Musings on the Human Condition

THIS IS A GREAT SERIES! This short series is totally the kind of content I would watch again, and again. Sort of like the movies Pulp Fiction or Sholay (for Bollywood fans) with their impregnable dialog and theater.  It's kryptonite for a geek like me. The series discusses a whole slew of cons and I can barely keep up. For example, Huckleberry Jones versus the little sister Sadie Jones. What? My goal is to watch and rewatch until I can list most or all of the cons, roles, and metaphors mentioned in the series. Here's a start. I hope to return here many to time to keep updating this list. If you know some that I missed, please add them to the comments. Safe Mr Success The Roll Over Coyote is always hungry The Spanish Prisoner Lady Macbeth Painting houses Justified Captain Whale Mechanic Rope Mark Huckleberry Jones Sadie Jones

I grew up in a family where we didn't feel comfortable going to our parents for help . My hope is that I wasn't that kind of father but I'm sure I was, at least to some extent. I can count on one hand the times I reached out to my baba (dad) for help. Perhaps there were more and I just remember the more memorable ones? But overall, I think my dad didn't excel at commiseration. I generally felt like I was being talked down to. One of my vivid memories is going to the living room where my dad used to sit in his standard spot on the couch and asking him to help me with the equation of a line. He certainly helped clear a lot of my doubts and explained what y = mx + b really means.  Not to bore you to death, but briefly, y is the vertical position of any spot on a line and x is the horizontal position of that spot (aka point for math junkies). If you assume m=0 and b=0, you get y = x , which means you get a 45 degree line sloping about half way up like a javelin . From ther...

I was reading the book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World . One of the chapters talks about the invention of LCD screen-based games at Nintendo.  And I remembered that growing up my brother Harmeet and I had the game Oil Panic , which was part of the "Game and Watch" series (they added a watch to the game console), which I’m sure baba (dad) must have bought for us on one of his trips abroad.  Harmeet was really good at it. Me not so much. Our kids, Ria and Ronak, grew up playing Nintendo Wii and 3DS (among other consoles), but primarily Nintendo. The book really highlights how the gaming company and global trend was fashioned by one engineer's way of thinking that was more generalist (like mine) than specialist. Read the book to find out what I mean.

  What Is This About? Since MCP servers (AI agents or Agentic AI) are all the rage, I figured "how hard can it be to build one?" What Is MCP? MCP and the AI Agent Landscape Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard created by Anthropic (the makers of Claude.ai) to action the promise of Agentic AI or AI Agents, that are supposed to be the intermediaries between humans and AI to help humans get stuff done. They also help Claude connect to the outside world, like the Web or your filesystem. Give Me More Context Claude's training with public data ended around October 2024. So, when you ask a question, Claude isn't generally aware of late-breaking information. Claude also doesn't automatically carry memories or context of what you discussed in earlier chat sessions. That's where MCP servers come in. They allow Claude to access data it wasn't trained with and use its training to answer our " today " questions using a combination of " traini...

I wrote an AI-assisted Python program to take my Web-based  timeline of Sikh affairs and convert it into a 169-slide PDF for easy viewing.  I started this project as a way to create a more user-friendly way for people to consume the timeline I created years ago based on  many hours of research and analysis over a number of years. My goal was to improve the formatting and add images for a more informative viewing experience . In other words, how to use the content you have and breathe new life into it . The programming effort took a couple of half days and some 500 odd lines of Python code. I used AI (Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity) to provide suggested approaches and code, but didn't directly integrate it into my editor. I use Sublime for editing and selectively cut and paste recommended code as needed. The alternative is too intrusive and AI has free reign to make changes to your code wherein you eventually lose track and control over your program and no longer fully u...

  Further to my previous post on Claude AI , since most of the GenAI tools (e.g. ChatGPT, Claude) present their default results in markdown, I have been looking for a reliable way to render the markdown.  Additionally, I want to be able to highlight, annotate and save the results for future reference. I reviewed a number of PDF tools. Adobe Acrobat (too expensive) Foxit PDFExpert (doesn't handle PDFs generated from markdown too well; while trying to highlight, it keeps selecting two lines instead of one) PDFGear (great for structuring if you want to add bookmarks like I did for Saurabh Mahapatra's thesis on Adobe Experience Platform's Data Distiller, but not much else) Skim , the most unpretentious on the tools on the list. But it handles highlighting on PDFs generated from markdown just fine. But more importantly, it refreshes when I update the PDF from markdown. My choice of Skim requires further elaboration. When I am researching a topic on Claude, I am constantly upd...