Starting Small

Read about this creative solar panel solution that seems to address a number of adoption issues. We had our local utility provider try to sell us on installing solar panels on the roof a few months ago. They way they went about it was so underwhelming that it is no surprise that it is close to zero percent adoption.

 There were no incentives, a bunch of upfront cost and no clarity on when all that would start to pay for itself. What if a person wanted to sell their home along the way and the new owner did not want to pay a premium for the solar panels, worse ask for them to be removed before closing. Something more manageable in size and the ability to realize value in a short time horizon are the two things that make Solago a winner for the average consumer. 

The so-called plug-in systems involve routing the direct current generated by the panels to an inverter, which converts it to an alternating current. They can then be plugged into a conventional wall socket to feed power to a home.

Janik Nolden, who together with two friends founded Solago, a German start-up that sells rooftop solar panels and the plug-in versions, said most of his customers were interested in installing the panels on their own.

Our utility company (if they are serious about driving solar adoption), should think about promoting a solution like this instead of running their ridiculous sales campaign that is yet to produce any results.

Seeking Mobility

 The comments on this story about a hiking exoskeleton made for interesting reading. As useful as the device is, form more that functionality can define its success. For the observer there is going to be the question of whether the user of the device is really in need of it or are they driven by the desire to act super-human. If the need is obvious then there will likely be no judgement - the usefulness would be evaluated on merits. But that is not a given if the user is perceived to be vain, seeking to act super-human. That leaves the potential customer base for a product like this in a bit of a quandary. 

Those that have the means to be early adopters would also need to have a real need for this beyond desire to experiment with a new toy because they can afford it. Imagine a scenario where you are a hiker (which I am) and you see a some folks outfitted in this thing to complete their Moncler and Canada Goose look. It is unlikely that I will come to the conclusion that all of them have a real need for it even if that might actually be the case. There is a path for it to become an aspirational product for those who are priced out at first - the exoskeleton becomes as ubiquitous as the selfie-stick, goes properly mainstream. 

Marketed as a mobility device that can help hikers extend their range instead of a medical device that can assist those with mobility issues (you can think of them as an e-bike but for walking), Skip claims the MO/GO pants can make the wearer feel up to 30 pounds lighter. The amount of assistance provided varies in real time by monitoring the wearer’s gait and leg movements to determine when they’re walking or climbing. At any time, the user can choose to increase or decrease the amount of assistance they’re provided with a simple button press.

Bad Outcome

Learned that declining vulture populations in India contributed to 500,000 human deaths. Cattle get treated with some pain-killer that is fatal to vultures and they don't survive after feeding on carcasses:

The unintentional decimation of these heavy, scavenging birds allowed deadly bacteria and infections to proliferate, leading to the deaths of about half a million people over five years..

This is like the four pest campaign in China and the cane toad introduction in Australia. The decision to treat cattle with that pesticide would likely have been made without thinking through every cascading consequence. 

Reading this story made me think about actions people take when they have their back against the wall or atleast feel that they do. That action is a strong response to something in their life where doing nothing, or even postponing action is no deemed possible. That sets off a series of events often unforeseen that lead to outcomes the person was not prepared for and most certainly did not expect.

Big Event

 P has been on my mind yet again - this time after the longest hiatus ever. I want to believe that coincided with the phase of my life when I felt most free, as close as I could ever come to what I imagined would be possible for me. Nowhere close to my dreams or even a replica or it but a kintsugi of sorts. But I was overjoyed to feel the ocean breeze on my face, jumping the waves, gliding over them like I never knew to before. 

For a while, everything was in its place, there was order and harmony for a bit - all the things that had been forever lacking or missing for me. Then I recalled P yet again. That last time I called - ever remembering what I had worn that afternoon. It was a pale yellow hakoba net outfit - a color as mournful as I felt hearing the hollowness of his voice, drained of all feeling just accepting the conditions I had laid out without question or protest. I replayed those few minutes in my head so many times in years to come - and came up with different ways to explain to myself what had happened. None provided satisfying because P was not there to speak for himself - just as he had not been there in spirit that fateful day I called him. 

Watching Three Of Us took me back to the times of P so long ago that it could be all in my imagination. The woman in the story is losing her memory and she wants to go back to the place that was the most significant in her life almost as it to check if she still has pulse. Things are where they are meant to be including some people from that time including the one she really need to see - to apologize, shed tears together, say a real goodbye. I told my friend S who goes back to the times of P and knew him well. She suggested that I wait some more for closure because this warrants a bigger life event - something that neutralizes everything For the woman in the movie that was dementia. 

Memorable Interview

 I had the strangest job interview experience recently. The recruiter has been warm, cheery and exuberant almost trying to sell me on the role but when pushed for detail he had very little to offer. It was a bit of a red flag but I let that pass. Reading about the company itself, I learned that they were in more than a fair share of trouble and the tenure of folks in comparable roles was very short - they bounced in and out within a couple of years. The hiring manager herself had been employed in a dozen companies in the last twenty years and about a year old in this role. I decided to proceed and see what would come to pass - some parts of the job were interesting to me to consider it. 

It was to be a thirty minute Zoom call to which she showed up five minutes late. It appears that she was reading from a list of questions but there were no prepared follow-ups so she asked none. I felt like I was delivering a monologue. Then around five minutes in a man started to show up in her background - moving in and out of the frame. Then she ducked behind her chair and then the man was gone from the frame and finally she dropped from the call. I was not sure what had happened and for a minute wondered if that woman had suffered bodily harm - maybe the man had her in a chokehold behind her chair. She had started to act a bit nervous once he appeared in the frame. It was not clear if she was at home or somewhere else - there was a low level of ambient noise but she was not in the office. Five minutes later, I dialed in by phone and her secretary picked up and said the woman's battery had died and she would be back online any minute. 

So I hop back on to Zoom and crickets. Then a few minutes later she is back and the man is not in the frame. She keeps repeating she does not have anything else to ask and I should ask her questions - this seems like a trick or a stress test. She seems to want to ascertain how I will cope in a low to no information environment and still get my job done. What if I don't know what I am supposed to do, how she measures her and my success and no one is willing or able to tell me. Can I still perform? I have interviewed and been interviewed more times than I care to remember but this has to be one of the most unique and bizarre experiences.

 In the second part of the call when the woman has been reunited with a power source, she started to slide down in the frame until only the upper half of her face was visible in the screen and then she disappeared and dropped for good. I was left absolutely stunned by it all - companies usually put on their best show when trying to recruit, but this was exactly the opposite. Absolutely nothing went well. She was in such a rush to drop that even the pleasantries we exchange with candidates we passed on in the first five minutes, were not exchanged. She might as well have dropped dead - it was so sudden.

There are a few ways to think about what happened. Maybe she hated me at first instance and thing was dead on arrival - she would sooner poke her eyes out than work with me. Now she is left with twenty minutes to kill and she did everything she could to reduce her own pain of tolerating me. She could be on her way out or may have been put in her notice - filling this role might be one of the last acts to complete before she is out - to that end she really does not care as long as she checked the box. She can hire any warm body and get out or say no one could be found in the time available and get out. The most optimistic version I could come up with - maybe the place is an absolute toxic cesspool and this woman out of the infinite kindness of her heart was giving me every reason to abort the mission, bail, run and never look back. I guess I will never know because I will never hear back.

Left Bereft

My friend T gave me a piece of wisdom that I have turned over in my head several times since I received it. When a person offers their partner support in a difficult time so they can get back up on their feet and thrive, they must do it unconditionally. Upon successful recovery, the supportive partner should not look at the outcomes they helped achieve and feel betrayed saying - this is not the goals I wanted you to fulfill when I supported you. What about the goals that matter to me and you could not fulfill then but can now. When will it be my turn. 

The answer to that can be your turn will never come because your goals are not my goals or at least not in the priority that you have in mind. You supported me in a difficult time and wanted me to thrive - I did. That alone should be the reward. If the person is feeling betrayed chances are they over-rotated on the support in terms of their emotional investment and subconsciously (at least) imagined what would lie on the other side after the struggles were over. That vision of the future when it is at complete odds with reality, they are unable to see the situation as anything but deep betrayal. 

It could be to the point of invalidating the whole relationship and experiencing loss of identity. T is no professional therapist but she is one of those quiet, observant types that has brilliant insights that the rest of us missed because we were talking and not taking notes as we lived our lives. All of what T had described I have experienced a couple of times in my life and yes, I did feel like I did know who I was anymore and if any of what I was doing was right.

Dumb State

While I don't have social media and don't have to deal with doom-scrolling, reading the news of my phone is almost as bad. Depending on the source, the opinions are skewed left or right in ways that turn news into content that triggers feelings of angst, hopelessness and pessimism about the world and our future. Not sure if that is any different than doom-scrolling. I was telling a friend recently about how my parents when I was a kid, insisted that I read the newspaper and particularly the editorial page. The weekend supplements were mostly considered good, useful reading and highly encouraged.

We got a couple of newspapers and some bi-weekly magazines at our home. The neighbor had a different set of items she subscribed to, so we traded across the fence often - magazines more so than newspapers though there were times when newspapers were traded too. Getting me to read this content everyday was their way of bringing awareness of the world to my life even though I lived in a sleep town where nothing ever happened. 

They also believed that reading the op-ed pieces would help my language and writing abilities because there was a certain quality bar writing had to meet to make it to the editorial pages. I cannot imagine any of that working today - most newspapers such as they do exist, are a far cry from what I grew up on. I don't think any young person would benefit from them in ways that I did back in the day. I am not sure what is available today to replace good journalism for kids who are growing up in a world where doom-scrolling, influencer posts, social-sharing and news reporting have fused into one thing. Maybe they need to be on dumber devices. It would not make such a dent in the level of the kid's awareness of what is going in the world being that the time names are resorting to AI to write for them. 

Kind Navigation

 When I am driving in a familiar place, I try not to use navigation - it was a bad habit to have such needless reliance and become a lazy driver, so I made an effort to change. This NYT opinion piece about the perils of over-reliance on navigation apps is very much relatable. If there is a toll-road and I have not explicitly asked to avoid it, I will find myself paying needless toll. The time savings sometimes can be under two minutes so its not really needle-moving. In times of traffic slow-downs, it is common to see a large number of drivers taking the de-tour the app is recommending to save time. Beyond a point, that detour stops being a time-saver because too many people are dumped on a route that was not ready to handle the influx. So now you have two ways to get late instead of one.

 I love the idea of having an app adapt to the what the driver wants and this can be quite variable. I might want efficiency on my commute to work but want to see the sea-shore while on a holiday. I would infact appreciate it very much if the app recommended a scenic route and places to stop along the way - that is adding real value to the driving experience. The multiple lane changes in peak traffic hours to make the next exit is a bad idea for the driver and for everyone else on the road - specially when the driver is in unfamiliar territory. They are doing as told by the app and creating risk for everyone. Maybe the better idea is to stay off the freeway until better merge options are available. It would be nice to see optimizations that reduced driver stress making difficult maneuvers and make the drive comfortable.

New Person

People rooting for your success, improvement etc., often distance themselves from you once you have achieved the goal. While this article talks about how not to let that happen in the context of a partner by bringing them the along for the journey, maybe the concept applies to other in the social and professional circle of the person

The researchers found that, when people had lower clarity about their self-concept, they generally were not as supportive of their partner changing. The team concluded that this was because the individuals worried that changes in their partner meant they would have to change, too. Without a solid idea of who they were on their own, they were unsettled not knowing how the partners would redefine them.

There can be a scenario where the person who has set out goals for self-improvement is an introvert and is unable to pull-together a viable support group. So they soldier along on their own and no one knows much about what is going on. Suddenly one day, a new person emerges at the other end. Given that the person is an introvert, chances are they did not see people too often - their social batteries last only so long. 

When on occasion a meeting did happen and the person wanted to share deeper thoughts about what they were doing to improve themselves, chances are their message was not communicated right (if at all).It's no surprise that no one feels comfortable seeing the new and improved person after a long hiatus - its as if they never knew who the person was. They might even feel a bit deceived. You can hardly expect those you've cheated in some sense to be your ardent fans and supporters. 

Finding Home

Read about this concept of  a traveling village and found it quite interesting. If this way of living works for atleast some of the families of the set of twenty, then chances are they could try in again. There may be a path for that group to buy homes in the same area (minding the walkability rule) and stay together as a village. I ran into a Reddit thread recently where new-comers to my town (30s and up) were be-moaning the lack of options to get to know new people, form real friendships. I can relate to that and used to think it had to do with me being an immigrant from India. But these folks are just transplants from other states in the country that did not live my town for many generations. They seem to face the same difficulties I did. 

The the vast majority of friends I started out with when I first got here, moved out to more exciting destinations for better professional opportunities. The rest drifted away when the trajectory of our personal and professional lives started to diverge, we had less and less in common to support any meaningful conversation. The parents of J's friends through the K-12 years faded out as the friendships between our kids did. So in about a couple of decades, the pool had completely dried out. I am much in the same boat as these new arrivals, just that clocking the years has not given me any advantage over them. The issue maybe not even be unique to this town and it makes sense that ideas like the traveling village would take root. 

People need community and getting involved in a serious, long-term relationship with all the baggage that it entails may not be everyone's idea of how to find it. The community that comes as a byproduct of marriage or relationship is also not one of your choosing or one that you want to be any part of. The partnership even if near perfect works only between the two people if the relationship, it cannot work nearly as well with the full cast of characters that come along from both sides. If it were actually pick a village of your own, that would be quite an Utopia.

Bruised Sisters

 I saw Provoked only recently - by now almost 20 years after it was released. Aishwarya Rai carries the movie almost on her with Naveen Andrew doing his part (somewhat) as the menacing, abusive husband. Around the time that movie was made, I used to know a woman, V who I had met through a support group for single mothers from India trying to raise their kids alone in America. At first she did not want to share her real name or location with me and mostly talked about her struggles trying to get custody of her daughter while living in a women's shelter. At some point she trusted me enough to exchange phone numbers and sometimes she would call. 

The conversations were long and rambled through past and present in ways that it often left me confused. There were days when she recounted particularly traumatic events from the past that had lead to hospitalization and she still had lingering health issues from her husband's physical abuse. She was trying to rationalize her decision to leave her daughter with this man - he is a very good father, but a bad husband. I found it hard to fathom but realized that she was in no position to financially support her daughter - V had never worked in America. There were days when the conversations were lucid, when she asked me about what was going on in my life and offered me good advice. 

I enjoyed those conversations a lot more because it gave me a fleeting glimpse into the person V had once mean before the horrific abuse had destroyed her body and mind. We stayed in touch off and on for about three years. Last I spoke to her, V had managed to get her daughter away from the father - she had decided to send the child to India to live with her family. She remained disoriented about her own life, fighting on many fronts to earn her freedom give her daughter a better life, not be beholden to her relatives back home. The immigration woes were never ending given her separated pending divorce status. Watching Provoked brought back memories of those long ago phone conversations with V. 

Even as a woman with similarities in culture and background, I could not fully comprehend the depths of her suffering, how mortally afraid she was of the man she was married to, and how her mind raced infinitely hoping to find peace and quiet. I hope V and her daughter have ended up having a good life.  

Endless Buffet

 The days of all you can eat days of trawling data to train AI are winding down. As always, the companies that precipitated the problem of content creators shutting down access are the ones that will be the least impacted by it. They will just pay their way out and also control what the AI does so users will see a filtered and distorted responses that are aligned with the company's interests. The up and commers will have to choose between dying out from lack of data or working around the barriers somehow:

Another challenge is that while publishers can try to stop A.I. companies from scraping their data by placing restrictions in their robots.txt files, those requests aren’t legally binding, and compliance is voluntary. (Think of it like a “no trespassing” sign for data, but one without the force of law.)

Major search engines honor these opt-out requests, and several leading A.I. companies, including OpenAI and Anthropic, have said publicly that they do, too. But other companies, including the A.I.-powered search engine Perplexity, have been accused of ignoring them.

The likes of Perplexity might have to throw in the towel eventually. Turn to some horrible ad-supported model where the AI responds in a way that is most advantageous to advertisers or they just get acquired by one of the big companies who don't want the annoyance of a pesky little newcomer trying to upstage them. Either way, we the users of search end up holding the bag.

Pay Forward

I have known S for a while but she has never met my daughter. When S and I met a few weeks after my birthday, she asked how my day had been. I  shared with her that J had send me a beautiful floral arrangement and lunch delivered from my favorite place where she took me out on my birthday. S smiled and said that I must have been a wonderful mother. I was glad to hear her say that knowing how hard a bar that is for any woman to clear - being a wonderful mother. 

You do your very best, make a lot of mistakes along the way, stumble to recover from them and try all over again - try not to lose your sanity and self-esteem along the way. If you were to take an honest and full accounting of your performance as a mother, you might find that there were some great highlights but also significant lowlights.  In balance you were a mother who did the best she could and if the child knows and believes that to be true, chances are you have not failed them. I told S that while I have always tried my best, I am also very lucky to have a really good kid. J has always been a kind and thoughtful person  - she can make people she cares about feel loved and connected to her

As a child, on the morning of her birthday, J always woke up to a bedroom festooned with balloons and streamers. I did the decorations while she was fast asleep and quietly as I could. Seeing her radiant smile and look of complete surprise when she woke up was the best reward I could ask for. It was tradition to have cake for breakfast that morning. On a school day it was all a blur and she'd be half sleepy eating breakfast, opening her gift and wondering when her bedroom turned so festive and if she could stay up long enough next year to learn my secret. I wanted her to understand the reward of making the person you love happy. And that it is worth the effort to earn it - maybe I taught her self-altruism. This year, I got from J what I gave her as a child but done in her own way. She earned the same kind of reward that I did when she woke up on the morning of her birthdays as a child.

Bot Candidates

 I interviewed a couple of candidates recently and had what my first taste of job interviews enabled by LLM. Both candidates had prepared for the interview with a chatbot and their resumes had been prepared by one as well. The AI markers were everywhere. They had managed to fine tune their resumes to the point that they made it through the ATS filter and whomever had chosen them for their first round interview clearly lacked a functioning BS-meter. The resumes did not compute for anyone who has worked real jobs in the real world in my line of work. It was a pure fantasy about imaginary work in completely unrealistic circumstances but written in a way that felt credible to someone who did not have related experience. 

The recruiters who let these two candidates in the door clearly thought the fantastical claims were credible. When I spoke to these folks, I felt like I was talking to a bot not a human - they relied on some kind of a teleprompter to answer my questions and went on to elaborate on responses that were already off tangent and wrong. With the bot-assisted elaborations they dug themselves into a even deeper hole. There was this blind and implicit faith in the power of AI that was sad to behold. As the bot hallucinated, so did the candidates. They were grotesquely unqualified for the job and yet they powered through the interview completely convinced they would nail it with the bot to help the deal with anything that was thrown at them. 

I met my friend V for coffee a few weeks after these surreal experiences and asked her if she had encountered anything similar. V replied - more than a few times and like me she had rejected these bot-enabled candidates because they were so far from being qualified. As we compared notes, we found that the candidates that had successfully gamed the ATS and made it to first round were remarkably unqualified and inexperienced but the bot created a myth around their thin and lite resume to the point where there were our interview candidates. I long for those simpler times when candidates were flawed and human, shared relatable stories about work they had actually done, not hallucinated about. I guess V and I can take satisfaction from the fact that we did not end up driving success stories for Final Round AI. 

Staying Shaded

 A friend who works for an premium cosmetics brand told me that all sunscreens are bad and to only wear things that form a physical barrier - the stuff that leaves behind white residue on skin. Even better leave the skin alone and wear wide-brimmed hats or carry an umbrella. 

My mother never steps out in the sun without and umbrella. As a kid, I was required to walk in the shade of her umbrella because it was not large enough for two. It has to be among the top ten embarrassing memories of childhood staying in the umbrella's shadow if there was so much as a hint of sun. In India that is just about every day of the year. Maybe there will be a good for you sunscreen yet - inspired by the octopus this time around.

..a synthesized version of xanthommatin can significantly boost sunscreen protection levels when blended with zinc oxide, without having any negative impact on marine life such as corals or to humans

That sounds good as long it does not mean killing of all octopuses in the world to make some uber-premium sunscreen that influencers will peddle to one and all including eight year olds. 

Speaking Words

 Reading this article reminded me of my cousin M who grew up in a joint family. She was the youngest child and everyone was concerned that she did not talk. They had her hearing tested and everything was normal and it appeared as if she understood at least some words spoken to her. Then all at once just after she turned two, the floodgates opened. 

She spoke whole sentences without any baby lisp, as articulate as any grown up. We could not have enough of it - we loved to get M talking and she obliged by holding forth, basking in the attention. She had an interesting turn of phrase because she took interesting liberties with words. Some of her catch-phrases from that age became so popular in the family, that we continue to use it to this day. 

It was as if a miracle had happened. Her parents were greatly relieved, everyone else found a baby talking like an adult very entertaining. She was highly sociable and her peers in the neighborhood could not keep up with her given her language skills and vocabulary. Maybe M had listened in for a couple of years, surrounded as she was by many adults and older kids. Once she felt confident enough, she joined the conversation herself. 

.. results show that human infants are clearly capable of learning language through observation, suggesting that talking directly to young children is not a requirement

False Alarm

 Whatever the new avatar of the Chrome third party cookie, it is all but given that it will be good for Google and not so much for the rest. It must be quite trippy to lead the world along saying you will be doing one thing, dance close to that thing you said you'll be doing, make it so everyone hates the thing you are almost close to doing that you said you'd be doing and then finally say never mind. 

I know of some folks who have spent the last several years getting ready for this day that never did come. Apart from wasting tons of their own resources going back and forth on this thing instead of doing useful stuff in the world, Google has wasted a lot of collective efforts by companies big and small globally. It would be interesting to do the math on the sum total of waste this aggravating Google caper has caused. I was talking to D about six months ago and he was super excited about leading his company's effort to survive and thrive after the third party cookie was deprecated. As is typical for D, he gave me an easy to understand explanation of what they were building and it was a clever technical solution that he was right to be proud of. When I first read this news, I wanted to ping him to get his reactions but decided a cooling off period may be wiser - he is likely pretty upset. 

Per Criteo's testing, Google’s Privacy Sandbox, the company’s suite of proposed cookie alternatives, would erase publishers’ ad revenues by 60%. The same should be true for other browsers like Firefox and Safari that have removed third party cookies but the impact is lower given that Chrome is used by over 63% of internet users. So many brain cells have been expended in trying to figure out how to compensate for signal loss and now it's a non-event - atleast the outcome that will happen is not the one these folks spent their years preparing for.

Broken Eggs

 I may have heard of one the six dishes listed in this story and have never been to Hong Kong. The egg waffles look very unique are has a couple of origin stories :

There are two contradictory explanations for the bubble-patterned shape. One is that the original version of egg waffles contained no or little egg in the batter, as eggs were expensive in the 1950s. The mould was used to create an illusion of the missing ingredients. The other explanation, on the contrary, argues that the ingredients of the egg waffles originally came from broken eggs in the market; the mould was to turn the broken eggs back into their original shape.

There has been more than one occasion when my carton of eggs got to bruised on the way home and there were more than a few broken eggs to deal with. Sometimes, the only reasonable answer was to cake a cake. In fact, greater the damage, bigger the size of the baking project. For someone who is not a baker, a situation like this can be a predicament. Bake a cake to use the broken eggs - a great idea for someone who loves baking and is good at it. I am neither so my results tend to be mediocre at best. So the cake serves to remind me of  how I mishandled the eggs. A solution to turn broken eggs whole again seems quite useful.

Seeing Color

Watched Pathaan recently after having read and heard a lot of controversy around it. The movie was excruciating long without any redeeming value but I was not able to appreciate why it became such a lightning rod back home. I have never played a video-game in my life so far be for me to opine on the quality or merits of any video-game. That said, the movie seemed to be like a video game to me - completely untethered from reality, logic, data, fact, and science. You are required to suspended disbelief and immerse yourself in the action the best you can. It seemed to be, having a player role is the right way to do it. 

It was difficult to be in front of a screen for the whole time - I had to take a break and watch the last hour another time. Bollywood has produced movies lately that have interesting plot twists, arguably too many and too intricate sometimes. This one was interesting in that the end state was a foregone conclusion - the leading pair would be together so their interests and loyalties would obviously need to align. The unpatriotic guy would huff and puff a whole lot before going up in flames. All of that came to pass - just could have been wrapped up a third of the time. A Pathaan video game can run infinitely I suppose.

At the time of watching the movie, I was not aware that the orange bikini was problematic and the song. But that has to be attributed to my lack of basic understanding - if a person cannot tell orange and saffron apart then they should get re-educated before they do anything else. I had to wonder if a significant percent of the viewers were like me - so clueless that they entirely missed the infraction. 

Dead Search

 The author describes the state of Google search these days very well. The results are more arbitrary than ever and of dubious reliability. They had search solved for the longest time (or so it seemed) but that seems to have come undone now. I have switched over to Perplexity almost entirely in-lieu of Google. It is a lot more efficient and I enjoy the follow-up questions because they help me complete my search better.

I’m not the only one who has been struggling with Google recently. Many users are saying its principal product, its search engine, isn’t working as well as it should. They claim the ingenious vehicle that has enabled us to navigate the internet’s infinite scroll of information is beginning to rust and decay. That’s not to mention the company’s endless court battles with rival companies and world governments, or the rise of ChatGPT, which many tout as a search engine killer; even Bill Gates said last year that once a company perfects the AI assistant or “personal agent”, “you will never go to a search site again”.

For now Perplexity is the best version of a "personal agent" I have. I don't think I will sign up for something more intrusive and over-zealous, trying to help me by taking whole digital life into context. A personal agent needs to maintain some healthy distance from what I consider personal to be useful. In the meanwhile, if Google mixes up data about people routinely, it is probably a good for everyone's privacy because it would be possible to disavow things you do not want to be associated way. This is the kind of enshittification that is somewhat useful.

Moral Ambition

 I have definitely worked a lot of bullshit jobs in my career. After a while it became hard to escape the gnawing inner voice that reminded every morning that I was wasting my time and talents (such as they are) to earn a paycheck. That voice reminded me all the time, the sum of the bullshit jobs is still a large pile of bullshit. 

As such, when I look back I won't have much I could feel proud or happy about. Depending on the years a person has between the end of their professional life and death, that is a lot of time wondering about such waste. That said, I have not seen my moral ambition translate into work that checks all the boxes - not yet. I hope that will diligent effort, some day I will come closer to that ideal. The proposed solution will work for some but everyone who has stumbled into a bullshit job and can't get out:

A solution may present itself in the unlikely marriage between the idealism of a professional activist with the ambition and practicality of an entrepreneur. Just as a business looks for holes in the market when developing a new product, so does Bregman urge these would-be activist-entrepreneurs to focus on pressing but overlooked global issues.

The example is good and illustrative of what a valid intersection needs to look like

..he shares the story of Rob Mather, a successful strategy consultant from London who – after organizing a charity swim for a burn victim he saw on television – went on to found theAgainst Malaria Foundation because, while a cure for the infectious disease already existed, it wasn’t being made available to the countries that needed it most. 

There is the third component to the puzzle - having found the intersection, are you qualified to build the solution and/or have the ability to attract the talent needed for doing so. This third component in my experience has been the hardest, specially if you are looking to tackle the problem as your full-time job, no some part-time volunteer gig.

Coming Together

 It was a bit surprising for me to see Ritalin and psilocybin mentioned somewhat interchangeably in this article. Poking around some more it seems while both influence brain function and connectivity, their mechanisms, effects, and subjective experiences are quite different. Psilocybin's profound impact on brain desynchronization are quite unlike the more focused and less transformative effects of Ritalin. 

The idea that psilocybin can scramble our brains for a while until we lose our sense of individual identity and become indistinguishable from others could have interesting outcomes (if done right and everyone consents) for team building efforts. If people are not getting along and see themselves as too different and apart from each other, then perhaps they could benefit from a period of cohesion and harmony that they can't fight off.

Bringing people together in such times as we live in seems to be truly magical. 

Initially, the study authors found that each person had a highly defined and completely unique pattern of network connectivity, like a kind of neural fingerprint that could be used to identify any given individual. Immediately after taking psilocybin, however, connectivity patterns became more chaotic, to the point that participants could no longer be distinguished from one another based on their brain activity.

“The brains of people on psilocybin look more similar to each other than to their untripping selves,” explained study author Nico Dosenbach in a statement. “Their individuality is temporarily wiped out. This verifies, at a neuroscientific level, what people say about losing their sense of self during a trip.”

Repeating Pattern

 In the last few years, I have started to realize that my mother imagines that my relationship with her mirrors mine with J. This a bit far from reality given the different people and circumstances in the mix. J is fiercely independent - always has been. I was too in my own way but unlike her, I did not think it was necessary to let go of the maternal tether to become free. For the longest time therefore, I was at odds with myself - straining for freedom and straining at the tether, unsure which way to push harder. When my mother sees the J and I as a relative outsider, she wishes there is continuity - the bond between mother and daughter being a story that replays in predictable ways, repeatable ways. There is a sense of validation in that.

There are some anchoring stories from my childhood she relies on to draw parallels where none exist. Even ten years ago, my response would have been to stop her and set the record straight, use that conversation to call attention to things she did wrong and such other unwise actions where no response was needed. A couple of days, she brought up the same incident - us walking past the shop window of a saree store Bangalore when I was in kindergarten and what I has said about one of the mannequins. This specific story has been recounted to me so many times that I feel like I can recall that scene in full-color detail. The truth is I remember nothing of it except the word picture triggered by my mother's repeated telling of it. 

Why is this such a seminal event from my childhood, why this memory over any others I am not entirely sure. But it means a lot to her. I want to have empathy for that though I do not have any similar experience with J. My time with J in the years before college, tended to be lot more dynamic - we had places to go and things to get done. A lot of times, I would be unduly stressed because I could not keep up with all the demands on my time and the pace at which she was going.

J had instituted a chai-time around 4 pm on weekends and holidays when we were both at home. That will remain a shining memory always because it speaks to J's spirit - the ability to make something special out of the mundane, putting her stamp on it. I still have chai on the days that I do around that time - she made it a durable habit, a place I want to cherish. I wish my mother and I had something similar together and the highlight reel of my time in her home would not end with me at age five.

Leaving Alone

 I read this essay right after spending couple of hours working in the yard - not because I am growing a magnificent flower garden or the fruit trees are laden. That is just how much time it takes to take weeds out and bring some semblance of tidy. It is impossible to get a handle on the spider webs if I don't resort to chemicals. 

That seems to be the answer to most pesky problems in the yard - chemicals that can cause you a lot of harm or a lot of elbow grease. Nature is wild and ferocious in my yard, there are a lot of invasive plants and the rabbits don't live here any more. I am sure, this piece of land has been meddled with plenty and well before my time. People have tried to do things to it and with it that was never intended by nature, as is the case around the world and on much larger scale:

..a proposal to engage in the large-scale pumping of ozone-destroying sulfate aerosols into the atmosphere to cool it—a scenario various writers of science fiction have played out in recent novels. Also the dumping of iron dust into the oceans to trigger algal blooms and the genetic modification of crops to increase their carbon uptake.

There are also plans to block solar radiation by mechanical means that range from the deployment of huge, heavy sunshades to the placing of 55,000 orbiting, wire­mesh mirrors, each 40 square miles wide.

All of these schemes come with serious failure risk

It seems like all the proposals read like mistakes with effects that would become apparent as soon as they are implemented. If people could just get far away from where nature is distressed, chances are time will do the healing. We are not needed and our ill-conceived interventions most certainly are not.

Correct Lanes

 Would be great to see this become a wider trend and college education for all deserving students become free. In that scenario, if a student who met the financial criteria still needed to pay for their education, it would be a strong and clear signal that they were in the wrong lane - the college and/or the selected course of study was not the right fit. A reasonable person could then re-think their options and go a different direction. 

This is not too far from the model of what I experienced during my high school and college years in India. There were two ways to get to finish line - defined by a medical or engineering degree. You either pressure-cooked for four years, and went through an inhumanely competitive process to get into a government college which was heavily subsidized - this was one option. The other one was for parents to fund admission to a private institution. Needless to say the first was considered the more "prestigious" and "legitimate" option and the second was not. The reality is a bit more complex. In the India scale of things, the competition is such that only a microscopic percent of the qualified pool got make it to a government college. 

All who failed to make it were not necessarily undeserving. In the worst of all worlds (which is not so uncommon) the kid failed to make the cut and the parents were not able to pay for private college. That is when things went in directions no one was quite prepared for. I have to say that in my generation those kids who were forced into non-engineering, non-medical colleges often ended up having very good outcomes in the long run because the fundamentals were strong and they still went to some kind of government college. I can see this filter working way more effectively in America given the higher availability of colleges and less competition per available spot. By removing money from the mix a majority of students should have a reasonable shot at landing where they should belong. 

Different Truths

 Watched this beautiful short film about a day in the life of a patient and care-giver. The old man played perfectly by Naseeruddin Shah has Alzheimer's  and the young woman is a rookie psychologist who is looking after him while the family is out for the day attending a wedding. Shah relives the days of his life that are long past as if they were his present reality and cannot recognize his grandson but his love for his wife is undiminished and every detail about her memorable. 

The story of the broken table is what the old man is able to give the young care-giver. He feels alive and is in touch with his humanity more than "normal" people might be. The young woman has a "flaw" of her own that she wants to deny and hide from her husband because she does not know that she has other choices. Losing one's mind is incredibly scary if the person has lucid moments when they realize that their grasp on reality is slipping away. 

Once that stops and the person settles into some kind of reality that is stable but incomprehensible to others, things seem better for a while. Then of course the irreversible decline happens to those who live long enough - that is terrific suffering for loved ones to witness and endure. When my maternal grandmother finally passed, the family was greatly relieved. I know I was able to escape back to the times when she was a force of nature, unafraid to speak her mind and make controversial decisions. 

I decided to delete all memories of her that were unpleasant or painful to remember. By reliving only the good and happy times with her, its as if my grandmother never suffered at all. Who is to say the way I processed out memories is "normal" - yet people have to find their own ways to cope. The only time her illness come to mind when I at doctor's office and being asked about my family's medical history. I blot it out immediately after that. 

Time Left

The level of effort it takes to have a vibrant social life is often seen as too high by those of us who generally prefer their solitude. The folks I have been friends with for the longest time are also somewhat reclusive. We are able to give each other plenty of space and our friendship does not need a lot of feed and care. It's much like growing an easy houseplant that can survive being watered only once in a few weeks, not fussed over every day. For people like us, having a group of friends nearby to hang out with on an impromptu occasion is a near impossibility. If ever we feel like it, we have to accept that we never made the needed investment to have it. Solutions like Timeleft might be the hack for the likes of us:

 “A lot of the time with our community members, they've got friends,” Cooke explains. “Their friends just don't live near them, or they’re at a different stage of their life.” She echos the reasoning of my TimeLeft table-mates: “[If] you want someone to call when you've had a bad day and you want to go for a drink, or you've had an amazing day and you want people to celebrate with, those people need to be near you rather than five hours away.”

The description of the community members fits me to the tee. My closest friends are in three different countries. To get the group together would take a year of planning. Last week, things at work were such that I longed to speak with someone who was a relative outsider, and yet could offer perspective on what's going on. Sometimes the best counsel comes from such sources. People too close to the action or biased towards me are not objective enough. A solution like Timeleft might work (or not) based on what the group that has come together for dinner want on that particular evening. If there were a couple of people who need to vent and the others just want to relax and chitchat, chances are it won't work well for anyone specially that its the first time people have come together. On the other hand, if the energy of the group on that particular day is similar, chances of success are much higher. 

Tasting Right

 I had a fun time reading Krish Ashok's Masala Lab recently. There is ton of wisdom in the book for novice and experienced cooks alike. The biriyani project plan towards the end of the book in a winner. If you followed it, chances are you will come away with a very decent production no matter what your prior experience with biriyani making.

In my own kitchen, I have only ever taken short-cuts and marveled at those who know how to make it right. Ashok's project plan emboldened me enough give the real recipe a shot. He made it seem plausible for one and all to get to the finish line of a respectable biriyani. I loved this bit of wisdom on the use of tamarind in cooking. I always blamed the quality of the tamarind when a dish ended up not the right level of sour or the smell of tamarind overwhelmed other spices. Ashok proposes a good way to achieve consistency with the use of tamarind which I will implement: 

A doubt that a lot of new cooks tend to have is this rather common, yet highly dubious, instruction in most recipes on the Internet: Cook the tamarind juice till its raw smell goes away. What does ‘raw’ mean here? A more sensible way to ensure that the tamarind does not overwhelm your dish is to keep tasting it till it has the level of sourness that you think is acceptable. In general, tamarind water-based gravies will need 6–8 minutes of medium heat to bring the sourness down to an acceptable level. Start from there and then decide if you need less or more cook time. Contemporary chefs who work with food scientists have determined that the pH of a good, balanced dish tends to be in the range of 4.3 to 4.9. So, while I am not recommending that you invest in a pH meter to test your sambar, this is a reaffirmation of the basic idea that a perceptible level of sourness is critical for most dishes. As we learnt before, a pH value of less than 7 is acidic.

Make Optional

 The only time some kids got to read and think about science writing might have been in the ACT.  It did not require any great knowledge or core understanding of science - more a test of science literacy. Can the person read an essay that explores a topic systematically and presents data to back the reasoning. But now they don't even have to bother. If high-school science is not the strength they have to "showcase" then they are free to go a different direction. Why not complete the job by making reading and counting optional as well. 

What is to say the student will have any strengths there either. Maybe they can demonstrate their social media prowess instead. The problem with such efforts ostensibly to help students out, many more will struggle to get into college and complete their education. Needless to say, they will not be prepared for the real world where such "help" stops being available. Meanwhile, there will be a category of students who won't need to care what the ACT includes because they have completed two years of college level courses while still in high-school. The ones who opted out of basic science literacy will never catch up to the population moving way faster in an entirely different lane. 

By making such moves, we will only make sure that graduating high-schoolers will have no data literacy to assess if what they are being told is true or not. That is a terrible handicap to have.

Always Perfect

I started to watch God Save My Shoes hoping it might be insightful. In my teens and twenties I was quite shoe-crazy and had many very uncomfortable ones. Ownership of the shoes felt ridiculously good and when I first started working, buying a pair on payday was a form of celebration of independence. Those years are all a haze now but my feet show the wear and tear from that time even though I stopped wearing "stylish" shoes a long time ago and high heels even earlier than that. It has been very much back to basics and mundane. My shoes no longer aim to make any statements of fashion or personality. They only need to serve one purpose - be comfortable enough to walk five miles in. 

The one explanation for why women have this thing for shoes that came from the documentary made good sense to me. When you are trying on clothes or accessories, the process can be quite draining - nothing ever feels right. It's rare to the experience the joy of finding the perfect fit. The mirrors in the dressing room cast a woman in the most unflattering light - I have always wondered about that. Why not have a trick mirror that creates a perception of perfection instead, wouldn't that move the product faster. The shoe does not pose such challenges. A woman does not look bad in any shoe she chooses to wear. That makes the choice infinite. She can feel good about her decision to buy just about anything. The only issue is about practicality and comfort which to many comes much later. 

I can think of some other things that fit that same category - glass bangles (which I had very large collections of and still have plenty lot of). They are always perfect and there is no such thing as a "wrong" glass bangle. So women tend to get a lot of them and replenishing the ones that break along the way.  The bindi is similar too - hard to get wrong and there is nothing that would not work for a specific woman given the right occasion. I had just never connected these things as being related which they might very well be.

Seeking Perfect

It's not often that I get to step into a Bangladeshi restaurant and speak in Bangla with everyone.  The owner was playing carrom with someone in one corner when I got there. It was too late for lunch but early for dinner. His wife took me to the remnants of what had been the lunch buffet. It was slim pickings and most notably none of the mishti was freshly made. Everything on display looked old and tired, cooked without love. As much I wanted to connect to my roots, have a conversation in my own language and feed my soul with food of my ancestors, I was not able to get into the state of mind. Experiences do not need to be perfect but  there cannot be so many flaws that it loses its structural integrity and keels over. 

We left the place more than a little disappointed and went to a generic Indian restaurant next door. The food was nothing to write home about. The chai was decent. The owner told me that everything was made from scratch and nothing was mass produced. I found that particularly amusing in light of the fact that their Manchurian Momo which they insisted I try was made from frozen Costco dumplings fried and dunked in pre-made Gobi Manchurian sauce. They had not even made an effort to hide the provenance of the dumplings. 

But I went along with the fairy tale which I hear at Indian restaurants all the time - it is a time-honored tactic to explain the excruciatingly slow service and sometimes amateur cooking. It is so predictable that I have used it as a parlor trick with non-desi friends in Indian restaurants. I will have them ask why our order is taking so long and tell them what they will hear for an answer. They have been come back bedazzled by my prescience - its like I am a mind-reader.

I thought about my abortive attempt to get authentic Bengali food at the Bangladeshi establishment on the flight back home. I missed my grandmother's cooking that afternoon as I do sometimes and it was why I stood there trying to see if anything they had there was worth trying - something that would feed that void. It made sense that nothing made the cut. These were dishes my grandma cooked and of course no one else can ever match their sublime perfection - there is no objectivity to how I feel about her cooking. Maybe the fault was mine and not theirs.