__rito__

Bhartrihari was a king, philosopher, and poet. Scholars argue whether they were the same person or not, but I don't care, as scholars also argue about if Socrates really existed or not.

He wrote 300 verses in Sanskrit. And they are on three different topics: sensuality and pleasure, policy and ethics, and finally renunciation.

In Shringar Shatakam (100 verses on sensual pleasures), he writes:

“Casting aside envy, considering the matter carefully, let the noble ones tell us, with due propriety: Which ought one to frequent — the slopes of the mountains, or the buttocks of women whose smiles are stirred by Love?”

and

“Why all this elaborate, pointless talk? There are only two things worth attending to in this world: the fresh, wine-intoxicated youth of beautiful women, heavy with their breasts - or the forest.”

But in the final book, he realizes the folly of the senses, and writes:

“Sensual objects will inevitably leave us, even after remaining with us for a long time. What difference is there between losing them and voluntarily abandoning them? When they depart against our will, they cause unbearable anguish; but when we ourselves abandon them, they produce the infinite happiness of inner tranquility.”

Amazing character.

1. Build an LLM from Scratch by Sebastian Raschka (https://sebastianraschka.com/llms-from-scratch/)

2. LLM from 0 to Hero, and nanoGPT by Andrej Karpathy

Typing out in an app window is not enjoyable.

Maintaining physical ones is not practical anymore - with travels and all.

I won't ever listen to AI music, because there is no human soul behind it. It's my choice, I have made it.

I will listen to worse music if a human has written it, performing it.

You can listen to all sorts of great musicians on Spotify, but why do you go to live performances of real artists?

The only AI 'art' I am open to using are AI-gen images for illustrating blog posts, etc., when the illustrations are not central or key to the post.

Not really.

For example, the AI model being used is also a big factor.

Gemini 3.5 Pro, Grok were like this - spewed nonsense advice for anything 'physical'. Grok gave me very poor gardening advice, as an example.

But Claude Opus 4.8, 5, GPT Sol 5.6 are much better in this front.

So, it is an AI/model issues, not a skill issue.

Creating flashcards is also such a chore!

For the recall part of education, the book's exercise, or simply covering up the relevant part with hand and forcing a recall, writing about what you learned, teaching someone else - all work great, and the flow is much more natural.

In India, there is Bhava Atomic Research Center (BARC) where many scientists mysteriously drop dead. Too many car crashes, too many heart attacks an suicides at young age.

We know how.

This does discourage real people to take up positions there.

Latest was my childhood friend; after his Master's from a reputed institutions, did not ultimately appear at a BARC interview and is now a PhD student in a really good institution.

This does happen.

Dude...

It's totally, completely, fully different.

Have you ever worked as an electrician/plumber, etc.?

The amount of physical stress, sweat, exposure to bad weather, etc. are orders of magnitude higher than what you get as a tech worker, even in 38°C heat even without an AC.

Your comment reads like it's coming from someone who never ever worked physically even as a volunteer/for fun.

Any non-trivial amount of physical work will tell you that it’s many orders of magnitude tougher than working with computers.

The worst part is you gotta show up and work your ass off even when you have flu, or something like that, or you lose a day's wages.

I had tried downloading release assets of two different OSS that I use, and all requests failed.

It was before it became a news and a trend in X.

Really frustrating experience.

Agree with the general spirit of the piece, but the examples that he gave create more problem than solving problems.

> A fitness app that sizes my smoothie to that morning's run

I don't feel I need more than the phone's calculator app for this particular problem.

Other examples could be solved by the Notes app, I feel.

I deliberately avoid creating new "apps", and make do with existing apps and solutions and create workflows rather than apps.

I write scripts, add features to scripts and understand all lines of them.

There are very few exceptions to this, like, I vibe coded a visual PDF cropper app that also handles scaling, merging in a GUI built with PyQt and GTK.

Having entire apps create maintenance burden and headaches.

That is true. But you can rise above it, or choose to ignore it. If not, then it is not the right group.

I have been part of groups with vile internal power struggles, politics. I never ever took part. Was okay. Maybe there is a threshold somewhere that I have not found yet.

> 4. Be part of bigger things

> Being part of bigger things makes us feel valued. Find communities and projects to be part of. Start your own. It could be online or in the real world.

Make sure the groups don't get politically active one way or the other. Today's social landscape is made significantly worse by political polarization dragged to the extreme - fuelled by short form content silos and bubbles. (Tiktok, Instagram, etc.)

Ban politics strictly in the spaces you create, and don't be part of the ones that lean one way or the other - unless you are actively looking to take part in politics.

This was not the case even ten years ago. But now, is.

What you are saying is true. But YouTube/FB algorithms are deliberately skewed towards regular posters.

It's like your content of love that you produce once or twice a month won't be shown to the users at all.

Where do I get the time after job, family, friends and self-study?

So I don't create content like that at all. I write. And that's all.

But I also want to make videos. The recording, editing timeline is way too high. And then if your stuff is not shown to anybody, that's a huge bummer.

Don't tell that to Indians! A lot of humans are named "Santosh". :x

Unlike in the West, naming one's dog after someone's name is considered an insult. "I will have a pet dog named after you" is insult thrown in fights. So, Indians name their dogs uncommon among humans. Or they have foreign names like Johnny, Jack, etc.

From the site's "About" section:

> "Ergo is a nonprofit that publishes long-form philosophical lecture courses with leading scholars. Everything we publish is freely available, without ads or paywalls."

I know what to do this weekend if it rains!

One sentence I heard somewhere wraps up the totality of computing:

"If Mathematics is the 'what', Computer Science is the 'how'".

This applies to each and everything.

> Lately I've been spending time learning Scheme and using it to implement the concepts I'm learning in my physics classes as time permits.

There is a whole book for that: Learn Physics with Functional Programming A Hands-on Guide to Exploring Physics with Haskell by Scott N. Walck, December 2022, 648 pp. ISBN-13: 9781718501669

There is also SICM [0].

[0]: https://archive.org/details/oapen-20.500.12657-26048

I spoke in the context of supercomputer clusters, and usage in scientific HPC.

I was in Gray Scott School for HPC last week, and even in scientific usage, CPU-only cases, AMD is still a pain point. Many tools and libraries don't have first class AMD support or any support at all.

It loses to Intel in CPU, and NVIDIA in GPU, in case of scientific libraries and HPC-worthy libs, tools.

I think people who want an "AI Dev Kit" will lean towards Intel + NVIDIA setup.

I am not a fan of Intel, but their MKL, MPI, etc. are not paralleled. Same goes for CUDA with NVIDIA.

My country only recently switched to 4-year undergrad for all streams. Previously, only Engineering had it (not counting professional degrees like Medicine, Accountancy, etc.)

GaTech only permits OMSCS if you have a 4 year undergrad. In many countries undergrads are three years. Even you have a Master's, that is also not counted. 4 years undergrad or nothing.

If this is not bad faith argument, then I don't what is. When someone is violating an OSS licence, they are doing it for commercial gains and monetary profit. Nobody is angry at someone using FOSS software for himself with no money getting involved.

As opposed to that, books, movies are pirated for personal consumption. Not monetary gains. If someone bought a $30 book, and then ran a BaaS with millions of VC money in his pocket, people in HN would be angry at him, too.

This is a great book if you already know good amount of Math. It helps you fit things into a bigger picture. Really appreciate the fact that something like this exists.

Agree with that. But I also meant full-names.

With so many Williams, Johns, Franks, Bens, etc. reading a novel with exotic names is just breath of fresh air.

Also feel the same when watching non-English modern TV/web series. Like Nordic or Spanish stuff.

Dostoevsky is surprisingly great to read. I first started with "Notes from Underground (1864)" and I found it a profound book. Then I read Brothers Karamazov, and it is one of those "great" books. I wrote my reflections here: https://ritogh.substack.com/p/reflections-on-brothers-karama....

Actually USSR pushed a lot of soft power and spent real money behind it. Especially the authors whose narratives didn't directly violate the narrative of the Party.

Leftist parts of society looked up to USSR a lot, and a lot of humanities professors, teachers all over the world were left-leaning, and promoted these books as Russian culture.

This is one factor, and doesn't explain the whole thing, of course.

See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48673777. Neither our family nor I ever leaned towards the Party or any form of Leftism, but books are always kosher in our culture.

Russian stuff were translated into Bengali a lot in 1970s - especially works favoured in the USSR. I came across multiple translations of children's books, and loved reading them as a kid. My father and aunt read those in their childhood. Raduga and Mir published Bengali books and printed them in Moscow, and shipped them to Calcutta. They were cheap, too.

I didn't like the flow of translation of Bengali versions of "adult" books, and read them in English.

My favourite Russian writer has to be Bulgakov who fell from grace of the Party, and his work was not translated. I am yet to read Solzhenitsyn.

Nowadays, there are indie blogs that scan and preserve those Bengali books. A lot of people I know download and print those books. You can still find Moscow-printed Bengali books in used-book stores of book fairs.

> The main difficulty is the names. The names make it so hard.

I think that's an exciting part. When I am bored with names of similar kind, the names make the characters somewhat exotic. I don't know about you, but the name "Grushenka" adds to everything that is going on with that woman.

> The most overhyped literature ever

Just because you aren't ready for it doesn't mean it's bad literature. That's basic.

I really like Dostoevsky. He was really onto something. What he wrote was deep and meaningful and profound.

Tolstoy is also great. His short story "The Three Hermits" (1885) profoundly impacted how I look into these things.

Coming from him, I am not sure even that is real. It could very easily (and plausibly) be a part of the ongoing hype drama.

"Our models so precious, US Gov has to revoke access to foreigner." - tuned up version: "Our models so advanced our #1 adversary is desperately stealing it from us."