When I first started freelancing more than a decade ago, many people asked me how it was.
The tradeoff I used to talk about is that freelancing gives you time and flexibility, but in return you take on uncertainity and volatility. On the other hand, a corporate job is rigid …
Poor Perplexity. Everyone in our household uses it through my paid account.
Perplexity implements agentic memory over past conversations to improve results and it is constantly confused. So funny when I ask a deep research question on something highly technical and it comes back saying "Since you are studying in …
I often say that developers should always attend local meetups and conferences. It's not for the knowledge. You can get knowledge anywhere - Internet, YouTube, blogs. Even most conferences themselves will release the talk videos.
The main point of attending a conference is to meet other developers. Developing connections in the …
The most annoying key on the keyboard is the Caps Lock. Does anyone actually use this key? It seems to get activated at the most inopportune moments (eg: when typing a password) without our knowledge.
But there are times when you want to type a small word in caps. Especially …
A recent news report says that Swedish schools are ditching tablets and back to books.
"Sweden’s Minister of Schools, Lotta Edholm, said children’s ability to read has deteriorated and their writing skills have weakened, and there are many reasons, the most important of which is their increased reliance …
Mindstorms is a book by Seymour Papert that was first published in 1980. Seymour Papert is the inventor of the LOGO programming language, and the book lays down the motivation for creating LOGO as a teaching aid for children.
When we talk about teaching aid, we probably conjure up something …
Even in quantum computers, many calculations are done using traditional circuits. What usually happens is that a bunch of calculations are done using traditional microprocessors and then there will be some hard algorithm that needs to run, things like prime factorisation or brute force search. There are the algorithms that …
"You can have a chocolate or ice cream. Which do you want?"
I posed this question to my son. To nobody's surprise, he rejected the choice and answered "Both". Repeating that he should only choose one of the options were in vain. What he knew very well was that the …
We have been talking the last few days about ChatGPT. One of the interesting things about a deep learning AI system is how it 'stores' knowledge.
In traditional computing systems, we can point to part on the storage device and say "these bytes are stored here" and "these other bytes …
On the topic of academia vs intuition of real people, Taleb has a funny, but illuminating story. It goes like this:
You toss a fair coin 99 times and it comes up heads every time. What is the chance of heads on the next toss?
If you ask a normal …