Tanvi Bhakta - Notes

October 5, 2026

Mon, 05 Oct 2026 10:21:36 GMT

October 3, 2026

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 11:32:14 GMT

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.

October 3, 2026

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 02:16:46 GMT

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?)

October 2, 2026

Thu, 01 Oct 2026 19:14:25 GMT

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.

September 29, 2026

Tue, 29 Sep 2026 01:44:34 GMT

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

September 28, 2026

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 17:06:58 GMT

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.

September 28, 2026

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 07:41:03 GMT

Urgh, just rediscovered why SSR exists from first principles 😖

September 28, 2026

Mon, 28 Sep 2026 06:52:24 GMT

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

September 27, 2026

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 08:07:19 GMT

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.

September 27, 2026

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 06:26:21 GMT

September 27, 2026

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 06:26:16 GMT

The trust needs to be earned by doing a close reading of the data. Here is an example where it is not earned.

September 27, 2026

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 06:22:24 GMT

September 27, 2026

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 06:22:18 GMT

Committed to being super boring and building the foundational processes - the floor. For example

September 27, 2026

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 06:21:06 GMT

Data for india wants to build accountability and credibility loops for data journalism

September 27, 2026

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 06:20:30 GMT

Why she left data journalism:

September 27, 2026

Sun, 27 Sep 2026 06:20:11 GMT

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

September 19, 2026

Sat, 19 Sep 2026 11:28:00 GMT

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.

September 10, 2026

Thu, 10 Sep 2026 02:34:10 GMT

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.

September 9, 2026

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 19:18:16 GMT

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.

September 8, 2026

Tue, 08 Sep 2026 14:56:53 GMT

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.

August 22, 2026

Sat, 22 Aug 2026 08:14:06 GMT

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.

August 21, 2026

Fri, 21 Aug 2026 13:00:12 GMT

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.

August 20, 2026

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 15:57:00 GMT

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.

August 20, 2026

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 13:44:23 GMT

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.

August 20, 2026

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 13:23:48 GMT

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?