The lockdown brought out many skills in people; a few turned towards cooking, a few to musical instruments, and a few tried to grow plants. Our household belongs to the last cohort. While growing up, we had the usual holy basil, aloe, and an occasional marigold growing in the pots but now was the time to expand the repertoire. Thus began the hunt on amazon and local nurseries for potting soil, pots, and other paraphernalia.

Mine is a massive country in size and diverse not only in cultures, people, and food but also in flora-fauna and types of soil. Depending…

The past — a train journey

On a fine summer day in 2016, I was on a train from Zagreb to Vienna, travelling between the European capitals, admiring the scenery from the window, enjoying my small cup of coffee, and working on a client presentation. There was a brief scheduled stop at Varazdin, a small city around 50 miles away from Zagreb, where hundreds of people started pouring into the train; they were everywhere — sitting on the floor, near the toilets carrying with them bags that contained a small sample of life they once lived in their home countries. …

I spent the last week reading about GPT-x models and how revolutionary they are going to be. I spent hours in front of the screen looking at the extraordinary results that people have gotten in the field of poetry, programming, bot conversation, fiction, and whatnot. Despite being excited, I read articles and news items with a pinch of salt that claimed that GPT models will end the era of coders and programmers, an article even concocted a term — cargo-cult programmers—and prophesied the sad demise of those who belong to the cohort.

With great powers come great responsibility; if you…

By now each one of you might have seen the tweets, apps, codes, texts produced by the mighty GPT-3 model of OpenAI. The 175 Billion parameter model was trained on a large corpus of data of the size of the internet. It has already amazed people in both tech and non-tech space with its real-worldly results and folks are drooling over the possibilities in the coming years.

What GPT models do is estimate the probability that how likely is the sentence will be formed in real-world e.g. I played with a football in the ground is a sequence of characters…

Most of 2020 we were inside the house but once the lockdown was relaxed, my friends and I would meet for dinner or for coffee once a month or so. Where to meet was always a proverbial question. Both the other friends were in essential services so they had to go to their offices and I was the one on whom the planning part was ‘bestowed’(which I didn’t enjoy much).

Given the knowledge of their predispositions to cuisines and their favourite areas in the city to hang out, I generally present the choices in a manner that I have to…

Although 2020 didn’t give us many opportunities to go out and eat like the old times, whenever we did, we spent a long time deciding where to eat! It was a proverbial million-dollar question. These two friends of mine are quite picky (a little less than me though but my goal is to make them look bad :D) and I haven’t dined with them much in the past 8 years but in my experience, we have to take an extra half an hour for our deliberations aka food wars.

I decided to put an end to this by understanding the…

This one doesn’t need much introduction. Thousands of articles, papers have been written and a few wars have been fought on Bayesian vs Frequentism. In my experience, most folks start with usual linear regression and work their way up to build more complex models and only a few get to dip their feet in the holy pool of Bayes and this lack of opportunity along with the terseness of the topic punches holes in the understanding, at least for me it did.

I don’t want to be bogged down by too many mathematical equations and want to have an intuitive…

Over the years, I have heard many of my friends comment- Do you ever sleep? Well, I won’t blame them. Generally, I am the first one up even after a late night, although that has changed over time. In my early 20s I used to sleep for 5 or 5.5 hours(We would catch a late-night movie, reach home by 2 am and still reach the office by 8 am and be functional) but nowadays it’s between 6 and 6.5. Of course, there are days when I linger in bed for much longer because the energy dissipates when you get older…