Ananth's Blog

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Before the Dream Dissolves - Travels through American West - 1

This morning, I had left the beachy environs of Ventura, CA and after what is almost 1000 kms, I am here in Cottonwood, AZ. Ventura stood out in its youthful excesses while driving through this very different America – This is the America of endless ranches, farms and hard-working Americans. It is the America that Taylor Sheridan generally writes about. Going through such variety of landscapes makes me feel dazed. And I have a mild anxiety of a strange kind. I worry that all these impressions that I picked up today will slowly dissolve into a dream tomorrow or maybe next month or next year and that eventually I’ll end up in the same place where I started and, in this process, I will lose something. Without pondering on the absurdity or the profundity of this mild anxiety, I want to proceed to documenting this journey so far. If nothing else, I think it will amuse a future version of myself reading through all this. Writing is, in fact – or any form of creativity or creation – is an ...

The GenAI Magic I Wasn't Looking For

So I heard this NotebookLM audio overview recently shared on X ( @shrikanth_krish ), and it completely floored me in a way I wasn't expecting. NotebookLM has always impressed me before, mainly when I was learning about technical content . But this time there was something different, something that caught me off guard in the most surprising way. The person who shared it had fed NotebookLM a bunch of content that was basically a lecture on Advaita Vedanta from Mani Dravid Shastriji. The original material was this dense mix of Bengali, Hindi, and Sanskrit—the kind of thing that feels almost impenetrable by design unless you're already steeped in that world. But somehow, NotebookLM just kicked it out of the park and made me think about things I hadn't been thinking about in a while. Most of the time when I'm thinking about AI, my mind goes straight to the obvious places—how it's going to change the way we work, its impact the global economy, what it means for companies...

My Machine of Loving Grace

Yesterday was wonderful. It was Saturday. The house felt more quiet after a flurry of activities. I gave myself permission to explore my curiosity. It's a wonderful time to be curious, especially when we're witnessing what might be the biggest transformation of our lifetimes. Claude's character voice Out of all the AI tools available, I find myself gravitating more and more toward Claude for its distinctive voice and character. As a user of technology, there's a growing sense of presence—a semblance of a particular personality that has slowly become an essential part of my life. I've come to expect Claude to be there as a highly available, intelligent sidekick. I use Claude several times a day, mostly focused on specific tasks at hand. I'm trying to understand, in retrospect, what triggers within me the decision to turn to Claude. I feel I need to isolate and identify this muscle—this muscle of agency—because the future of work will largely depend on our abil...

From GitHub to Grass - Thoughts on Windsurf, Davidoff and Potential

Recently I created my first GitHub repo . During those precious moments of flow, I felt like a teenage programmer - a prolific creator back in college. Sometime during my stint in Isha IT, I had this thought that creativity, the act of creation and the what we call creation itself can have multiple forms. That it need not all be direct, physical, visceral - it can be of higher order - one can "create" teams, products, culture. Then last few weeks, I got the experience of being the direct creator - without those pesky layers of management and indirection. It was something practical too . It was something that I could use - It allows the user to upload NSDL statements and allow you to create portfolio trendlines. This excites me - enough to believe that I will be able to complete my planned tenure at Salesforce. More than anything (more than the Salary at least), this learning potential excites me - I notice that this excitement about learning stems from two very different thin...

Notes from a Tribal Dropout

Leaving our Shivapadam house at the end of Mahashivarathri, I found myself contemplating the curious phenomenon of tribal detachment. Not a complete severance—more of a self-imposed exile, a deliberate step away from the collective heartbeat. Yet the Tribe, utterly indifferent to my absence, continues its relentless forward march. It recruits fresh blood, elevates new heroes to its pantheon, and advances its grand mission with mechanical precision. The proper response from someone who still claims tribal identity (albeit from a comfortable distance) would be pride, connection, enthusiastic cheerleading from the sidelines. But this isn't about proper responses or should-be feelings. This is about the messy reality beneath the socially acceptable veneer. And articulating what I actually feel requires a certain brutal honesty I'm not entirely comfortable with. Yes, I genuinely desire the Tribe's success. Yes, I experience what appears to be authentic happiness when my fellow...

The Greatest show on Earth - Richard Dawkins

For the second time, in the last year or so, I am poring over another book from Richard Dawkins - this one is called The Greatest Show on Earth. This is my second book of Richard Dawkins. It’s far more breezy and compared to the earlier book that I read: "The Ancestor’s Tale". Like the previous book, it makes me wonder at the emergent sense of what can only be called Intelligence. This intelligence - seemingly unconscious and purposeless but which nevertheless powers the process through which animals or plants - Life - evolves to its rich eventual tapestry. Each of the chapters are essentially arguments against the so-called Intelligent Design or Creationism. These chapters are enlivened by amazing stories of various life forms. These stories are what create a sense of wonder. These stories evoke a sense of disbelief, make me marvel at the sheer unlikeliness of the specific way life evolved the way it did. It also evokes a sense of kinship with all the creatures which endure...