https://georgesupreeth.com/web/Recent content in Home on George SupreethHugoen-usFri, 03 Jul 2026 11:39:25 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260703_making_an_ai_teaching_assistant/Fri, 03 Jul 2026 11:39:25 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260703_making_an_ai_teaching_assistant/In 2024, I wrote about how it would be amazing to have a local LLM be my own little Jarvis in a box. Back then I tried to install Jan, Ollama and Khoj, but a combination of not really knowing what I was doing and the complexity of the terminology and set up made me drop the whole thing. I’ve been using A.I in the browser in the meanwhile. I like Gemini and a couple of other specialist tools I’ve bookmarked.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260623_erring_to_sound_authentic/Tue, 23 Jun 2026 11:10:45 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260623_erring_to_sound_authentic/It seems like some people are taking the phrase–"To err is human" too literally. In The Typo Vibe Shift, Michael Waters wrote about how people are deliberately adding typos to their writing so people do not think their work is AI generated. Some job applicants are intentionally adding typos to their cover letters to prove that they, and not an AI program, wrote them. Celebrities and CEOs are sending out error-ridden emails and Instagram Stories, and instead of getting a scolding, they are praised for sounding authentic.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260620_managing_stuff_in_org_mode/Sat, 20 Jun 2026 18:24:38 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260620_managing_stuff_in_org_mode/Stuff is information that enters your life with no specific purpose. At first, it is never clear what stuff means or what you should do with it. Sometimes it evolves at alarming speeds. It could turn into a project, a speaking event or an insight that could spark a new venture overnight. Or it could crawl, and sulk and drop dead one day. The maddening thing about stuff is the uncertainty.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260618_making_sense_of_zettelkasten/Thu, 18 Jun 2026 09:45:13 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260618_making_sense_of_zettelkasten/When I first came across the concept of a Zettelkasten I waved it away as a fad. Actually, no. I didn’t just wave it away. I waded into the deep end, read extensively, joined the community and eventually came to these conclusions: The emphasis on constantly curating, pruning and connecting notes seemed like too much work. Better suited to academics or researchers who naturally live in their notes. The emphasis on atomic notes that stick to one idea for each note seemed excessive.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260616_little_acts_of_kindness/Tue, 16 Jun 2026 20:03:00 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260616_little_acts_of_kindness/The resident’s association is having our apartments repainted and it is a bit of a challenge because a horde of pigeons have taken over our building. They build nests everywhere and poop on newly painted surfaces. The painters should be mad at them but no. A pigeon had laid it’s eggs on a parapet. They carefully removed the eggs, painted the parapet and then placed the eggs back. On a plate.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260616_paws_for_a_moment/Tue, 16 Jun 2026 19:55:20 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260616_paws_for_a_moment/The nice thing about working out of a public park is passing doggies will stop by and ask you for a petting.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260615_making_notes_in_a_hurry/Mon, 15 Jun 2026 10:42:39 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260615_making_notes_in_a_hurry/I have a leaky memory. If I don’t write something down, I forget it, such as when: A friend tells me about an interesting book or a movie I’m deep down a Wikipedia rabbit hole and find a cool website I remember something in the midst of house cleaning I’ve just made an appointment with someone I’ve had an epiphany My wife tells me (thrice!) that I need to get the wheat milled I receive an email that needs me to act and so on.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260527_faster_than_the_speed_of_rtfm/Wed, 27 May 2026 09:43:47 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260527_faster_than_the_speed_of_rtfm/Lately, I have been adding a ridiculous amount of new functionality to Emacs using Generative A.I. tools like Google’s Gemini. It has gotten to the point where I realise only much later that the function I generated to do a thing already exists. I just hadn’t read the manual. Case in point. I use Denote, a note taking package in Emacs that uses among others, the .org file format. Sometimes I need to refer to these notes on my mobile phone, and given the low number of choices for apps that work with the format, I settled for Logseq which kind of supports .https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260505_a_folder_full_of_trivia/Tue, 05 May 2026 10:32:49 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260505_a_folder_full_of_trivia/At art school during the 1990s, in the pre-inernet and Google Image days, I kept files of pictures, torn from magazines, for reference. If I needed to illustrate a particular type of tree, then I’d leaf through my nature file and pick out a picture that came close to what I need. When I started using PCs that practice continued, this time with folders holding .rtf format files. I kept notes in them.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260305_how_the_speaking_tree_died/Thu, 05 Mar 2026 20:27:06 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260305_how_the_speaking_tree_died/N o one in the tribe could remember who discovered speaking trees first. The squat, ugly tree was the quickest means to get in touch with other tribes. The way it worked was that you spoke into the hollow in its trunk and the tree conducted your voice through its network of roots to other speaking trees across the world. Of course, this meant that anyone standing near a speaking tree could hear you, even if they were not meant to, but it beat running across forests with sabre-toothed predators nipping at your loin cloth.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260226_how_our_community_members_learn/Thu, 26 Feb 2026 10:43:03 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260226_how_our_community_members_learn/I’ve been thinking about how social learning is such a contrast to formal, structured learning systems. I am a fairly experienced educator. I have worked with a diverse group1 of students over the last three decades. I am also the co-founder of what is arguably the oldest on-location drawing community in India, which has taught me a lot on how people learn in informal and unstructured ways. This community does not ask people to register for drawing events.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260220_thirteen_years_hundred_posts/Fri, 20 Feb 2026 17:07:32 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260220_thirteen_years_hundred_posts/I’m imagining a secret society for people who have published over one hundred blog posts, and because this is my head space, I name this society The Hundredfold Order of the Indie Quill. I will be carried on a palanquin, on the backs of those who have published less than a hundred, onto a platform ringed with giant braziers, held up by marble statues in the pose of Atlas holding up the heavens and which also incredibly look like me.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260219_a_mindset_for_creating_art/Thu, 19 Feb 2026 10:44:43 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260219_a_mindset_for_creating_art/S omeone I know wished to apply for a $50k grant offered to artists by a foundation in the U.S., and the grant rules stated only fine artists may apply. Not illustrators, commercial artists or people who create pictures for a living. Just fine artists. Now this person is an illustrator but she could be a fine artist. couldn’t she? The line that divides these two is thin. Both illustrators and fine artists make art, so one can switch over, and indeed, many fine artists have illustrated for a living, and there are illustrators who have quit to paint full-time.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260216_wallabag_one_year_later/Mon, 16 Feb 2026 23:40:03 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260216_wallabag_one_year_later/Last year I wrote about switching my read-it-later service to Wallabag. A read-it-later service lets you save web pages and blog posts to a personal online repository so you can read them later, when you have the time. I’ve said this before. This type of service is valuable to me, because it lets me create my own little pond of information from the vast ocean that is the internet.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260213_make_many_backups/Fri, 13 Feb 2026 18:36:31 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260213_make_many_backups/I almost lost all my data. Almost.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260209_what_is_language_anyway/Mon, 09 Feb 2026 14:35:49 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260209_what_is_language_anyway/Monday 9 February 2026 This morning we walked along a beach and discussed A.I. and Language and that bit of news I read about how A.I. researchers don’t understand how these models work. Considering my wife and I aren’t programmers, and what we know about A.I. (or computing in general) doesn’t extend beyond using things like Gmail or Wordpress, or reinstalling the OS successfully (but only on the second or third attempt), our conversation didn’t get very far.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260208_back_to_ledger/Sun, 08 Feb 2026 12:52:38 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_260208_back_to_ledger/I remember reading about the story of a person called Kenge of the Mbuti people of Africa. When the anthropologist Turnbull took Kenge out of the forests and onto a vast, open plain for the first time, something interesting happened. Kenge pointed to a distant herd of grazing buffalo and asked Turnbull what type of insects they were. When Turnbull told him they were buffalo, Kenge thought it was a joke.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_251031_self_assesment_for_non-professionals/Fri, 31 Oct 2025 00:53:12 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_251031_self_assesment_for_non-professionals/The majority of the artists in the Penciljam community are not professional artists, by which I mean - their profession does not involve creating art. While there are a decent number of professionals1 such as concept artists, illustrators, painters, comic book artists and so on, most of our group may be described as deeply passionate hobbyists or at least aspiring professionals. I think of it as a gradient. Some Passionate Hobbyists transition to aspiring professionals and some of these eventually become full time professionals.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_251017_practice_to_make_things/Fri, 17 Oct 2025 18:31:02 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_251017_practice_to_make_things/“How do you balance between practice and actually making stuff?” This question popped up on Penciljam’s Discord server. I almost missed it because it sounds rhetorical, but the more I think about it, I realise, the answer isn’t so simple. “Practice makes perfect” is too trite an aphorism. It is black and white in it’s assumption that perfection occurs at a specific point in time. I think perfection is an unachievable goal because every time I believe I have perfected something, the bar I previously set for myself… resets.https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_251004_art_supply_vacillation/Sat, 04 Oct 2025 12:31:32 +0530https://georgesupreeth.com/web/blog/blog_geo_251004_art_supply_vacillation/I have this weird problem - I can’t decide on how much art material to carry when I go sketching. I enjoy experimenting when I go on sketch outings. I love trying out different types of art material and playing with drawing styles, so my drawing pouch has all the supplies I need to indulge myself. I use different types of pouches. Sometimes, I pick a small one and fill it with the basics.