S Anand

This morning, I migrated my Tools in Data Science course page from Docsify to Hugo using Codex. Why? Because Docsify was great for a single term. For multiple terms, archives became complex. I still could have made it work, but it felt like time to move towards a static site generator. I don’t know how Hugo or Go work. I didn’t look at the code. I just gave Codex instructions and it did the rest. This gives me a bit more confidence that educators can start creating their own course sites without needing coding or platforms. Soon, they might not be stuck to LMSs either - they can build their own. ...

As AI marches along, another role at risk is the data engineer / database administrator. (Data scientists are already feeling the heat.) A common task for data engineers is to analyze SQL queries - to optimize and standardize. Pavan used Antigravity to analyze 1,500 SQL queries and found: 30% of queries are purely headcount / volume related. Much more than revenue (25%) or engagement (15%). That’s sign of a tactical culture. 70% of the queries are about What happened yesterday? rather than What will happen tomorrow? - again, tactical culture. Here’s the analysis. ...

If you look at the IMDb titles with a 9+ rating and 50K votes this decade, there are only 4 entries. Every single one of them is an Indian TV series. Title Votes Rating Aspirants 316,390 9.1 Scam 1992: The Harshad Mehta Story 166,400 9.2 Sandeep Bhaiya 76,586 9.1 Sapne Vs Everyone 74,342 9.3 This is a new phenomenon. Last decade, there was only one Indian TV series in the same list: TVF Pitchers. ...

Scott Adams, the author of Dilbert, passed away last month. While his work will live on, I was curious about the best way to build a Dilbert search engine. The first step is to extract the text. Pavan tested over half a dozen LLMs on ~30 Dilbert strips to see which one transcribed them best. Here are the results. Summary: Gemini 3 Flash does the best, and would cost ~$20 to process the entire Dilbert archive. But if you want a local solution, Qwen 3 VL 32b is the best. ...

I continue to be impressed by Gemini 3 and it’s become my default agent. It writes in simpler language than ChatGPT (almost as eloquent as Claude), has much larger limits, and, of course, is unbeaten at generating images. The Gemini app has 3 modes: Fast, Thinking, and Pro. Here’s when to use each: Simple task, e.g., grammar check, translate, summarize, or basic question? Use Fast. Pro overthinks. Multi-step logic, e.g., planning a trip with constraints, checking 15 emails, or identifying a subtle error in code? Use Thinking. Flash-based thinking beats Pro. Large input, e.g. 300-page PDF, 2 hours of video, etc.? Use Pro. It uses the 1M+ token window well. Complex problem, e.g. PhD-level science or a legal contract review, with high stakes? Use Pro. If you hit your Pro limit (which is pretty high!), just switch to Thinking, which is smart enough for most jobs anyway. ...

Several educators have AI-enabled their courses, like: David Malan at Harvard CS50 provides an AI-powered “rubber duck debugger” trained on course-specific materials. Mohan Paturi at UC San Diego has deployed AI-tutors to his students. Ethan Mollick at Wharton uses AI as tutor, coach, teammate, simulator, even student, and runs simulations. Jeremy Howard’s Fast.ai encourages students to use LLMs to write code, with a strict verification loop. Andrew Ng DeepLearning.AI integrates a chatbot into the platform, next to code cells, to handle syntax errors and beginner questions. But no one seems to have eliminated reading material, nor added an “Ask AI” button to solve each question, nor run it at my scale (~3,000 students annually). ...

I ordered a Caramel Cashew Cookie - Soft & Chewy at the Chennai airport, an hour before my flight. I’ve had cookies before, but not heated. The person at the counter put it in the microwave for 30 seconds before handing it to me. It was the best discovery I made in Jan 2026! It is crumbly. It is chewy. It melts. It soaks. It bends when you pick it up. It’s warm. It’s sweet. It’s nutty. It’s gooey. Oh, I could go on. It’s heavenly. ...

OpenAI launched Prism - an AI LaTeX IDE. It’s a boon for anyone writing LaTeX documents. All the nitty-gritty of formatting, syntax, etc. is handled by AI. You can collaborate, too. It brings the power of AI code editors to scientific document editing. It still has some way to go, though. I asked it to convert a portion of this paper into LaTeX. Here’s the image I passed: … and here’s the LaTeX output it generated: ...

My Tools in Data Science course is available publicly, with a few changes from last year. First, I removed all the content! Last year, Claude generated teaching material using my prompts. But what’s the point? I might as well give students the prompts directly. They can tweak it to their needs. This time, TDS shares the questions needed to learn a topic. Any AI will give you good answers. Second, it focuses on what AI does NOT do well. Coding syntax? Who cares. Basic analysis? ChatGPT can do that. In fact, each question now has an “Ask AI” button that dumps the question into your favorite AI tool. Just paste the answer and move on. ...

On Friday, our data & analytics client-facing teams connected Gemini to their Drive and Email: Open Gemini Make sure you see a “Pro” icon on the top right. (Some already had access. Some enabled it by clicking stuff.) Go to Settings & help > Connected apps. Turn on “Google Workspace” and approve access. Select “Pro” as the model (instead of “Fast” or “Thinking”). Then they ran this a prompt like this: Go through my Google Drive and find out what are the recent sales proposals we’ve picthed or new clients we’ve won. ...