February 15, 2026

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): ...

This week, I learned: ffmpeg lets you concatenate files without needing a separate input file. ffmpeg -i "concat:input1.ext|input2.ext|input3.ext" -c copy output.ext works as long as the files use the same codecs and parameters. There is a psychological phenomenon where we “overlay” old images of people we haven’t seen in decades onto their current selves, making it hard to distinguish between someone who is 30 and someone who is 70. Gemini Most modern ls tools like eza --icons or lsd support icons if the terminal font supports icons, like Nerd Fonts. For example, this:  shows up as a GitHub icon and 󰌻 as a LinkedIn icon. The Nerd Fonts Cheat Sheet is a good place to search for these. You may need to download a supporting font. I just replaced Fira Code with Maple Mono as my default font on VS Code. Like Fira Code, the ligatures are great, but there are extra ligatures like [TODO] or [ERROR], connected italics, nerd font support, variable font weights, and more. Via lobste.rs. (Update: Maple Mono is much harder to read than Fira Code, so I switched back. But it’s a nice idea.)