Meta: This was written a few years ago when I was in grade 7, which is why much of the writing is terrible, many of the facts misleading and wrong, and why there are so many parentheticals (like this (and sometimes nested parentheticals too)). I may return to this one day and make it better, but don’t hold your breath. You can also see some discussion from when I posted this, on Reddit. ...
One thing I have pondered of late is what I wish to deliberately practice. These thoughts have been stoked by many pieces of writing, but one that has been especially great is Tyler Cowen’s piece on this topic. One great quote Cowen mentions is the following: What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales? Sadly, I don’t have a great response to this! The area in which this is most applicable is working out. Recently I have begun weight-lifting, and while it’s not a very exciting response, that is quite comparable to a pianist’s scales. When it comes to my work however, I have never found intentional repetition to be an especially effective method to improve my abilities. The greatest difficulty I face in this sort of deliberate practice is that currently, my work is very varied. It’s a mixture of engineering, machine learning, physics, and more recently chemistry. One thing I tried to do last October was commit to reading a different machine learning every week or so, but I found that ineffective at growing my skills. The only effective method I have found as of yet to improving my skills is to simply build projects. ...
This was googled in relation to this post: https://amitav.net/posts/on-animals.html. As you can see in the second photo, the penis of the dog is relatively prominent. I considered censoring it, but I don’t think it matters that much. Zotero item: LLKP3D3K
Meta: This is a blog-ified version of this X article Hey! Alongside my good friend Krishiv Thakuria, I will be doing a long(ish) tweet everyday for the next 21 days. One random thought I had today is that animals are really weird. Above, I have photographed a goose. A goose is a bird, and it’s alive[, definitely, but it’s also definitely not human. It’s quite small. It’s oddly shaped. I have four limbs, but a goose really has just two limbs, the legs, and two wings. It’s neck is long and thin, where mine is (proportionally) thicker and shorter. And it doesn’t really have a face, instead having a hard beak where I have soft skin. Above I have photographed a dog. A dog is a mammal, so closer to me than to a goose, but still very dissimilar. the dog also has four limbs, but it’s back two limbs are almost the same length as its front two, unlike mine where my back two limbs (my legs) are quite a bit shorter than my front two. Its eyes are different than mine. In my eyes I have two black dots inside of a white orb, while its eyes appear to be an almost-black dark-brown. Its ears are floppy where mine are stiffer, and much longer too. Its nose does not so much protrude from the face as meld with it, where my nose protrudes from my face, a clearly distinct appendage. ...
Hello! This was an interesting piece. I found it via https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1v4zjfj/chinese_6yearold_girl_dies_after_receiving/ Zotero item: D2NU36AK
I’m listening to “Watermelon Sugar” by Harry Styles. I feel chill. In the morning I did some work for my religion work. {{REDACTED}} After that I ate dinner, biked to the gym, photographed some geese, and then wrote my geese post + this daily update while intermittently scrolling X.
Meta: This is a lightly-edited, blog-ified version of this X thread. 1/8 This is a terrible goose picture because the geese are confined to the bottom right corner, but it’s an okay photo in sum. Too busy though, it will be much better with some cropping. 2/8 I like the symmetry in this photo. The two geese in the front are facing the same way and look almost the same, which gives it a nice surreality. I suspect it will look much better after cropping out the top part because right now the light grabs attention away from the geese. ...
Today I did some [[school_hrt3mss]] work. I finished a few assignments. It’s crunch time because the course ends on Friday. {{REDACTED}} I also did a bunch of blog stuff. I want to sleep now. The blog stuff + x kept me up till 1 again :^(. Top up DeepSeek API key Figure out how to x-post these posts to substack automagically.
*Meta: This is a dynamic post, which means that it will be updated often. You can navigate through previous versions of all posts here. If you are non-technical, ask your favourite LLM for help. This is a non-exhaustive list of tools I use: Python, JAX, PyTorch, Quantum Espresso, Cirq, Jupyter Notebook, Marimo Notebook, OpenAI Codex, Ubuntu, i3, GitHub, Zotero (you can see my library here). In the future I would like to expand this post. This post was inspired by this post by Gavin Leech and this post by Ti Guo. ...
This is a blog-ified version of this X thread: https://x.com/amitavkrshna/status/2079752248872050770, with some minor edits. Also, these photos were actually taken yesterday, 2026-07-20, but I chose to exercise my free will and post them today instead. 1/7 I don’t like this one because the camera isn’t straight and the geese are far away. It will be okay after some cropping + rotation 2/7 I like this one a little bit, but I think it could also be improved by cropping from the left such that the geese take up ~all of the frame. ...