Arish Ali | A Swell Personal Podcast episodes:

• November 09, 2024@arish | A seat at the table

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  "When you have millions of users in a platform, only then you can make a dent in online conversations. So we are working hard to earn that seat by adding new capabilities such as distribution on popular podcasting platforms such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube and more, and through innovations such as prompts that make it easy to create new posts."

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• November 01, 2024@arish | Are your beliefs falsifiable?

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  "I ran into an old college friend of mine a few days ago. A quick shout out to Anant Chandrashekharan if you're listening. And for some odd reason, the one memory of our IIT Kanpur college days that came back to me was remembering that we had taken a philosophy of science course together and Anand had presented a brilliant term paper on the philosopher Karl Popper. Popper's great contribution to philosophy of science is the idea that in order for a theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable."

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• October 27, 2024@arish | Uncommon Sense

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  "I was watching the US elections coverage on TV recently and one of the talking points for the Republican Party is that it is a party of common sense. And it reminded me of an incident from my childhood. When I was in school. In fourth or fifth grade, our science teacher had given us a problem and everyone in this class came up with their own answer or solution to it."

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• October 11, 2024@arish | #AmReading l The Journey of Man, by Spencer Wells

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  "While superficially people look very different across from, coming from different parts of the world, being from different races, what you see when you look at all the genetic diversity is that there's lot more diversity within a particular race than across races. Specifically, 92% of difference in genes between people is between people of the same race. Only 8% of the difference is across races."

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• July 01, 2024@arish | #AI | My perspective on whether LLMs are stochastic parrots...

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  "Over the past few years, it has obviously advanced by leaps and bounds, but it is still fundamentally trying to solve that same problem. What is the next best based token in a string? And to me that just doesn't sound like the right foundation for intelligence. I know Sam Altman and others have claimed that we are all stochastic parrots at some level, but for whatever reason, I'm not quite convinced that's not how I think about the world and reason about the world."

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• May 08, 2024@arish | Coffee in Rome… Tazza d’oro and Emporio Sant’Eustachio…

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  "When I visited Rome last year, one of the highlights of my trip was the incredible coffee. Almost anywhere in the city you went to, you could not go wrong. Two of the best coffee shops I found were coincidentally very close to the pantheon, so if you're visiting Rome as a tourist and go to the pantheon, you should definitely not miss these places."

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• March 29, 2024@arish | #AmReading | In The Three Body Problem, the most interesting sci-fi idea is...

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  "I thought that was a very clever workaround, albeit also the least plausible one, since in terms of what they're talking about, this is probably something that we'll never actually find out to be true later. See, a lot of Sci-Fi books are come up with ideas that eventually, later on turns out to be possible or plausible, and it's just that they are ahead of the times."

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• March 16, 2024@arish | One thing I learned as an engineer that has been useful in life in general...

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  "One thing that I learned as an engineer, and I've found invaluable in all aspects of my life, is linear algebra. Or more accurately, the way linear algebra teaches you to look at the world. I consider the linnal course I took one of the most useful courses I took during my undergraduate education at the Indian Institute of Technology in Kanpur. The fun fundamental concept that I learn was that of resolving any complex property into its mutually independent basis vectors."

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• January 24, 2024@arish | My story of working with Ronjon during Cellmania days

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  "You. My Ranjan story starts in 2004 with the chance encounter I had with Nirav, who was Ranjan's cofounder at Cellmania. So both Nirav and I were staying at the same hotel during the CTIA wireless conference and we happened to share a cab to the conference and we got talking. At that time we were a mobile game startup and Nirav told me that Cellmania was looking for mobile game developers."

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• July 10, 2023@arish | The most important lesson from history.

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  "Thereby, this system of government tends to result in the triumph of mediocrity and entails the exclusion of first rate ability if this is combined with honesty. But the alternative to that despotism almost inevitably means the triumph of stupidity. And of the two evils, the former is the less."

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