summarization on S Anand

Agent-consumable content

Tue, 19 May 2026 11:08:59 +0800

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:

Things I learnt and blog posts I write.
Prompts I use frequently.
Trending GitHub repos I want to evaluate.
Talks I deliver and data stories I write.
Demos I build and code I write.
Weight and other fitness data.
Teaching material, assessments and evaluations and analysis.
Coding agent logs.
Sensors: Location, mostly.
Daily journals: Food, sleep, deeds, pains, …
Media journals: Books, movies, TV series, …
Notes (of various kinds): TODOs, app / tool ideas, people I know / meet, questions I’m asked, my beliefs, …

(Notably missing are photos / videos, which I’ve fallen out of the habit of.)

Three, I summarize the content for agents. For example:

Adding blog frontmatter by summarizing my blog posts
Adding transcript frontmatter by summarizing my meeting transcripts.
Identifying actions extracted from transcripts.
Summarizing my code as podcasts.
Summarizing prompts as SKILL.md files.
Summarizing conversations into advice for AI, time management, etc.
Summarizing technical choices into a technology radar
Extracting transcripts elements, like insights, experiments to run, actions, what I missed, what they missed, etc.

On my list is Karpathy’s LLM wiki, summarizing my photos, and more.

Just writing this post took me an hour! It also convinced me that I have lots of content and there’s a lot of under-leverage in unleashing agents on what I already have.

New ways of reading books

Tue, 06 Jan 2026 11:03:07 +0800

I’m using AI to read books by:

Summarizing. This tells me what the books is about, the key points it makes and the main takeaways. It also helps me decide if I want to dig deeper.
Fact-checking. I can find mistakes, alternate perspectives, and biases. That’s a huge win!
Re-authoring. I can write it in the style of Malcolm Gladwell, Randall Munroe, Richard Feynman, or anyone else I like. Makes dense prose much more enjoyable.

So far, I’ve applied this at different levels - and I’m sure there are more possibilities:

A book. I can summarize & fact-check books like How Not To Die and learn what’s really established.
A chapter. I can turn each chapter of Primo Levi’s The Periodic Table into a Randall Munroe article that makes me laugh.
A sentence. I can take a single proverb like 忙しいほど幸せ or a Kural like அடக்கம் அமரருள் உய்க்கும் and turn it into an essay that makes me cry.
Multiple books. I can compare and fact-check multiple books on the same topic, e.g. Make It Stick, A Mind for Numbers, Ultralearning, and How to Take Smart Notes.

But I suspect this is just the beginning. AI opens up many more reading styles. For example:

Reviews over time. Could we read Lolita along with the 1950s interpretation, the 1970s feminist critique, the postcolonial turn, the contemporary reassessment? Understanding how meaning evolves over time?
Character story. Reading just the sub-novel of a single character, e.g. Hoid across the Cosmere?
AMA with the author. Interpret what the author might have meant or said, e.g. What caused the quake in Arelon?

We should be mindful that artistry is not understanding. Assessing, teaching, applying, debating, … these are better tests. But accessibility, enjoyment, and novelty are meaningful too. Let’s go exploring!

Books in 2025

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 07:21:27 +0000

I read 51 books in 2025 (about the same as in 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021.)

With a difference: I used AI to read 44 of them in the last week of the year.

Mind blowing

The Ants by Bert Hölldobler. Finally, after 20 years of wanting to read it. It lives up to the hype.
Wind and Truth (The Stormlight Archive, #5) by Brandon Sanderson. The only fiction I’ve taken notes for. (About 500 points.)

Life changing (or at least, perspective changing)

The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Edith Eger
Immune: A Journey Into the Mysterious System That Keeps You Alive by Philipp Dettmer
Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky
Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman
How Minds Change: The Surprising Science of Belief, Opinion, and Persuasion by David McRaney
The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Phantoms in the Brain: Probing the Mysteries of the Human Mind by V.S. Ramachandran
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Interesting

Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making by Tony Fadell
Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence by Anna Lembke
Ego Is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday
How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker
How to Change: The Science of Getting from Where You Are to Where You Want to Be by Katy Milkman
Lux (Texas Reckoners, #1) by Brandon Sanderson
Outcomes Over Output: Why customer behavior is the key metric for business success by Josh Seiden
Outlive: The Science & Art of Longevity by Peter Attia
Reality is Not What it Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity by Carlo Rovelli
Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes by Morgan Housel
Small Wins Every Day: 100 Powerful Ways to Transform Your Life and Health by Luke Coutinho
The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker
The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma by Bessel van der Kolk
The Cancer Code: A Revolutionary New Understanding of a Medical Mystery by Jason Fung
The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business by Erin Meyer
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan
The Diabetes Code: Prevent and Reverse Type 2 Diabetes Naturally by Jason Fung
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene (Popular Science) by Richard Dawkins
The Frugal Wizard’s Handbook for Surviving Medieval England (Secret Projects, #2) by Brandon Sanderson
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt
The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker
The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
The Slight Edge by Jeff Olson
The Song of the Cell: An Exploration of Medicine and the New Human by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Structure of Evolutionary Theory by Stephen Jay Gould
The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature by Steven Pinker
The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human by V.S. Ramachandran
Why We Die: The New Science of Aging and the Quest for Immortality by Venki Ramakrishnan
Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker

Worth skipping

How Not to Die: Discover the Foods Scientifically Proven to Prevent and Reverse Disease by Michael Greger
Lifespan: Why We Age―and Why We Don’t Have To by David Sinclair
Metabolical: The Lure and the Lies of Processed Food, Nutrition, and Modern Medicine by Robert H. Lustig
Price of the Modi Years by Aakar Patel
Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality by Christopher Ryan
The Molecule of More: How a Single Chemical in Your Brain Drives Love, Sex, and Creativity—and Will Determine the Fate of the Human Race by Daniel Z. Lieberman
The Obesity Code: Unlocking the Secrets of Weight Loss by Jason Fung
The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer by Elizabeth Blackburn

Re-reading

Words of Radiance (The Stormlight Archive, #2) by Brandon Sanderson
The Way of Kings (The Stormlight Archive, #1) by Brandon Sanderson
Elantris (Elantris, #1) by Brandon Sanderson

Here’s the list on GoodReads, sorted by read date.

Sun, 20 Oct 2024 07:32:39 +0000

Arun Tangirala and I webinared on “AI in Education” yesterday."

“(“Webinared” is not a word. But “verbing weirds language”.)”

Mid-way, Jose Swan from the audience asked, “Can you summarise this session using an AI?

There are SEVERAL tools you can use to summarize talks. Whisper for transcription, FFMpeg for keyframe extraction, #NotebookLM for podcast generation, text-embedding-3-small for topic modelling, and of course, any regular LLM include #ChatGPT for summarization or translation.

I spent this morning applying those to the webinar video, and writing it up the process.

Read on for the details…

https://www.s-anand.net/blog/tools-to-publish-annotated-talks-from-videos/

PS: I referenced Raj Vadigepalli midway and thought of Vivekananda Vedula, bringing back hostel memories from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras.