This time, my trip to Chennai was also a road trip. I got a ride with friends in the car, and it also gave us lots of time for conversation. As we were going to the convocation, the discussions turned to education and degrees. Though there are lots of folks dissing college education and degrees in the tech world. I...

I did a workshop titled “Back to Basics: Build Your Own LLM from Scratch”, which kind of included some basic theory on how a transformer works, and then building a very small LLM. The idea was to demystify an LLM (or transformer) by understanding what goes on and then building one to deepen our understanding. I had...

I am at IITM/Chennai for Paradox. I have been here since 2022, since the first Paradox. The fest and the crowd have grown bigger. I came by car with friends A&S. We took Old Madras Road and stopped at Sriperumbudur for a quick visit to the Rajiv Gandhi memorial. Rajiv Gandhi Memorial at Sriperumbudur I explored a...

FlavorGraph is a large-scale graph network that combines data from over a million recipes with chemical compound information from 1,500+ flavor molecules to predict ingredient pairings. It uses graph embedding methods to represent foods as dense vectors, enabling data-driven food pairing suggestions that go beyond...

It’s been a good week in general. The work schedule is back under control. I am getting back to normalcy there. I also played after a long time on Sunday. We played singles again. It was tough but fun. It tests one’s stamina and technique more than doubles. I enjoyed it. I am back to physical P.T again. I have also...

We have updated Uma’s playlist on her radio. It’s no baby rhymes now. It has carefully selected songs. Currently, U2026 has songs from Kannada, Malayalam, English, and Italian. I have heard all of them and read lyrics as well to make sure it’s friendly. It is tough to filter out songs for toddlers, especially those...

There have been many incidents related to CBSE (and NEET).. Nisarga has written a responsible, well-written tech disclosure blog post about it, followed by Sarthak on the breakage of process and rules. Bugs happen in large systems. But public exam systems need a much higher standard of transparency, correction, and...

I have proposed BoF (Birds of Feather) session and discussion at IndiaFOSS/2026. The proposal is yet to be approved as of today. I am logging the same content here for readers of my blog post and also for record keeping. I will update in both places if there are any changes. Background I am Thejesh GN. In 2018, I...

This Saturday, we drove to Palakkad to meet Pradeep and Dhanya. It was a short morning walk and breakfast meet. We met at the fort, walked around, and chit-chatted while having breakfast at Indraprasta. The fort is well-maintained, and the walking path around the fort is good for a casual morning walk. Thanks to...

I was in Chennai for the first half of the week. I couldn’t get a confirmed 1st or 2nd class train ticket. So I had to fly from Kochi. It’s such a waste of time and money. Chennai is hot, hotter than Thrissur. But I mostly worked from Indoors, so it was okay. It seems like it’s been raining a lot in Bangalore, and...

Every application I love has some kind of power-user mode where I can add my own code or scripting to make it useful to me. Simple examples are Firefox with its addons or VLC with its plugins. Ideally, any significant or valuable application should have such a feature. But as a developer or builder, it’s not easy to...

We are in Thrissur. We left at around 2 AM and reached by 11 AM, with two breaks. The drive was comfortable. The traffic was friendly this time. Echo is getting old, and Uma is more active now. So the breaks are a necessity now. Thrissur is hot, but it’s been raining since we arrived, which keeps it manageable. Uma,...