S Anand

Sukumar Rajagopal shared a LinkedIn post about our meeting on 11 June at Chennai, saying: Had a fanboi moment recently with Anand S who I have been following for a long time. He is prolific. It’s very difficult, no impossible, to keep up with him. He generously shares his work with full source code; approach; working examples; the whole nine yards. All this I knew before I met him in person. The in-person meeting took me by surprise. ...

Karthik Sashidhar shared his AI-generated Bangalore weather blog, which is generated by Hermes listening on Telegram. “The data analysis and stuff is still fairly YOLO but … skill based on my 10 years of experience,” as he put it. That includes critique too. Arjun asked it: Does it rain at specific hours in the day during monsoons? In a few minutes, Pre-monsoon rain is an evening creature emerged. In short, it rains in the evenings: 5 - 6 pm is the peak. ...

In this age of AI psychosis, I think we have all been blessed with Calvin’s prayer. Calvin: Know what I pray for? Hobbes: What? Calvin: The strength to change what I can, the inability to accept what I can’t, and the incapacity to tell the difference. Hobbes: You should lead an interesting life. Calvin: Oh, I already DO!

Yesterday, I wrote about @syu-toutousai, the bounty-hunting agent ecosystem. That led me to OpenAgents. OpenAgents has plenty of bounty issues: Fix JWT auth middleware accepts algorithm none - $8k Fix rate limiter doesn’t differentiate authenticated vs anonymous limits - $2.2k Add structured error responses with error codes - $8.6k Fix Math.random used for nonce generation - $8k Fix ABI encoding BigInt overflow - $9k Most issues also include a trick requirement. For example, #100 asks contributors to add a @generated-by block with: ...

Yesterday, I submitted a Codex co-authored PR to fix an issue I raised (using ChatGPT and Z3 - so yeah, I used AI to raise the bug and squash the bug!) A few hours later, @syu-toutousai submitted another PR to solve the same issue. @syu-toutousai seems interesting. The user account description says “Autonomous Technical Contributor & AI-Driven Developer” - a bot account. The PR itself was simple and had a few improvements I can think of: ...

On Sat 4 July at Bangalore, Arvind Satyanarayan is speaking at VizChitra 2026 - a talk I’m keenly looking forward to. I’ve been following Arvind’s work since Vega-Lite. It’s a grammar of graphics - something that makes data visualizations (charts) more structured. I tried switching to it our default at Gramener - but most felt it was too much to learn (they already knew Excel/Power BI) or too limiting (D3 can do more). ...

At the PyCon SG Education Summit today, Melvin’s lighting talk on “Writing Proofs in Python” began with a subtle bug in this mid-point calculation (often used in binary search or sort) in languages like Java, C/C++, Go, etc. low = ... high = ... mid = (low + high) / 2 Since the integers are fixed-width, this triggers an overflow when low + high exceeds the maximum integer value. Even popular libraries like Pandas had this bug until 2019. In fact, even Python’s native list.sort() had this sort of bug until 2015! Read the details. ...

The IMF forecasts GDP growth every year. Their forecasts for the current year are slightly low. Their forecasts for the next year are slightly high. After that, it remains high. Some forecasts, like China, Singapore, UAE, Equatorial Guinea are consistently low. Other forecasts, like Japan, Congo, Mexico, Pakistan are consistently high. The interesting meta-pattern is how this sort of past-forecast analysis can be done for any topic. This emerged from an Ethan Mollick post and then I asked: ...

In Tamizh Padam 2 (2018), there’s a parody where Jiiva’s car hits Manobala and kills him: Siva/Iswarya (crying over Manobala) நோ, நோ, சித்தார்த்! சிப்ரோ… மச்சான்… அண்ணா… சித்தார்த்! சித்தார்த்! ஏய்… மச்சான், மூச்சு விடுறா மச்சான்… டேய்… சித்தார்த்! சித்தார்த் வேஸ்ட்-லே போயிட்டேண்டா சித்தார்த்! No, no, Siddharth! Sipro… Buddy… Brother… Siddharth! Siddharth! Hey buddy, breathe buddy… Hey… Siddharth! Siddharth, you went to waste, Siddharth! Jiiva: நீங்க சாங் போயிடுங்க. You should break into a song. Siva: என்ன சொல்றீங்க? What are you saying? ...

The theme of yesterday’s workshop for the IIM Alumni at Singapore was Tools and Workflows was: Agents are getting smarter, so they know what to do. Tools agents can use are growing and are more powerful. This combinatorial explosion creates explosive possibilites. This workshop covered the following six workflows: Leverage transcripts. Use Google AI Studio to transcribe non-sensitive recordings with a reusable “don’t miss anything” prompt. AI Studio’s record button is a ready-to-use transcriber. Simplify dense text as a comic, an infographic, a story. Image generation is now a tool call an agent runs for you. Then compress it as AVIF on Squoosh before you email it to a thousand people. Verify - cheaply. Paste one suffix: “Break this into key claims, mark certainty, flag the five highest-risk ones, and tell me how to verify or falsify each.” Convert to a skill to automate. Cross-checking with multiple models took error from 14% to 0.7%. Skills are assets. A skill tells the agent “here’s how I do stuff.” Build them slowly, edit them weekly, and they compound for years. No skills support in your tool? Keep them as copy-pasteable prompts. Brainstorm by forcing range. Ban the five obvious ideas; borrow from unrelated domains; smash two random concepts together with the Ideator. Hallucination is a feature when you’re being creative. Schedule tasks. Weekly regulatory scans, daily meeting prep, market briefings - and even an “unreasonable gesture” nudge. As AI hides the tech, human relationships gain value. Here’s the talk video and full story + transcript. ...