akprasad (u/akprasad)

akprasad commented on Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself henrikkarlsson.xyz/p/atte... · Posted by u/jger15

onenite · 5 months ago

“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”

- often (incorrectly) attributed to Lao Tzu

akprasad · 5 months ago

A similar idea from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, ~7th century BCE

> 'And here they say that a person consists of desires. And as is his desire, so is his will; and as is his will, so is his deed; and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.

akprasad commented on Providing ChatGPT to the U.S. federal workforce openai.com/index/providin... · Posted by u/gmays

namuol · 6 months ago

A Trojan horse if I’ve ever seen one.

akprasad · 6 months ago

What is the strategy, in your view? Maybe something like this? --

1. All government employees get access to ChatGPT

2. ChatGPT increasingly becomes a part of people's daily workflows and cognitive toolkit.

3. As the price increases, ChatGPT will be too embedded to roll back.

4. Over time, OpenAI becomes tightly integrated with government work and "too big to fail": since the government relies on OpenAI, OpenAI must succeed as a matter of national security.

5. The government pursues policy objectives that bolster OpenAI's market position.

akprasad commented on Building better AI tools hazelweakly.me/blog/stop-... · Posted by u/eternalreturn

jxf · 7 months ago

Q: Where did he say this? I think this may be apocryphal (or a paraphrasing?) as I couldn't find a direct quote.

akprasad · 7 months ago

I can't find an exact quote either, but AFAICT he wrote extensively on extensions and amputations, though perhaps less concisely.

akprasad commented on Ask HN: What are you working on? (April 2025) · Posted by u/david927

akprasad · 9 months ago

As a side project, I'm creating resources for learning Tamil, my parents' native language:

https://akprasad.github.io/tamil/

It's been a lot of fun getting the basic tools going: transliterators, morphological generators and analyzers, and some other things on top. But the main goal is to improve fluency as quickly and efficiently as possible.

akprasad commented on Shunpo: Minimalist bash tool to make directory navigation a little bit faster github.com/egurapha/Shunp... · Posted by u/thunderbong

smitelli · a year ago

Seems like as good a time as any to show off this cursed thing I keep in my dotfiles:

    # Allow .. through ........... (yup!) to cd up some number of directories.
    for i in {1..10}; do
        spaces=$(printf "%${i}s")
        alias "${spaces// /.}."="cd ${spaces// /../}"
    done

Going into it, I thought it would be something I'd use all the time. In practice all I ever use is `..` and not nearly as much as I originally imagined I would.

akprasad · a year ago

I use something similar: .. , .2 , .3 , etc.

akprasad commented on Protecting your time from predators in large tech companies seangoedecke.com/predator... · Posted by u/alexmolas

nine_zeros · a year ago

The fact that engineers now think that helping others and working with others is negative value, just shows how terrible tech culture has become.

This all comes from management wanting to assign and claim credit. It is this credit system that ensures that people will not cooperate but instead let "others" fail.

akprasad · a year ago

The author agrees with you:

> Not all requests for help are predatory. It’s part of your job to help out engineers on your team, and cross-org impact really does involve helping others sometimes, even if you get nothing in return. Predatory behavior is a consistent pattern of drawing on your time for nothing in return.

akprasad commented on OpenAI has upped its lobbying efforts nearly sevenfold technologyreview.com/2025... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar

bko · a year ago

Made me think what Mark Andreeson said in a recent interview.

> They said, look, AI is a technology basically, that the government is gonna completely control. This is not gonna be a startup thing. They, they actually said flat out to us, don't do AI startups like, don't fund AI startups. It's not something that we're gonna allow to happen. They're not gonna be allowed to exist. There's no point.

> They basically said AI is gonna be a game of two or three big companies working closely with the government. And we're gonna basically wrap them in a, you know, they, I'm paraphrasing, but we're gonna basically wrap them in a government cocoon. We're gonna protect them from competition, we're gonna control them, we're gonna dictate what they do.

>And then I said, I don't understand how you're gonna lock this down so much because like the math for you, AI is like out there and it's being taught everywhere. And you know, they literally said, well, you know, during the Cold War we, we classified entire areas of physics and took them out of the research community and like entire branches of physics basically went dark and didn't proceed. And that if we decide we need to, we're gonna do the same thing to to the math underneath ai.

> And I said, I've just learned two very important things. 'cause I wasn't aware of the former and I wasn't aware that you were, you know, even conceiving of doing it to the latter. And so they basically just said, yeah, we're gonna look, we're gonna take total control the entire thing and just don't start startups.

If this is true, makes sense for OpenAI and other to ramp up lobbying to be one of the two or three big companies. In another subsequent interivew Altman denied he was ever in such a meeting.

https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/118114058

akprasad · a year ago

For context, Andreessen is talking here about the Biden administration, and his revulsion to this approach is why he endorsed Trump:

> I, you know, look, and I would say like when we endorse Trump, we, we only did so on the basis of like tech policy. [...] Number two was ai, where I became very scared earlier this year that they were gonna do the same thing to AI that they did to crypto.

akprasad commented on Nalanda: The university that changed the world (2023) bbc.com/travel/article/20... · Posted by u/priyankanath

dvfjsdhgfv · 2 years ago

> Vikramshila

I saw this spelling somewhere before - why do some people use it instead of the more official Vikramashila (Vikramaśilā)?

akprasad · 2 years ago

In Hindi and some other Indian languages, it is common to drop the last short “a” of a Sanskrit word, hence Ram for Rama, Vikram for Vikrama, etc.

akprasad commented on Human Life complicated.world/en/Huma... · Posted by u/w_complicated

taneq · 2 years ago

I thought the whole point of these Zen sayings was that they are silly or nonsensical until you interpret them in some deeper way.

Edit: As akprasad pointed out below, I was thinking of koans.

akprasad · 2 years ago

You're thinking of koans [1], which are a specific kind of Zen speech used to shift the mind out of conceptual thinking. Outside of that context, Zen teachers often just talk in conventional language.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koan