Art & Objects
Reflections on art, collecting, design, and material culture
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Unpacking DeepSeek
The Firm DeepSeek’s success prompts two critical questions: how it outperformed well-funded Chinese AI giants and what this reveals about China’s broader tech innovation framework. DeepSeek distinguishes itself through a revolutionary approach to labor relations, contrasting sharply with the typical Chinese tech sector’s grueling “996” work culture (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a…
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Unpacking Reinforcement Learning
I write this as part of what I do in explaining ML (and goodness forbid, AI) concepts to non-technical friends. Reinforcement learning (RL) is a machine learning approach where an agent learns to make decisions by interacting with an environment to achieve a specific goal. The agent improves over time by receiving rewards for good…
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The Unpacking of Mind
Time is the silent conversationalist at every table, the unacknowledged guest who draws the map of our wrinkles, etches the slow change in our voices, but more cruelly, redraws the emotional landscapes we inhabit. The friend we remember laughing with in a shared past becomes almost a stranger, not because they have changed beyond recognition…
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1790 Kennedy cello
I worked on this as a Covid project – from February 2021 to November 2021. I didn’t keep track of the number of hours it took me, but I’m quite sure I will not be doing this again… it’s much too involved in terms of time, effort, focus – no regrets, though. I learnt a…
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Cello Collection
18 months later… Waiting for #6 – a 2022 Frank Ravatin, on commission. I pretty much spend most of my playing time evenly distributed between the Aguzzi and the Kennedy so the rest are for adoption to better homes. The reality about owning multiple musical instruments is that unless you are a professional (which I…
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… 6 months later.
So this has been a half-year in making. Countless coffees, anxiety, frustration and a healthy dose of good luck later, the cello restoration is literally taking shape. Said cello is around 240 years old, from England. And this was what it looked liked in April, after 6 weeks of dismantling to reglue the joints with…
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Cello setup (putting the soundpost in place)
Sounds difficult but actually it’s not too bad after a few hours of seemingly mindless frustration. First, you need your old soundpost as a reference. Do you like the sound your cello already makes? If you do, then there’s not much reason why you’d be making your own soundpost beyond just wanting to experiment with…
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Cello setup (making your own soundpost)
Over the course of the past 2 months, and as part of an introspective series on ticking off the checkboxes in my bucket list I have been playing the cello. But true to form, I have also been taking the opportunity to pick up the finer traits of setting up cellos – and along the…
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Instrument making – classical guitars, violins, cellos
I built my last classical guitar in 2006, with life getting in the way during the intervening 14 years. Thanks to mid-life meanderings, I decided that life is too interesting to put on hold waiting for retirement. I have always been a tinkerer from birth. I build things, but I deconstruct things just as readily.…
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Covid-19 Trackers
Without doubt, the fabric of the world has changed between the last post and this. Suffice to say, nothing will be quite the same after this. I’m pretty sure in half a year normalcy will resume – but our paths in getting there can vary. First scenario is the discovery of an establish antiviral treatment/vaccines…