simonkayar – Simon + Kayar

In Lov’e’ with Learning – again

On March 7, 2026 By simonkayar In Diary

I was introduced to ‘e’ at school. The quintessential natural logarithm or ln as it was called, was supposed to have a base ‘e’ (whatever that meant). Then I ‘met’ it again in calculus when the formula page for differentiation included Thank God – it is the same. One less thing to remember as we were trying to pile up stuff in memory ‘studying’ for board exams and entrances. I met it again in my M.Tech in AI/ML but I was not curious enough even then – to probe and understand what is was all about, instead trying to finish …

A Paradise for Problem Solving

On March 6, 2026 By simonkayar In Tech / AI

This post was the result of my tryst with Claude Opus 4.6 from the time it was launched, which I consider a watershed moment. This is when coding as we know it has been truly solved – well almost. Now, don’t get me wrong. ‘AI coding’ was well and truly happening even several months back. But with Opus 4.6, the agentic workflow is so much improved that it can think about the problem much deeper and can work autonomously for much longer (like 30 minutes or more) instead of going wayward or needing user intervention or not able to understand …

An Ode to Coding

On September 12, 2025 By simonkayar In Tech / AI

Let’s face it. Coding as we know it is dying and we need to bid it farewell. This will be comical and akin to those who would have lamented death of punched cards and assembly level programming – basically historical artifacts and old people hugging it. But for a generation that grew up with it, this is an emotional good bye moment. Not sure about others but for me it was love at first sight with computers – gleaming green monochromatic monitors at school – I was stunned by what they could do, even more so when I figured out …

The age of the Machines

On August 8, 2025 By simonkayar In Tech / AI

For a long time in the history of our planet, we have been the dominant species, at least when it comes to intelligence and sheer brain power. That is about to change profoundly. I have written enough about the advent of AI but now I see that everyone around seems to have woken up to it and has come to some level of acceptance as well. TCS laid off 12000 employees and I think the churn has begun in IT, at least at the lowest level. It is going to be extremely unprofitable to recruit huge numbers of under-prepared freshers …

An ardent fan of Dhoni

On May 3, 2025 By simonkayar In Diary

If you have watched the ‘Dark Knight’ by Nolan, there is a beautiful dialogue at the end of the movie “You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain“. That is exactly what is happening to Dhoni. The funny thing is that this has been true for the past several years but no one (except Harsha Bhogle sometimes) has pointed out that Dhoni, instead of enhancing the prospects of CSK, is actually hampering them. For rational fans like me, it was tough to validate his overstay. In 2023 when we won the cup, it …

Some Interesting thoughts…

On December 26, 2024 By simonkayar In Diary

It is not like I am an avid follower or anything but this made sense so I had scheduled this post like 5 years back and it auto posted on 26th Dec 2024 🙂 Ravi Shankar suggests this five day programme to understand and improve your attitude towards life Day 1: The first role which I would recommend to you is to be a School Teacher. To teach lessons to children who are not learning, you need a lot of patience. Being a nursery or primary school teacher, even for one day, you will see how you have to increase …

Once upon a time

On December 14, 2024 By simonkayar In Tech / AI

These days I am buzzing with excitement, it seems to me that we are on a roller coaster ride in tech currently. [In fact I had to update this post twice in the last few days to include Google XR and then again for Veo 2] Most of us are aware of ChatGPT of course, and it is marvellous no doubt. But our brains are extrapolating that things will change drastically in 20 years or so. Even the most optimistic amoung us, think that it will be another 10 years before another big thing arrives. But ‘Big’ things are happening right now, …

Athletic Tongues

On November 30, 2024 By simonkayar In Life

Next time you are in a group – say, with friends, colleagues at work, any group at all, it does not matter – pay close attention to who talks the most. Then try to find out what percentage of that was useful information. I can bet that in most cases, 80% of the time was hogged by very few people producing less than 20% of useful information. I am not against the talkers. Some of those close around me are. In fact they are the ones who keep a conversation going, the energy level up and the world spinning. It …

Bulls, Bears and Rats

On November 16, 2024 By simonkayar In Personal Finance

There has probably been never a time in the history of Indian Stock Market like now, with such a huge percentage of the nation’s population interested and invested in it 🙂 . Everyone and their dog is discussing about how this Mutual fund has given 60% returns last year and how the other fund has under performed with just 20% – and here I was happy with 12-13% for years :-). Now, I can’t be envious that more people are entering this once niche area – it is bound to happen in a nation that is growing at such a …

The Wonder of Learning

On May 17, 2024 By simonkayar In General, Life

It is that time of the year (no, not talking about Bangalore rains) when results are announced for all public board exams in India. You have the proud toppers (with their prouder parents) who ended up – yes, you are reading it right – with 99% or more and centums in 3 or 4 subjects – even languages are not spared these days. Then you have the “not sure if they should be happy or sad” set who got above 95% and their parents lamenting how they lost the centums – a small careless mistake from their ‘almost there’ wards. …