Suramya's Blog : Welcome to my crazy life…

January 20, 2024

NFTs, AI and the sad state of Thought Leaders/Tech Influencer’s

Filed under: Artificial Intelligence,My Thoughts,Tech Related — Suramya @ 11:59 PM

NFTs became such a big thing in last few years, going from millions of dollars to 95% of them being worth $0 in Sept 2023. The whole concept of a JPG of an ugly drawing never made sense to me but you won’t believe the no of people who tried to convince me otherwise.

Today I was watching Lift on Netflix and the first 20 minutes are this group of thieves stealing an NFT Oceans 11 style. It is one of the most ridiculous things that I have seen that someone would spend so much effort showing a NFT heist but the movie was scripted in 2021 when the NFT craze was starting to become insane. Haven’t finished the full movie yet and I doubt I will ever do so as it is very slow/corny and has poor acting and script (as if the whole NFT heist thing didn’t give that away).

It is interesting that all the folks who were shilling NFTs a few years ago have ‘pivoted’ to AI now. If you read the posts from Infuencers you will think that AI is the best thing since sliced bread. Saw the following in my feed and I did question the sanity of the person posting such ‘thought leadership’.

I can suggest an equation that has the potential to impact the future: E=mc?+ Al This equation combines Einstein's famous equation E=mc?, which relates energy (E) to mass (m) and the speed of light (c), with the addition of Al (Artificial Intelligence). By including Al in the equation, it symbolizes the increasing role of artificial intelligence in shaping and transforming our future. This equation highlights the potential for Al to unlock new forms of energy, enhance scientific discoveries, and revolutionize various fields such as healthcare, transportation, and technology.
Technology Consultant’s thoughts on AI

Each influencer keeps posting things like this to make them sound more technical and forward thinking but if you start digging into it then you will find out that they are just regurgitating a word salad that really doesn’t mean much but sounds impressive. Actually now that I think about it, they are just like an AI bot that sounds impressive if you are not experienced in the that area but when you start digging into it, you find out that there is no substance to what they are stating.

The current state of AI is basically a massive hype machine which is trying to get folks to buy things or invest in companies because they are working creating an intelligent entity. Whereas in reality, what we have today is a really good Auto Complete or in some cases really nice Machine learning system. It does some things quite well but is nowhere close to being “Intelligent”. What we have now is something that is really good at extrapolating and guessing which can reduce manual efforts in a lot of things but it is not the cure all that everyone is making it out to be.

For example, Github Copilot automates a lot of grunt work while coding allowing users to reduce the time spent of writing code, but in a recent study it was found that Users Write More Insecure Code with AI Assistants. Now this might change in the future with advances in compute power, data and something that we haven’t even thought of yet. But the problem is that in the short term these can cause immense harm and problems.

– Suramya

January 19, 2024

Why do folks keep insisting that only kids who like playing outside are ‘normal’?

Filed under: My Thoughts — Suramya @ 11:37 PM

There is a unfortunate trend and narrative that keeps repeating the trope that folks who are geeky or not interested in playing outside are somehow not normal. A good example of how that keeps coming up is the screenshot below where someone posted about a kid who started coding at a young age (10 years!) and asked what were you doing at his age and another person responded stating “Being a normal kid and playing outside??”

10 years old boy writing program in python...what were you doing at his age? Being a normal kid and playing outside??
10 years old boy writing program in python…what were you doing at his age? Being a normal kid and playing outside??”

Why is it that it is considered ‘normal’ to play outside but not normal to create something on a computer or compose music, or write a book or write poetry or any other creative activity? Both require skill but one is considered normal and the other is not.

Media plays a big part in it especially the US shows and movies where the geek is someone who is an outcast and is always picked on by the more popular kids who are usually good looking but otherwise have no redeeming qualities. They are loud, rude and obnoxious and for some reason everyone thinks that this is a good behavior pattern to emulate. The recent push towards becoming ‘manly’ or alpha or whatever they are calling themselves now is another reason smart folks are picked on because these ‘alpha male’ folks want to showcase how tough they are. Due to this push too many people think that being manly means that you need to behave like an ass or put another way they think that:

Being an asshole is all part of my manly essence
Being an asshole is all part of my manly essence

Obviously this is not a good approach and unfortunately for them they are usually whiny snowflakes who are threatened by everything. If you read the definition of what it means to be ‘a man’ you will be rolling on the floor laughing or be scared because they think that having literally any emotion other than anger is something that makes you less manly and if you happen to be a smart person it makes you ‘less manly’ because obviously the only thing that matters is physical strength. Here are some gems that have come up in my feed over time and I collected them as I wanted to put them on a blog post. There are a lot more but I decided to just delete them/block when they come up in my feeds.

These folks need therapy, not that they would ever agree to go for it.

– Suramya

December 27, 2023

25th Reunion of the 1998 Computers Batch of AFBBS: The Class with a Class

Filed under: My Life,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 7:33 PM

This year is the 25 anniversary for when I passed out from Air Force Bal Bharati School (AFBBS). I was there for two years and they were some of the most fun and memorable times of my life. During my time there I made some lifelong friends and learnt a lot about life and the good stuff. I was in the computer section, XII-C or “The Class with a Class” as it was otherwise known.

Class photograph of XII-C
XII-C The Class with a Class

A few months ago a group of people from one of the other sections in our batch started a thread about having a reunion and started working on it. Over the next few weeks I noticed that it was mostly folks from the other sections who were interested and actively planning for the reunion, our class was mostly silent on the topic. Since I was not much in touch with anyone from any of the other sections, or rather was never friends with anyone outside of the C section (my class) I was of two minds about attending the reunion. Then we found out that the event was not happening at the school and instead was in a place in Qutub Minar area somewhere.

Then someone asked a question in our class group if anyone else was going. Interestingly most of the folks said that they would rather meet separately with just our class instead of the whole batch. After seeing that me and Tarini got talking about it and thinking about a separate reunion for our class. Tarini was nice enough to volunteer her place for the event and thus we decided to have our get-together on the same day as the other one.

The event was planned for the 16th, and Jani and I flew in early morning that day to reach Delhi by 2:30pm. Since it would have taken us too long to go to Noida and come back (we would have spent the entire time traveling instead of spending time at home) we decided to show up early at Tarini’s place and start the party early. That way we got to spend time with the kids and Aunty as well before the rest of the folks arrived.

The evening was quite memorable with a lot of old stories being told to spouses about folks who I hope didn’t get into too much trouble once their wives found out what they had been up to in school. Crushes were explained in detail, famous pranks explained etc. It was much more fun and intimate than attending a party with loud music, though that also would have been fun if we knew more people there.

Its hard to believe that its already been 25 years since we all were in school together and we have gone from:


to looking like this 25 years later:


I wish I could say that we all kept in touch throughout the last 25 years, but sadly that wasn’t the case. I was meeting Ravi after 25 years, Ankush and Rahul after ~16 years or so and it was a lot of fun to catchup after such a long time. To be honest it didn’t feel like so much time had passed since we last met. The rest of the folks I had been meeting them more frequently; some more frequently than others. It would have been great if the rest of the 40 odd classmates could have also made it for the reunion but that’s ok. There is always a next time.

In spite of only getting back to Delhi the day before Tarini went above and beyond with the food and drinks. I especially loved the mulled wine and that reminds me that I need to get the recipe from her, or instead get her to make it for me everytime I visit. Actually the second option seems a lot more fun and less work for me so I will do that.

The party went on till almost 4am, then me Tarini and Jani chilled out for a while after everyone went home and just chatted. The next day was again hectic as we had a brunch and headed back to the airport to come back to Bangalore so that we could prep for our next trip to Malaysia which we were leaving for the next day (18th). Got back to India on the 25th and that is why this post was delayed as I was having too much fun there to write about the reunion.

Well this is all for now. Will write more later.

– Suramya

December 13, 2023

Researchers use living human brain cells to perform speaker identification

Filed under: Computer Hardware,Emerging Tech,My Thoughts — Suramya @ 10:51 AM

The human brain is the most powerful computer ever created and though most people have been trying to create a copy of the brain using Silicon and chips, a dedicated group of people has been actively working on creating computers/processors using living tissue. These computers are called Bio-Computers and recently there has been a major breakthrough in the field due to the work of scientists from the Indiana University Bloomington.

They have managed to grow lumps of nerve cells called Brain organoids from stem cells, each of these organoids contain about 100 million nerve cells. The team placed these organoids on a microelectrode array which sends electrical signals to the organoids and also detects when the nerve cells fire in response. They then sent 240 audio clips as sequence of signals in spatial patterns with the goal of identifying the speech of a particular person. The initial accuracy of the system was at about 30-40 percent but after being trained for two days (with no feedback being given to the cells) the accuracy rose to 70-80% which is a significant increase. The team’s paper on this project has been published in Nature Electronics

Brain-inspired computing hardware aims to emulate the structure and working principles of the brain and could be used to address current limitations in artificial intelligence technologies. However, brain-inspired silicon chips are still limited in their ability to fully mimic brain function as most examples are built on digital electronic principles. Here we report an artificial intelligence hardware approach that uses adaptive reservoir computation of biological neural networks in a brain organoid. In this approach—which is termed Brainoware—computation is performed by sending and receiving information from the brain organoid using a high-density multi-electrode array. By applying spatiotemporal electrical stimulation, nonlinear dynamics and fading memory properties are achieved, as well as unsupervised learning from training data by reshaping the organoid functional connectivity. We illustrate the practical potential of this technique by using it for speech recognition and nonlinear equation prediction in a reservoir computing framework.

This PoC doesn’t have the capability to convert the speech to text but this is early days and it is possible that with more fine-tuning we will be able to create a system that will allow us to to speech-to-text with a much lower power consumption than the traditional systems. However, there is a big issue of maintenance and long term viability of the organoids. Currently the organoids can only be maintained for one or two months before they have to be replaced which makes it difficult to imagine a commercial/home PC like deployment of these machines as the maintenance costs and efforts would make it unfeasible. On the other hand it is possible that we might see more powerful versions of this setup in research labs and data-centers which would have the capacity to maintain these systems.

I am looking forward to seeing more advances in this field.

– Suramya

Source: AI made from living human brain cells performs speech recognition

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

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

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