
ABOUT ME
aliases: Anand, Bal, Bhalla, Stud, Prof.
Vidya Mandir. IITM. IBM. IIMB. LBS.
Lehman. BCG. Infy Consulting. Gramener. Straive.
More about me.
CONTACT ME
whatsapp: +91 9741 552 552
phone: +65 8646 2570
e-mail: [email protected]
social: LinkedIn | GitHub | YouTube
WORKING WITH ME
To invite me to speak, please see my talks page.
For advice, see time management, career or AI advice. Else mail me.
To work with me on projects, please send a pull request.
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RECENT POSTS
Unresolved questions across disciplines
I asked Claude: “What are the most effective and impactful ways you can help me?” One of its ideas was to ask it: What are the three questions this field has not resolved, where the disagreement is substantive and not just semantic? Who represents each position most forcefully?" So I posed this question about several subjects. This is a great way to discover the frontiers of knowledge in a field. ...
Tracking redirects minimally
Everyone needs a tracking URL shortener. Why tracking? I want to know if they opened my email and clicked the link. Why shortener? I want them to know what the link is about. For example, https://r.s-anand.net/edge-remote-debugging.html is so much more meaningful than https://chatgpt.com/share/68528565-0d34-800c-b9ec-6dccca01c24c I’ve used redirection services in the past - like t.co, bit.ly, goo.gl, ow.ly, and others. They tend to vanish, start charging, serve ads, etc. Here’s my solution: use static HTML for redirection. ...
How the Innovation Team works
Based on 44 meeting recordings from February to late April 2026, here’s how Straive’s small team (3-6 people at any time, mostly freshers and interns) produce a continuous stream of client-facing demos across topics as diverse as image filtering, geospatial analysis, insurance contract verification, NFL medical scoring, OCR benchmarking, and song similarity clustering — often with a 24–48 hour turnaround from assignment to demo. Here is how the team works: ...
Deploying websites over dinner
Over dinner with Nishka, we were trying to deploy a website. The challenge was: How can we deploy this website, just on mobile, without getting up from the dinner table? STEP 1: Hosting. On my phone, I dictated to ChatGPT (whose transcription is excellent), copy-pasted that to Gemini (which is faster): I want to publish specifically a static HTML web page on my own domain. I want the easiest way that I can host it, preferably just by copy-pasting from my mobile without needing to muck around with Git and the likes of it. What are the most robust, reliable hosting providers that I could use? I can sort out the domain name myself as long as they support an option to map a custom domain name to them. Ideally, I am looking for something that is free, preferably free forever. ...
Sambar Styles
My wife’s sambar tastes different from my mother’s. And mine, too. When I cooked as a bachelor, my neighbour would pop by, taste the sambar, and exclaim, “Rasam super!” Surbhi’s Day 5 of the 30-day challenge was about Sambar which inspired me to take her dataset and create a decision tree for which state a sambar recipe is from based on its ingredients. ChatGPT started with 68 recipes and built a tree at 41% accuracy. As we added more recipes: ...
Panchayat solves the wrong problem
In Panchayat Season 1 Episode 7 Ladka Tez Hai Lekin…, at around 17:00, Pradhan asks Abhishek to solve problem 42. 42. A takes 5 days more than B to do a certain job and 9 days more than C. A and B together can do the job in the same time as C. How many days would A take to do it? (a) 16 days (b) 18 days (c) 15 days (d) 20 days The correct answer is (c) 15 days. But interestingly, ChatGPT got it wrong the first time too. It said (a) 15 days instead of (c) 15 days, and required a fact-check to correct itself. ...
AI advice for teams
I updated my AI Advice page by: Transcribing my calls in the last 2 months (Gemini 3.1 Pro, “Transcribe this call recording…”) Extracting AI advice (Gemini 3 Flash, “Summarize ALL AI-related advice … into 1-sentence bullets”) Asking Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini to document what’s new / changed. I added this request: But, and this is IMPORTANT, analyze my original writing style, write it exactly in that style, and then verify to make sure it follows the same style (correcting where required.) ...
LLMs are as energy-efficient as brains
For a typical GDPVal style task, humans take ~7 hours and the brain consumes ~135 Wh. Frontier LLM agents spend 50-500 Wh. So, we may already be 3x more or less efficient than the brain. Roughly in the same ballbark! ...
My food preferences
I use ChatGPT to recommend which restaurant I should eat at and what food I should eat. So often that I decided to share a profile of my eating preferences. But rather than think about it and type it myself, I asked it to Efficiently interview me to identify my food preferences. Document it for AI agents to help me pick restaurants. Plan like an expert. ...
Using Codex as my OS
Increasingly, I’m using Codex (or other AI coding agents) as the “operating system” to run programs. That is, rather than directly run programs, I have the coding agent run the program. Advantage: If the program breaks, or needs a configuration change, the coding agent debugs it and fixes it. I don’t need to do anything. This is particularly useful for installation. For example: Install demucs and run it against my music folder. ...