Bhardwaj Rish

TL;DR. Food for thought. Can a monk's true ability to control his mind be tested under the influence of recreational drugs? Our mind is an ever-wanderer. The minute you think, hold on, I'm just going to sit here and think about one thing, and one thing only, say the yellow wall in front of you, your mind just won't let you.  For the first minute or so, you think of just the yellow wall, you see, you start to immerse yourself into it. Except then, suddenly your mind remembers a tune from Coldplay's track and you start humming.  No. Brain. Shut up. We're concentrating here. Not the yellow song. Yellow wall, that's it. You go back to just the yellow wall, except this time you're sure nothing can distract you. You're trying to discard all triggers from sensory events that remind you of yellow. But then! The fridge starts it cooling cycle and it suddenly becomes louder than usual.  Yellow. Mind yellow wall. Fridge? Agh. Yellow. Oh wait! I have a m...

I'm jealous of this particular man. He's 40 something, and from the outside he seems to have has his life all sorted out. You'd think I'm talking about a man that founded a technology business at the age of 15, and is now a multi billionaire. Or a hotelier with scores of chains under his name, living life in luxurious suites each night. No, this man, he isn't doing rocket science. He isn't an extraordinary mathematician. He hasn't pursued the pleasures most of us are taught to look upto as children. He's a font maker. He makes brilliant fonts and gives them kickass names. He's a marathon running hobbyist. And his real job ; he's a kindergarten teacher guiding kids aged 3-6. http://pizzadude.dk/about/ - Why can't we all be content with a life like this?

One thing I've learnt about social media and instant messaging is that you are only as important to people as the time you spend on it, putting in effort to show people your presence. The less you text, the less people are going to bother texting you. If you text at night, you are bound to receive replies in the morning, and that's the cycle of always having new chats on your chat list. You text now, and you will receive replies later, keeping you hooked all the time. I recently reduced my whatsapp usage by moving the app to a secondary phone that I don't carry around with me all the time. Especially at work, I carry a phone that only has the bare minimum utilities installed, and nothing more. During the initial week when I started this, I'd leave my phone at home at around 9 in the morning, and by the time I reached home from work, I'd have received about 20 messages from different people/groups. It was mighty difficult to reply to everyone. I then actively infor...

With emails about graduation and yearbooks hitting our beloved Zimbra email, I realize I'm graduating soon. The  presswaale of our batch have taken up the responsibility to publish a yearbook with our photos and 50-100 word notes of how the experience was for each one of us. Here's mine! I spent hours trying to think up a way of coming up with something unique, something that didn't sound like what  any other graduate from just another university would say, but that's impossible. So I decided to simply let the words flow. One downside is, that makes my note very generic. Oh well. There's not a thing I would change if I could relive these years. DA really gave us the experience everyone says you'll have at college - the hostel that never let us sleep before 3am, lectures that demanded minimal work, a huge lecture theatre that allowed us to sleep unnoticed, a football team and a ground I'll remember for life, and friends that I would love to grow old wit...

AI, in the form of neural networks today takes hundreds of thousands of iterations to learn from scratch. Given a set of defined goals and a basic know-how of the limited set of controls it has, it repetitively performs a sequence of operations to understand what helps it reach its goal and what doesn't. At times it takes the same path with a slight detour to see if that made any difference. Take for example the following brilliant demonstration of a neural network learning to play Mario.  Easter egg - MarI/O is open source. The entire process of the neural network learning to play the game is based on biological evolution. During its initial generations with almost no idea of what to do, MarI/O simply stood there, or kept jumping in place. It then learnt that pressing the right button helped it reach closer to its goal - to reach as far right as possible. So over the next hundreds of generations, it just kept pressing right, and then jumping in place. Later, it realized p...

If in the next couple centuries we are able to build an AI that surpasses human intelligence, will it exterminate humankind? It simply might as it may foresee humankind turning against it and pulling its plug of life. As a race, we have not been subjected to another species more intelligent than us, and when the day comes, we might find it very difficult to control the motivation of a race smarter than ours. A naive proposal suggests making an AI with seemingly benign goals, one as simple as calculating the value of Pi. But here's how it can backfire. "One popular scenario images a corporation designing the first general purpose artificial super-intelligence and giving it the simple task of calculating the value of Pi. Before anyone realises what is happening, the AI takes over the planet, eliminates the human race, launches a campaign to conquest to the ends of the galaxy, and transforms the entire known universe into a giant supercomputer that for billions upon billions...

Mission Impossible VI : Home Hunt. Relatively difficult things in life : - Finding a place to work at. - Then finding a place to live in. Repeat those once every 3-5 years. There are just way too many factors that you have to take into consideration while finding a suitable place to live. If the rooms are nice, the hall is too small. If the house looks good from the inside, it's a mess on the outside. If the home is at a convenient location and the rooms are good enough , the rent is too high. These online websites that attempt to make the world a better place by helping you find a place to live in, like commonfloor, nestaway, nobrokers, yada yada just do not work out. None of them capture the essentials each one of us is looking for while home hunting, probably because such human intuition just cannot be captured. A place that radiates a homely vibe to me may not to you. What feels right  to me might just not to you. However, I've been trying to observe my thinking p...

Food for thought. Can we ever run out of jobs? Automation kills jobs. Work that demanded humans in the 20th century will not employ us anymore, because we've found efficient and accurate alternatives using machines. Farmers became industrial workers, small time construction workers became infrastructure machine operators, and now we're all headed to become slaves of the computer, irrespective of which domain we're in. Machines can currently do most jobs humans used to do till the previous century. What will happen if artificial intelligence takes over our current jobs? Humans can then only be employed in creative and emotional domains, but I fear artificial intelligence may overpower humans there too. Say 2000 years from now when AI is very powerful and over the generations humanity has come to believe there is no scope for improvement, what will we do then? Could the world then become Utopia? Remember, no jobs means no hierarchy in society.  - Meh. The hypothet...

I was going through my blog drafts list and found this. This is a post I wrote immediately after giving my second interview at Tonbo Imaging. It was a disaster, and I was far too discouraged to publish it. It has been three months since I wrote this, and am now interning here :) - I sat through one of the most embarrassing interviews I've ever faced - at a company I genuinely would love to intern at, and later hopefully work at. The company makes products. Keywords. Make . Product . They're not just another Indian service startup/company that barely goes beyond making apps and websites to claim they solve real world problems. These people really do solve a real world problem. They really do *make* things that solves problems. Having gone through A LOT of potential places I'd like to work at, these guys were the only one to employ people from fields like electronics, mechatronics, design and software. Software was just a small section. A true combination of hardware ...

Highly unstructured flow of thoughts on money. Not sure if I'm going to be able to make my point by the end of this. The thought of how money controls this planet keeps surfacing my mind every now and then. The world needs a common mode of trade to function, and thus money was invented to bridge the gap of trade. The problem however is that our entire society functions solely on this one object . All our life decisions are based factoring money into account. From the cook that comes to our home, to the guy that runs the local store downstairs, to the professors that taught us (lol) at university, to the people I work with at office. The career we invest in, the school we attend, the place we live, the job we do.   Our life decisions are too heavily based on this one man made tool! Money was created as a tool for exchange; we've all heard about since Kindergarten. The secret is, let it be just that, and nothing more. Money is a level of abstraction above what value you can...