Musings on the Human Condition

  I spent the Saturday assembling a cedar planter, catching up with a college friend from IIT Roorkee, and exploring Anthropic's new model context protocol for their AI tool Claude.  Yup, that's how I roll! Claude now has richest set of MCP servers  that can be integrated into Claude to augment its capabilities to, for example, search the web (think of it as a sort of RAG), search your filesystem, search your Google Drive, and best of all, save memories about your preferences that Claude can recall and leverage in future exchanges. Think of MCP servers as Anthropic's open-source framework aimed providing a bridge for AI agents or agentic AI to access real world data . In large language models (LLMs), "context" refers to the information the model can "remember" during a single interaction — typically the prompt, any system instructions, and previous exchanges. This is often measured in tokens . One more thing, unless you're running a quantum ...

  How To Solve It by G Polya I am starting a new "Solve It!" series of blog posts. This book came highly recommended to me many years ago and sadly I never gave it enough of my time. If I can still find it in my shed, I will give it another attempt. It thought of the book because I was reminded of it while trying to come up with a title for this series of blog posts. The book talks about problem solving strategies in mathematics. I won't discuss math here, but the idea is the same. You have to be a deep thinker to solve everyday problems. Contrary to Nobel Prize winners and such, my fascination in life has been with solving the common problems that plague us. The problems are common but the solutions often seem to evade us. This blog series will provide a few examples. Getting the kitchen sink to drain reliably If this sounds like a trivial problem to you, it is likely because you don't cook much or you just call the plumber. Here are the key elements to consider. The...

  (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...