Pawan > Recent Status Updates

Showing 1-30 of 225
Pawan
Pawan is on page 398 of 432 of India Unbound
Part 3 gets engrossing by the page: business houses, prominent people, repealed ACTs, and corporations (manufacturing, synthetics, technology and pharmaceuticals).

The author travels a lot - waiting list for flight tickets was new to me - airport must have felt like train station - should have taken a bus.

It gets increasingly opinionated, and problems with prospective solutions are bombarded.
Jun 10, 2026 06:41AM Add a comment
India Unbound

Pawan
Pawan is on page 228 of 449 of Pax Indica: India And The World Of The 21st Century
The book mentions most of the treaties, frameworks, member nations and procedures. D. Malone is quoted often.

Now that my memory has been jogged, I remember reading and watching television about most of the events.

2001 is the earliest I can recall, and the most intense. An earthquake at the start of the year, sanctions continued, plane hijacks in a far away land, and the western theatre was nearly lit.
Jun 07, 2026 07:36PM 1 comment
Pax Indica: India And The World Of The 21st Century

Pawan
Pawan is on page 277 of 432 of India Unbound
"It is no wonder that Bombay’s vision was ignored. It was too practical and sensible—much like Bombay’s citizens."

Mistakes are expensive. Few have time to dilly dally.

"Instead of going back to my desk, I went out into the street and wandered aimlessly toward the harbor, feeling defeated."

La land de la wanderers.
May 29, 2026 06:10PM Add a comment
India Unbound

Pawan
Pawan is on page 326 of 838 of The Discovery of India
Preventive detentions have made amazing authors out of noteworthy individuals (of democratic stature), who would have otherwise ferociously debated and pointed fingers at one another (figuratively) on the legislative floors, instead of being obligated, by virtue of boredom, to delegate time towards applying literary skills in assimilating information: as what has, in the confines of desolate walls, lead to this book.
May 28, 2026 08:21PM Add a comment
The Discovery of India

Pawan
Pawan is on page 75 of 448 of An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions
Comparative study with numbers may not tell the whole story. Few entities censure data until much later when it's effect would most likely be dimmed down. When a certain kind of negative events become regular occurrences, it insinuates apathy which leads to delayed resolution.

Lot of doomsday signalling.
May 26, 2026 07:13PM 1 comment
An Uncertain Glory: India and Its Contradictions

Pawan
Pawan is on page 133 of 432 of India Unbound
Why not a fast tiger and an enduring elephant; like a quantum superposition.

"[...] Alexander reassured his men that they were doing all this for the sake of glory— [...] talk and write about them." Alexander was right.

"'Treat me . . . ' replied Puru." Puru was toiling for honour.

Macedonian Phalanxes, likely, had tough time taking on trumpeting elephants to deter futher inquisitions towards peninsular conquest.
May 25, 2026 06:19PM Add a comment
India Unbound

Pawan
Pawan is on page 53 of 432 of India Unbound
Addictive.

Paying less heed to specific criticisms (which may be feelings rather than facts): Economics may not be an exact science, but to be formulated (especially the Macro kind) through centuries, from atrociously massive experiments of trials and errors, is dismal to the extent of being appalling.
May 19, 2026 06:21AM Add a comment
India Unbound

Pawan
Pawan is on page 129 of 838 of The Discovery of India
Contrary to the expectations - based on Author's (Chacha Nehru) legal profession - of muddled, meandering and emotionally unscathed passages; this book nearly overflows with sensational articulation.
May 16, 2026 01:33AM Add a comment
The Discovery of India

Pawan
Pawan is on page 460 of 552 of Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction
Parameters such as α, n, γ, λ can be picked by trials (n ~ 5 in most cases), instead of grid search, as they seem fairly independent. Methods can be specific to the problem (which maybe a prediction or control, amongst others) with tradeoffs between latency and memory. LLMs help with method selection, discretisation and reduction of state-action space to explore feasibility of ideas.

Had to relearn backgammon.
Apr 05, 2026 01:06PM Add a comment
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

Pawan
Pawan is on page 357 of 552 of Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction
This subject is rife with higher algebra (especially progressions and probability). Notations can cause mental havoc. Part III seems like interesting prose.
Apr 04, 2026 10:58AM Add a comment
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

Pawan
Pawan is 80% done with RTFM: Red Team Field Manual v2
Depending on the distribution, some commands may not be pre-installed. Seems useful for LAN based contests - which reminds me of a game called Lagori (Seven Stones) wherein a team had to try to dismantle a stack of stones (in limited attempts) from a perimeter using a soft ball and then takeout as many players of other team by throwing the same ball at them as they try to reassemble the stack while dodging the ball.
Apr 01, 2026 11:26AM Add a comment
RTFM: Red Team Field Manual v2

Pawan
Pawan is on page 503 of 793 of The Algorithm Design Manual (Texts in Computer Science)
Should have read this book earlier - there are external references (to papers and codebases) which would have been of immense help.

One way to generate true random numbers is by taking external measurements (I use temperature and time). It may take longer than a few processor cycles per number. The overhead can be reduced by storing the numbers in memory (in an independent queue) for other programs to use.
Mar 21, 2026 01:54PM Add a comment
The Algorithm Design Manual (Texts in Computer Science)

Pawan
Pawan is on page 439 of 793 of The Algorithm Design Manual (Texts in Computer Science)
Part one is usual, but part two seems to have new to offer. Seeking improvement. Easy to understand and practical.
Mar 19, 2026 08:32PM Add a comment
The Algorithm Design Manual (Texts in Computer Science)

Pawan
Pawan is on page 92 of 360 of Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams
According to this book there are more morning larks than night owls, but I have known disproportionately more night owls. I had a notion that if minimum required downtime is H hours, then one could complete the sleep roster in multiple segments that sum cumulatively to H. That notion is unfounded. People involved in active decision making must undergo contiguous downtime.
Mar 16, 2026 10:55AM Add a comment
Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams

Pawan
Pawan is on page 335 of 552 of Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction
Tabular methods can be understood without programming by creating a scenario with a small state-action space, initialising policy intuitively, and then iterating through the algorithms by setting the variable values. This may not be possible for complex algorithms in the second part - especially off-policy and online search and approximation.

It gets increasingly interesting. Need to revisit a few chapters.
Mar 14, 2026 07:39PM Add a comment
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

Pawan
Pawan is on page 595 of 848 of Engineering a Compiler
Tedious.
Mar 09, 2026 09:57AM Add a comment
Engineering a Compiler

Pawan
Pawan is on page 445 of 848 of Engineering a Compiler
More difficult than anticipated. The pseudo codes seemed like an actual programming language initially - expunged a lot of time to understand them. The book has its own non hardware based ISA called ILOC. IR are analogous to middlewares with optimisation runs. Many old and exotic languages are refered to, such as FORTRAN. Implementation would help with few important topics. Skipped the advanced topics.
Feb 25, 2026 07:46AM Add a comment
Engineering a Compiler

Pawan
Pawan is on page 320 of 848 of Engineering a Compiler
Way too many abstractions to keep track of simultaneously. There are references to the theory of computation, data structures (particularly graphs, tables and compression), language processing, computer architecture (which I tried reading once to learn about the caches: I and the Ds). Need to refer to the newest edition.

This can wait - discounts on chocolates might be up already.
Feb 14, 2026 08:40PM Add a comment
Engineering a Compiler

Pawan
Pawan is on page 810 of 1034 of Fundamentals of Aerodynamics
Aerodynamics is exciting because the point and line elements remind of electrostatics; vortex flow and its sheets remind of electrodynamics. Lattice (Boltzmann) method reminds of machine learning gradients, with damping factor analogous to learning rate. At higher speeds, sonic booms, wave mechanics and thermodynamics come into play - now: energy transfers in hypersonics.
Feb 09, 2026 10:43AM Add a comment
Fundamentals of Aerodynamics

Pawan
Pawan is on page 490 of 1034 of Fundamentals of Aerodynamics
History, design and applied sections make the read more interesting (and addictive).

Usually, analytical solutions have rampant approximations that extenuate drudgery. Numerically, each grid point (vertex) uses values computed in the previous step, at nearby vertices, to compute the value at current step. Large number of threads allow values to be obtained together in parallel.

Chapters 4 and 5 were of interest.
Feb 06, 2026 11:56AM Add a comment
Fundamentals of Aerodynamics

Pawan
Pawan is on page 320 of 1034 of Fundamentals of Aerodynamics
High alpha. VO2 maxed out. Boundary layer separation. Stall. Fatigue. Nose dive. Injury.

Specific part of this book was suggested for reading to understand the underlying theory in iterative mesh based simulations to select optimal design within constraints. I had read an older book long back, to appear busy, and evade speaking during discussions on blackbody radiation of fair faced females. Reading rest of it.
Feb 03, 2026 09:23PM Add a comment
Fundamentals of Aerodynamics

Pawan
Pawan is 62% done with The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research
Professional PhD or by publication seems difficult but plausible. I used physical storage for bibliography (along with compressed cloud storage of essentials) as it is easier to run my command line tools. There was a tool called Calibre which few of us used, to organise cbz files. I have read more review papers than any other kind of paper.
Jan 31, 2026 07:23PM Add a comment
The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research

Pawan
Pawan is on page 58 of The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research
Friendly read. Describes waypoint navigation. Tables (usually at the end of chapter) help recalibrate.
Jan 23, 2026 12:47PM Add a comment
The Unwritten Rules of PhD Research

Pawan
Pawan is on page 352 of 580 of Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach
Enjoyed the soccer example for reduction trees.

Consecutive threads and warps minimize control divergence - wanted to try them out. The variables are in camelCase but have been using snake_case in C language - so the programs look like they contains mixed case.

Deep learning and physics follow.
Jan 20, 2026 07:01PM Add a comment
Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach

Pawan
Pawan is on page 170 of 580 of Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach
A one-time affair can be accomplished by collecting all the test programs and running them on a (rented) virtual machine, chosen so as to minimize expenditure by estimating required compute capability and vetting it against hourly rates.

Instead, I ported the code to a hobby board with cortex host and 128 cores device. Test programs partition data into tiles to store them in shared memory followed by coarsening.
Jan 17, 2026 01:21PM Add a comment
Programming Massively Parallel Processors: A Hands-on Approach

Pawan
Pawan is on page 77 of 936 of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design)
This book is like an extra large research paper with the appendices longer than the actual text. Rereading with suggested order:

1. Appendix A + B + C
2. Chapters 1 + 2
3. Appendix D + E + F + G
4. Chapter 3 + 4 + 5
5. Appendix H + I
6. Chapter 6
7. Appendix J + K
8. Chapter 7
9. Rest of the Appendices.
Jan 12, 2026 03:00AM Add a comment
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design)

Pawan
Pawan is on page 77 of 936 of Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design)
This book is like an extra large research paper with the appendices longer than the actual text. Rereading with suggested order:

1. Appendix A + B + C
2. Chapters 1 + 2
3. Appendix D + E + F + G
4. Chapter 3 + 4 + 5
5. Appendix H + I
6. Chapter 6
7. Appendix J + K
8. Chapter 7
9. Rest of the Appendices.
Jan 12, 2026 03:00AM Add a comment
Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Architecture and Design)

Pawan
Pawan is on page 255 of 552 of Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction
Not as difficult to read now. Going to try non-model based implementations in JAX, but first, remembering my kite equations using plotting libraries.
Jan 11, 2026 08:57PM Add a comment
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

Pawan
Pawan is on page 140 of 552 of Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction
I had read a different edition of this book for a coursework until a few chapters back, which was available online for free, through none other than Google search. My mind was too shallow to estimate values for bootstrapping, back then. Time to dig.
Jan 05, 2026 09:16PM Add a comment
Reinforcement Learning: An Introduction

Pawan
Pawan is on page 314 of 546 of Challenge and Thrill of Pre-College Mathematics
Condensed. No conic sections. Exercises are fun - problems on a tougher side.
Dec 20, 2025 07:10PM Add a comment
Challenge and Thrill of Pre-College Mathematics

« previous 1 3 4 5 6 7 8
Follow Pawan's updates via RSS