Aneesh Sathe

Few ideas capture the collective human imagination more powerfully than the notion of a “universal library”—a singular repository of all recorded knowledge. From the grandeur of the Library of Alexandria to modern digital initiatives, this concept has persisted as both a philosophical ideal and a practical challenge. Miroslav Kruk’s 1999 paper, “The Internet and the Revival of the Myth of the Universal Library,” revitalizes this conversation by highlighting the historical roots of the universal library myth and cautioning against uncritical technological utopianism. Today, as Wikipedia and …

Leading with Kindness # PDF kindly made available by the author, Steve Swensen - via Helen Bevan on Bluesky. Steve Swensen held leadership positions at Mayo Clinic ensuring not just improving care but also preventing burnout. This paper from May 2024 provides leaders with a framework to help colleagues do better and “Kindness is helping people do better.” That colleague or work environment that creates stress and anxiety have a very real impact on your health and long-term well-being. An organization can improve team health by creating space for “nurturing human conditions” to emerge:

Agents Are Not Enough # Last year I was heavily experimenting with Knowledge Graphs because it’s been clear that LLMs by themselves fall short because of the lack of knowledge. This paper by Chirag Shah and Ryen White (you can click the heading above) from Dec 2024 expands on those shortcomings by exploring not just knowledge but also value generation, personalization, and trust. They open the paper by casting a very wide definition of an “agent” everything from thermostats to LLM tools. While this seems facetious at first, their next point is interesting. Agents by definition “remove agency …

Today I discovered the Public Domain Image Archive attached to the Public Domain Review which has some great essays and commentary on image collections, like the one below. Utagawa Hiroshige: Last Great Master of Ukiyo-e # Just before Hiroshige died, possibly of cholera, he wrote the following poem: I leave my brush in the East And set forth on my journey. I shall see the famous places in the Western Land. This was a fortelling of sorts because Hiroshige

NVIDIA Project DIGITS # Around 2015 I was putting together funds in academia. Convincing IT, senior professors, and finance that yes, it was worth giving me a LOT of cash to build a workstation with multiple GPUs. … “No, it isn’t for gaming.” … “Yes, it will change the world.” … “No, there are no university rules that hardware bought multiple invoices across multiple departments can’t be used in the same box.” … “Yes, I’m aware that all my individual quotes are just below the bureaucracy summoning purchase limits.” … “Yes I tried random forest with the other stats and ML methods, this really …