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Showing up on my yoga mat - Notes from a weekend @Ashram

Thomas Daniell, Tremal Naig’s Choultry, Madura (1798) Today is November 1 st . I am leaving Isha Yoga center tonight. Last 2 days here in the ashram has been wonderful. Today was especially gorgeous. I got up early and showed up in my yoga mat. Showing up on the yoga mat has become a thing for me. Especially when I am visiting ashram. One thing is that it reminds of what it means to be deeply human – I used to fight the idea that AI agents can think. Especially working with Opus 5.5, I am very clear that what is happening within them can definitely be called “thoughts”, “reasoning”. There is really no straw to clutch anymore. But I am more convinced than ever that they do not/cannot/will not experience anything close to consciousness. I obviously don’t have an explanation. But showing up in the yoga mat has at least let me taste this last frontier a few more times till I am proved wrong. On a less philosophical note, “showing up on the yoga mat” means you start the day by confronting ...
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Dreamforce and Other Dreamy Delusions

  Yesterday was Friday, and I had every excuse to take it easy: just chill in my hotel room and walk along the Bay Trail, watching the airplanes land at SFO. I'd had a hectic Dreamforce. This was my second Dreamforce, but my first as a speaker. But I already feel like I have been here every year. Salesforce is a very in-your-face kind of company; I must admit. Sometimes it's a little overwhelming for me: all the noise, all the marketing, all the showmanship. Unlike at other big tech companies, you can't just be good at technology and leave it at that. You also must be a good showman, with good marketing and presentation skills. To be honest, sometimes the marketing is too much for me. It's too loud for me, but I see that it's needed, and I see that it works. One of the things I wanted to do this time was to embrace this almost bizarre identity of showmanship that my role at Dreamforce demands, so I pitched for, and got approved, three theatre sessions. It was a grea...
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Jumping ship and other Confessions

Early Morning by Moritz von Schwind So I recently jumped ship. Meaning I moved teams internally at Salesforce. I was not explicitly looking for a change. I was actually quite comfortable in my previous role. In fact, the product I helped launch is growing and shows a lot of potential. But when an opportunity came up on a different team, one that promised newer challenges and a lot of learning, I made the call to join. What surprised me was how quickly I decided. I took just a weekend. But truthfully, a voice within me had already said yes while my manager was still explaining the proposed role. I find myself asking: how come I said yes so soon? Do I not like my role anymore? I thought I did. Why did I jump so quickly? Was I always, subconsciously, waiting to walk away from a product I had so lovingly created? Was I always waiting to leave my role, maybe leave it all? Anyway. Moments like this reveal what motivates me about my work. Here are a few things I could think of. Mostly, I lov...
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Notes to Self - Being Human in the age of AI

 TL;DR: In this post, I remind myself about 6 traits that matter in the age of AI: Intellectual Agility — rewire how you work, constantly Curate like Crazy — less is more; avoid AI fluff Second Brain — build a compounding system of context New Muscle Memories — pause before doing; ask "can my agent do this?" Being a Good Manager — of agents, not just people Being Human — empathy, agency, and curiosity as the last moat Recently this AI thingie has graduated from being a fascination to being something close to an obsession. I have a unique vantage point where my products are powered by/powering AI while I also grapple with how AI can actually impact 'how i work'. In this context, like so many of my professionals I am super fascinated by the endless stream of innovation. Every weekend is filled with constant tinkering, wonderful POCs and nice demos. But there is one strand of thought which has been recently keeping me up. Fully Realising the magic and power of ...
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Another Caravanserai - Travels through American West - 2

Today I drove down the Sonoran Desert Highway from Sedona, AZ till Joshua Tree, CA. I am staying in this unique AirBnB which is basically a remodeled 1984 Fleetwood Prowler (no relation to Fleetwood Mac that I have been recently obsessing over and whose tribute concert that I am planning to attend day after tomorrow in LA). My left eye seems to have got scorched by the constant exposure to desert sun – Gemini thinks that it is because of being inside the air-conditioned car which dramatically reduces the humidity especially while travelling through desert. Throughout the journey I was struggling with a constant pain/irritation on my left eye. A thought crossed my mind about what it would be like if all of this ended in a fiery car crash. Such thoughts of mortality keep coming to me. When this thought came, I felt absurd about checking the NAV of my mutual funds last night. What is not absurd is that I felt the preciousness of my meditation practice yet again. These quiet moments of cl...
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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 ...
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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...
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