Week #55

A clean week, it was a festive week. Saturday was Raksha Bandhan, so almost half of the day was spent in those rituals and getting in and out of the house and guests.

Sunday was mundane as I just sat back and took a break to detox the technical things I have been doing over that last week. Then hard hitting monday came where I was frustrated with AI vibes, that left me a headache and sore throat for the next day. Took a leave for the day and was feeling better on Wednesday, cradled a few more vibe coding sessions, this time more focused on my code expertise and drove the LLM to do certain things in certain limited ways, and it worked better.

The tuesday bit is what gave me a little relief, I just layed back and slept for the most of the day, I had minor headache and throat was sore in the morning part. I just didn’t pick up my phone or the laptop till late evening and felt calm and human again. I think I can say humans need to have a digital detox day once a week or months to develop their brains again in this AI-dominated world.

Regarding learning more SQL, I took this week off. I think I need some time to accept all the things I have learnt and start a fresh next week. This is something I read somewhere that your brain needs time to retain information, too much information dump makes it harder to remember and connect things. Slow down the input and let the output process itself.

Quote of the week

“If we let everyone who dies to be a cause of unhappiness, that would mean people are being born to become unhappy, but people are always born for the sake of happiness“

— Toshikazu Kawaguchi from “Before your Memory Fades”

LINK

I read this book, and man! this quote hits home in the end. It just changed the way of my thinking about life and my loved ones. It gave me a reason to exist (among AI doom and gloom), it gave me a reason to be myself and choose being happy over sad.

If life gave you an option to choose anger over empathy, always choose empathy, this is also on the similar lines. If you have choice to be happy or sad, be happy, because that is what we are here for. Why be sad and live life like a zombie, like a AI chat bot without a true purpose and inner fire? Live life like a smiling and let that happiness spread and remove negativity.

Read

  1. Grug brained AI developer: LLM Appendix

LLM worst when grug not know answer and hope LLM figure out.this important distinction! many grug not understand! - That made me laugh hard, not gonna lie. Truly relatable

  1. AI Efficiency? Give me a break
    1. People are seeing it, people are coping now.
    2. AI is good, but not great. It has its value but the hype people created is 200x the value. Please, use AI I don’t refrain it, but everything has its moderation and area of use. AI for ART is pointless and gives existential crisis, refrain, I am not sure where it could be used without a thought blindly. In programming? yes to some extent in generating throwaway scripts or prototypes.
  2. 1910: The year where the modern world lost its mind
    1. I could not relate but can feel the dredge in me when Machines might be taking over humans. Similarly AI is like taking away some jobs, but probably creating more to manage and architect around them, just like engineering was booming after the industrial revolution, AI management might be a field that would be full of potential.
  3. I tried coding with AI, I became lazy and stupid
    1. I have tried it too, I use it, but yes I have found myself in the author’s place.
    2. It helps but only in that fine moment, after the work is done, I don’t feel rewarded, I don’t feel fulfilled, I didn’t learn anything, barely any dopamine.
    3. I am better polishing off my skills
  4. Why I choose OCAML as my primary programming language
    1. This is huge post, the person lives and breathes OCAML. There are so many golden pieces of resources and thoughts. I would bookmark it for later detailed review when I think would be a right time to learn OCAML.
    2. One interesting thing is that OCAML is a blend of theoretically established and practically used language. Which hardly any language does it that well, the ecosystem and the community too looks rich and supportive. These things must be true as these observations can be taken from years of involvement in the project/community.
  5. Cross Site Request Forgery
    1. Such a nuanced and detailed post about how CSRF is a tricky problem to counter. Why they exist and why one should be careful in building web apps.
    2. AI generated slop code could probably cause CSRF issues but its very hard to say from a humans perspective, since the generated code is often hard to debug and pinpoint the issues as it would take considerable time to read through it.
  6. Curate your own newspaper with RSS
    1. In this constant hole of doomscrolling which I think I was falling for the last couple of weeks and finally got out by reading books. fiction books. It is important to make these kinds of apps and rss readers, as to be mindful about what we consume and at what rate.
    2. In those days (2014-2017), I used to read newspaper after coming home from school. Those were just a 10 minute glance at the first 2 pages, but majority of time was spent in the sport and science zone. I loved reading it, that now makes me wonder, that even little and moderated content is enough for the brain to sustain. This never ending social media has made us brain want more and more, so we need to bring that fun and content (satisfaction) in content back.
  7. How React works behind the scenes (under the hood)
    1. Wow! What a post, I can happily say, I know something about React now. There are a lot of moving parts. I thought it was just one step compilation, but man there are layers of compilation happening in various formats/data layers I think.
    2. The first one is JSON, the components and the apps are converted into JSON notation and then used to construct the DOM, that is fascinating, based on the reference to different components, it can decide which elements to render or re-render. There is a graph created so that it becomes easier to distinguish and make a hierarchy of the app. The virtual DOM as called is like the graph that helps in re-rendering, but the heavy lifting is done by the Fiber tree (which is a lower level abstraction) that does the actual replacement or rendering technique algorithms.
    3. The process is so quick that the magic is not even noticable, but yes that is one rabbit hole to dig into.
  8. Hugo + Obsidian + Git Pipeline
    1. This blog gave me a idea to simplify my static site generator, instead of syncing with the database from github, I can just simply use a sqlite file and sync to the database an vice versa. Right now the problem is on the inconsistency in github content vs the database, so after having an in-memory or local file that can reside at any time on the repo, it would be easier to pull, push changes to the remote repository.
  9. How I code with AI on a low budget/free
    1. I need to try Cline, claude code router and qwen models. I have been sleeping on local hosted models, nit entirely though. I have a low spec laptop, 8GB RAM, so can’t use a model beyond 2 or 4 Billion parameter.
    2. Kimi also has an API and a free credits, might as well give it a shot to use claude code for quick improvements to some projects.

Watched

  • Rewriting SQLite from scratch: Database School, Glauberg Costa, CEO of Turso

    • I have been keeping an eye on turso, I really like the product, but now after watching it and hearing the mindset and approach of the company, I feel I need to get involved and contribute to this.
    • This is such a great learning experience, I had cloned and ran the project locally last week and would find quirks and new features to implement next week.
    • In a nutshell, turso started as a SQLite fork, but they realised the embedded replicas, the server and all the other things around sqlite were just hacks and they needed something better to support it natively. And hence Turso (limbo) was born which is a sqlite written ground up from RUST. I was amazed to see almost all the features are supported out of the box in this repo. github.com/tursodatabase/turso

  • Wishful programming

    • This is so intuitive. I think Mitchel Hashimto too recommends this. He just prints out the things that he wants to get finally out and works to reverse engineer how it can be programmed. Mind blowing idea but quite simple to follow.

Double click to interact with video

  • DuckDB in 100 seconds: Fireship is back?
    • In 2025, we haven’t seen any 100 seconds video from Fireship, is this some sort of a cope to AI slop or really we think he was in crisis.
    • But anyways, duckdb is cool, I haven’t tried it, it does use column based instead of tables or rows, which is kind of cool.

Learnt

  • Working with AI uses 2x my brain power, I am better off writing myself for complex or very detailed things I need to work on
    • I was coding in Cursor for experimenting a few things on the pdf extraction and plotting certain tables and grids. LLMs are very nasty when assuming a lot of stuff and doing somethings on their own. And it didn’t miss a chance to do it there, to extrapolate the coordinates of the grid on the page for columns and rows.
    • Also the frustration crept hard when the cursor was extremely slow for GPT-5 and even any model for that time frame on Monday and Wednesdays.
    • I did so many iterations and finally gave up since it was quite frustrating to review the AI generated slop. I thought to myself, I could have done that myself in 2 hours rather than vibing it for 4 hours. Lessons learnt, never vibe code ever for tiny experiments or fixes.

Tech News

Was a bit of digital detox week, 2 days, I just did nothing but stare at the ceiling and out of my window. This gave me a mental reset and some good vibes to just live. Hoping to crush next few weeks.

See you in the next one!

Happy Coding :)

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