Monday, 2025-08-11 to Sunday, 2025-08-17
People exist for one another — Marcus Aurelius
As my father often says: “ಯಾರೂ ಅವರ ಗುಂಡಿಗೆ ಅವರೇ ಉರುಳಿ ಹೋಗಲ್ಲ (No one rolls into thier own grave)”
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There was a water line break in Carmel on Monday, Aug 11, 2025. I came home yesterday at noon, because they shut down all taps, coffee-machines ( critical infra for me), and will continue to work from home tomorrow also till the city runs bacteria tests and confirms that water is potable. There is a boil-water directive in place as of now (Tuesday).
Blogging at btbytes.micro.blog
after I locked my X account, threw away the keys ( changed 2FA to something I can’t get to without some effort - increased friction), I needed a place to write short form notes, and post an occassional picture as a zeitgeist breadcrumb. I was reading someon’s micro.blog, and realized perhaps this would be enough to satiate that need, and started blogging at btbytes.micro.blog on Aug 13, 2025.
I got the $1/month plan. Considering it has an iOS app, and a MacOS app, it makes it very easy to post from the laptop or on the go, which is really nice for posting whimsical observations. It is definitely worth the price.
My main worry about using micro.blog was - “what happens to my posts if I stop the subscription?” That concern was addressed today (Aug 17), when I read their FAQ section: ℹ️ Hosting after subscription ends (short: they will not delete your posts, and you can even offload archiving to the wayback machine. there is always the option of downloading all posts). So, I expect to fully replace my X postings with micro.blog for the foreseeable time.
The biggest time sink with X is not so much the effervescent timeline, but the interactions - replies, likes and refreshing to see how your followers, and mutuals responded to your post. If I ever gain a lot of followers, and likes on micro.blog, i will probably move to just writing stuff by hand posting it by mail to a handful.
From around the web
Do things that don’t scale, and then don’t scale
- do the simplest thing that solves a problem or brings joy to you and the intended audience.
- generative AI, cheap hosting, and free tier services, etc makes writing software easy.
- you may want to solve problems for just you, and a small number of people in your life or ones you trust to not become a maintenance burden.
- scaling brings problems that are not worth solving.
- Do things that don’t scale, and then don’t scale
Related reading: An app can be a home-cooked meal
Richard Morris who runs Richard Morris (@ahistoryinart) / X was recommended by Paul Graham as a good source to learn about art.
LLMs
git worktree
Learnt about git worktree in the context of Claude Code etc., The git worktree add ../sibling-dir branch-foo command will create a seperate directory under sibling-dir tracking branch-foo. Run claude inside the sibling-dir, so that multiple instanes of claude do not clobber each other. see.
- Brokk has supported this for a while.
- Conductor “Run a bunch of Claude Codes in parallel. Each Claude gets an isolated workspace. See who’s working, see who’s stuck, and what’s changed.”, and GitHub - degtrdg/poverty-conductor: poor man’s git worktree manager inspired by https://conductor.build/
Cluade Code: Inside out
ClaudeCode & Obsidian: Teaser “let ClaudeCode be “a local delegate” to your Vault.”
There’s a real sense of how radical the ClaudeCode UX is — it’s turning a lot of closed products inside out. PKMs are a prime category … whole ecosystem of products can collapse into an open system with the agent at its core, churning away. — x.com/agambrahma/status/1952841715808907407 In the vision of Kleppmann’s “turning the database inside out”, instead of querying a locked database, you stream data to where it needs to be. It’s a similar principle here: Instead of AI trapped inside Notion’s walls, it flows through your actual knowledge graph”
The Claude Code “UX” appears to be pretty unbeatble (though I haven’t compared it to Gemini CLI and OpenAI Codex compare) so far, and it is encoruaging to see this kind of “i’m going to let loose an ‘agentic’ tool loose on my data”. What would be even more cool is to have this kind Shell tool be powered by a local-llm like gpt-oss or better.
GPT5
GPT-5 New Params and Tools via Jo Bergum.
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Weaviate’s Elysia ^7d2c87 has hit several sweet spots.
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LiteLLM: LLM gateway to provide model access, fallbacks and spend tracking across 100+ LLMs, in OpenAI format. It is a compatibility layer.
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Google’s Gemma3 270M is an “edge device” oriented, compact model for efficient AI. I should probably become familiar with llm families like Gemma, and how people are Fine Tuning them for various applications. This specific finetune made me aware of the need to track them.
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Yan Lecun’s A Path Towards Autonomous Machine Intelligence toread
This position paper proposes an architecture and training paradigms with which to construct autonomous intelligent agents. It combines concepts such as configurable predictive world model, behavior driven through intrinsic motivation, and hierarchical joint embedding architectures trained with self-supervised learning.
Design and Typography
The website of Neil Panchal, proprieter of U.S. Graphics Company - Office is a design inspiration for pradeepgowda.com. The CSS is a modified version of spectre.css, which has now a maintainance fork called sprecre-css
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WTF PDF - How bad is your PDF? HOW BAD IS YOUR PDF? PDFs are filled with horrible edge cases. With WTF PDF, you can finally quantify exactly how bad your PDF is. This might be even useful to convince someone of how difficult their PDF documents are. from Datalab.to via the founder Vik Paruchuri.
Programming
Created an account and a repository on tangled, after reading @oppi.li/journal at main · tangled
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water.css is an awesome css framework. But, what makes it even more useful to me on a daily basis is the waterize bookmarklet which I put on every browser’s bookmark bar, and click it to rerender any page that is badly styled (weird fonts, bad color contrast, etc.,). The reader mode on browsers works too, but my muscle memory works better with water.css.
Generative AI Coding
Nirmal Thacker recommends use of Amp - an AI coding agent built by Sourcegraph, Cline - AI Coding, Open Source and Uncompromised and Claude Code over cursor.
Cline can be installed as an extension for vscode, and its clones like cursor, vscode insiders?, and windsurf.
New and Updated Pages
- ^b5a0d2 I wrote up so that I can print The Big LLM Architecture Comparison llm mustread