S Anand

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: ...

This weekend, two people asked me, roughly “How do I use AI better?” This is a frequently asked questions. I document my FAQs, e.g. time management, career advice, etc. and it was time to add AI advice to this list. I often record online calls and transcribe them. I asked Gemini, Claude and ChatGPT for the best way to summarize 400 transcripts of ~40K each. Claude’s suggestion was the best: Use Gemini Flash (1M context, dirt cheap) to process calls in batches of 20-25 Each batch → extract advice themes Aggregate batch results with Claude Sonnet for final synthesis But I ignored it because it was too much work. (See my AI advice: “Ask for easier output”) ...

I use comics to make my course more engaging. Each question has a comic strip that explains what question is trying to teach. For example, here’s the comic for the question that teaches students about prompt injection attacks: For each question, I use this prompt on Nano Banano Pro via Gemini 3 Pro: Create a simple black and white line drawing comic strips with minimal shading, with 1-2 panels, and clear speech bubbles with capitalized text, to explain why my online student quizzes teach a specific concept in a specific way. Use the likeness of the characters and style in the attached image from https://files.s-anand.net/images/gb-shuv-genie.avif. 1. GB: an enthusiastic socially oblivious geek chatterbox 2. Shuv: a cynic whose humor is at the expense of others 3. Genie: a naive, over-helpful AI that pops out of a lamp Their exaggerated facial expressions to convey their emotions effectively. --- Panel 1/2 (left): GB (excited): I taught Genie to follow orders. Shuv (deadpan): Genie, beat yourself to death. Panel 2/2 (right): Genie is a bloody mess, having beaten itself to death. GB (sheepish): Maybe obedient isn't always best... … along with this reference image for character consistency: ...

Graded Assignment 1 (GA1) for the Tools in Data Science course is released and is due Sun 15 Feb 2026. See https://exam.sanand.workers.dev/tds-2026-01-ga1 If you already started, you might notice some questions have changed. Why is GA1 changing? Because some questions don’t work. For example: We replaced Claude Artifacts with a Vercel question because Claude won’t allow a proxy anymore. A question had unintentionally wrong instructions. (Some questions have intentionally wrong instructions, but those are, …um… intentional). Someone changed an API key. … etc. When will GA1 stabilize? Probably by end of day, Sun 9 Feb 2026? ...