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My now page as of Mar 1st '26

It's inspired by Derek Sivers'nownownow  project, and is meant to capture a point-in-time snapshot of what I was upto at the time. I've written about how I built and maintain ithere.

Listening

Music: Wrong Way Up - John Cale, Brian Eno

Reading

Book: The Trees - Percival Everett

Watching

TV: Fargo - Season 2
Movie: Good Luck, Have Fun, Don't Die

Weeknotes

Kannada Coach Beku

Over a couple of recent conversations, I’ve been surprised to learn that people who know me think I know next to no Kannada. I’m no wordsmith, of course, but considering I can actually read the language, I take it as an affront for my Kannada skills to be rated comparably to my proficiency in Dothraki. This also coincides with me making extra efforts of late to use ChatGPT’s voice mode to help me improve my spoken Kannada. So, with the added impetus of proving the doubters wrong, I’ve decided to get more regular with my practice.

I also ran a bake-off between the voice modes of various LLM providers to see which one does the best job of being my Kannada coach. It’s not the simplest brief for LLMs though:

  1. The focus is more on everyday, colloquially-spoken Kannada. This requires judgement to choose simpler words and sentence structures, and also to know when to naturally swap in common English words for abstruse Kannada ones (e.g., “please” sounds more natural in everyday scenarios than “dayavittu”).
  2. Apart from having a decent model for commonly spoken Kannada, the AI’s expected to switch between Kannada and English fluidly, often in the same prompt or response.

After trying some of the usual suspects and one dark horse, my thoughts on each:

  • ChatGPT - The most usable one overall. It handles most things competently. And while it falters with substituting more complicated Kannada words with common English words, it does vet my word choices when I mix languages.
  • Claude - No regional language support, so it was a struggle to even get it to understand that I wanted help with ‘Kannada’ and not ‘Canada’. Oh well.
  • Gemini - Also decent, but not as usable as ChatGPT. It actually nails Kannada pronunciation better than ChatGPT. Unfortunately, it’s not the best when it comes to switching between languages smoothly, and its voice mode is kinda glitchy.
  • Sarvam AI - Gave Sarvam a shot because Indian vernacular support is supposed to be their niche. Came away kinda disappointed. You’re forced to pick a single language upfront, which prevents the model from code-switching unless explicitly prompted. And even then, it often gets stuck on the selected language while insisting it’s actually switching.

So most providers save ChatGPT couldn’t do a great job of it. Still, it’s kinda crazy that we’re at a place where something like this is even somewhat possible.

Other Updates

  • Really digging Cyberattack’s gear videos. Was particularly inspired by this one and decided to play around with a couple of pedals I had almost written off - Minim & The Stranger. The advice about using the pedals percussively was especially perspective-shifting and has led to some fun looping experiments.
  • Been suffering from the weirdest side-strain for the last couple of weeks. Happened out of nowhere, triggered by nothing in particular. It has cycled through identities - bruise, muscle tear, now something resembling an internal inflammation. Funnily enough, been able to weight-train through it just fine, but I’ve had to pause tennis for a bit.
  • Catching night shows on a whim has been one of the highlights of the sabbatical so far. Feels like a throwback to my college days when I’d bunk the first half and catch morning shows to save money, only this time it’s to save time by avoiding traffic. Watched Good Luck, Have Fun, Don’t Die this week. A sci-fi comedy that intermittently switches between fever dream and panic attack. Highly recommended.