Weekly on Noetic Nought

Weekly #31 (2026)

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 01:03:00 +0530

Down with Flu

I was down with the flu from Thursday. I suspect I may have caught something in the gym on Tuesday – the only workout that I was able to get this week. I’ve been getting better and hoping to get back to the gym, soon-ish.

Replaced broken Uke string

After months of letting the Uke remain in the cupboard with a broken string, I finally had the time to replace a broken string. Like all things Ukulele until now, used a couple of YouTube videos to learn how to do it. It seems to be holding up so far.

Finding Forrester

We watched Finding Forrester this weekend on separate screens, but synced. It was such a heart warming story that I kept wishing that it was a true story when the movie ended.

Sing Geetham

I usually catch up on my Telugu movie backlog when the wife isn’t around. (I was ‘quarantining’ this week to spare her the Flu). I finally watched Sing Geetham. The songs as dialogue idea was novel. It was nice to see a couple of Instagram/YouTube creators I watched during the COVID-19 years, in the movie. But, I wasn’t impressed by the plot itself, as much.

Book: Ultimate Glory

I was gifted this book on the history of Ultimate a few months ago, but only got to reading it this week. I read about 60 pages of it, and it has been a fun read. I picked it up from a small pile of books that my wife put in front of me, also because Mukund recently gave a plug on the TIKS Frisbee group.

Delhi Ultimate fund raising for Bharat Trophy

We are trying to send a fully funded team from Delhi to Bharat Trophy this year. I’ve been involved in an advisory capacity and helped with getting the coaching staff, managers in place, who are doing all the work. It has always been tricky to raise funds for Ultimate teams, specially so, in the post-Covid era. Here’s the fund raising page for contributing!

Posham-Pa Pouch

The wife designed a pouch for a friend’s family gathering. There were some pieces left from their gathering which we have been trying to sell to our friends’ circle. If you’d like one, you can get it from here.

Weekly #30 (2026)

Mon, 27 Jul 2026 16:42:00 +0530

Protests against the education minister

I spent a lot of time this week following the happenings at the protests in Delhi (and other cities) against the education minister. I had a lot of fun looking at the creative ideas to protest by the Gen-Z. I’m a little sad all the creative posters, for instance, will be lost in the ephemeral feed of Instagram. It’d be interesting to see an archive of the posters, if anybody would take the time and energy to create one.

I loved the clarity with which some of the kids expressed themselves, in this video. It was great to see some articulate Gen-Z’s in the numerous protest related videos I consumed this week.

My wife had some conversations with family after which she felt like they were talking about an entirely different protest than the one she was talking about. Manisha from Newslaundry gave a detailed explanation of how this came to be. I found it insightful to see the tactics being explicitly named and called out, even though they all seem familiar.

I was shocked that pellet guns were used against the protesters in Delhi! There hasn’t been any acknowledgement or explanation from of the security forces, yet.

Email newsletter for this blog

I learnt that my blog’s email newsletter no longer works. I’ve restored it using a Google spreadsheet, Resend, and GitHub actions. I wrote a post with more details.

In Hyderabad

I was in Hyderabad this week to moral support my mom undergoing a small medical procedure. I really liked the hospital’s vibe. Most of the staff were women and it seemed like they were trying hard not to add additional stress and maybe even relieve some of the stress that comes from being in places like hospitals (and airports in India).

Cult Fit’s code of conduct

I only got one workout done, this week, apart from playing 2+ hours of Badminton after more than a year. I can’t seem to recall the last time I played.

I had to get the staff to read Cult’s Code of Conduct to let me workout without my shoes. I happened to read them recently since they sent me an email reminder. It says that it is recommended to wear shoes, but not mandatory unless you’re using the treadmills and other such equipment. I’d have been really mad if I had to miss the week’s only workout because I was travelling and not carrying my shoes. Apparently, they did send some other folks home in the past at that center. So, posting this as a PSA, I guess.

Hello Bossuu (From “Sing Geetham”)

L introduced me to this song Hello Bossu from Sing Geetham, “Aa anna paatavtundi…”, on a video call. I’m looking forward to get introduced many more things by her and her sibling A!

Asma Khan: Stop Calling it Curry

I loved watching Asma Khan in conversation with Trevor Noah and Eugene. She talks about everything from girls seen as a liability in South Asia to how hospitality industry glorifies the image of loud and abusive chefs and kitchens. I was inspiring to see how passionately she talked about her work and her women run kitchen. It’s a 2 hour long conversation that is totally worth it!

Weekly #29 (2026)

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 20:05:00 +0530

SQLite: use GLOB instead of LIKE to hit the PK index

Thanks to a fix by @mtelvers to Opam Repository CI, I learnt the difference between using LIKE and GLOB for fields with a primary key index.

The TL;DR is that LIKE is case-insensitive by default and cannot make use of an index where as GLOB which is case-sensitive would.

Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur

As a part of my continuing endeavor to make sense of what programming (at work and outside of it) means to me in the age of LLM assisted or agentic programming, I decided to spend some time carefully reading the paper Programming as Theory Building by Peter Naur.

I’m aware of the ideas presented in this paper at a high level, thanks to discussions with Shon over the past year or so. But, I figured it’s time to read the paper thoroughly and reflect on it more carefully. I’ve read through the first two sections of it, and hope to continue over the course of this week.

The UV index is not the warm sensation of sunlight on bare skin

I enjoyed reading this post on why the warm sensation from being the Sun isn’t exactly what causes sunburn. I guess it calls for a mandatory watching/listening of Wear Sunscreen.

John Wiegley’s org-mode magic setup

I discovered this chat Sacha and Karthik had with John Wiegley and I was totally blown away! I spent a bunch of time (with Claude) trying to improve my own org-mode setup, picking some nice things from his setup.

Some of the highlights, reminders, take-aways for me were:
- Capture should be quick. Review stage could add finer tagging, etc.
- John has written/uses packages like org-review, org-hash, org-drafts, etc. which seem to be crystallisation of some useful wisdom/ideas from his extensive use of org-mode.
- TIL: use org-capture with M-0 prefix to use a capture template in at point, instead of the location associated with the capture template.
- John heavily uses AI (local and cloud-provided) to generate bunch of “boring” things like org-mode titles for TODOs/NOTEs, etc.
- Voice transcription is also something both him and Sacha seem to be using a lot. I’ve not found myself a good way to set this up. John also mentioned that he tends to be more descriptive when using the voice interface, which helps when acting on the captured entries in future. (Especially with the LLMs that he uses).
- TIL: C-c C-o opens links in an entry. Karthik has a completing-read version of it that might be useful to check out.

Restaurant: Tuoi Moi

We went to Tuoi Moi last night. It is a small cozy place in Humayunpur. The food was lovely, too. We especially loved the chilli oil and even bought some to use at home.

Enola Holmes 3

We (wife and I) watched Enola Holmes 3 on OTT. We enjoyed Millie Bobby Brown’s “‘Tis I” in the previous editions of the movie and looks like some of the other characters also picked it up this time around!

Weekly #28 (2026)

Wed, 15 Jul 2026 16:34:00 +0530

I’ve decided to start posting weeklies inspired by some folks from the OCaml and the Bangalore Indie Web communities.

I spent a bunch of time over the weekend updating the setup of Orgzly Revived and Termux and my scripts for syncing everything between my phone and my laptop. I hadn’t bothered copying over my setup to my current phone since it felt too brittle after using it for a few months on my previous phone.

With Orgzly being revived and getting continuous improvements, and the availability of LLMs to debug and fix annoying breakages that I don’t want to sink time into, hopefully this time everything will work better…

Hopefully, this will all help me continue to be regular with these weeklies.

Android playstore and F-droid

While working on this setup I stumbled on this site “Keep Android Open”. It is a site which explains the planned changes to Android’s permissions for installing apps. The change seems like an iOS-ification of Android where only apps by developers registered with Google can be installed, even if they are not distributed via the Play Store. I had received a notification from Google about deleting my developer account since it was inactive and I didn’t pay much attention to it. This proposed change is so much wider reaching, though, and needs more investigation.

Phones stand in for earthquake sensors in Venezuela

I read an article about how Google runs an earthquake warning system that’s great for countries without a public-funded earthquake warning system. It’s the first time in a long time that I felt something from Google gave me the “Don’t be evil” vibes. For a company that managed to worsen their search for increasing traffic and ad revenue, this is pleasantly surprising!

Google Summer of Code updates

I’m co-mentoring a student for GSoC again this year. Last week, we submitted his mid-term evaluation and he’s good to go for the rest of the GSoC period.

It’s been an interesting experience mentoring this year, with Zulip maintainers allowing and encouraging students to use LLMs for their work. There’s a detailed AI usage policy here for all contributors, but I think the current breed of LLM agents make it easy to fall into the trap of cedeing control to them, and letting them drive you. It does need conscious effort from contributors to wrestle with the problem they are working on and understand any AI generated code well enough to critic, modify, explain and own it. We have been trying our best to make sure my mentee doesn’t fall into those traps and is making the time and space to be thoughtful and deliberate with their AI use.

Also, I’ve applied to attend the mentor summit for the first time and I’ve been accepted! If everything goes well, I’m hoping to attend the GSoC summit for the first time, in October in Berlin!

Home-built Websites for personal needs

My fitness trainer has built a website for himself using Lovable and Claude! The idea is to ease his workflows to track the progress of everyone who trains at the gym (in person or virtually). I could tell at first glance that the website is AI generated, but it’s pretty cool that he could make the time and was able to build something for himself.

A couple of weeks ago, an architect friend reached out to me to have a chat about a new SaaS startup that she’s working on with a friend to help improve the workflows for architects to go from first draft sketches to proper plans/models. She has a couple of CS students/interns who are “vibe-coding” the first version of their app. They are also training some models for the transformation, I believe.

Whatever qualms and complaints I have about the use of LLMs for knowledge work and all the current buzz and hype around it, I enjoy stories like these of it empowering people to build things they need to improve their workflows. I also enjoyed this thread (somewhat old, now) from Hacker News of people sharing what they are building with LLMs.

Ads on Instagram - BBC Documentary

I watched this BBC documentary on how Instagram allows ads promoting child abuse. Sadly, I’m not surprised by everything that the documentary explained. I’ve previously come across ads that are phishing scams, crypto scams, etc., and it didn’t look like Meta was doing anything to prevent such ads. I wasn’t surprised to learn that they don’t seem to be doing much in this case too. I don’t think these problems are unsolvable if these platforms care to take responsibility, given the tech available today.

Video on the discovery of Nitroplasts

I watched this video shared by Chaitu on nitroplasts, the organelle that lets Eukaryotes fix atmospheric nitrogen into ammonia. Until this recent discovery, it was thought that only Bacteria and Prokaryotes can do this, and this is the first instance of an algae (Braarudosphaera bigelowii) that seemed to have “engulfed” a bacteria that can do this, which eventually turned into an organelle (similar to the evolution of mitochondria). This seems like a much more recent evolution than mitochondria and chloroplasts and possible provides a window into how such organelles get formed. And studying nitroplasts in Bigelowii could lead to research that could reduce our dependence on synthetic fertilizers, for instance.

Sid’s birthday

We attended Sid’s (nephew) 4th birthday. This was his first birthday after his little sister was born. He was so excited by all the toys he got, but also wasn’t expecting any of us to bring gifts for his sister. He wanted them all, but understood on adults explaining it.

I like how he was cautiously sharing his new toys with her too. He got a new robot which dances with lights and music to Indian songs. He understandably didn’t want to share it. It had enough moving parts and seemed breakable in his little sister’s hands. His dad tried to explain that his sister is playing with it carefully, and he kept repeating “Of course, she will break it!”, until he saw that this line of argument wasn’t working. He came back later saying, “It is too bright for her” (with all the lights that glitter).

Carnatic Cafe

I usually avoid eating out at South Indian restaurants in Delhi, but in solidarity with Chaitu who ate at a couple of Indian restaruants after we left from his place in Vienna, we ended up eating in Carnatic Cafe. I found the Vada in Vienna to be better than here, but the Rava Masala Onion Dosa was great!

Penguin Bookfair by Hubhawks

We attended the Penguin Book Fair by Hubhawks. I wasn’t aware it had a “Buy by the bag” pricing. The available selection of the books didn’t seem compelling enough to spend more than a few minutes in the small hall filled to the brim with people. Many of whom were trying to fill up their bags to the brim, err.. I mean the zipper, to make the most of the pricing model but frustrated by it.