Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

December 12, 2023

The entire Byomkesh Bakshi Series is available on YouTube legally

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:59 AM

Byomkesh Bakshi was one of my favorite Detective TV shows when I was a kid. He is the Indian counterpart to Sherlock Homes but is not a copy of the character. The character of Byomkesh Bakshi; an Indian-Bengali detective with proficiency with observation, logical reasoning, and forensic science was created by Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay in 1932 and appeared in multiple novels after that. In 1993 a TV series based on the character was first broadcast which adapted each novel into an episode of the show.

For some reason till recently there were hardly any copies of the original show available online to watch/download. I was searching for something else when suddenly I decided to see if I could find copies of the show and after a little bit of searching I found out that Doordarshan National, which owns the copyright to the show has uploaded the entire run of the show on their YouTube Channel (along with a lot of other shows as well from their golden days). This was an awesome find and over the next few days I am going to rewatch the entire series and confirm if my memory of the show is accurate. (I last watched it when I was ~13)

Interestingly enough I have met the actor Rajit Kapur who plays Byomkesh Bakshi a few years ago and he was extremely polite and considerate of the fans.

If you have not seen the show, I highly recommend you watch it.

– Suramya

December 11, 2023

ChatGPT is changing how we search for information and that is not good as it hallucinates often

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 8:23 PM

Much as I dislike it, ChatGPT has changed the way we do things and look for things. Initially I thought that it was a fad/phase and when people would realize that it gives incorrect information mixed with correct info they would stop using it but that doesn’t seem to be the case. A couple of days ago we were having a discussion on worms and how much protein they have in them in a group chat of friends and Surabhi was tried to gross Anil out, instead of getting grossed out Anil asked for a recipe he could use to cook the worms. Immediately Surabhi went on ChatGPT and asked it for a recipe but it refused to give it stating that it is against their policies and might be disturbing to see. Before ChatGPT she would have searched on Google for the recipe and gotten it (I did that in a few mins after I saw her comment). The a few days later another friend commented similarly where they couldn’t find something on ChatGPT so decided to give up instead of searching via a search engine.

Other people have stated that they use it for tone policing of emails to ensure they are professional. Personally I would recommend The Judge for that as I had stated in my review of their site earlier this year.

The problem I have with ChatGPT is highlighted by the following quote shared by @finestructure (Sven A. Schmidt) “Whether it did it correctly I don’t have the expertise to evaluate but it was very impressive sounding.”. The way GPT works it gives information in a very well crafted manner (and that is super impressive) but the fact that it can have errors or it hallucinates from time to time makes it useless for detail oriented work for me. If I have to verify the output generated by ChatGPT using a browser then I might as well use the browser directly and skip a step.

I have screenshots of so many examples of how ChatGPT/Bing/Bard hallucinate and give wrong information. I think I should do a follow up post with those screenshots. (I have them saved in a folder titled AI nonsense 🙂 ).

– Suramya

December 7, 2023

Rice with Ketchup, Why??

Filed under: Humor,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

Why would anyone eat plain rice with Ketchup??? There are so many awesome things that you can add to rice to eat it with. No one I know or for that matter no one from the entire Asia, Africa, South American and maybe the Europe will try to eat plain rice with Ketchup… Even in the US most people would eat rice with some sort of gravy or sauces etc.


Ketchup doesn’t exist, what are y’all adding to this?

This is most probably a joke but remembering what some of the folks in the Western countries consider to be good food, I wouldn’t be surprised if there were folks who would eat plain rice with Ketchup.

– Suramya

December 6, 2023

ISRO Returns the Propulsion Module from Chandrayaan-3 mission to Earth orbit

Filed under: Astronomy / Space,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:55 AM

ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) made a surprising announcement earlier this week about a new accomplishment by the Chandrayaan-3 Propulsion Module after the team managed to successfully return the propulsion module used by the spacecraft into a high orbit around Earth. This is a big deal and something only achieved by 3 countries before India (US, China and USSR).

This was not one of the planned missions for the module and was attempted when the team found that they still have over 100 kg of fuel in the PM available on the module for maneuvers. Its a credit to the precise planning and execution of the entire mission that the module still had extra fuel available for followup missions. So the orbit was modified over the course of a few months to move to an Earth orbit at about 1.54 lakhs kms (154,000 kms) allowing the module to complete an orbit every 13 days.

In order to continue SHAPE payload for Earth observation, it was decided to re-orbit the PM to a suitable Earth orbit.This mission plan was worked out considering the collision avoidance such as preventing the PM from crashing on to the Moon’s surface or entering into the Earth’s GEO belt at 36000 km and orbits below that. Considering the estimated fuel availability and the safety to GEO spacecrafts, the optimal Earth return trajectory was designed for October 2023 month.

First maneuver was performed on October 9, 2023 to raise apolune altitude to 5112 km from 150 km thus, increasing the period of orbit from 2.1 hrs to 7.2 hrs. Later, considering the estimate of available propellant, the second maneuver plan was revised to target an Earth orbit of 1.8 lakhs x 3.8 lakhs km. The Trans-Earthinjection (TEI)maneuver was performed on October 13, 2023. In thepost-TEI maneuver realized orbit, propulsion module made four Moon fly-bys before departing Moon SOI on November 10. Currently, propulsion module is orbiting Earth and crossedits first perigee on November 22nd with an altitude of 1.54 lakhs km. The orbit period is nearly 13 days with 27 deg inclination. The perigee and apogee altitude vary during its trajectory and the predicted minimum perigee altitude is 1.15 lakhs km. Hence as per current orbit prediction, there is no threats of close approach with any operational Earth orbiting satellites.

This test was a good way to prepare for future lunar missions where one of the mission parameters would be to bring back samples from the Moon to earth for study. The module’s expected lifetime was about 3 months and its already past that and still going on. Looking forward to finding out what other additional experiments we can run on it.

– Suramya

Source: Arstechnica.com: India reveals that it has returned lunar spacecraft to Earth orbit

December 5, 2023

Near real-time Generative AI art is now possible using LCM-LoRA model

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 6:21 PM

There are a lot of advancements happening in Generative AI and while I don’t agree that we have created intelligence (at least not yet) the advances in the Computer generated art are phenomenal. The most recent one is LCM-LoRA, short for “Latent Consistency Model- Low-Rank Adaptation” developed by researchers at the Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences (IIIS) at Tsinghua University in China. Their paper LCM-LORA: A Universal Stable-Diffusion Acceleration Module (PDF) has been published on Arxiv.org last week.

This model allows a system to generate an image given a text prompt in near real-time instead of having to wait a few seconds which was the case earlier. So you can modify the prompt as you go and get immediate feedback which can then be used to modify a prompt. You can test it out at Fal.ai

Latent Consistency Models (LCMs) (Luo et al., 2023) have achieved impressive performance in accelerating text-to-image generative tasks, producing high quality images with minimal inference steps. LCMs are distilled from pre-trained latent diffusion models (LDMs), requiring only ∼32 A100 GPU training hours. This report further extends LCMs’ potential in two aspects: First, by applying LoRA distillation to Stable-Diffusion models including SD-V1.5 (Rombach et al., 2022), SSD-1B (Segmind., 2023), and SDXL (Podell et al., 2023), we have expanded LCM’s scope to larger models with significantly less memory consumption, achieving superior image generation quality. Second, we identify the LoRA parameters obtained through LCM distillation as a universal Stable-Diffusion acceleration module, named LCM-LoRA. LCM-LoRA can be directly plugged into various Stable-Diffusion fine-tuned models or LoRAs with-out training, thus representing a universally applicable accelerator for diverse image generation tasks. Compared with previous numerical PF-ODE solvers such as DDIM (Song et al., 2020), DPM-Solver (Lu et al., 2022a;b), LCM-LoRA can be viewed as a plug-in neural PF-ODE solver that possesses strong generalization abilities. Project page: https://github.com/luosiallen/latent-consistency-model.

The technique works not only for 2D images, but 3D assets as well, meaning artists could theoretically quickly create immersive environments instantly for use in mixed reality (AR/VR/XR), computer and video games, and other experiences. I did try going over the paper but a majority of it went over my head. That being said it is fun playing with this tech.

The model doesn’t address the existing issues with AI Art such as how should the artist’s whose art was used as part of the training data sets be compensated, or the issue of copyright infringement as the art is not public art. We also need to start thinking about who would own the copyright to the art generated using AI. There are a few open court cases on this topic but as of now the courts have refused to give any copyright protection to art generated by AI which would make it a non-starter for use in any commercial project such as a movie or game etc.

– Suramya

Source: Realtime generative AI art is here thanks to LCM-LoRA

December 3, 2023

My Birthday celebration: A perfect day with friends and family

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:58 PM

Birthdays are usually a lot of fun and this year was the first one in a few years where I was at home instead of traveling. Brief list of where all I celebrated my Birthday in the past few years: 2019 – Antarctica, 2020 – Maldives, 2021 – Assam, 2022 – Nagaland. So this year we decided not to go anywhere and just spend time at home only. Now that we are older we had stopped cutting cakes at midnight for a few years but recently restarted doing that as it was a lot of fun. This time Akanksha, Ayush, Bagri,JD, Himanshi, Rajani, Samariddhi and Shahrukh showed up near midnight to wish me and that was sweet of them. Even though folks have come over to our place multiple times some of them still managed to get lost on the way and it was really hard not to make fun of them.

While sitting and chatting we started talking about ice-cream and and obviously I started craving for some ice-cream as we had been talking about it constantly. Rajani and Jani ordered ice cream for me and in total got almost 1.5 kgs of ice-cream. I am going to be eating that for the next quarter unless we have more folks over and I manage to feed it to them 🙂 .

Since I don’t like chocolate, Jani had asked for a Pineapple cake for me. The bakery folks forgot to write my name or anything on the cake and we were all making fun of Shahrukh about it, since he had picked up the cake. JD immediately jumped into action and at first tried carving ‘Happy Birthday Sur’ on the cake. Since that was too long and we had a Happy Birthday cake topper he switched tracks midway and carved ‘Sur’ on the cake. I guess they wanted to make sure people knew it was for my birthday and not a reused image from someone else’s birthday.


Pineapple cake with my name carved in it (look carefully, it is there)

Once we cut the cake everyone fed me a slice and thus I personally was forced to eat almost 3/4th of the cake. It was an awesome cake which made it easy but then I didn’t have any space to eat anything else after that even though the Pizza we had ordered was awesome.


Group pic on my Birthday

Unfortunately for Rajani she was extremely tired and decided to crash early and the rest of us continued to hang out and chill. At around 3am people decided to start heading out and we took a group selfie. Since Rajani was sleeping she wasn’t in the photo so we came up with the bright idea of taking a photo with her as she was sleeping and that was an awesome decision. She was very sporting about the whole thing when we showed her the photo the next day.


Pic with the sleeping beauty

After folks headed out we crashed (even though I wanted to stay up and watch the new Dr Who episode that had just come out) and the next day we were supposed to meet for Lunch with Surabhi & the kids, Anil and Manisha. As I knew we won’t be getting up early I pushed lunch to 2pm and then slept off. Waking up in the morning was painful but we managed it and drove over to ARAKU Coffee in Indiranagar.


Group photo during Lunch at Araku Coffee

We didn’t know it at the time but they were having a Taco themed event today and since I love Mexican food it was an awesome coincidence. We ordered pretty much every type of Taco they had listed and loved it. I also tried a Spiced Mead cocktail and it was soo good that I barely got to drink it as others (mostly Surabhi) kept stealing sips and I ended up having to order another one. It was one of those awesome lazy lunches where no one was in a rush to be anywhere so we all just hung out and chatted.

But all good things must come to an end so around 5 we had to call it a day and head back home. Once I was home, Jani crashed after finishing some of her work while I watched the new episode of Dr Who. It was an interesting episode, not one of my favorites but not one that I disliked either. The 14th Doc’s personality is noticeably different from the 10th and that does get disconcerting at times but still a lot of fun.

Well this is all for now. Have a really early morning tomorrow so an going to call it a night.

– Suramya

November 26, 2023

Thoughts of Dr Who and the 60th Anniversary Special

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 8:45 PM

Folks who know me or have been reading this blog frequently know that I am a big fan of Doctor Who and yesterday was the first of the specials made for it’s 60th anniversary. I have been reading Dr Who since around 1992/1993 and watched the first episode around 2000. Then the series relaunched with Rose and the rest is history.

David Tennant nails it again as the Doctor and while the story was not too complicated or involved it was a fun one that didn’t make me want to forward through it. I feel that a lot of the shows/movies etc are going for the dark and gritty reboots/changes and that is something that is good in small doses but not for too long. I watch TV or read a book to get lost in another world. Not to see the same issues up on the big screen as well. This episode was a welcome exception to that trend.

In addition the folks at BBC have also released a new colorized version of the first story featuring the Dalek’s called ‘The Daleks’ with the video cleaned up and new score added etc. I re-watched the episode and it was great. However, the Doctor as shown in the first season was not a very likable person. They were manipulative, arrogant and selfish at the beginning of the show with a very Sexist attitude that mirrors how the world was at that time. Over the decades since then the character has evolved and become much more emphatic and caring. Looking back the way the 12th Doctor behaved was the closest to how the 1st Doctor always acted which could be the reason I never really liked that iteration. Plus there were the ridiculous sonic-sunglasses.

There are a lot of people complaining about the new version and that is ok. They don’t like the direction because a non-white man is going to take over from Tennant and are pitching a hissy-fit over it. I personally am looking forward to the new season and cant wait for it. The best quote for Ncuti Gatwa taking over as the 15th incarnation of the Doctor is from Tom Baker who played the 4th: “Oh! Is this the next Doctor Who? A handsome young man! Marvellous cheekbones. These things are important as you get near to death.”

Some of my other all time favorite quotes from the Doctor :

“Never be cruel. Never be cowardly. Remember, hate is always foolish and love is always wise. Always try to be nice, but never fail to be kind.” – 12th Doctor
“There’s no point in being grown up if you can’t act childish sometimes.” – 4th Doctor
“You know, the very powerful and the very stupid have one thing in common: they don’t alter their views to fit the facts. They alter the facts to fit their views.” – 4th Doctor
“We’re all stories, in the end. Just make it a good one, eh?” – 11th Doctor
“Some people live more in 20 years than others do in 80. It’s not the time that matters, it’s the person.” – The 10th Doctor
“You want weapons? We’re in a library! The best weapons in the world!” – The 10th Doctor
“I eat danger for breakfast. I don’t, I prefer cereal. Or croissants.” – The 13th Doctor

– Suramya

November 23, 2023

Watched The Marvels and loved it.

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 12:01 AM

Watched the Marvels today and loved the movie. The reviews and the initial box office returns had made me a little skeptical on how good the movie would be as it has apparently the lowest opening weekend of all Marvel movies ever. I think that this is because there are a vocal group of people who don’t like the idea of a non-white male centric movie and that resulted in a poor opening weekend.

The movie was good and most of the jokes were actually funny and from what I could tell the entire audience loved the movie. The villain of the movie was a bit 1 dimensional their motivations could have been explored more in detail and other than the Marvels not much focus was given to the supporting cast. Even with that though the movie was a fun watch. My Niece Sara who watched it earlier this week apparently loved it because of all the cats in it. So that is another point to consider.

The end credits scene on the other hand was wow! It really opens up the stage for a massive new set of stories and crossovers. So I am looking forward to that.

– Suramya

November 22, 2023

My Deepavali vacation 2023 – Part 2

Filed under: My Life — Suramya @ 11:36 PM

Continuing from my previous post My Deepavali vacation 2023 – Part 1. After Diwali we relaxed for a day and finished the Bhaiya Dooj festival. On Wednesday, we met up with Tarini and Varun at their place for dinner and drinks. I am not a cricket fan but if you are in India (or anywhere where there are Indians) it is impossible to escape the craziness of the World Cup.

Since India was playing in the Semi-finals we ended up going to a nearby sports bar to have a few drinks and watch the match. Watching any sport with a crowd is an interesting experience as it is almost impossible not to get caught up in the excitement when everyone is on their feet cheering and screaming their heads off. After a few drinks we headed back to Tarini’s place for dinner and finished watching the match over there. India won the match even though it looked it they might not earlier in the game so that was good.

We would have loved to stay back longer but folks had to go to office the next day (not everyone was on a holiday like me) so we headed back home to Noida. When I got home we found that the parents had forgotten to leave the outer door unlocked (I had the key for the inner doors). As I didn’t want to wake anyone up, I ended up jumping over the wall, unlocking the inner door to get the keys to unlock the main gate to let Jani inside.

The remaining week went by with us just chilling at home. On Saturday, I had friends from college visiting for the weekend. Amit, Vinit, Pranav and his Wife Jigna came over and stayed with us in Noida. I was meeting Amit after almost a decade so it was fantastic to catch up after such a long time. I have known these folks for 24+ years now. Saturday afternoon we went out to Lunch at Burma Burma where the food was so good… we ended up overeating to the point were we barely had room for dinner a few hours later. (We started lunch at 3 and ate till around 5:15 or so).


Lunch at Burma Burma

After lunch we were almost in a food coma so we hung out at home while Jigna caught up on her sleep and Amit visited his uncle. Jani had meetings so once she got back we drove over to Ravi’s place who is another friend from NJIT for dinner and drinks. Since the last time we had met, Ravi had learnt how to make amazing cocktails so we had drinks and just caught up with each others lives and were up almost till 3am just chatting and then drove home.

You don’t often make friends with whom you stay in touch and remain great friends even decades later and it is a privilege to have such friends. Or as Yeats said “Think where man’s glory most begins and ends And say my glory was I had such friends.”


Group Pic at Ravi’s place

For Sunday we had planned to go out somewhere where we could watch the match and spend the day there. But as always the laziness quotient was high and dad moved the TV to the drawing room from the living room to give us more space where we could laze around and watch the match. The setup was a complete jugaad with my Dressing table being used as a stand for the TV and cables being run all over the place.


Watching the Indian Cricket Team’s pathetic performance at the 2023 World Cup Finals

Unfortunately for us the Indian teams performance was not worth the effort that we spent setting up everything. It got to the point where some of us actually dozed off in the middle of the first innings. The second inning was a little bit more interesting but the Indian fielding was pathetic so we stopped watching the match when it was clear that India is not going to win and went out for Dinner.

Diner was at this lovely place called Theos Cafe & Patisserie. The food there was quite good and pretty much everything we ordered was good. Once we finished dinner we just hung out at the cafe till it became obvious that they were waiting for us to leave so that they could close up so we headed home and spent the next few hours looking at old photos from our College days.


Dinner at Theos Cafe & Patisserie

The next day everyone except me and Vinit left to go back and since I was working on Monday I spent the day catching up to emails and things that had piled up during my vacation. My return flight to BLR was supposed to be at 9pm but Spicejet delayed it till 11pm (we actually flew out around 11:30pm). Thankfully they did send an email/sms/call about this early enough that I could plan accordingly and not end up sitting at the airport from 6:30pm… The Delhi airport Terminal 1 is undergoing renovation so not much to do there except sit at the lounge. I ended up working for a bit before catching up with my reading.

Thanks to the delays I reached Bangalore around 2:30am and home around 3:30am. That concluded a very restful and fun vacation and I am already looking forward to my next trip.

– Suramya

November 21, 2023

How to get people to spend less time in the toilet

Filed under: Humor,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 3:51 PM

If you have had a roommate who takes ages in the bathroom because they are busy catching up on social media or a company who wants their employees to spend less time on breaks there are a few anti-user designs that people have been pushing over the past few years. Such as a slanted toilet designed to make it painful to sit on for more than 5 minutes and other such hacks.

I have a better way to ensure people are not spending too much time in there. All you have to do is ensure that the Wifi and Mobile data connectivity in there is poor and folks will automatically stop spending too much time in there. This idea came to me when I was stuck in such a restroom with very limited cellphone coverage and poor wifi signal.

Obviously this is a joke post not meant to be taken seriously so please don’t do this to your workers. 🙂 Yes, I am zonked out due to all the travel I have been doing. Why do you ask?

– Suramya

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