English is the hot new programming language

Taleb insists that we've been scammed by the Gaussian distribution club. The gaussian distribution has become so ubiquitous in our daily jargons, oru day-to-day decisions even. ...

When you actively hold a question in your mind, you start seeing potential answers and questions related to it pop up in your radar. The question and the answer co-evolve in a gracious dance enriching our understanding of the world and space around us. Questions act as your personal radar. > The textbook definition of a question is **a sentence used to seek information**. But it feels borderline criminal to reduce something as foundational as a question to something…transactional. We think in questions. If knowledge is a complex web inside the mind, each node is a question, and each connecting line the information you’ve picked up on the journey from node to node. The pursuit of knowledge is the accumulation of questions. They shape our identity as much by being asked as by being answered....

I've been hiring people (and conducting more thorough reference checks) more recently now, and I've learned something important: most reference checks are useless. They're like those mandatory training videos you have to watch at big companies. Everyone goes through the motions, but nobody really learns anything. But it doesn't have to be this way. Reference checks can be incredibly valuable if you do them right. Here's how I do it....

Imagine you're building a house. You could break down the act of building into various steps: first comes the foundation, then the framing, then the roofing, and the plumbing, and the wiring, and so on. Or you could try to do it all at once, ordering a jumble of materials and hoping they somehow come together into a structure. When I instructed Claude/Cursor to build an app, I did something similar by jumbling it up. I dumped a vague request into the LLMs and hoped for the best. "Build me an app that does X."...

While creating a brand, one of the hardest things to do is to arrive at the right set of colors. Colors are a tricky subject—when done incorrectly, the emotions get mismatched, and in the worst of situations, the brand might just seem all over the place. Think of the last time you went to a fast food joint. What was the color of the brand? Most probably, it might be a combination of red and yellow. And that’s definitely not a coincidence — research suggests that red or pink occupies 41% of the food industry when it comes to branding....

This thought was inspired by the book _Design Expertise_ (Lawson & Dorst, 2009) which includes an interview with the architect Ken Yeang where the author mentions: “I give every new member of staff the practice manual to read when they join. They can not just see past designs but study the principles upon which they’re based”. In other words, what would be the ethos behind your own unique design practice? When every designer is different in their own way, what would be one’s own **philosophy of practice**?...

Have you head of the Eudaimonia machine? Imagine a one-story, narrow structure, a straightforward rectangle divided into five rooms, in succession. There's no quick escape route here. This design insists that as you move through, you're plunging deeper into the world of intense productivity....

If you were tasked with a need to find the tallest mountain, and went searching in a far away land surrounded by a series of mountains, how would you finalise the tallest mountain, especially when you could still go farther, and find even more taller mountains (only if you explore even more). There are various ways to term this, some call it the travelling salesman problem, or the "secretary problem", or just as the "optimal stopping" problem, which attempts to come to a mathematical decision on when to actually stop in such explore versus exploit situations. ...

From the place I come from, in Kerala, a baby is not given a name until he/she is 28 days old. And for marginalised castes/communities, the naming ceremony is delayed to 90 days. I never really questioned as to why this was the case. I let it become a ritual system until I overheard a conversation between some of our family members. This was mainly because the chances of a baby surviving was very low in our previous times. So our forefathers temporarily delayed the naming ceremony to avoid the emotional downpour if things go south. And for marginalised communities, the mortality rate was even more low owing to the difficult circumstances. Knowing this reality shocked me. We might have more complex challenges facing the world right now — AI taking people’s jobs, climate change induced shock waves, food insecurities, refugee rights, future pandemics etc. But I believe that the cause of addressing maternal deaths requires the most urgency. When a mother dies during childbirth, the future dies with her....

I was listening to a talk by [Debbie Mcmahon from Financial Times recently at Productcon](Notes%20from%20ProductCon%202025.md) recently and I was surprised by the fact that even in journalism we're seeing tailwind trends more and more computational skills required — genAI is now used to spot stories, and to spin up newsworthy headlines and narratives around these stories. They are now, '**computational journalists**'...who are equipped with AI, data and trendspotting skills. ...

What is an insight? An insight for Elon was: "The most entertaining outcome was the most likely'. His tweet suggests that he believes in taking risks and embracing the unknown, rather than playing it safe....

The top 1% smart thinkers I've observed have all been very clear thinkers. They could elucidate complex thoughts as they understanding the basics, at a very fundamental level. Sure, you could memorize all kinds of complicated concepts and stitch them together, but you will only get so far. And I feel that cleaner thinking is an outcome of deeper reflection — both _reflection in action_, and _reflection on action_ (more on that later) Richard Feynman very famously does this in "Six Easy Pieces", one of his physics lectures. He basically explains mathematics in three pages. He starts from the number line, the rudimentary, one + one = two, and then goes all the way up to precalculus stage. He just builds it up through an unbroken chain of logic, and not really relying on definitions to advance his ideas....

My last year's resolution was to learn how to build on Rails. I taught myself the basics by following some courses, but nothing really stuck with me. I wasn’t building apps; I was getting into a tutorial rut. I needed a better way to learn, akin to being pushed into the river with a swimming instructor. So, I discovered the Founder/Hacker course, which provided more tactical insights into the actual process of building Rails apps. Most online courses polish the loose ends and make it look spotless, but Ryan Kulp didn’t want to do that. He wanted us to see through the mistakes he made as he built the app in a spontaneous manner. I enjoyed this approach so much and have been practicing Rails fundamentals ever since....

Recently, a relative sought my help to tweak a badly designed poster on Microsoft Paint. This was meant to be circulated on Whatsapp as an advertisement for the handyman services his friend was offering in his locale....

The _Lead By Design_ program started about 5 months back in Auroville, Pondicherry for a group of 11 students from two different communities, the edayanchavadi and kottakarai village communities. It was in the initial phase difficult to get these communities together, especially the parents to allow their children to learn with each other owing to their varied social backgrounds. There were certain occasions while their used to be communal clashes. Even now, for instance, these clashes continue where one community always suppresses the other owing to the status. It was also observed that these children from the ‘_lower_’ status were labelled throughout. The labelling however was not something which happened all of a sudden. It has been happening right from when the french rule was initiated in Pondicherry....

Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Mona Lisa achieved through the painstaking application of countless gossamer-thin layers of oil paint over the course of many years, many months. The _sfumato_ technique which Da Vinci popularised, involved applying more than 40 layers of paint, each only 10 to 50 micrometers thick, using fingers to blend the colors and create the depth of illusion. The creation process was "perpetually unfinished" — He began the portrait around 1503, but didn't complete it till his death in 1519. And it would be foolish to dismiss him as a 'master procrastinator' — _What if the attribute of delayed procrastination in itself had some merit?_ I'm beginning to suspect that this was the hidden reason behind the genius of Mona Lisa. The art of brewing ideas lazily. In 2009, a review of three dozen studies conducted by researchers of Lancaster University concluded that setting aside a problem was helpful in improving the performance of divergent thinking tasks....

What differentiates a good essay and a great essay? — With a great essay, you can see the larger tree that connects all those branches, leaves, and twigs together into a single unit of a 'tree'. A bad essay is where you only see the random assortment of leaves and branches. You don't see the larger tree among the branches. While listening to one of the podcast episodes from [David Perell's Writes of Passage](https://perell.com/write-of-passage-podcast/) where he interviews writer-operators to deconstruct their writing process, I noticed the podcast episodes to be very free-flowing, without losing the central theme of the conversation....

Not starting with a blank slate has been a great productivity boost in my writing. I wrote 50K words in 2024. And I can safely say that these 50K words have been written in a well thought manner, instead of an AI generated word salad. All this, because I've been exploring this neat little plugin called as [Smart Connections on Obsidian.](https://www.google.com/search?q=smart+connections+obsidian+plugin&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8) It is a tool, and I wouldn't be naive enough to say that tools don't matter. This tool allows for two main affordances:...

I’ve found this exercise very valuable when it comes to mapping both the frontstage and backstage of any product/service. It’s a terrible tool to communicate what the product/service looks like. If you squint your eye and look at it, you might see an array of sticky notes and flowcharts lined up. However, it’s the best way to understand the front stage, the backstage, or even the backstage behind that backstage....

If you think most product managers spend time in meetings, you're mistaken. The larger chunk of a PM's time is spent in _preparation_ for those meetings - having the "meetings before the meeting", "the meeting", and the "meetings after the meeting." ...