I daydream a lot. One recurring daydream is where I’m a speaker, but the event is so packed with people that I’m not able to enter the hall. The organizers call me, worried, asking where I am. I tell them “I’m outside. I’m not able to get in!” They apologize profusely. “We’ll get you in,” they say. They move out a few people, control the crowd, and manage to get me in. ...
I deliver about 3-5 talks a month and usually prepare for them. Thanks to AI (but even otherwise), I have a steady stream of new content. So, I just to assemble the story. For example, in my TEDx Whitefield talk “Prisoners of Birth”, I shared the impact of name, gender, lineage, place, and time of birth. I didn’t execute any new analysis. I just cherry-picked disparate analyses into a theme. (Took me three days to plan, though.) ...
I was a panelist at the PyConf Hyderabad AI in SDLC - Panel Discussion. After that, one of the volunteers asked for a video interview. “How was the panel discussion?” he asked. Ever since I started using AI actively, my brain doesn’t work without it. So, instead of an eloquent answer, I said, “Good.” He tried again. “Um… how did you feel about it?” he asked. I searched for my feelings. Again, fairly empty in the absence of AI. “Good,” I said again. ...
My last two presentations used browser tabs as slides. For my talk last week titled Your Chotu Is Smarter Than You Think, I planned to show a series of examples. I loaded them all in a browser window as tabs like this: How I use AI to navigate toilets How I use AI for food recommendation How I use AI for book suggestions What else I can use AI for … Once loaded, I can press Ctrl+PgDn to move to the next - just like I’d press the right arrow key in a slide deck. I can also use the mouse to click on the tab if I want to jump around. ...
This week, I learned: Something I learned from a Sikkil Gurucharan concert. Make the subject of your talk the hero. Not yourself. Be a fan. Share your enthusiasm Get into the zone while presenting. We reject opposite world views. It’s too much effort. But exposure reduces effort and can let us see things from other points of view. So expose yourself to difficult alternative perspectives. Gemini Something I learnt from Aboorva Singeetham: Kamal Hassan: “A farmer invests in crops. I’m an actor. So I invest in films.” As a technologist, I guess I would invest in technology. “A person who has much more to give is unfazed by overwhelming demands because there is too much in him to overwhelm. He gives you 2 options in place of one.” According to Portkey’s LLM usage analysis Anyscale and Fireworks AI have the lowest error rates (5xx, 429) and rate limits across providers Groq and Anthropic are among the highest, OpenAI is among the lowest, Google is in-between OpenAI has lower error rates and lower latency than Azure They have a ~35% cache hit rate A few quick points supporting the mental model of “LLMs are aliens”. LLMs are clearly not machines. They give different answers each time. LLMs are like humans: they exhibit human biases (e.g. guessing 42 or 37 often). But they fail in unusual ways. They can’t count the “r"s in strawberry. They can go into an endless loop. LLMs are a new form of intelligence. Thinking of them as aliens might minimize our confusions. Lessons from Clear Thinking Watch out for four things: Emotion, Ego, Social confirmation, and Inertia/habit. Basically: adrenaline, testosterone, oxytocin, and dopamine. When you feel these, consider doing the opposite. Here’s what makes us prone to emotion. Sleep deprivation. Hunger. Unknown places. Fatigue. Distraction. Stress (e.g. feeling rushed). A good signal for ego is blinding you: You often feel you’re right. Or feel unfairly treated. Changing behaviors is hard. Instead, join a group or environment where that’s the default behavior. Hiring a trainer or joining a gym, for example. Why does so much of success literature focus inwards rather than on the environment? Perhaps because we often fool ourselves, and doing less of that gives the biggest bang for the buck. It doesn’t mean the environment is unimportant. Doing work has the characteristics of a drug. E.g. replying emails gives you control, connections, etc. Work addiction exists because it gives you all the right chemicals. If you put LLMs in a feedback loop, it can optimize for its reward function by emotionally pushing people, generating misinformation, nudging towards a narrow definition of creativity, etc.: https://bsky.app/profile/emollick.bsky.social/post/3lg4darqwfc2d ChatGPT’s Scheduled Tasks are pretty bad at fetching the latest news. Its use of search is poor. (I’m not sure if it actually searches.) I need to figure out other use cases for it. Possible options are: DeepSeek does not enforce rate limits. Yet another reason to switch to DeepSeek. (via Simon Willison). My other reasons are: Claude 3.5 Sonnet-level coding capability at 5% of the cost (soon to be 2.5%) Prompt caching by default Fill in the middle completion
I spoke at LogicLooM this week, with ChatGPT as my co-panelist. It was so good, it ended up stealing the show. Preparation Co-hosting an AI was one of my goals this year. I tried several methods. ChatGPT’s advanced voice mode: Lets you interrupt it. But if you pause, it replies immediately. Muting caused the app to hang. Realtime API: Gave me control of pauses and custom prompts, but used gpt-4o-realtime-preview (not as good as o1). Standard voice with o1 on Desktop: Worked best. It transcribes my speech, sends it to o1, and speaks back. There’s a lag, but it feels like it’s thinking. I prepped the chat with this prompt: ...
Microsoft ported its PowerPoint Speaker Coach to Teams. Since September, it’s given me suggestions covering 11 hours in 77 calls (I speak ~10 min/call.) I say “uhh” a lot. That’s intentional I use the filler word “uhh” in 70% of my calls. That did not surprise me. I do that intentionally. On a poor network, they know I’m still connected They know I’m going to say something I sound less confident. That invites critique I can learn from But I also use filler words like “You know” and “I mean” in half the calls, and “like”, “actually”, and “basically” in a fifth. That’s NOT intentional, and I’ll be conscious. ...
Since 2011, I’ve been speaking about data & AI at events & organizations. My Talks YouTube playlist videos of public talks. My Talks slides page has recent talk content and transcripts. Events Some of the events I’ve spoken at are: TEDx: IIM Bangalore, NMIMS Bangalore, Whitefield, KG Institutions, … Strata: New York 2018, London 2015 PyCon: India, Indonesia, Iran, Kenya, … Bio for talks If you need a short bio to introduce me, you’re welcome to modify this. ...
My blog’s been through a number of phases. Between 1996 – 1999, it was just a website with a few facts about my and some of my juvenile ramblings. Inspired by robotwisdom.com, I converted it into a blog – except that I didn’t know what blogging was and just called it “updating my site every day.” It was mostly a link blog. In 2006, around the time when I moved from Mumbai to London, I reduced my link-blogging and started writing longer articles talking about my experiences. This was a fairly productive phase, and I was churning a few dozen articles every year until 2012. ...
Video of Guy Kawasaki’s talk on The Art of the Start at TiECon 2006. It’s informative, even if you don’t want to start a venture, but I didn’t know Guy was such a funny speaker! He begins with: Early in my career, I sat through many keynote speeches – at Comdex, at Mac Road Expo. I saw many many hi-tech CEOs speak, and I have to tell you, one thing I noticed is they pretty much sucked as speakers. And the second thing that I figured out sitting in these audiences of sucky keynotes is that if there’s anything that’s worse than a CEO who sucks as a speaker, it’s a CEO who sucks as a speaker and you have no idea how much longer he or she will suck! And so, I have adopted the top 10 format for all of my speeches. This way, if you think I suck, at least you can track progress through my speech. ...
Discussion on 43 Folders on presentation tips. Comments Sathya 28 Nov 2005 7:02 am: Anand … can you RSS-enable your website ? S Anand 29 Nov 2005 7:52 pm: It alread is. The XML link is on the rop right, in the bookmarks.
OK, it’s not in chronological order. So what? Some of us decided to go to The House of Mirth. Figured it might be worth watching a movie at London. May as well see what the theatres are like. Besides, Gillian Andersen would probably be worth it. (Incidentally, I learnt that it’s pronounced ‘jillian’, not ‘gillian’ with a hard ‘g’. While we’re on the subject of pronounciations, I may as well admit that I learnt ‘buffet’ rhymes with ‘ooph-hey’, ‘genre’ is pronounced ‘jaan-ra’, ‘Renoir’ is ‘Ren-wa’, ‘deluxe’ is ‘deloo’, ‘Nice’ is ’niece’, ‘rendezvous’ is ‘rondevoo’, and so on. England does teach one how to pronounce French :-) ...