Musings on the Human Condition

  Andrej Karpathy, during his podcast interview with Dwarkesh Patel. October 17, 2025. Hype. In the midst of all the hype around how AI is going to take all our jobs and Elon Musk telling us to give up on the idea of humans producing code in 2027, it's refreshing to hear saner voices making more nuanced statements and predictions about AI and our future.  Andrej (pronounced Andre) Karpathy is one such voice. I will talk more about him a bit later in this post. While AI has produced some incredible results, there have also been plenty of failed predictions. Geoffrey Hinton (considered the godfather of AI)  predicted  in 2016 that AI will completely replace radiologists by 2021. Here we are in 2026 and radiologists are flourishing like never before! We live in a world that is undergoing disruption by AI just as it was once turned topsy-turvy by the inventions of printing, electricity, personal computers, the internet, smartphones, and CRISPR. Each time hype-mongers to...

Modern School Vasant Vihar (MSVV), New Delhi, 1983-1984 The picture above is me , likely in grade 11 . Or, as Americans would say, during my high school junior year. Not only do I not remember posing for this picture, I also don't recall looking like this. This picture was taken on  school  premises, as evidenced by the red brick half wall. But the occasion escapes me. Most likely someone brought in a camera (a rarity in those days) and offered to take a picture. I had just acquired an Agfa Click III (or similar) camera in those days (probably as a birthday present) but I doubt my parents would have let me take it to school without making a huge fuss. It took me a while to believe that it was indeed me. I know I occasionally wore glasses . I despised wearing them but did so because my mom's incessant warnings had sunk deep into my psyche, "Your eyesight will get worse if you strain your eyes trying to read without your glasses!" But I definitely don't remember hav...

  Photo by yours truly in front of our house garage. A bounding track describes the gait (how the animal moves), not the foot. In a bound , the animal moves in little “launch and land” jumps: It pushes off with its back legs. The front feet land first . Then the hind feet swing forward and land ahead of the front feet (often side-by-side). That landing order makes the classic “bounding” track pattern seen in the photograph above: two prints in front (hind feet) and one or two behind (front feet, often overlapping). Animals that commonly leave bounding tracks: rabbits/hares, squirrels, weasels/stoats, mink, otter —basically critters that hop or lope rather than walk with evenly spaced alternating footsteps. The above picture, taken today while shoveling fresh snow in front of my garage, is most likely that of a rabbit. What you’re seeing: The two longer prints side-by-side in front = the hind feet landing ahead of the body. The single rounder print behind ...