Daily-Update on Amitav Krishna

2026-05-20 Retrospective

Thu, 21 May 2026 04:42:14 +0000

Hello! My name is Amitav!

Today I did little work. This is bad. I read a lot of random things. I practiced competitive programming, completing question 2 from the 2011 CCC Senior division and getting stuck on question 4 before spending some time learning about max flow graphs, though tomorrow I must continue learning about them further. I finished listening to David Senra’s podcast on Claude Shannon, and began listening to his podcast on Phil Knight (Nike man). In addition, I began listening to a podcast from Machine Learning Street Talk with Llion Jones and Luke Darlow on a stagnating machine learning research landscape. They also discussed their own model, Continuous Thought Machines, though I don’t have too many thoughts on it as I didn’t read the paper in much detail. I completed none of the tasks I set out for myself yesterday. It’s also late. One thing I will try for tomorrow is restricting the set of media I am allowed to consume. In particular, tomorrow I will only consume my work Slack, work email, school email, school brightspace page, and “The Death of Ivan Ilyich”, along with my music. Another thing I began tracking today was how much profanity I used, which came to 140, +/- 10-15. That includes also times I had profane thoughts, with the number of times I spoke what I consider curse words probably in the single digits. I am attempting to cut down my profanity usage as it’s unprofessional and I would not like to accidentally curse in front of coworkers. My goal by next Monday is to bring that number down to at most 70/day, with at most one spoken instance per day. I believe this may not be ambitious enough, as I suspect beginning tracking caused me to curse more out of awareness of my tracking. My tasks for tomorrow are:

2026-05-19 Retrospective

Wed, 20 May 2026 04:41:21 +0000

Hello! My name is Amitav! A good summary of today is that I did some work that then was invalidated, so I’m feeling a bit deflated. I did quite a bit of work for 8090, but wasted quite a bit of time on setting up some infrastructure that was then nullified when my boss and I decided that it would make more sense for the system I’m working with to work with lighter-weight tools that would allow me to iterate faster as the system I’m working on will likely never see absurd levels of traffic. That’s good for future Amitav, however it is somewhat saddening for current Amitav as quite a bit of work will be redone, but it is what it is I suppose. In addition to that, today I read this article which was interesting (it was shared with me yesterday and I did read it yesterday, but did not share it on this blog). There are a couple of action items there that I will not act on right now due to greater priorities, but that I defer instead to the 28th (the day after final paper submissions are due for qCCL). In particular, I lack mathematical maturity, which is bad and must be solved. Another interesting thing I read today was this slideshow by my boss from a few years ago (not recommended to me by him, found it on my own), though I lack a lot of prerequisites in distributed systems and so it’s mostly gibberish to me. One thing I’d like to do eventually is learn more about distributed systems. Today, I also listened to the podcast by David Senra on Claude Shannon. Overall it was interesting, I think my biggest takeaway is that you shouldn’t take things too seriously. Now, back to Amitav, the tasks I set out for myself yesterday are as follows:

2026-05-17 and 2026-05-18 Daily Update

Tue, 19 May 2026 05:35:36 +0000

Hello, I am Amitav! This is actually my daily update to be first posted on my personal website, amitav.net, before being syndicated to substack (see this). The biggest reason for this is that I have an admin portal now on my website, which gives me a snazzy interface with which to write my posts. You can see this for yourself here, though I will warn you that this is password restricted so that I don’t get random folks posting stuff on my website. Anyways, back to the task at hand, my daily update(s)!