S Anand

I have a bad memory. (I need to write about that. I keep forgetting to.) It’s worsening. Yesterday, I misplaced my debit card for the first time. Or maybe the second…? Which reminds me, I just forgot a call I have now! (Panic.) (15 min later.) So, anyway, therefore, I log stuff meticulously. Like what I did each day, what I ate, what I weigh, what pained me, etc. But the best logging is automated. My phone logs where I am. My bank logs what I spend. My calendar logs who I meet. ...

You can use AI to submit not just talk proposals but entire articles from your past work. Ranjeeta said Built In wants an article and had written one on my behalf. If someone’s going to write for me, I’d rather pick an AI! So here’s what I did: Research the audience So I asked Gemini to research and suggest topics: I received a request to write an article for Built In (https://builtin.com/), an online community and publication for startups and tech companies. ...

Developing taste & judgement are an essential skill in the AI era. # # But taste is different from knowledge and takes more time. Gaining knowledge is a software upgrade. It strengthens existing synapses. It’s fast, reversible, no new “cables” required. Taste is a hardware upgrade. It destroys inefficient pathways, grows neurons for new pathways, and wraps axons with myelin speeding up signals 100x. (London cab drivers literally have a larger hippocampus.) Taste takes time. How we acquire taste depends on the environment. ...

10:20 am. After submitting my VizChitra 2026 talk proposal, did a quick analysis of the submissions. Copy the HTML from the submissions page and paste into Gemini. Ask it: “Given this HTML, share a JS snippet I can copy and paste into DevTools that will return an array of objects containing all the useful information about each submission.” Paste the JS snippet into DevTools and get the structured result. Here’s the breakdown of submissions (excluding exchibitions): ...

My last two presentations used browser tabs as slides. For my talk last week titled Your Chotu Is Smarter Than You Think, I planned to show a series of examples. I loaded them all in a browser window as tabs like this: How I use AI to navigate toilets How I use AI for food recommendation How I use AI for book suggestions What else I can use AI for … Once loaded, I can press Ctrl+PgDn to move to the next - just like I’d press the right arrow key in a slide deck. I can also use the mouse to click on the tab if I want to jump around. ...

Here’s my talk proposal for VizChitra 2026: Description There’s stuff I know AI can do. Create data visualizations. I just tell it to convert a dataset into a treemap, and it does. Hallucinate. That’s a fancy word for “make stuff up”. I prefer calling it “creativity”. Run forever. As long as I have token budget and can summarize the context, it can go on. What if we combine these? What if we asked it to do research? If infinite monkeys will almost surely produce Shakespeare, how long will it take for the greatest AI to discover a truly novel data visualization that is useful? ...

This week, Namit and I met a Straive team that operates from a client office. One team member asked: I believe that we are doing wonders out here, but we are closed from what is happening in the rest our organization. I want team members to interact with others to see what interesting things they have delivered and where we can implement that solution. Could we have sessions, maybe a monthly newsletter, showing what innovations we’re working on? This would really keep us engaged with the tech that is going outside of the work that we do. ...

Whenever “let’s set up a recurring meeting” comes up (from me or others), I add: “We’ll set it up 4 sessions and then finalize the cadence.” Why? Most recurring meetings are about: I want to do something Not sure what But I really want it, like long-term And I my future self might not follow through So my present self is going to force my future self with a long-term commitment But during the recurring meetings, my future self is usually asking: ...

One of my goals this year is to “Automate finance + tax”. Today, I took a baby step by organizing my expenses. This is my current process: STEP 1: Download PDF receipts (from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and other cloud/AI services) STEP 2: Organize them, so I know which receipt to upload against which expense STEP 3: Submit on SAP Concur. All steps are manual as of now. I automated STEP 2: Organize them. ...

I was taking a bus past Mandaveli in Chennai, which reminded me of where I learnt mrdangam from Mr Melakaveri K Krishnamurthi between 1993-1996. So, after a few futile Google searches trying to find his whereabouts, I asked Gemini: Tell me everything that you know about and the current status of Melakaveri K Krishnamurthi, Mandaveli, a mridangam artiste. His son Balaji is a mridangam artiste too … and I learnt that: ...