Musings on the Human Condition

  (The stock images of raita above are lame. But they will have to do until I can replace them with one of my own.) (Madani, used in India as a whisk to turn the yogurt into a homogenous state.) (Homemade yogurt.) (Boondi strainer.) My Distaste for Milk My obsession with raita might have its origins in the distaste I developed for milk after moving from Canada to India at the age of 3. Canada generally uses cow milk and India uses mostly buffalo milk, since cows are considered scared in India.  Furthermore, in Canada milk arrived in pasteurized form from the supermarket. Whereas in India the milk arrived at your doorstep in the form known as raw (or unpasteurized) in the West.  So, my mom would boil it, which would result in the formation of malai (clotted cream) on top of the container of boiled milk once it was left to cool off. I never liked malai and was constantly struggling to remove it from my glass of milk. Furthermore, to make my life even more miserable, we were...

  Over the last decade or more I've gotten into the habit of reading multiple books at once .  I'm using the multitasking analogy from how computers appear to be running multiple applications or programs at once. Let's consider a scenario . You're writing a report using Microsoft Word and you're also searching on Google to get answers to questions you want to address in your report. Your Chrome browser is also running a tab with Gmail and just alerted you to inform you that you have a reminder email letting you know that your report is due tomorrow.  All of this is seemingly happening concurrently . That is what we generally mean when we talk about multitasking. To keep things simple, let's take the single processor (CPU) example. Since it's a single processor, it can really only be running one application at a time. So, what's actually happening is that the processor is switching between the three applications (Word, Google Search, and Gmail) several t...

If you want to understand how LLMs work, this video is BOMB. Will you be writing your own LLMs soon? You could. But better to think of it as the equivalent of being able to see the list of recommended actions suggested by your dealership during your next oil change and feeling confident enough to say, "Do these 2 now and let's defer the rest until next time." If you really did want to build your own LLM, this book with code on GitHub  is probably one of the best resources. But an even better approach is to learn from the video and the book and then "teach" it (little or no coding, once you understand the levers available to you) to do your bidding. Good luck!

A private sector enterprise is meant to distinguish from organizations that serve the public good , i.e. government enterprises such as the police, the fire station, the construction of roads and bridges. The list is getting shorter every year. For example, government used to include space exploration . Is space exploration an initiative for the public good or a private enterprise? NASA used to be exclusively responsible for sending rockets into space for scientific research and exploration. That was partly because no private enterprise could afford such a huge expense. Furthermore, the investment was assumed to be for the public good because new science benefits us all, right? When the government sends a vessel into space, the goal is to study the universe and add to our scientific knowledge about the universe. Well, no longer. Now we have SpaceX launching flights into space. The motivation is unclear. It doesn't seem to be driven by science. Perhaps the goal is space tourism...

If I could do anything at all, I would buy a single engine plane (perhaps a Cessna) and fly from place to place forever and ever. The first career I thought of as a kid was to be a fighter pilot. But my eyesight wasn't perfect and I was told I wouldn't qualify. I was also discouraged for reasons of safety.  A used old Cessna in working condition can apparently be bought for $50k or so. But there would be the additional cost of learning to fly.  When I was 15 or so, I had bought one of those small handbooks you could buy (perhaps the Observer's Book of Aircraft) which listed every plane in the world with a picture and its specifications. I took pride in identifying the few planes that flew overhead where we lived on the IIT campus in New Delhi. We were close enough to Palam Airport (now Indira Gandhi Airport) so that planes would fly overhead low enough to be identifiable. Of course, most of what we saw was easy enough to identify. Boeing 747, 737, and the occasional 727 com...

  AEM as a Cloud Service (AEMaaCS) is Adobe's software-as-a-service (SaaS) version of Adobe Experience Manager (AEM), which provides clients with a CMS platform (Sites), Digital Asset Management (DAM, or simply Assets), and Forms. It was released a few years ago with several upsides and a few downsides. In the intervening years, Adobe has continued to build on the pros while the cons continue to dwindle. Some fairly large companies have been enticed with licensing discounts and package deals to embrace CS and migrate their AEM instances to it. We have helped a few of our clients with this journey and some are now live on CS. This post briefly describes the key steps involved in such a migration. Assess Current State The migration from on-premise (data center) or cloud-hosted to CS is not a lift-and-shift. Significant refactoring is required in order to make your AEM implementation ready for CS. Additionally, it's a great opportunity to modernize and clear off technical debt.  ...