Surya Prakash Jayanti

The year 2023 is kind to me in several ways, Overall a decent year I would say, and here are some things I really enjoyed. 802 miles run during this year  If you measure in a straight line, it could be the distance between Bentonville and to Canada border. Read 23 books this year.  Books I read so far:  http://jnsuryaprakash.blogspot.com/2009/03/books-i-read.html   Here is my Goodreads link:  https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/101483828-surya-jayanti 24 blogs written refer  http://jnsuryaprakash.blogspot.com/ More than 300 games of chess. Still struggling with ELO 1600-rated bots. One blood donation, and more than 100 hours of volunteering. 

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a very interesting author, he has radical thinking and he really impressed the way he thinks differently from the crowd. Here are some quotes that hit me from his book "Antifragile". We are largely better at doing than we are at thinking. The world as a whole has never been richer, and it has never been more heavily in debt, living off borrowed money. The more energy you put into trying to control your ideas and what you think about, the more your ideas end up controlling you. If I never hear anything wrong said about you. You have proven yourself incapable of generating envy. If nature ran the economy, it would not continuously bail out its living members to make them live forever. He who has never sinned is less reliable than he who has only sinned once. And someone who has made plenty of errors - though never the same error more than once is more reliable than someone who has never made any. When we look at risks in extremistan, we don't look a

I really enjoyed the different perspectives projected in this book. Definitely something I would like to pick again 10 years from now and read. Here are some of the quotes I loved. Choosing to be special (intoxicated, high, successful) over happy is addiction.   Strivers tend to be addicted to alcoholism or workaholism. Many leaders tend to work 60-hour weeks.   Workaholism leads to loneliness and loneliness leads to workaholism.   If you answer yes to the below questions you are a workaholic. Do you spend your discretionary time working?   Do you usually think about work when not working?   Do you work beyond what's required for work?   Spouses want nice things to buy with money but hate when their spouse is spending time on things that get money.     Self-objectification is when you look at the person in the mirror and hate him for his performance eval that year or his physical/looks.   You are not your job. A narcissist is someone who falls in love with their self-image.      Pr

Here are some interesting quotes from the inspiring book "The Almanack of Naval Ravikant" By  Eric Jorgenson. Consider everything, but take nothing as gospel. Reading is faster than listening. Doing is faster than watching. Work as hard as you can. Even though who you work with and what you work on are more important than how hard you work. Intentions don't matter. Actions do. That's why being ethical is hard. If it entertains you now but will bore you someday, it's a distraction. keep looking. The less you want something, the less you think about it, the less you obsess over it, and the more you're going to do it naturally. If they can train you to do it, then eventually they will train a computer to do it. Products with no marginal cost of replication include books, media movies, and code. This is the highest form of leverage. Forget rich versus poor, white-collar versus blue. It's now leveraged versus un-leveraged. You're never going to get rich ren

This is one of my favorite books this year. The authors in this book talk about 6 principles to make messaging stick.  S:  Simple: Find the core and share the core U: Unexpected: Get attention(Surprise), Hold Attention (Interest). C:  Concrete: Help people understand, remember and coordinate. C:  Credible: Help people Believe. External and internal credibility. E:  Emotional: Make people care through the power of association, self-interest, and appeal to Identity. S:  Stories: Get people to Act through simulation and inspiration. Golden Rule of Simplicity: A one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it. People can be driven to irrational decisions by too much complexity and uncertainty. Simple messages are core and compact. We need to shift our thinking from "What information do I need to convey? to "What questions do I want my audience to ask ?" Curiosity comes from gaps in our knowledge. Statistics will, and should,

  Some of the interesting quotes from the book "Lean Startup" by Eric Ries. Unfortunately, too many startup business plans look more like they are planning to launch a rocket ship than drive a car. To achieve that vision, startups employ a strategy, that includes a business model, and a product roadmap. The product is the end result of this strategy. Entrepreneurs who operate inside an established organization sometimes are called "intrapreneurs". Productivity in a startup: not in terms of how much stuff we are building but in terms of how much validated learning we're getting for our efforts. Success is not delivering a feature; success is learning how to solve the customer's problem. The goal of the MVP is to begin the process of learning, not end it. Metrics are people too. Only 5% of entrepreneurship is the big idea, the business model, the whiteboard strategizing, and the splitting up of the spoils. The other 95% is the gritty work that is measured by i

Few quotes I liked from my recent book "Contagious". STEPPS model for virality: In 2010, for example, there were almost 17,000 Olivias born in the US but only 492 Rosalies. It's always difficult to understand why some names catch fire and others don't. Word of mouth tends to reach people who are actually interested in the thing being discussed. One in 10 Americans tells the other nine how to vote, where to eat, and what to buy. People share things that make them look good to others. As the story gets transmitted from person to person, some details fall out and others are exaggerated. And it becomes more and more remarkable along the way. Experts estimate that as many as 10 trillion frequent flier miles are sitting in accounts, unused. Enough to travel to the moon and back 19.4 million times. Just like many other animals, people care about hierarchy. Apes engage in status displays and dogs try to figure out who is alpha. But status is inherently relational, Being the l

Quotes from the book "Masters of Scale" -  Reid Hoffman. The earlier you can predict a "Yes" in a field of "Nos" the bigger your opportunity. Part of the journey that we entrepreneurs are on is learning how to separate our winning instincts from our losing ideas. Your instincts are right 95% of the time and your ideas might be right 25% of the time. Time is your most precious resource; don't waste it on a bad idea. Naysayers are likely to be right, their "Nos" can help you switch from a failing Plan A to a more promising Plan B. It's better to have one hundred users who love you than a million users who just kind of like you. A lot of people have the fallacy of believing design is how it looks. Design is how it works. If you're not grappling with decisions, then you're living with a false sense of neutrality. Trust = Consistency Over Time. If you foolproof your culture, you'll have a culture of fools. You can train someone on

Quotes from Miracle of mindfulness - Thich Nhat Hanh I think the real miracle is not to walk either on water or in thin ari, but to walk on earth consciously. When walking, the practitioner must be conscious that he is walking. when sitting, he must be conscious he is sitting. No matter what position one's body is in, the practitioner must be conscious of that position. We must be conscious of each breath, each movement, every thought and feeling. Mindfulness to refer to keeping one's concsciousness alive to the present reality. Hardest of all is to practice the way at home, second in the crowd, and third in the pagoda. A person who knows how to breathe is a person who knows how to build up endless vitality. Meditation is not evasion; it is a serene encouter with reality. Mediation is contemplating Body, feelings, mind and eternal objects. Quotes from zero to one - Peter Thiel In a world of scarce resources, globalization without new technology is unsustainable. The most contra

Here are some interesting quotes from the book, "Our Final Invention" - by James Barrat. The author constantly warns about the perils of AI. The AI does not hate you, nor does it love you, but you are made out of atoms which it can use for something else. The National Institute of Standards and Technology found that each year bad programming costs the US economy more than $ 60 billion in revenue. An agent who sought only to satisfy the efficiency, self-preservation, and acquisition drives would act like an obsessive paranoid sociopath. Per dollar spent, computers have increased in power by a billion times in the last thirty years. Imagine a world where the difference between man and machine blurs, where the line between humanity and technology fades, and where the soul and the silicon chip unite. When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, that only a fool or a prophet would have dared compla

This is very interesting book from Ray Kurzweil , A futurist, inventor and author. Its fascinating to imagine the role of GNR(Genetics, Nano and Robot AI) in the future. You can refer his 6 Epochs of evolution here . Image courtesy: Bing AI image generator Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world. When scientists become a million times more intelligent and operate a million times faster, an hour would result in a century of progress (in today's terms). There are no hard problems, only problems that are hard to certain level of intelligence. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. There are three great philosophical questions. What is life? what is consciousness and thinking and memory and all that ? and how does the universe work ? The good news is that our lives have purpose; the bad news is that their purpose is to help some remote hacker estimate pi to nine jillion deci

 Quotes from "My Journey Home" Within you, without you According to our surroundings and experiences, we have a particular perception of reality. When passion is frustrated, people lose all good sense. The nature of the mind is to interpret nonessentials essential. The mind creates artificial needs, believing it cannot live without them. In this way we carry a great burden of attachments through our life. Where there is faith, fear cannot exist. You may have to leave the geographical boundaries of India. However, you never have to leave Bharata, the spirit of India within. Saintly personality can be softer than a rose or harder than a thunderbolt. Quotes from "The Dark Net" Normal person + anonymity + audience = Total Fuckwad For every starry-eyed vision of future utopias there was an equally vividly dystopian nightmare The idea that technology is neutral, just a tool, is plain wrong. That's never been the case. It embodies basic choices and values of any societ

Please don't be mislead by the title, its a book on AI. If you are wondering why the book is named like this, Author is a researcher trying to teach AI on generating "pick up lines". Thats the pickup line AI came up with 😀 . This is one of the best books I read so far on AI. Here are some quotes from the book: Programming an AI is almost more like teaching a child than programming a computer. The question AI is answering is not "what is the best solution?" but "What would the humans have done ?" The narrower the AI, the smarter it seems. The human brain is a neural network made of eighty-six billion neural networks. Most of the times, what we asked AI to do isn't what we actually wanted them to do. Give AI a goal - data to imitate or a reward function to maximize and they'll do it, whether or not they've actually solved your problem. On December 2017, Google maps directed cars toward neighborhoods that were on fire. It wan't trying to

Here are some quotes from the book "The Inevitable". Author Kevin Kelley talks about the 12 factors that are going to shape the world: Flowing, sharing, tracking, accessing, interacting, screening, remixing, filtering, Cognifying, questioning, and becoming. We cannot expand ourself, and our collective self, without making holes in our heart. A world without discomfort is utopia. Protopia is a state of becoming, rather than a destination. One study a few years ago found that only 40 percent of the web is commercially manufactured. The rest is fueled by duty or passion. By 2026, Google's main product will not be search but AI. AI is akin to building a rocket ship. You need a huge engine and a lot of fuel. The rocket engine is the learning algorithms but the fuel is the huge amounts of data we can feed to these algorithms. The most important thing to know about thinking machines is that they will think different. So we'll get this network of locally franchised factories,