38/Trip to Chennai, love in Sanskrit

Monday, 2024-02-26 to Sunday, 2024-03-03

Created: by Pradeep Gowda Updated: Mar 02, 2024 Tagged: weekly · chennai · travel · rss · llm · tools · gui · python

Updates

Travelled to Chennai last Wednesday and Thursday to get some paper work done. Stayed at the Marriott on Anna Salai. The hotel upgraded us to the executive suite. We didn’t have enough time to enjoy all the facilities. They comped us the breakfast, which was quite nice. It’s a 4 star hotel, and definitely felt like it. Excellent service too.

We used public transport Blr Metro -> Indian railway -> Chennai Metro. The Marriott hotel is just 2-3 buildings away from the metro exit, which makes it a great option if you are traveling light.

On the way back, the Mysore express was running late, so we got down at Krishnarajapuram and took the metro from there. Stopped at Indiranagar metro station and went to “Shalimar/Maravanthe” seafood restaurant for dinner. I have been there a couple of times in the last year to meet techie friends. Indiranagar is a central spot, and for me very accessible from the metro station.

Purchased “How to Love in Sanskrit”, a book of Sanskrit (and Prakrit, and Apabrahmsha) poems translated to English by Anusha Rao and Suhas Mahesh, both of whom I know through twitter and read their writings in newspapers. The revelation was Seven Hundred Gahas (gāhāsattasaī).

Bought a license for reeder because NetNewsWire was proving to be inflexible in managing feeds ( rename folders, assign feeds quickly). I paid $9.99.

I have been organizing my Feeds after I bought Reeder. Lot of 404s. I had resubscribe to many feeds from their new feed addresses. Many blogs have retired (meaning they haven’t blogged in years). One of the “OGs” of blogging that I used to read regularly (or may be on Flickr, I can’t remember now, but I remember the name strongly) is Jeremy Zawodny. He posted an update just few days ago - Life after The List, announcing his departure from Craiglist.

Motivational

Focus

Coaching

It’s not just how good you are now, it’s how good you are going to be that really matters.

Generative AI and LLM

Eli Bendersky has a series of blog posts on using Gemini, OLLAMA and GEMMA models from golang

Zoo: Introducing Text-to-CAD – An early example of LLMs affecting fields beyond programming. The examples show how you can generate 3D models with prompts like “involute helical gear with 36 teeth”, and have an editable CAD file generated. How far are we from doing something like “The gear should withstand ** pressure, for application under ** conditions” etc, and the LLM refer to the material science, safety factors and come with a design that is ready to be reviewed by an engineer?

Do large language models really need all those layers? - Amazon Science

From around the web

100 things you can do on your personal website – I am still digging through the list, but I really liked the the OMake concept - “Omake is an oft-abused Japanese term for bonus content. This is my personal OPML outline of everything.”

PID without a PhD PDF.

‘We don’t need air con’: how Burkina Faso builds schools that stay cool in 40C heat – by the architect # Diébédo Francis Kéré

How Alan Watts re-imagined religion, desire and life itself | Aeon Essays

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer a novel by Philip K. Dick.

Tools and Tips

You can use the exiftool (available on MacOS and other Unixes) to remove GPS information etc from your photos.

$ brew install exiftool
$ exiftool IMG.HEIC
.... prints out a long list of exif information ...
$ exiftool -all= IMG.HEIC
... strips out exif info ..
$ exiftool IMG.HEIC # to confirm reduced exif infor
Original Image with embedded EXIF data
Original Image with embedded EXIF data
Altered Image with reduced EXIF data
Altered Image with reduced EXIF data

Programming

Played around with NiceGUI, that uses Vue.JS + FastAPI to provide a single API to write backend + frontend applications. Could be a quick way to put together an UI for an “App”; there is also an option make it “native” via WebUI. The documentation section of NiceGUI is well done and makes it easy to learn it quickly and use it by copy-pasting code. There are also a bunch of examples

There is also pydantic/FastUI that uses React; the fastUI demo is here. I found NiceGUI at a discussion about FastUI. As usual FE devs are crying in the comments.

Golang Weekly Issue 489: December 19, 2023 – a roundup of “The Best of the Go Newsletter in 2023” with some interesting posts.

Site Updates

Added pages – zed, reeder, tigerbeetle, illustrations, interesting-oss

Updated pages – webhosting, yakshaves, machine-learning