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The Weekly: Technology and Art, a conflict in purpose

It has taken me longer to get this edition of The Weekly out. It’s partly because I have been organizing my thoughts around art and technology. I am starting to worry that tech is doing art dirty. I also suspect that technology’s impact on art, is a precursor to tech’s troubling impact on humanity at…
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The Weekly: AI Eats AI Research

I am earnestly trying to think and write about anything but AI these days. I was honestly going to write about cricket this week. The recent drama that is engulfing Indian Cricket at the moment is worth talking about. But that will have to wait for something a little more consequential. AI Eats AI Research…
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The Weekly: 996 or AI? Pick.

First things first. Been away for a while. I have probably gone through 3 rounds of burnout this year. Those burnouts triggered an intense re-look at my life and life choices. I will speak to the burnout soon. What I can say is that while I accomplished a lot this year, I am not ending…
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The Weekly: No Vibes in Manuals and Testing

… also in this issue: Sauce, SloMo and some stuff brewing in my mind. There is a scene in Die Another Day, where Q hands Bond a thick instruction manual for his new Aston Martin that comes with all kinds of guns and gadgets, and says, “You should be able to shoot through that in…
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The Weekly: Being Obviously Wrong

… also in this issue: life of legos and eggs, a brief crosspost, and a nagging question. Being obviously wrong, i.e., in a manner that is obvious and clear, can be a strength for automated systems. Because when a machine breaks — digital or mechanical — with a lot of sound and drama, it becomes…
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The Weekly: Schools need to teach Art History

… also in this edition of The Weekly: a dance of water and light and a quick kook at Microsoft’s original logo. Here is an unsubstantiated thesis: One reason society does not invest in art or pay artists is because we do not teach about art or art history in school, like we do math,…
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The Weekly: The Web with no Apps

… also in this edition of The Weekly: cool looking legos and a Waymo spotted in the wild. I have been thinking a lot about websites and web apps. What makes a website distinct from a web app? How do you define a web app, or a website? Are they necessarily different? I think these…
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The Weekly: Language is not Math

… and more from this edition of the Weekly. Counting and numbers as concepts strike me as different from words and language. This became obvious to me when I saw my toddler learning how to speak and count. We may assign words and language to numbers, but the abstract ideas of counting and arithmetic do…
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The Weekly: India does not need Generative AI

… and more from this edition of The Weekly. I contend that India does not need to worry about advancing fundamental GenAI research. Instead it needs to worry about knowing how to apply all of computer technology, and not just GenAI, to an Indian context. A tale of two problems: Research and Applications of Gen…

