Practical

A dubious virtue

But smoothness, it turns out, is a dubious virtue, since it’s often the unsmoothed textures of life that make it liveable, helping nurture the relationships that are crucial for mental and physical health, and for the resilience of our communities. Your loyalty to your local taxi firm is one of those delicate social threads that, multiplied thousands of times, bind a neighbourhood together; your interactions with the woman…

Why write

Writing gives you a license to explore and organize your thoughts. This is the fun bit. Chasing down an idea that interests you, forming questions and then investigating them; it’s a joy. The second most common question I get about my writing is, “How do you motivate yourself to write?” This is the answer. There are so many drafts that live, dormant in my draft folder. So many times I start a piece and lose interest. And…

Blogging is good for your soul!

You should start a blog. Having your own little corner of the internet is good for the soul! But what should you write about? It’s easy to get hung up on this. I’ve definitely felt the self-imposed pressure to only write something if it’s new, and unique, and feels like it’s never been said before. This is a mental trap that does nothing but hold you back.

AI coding tools keep getting better and better

Interesting discussion on how good LLMs have gotten at coding. Some of the quote tweets on the link are also interesting.

What to expect when expecting

Philippe Lemoine I think that if progress in generative AI continues, which I'm pretty sure it will (it doesn't even have to continue at the current pace as long as decreasing marginal returns don't hit too hard), cultural products will become massively diversified. One factor that limits the diversity of cultural products is that they tend to have high fixed costs, so you need a large enough audience for them to be…

Dhwani: A directory for Indian public domain works

Built a small site to collect links to Indian literary and historical works in the public domain. While looking for books, I realized the sheer extent of our cultural apathy. Also, there are some amazing books just waiting to be read. Visit

You never know when the carousel stops spinning

One complication of the n+1 listing is not so much the salary itself but the sheer number of responsibilities. A managing editor must oversee all three print issues, supervise fact-checking and proofreading, serve as “product manager” for n+1 Books, plan and execute magazine events and fundraisers, read submissions and respond to pitches, hire interns, and “assist with the management of n+1 programming and day-to-day…

How Terence Tao uses AI

I was able to use an extended conversation with an AI to help answer a MathOverflow question. I had already conducted a theoretical analysis suggesting that the answer to this question was negative, but needed some numerical parameters verifying certain inequalities in order to conclusively build a counterexample. Initially I sought to ask AI to supply Python code to search for a counterexample that I could run and adjust…

Philosophy of life and Seneca’s letters

I've been messing around with AI coding tools lately, and they're so good that even someone who can't code (me) can build actual websites. While building Paper Lanterns to collect public domain letters and essays, I stumbled across Seneca's letters to Lucilius. First read? Meh. Thought it was just another ancient…

Aggregating book mentions

There are countless websites that aggregate book reviews and recommendations. So what I am doing instead is aggregating all mentions regardless of whether they are good or bad. When I read or listen to something, and if someone mentions a book, I post it here. Check it out

I just want to know

The Importance of Curiosity in Science There are some questions that we need to ask simply because we don't know the answer. My work looks into ancient life by studying ancient enzymes and tracking their evolution over long periods of time. First and foremost, it's completely curiosity-driven discovery. I think it's important to realize that science doesn't necessarily need to serve humanity tomorrow. Ultimately, it comes…