Some Ponderings on Books and Articles

August 26,2022

Some thoughts on The Penelopiad (by Margaret Atwood book)

Sitting myself by the window sill and pondering on the mysteries of life and human soul, I recollected some interesting facet in Atwood's thinking from her book The Penelopiad which I finished reading recently. 

Penelope is dead and her soul is migrated over to Hades. Here she sees her other friends, maids, Helen and husband Odysseus moving in and out of multiple next lives donning different personalities while she just stays put. She justifies this by saying " I know that the past has been bad but who knows how future will be" (paraphrasing). She is referring to her next lives and the uncertain conditions surrounding them. She has seen how her husband and Helen fared. How her friends and maids did. Still, she had a deep rooted fear that was keeping her fixated. 

It would be different I guess if this is not fiction and everyone has the same alternative to remain stagnant. But that's not how evolution of soul works, is it? And also, one can only take a step into the *unknown* future by leaving the burden onto God and holding only pure Faith/Trust in things turning out well. 

#krishnalove #books #review #prayer #philosophy 

Love/Hatred or any other kind of passion will have a gained strength through subjectivity and making things personal.  

#krishnalove #books #review #prayer #philosophy 

Only naive people indulge in "open" warfare or aggression against an enemy more powerful and more devoid of morals than them. Especially when dealing with someone who is ruthless in using their *power* in ways that are not based on a solid moral ground .. it doesn't behoove to trigger them openly. 

#meditation #prayer #philosophy #krishna 

14 July 2025

Machinehood : Novel 

One of the reasons for deep learning to work so well is that they don't need preset attributes. We give the raw data and they extract needed attributes. 

I just read in a book, an AI chaiwala  bot identifies a person as Indian using skin color, hair length and height - and delivers black coffee with a sip of milk added. A neighbor chai stand man calls her over and gives her the American version without milk. To her surprise and understanding, he tells that he looked at her nose shape and cheek length to identify her nationality. 

Older machine learning models .. we give them the attributes or features. Deep learning .. it learns them. But it is also limited by the learning examples. 

Ai can't reach human level anytime soon. Sleep well folks!!