Weeknotes - 2025-W05
Cover image for 2025-W05
The team and I went and played badminton together and it was amazing. It is one of those few games that I really enjoy playing and look forward to.
A lot of this week has just been about putting the finishing touches on the work for the upcoming New Delhi World Book Fair. Lot of work got done.
We also got our hampers from Takshashila which had 2 books in it:
I am already about 40% of the way through Missing in Action because I picked it up a few months before itself, to start some reading for the GCPP course I was to join. So I gave this to a friend, who I know is also interested in the policy space too. Even though he and I donāt see eye to eye on the politics of things, we keep our debates civil and respectful and for that, I respect him very much.
I joined a gym this week, after much procrastination but I wasnāt happy at all going there. The trainers are just large looking bean bags who have no reason to help out. Heck, they didnāt even give me a tour of the gym (Note: It is an upscale gym). I didnāt know where the mats were, 2 out of 6 treadmills werenāt working, 2 out of 4 ellipticals (EFX) werenāt working.
Rants aside, Iām glad I live in a time where I have LLMs at my disposal, so I donāt really need those bean bags to help me out. Since I have a bunch of experience with what strength training means (from all my running days and working with a wonderful coach), I can just train myself and use the gym as a place where they exchange money for time on the machines. There.
Also, for the first time, I got a bunch of reading done for the upcoming GCPP class this week. I used some tools to get this done, the primary one being Print Friendly so that I could print the article to PDF and remove all the cruft. This allowed me to read it full screen on my laptop when taking notes. For the longer ones, I gave the PDF to Notebook LM to generate it as a conversation that I could listen to. Then I gave the same PDF to perplexity to ask me questions about, to see if I needed any gaps to be filled.
Between being able to craft a plan for the gym for myself and being able to learn the way I want to, its getting more obvious that we truly live in a new Renaissance where AI is putting a SHIT ton of power, in the hands of the people. It is mind blowing and scary at the same time.
I finished up the book I was reading - Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. It is a wonderful read and I would highly recommend that everyone pick a copy of this up. It really helps to reduce the stigma around therapy and what it really aims to do - seen through the eyes of a therapist seeking therapy herself.
4 books done out of my target to read 12 this year. I am happy š
On Friday, I came to my motherās place in OMR since my father is travelling. I left at 6:30PM and reached only at 9:00PM. To my luck it looked like the great great great great Amit Shah and the VP were coming here and that caused the build up. It frustrates me to no end, that a āwell to doā state like TN cannot even get traffic diversions right (heck, why does there need to be diversions in the first place?). But breathe, thatās why Iām doing the public policy course, so that I may help understand and perhaps even move a stone in the right direction. </Rant>
This weekās GCPP was fun! I am a total fan of the way Anupam teaches. It looks like many others agree with me too:
Few people have a curve named after them. @anupammanur is one. The Anupam Curve is an upward sloping feedback curve, where most people rate your class as excellent. https://t.co/6RoFmLoEpr
ā Nitin Pai (@acorn) January 9, 2025
Also this was the first time I got a large % of pre-studying done before the class and I could easily see what a large difference it made.
A dear friend is running the Lake Sonoma 100 miler as I write this and as a dedication to her, I brisk walked a 100 minutes to dedicate to her mammoth effort. I strongly believe that she is well on her way to change the entire face of trail running for women in India šŖš¾.
This week is going to be a long one - between travelling to World Book Fair and then an academic conference over the weekend, I am not going to know how it whizzed by. But Iām looking forward to being around books, friends and learning more.