Manmade

I recently read this blog post by David Hagen who figured out why the 11th of every month in ordinal form (‘February 11th’) occurs so much less often than every other date (except September of course) in xkcd #1140 (reproduced below): This graphic was gen…

I’m especially proud of this: I wrote a paper on sentences from the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest(BLFC).

This is going to be another post reminiscing on the past, and my present self possibly assigning too much meaning to an incident that’s wedged in my brain.

Tom Scott’s video explaining why FizzBuzz is a good interview question to weed out bad programmers is 8 years old (!)

I’ve finally published a paper where I could cite KJ Healy’s provocative 2012 paper ‘Fuck Nuance’.

Over the last two years, I’ve seen quite a lot of blog posts, videos and explainers about embeddings which initially surprised me.

I recently watched Fallen Leaves on a flight to Chennai.

I haven’t had a traditional formal CS education, which hasn’t held me back from getting things done with computer programming.

“How many of you are actually proud of being Indian?”

I was watching HBomberguy’s video on Director’s cuts a few days ago, when my mind discovered a connection to something else I’d read, as it tends to do when I’m marinating on the couch after dinner.

I’ve been reflecting on the topic of friction in software design and interfaces for a while now.

It’s been a while since I’ve written any blog posts.

What the fuck does authentic mean anyway?

It is easy for an American intellectual to deliver homilies on the virtues of freedom and liberty, but if he is really concerned about, say, Chinese totalitarianism or the burdens imposed on the Chinese peasantry in forced industrialization, then he should

Two years ago, I thought I would ‘discipline’ myself by being deliberate with the way I spend time online.

Nick Heer talking about the centered Apple logo on iPhones 11 (and all iPhones after that as of the writing of this post): I can’t find it right now, but I remember an old piece of advice — possibly in the HIG — that said that items mathematically centred…

Human memory is flawed and gets worse with time.

Paul Grice’s 1957 paper on meaning is a favorite of mine.

I have one year left in my PhD.

This blog is called Manmade, but unless you subscribe through RSS, you wouldn’t know.

I was reading Resident Contrarian’s recent blog post when a throwaway line at the beginning caught my attention, prompting a longer train of thought: The most troublesome arguments to try to make are those that are both very specific and limited (and are…

Kate Manne, over on her lovely substack: I write in this space in order to put ideas out there quickly, often in an unpolished form.

I’ve burnt a few bridges in my short life.

Me, back in October 2020: It struck me that today’s AI assistants (Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri) are all based around having conversations.

Two years ago, I wrote a post right as I started my study of interpersonal biases in language.

One of the advantages of not being a full-time iOS app developer is that I can spend an unreasonable amount of time on minuscule details of app design.

Christopher Hitchens: In the ordinary moral universe, the good will do the best they can, the worst will do the worst they can, but if you want to make good people do wicked things, you’ll need religion.

Me: Does causation imply correlation?

Andrej Karpathy on the Lex Fridman podcast, when asked how beginners should approach learning machine learning: I am a believer at a high level of the 10,000 hours concept…You literally have to put in 10,000 hours of work… Now, while Malcolm Gladwell does…

I’ve gotten back into gaming recently, and realized something while I played the brilliant metroidvania game Dandara: Trials of Fear+ – video games fall under a spectrum of game-y-ness just like any other category.

A year and 2 months ago, I released DeTeXt – my first iOS app that I had built using SwiftUI, Combine, CoreML and PencilKit.

Phil Price over at Andrew Gelman’s blog had an interesting post about a certain unnamed principle that caught my attention: Many years ago I saw an ad for a running shoe (maybe it was Reebok?)

Vaibhav Vats in Caravan magazine, on the pathetic orchestrated tweets by Indian celebrities following Rihanna’s tweet bringing attention to the farmer’s protests: Tendulkar became the epitome of values prized in the conventional, hierarchal and self-congr…

It’s terrifying to choose an area of study for your PhD research – what if it turns out to be a dead end in a year?

pardés in Hebrew: orchard, grove, fruit garden paradesi in Tamil: Foreigner, stranger … 2.

John Siracusa in episode 19 of his pre-eminent podcast Hypercritical: What were the earliest mass-market PC interfaces like?

Why now?

Howard Zinn in A People’s History of the United States (emphasis mine): One can lie outright about the past.

I recently re-read Kieran Healy’s 2015 paper deriding the abundance of ‘nuance’ in U.S Sociological research.