotating wings to see how the plane handles them
Question: I am very interested in learning or reading about indigenous ways to identify and mitigate potential avalanches in the Himalayas. Honestly, I would also be interested to know what governments in these regions are doing about it (do we have an equivalent of SNOTEL?)
I wrote unabashedly of how much I am enjoying spending time with myself on my birthday post.
> over the last year I have repeatedly chosen spending time with myself over (excellent!) company
One day later, Winnie Lim published her own piece about enjoying solitude
> One of the best things I’ve done for myself is to learn to be alone.
> When I was younger I believed I couldn’t be alone… I think I had this idea that my life would be complete if I found the right person. If only I could belong somewhere, to someone.
> In one relationship I stayed way longer than I should because I thought … Love meant endurance and sacrifices.
This is a much better version of my own post. I would quote so much more from it. The quote that terrified me the most was “if you’re lonely when you’re alone, you’re in bad company” - i worked very hard to be more fun to be with, to predict what people wanted and what will work. But I was still lonely because I couldn’t accept myself.
In some ways, I am grateful for the skills that not being able to be alone gave me. I became very good at listening to people, and coordinating groups, and communicating how my brain works. But now I am also glad to have the option to not be forced into any of that.
Tonight, this poem found its way to me:
`The time will come
when, with elation,
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror,
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.`
- Derek Walcott, Love after Love
Thank you, serendipity, for curating this lovely celebration on the self.
Woke up with a 6 on the pain scale and got it down to a 3 or 4 before I got out of bed through the power of breathwork, stretching, and the knowledge of your body that only comes with waking up with a 7 on the pain scale for half a decade. Proud of me
Other things I did today:
1. Went down performance rabbitholes unrelated to ssr being the answer
2. Looked at the new architecture we’re doing evals with at work
3. Thought seriously about building a parser for the first time in my life
4. Did a code typing exercise (turns out I suck at symbols)
5. Got my glasses fixed, bought medicine, walked 6000 steps
6. Debugged a tricky social situation
7. Pep talked a friend (40 minutes! But maybe this is cheating because I did it along with the steps)
8. Figured out a code experiment for later in the week
God i fucking love Mondays. Don’t put kann.
Urgh, just rediscovered why SSR exists from first principles 😖
big fan of getting the agent to do dumb things on my phone via wireless debugging. So far I have
- fixed an issue with all the files imported from old phone to new phone so that they show up in search
- sent a file to a friend as an epub
- ordered pet food, and chai
- downloaded and set up the revanced versions of some common apps I use
Harsh Nisar: the lack of ability to build provided a natural resistance for government to not build the stupider ideas. Now we need to figure out a way to artificially introduce resistance in these projects
Harsh: they have a project to count the number of apps, and portals etc. the government of india (alone, nit counting state governments and independent bodies) have apps in the 5 digits!!
Kailash Nadh: we have a policy to not institutionalise vibe coded applications
Kailash Nadh: I want to keep all the context of the tech in my head. K don’t use skills, or agent.md, or anything else to keep my conversations ephemeral
Kailash: if code is cheap or largely dead, we can come back to actual problem solving. All that is standing between a person and a solution are developing the actual human skills of talking to people and figuring it out.
Kailash: “react sucks and nobody should use it” amen :)
Tarunima Prabhakar: quotes Djikstras notes on advanced programming written in 1962, which is exactly relevant to our present time
Tarunima: if you are able to reach yourself there will always be a place for you in industry and society
Ambika: Think about resilience and adaptability and not skills and chops with respect to a career
Harsh: increase your surface area for serendipity.
Kailash: we - civilisationally as humans - need to stop bounding technology to mean software.
The trust needs to be earned by doing a close reading of the data. Here is an example where it is not earned.
Committed to being super boring and building the foundational processes - the floor. For example
Data for india wants to build accountability and credibility loops for data journalism
Why she left data journalism:
Rukmini’s talk
What surprised her about the book
- how much of the contents of the book were not widely known
- the public minded students she met were also deeply suspect of the data itself
Miley’s Bass Persuades just dropped.
1. I really appreciate that she got into electronic music the same time I did 🌝
2. She does something different with every single album, which is always fun to look forward to. Talk about range.
3. Her take on electronic is much harder, and leans towards the kind of techno I don’t listen to (I’m more of an electronic*a* girlie) but there is an undertone of pop hook that keeps me tuned in.
4. The album starts off as dance heavy but builds around an emotional core. The shift happens right away, on track 3 (“Let’s get Married”)
5. This is a very millennial album. From the chorus of the lead single, “the kids don’t want to dance” to talking about “let’s get married tonight” - what a concept, girl. The kids don’t want to dance *or* get hitched. We want to fuck and then go back to our single-person-and-plants households.
6. That is not a diss. I love that this album is a pop-heavy, electronic-heavy, millennial-coded album from a woman people have started calling “older”.
7. I don’t think I will listen to this album too many more times, but some hooks will stick and I love that it exists in the world.
Yesterday was a bad day.
3h work - learning,
2h reading up about solid and the protocols surrounding it - pursuit of nerddom,
2.5h talking to some friends who came home about brand strategy - this was refreshing. I haven’t done this in a while. I want to do this for myself but have been procrastinating - doing it for someone else is far easier. I also enjoy helping non-amab people make more money.
But apart from that? Day was a wash. I cooked and didn’t eat what I made. Skipped dinner entirely. Finally gamed for 3hours instead, can’t remember the last time I did that. I didn’t have brain left to pursue on solid or will left to work. Perhaps the siren call of deadlines will be the kick in my pants I need today.
I spent 4 additional hours continuing to prune tabs. I had 400 tabs open total on my phone
~200 read later articles on various topics - ai, tech, culture, short fiction, essays
~150 landing pages - apps to research, understand, try out
~ 50 assorted pages - books to read later, courses to learn from, tasks to do, forms to fill.
I have at this point looked at every single thing! Haven’t opened the web pages of them all, but processed them in my head or out loud. I’ve done the tasks, filled the forms, triaged the libraries, added the categories to my bookmarking tool, added the blogs to my feed reader, updated my learning repository with coursework, sent the books to my Kindle… I am tired.
I was very happy with the work I was doing around going through it until two hours ago, when I picked up the 200 articles list of read later items. I should have stopped when it stopped sparking joy, but instead I was a completionist about it and now I’ve skipped dinner and made myself a little sick.
Going to log everything I do in time blocked chunks per day for the next few days, and log what their purpose is. I am constantly feeling both
- that I’m doing too much and too many kinds of things
- that I’m swimming in place, that I’m not getting anything done
Perhaps understanding where I’m spending my time will help me understand my implicit priorities, and will give me more data to budget better.
5.5h today - work. 2h of that was in a call. For learning and money, 2/5
2h - pruning the infinite tabs I have open on the phone. I have been feeling mentally cluttered, and wanted to get rid of digital detritus to help soothe that. I also have the desire to learn something new, and want to catalogue everything I want to learn so that I may pick what’s most interesting.
2h - chores/book/thinking. Self soothing because some anxiety came up.
1.5h - walking around doing chores in the neighborhood with a friend. Self-care.
TIL that to “left-shift” a problem means to surface the problem earlier in the workstream.
● catch the problem closer to the source
● more root cause solutions, less symptomatic solutions
● fun and profit
The metaphor comes from drawing a process as a left-to-right timeline:
requirements → design → implementation → review → testing → production → support
Crucially, this usage, while widely used in discussions of technical strategy, has nothing to do with bit shifting left.
Further Reading
1. New relic blog: https://newrelic.com/blog/observability/shift-left-strategy-the-key-to-faster-releases-and-fewer-defects
2. Sourabh Hirani’s talk at the Failure Modes meetup on Aug 8th, 2026
Jazz night was excellent. Measured thoughts on it later. I’ve had entirely too much work today, so I haven’t even been able to step out of work to buy milk! Until just now - all the agents have decided to be busy right now, so I’m going to take my ten minutes for chai.
My friend lives next to a market, and it is very happening. There’s places like this all over - thippsandra, chikpete, places in Pune - but I think what is unique about Delhi is that they’re all more planned - so the bazaar is happening in 4 concentric rectangles around a large park. And (perhaps because of the population density?) the incidence of these bazaars (and parks) are much higher here than elsewhere. I love it!
I went to get tea and the man running the shop wasn’t there, so a few regulars colluded to pour me some in the span of thirty seconds. The stall owner got yelled at for not filling the kettle before he left 😁
I’m in an area that is relatively planned - it was built up to accommodate refugees from the partition - so I’m told the cameraderie in the neighbourhood is higher. Most regulars have families who grew up here.
There are so many food places interspersed with the bazaar! I’m holding off on chaat until a friend accompanies me, but I am sorely tempted. I am also told that the standards for all kinds of food is just much higher here than in Bangalore. I feel like the service is definitely much better. At pianoman last night, in a packed house, when I asked for water, the waiter remembered that id asked for warm two hours ago and brought me more of the same. It was a good, surprising feeling.
Encountered the infamous privatisation of public roads right away. Couldn’t find the entrance to friend’s apartment so I went exploring through a gate. Came back to find the gate locked! Was told that the other gate is open so I went around. Interestingly, the “other road” was twice the size of the one I was on, but not actually marked on the gate. I wonder if they had to appeal to get the road unlisted or if gmaps just assumes that a road behind a gate is private andmust be unlisted? But I know of several private roads in small towns that have been listed too…
Anyway, off to a jazz night and then to see the sights. I was complaining about delhi exhibiting bangalore-ass behaviour (25min for 4km!) but it looks like the peaks for traffic in Delhi are much more contained. Got here in 14 minutes instead.
The average man in Delhi puts more effort into their appearance than the average man in Bangalore. And there’s more variety in the style too! The gentleman sitting opposite me looks very much like a smart late eighties hero.
The Delhi metro doesn’t have a ladies compartment?? Is this just because it’s the line from the airport? Wait, I’m trying to remember if there was a ladie’s compartment when I travelled elsewhere. Is segregation on the basis of gender like this a uniquely Indian thing?
Touchdown in Delhi! I’m very glad I picked a flight that let me take the metro from the airport. There’s something about airport <> metro stations the world over that look/feel the same. Taiwan, Singapore (?), Hong Kong, Delhi. It feels like a womb. A cold dark place underground that the sun can’t touch, where you’re safe. Then you board a train and are spit into the chaos of the world (city). Go forth, it seems to say.
I’m not happy with it, but the essay is out:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_1_Naor02YzS2_zAm3xLKzYIM9reXFBRep2pT2ql1kw/edit?usp=sharing
This is the first time I’ve had to do any sort of real research when submitting a paper. It was fun! and hard. I don’t really think I did it right, though. Can’t wait to do more.
This essay will talk about:
This is hard. :)
I have actually made time for this course now, and I can’t wait to go back!
These notes came in super useful just now, and I need to do it more.
I am also going to be doing the Honors version of this course so the first thing I have to do is write a reflective essay.
FOLKS. WE’RE DONE WITH THE FIRST MODULE oh finally I took two weeks to do what was suggested for one but it’s okay. Things are hectic and I’m still glad that I’ve been persistent about this. Now to do the assignments and everything else this evening. :)
with different (fresh) perspectives
Success != Smart
Success == passion, persistence.
And we’re done.
Something I’ve found very important in my own professional life as well.
Creativity in the face of routine: surround yourself
Everytime schools have to make space for a new activity, what do they do? Axe the PT period.
The amt of times this has happened in my brother’s skl alone is so depressing. I wish there was a helpline we could call and complain to, or a campaign we could run to make this happen.
Exercise, in the absence of an enriched environment, will provide the same conditions that promote the growth of neurons in the hippocampus.
This is incredibly important to consider in the landscape our current educational policies.
movement and different people and things all day, or
I really really need to start putting my running shoes on.
So you’re born with a set number of neurons in your brain, and you die with lesser, because some of them die.
The only thing that allows you to produce more neurons is the simulation of the hippocampus, which happens via:
in a ‘boring’ lecture/talk, engage with the speaker (brain also responds better to active engagement as opposed to passive listening)
when doing physical work brain is in diffuse mode. This is why exercise is great. Carry notebook around.
We’re talking to someone who has achieved major things in academia now.
(the brain is able to do this only when asleep because that’s when the pre-frontal cortex, or the ‘RAM’ is completely suspended. So fascinating.)
When you’re asleep, your brain is also constantly going over the patterns you created with thoughts that day, willing away weak ones and strengthening strong ones. (Is this where dreams come from?)
This is why the solution seems obvious to you when you wake up from a nap.
Which means of course that is not followed adequetely can lead to years and years of health issues.
The case for much higher respect and pay for people working night shifts, variable timing jobs, or change timezones a lot of very high.
This means that if we’re taking a test or driving on very little sleep, our brain is literally not performing in an ideal state.
Also, this behavior, like most other bodily functions, is programmed over the course of years and years.
But I have a commute ahead of me, so here we go again.
So when we’re awake we’re constantly producing toxins that litter are brain. And when we sleep? Our brain is literally cleaning house. How it does that is pretty neat, see image.
Guess who has two thumbs and no time to follow up on this course?
In my defense though, I attended a very amazing conference, met great new people, planned a Meetup, attended a meetup, and wrote about 4 college tests.
In the last 6 days.
Not too bad, if I do say so myself.
Note to self - go through this entire thread again in two days.
The next video is ‘effect of sleep on long-term learning’ and I am going to feel so guilty now
Long term memory occupies the rest of our brain, and can hold millions and millions of items. The transaction is made into the long term brain by a technique called ‘spaced out repetition’
(Otherwise synapse vampires suck the brain connections away!)
WM is like a black card with limited space, but it’s not a very good one. Things are constantly being overwritten by new stimuli, which is why if we want to remember a date, or a name, for example, we need to repeat it a few times - until it moves into long term memory
Working memory is located in the pre-frontal cortex, and occupies about a third of our brain. Research shows that we can actively hold at most 4 ‘chunks’ of information in our head at any given time, which is why, if we want to remember something, we might close our eyes.
When were learning things, we are accessing memory. We have two major sorts:
Working Memory, which only holds the things that you are actively thinking about, and
Long Term memory, which is the sum of everything else that we remember.
Abstract ideas are harder to understand instinctively, and therefore the neural pathways they create are fainter as well. This means that for a single abstract idea to take root you will have to practice the same thought process a lot more.
That’s why ‘reading’ math never works
Day 4.
The reason math and science might seem more challenging than other subjects is because it is filled with abstract ideas - you can’t point to a plus sign standing in a field and explain it the way you can the working of a car engine, for example.
Use the pomodoro technique to:
Don’t
It’s meant to be a launch pad.
The pomodoro technique.
Yes I know you’ve been told this time and again but it hasn’t worked and that’s so frustrating. But we’ve been doing pomodoro all wrong. Hear me out.
BUT scientists also found that once you start doing the task, your pain center is slowly deactivated and you actually start enjoying it.
So how do we get past the initial hurdle?
(this means that my technique of covering up period cramps with binge watching/reading/listening has been Scientifically Approved and all the aunties insisting I should sleep can find someone else to harass)
Turns out the REASON we procrastinate is that when have to do something we don’t want to, centers in the brain associated with pain are activated. To distract ourselves from the pain, we are inclined to do something that gives us temporary happiness.
Day 3, and the video starts off by saying “Everyone has problems with procrastination…” which is so great to hear from someone else’s mouth! (Begone, ye pesky imposter syndrome!)
All this also begs the question - if the landscape of the brain is changing so fast, where are long term memories stored?
resting/diffuse state is when the learning paths and patterns are strengthened.
Every time you get a good night’s sleep, your brain is basically getting an upgrade. That is so cool.
Note to self: fix sleep issues asap
The course goes on to show the picture of a dendrite before learning, and after learning with a good night’s sleep. They almost look like different dendrites! Then they talk about how sleep activates quite a few resting areas that aren’t touched by your focus mode but this
on the floor when they were almost asleep and then jerk them awake. Then they would collect all the thoughts they had had in their ‘diffuse’ state and get to work!
Back again looking at this. It seems that both Salvador Dali, surrealist painter of repute, and Thomas Edison, master inventor, would both let their minds wander until almost a state of sleep. They would hold in their hands a bunch of keys or some ball bearings which would drop
@visakanv uh I guess I’m live-tweeting the course as I take it if you want to follow along
@abhi12ravi Think of a crossing a forest via a path vs having to hack your way through the brush;
If the forest is your brain and the person crossing is a thought, the path is FL and hacking your way through is DL.
They both have their purposes and you should know when to deploy what.
@abhi12ravi Focused learning is when your brain is doing the former; it’s great when you want to think about details of things.
Diffused learning is like your brain’s ‘The big picture’ state. It also allows you to create new pathways easier.
@abhi12ravi You should take the course ;)
Your thoughts are either based on patterns you’ve already thought, or completely new patterns which involve creating new pathways through a new series of synapses.
I also love @barbaraoakley ‘s voice and intonation! Or maybe it’s the fact that it’s nearly 2am and I have work tomorrow but I’m so very relaxed after listening to her on the videos ❤️
Another thing I really like is that everything the course says is the results of decades of study; makes me feel really good about not supporting random pseudoscience (Teach your child 100 percent Memory Retention techniques in just 10 days!)
Just did the first ten minutes of the course and I really like the concept of ‘focused learning’ and ‘diffused learning’.
Makes all the “After 5h on a bug, i took a break and solved it in two minutes” stories so much more believable
I’m surprised by how small the course is. About 12h of content, of which about 2h is reading, spread out over 4 weeks. Decided to finally take it.
A new batch starts today. ;)
I’ve been very frustrated with my process of how I pick up new skills recently; finally bit the bullet and enrolled for the @LHTL_MOOC.
So far the only thing I know about myself and how I learn is that I’m a social learner (hence this public accountability).