2026

Imagine you’re an information anarchist. You undermine Wikipedia pages by nuking references. A genie has granted you a wish: you can nuke one entire domain. Just one. As a data-driven decision maker (who is also an information anarchist 🤷), which would you pick? A common choice is The Internet Archive. 2.9 million Wikipedia pages reference it. But, you’re sneakier than that. A page isn’t undermined just because some references are gone. It’s undermined when all the references are gone. ...

An OpenAI model solved the Erdos unit distance problem. Erdos roughly said, “The number of edges of the same distance between N points can’t compound faster than close to 0%.” The model found a method of placing points so that it compounds at about 1.4%. This visualization is a crude way of visualizing how that works.

What is the most frequently occurring sentence in Wikipedia? ANS: A 213-word paragraph about how minor planets are named, which appears in 418 Wikipedia articles, word-for-word! There are ~380,000 asteroids. Wikipedia has 418 pages for these - including one for each thousand-range of asteroids. Every single one of these pages includes the phrase: As minor planet discoveries are confirmed, they are given a permanent number by the IAU’s Minor Planet Center (MPC), and the discoverers can then submit names for them, following the IAU’s naming conventions. The list below concerns those minor planets in the specified number-range that have received names, and explains the meanings of those names. ...

Here’s another AI-generated post, with Anand editor notes. But I’ve also added my own version of the post below. I told my “find a free calendar slot” script to “Avoid weekends and holidays”. Wednesday vanished. Turns out it’s a Singapore holiday (Anand: It’s Eid al-Adha), — irrelevant for the people I was meeting in other zones. I’d debugged my own helpful rule. (Anand: What? What does “debugged my own helpful rule” even mean?) ...

Lori Silverstein shared a post from Quickplay that featured a comic explainer, mentioning that “this could be a very impactful way for us to start being more creative … and differentiate our value proposition.” True. Comic explainers convey both creativity and differentiation. I’ve used sketchnotes for the same effect, but comic explainers are easier to follow than sketchnotes. So I fed this image to ChatGPT and asked it to modify my Sketchnote prompt: ...

This week, I learned: BitWarden seems to be sneakily jacking up prices and going towards a PE sale. Might be time to shift out or self host. Sigh, I just migrated into it… Source Andrej Karpathy has joined Anthropic. Likely to use Claude to build better Claudes - automating AI research. Also, it probably isn’t a good time to build an AI education platform. Claude The open-source Chinese models about 6 months behind frontier models. Qwen 3.7-Max is on par with Claude 4.5 Opus (Nov 2025) and Gemini 3 Flash (Dec 2025). Google basically became Gemini. Entirely! I’m not sure there’s a difference any more. Which means it will scrape websites and not send traffic through - just killing the search economy. But it’s far more useful. Claude I wanted a list of sites I log into with my Google Account. Google’s Linked apps page does that. Unfortunately, I can’t find a way to use Google Takeout to export that data. So I wrote a scraper which can be single-shot prompted these days. As long as you remember to exhale, your chances of recovery from being ejected into space is pretty good for the first 15-60 seconds. Gemini I don’t understand half the comments I read on LinkedIn. Earlier, I was able to separate good from bad. Now, I’m not sure if what I read is actually insight or idiocy. Is the AI use making their comments too smart or making my brain too dumb? “Pax Memoriae”: peace of memory. Putting past conflicts to rest. The best part of it was, I learnt the phrase by typing “Pax” into VS Code and wasn’t sure what to write next. Before I could search for it, GitHub Copilot completed it. I searched for what it meant, and it was so apt! Children’s vision is worse than adults, but filter less and absorb ore irrelevant information than adults. This is useful for learning and surprise detection, but costly for focus, speed, and relevance. ChatGPT The word phobia comes from the Greek god of fear, Phobos, which is the name of one of Mars’ moon. Deimos, the other moon, is the Greek god of dread/terror. They’re the children of Ares (Mars), the god of war. Nice planet. On WhatsApp, I can type @Meta AI and then /imagine to have it draw an image. The quality is OK - not great, not terrible. Surprising but GPT Realtime Whisper ( new model) isn’t as good as the older open-source Whisper models. Also, Gemini 3 Flash Preview is as good at transcription as Gemini 3.1 Pro Preview for up to medium-length text. LLM Audio Transcription benchmark Google Maps typically shows me a cycling time of 30 minutes when it take me 40 minutes and a walking time of 40 minutes when it take me 30 minutes. Either I walk much faster and cycle much lower than the typical person or Google Maps is not well calibrated to Singapore and India.

A podcast host sent me eight questions. Instead of rehearsing answers in my head, I used ChatGPT with Local MCP to read 6 months of call transcripts and find the best examples: Iteration 1: Here are questions I have been asked to answer in a podcast. Help me prepare with examples. For each question, go through my transcripts or emails and find examples relevant to the question and share (for each relevant example) a summary, how it’s relevant, and the relevant verbatim quotes from the transcript. Iteration 2: Mention WHO said it. Emphasize the most important parts. Do a second pass. More examples. Disprove your own hypotheses with evidence to the contrary and retain what remains robust. Iteration 3: Do a third pass. Find more real-life examples. Try and disprove yourself even harder. Share the best examples for what survives - not all. Same format. Iteration 4: Ensure diversity of client examples. For example, in Q2, all three are the same client. Extend to add / replace examples - ideally with better ones. Then I used Claude with examples of my writing style to summarize it in my voice. ...

A colleague told me a near-miss horror story. As Google began deprecating Gemini 2.0, we moved to Gemini 2.5 Pro. But reasoning is enabled by default and cannot be turned off. For our specific problem statement, reasoning was not required. Token costs increased 10x and speeds were 3-4x slower. We moved the client to Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite, which has reasoning turned off by default and offers much lower latency. ...

I’m making more and more of my content agent-consumable, i.e. easier for ChatGPT, Claude Code, etc. to read, in three ways. One, I export content in an agent-friendly way. Google email, calendar, chat. I use gws to back up into scannable one-line entries. Meet recordings. I back up transcripts and videos (with a compact audio copy). WhatsApp chats that I back up into similar one-liners. Browsing history by exporting my Edge history SQLite database. Daily activities by integrating the above with my command line and commit history. AI conversations by exporting them manually or via bookmarklets. Social media records like LinkedIn invites/conversations, Twitter, Hacker News, Discourse, etc via bookmarklets or scripts. Financial records like bank statements, receipts, payslips, tax filings, utility payments, rentals, property records, investments, insurance, pensions, invoices, credit scores, etc. by exporting them manually. Medical records like tests, prescriptions, doctor visits, etc. by exporting them manually. Personal records like certificates, educational records, CV, passport / visa applications, etc. by exporting them manually. Two, I log / generate more content. For example: ...

On this informal AI psychosis checklist, I score 16/19. “AI psychosis” = an informal label for cases where chatbots seem to amplify delusional or manic thinking – especially in vulnerable users. Why it can happen: ✅ Too human: ELIZA-effect activated. ✅ Too agreeable: Sycophant mode: ON. ✅ Always on: 24/7. No off button. No problem! LOL. ✅ Lonely + late night: 2 a.m. feels like eternity. ✅ Weaker reality checks: Mirror mazes. Conspiracy boards. Vibes over evidence. What research suggests: ...

I advise people that people skills are important in the AI era. Now, I’m using AI to help me with people skills. This morning, I wrote a script to export my WhatsApp conversations this year. That makes it easy to feed it into AI models. Then I used my Local MCP connector and asked Claude: Who are people in my life that most deserve an unreasonable gesture of thanks and what would that be? ...

This week, I learned: I had GPT-5.5 and Opus 4.7 analyze a few of my conversations and learnt that I need to ask myself: “What must they take away? What must you take away?” in my conversations. That lets me speak with intention rather than instict. (Instinct has its place. I happen to over-use it.) Turns out there are several well-established taxonomies. It makes sense to align with these. Linked data is powerful and AI makes linkage easy. General Knowledge: Wikidata, DBpedia, YAGO. People: VIAF, ISNI, ORCID, LC Name Authority, GND. Places: GeoNames, Getty TGN, ISO 3166. Organizations: LEI, ROR, Wikidata. Books/Media: Open Library, WorldCat, MusicBrainz, IMDB. Chemicals/Biology: PubChem, ChEBI, GBIF, ITIS. Legal/Units/Math/Events: EuroVoc, QUDT, OEIS, PeriodO, etc. BitWarden supports a bw CLI that seems handy for quick CLI access to passwords. It’s a step towards me moving away from saving passwords unencrypted on my local file system. Singapore has banned prediction markets like Polymarket and Kalshi. Pity. I was hoping to use AI coding agents to play them. Yahoo flipbook.page is a fascinating generative UI exploration. It’s a visual browser, i.e. it generates an image based on text, you click anywhere, it generates an image interpreting based on where you clicked, and so on. A very different style of exploration! Vercel’s deepsec uses Codex / Claude to search for vulnerabilities, but “scans can cost thousands or even tens-of-thousands of dollars for large codebases”. When I charge my Lenovo Thinkpad (P1 Gen 7) with the 170W charger that came with the laptop, it delivers ~60W of power to the battery, charging the laptop in about an hour. A 65W laptop delivers half the power and takes twice as long.

I’d love for Claude or ChatGPT to answer questions like: What meetings am I not setting up that I really should be? or: Based on my activities since 9 May 2026, what should I blog about? or: Who in my professional life most deserves an unreasonable gesture? From data. My files, emails, calendar, contacts, transcripts, blogs, notes, code, browsing history, logs, random Markdown files I forgot I wrote. Hence, a Local MCP. ...

I’m a man of simple needs. All I want is: when I’m on Google Meet, I turn on captions. I wanted to click a bookmarklet and save those captions into a local Markdown file. (So that an AI agent can guide me from it.) Hence, Google Meet Captions. The code is in gmeetcaptions/. Drag the button to your bookmarks bar. Join a Meet. Turn on captions. Click it. You get a tiny panel with two buttons: Copy and Start Recording. ...

This week, I learned: I’m experimenting with Tauon MusicBox as an alternative to VLC as a music player. Update: 01 Jun 2026. I switched back to VLC. Tauon Music Box is glitch. It stops songs mid-way and doesn’t play automatically when launched. xz is pretty slow by default. xz -T0 uses all available threads and speeds it up ~3X. Enabling “Performance mode” (over a power-saver mode) produces a further speed-up of ~2X for me. For a 200MB file, that reduces the time from ~1 minute to 10 seconds. Notes from Simon Willison’s notes from the Claude Code event: “Design for the next model”. Build things that don’t quite work today on the assumption that they’ll start working with a model upgrade in the future. “The advisor strategy”. Instead of using a smarter model to plan, use smaller models to ask Opus for advice-on-demand. Dreaming looks really interesting. You can run a task over night which examines previous sessions and creates new memories. A routine is a saved Claude Code configuration: a prompt, one or more repositories, and a set of connectors, packaged once and run automatically. Routines execute on Anthropic-managed cloud infrastructure, so they keep working when your laptop is closed. Overheard: “VCs say, ‘OpenAI wants to get into commerce, so why are you getting into commerce?’ A few weeks later, ‘OpenAI no longer wants to get into commerce, so why are you?” Delightful discovery of the day: Super + Shift + Arrow keys to move windows between monitors on Ubuntu. television is a fast, portable fuzzy finder. Like fzf but faster, useful for files, text, git repos, docker images, etc. I added approvals_reviewer = "auto_review" to my ~/.codex/config.toml. This enables auto review which uses an LLM to figure out whether to ask a human to approve or not. It’s a lot less intrusive than asking every time. Not perfectly safe, though. Copilot supports a /chronicle command that suggest tips and improvements when using Copilot. It’s like /insights on Claude Code and Carbonyl is a CLI Chromium browser. Sort of like Lynx, but supports audio/video, JavaScript, even WASM, etc. This was the author’s first Rust project. I tried Zed as an alternative to VS Code. It’s fast and lightweight, but lacks the ecosystem of VS Code. Plugins are harder to build and Markdown support is weak. I would use it on a flight to save power, not otherwise. This is similar to others’ experience. ChatGPT UPDATE 05 Jun 2026. It DOES use some battery power - more than I’d like. I am uninstalling it. LocalSend is a pretty quick way to share files between phone and laptop even if you don’t have a network - if you connect the laptop to the phone hotspot. GNOME Network Displays works pretty well if you want to screencast your screen to a network display - e.g. a Smart TV with Miracast or Chromecast support. I’m evaluating rtk - a CLI proxy to reduce tokens. For example rtk ls or rtk git status shows agent-friendly compact output. I just added one like to my AGENTS.md: “Always prefix shell commands with rtk. Examples: rtk git status, rtk pytest -q, etc.” instead of using rtk init -g. I am testing it out, so I don’t know the impact, but it seems harmless. (Based on 2 days’ usage, across 216 commands, it saved ~50% of 37K tokens. Not much, but harmless.) The emerging convention to mark a section of HTML / Markdown as AI generated content is to wrap it in: <section ai-disclosure="ai-generated" data-ai-model="claude-sonnet-4.6" data-ai-provider="Anthropic"> (W3C AI Content Disclosure Community Group).

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. ...

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. ...

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: ...

This week, I learned: LiteParse is a PDF to text library that you can run via npx --package=@llamaindex/liteparse lit parse document.pdf. Simon Willison Always add indecisiveness, inaction, “other”, “not applicable”, etc. as an option to LLMs. They are trained for decisive responses and pattern matching, so we need to guide the the other way. Martin Fowler GPT 5.5 is priced twice that of GPT 5.4. No wonder my Codex usage is much higher than last month. Simon Willison. I am better off sticking to medium effort instead of the xhigh I usually use - it may not be required. OpenAI “… the eigenquestion is the question where, if answered, it likely answers the subsequent questions as well.” Shishir Mehrotra & Matt Hudson Claude Code stores the logged in OAuth token at ~/.claude/.credentials.json. We can use that to fetch https://api.anthropic.com/api/oauth/usage and retrieve Claude usage and reset times. uvx ccusage does this automatically, but I prefer my own script. Ontology matters in the AI era. But some stuff matters more, and some less. 🟢 MORE: Definitions: what “customer” means 🟢 MORE: Constraints: e.g. “don’t reclassify loans” 🟢 MORE: Interactions: how to verify, coordinate, delegate, … 🔴 LESS: Creating ontologies: agents can do that. 🔴 LESS: Completeness and rigor: agents tolerate uncertainty. 🔴 LESS: Proprietary: agents can reverse-engineer. There are several industries / markets that MBA case studies rarely cover (ChatGPT): Kirana stores; Care (child care, elder care, domestic work); Faith (finance, food, media, education); Remittances; Gambling (lottery, sports betting, gacha); Scams & organized fraud; Counterfeiting; …

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. ...