avif on S Anand

Things I Learned - 25 Jan 2026

Sun, 25 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

POSSE - “Publish (on your) Own Site, Share Everywhere” - is a self-explanatory content sharing approach. 1 minute video introduction. Alternatives are:
- COPE: Create once, publish everywhere.
- POSE: Publish once, syndicate everywhere.
- PESOS: Publish elsewhere, syndicate to own site.
- PESETAS: Publish elsewhere, syndicate everything to a silo (one of the “elsewhere"s).
Cory Doctorow’s essay on how Google will use AI against shoppers is a great lesson on several lessons in behavioral economics. Fighting it is hard, but here is generally good advice: ChatGPT
- Never buy when rushed.
- Set a max price.
- Compare 2+ options (TOTAL price) early.
- Shop logged-out for big purchases.
Vortex is supported by DuckDB. It’s a better format than parquet for analysis and querying remotely. Gemini
Research suggests that insight emerges when we struggle with a problem, get stuck, then DISENGAGE (to inhibit distractions). EEGs can predict insight ~8 seconds before it happens using this pattern. Gemini
- Books that have suggested this are:
  - The Art of Thought (1926)
  - The Act of Creation (1964)
  - The Inner Game of Tennis (1974)
  - Hare Brain, Toroise Mind (1997)
  - Taoism’s Wu Wei: “muddy water, let stand, becomes clear”
  - Zen Koans: giving students impossible riddles
- Books that have argued (probably incorrectly) that an impasse is a signal to push harder, not step back, are:
We are starting to talk like LLMs. Empirical evidence of Large Language Model’s influence on human spoken communication
Email support for animated AVIF is limited. Though it’s perhaps the best compression format, and Apple Mail supports it well, Outlook on Windows does not support it. GMail converts it to GIF. Also, Google Groups does not yet support it. When I sent an animated AVIF in a Google Group email, it was replaced by the content proxy to this nonexistent URL.
Portkey Models is a repo of model related data (e.g. price, max tokens, capabilities, etc.) for a large number of models. Somewhat similar to Simon Willison’s LLM Prices.
git-filter-repo is a surprisingly easy way to rewrite your git history to remove specific files (e.g. large files, sensitive files). It can preserve timestamps, messages, etc. It just filters out specific files as if they were never committed. This can reduce the size of repos dramatically.

Things I Learned - 18 Jan 2026

Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

Vulture is a neat library that funds unused Python code. uvx vulture script.py works fairly well, out-of-box. This helps when cleaning up AI-edited scripts that often have left-over code or imports.
One of the lightest alternatives to Google Analytics is GoatCounter. If you just want page views, referrers, browsers, OSes, countries, and devices, it’s great. It’s privacy-friendly (no cookies), open source, easy to self-host, free for small sites, and the data is exportable.
The number of countries that allow visa-free entries to Indian passports is gently growing in Asia (Kazakhstan, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Malaysia, Iran, and Philippines).
Lessons from performance books. Claude # #
- Summary: In early days, explore, sample. Then narrow based on interest & fit. Practice hard and persist.
- ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Range (David Epstein): In changing environments (rules shift, feedback is noisy/late), sample broadly, i.e. generalize. Specialization vs generalization
  - Nobel laureates have more hobbies. Olympic athletes have less. Shift nurses have same hobbies as non-shift workers. Hobbies help expertise in some areas
  - Rewarding ONLY what succeeds locks behavior, halts exploration. Vary / delay incentives. Reward AFTER figuring out what works. Reinforcement and rewards
  - Maybe “orderly” people specialize and creative people generalize? So pick what aligns with personality?
- ⭐⭐⭐ Peak (Anders Ericsson & Robert Pool): Compounded practice at the edge of competence, with good immediate feedback, helps 14-26%.
  - But talent (genetics, upbringing, brainpower) differentiates more the expert level.
  - Slow, effortful practice (spaced recall, interleaving topics, self-testing) builds lasting knowledge - but looks inefficient and doesn’t help with exams. Learning and long-term retention
  - “Easy” 10K hours don’t help.
- ⭐⭐ Grit (Angela Duckworth): predicts roughly the same as conscientiousness (18%). It predicts success in stable paths moderately (but brainpower, etc. matter too).
  - But premature grit hurts. Quit if it helps.
  - But environment can defeat grit.
Lessons from attention economy books. Claude # #
- The attention economy is real. It is designed to capture our mind, and it is winning.
- Distractions hurt MUCH more than we think. Batching, focus time helps.
- Privilege helps. The rich have more control over these than the poor do.
- ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Deep Work (Cal Newport, 2016) and ⭐⭐⭐ Digital Minimalism (Cal Newport, 2019): control the tools. Focus time, digital detox, embrace boredom. This helps - when you can afford to.
- ⭐⭐⭐ Indistractable (Nir Eyal): control yourself. The problem is internal (also true), so build habits, since willpower depletes (hm… not really).
- ⭐⭐⭐ How to Do Nothing (Jenny Odell, 2019): reject. Embrace boredom as resistance. This helps - when you can afford to.
- ⭐⭐ Stolen Focus (Johann Hari, 2022): regulate & rebel. The problem is systemic and external (also true). Reclaim your interface.
- BTW: Goldfish have excellent attention spans and memory :-)
Lessons from trauma books. Claude # #
- ⭐⭐⭐ The Body Keeps the Score (Bessel van der Kolk, 2014): trauma recall shuts down the speech area. Eye movement desensitization (EMDR) helps. So does CBT, despite what the book says. But does yoga (only a little) or neurofeedback (too little data)?
- ⭐⭐⭐ What Happened to You? (Bruce Perry & Oprah Winfrey, 2021): calming people down before talking. Strong connections help more than a therapist.
- ⭐⭐ The Myth of Normal (Gabor Maté, 2022): trauma causes cancer (no), autoimmunity (partly), ALS (?), etc.
- ⭐ It Didn’t Start with You (Mark Wolynn, 2016): maybe anxiety is epigenetic and heriditary? Unproven. Family Constellation Therapy is wrong
- ⭐⭐ My Grandmother’s Hands (Resmaa Menakem, 2017): maybe racism is a somatic (body) response to generational (epigenetic) trauma? Too little data
- ⭐⭐ No Bad Parts (Richard Schwartz): maybe we’re not one person but a collection of parts, and interviewing family systems (IFS) helps? Unclear
- ⭐⭐⭐ Maybe You Should Talk to Someone (Lori Gottlieb): our memory is unreliable and therapy is messy. Connection & compassion help
- Most of these are based on the contested Polyvagal Theory: the nervous system scans for danger before the mind can process it. But the specific claims of the theory are wrong and it makes no other falsifiable claims.
  - The nervous system has hierarchical responses to threat. 🟢 Not unique to PVT
  - Social connection regulates physiology. 🟢 Not unique to PVT
  - Unconscious threat detection (neuroception). 🟡 Weak evidence
  - Mamellian brain (ventral vagal system) is uniquely mammalian. 🔴 Lungfish have it
  - Reptilian brain (dorsal vagal) “shutdown” causes dissociation. 🔴 No evidence
  - RSA directly measures vagal tone. 🔴 Contested
  - Reptiles are “asocial”. 🔴 Wrong
- Trauma causes body changes too. It’s not just the mind.
- Childhood trauma persists.
- Relationships (connection & compassion) help more than therapy
What constitutes tax residency in India? For an Indian citizen, as I understand it (after 2 hours of research):
- If you were in India >= 182 days: Resident*
- Else, if you left India this year for employment: NRI.
- Else, if you are an Indian Citizen living abroad (visiting or not):
  - If Indian Income <= ₹15 Lakhs: NRI.
  - Else if you were in India >= 120 days AND >= 365 days in the last 4 years: RNOR.
  - Else if you are not liable to tax in any other country: RNOR.
- Else, if you left India for non-employment (students, tourism) and were in India >= 60 days AND >= 365 days in the last 4 years: Resident*
- Else: NRI.
- If you ended up as a Resident*
  - If you were NRI in 9 of the last 10 years OR in India <= 729 days in the last 7 years: RNOR
  - Else: ROR (Resident & Ordinarily Resident).
- For all practical purposes, RNOR is like an NRI. You pay tax only on Indian income, not global income. It’s like a transition status for returning NRIs.
AVIF compresses better than WebP and may be the “next big thing”. I will be switching for all future images. Squoosh remains my choice of compressor and Ezgif’s AVIF maker and GIF to AVIF are handy.

Things I Learned - 29 Sep 2024

Sun, 29 Sep 2024 00:00:00 +0000

This week, I learned:

Pyodide can access the DOM and JavaScript in the browser
Jupyter Lite lets you run Jupyter notebooks in the browser
AVIFs is about 10X better than GIFs. I tried creating one via EZGIF AVIF Maker and the .avifs file created was 15X smaller! ffmpeg -i input.gif -c:v libaom-av1 -crf 30 -b:v 0 -cpu-used 4 -tiles -an output.avif
Claude 3.5 thinks .opus is the best format to compress audio. It used ffmpeg -i audio.wav -c:a libopus -b:a 16k -application voip -vbr on -compression_level 10 audio.opus
API coding best practices Source via Simon Willison:
- Always add screenshots to the Readme. They never break.
- Always add every example. Human think in examples.
- Avoid defaults and be explicit unless 99% of the usage is with the default.
- Make the feedback loops incredibly fast.
- Make deprecations easy for users to deal with.
- Keep objects immutable.
PyMuPDF4LLM can convert PDFs to Markdown. It handles tables, too.
- 04 Oct 2024. PDF-Extract-Kit does PDF layout, formula, table, and OCR extraction using various models.
- 04 Oct 2024. llmsherpa extracts PDF layout, tables, not OCR
When evaluating feasibility of technology with LLMs always ask for multiple options and pick from those. Simon Willison
Gemini supports audio natively
Google Vertex AI has an OpenAI compatible API but it works only for some models. Anthropic and Gemini are not compatible.
When you paste HTML into Excel, it automatically changes the font of the cell to match the content in the HTML!
Aptos is the new default font in Office - replacing Calibri.
Anthropic’s Introducing Contextual Retrieval says:
- Use BM25 in addition to embeddings to match rare terms (e.g. identifiers)
- Add a context to each chunk’s metadata (generate it with a cheap LLM) and pass it to the summarizing LLM
- Reranking helps with cost AND accuracy. Use Cohere or Voyage
Sentient lets you control the browser via Python in natural language