Kyoto in three days

Unlike Tokyo, Kyoto is a nice and cozy city. We started the day with a walking tour that gave us an intense view of this city of shrines. There is a lot to do in this city. However, I would recommend focusing on a few of the best specific shrines. Inari Shrine - do the full mountain hike to the top and check the small waterfalls on the backside Kinkaku-ji Shrine Ninna-ji temple - a 1200-year-old temple with several statues of Hindu gods sculpted in 800 AD....

Migrating from WordPress to Hugo

For more than 10 years, this website has been running on WordPress. Over time I come to dislike it for multiple reasons.

Book summary: Sick Societies: Challenging the Myth of Primitive Harmony by Robert B. Edgerton

This book seems to address the myth that primitive societies are more harmonious than our present societies.

Statistical outcomes require statistical games

Let’s say 1% of kids are born with allergies. The statistic is useful for a public policy maker, someone who is setting up food menus in schools or regulating restaurants. However, the statistic is useless for you as a parent. Unless you are planning to have around 10+ kids, you are never going to experience the statistical outcome. If you have one child, either the child would have an allergy or he won’t. Statistical outcomes matter only when someone plays a game sufficient times.

August 17, 2024 Â· 2 min      Misc

Illegal immigrats to Europe via Cairo

While traveling in the streets of Cairo or Qahira/क़ाहिरा, I came across a group of Indians who didn’t look like tourists.

Shinjuku at night

Tokyo in three days

Tokyo isn’t a city per se but a prefecture. A prefecture is more akin to a county in the US. Japan has 47 prefectures. I would recommend two important cities in Tokyo to spend your time in - Akihabara Electronic District and Shinjuku (fancy) District.

Mobs are Status Games

Unlike an army or a militia, mobs are loosely held groups of individuals. Mobs are held together by some identification (race, ethnicity, shared belief towards a cause, etc.). While an army/militia is more top-down, a mob is bottoms-up in many cases. A mob leader exercises much less control over the mob than an army chief. And that’s why mobs are much more dangerous.

July 27, 2024 Â· 1 min      Politics

Writing Script matters as much as the spoken language

Language isn’t just a means of communication but it is the medium of propagating culture. That’s why culturally Canada is similar to the USA while Mexico (and the rest of Latin America) to Spain. One huge advantage the USA has over Europe is that practically everyone speaks a single language. A Californian can fly 6 hours to New York City, and feel just at home, with the same language and thus, a similar culture.

Thirukoneshwaram Kovil

Sri Lanka in 5 days

Sri Lanka is a small island country near the southern coast of India. My trip was heavily focused on Ramayana and Hinduism. While I loved it, those who have little interest in Hinduism might find the trip. Like Kerala and Sikkim, I had a chauffered guide for the trip. I would highly recommend doing that, otherwise, a packed trip becomes harder to pull off. You can see a list of recommended guides here.

LLMs: great for business but bad business

The true value proposition of LLMs lies in their ability to convert unstructured data from sources like websites and documents into structured information with reasonably high accuracy. Yet, the real profit lies in the products built on top of LLM technology. Each year, approximately 4 million books are published worldwide. On average, a book contains fewer than 120,000 words, translating to less than 160,000 tokens in LLM (Large Language Model) terms. Imagine if every single one of these books were generated by GPT-4—it would amount to an astounding 640 billion tokens. At $5 per million tokens, generating all these books would tally up to about $3.2 million! Let’s say the book market represents only about 1% of the total LLM text generation opportunity. Even then the total addressable market of LLM text generation is approximately $300 million annually—a modest figure when compared to AWS, which raked in $90 billion in 2023 as the cloud market leader.