Nitin Khanna

I was once described as a philosopher programmer. I think I'd like to describe myself as a lifelong student.

Highlights from – How to Raise a Genius: Lessons from a 45-Year Study of Supersmart Children

How to Raise a Genius: Lessons from a 45-Year Study of Supersmart Children

Pioneering mathematicians Terence Tao and Lenhard Ng were one-percenters, as were Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and musician Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga), who all passed through the Hopkins centre.

Such results contradict long-established ideas suggesting that expert performance is built mainly through practice—that anyone can get to the top with enough focused effort of the right kind

The findings, which dovetail with those of other recent studies, suggest that spatial ability plays a major part in creativity and technical innovation

In a comparison of children who bypassed a grade with a control group of similarly smart children who didn’t, the grade-skippers were 60% more likely to earn doctorates or patents and more than twice as likely to get a PhD in a STEM field

Among students with high ability, those who were given a richer density of advanced precollegiate educational opportunities in STEM went on to publish more academic papers, earn more patents and pursue higher-level careers than their equally smart peers who didn’t have these opportunities.

for individuals beyond a certain IQ barrier (120 is often cited), concentrated practice time is much more important than additional intellectual abilities in acquiring expertise

It’s far better, Dweck says, to encourage a growth mindset, in which children believe that brains and talent are merely a starting point, and that abilities can be developed through hard work and continued intellectual risk-taking

“They work hard to learn more and get smarter.” Research by Dweck and her colleagues shows that students who learn with this mindset show greater motivation at school, get better marks and have higher test scores.

Perplexity: Pros and Cons

I’ve had Perplexity Pro for over a month now and I’ve dived deep into it. I’ve made it my primary search engine on my computer’s Chrome browser. I’ve downloaded their Mac and iOS apps and given them a prominent place on my digital yard. I’ve started using it for every search under the Sun (except for map searches, which are going to Apple Maps these days). So here are some quick Pros and Cons from my experience –

Pros

Perplexity is very good at search and more specifically, at nuanced search.
- I am looking for a printer for my home and I gave it a printer I like, a price point I prefer (less than the sample printer), and some features I want in it.
- It was able to search for and summarize the features of similarly priced printers and let me know what the best option for me is.
- I separately did the search myself and came to pretty much the same conclusion!
Perplexity Pro isn’t ad-driven.
- I’m paying for this service. I mean, technically I’m not because I got it for free for a year through a deal, but come Oct 2025, I will probably pay $20/mo for it.
- While the price point is not great, it feels nice to be able to pay for a service as critical as web search and not have to wade through a bunch of ads to get to a relevant link. (Take a hint Google. I pay for YouTube Premium, why the heck wouldn’t I pay for Google Premium?)
Perplexity lets you organize your searches and system prompt them.
- Spaces are a way to organize your searches. You can retroactively add a search to a space.
- I currently have three spaces – Investment, programming, and “software tools”
- Each space allows you to set a custom AI model and a “system prompt”. For example, you could say “You are an investment advisor. Help me plan investments in stocks, bonds, market funds, and any other type of investment which can give me high returns in the US with a medium amount of risk.” and set the model to GPT-4o.
Perplexity can write small scripts and improve upon them.
- This is par for the course for every LLM right now, but it’s still a nice to have. It takes the friction away from doing a lot of random experimentation. I asked it to write a script to batch use “Imagemagick”, it did so. I asked it to change the script from bash to zsh, it did so. I asked it to add parameters, print stuff out, supress warnings, it did all of that.
- That said, I once asked Perplexity to install and run a python package. While it acted like it’s installing the package, when the time came to actually run it, Perplexity balked and told me it doesn’t have runners.
Perplexity taps into other LLM models.
- In case you didn’t know, Perplexity is web search engine with access to other large language models, instead of building their own. As part of Pro, you can pick and choose which model you want to use to answer the question. Depending on what you pick, you can get different responses. It’s worth noting though, that I ignore this and let Perplexity decide which model to use to give me a response and it just does so and does a good job of it.
Perplexity spills the tea.
- Perplexity has the news. No, I don’t mean the Perplexity Discover feature, which is a sort of MSN/Apple News competitor in that it collects and recommends news items for me to read, but which invariably feel not particularly well tailored.
- I mean that I can ask it the latest news on a particular topic and it does a really good job of pulling and summarizing “up to the day” news items on the topic.
Perplexity really understands complex questions.
- Here’s the question I asked about the printers – “Find a wireless printer for my home, similar to Epson EcoTank ET-2850. It should have a touchscreen display and a way to wirelessly print from computers and phones. It should be able to print double sided pages automatically. It should use a refillable ink tank that I can use third party ink with. Lastly, it should be less than $200.”
- I did not expect it to get all the points. It did.
Perplexity understands files.
- Someone sent me a PDF file that was a bunch of land surveys, notes about where the land will be acquired and where it’ll be left untouched, and timelines and other details.
- I couldn’t made head or tail of the file. So I gave it to Perplexity and asked it some deeply relevant questions.
- Perplexity actually gave me all accurate answers about the file and helped me understand the issue at hand.
- I verified the info I got from Perplexity with some neighbors and it turns out Perplexity got everything right!
Perplexity has access to Wolfram Alpha!
- Someone recently posted online that Perplexity doesn’t do math properly. A colleague commented – “Why the heck would you even ask an LLM to do math?? That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how LLMs work!”
- But Perplexity isn’t just an LLM. It’s a Search Engine with an LLM interface. That means it should be able to tie into all kinds of other services, including those that current Search engines do.
- Services like Wolfram Alpha, arguably the best math tool on the web.
- I asked Perplexity “What is sqrt(45) times 11,546?”
- It went straight to Wolfram Alpha and gave me 2 versions of the response.
- It even gave me the link to Wolfram Alpha, to let me run the query myself.
- I verified the result with Google Search’s Math Solver.
- Same result.

Cons

Perplexity is great for Search. Just not Website Search.
- A lot of times, all I want to do is get to a website. I know Keepa exists. I don’t know if it’s a .com or .somethingelse
- I know Kindle’s Online Reader exists. I just haven’t visited it on this computer, so I don’t have the URL in my history.
- Instead of giving me the next hop, Perplexity strives to give me the next hop and a summary of the service, a Chrome extension, the iOS app, and “features and benefits” of the service. I do not need any of this. Just give me the link and let me go!
- I really wish Perplexity would offering a dumber and faster version of their search for one-word searches or keyword searches like “website for writefreely”. I do not want an AI summary, I do not want options, I just want a jumping point.
While Perplexity is really good at product search, it feels limited to the sites that they have collaborated with. For example, in the first Pro point, I mentioned printers. It seemed like Perplexity only looked at prices on Best Buy. It looked for advice on reddit, NY Times, etc. But pricing came only from Best Buy. So are you really getting the best pricing advice or just more vendor lock-in? Remains to be seen.
Also, one of Perplexity’s offerings is called Perplexity Purchases. It’s basically a customized interface for shopping, where you can apparently compare products and buy from within the Perplexity interface.
- I have not signed up for the service because of a few key points which made it feel weird.
- While they take your address and credit card info like any other service, the copy around it says that “Perplexity will purchase it on your behalf. For a limited time, shipping is free!”
- What this tells me is that I’ll pay Perplexity and they’ll pay the vendor. This is not good because what if disputes arise or I want to return a product? Will Perplexity provide the same level of support that we’ve come to expect from vendors?
- Also, will this mean that I lose out on points on my Credit Card because the payment isn’t going directly to the vendor? Like if Chase is running a points bonanza on a particular mattress brand, and I buy it. But the payment looks like it went to Perplexity and not to the mattress brand, do I still get the cashback or extra points?
- Lastly, what the heck does “shipping is free for a limited time” even mean? Why is Perplexity in charge of shipping anyway? Most vendors provide free shipping these days. So if I’m buying from Costco or Best Buy through Perplexity, is there a future where Perplexity would charge me for shipping while buying directly from the vendor would not?
Perplexity has opened our eyes to paid web search. Good for Kagi. If most of the time, I’m using Perplexity to only do web searches, I do not want to pay twenty dollars per month for it. I want to pay less. Ten dollars per month for unlimited searches on Kagi seems like a nice number.
Perplexity doesn’t have a Firefox extension!
- I use Firefox for my personal browsing. Perplexity doesn’t have an official extension there. Not a problem as I just go to perplexity.ai and then do the search. But we’re all so used to the Omnibar.

Verdict

Perplexity is awesome! It’s got a lot of search results (I don’t know who their backend web-crawler is, or if they’re building the database themselves), advanced search capabilities, and features to make your research easier. It even has some confusing and moonshot features which may or may not pan out, and it is experimenting with ads too, for their free offering.

But. It is not a Google Search replacement. Yet.

There are simpler things that Perplexity brings too much complexity to. If I’m looking just for the weather, or simple math, or the domain of a website, I do not need LLMs or explanations or summaries. I need a quicker interface.

Perhaps Perplexity could hire a few Google Engineers and implement DNS prefetching to improve their page load times. Perhaps they could build simpler, faster interfaces to solve some of our non-LLM queries faster.

Then how valuable would the company be?

Also, since the company has introduced us to the concept of paid web search, I’m now more open with experimenting with search engines like Kagi, which cost less per month and act like traditional search engines. Maybe at the end of my Perplexity Pro free trial, I’ll go experiment with that company and see what comes of it. If I don’t like it after using it for a month or so, I know I’m going to come back to Perplexity.

why it’s difficult to journal

I struggle to journal or otherwise write privately: I don’t find myself a worthy audience.

Source: se acercan tiempos oscuros (el finde) | yours, tiramisu

This is what I struggle with too. I feel like people who are successful at journaling every day must really enjoy being told what went on with their own lives. To me, I’m living that event, what then is the point of writing about it?

I know, I know – the point is that the journal is not for the now me, it’s for the future me. That future me will be thankful I noticed that moment in time enough to write about it. One of my favorite things these days is to stare at older pics of my child. I’m sure I must have felt awkward taking those pics when I did, but the now me thanks that one because these precious memories are so wonderful to look back at.

Maybe taking a quick photo and writing a quick note in a journal don’t need to be that different in cost in my mind? But for that, I need to tell myself that there is a worthy audience for what I’m doing – future me.

Writing Month or something

I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do a Novel writing month, but I have signed up for writingmonth.org with the idea that I want to write at least 10,000 words in my journal (this blog counts) and another 10,000 words at least for office work.

For office work, I’ll only count words I write in documents and not in emails or chat, simply because it’s easier to account for documents than for the latter two. WritingMonth.org is a small endeavor by 1 person actively and another contributing member in some capacity. So while I can reasonably expect the developer to respond quickly to feedback, what I do not expect is a mobile app and a browser plugin and an obsidian plugin, etc etc.

And in one sense it doesn’t even matter. The friction of manually entering my goals into a platform means that I’ll only do it if I’m genuinely going about the process. This same has been true for StoryGraph, where I’ve been tracking all the books I’ve been listening to. I manually plug in my read count daily, instead of relying onon, say, Goodreads and Kindle being integrated and doing it automatically for me.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that – I hanker for this kind of automation when I’m comfortable in my efforts. But when I’m starting out, it makes sense to do the process of tracking details manually. After all, there’s recollection in that task, and also intent. Only if I write and then plug in by word count into the web app will I see that meter fill up for that monthly word count. Only then will I get to see the satisfaction of knowing for sure that I’m doing something with my time and my life instead of simply… living it.

GPT based “Denial of Information” attack

Academic journals, archives, and repositories are seeing an increasing number of questionable research papers clearly produced using generative AI. They are often created with widely available, general-purpose AI applications, most likely ChatGPT, and mimic scientific writing. Google Scholar easily locates and lists these questionable papers alongside reputable, quality-controlled research. Our analysis of a selection of
— Read on misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/gpt-fabricated-scientific-papers-on-google-scholar-key-features-spread-and-implications-for-preempting-evidence-manipulation/

I think we can define a new type of attack on the Internet. Much like the Denial of Service attack makes a service unavailable to ordinary users, a Denial of Information attack makes readily searchable information obscure by inundating it with generative AI based nonsense or outright misinformation.

This can be both a malicious attack or negligence.

A malicious attack would be threat actors specifically targeting information silos such as social media or SEO with misinformation intended to influence society.

A negligent attack is either in the form of misguided attempts by end users to use LLMs to churn out content faster, thereby inundating traditional systems with unverifiable data; or a negligent attack can come in the form of data retrieval infrastructure (such as search engines or LLMs) using generative AI to compile information without adequate gates to verify such information.

A Denial of Information attack is more insidious than a Denial of Service attack because it’s much more difficult to detect and even harder to neutralize due to the individualistic nature of information retrieval and consumption.

Comment for Colin Walker Blog – Sep 9, 2024

My MacBook is getting very tired so I want to mainly use it for music to get the most life out of it.

Source: Colin Walker – Sep 9, 2024

Say, Colin, doesn’t it make sense to try to get base Linux on your MacBook? I’ve heard people say it really gives a new life to old Macs, and not just a fresh coat of paint.

Drivers are fully supported, things seem to be snappier and RAM is used better than if you were on Windows or ChromeOS Flex or anything else.

From what I recall, base Ubuntu or Debian or Linux Mint are good options.

Dare I say, I’m sending you down a new rabbit hole? 😀

Steam Deck’s Killer App (Game)

I’ve owned a Steam Deck since April – a birthday gift I deeply desired.

In the first few months, I fired up the old favorite of Counter Strike and figured out what else out of my 100 game Steam collection is playable on the Deck. But I couldn’t figure out one thing – what’s the killer game for this device?

What’s the one thing that will make me keep coming back and wanting to keep coming back when I can’t?

I couldn’t find it. I spent some money here and there, played some demos here and there. But nothing stuck.

100 games – that’s a big collection. Though, out of that, only about 40 or so seem to have exceptional support on the Deck. Of those, only 20 or so interested me in terms of graphics and what I’m doing with the game.

Of those, basically none captured my imagination.

Then, about a month ago, I came across Skyrim on a bargain bin site. I remember happy hours playing this game. Not too challenging, adequately open world, a storyline that catches you every once in a while because a random dragon will plop down and force you to kill it. With the Skyrim Special Edition I have on Steam now, I get a lot more missions, artifacts, strange tales. I also get to explore the idea of mods. I’ve never modded any games. With Skyrim, I can dip my toes into that space and see how it works. Folks online swear by running Skyrim as an NPC, or in Cozy mode, or adding skins and missions and areas, all of which is very interesting to me.

But most importantly – it beckons me. I want to go back to it at the end of every day, to unwind as I roam the terrain in search of one mission or one cave or one challenge to conquer. I can’t get to it every day. But when I do, I come out satisfied by the experience.

I don’t know how long Skyrim will hold my interest. Last time, once I’d finished the main quest, I dropped the game. But this time, I want to revisit it and play as some other character, and see if I can install mods to make it a wild ride. With Skyrim, it’s possible, simply because even 17 or so years later, this game still compels people.

It’s a proper killer game for the Steam Deck.

Addled

“I’m really concerned about you.”

This is how my wife started the conversation the other day, as she sat in the car.

I didn’t know how to proceed, but blood rushed to my face, unsure but embarrassed.

“What happened?”

“These videos you keep watching… You really need to stop. Go back to reading. You used to read. Go back to that. Do anything, but stop watching these videos.”

Ah.

See… while I was waiting for my wife to get ready to leave the house, I sat down and hit up YouTube to watch some Shorts. I’d been doing that a lot lately. Enough to know that the algorithm is irritating. Enough to not know that I need to stop.

This was an intervention.

“I know, I know. I need to stop. I’ve said it myself. The algorithm sucks too… It’s pinned me down and shows me only a few categories of videos. A few SNL shorts, specially the news ones. A few geeky shorts from a YouTube channel that focuses on DND and other table-top and online RPGs, and…”

That was my defense. It was clearly meant to deflect.

“That’s fine,” my wife countered, “but these videos suck you in. You can’t stop watching them. Trust me. I know. I watch them on Instagram. I know I need to stop too. But you definitely need to stop. This stuff addles your brain.”

“You’ve spent over thirty years,” she continued, “not getting addicted to any of this stuff. You read books. You read articles and blogs. You need to go back to those. We can’t all be addicts.”

She knows of my RSS feeds and Instapaper “habit”. I reckon a habit needs to be something you do regularly, but I don’t follow up on those often enough. Not anymore.

I thought for a second about how true her words are. My wife has been sucked into Instagram. It’s part true social network for her, with a constant line of communication with her girlfriends; it’s part addiction. Any time I see her phone, it’s open to Instagram.

My brother has been sucked into TikTok. He’s on it constantly. He sends me videos here and there. He is always mentioning it in our conversations. Taking decisions based on it. I don’t know if it’s an echo chamber for him, though I wouldn’t be surprised. Clearly… something has clicked for him there, the way Instagram has for my wife and YouTube Shorts has for me.

I’ve struggled against algorithms all my Internet life. From the time life on the Internet became easier thanks to search engines and ludicrously plentiful email accounts and social networks that just felt like natural connections (till they didn’t), I’ve had to constantly feed the side of me that says “enough” to someone else deciding what I should be seeing and reading and consuming. It’s why I’ve maintained some RSS feed reader or other since 2012, when I bought my first RSS reader – Fever. I’ve also been paying for Instapaper since I gave myself an annual subscription as a birthday gift a half decade ago. But it’s a struggle to keep that hunger fed. I’ve often burned down my RSS subs (numbering to around 400) to the ground and rebuilt them, only to realize that if I don’t have the firehose pointed at me, I get bored of it. It’s a constant push and pull of having enough to read and having too much to read in every single blog post. (Hence, Instapaper.)

So when it became as easy as opening the YouTube app (an app that lives on my phone’s first page anyways, due to the myriad other uses of the service) and getting dropped into an algorithmic feed, the question didn’t even present itself. I was constantly on it, filling up time at first – the interstitial time of waiting for buses, waiting for other people, waiting for the microwave to finish its dance. Then, I was finding time for it – standing at the microwave longer than I should, stealing moments when I should have been paying attention to my family, being awake for hours in bed. All of these video platforms are excellent for revenge bedtime procrastination, I’ve learnt.

But it’s time to pull back.

We can’t be going into our 40s getting sucked into echo chambers and algorithmic escapes. That’s not the way to live a life.

Immediately after my wife pointed this out to me, I cut myself off completely. Cold turkey, as they say. Then, a week later, I found myself going back into the warm embrace of short form videos. It’s just too easy to switch off your brain for a minute, or thirty.

But it’s time to pull back.

Maybe this time it’ll not be cold turkey. I might keep going back to Shorts every few days, only to taper off my usage over the next few weeks or months. Or maybe this is what remission looks like and I just don’t know it yet.

We’ll have to wait and ~~watch~~ keep reading.

Another Book Reading Update

Here’s another book reading update, since nothing else is happening in my life other than, you know, living life.

I finished In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust and immediately realized something was wrong. See, when I track an audiobook in StoryGraph, I do it by percentage completed. StoryGraph then translates that into number of pages read for some reason. It was reporting that I was reading something like 1200 pages a day. I do not have that capacity OR time. Turns out, In Search of Lost Time is a massive book! ISOLT is about 4000 pages. Compare that with War and Peace, which peaks at about 1400 pages depending on the edition you’re reading. It took me the better part of two years to read War and Peace. Yet I was done with BBC’s radio rendering of ISOLT in, oh, under a week!

I then started wondering if I should read the original text, just to get the parts I didn’t cover in the audiobook. I have shelved that project for now. I want to refresh my memory of this story some other ~~day~~ year.

Since then, I finished Flux by Jinwoo Chong – a wonderfully sad story about Korean identity in the US, a female protagonist who is eerily similar to Elizabeth Holmes, and some sci-fi thrown in for good measure. It reminded me of Embers, which too was about a life not well lived.

I’m currently listening to The Silver Pigs by Lindsey Davis. I picked it up in Libby on a whim and it’s been a nice ride! I’m still on the fence about historical fiction, though leaning in than out at this point.

I’ve also started reading Scent of a Garden by Namrata Patel. I am not sure about Diaspora authors. I’ve tried before and failed to find a footing. Maybe this one will change my mind?

Slow progress on Romantic Outlaws by Charlotte Gordon, which is an excellent retelling of the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter Mary Shelley. I am surprised to discover the details of the lives of these two extraordinary women. The only reason this process is going slowly is because of changes at home. I no longer have the ability to sit and read for a long period of time. Instead, I’m able to use that same time to audiobooks. This may change over time. Let’s see.

I’m at day 148 of reading daily.

Book Reading Update

Finished listening to Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa yesterday. It’s a sad little story but it’s got its highs and lows. There’s some meta-book discussion, since the story revolves around a used-book store and therefore, used books. There’s even (I think) a whole fictional story inside the story and that’s a beautiful touch!

Now I’m listening to In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust. The audio version is produced by the BBC as a radio drama. It’s very well done and I’m left wondering if reading the book(s) would give me the same sort of experience as listening to it. One funky thing though was that I totally forgot that the story is set in France, since it’s all spoken in very English accents. At one point when I was keenly listening to it, the realization came to me and tickled me so!