Posts

Update: Ported the code to Clojure too. TL;DR: Inspired by a couple of posts implementing particle swarm optimization in Python and R, I implemented one in Guile Scheme. Here’s the Guile code, and here’s the Python translation of the same approach.

There is a war going on. On one side are trees. And on the other... semilattices. Trees vs Semilattices One of the earliest reports came from the urban design front, from a certain Christopher Alexander who has been surprisingly influential outside his fields of architecture and design.

Aspects of chess are often packaged into insights to apply in other areas. But you don't need chess to tell you to think before you act. And think a lot of moves ahead is neither particularly useful nor true (strong players aren’t strong because they see dozens of moves ahead).

Last year was so strange that it would be strange to call it just strange. As someone who works with data, one strain of strangeness stood out: that of data science concepts becoming unusually common in conversations.

The constitution as a graph A while back in an edition of the excellent public policy newsletter Anticipating the Unanticipated an idea was mentioned: It would be great to convert the constitution of India into a graph of cross-referencing articles.

Recently I read Toyota Production System. There are later books which explore it more fully, but it was great to read Taiichi Ohno himself revealing the essence of the system. It is fascinating how just a few simple ideas were developed to the extent that they eventually were.

Obvious Adams is a classic business story published in 1916. PDFs are publicly available but I couldn’t find a well-formatted ebook. So I made one. You can download the EPUB here.

As the year was drawing to a close I tried drawing something close to a portrait of my daughter. As expected, the result does a huge disservice to her. She is way cuter than the monstrosity I created.

AI and strategy are casually flung together into far too many sentences these days. Usually during meetings where a lot is spoken, but little is said. Here I make connections between the two and see where that takes us.

Captains of ships are interested in storms. Living in Bangalore, I am interested in traffic. Both are agonizing and unescapable, although I suspect storms are a lot less frequent than the suffocating, slow-moving museum of human failings, that I grudgingly navigate every day.