Week #68#

It was a great week. A consistent clean week. I wrote around 9k words on my project. I feel good again. I didn’t do much on the weekends as usual. I am slowing down. I did a lot of things at work, experiments, and more experiments on VLLMs and parsing documents. It’s fun times. I think for this weekend, I have plans as this post will cover what my mind is fixated on for the moment, Golang and TUIs, and a pain that is daily buzzing me, cleaning log files to get the actual data. LLMs are good at it, but take a bit of time for such trivial things.

Apart from this, I have also been reading, a lot of reading, I completed a book of 300 pages in 3 days and found peace. Started one more. I want to create a webpage full of my notes and reviews of all the books I have read so far, not sure if I can do it before the year ends.

Quote of the week#

“To understand emotion, don’t seek the outcome, or the reaction, go deeper, find its intentions.”

This is my quote, I have observed from reading “Goddess of the River” by Vaishnavi Patel. The character of Karna, and his opinion about friendship with Duryodhan, is so subtle yet this is what I can comprehend. He went for the outcome. Duryodhan made him the king of Angadesh by giving him his part of the kingdom, to make him royal and worthy to compete with Arjun. He didn’t see the intention, his intention was to defeat Arjun. The revenge was in the minds of Duryodhan, not peace or friendship. He made everything in life less important than his loyalty and debt to repay the friendly help. If he knew the intention, he would have been on the right side of the war, maybe the war might have been averted. But no, he wanted to feel recognized and equal to Arjun too.

So, look beyond the outcome, the intention of an emotion or an act. The thing that drives the emotion is more important than the emotion itself. Don’t get carried away.

For similarity in this quote in tech, find the why, its important, go a level deeper. The question ‘what’ is already answered; you need the core intention to build something, to solve something. Without the intention, all software is slop.

Read#

From words to worlds with spatial intelligence- This a refreshing read, a positive take on the LLM thing. Its true, the words might have limitations, we don’t even know what true VLLMs are capable of, they can’t actually recognize the physical space, and what interpretations can they perform on it.

  • The one thing that stuck with me was the use of LLM in education or learning. It is ranked or stated at the very end, indicating that LLMs are going to be least used to reform how we learn. If that is true, then I can take a relief. If they can’t change the way we learn things, I am a happy and satisfied person. It helps me use my brain rather than I handing over my neurons to it.

The AI Wildfire is coming and its going to be very painful and incredibly healthy- A beautifully written comparison of natural phenomena to the current situation.

  • The reset of nature as wildfire is really needed in Tech for AI to seed its place. It would burn the hype and leave behind it some mess and blessings that people who struggled here will clean up and reap the benefits.

  • I don’t have much to say, a lot to say rather. I recommend just reading it, it gave me calmness, it’ll be just fine. AI is not coming to burn you, don’t worry, but there will be a new resource at our disposal. You know it, it has its pros and cons, the AI chat.

Parsing integers in C- Its again one relatable post. The author is pointing out that he saw a problem. Parsing and robust handling of integers in C. I love python for it. I wonder how is it developed on top of C then. If C is worse than python for handing integers, how is Python working so well.

  • cURL, that library man! The author and the creator of libcURL or cURL the tool is a legend, he is a gift to the developers and the world. The library is much more than a http client. It has laid so many ground works for making the ecosystem of working with the web and APIs coherently and without causing any confusions.

  • This post highlights the presence of parser for string to integer conversion in cURL as well as cURLX libraries. It handles them in a more robust way than the typical standard C libraries.

Recommendations for getting most from technical books- This is some gold advice on consuming technical content in general I think. Not just books. It could be a big blog post, video or any course. First consume it without distraction, try to understand next, try it on your own, try it again, think about what you want to do, do it and repeat from 2 again if you fail.

How to stop having FOMO as a software engineer- This one is a hard hitting banger. yacine writes some banger posts.

shed for a minute all the other’s expectations and look deep, look at all the stuff that truly brings you a sizeable amount of joy in life.

  • Yes, just bury all the expectation for once and do what you truly want to. I think this weekend, I would build a TUI for GCP Cloud Logger. Because I want to. No expectations. I don’t want to livestream, things get in the way, I don’t have the right set of mental clarity to write golang posts, I won’t for now. I’ll do what I love write now, things are overwhelming me. SQL, LLMs, VLLMs, Transformers, Vibe coding, PDFs, Rust, everything seems to sucking out the joy out of me, they are all great things, but I can’t handle them all at once. One thing at a time, and for this weekend, its TUI for GCP Cloud Logger, for sure.

Why I stopped trying to be a great engineer- This is a wholesome post. Just read it, its so short.

  • It conveys that taking a break from the normal chore, brings a fresh perspective and unclogs the brain. It helps your brain get out of the rut, it shows you a new hope, it fires a kindle of hope and curiosity. I guess, stopping to code, or writing some code if you haven’t been due to AI, just do what you wanted to do, but something or the other kept bugging you. Because when the heart and mind are in sync, impossible becomes possible.

The quite power of SQL- This is true. After all, sometimes, not all new tools are worth using all the time. Sometimes, maybe often times, we need to keep it simple and use the good’ol trusted tools, the simplest ones just like SQL, the dc calculator, how LLMs are using the existing tools to create wide possibilities.

How to demo- Some great advice on how to demo. It has some good catches. Keeping it shorter, slowly moving to the solution, not banging it in the start. Let the viewer understand the problem in its entirety then develop the intuition to your solution.

  • Adding pictures add value, but I think it should be a concise representation of what is changing or what the crux of the presentation is, not just adding visuals just for the sake of it.

On doing things- I don’t know nature is hinting this week to me to just do things. Right, I’ll do it.

Sometimes ideas come when you stop trying to force them.

  • True. You have to just let it sleep with you. We say right, let me sleep on it, let it absorb, because the unconscious mind always keeps ticking off, it keep finding paths to connect, firing right set of neurons happen at a shower, at a walk, maybe just before the sleep. Just breathe, and let the world be it. Your in-action won’t cause it to fail, but don’t make it a excuse to never do it.

Watched#

How Martain was written- I haven’t read Martain, want to. But nonetheless, this is an inspiring talk, as a writer and a programmer I am compelled to write a story now. This might be a turning point for me. If he can, I can too.

  • It appeared to me at the right time though, November in middle of NanoWriMo. Perfectly adding up to my writing streak and building confidence.

Building a terminal wizard in BubbleTea- This is a great video to understand Bubble Tea framework in almost 20 minutes. I was pumped after this to finally decide to build the TUI for GCP logger. Finally it will be done this weekend.

How OpenAI Atlas is built- Atlas is a chromium wrapper right? right? Nope, its a little custom separate entity that is powered and laid by chromium but it doesn’t look and feel like Chromium.

  • I don’t know anything about what Theo said, but if he is saying its gross. It might as well be, I can’t comment if I don’t know it.

Learnt#

Visual LLMs: Show then, don’t tell.

  • If the VLLM has visual recognition, prompt tuning will only work till a point, you then have to show it, not tell it.

  • Text LLMs are bottlenecks due to that exact reason, they can’t see. But if you add reasoning, it opens up a possibility. But if you power a VLLM with reasoning (Gemini 2.5 Flash) it is a superpower that you have honed it. I think this is barely explored territory and needs more eyes and experimentation.

Golang BubbleTea TUI Framework

  • It has Model, View and Update as a core principle, which is the ELM Architecture style.

  • It fits this style of developing the TUIs so well. You have some state to display, you present it and you update it. Simple. You can build almost anything with this principle. Would be trying out to build GCP Cloud Logger TUI.

Tech News#

OpenAI releases GPT 5.1- It looks like a general-purpose and more tunable model. Looking forward for the snitch bench test.

Google release Code Wiki- Wow! This is a Holy Grail of code wiki. It can generate tons of things from a given github link. Very good point to start understanding a codebase if you want to contribute to. If you its hallucinated, you can prove it by running the code, simple

It was a whimsical week, the writing just gave me everything I needed in a week. Peace and Clarity of actions. I am in the right mood, at the right time. Just by spending one hour each day, I become a better version of myself every day. Good to write this way. Hopes to continue in the next week and year too.

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