Greetings, Earthling 🖖
Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.
In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.
Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.
When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.
I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.
Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.
Almmost anyone who grew up in the 80s can beat World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros in their sleep. This level was the rite of passage that taught a generation where jump buttons belong. So when I set out to teach a reinforcement learning agent to finish it, I expected a long afternoon and a short victory lap.
Instead I got days of training, a laptop that doubled as a space heater, and a genuine lesson about how badly I had misunderstood my own childhood.
What’s better than one health tracker? Two health trackers. I kid, I kid. But maybe not :)
I like my Apple Watch Ultra. It is the better workout tracker, lets me leave my phone behind, and is useful as an actual smartwatch when I am out. It is also a fairly large slab of metal to wear around the house and, especially, to bed. If I take it off, though, I lose the boring background data which makes health tracking useful in the first place.
Imagine yourself in a Hollywood Thriller. You wake up in a dark room without any memory of how you got there or what are you doing there. All you know is you need to get out somehow but don’t have any instructions on how to do so. You can’t really see anything, but someone keeps shouting random words. Every time you do something, you either feel a sharp bout of pain or a bit of exhilaration that becomes your sole guide. Gradually, you figure out the connection between those random words and your actions and you start making your way through and soon see the light at the end of the tunnel.
Pomodoro cube