One of my goals this year is to learn to dance. I haven’t done much about it, but I did snatch one opportunity. At VizChitra, Ashok Kumar led an Afternoon Rhythm “where the drum sets a beat and you find your place within it.” He invited volunteers on stage. I usually volunteer for uncomfortable things (a habit from school days), so I briskly walked to the stage, waited for a few others to join, then started dancing to the beat. ...
Pick next month's LinkedIn posts from my blog. - Blog: ~/code/blog/posts/YYYY/\*.md (frontmatter: title, date, categories, tags, description, and `linkedin:` if already posted) - LinkedIn dump: ~/Documents/data/linkedin-posts.jsonl (type=post and type=comment; posts have impressionCount, reactionCount, commentCount, repostCount, postedText as a RELATIVE age like "2mo") Based on a Jul 2026 analysis of 169 posts + LinkedIn metrics: - Audience: ~750 founder/CEO/CTO/chief titles, ~570 engineers and data scientists, ~280 product. India and Singapore heavy. They read for a decision they can act on or a story they recognise. - My top posts have a reach (vs a typical post that month) of: 1. 8.6x - Everyday observation with a twist. Specific, visual, slightly absurd, mild grievance welcome. E.g. Plastic-cover-on-phone 185K, no-entry-for-sandals 47K, kind-air-hostess 36K, hot-cookies 27K. 2. 14-87x - A number that flips a default decision. "GPU or API" 663K, "which LLM gets better grades" 64K. Ensure a concrete decision. 3. 34x - A free thing usable today. TDS-free 285K, 60 reposts. 4. 4-12x - Exact, reproducible "here's how I did it". Voice-to-slides 93K. What loses: prompt-engineering 0.63x, vibe-coding 0.72x, coding 0.80x, ai-agents 0.79x, llms 0.89x. Workshop recaps get 1,700-2,700. Under 250 words gets a median 8,020 impressions; over 900 words gets 5,303. Pure data analyses (IMF, Wikipedia) get respectable but modest numbers unless they carry personal stakes or an actionable consequence. Reposts (save intent) run highest on benchmarking (7.0 avg) and education (5.9), even when reach is modest. Treat reposts and comments as better signal than reactions. The 2026 baseline is roughly half of 2025 (~4,000 vs ~8,000 median), so don't compare raw impressions across years. I no longer link the blog on LinkedIn: link posts get throttled. So we'll rewrite. ## Method 1. Take blog posts from the last 3 months. 2. Drop any with a `linkedin:` field. Then DO NOT TRUST that field - it has false negatives. For every remaining candidate, keyword-check its distinctive terms (proper nouns, tool names, coined phrases) against BOTH post and comment text in the full dump. Report anything already live. Example of a real miss: "How IMF mis-forecasts GDP growth" had no frontmatter field but was posted a month earlier. 3. Note the dump's max scrapedAt. Anything dated after it is UNVERIFIABLE - say so rather than assuming it's unposted. 4. Clean the dump: discard records where reactionCount > impressionCount (a scraper bug inflates some counts by ~1e9). 5. Auto-exclude: "Things I Learned" digests, workshop and talk summaries, dev-tooling posts (ffmpeg, redirect tracking, shell utilities). These are the developer posts I deliberately keep off LinkedIn. 6. Score each candidate against the four winning patterns. Prefer posts already under 500 words. 7. Portfolio rule: at least 2 of 5 must be non-AI or non-LLM. My feed is already LLM-saturated and that category runs below my own baseline. ## Output - for each of 5 picks, in priority order - Title, date, word count, blog URL - Which pattern it hits, and the specific past post it resembles - A one-line LinkedIn hook, in my voice, that I can use as the opening line - What to cut for LinkedIn (name sections, not "shorten it") - Any risk (named company, staleness, tone) Then: 3 near-misses in one line each, and a list of what you excluded and why. 31 Jul 2026. Created. Sources: https://chatgpt.com/c/6a6ab214-fd78-83ec-b319-3f5645325155 https://claude.ai/chat/c3dd952f-1a20-44a2-8eb3-29860201d8ee Feedback loop - run this first each month ...
Help me answer: **"What did I REALLY accomplish?"** in the last 7 days until yesterday. The aim isn't to produce a time log, activity report, exhaustive chronology, or list of completed tasks. It is to find out what really changed because of this week: in the world, in my trajectory, in other people, or in my sense of myself. Use @LocalMCP bash/read. Do not run Claude, Codex, Gemini, or other AI agents. I will update ~/Dropbox/notes/daily-deeds.md based on your output. ## What counts Look for state changes such as: - Something shipped, finished, adopted, decided, resolved, or stopped - Significant movement against one of my stated goals - A reusable asset, system, method, relationship, reputation, or capability that may compound - A conversation or introduction that opened an important new opportunity - A reaction - from me or someone else - that revealed impact or signficance - A changed belief, newly discovered principle, or invalidated assumption - A wrong direction killed, loss prevented, burden removed, or lingering loop closed - A personally significant first, act of courage, relationship moment, delight, surprise, or state of flow - Something small that future me may see as the beginning of something large Do not rank by time spent, apparent effort, number of meetings, seniority of people involved, prestige, or monetary value alone. One emotionally specific sentence in `daily-deeds.md` may matter more than twenty transcripts. Treat exact quotes, `:star:`, "wow," firsts, unusual behaviour, repeated later references, spontaneous delight, embarrassment, courage, and flow as strong (but not conclusive) personal importance signals. Do not invent undocumented events. Instead, generate specific memory prompts that may help me recall them. ## Sources and search procedure Search efficiently in two passes. ### Pass 1: Discover candidates Start with: - `~/Dropbox/notes/daily-deeds.md` - see what I record/skip/miss and how I write. - The current goals and status in `~/Dropbox/notes/goals-bucket-list.md` and `~/Dropbox/notes/@todo.md` and `~/code/blog/pages/skills/anand-objectives/SKILL.md` - Transcript filenames within the date window under `~/Dropbox/notes/transcripts/` - Emails via `gws` - both work ([email protected]) and personal ([email protected]) - WhatsApp messages via `~/Documents/data/whatsapp` - Dated completed and open entries in `~/Dropbox/notes/@todo.md` - Overlapping `~/Dropbox/notes/about/week-*.md` files, using them as leads rather than trusting their ranking - `~/code/talks/README.md` - `~/code/datastories/config.json` - `~/code/til/README.md` - `~/code/blog/description.md` - `~/code/README.md` - `~/code/llmdemos/config.json` Check file shapes and indexes before opening large files. Locate candidate files first, then read only relevant passages. Use calendar, email, chat, WhatsApp, browsing history, and repository history only through targeted date/name/topic searches to verify candidates or detect state changes. Do not dump or broadly scan archives. Browsing time and meeting duration are not accomplishments. Create a private raw list of roughly 20-40 possibilities before ranking. ### Pass 2: Verify and rank For the strongest possibilities, find direct `path:line` evidence where available. Judge each candidate separately on: - **State change:** What is now different? - **Goal movement:** Did it significantly advance an explicit or durable objective? - **Leverage:** Can it compound through an asset, person, system, method, or reputation? - **External evidence:** Did anyone adopt, approve, respond, quote, pay, publish, merge, invite, or change behaviour? - **Personal importance:** Are there signs that I may remember or value it unusually strongly? - **Durability:** Is it likely to matter three months from now? - **Counterfactual:** Would omitting change the week's story? Keep importance and evidence confidence separate. Small personal moments may be very important but low-confidence. Detailed meeting notes may be high-confidence but less important. There'll be plenty of work-related content. Balance by probing deeper for personal life signals (family, relationships, health, body, play, service, art, courage, joy, and unusual experiences). Include meaningful failures and closures - don't make the week look artificially successful. ## Output Keep the entire response reviewable in about two minutes. # What I may have REALLY accomplished ## Best current answer Write three concise bullets representing your best current interpretation of the week. Phrase them as changes, not activities. Prefer constructions such as: - "I proved that..." - "I moved ... from ... to ..." - "I created ... that can now..." - "I opened..." - "I stopped..." - "I discovered..." - "I experienced..." Do not simply say "I attended," "I worked on," "I discussed," or "I spent time." ## Candidate slate List up to 10 candidates, most significant first. For each: **1. Short candidate title** - Category: Outcome / Goal / Leverage / Seed / Learning / Closure / Moment - **What changed:** One sentence. - **Why it might matter:** One sentence explaining the possible long-term, goal, leverage, or personal significance. - **Evidence:** Concise `path:line` references. - **Your guess:** Importance: High / Medium / Wildcard. Evidence confidence: High / Medium / Low. Use **Wildcard** for something that might be deeply significant but whose importance cannot be inferred reliably. Do not fill all slots merely because they are available. ## What the record may have missed Ask at most three highly specific memory questions derived from the week's actual events. Good questions resemble: - "After the [specific event], was there one audience remark or private conversation you kept replaying?" - "During the trip to [place], did anything off-stage matter more than the scheduled event?" - "You had [specific demanding sequence]. Was there a moment of fear, courage, delight, embarrassment, connection, or flow that the records would not show?" Include: 1. One event-specific backstage or reaction prompt 2. One personal, relationship, body, play, or joy prompt 3. One quiet decision, failure, refusal, closure, or changed-belief prompt Do not ask generic questions such as "Anything else important?" ## Goal movement Mention only explicit goals that appear to have moved. Distinguish: - **Outcome movement:** the goal itself advanced - **Leading evidence:** behaviour or capability improved, but the goal did not necessarily advance - **No reliable evidence** Do not turn routine habit compliance into a headline unless something changed. ## Suggested `daily-deeds.md` additions Provide copy-ready lines for items that are important and absent or weakly recorded. Use this structure: `- Day YYYY-MM-DD. [What changed]. [Exact reaction, why it mattered, or what it may enable].` Preserve memorable exact words. ## Likely motion, not accomplishment Optionally list at most two items that consumed visible activity but did not appear to change anything important. Explain briefly why you excluded them. End with: `Reply with Keep: ... / Drop: ... / Missing: ... and I will turn this into the final weekly answer.`
Robert Engle and Clive Granger won the Nobel Prize for their work on ARCH and something-or-the-other-I-ought-to-have-studied-at-B-school. I was outside Engle’s office last month (somewhere within 100m of the corridor in the photo), and that’s the closest I’ve been to an Nobel laureate. Of course, some people know him personally and discuss ‘stupid problems’ with him.
In the meantime, I have been up to no good.
I’m on vacation until 27 August. Don’t expect too many updates. In the meantime, enjoy a CNet ad I liked. (Note: I’m not getting any “ad revenues” for this. Nor do I enjoy vodka. I prefer milk shakes.) (I used to have an Absolut vodka ad here, but it doesn’t seem to work any more.)
anand_m26blr: Hi Sonisha! How’re you? sonisha_jd: hi anand_m26blr: Where are you from? sonisha_jd: adb anand_m26blr: Sorry? ADB? sonisha_jd: adilabad sonisha_jd: a.p anand_m26blr: Oh, I see. I’m right now in Mumbai. anand_m26blr: Which chat room are you in? The reason I asked this was because sonisha_jd wasn’t in the chat room I was in, and I was logged in invisibly. I have a theory on who sonisha_jd is, but that’s a different story. ...