Approved Thoughts

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, and the Oscar-nominated film.

I recently read The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro, after coming across a positive review and remembering that there was an Oscar nominated movie based on the book in the '90s, when watching the Oscars used to be in thing in India.

After the first couple of chapters, thinking that this was perhaps an artsy book, I also opened up a chat with ChatGPT to improve my understanding of the book.

This was useful but note to self: in future explicitly tell ChatGPT to avoid spoilers or otherwise reveal information or conclusions from the later chapters. To be fair, I did ask for themes to notice in rest of the book so its mostly on me.

This isn't a thriller so in one sense the damage was limited. It is, however, a very subtle book that gradually unveils its layers and getting a bunch of bullet points upfront, spelling out every complexity and nuance wasn't ideal.

The book is a masterpiece. Very few books have ever had this effect on me where, for days afterwards, I suddenly get a flash of feeling, a pang that forces me to stop for a breath.

The closest analogy that came spontaneously to my mind was of eating great Japanese food (yes, even as a vegetarian) - the flavours are extremely subdued - very much the opposite of, say, Indian food. But they are unmistakable, sharp even, if you stop and notice, and you know it took a lot of effort and craftsmanship to pull it off just right.

When reading fiction, I have a tendency to really flip pages towards the end, a tendency developed from years of reading mostly thriller novels. Because of this I found the book depressing, having barely spent any thought on the final pages. It is only while writing this post that I revisited the ending (and the title) and had to reconsider my understanding.

I had identified so deeply with the sense of loss in the middle of the book that I completely missed the gentle ray of hope that Ishiguro leaves us with at the end: as humans, on any given day and at any given time, all we can do is to make the best of whatever remains of the day.

Highly recommended.

1. Digital hygiene by Andrej Karpathy: I discovered this just a little late to include in the last weeks post, where it would have been the perfect companion piece along with this one on getting phished.

   I practice some of these recommendations already and wholeheartedly recommend the password manager, for example. I use Dashlane, which is about $60 a year if you want to sync across devices, but there are many free tools out there. Bitwarden offers all the essential features, including syncing across devices, for free and the paid versions are cheaper too.

   I plan to explore his solutions for credit cards (privacy.com) this weekend. Work-life separation is also great advice, which I did not follow in the past but am doing at my new(ish) job.

2. Flight to unkown destinations. Would you take one? Doesn't seem like a big deal to me. As a reply to the tweet says, unlikely they will put you in a war zone, so if it is in Schengen, how bad could it be? I am probably clueless...

   Scandinavian Airlines are running “unknown” destination flights.

   You buy a ticket and board the plane. Then you find out where you are going.

   Would you do it?

3. Kim Shin-jo, 82, Failed North Korean Assassin, Dies as Pastor in the South (NYT Paywall) : What a story and what a life! And this story is straight out of hollywood, but without the happy ending.

4. Getting the Most from Deep Research Models:

   After a fair bit of experimentation, I've built a Claude project that handles all the repeatable high-effort prompt engineering (like source selection) for you. It asks for your preferences, clarifies what you need, and produces a well-structured prompt that you can then feed into any DR model.

5. Two high-value excerpts from John Authers Bloomberg newsletters:

   Here follows a crowd-sourced literary tip. I asked yesterday for recommendations on great detective franchises for easy reading in stressful times, and you delivered. I’ve had so many suggestions that this will need to come in installments.

   To start, the name you’ve recommended most often, and with greatest enthusiasm, is Michael Connelly and his Harry Bosch series (the detective loves jazz and lives in the LA hills).

   Other entrants includes the Dave Robicheaux series by James Lee Burke (set in Louisiana and starting with The Neon Rain), Arnaldur Indridason’s “really good, bleak Icelandic stuff” (try Jar City first). Volker Kutscher’s Babylon Berlin series, set in Weimar Germany. Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee stories (written some decades ago and set in Ancient China — try Willow Pattern). Also the Martin Beck books set in 1960-70s Sweden and written over 10 years by Maj Sjowall and Per Wahloo — a husband and wife team, and godparents of Scandinavian noir (Roseanna is recommended) and the Harry Hole books by Jo Nesbo, set in Norway.

   To be clear, I didn’t mention Raymond Chandler’s Marlowe books because I’ve already read all of them. If you’ve never dipped into Chandler, you have a treat in store — perhaps start with The Big Sleep. And as more than one of you said Connelly was as good as Chandler, I definitely want to read one of his. I’ll have plenty more suggestions tomorrow. Please, if you have any more to recommend, let me know.

   Herewith another installment in our crowd-sourced tour of great detective fiction franchises. You might want to try: Abir Mukherjee’s Wyndham and Banerjee series is set in India under the British Raj; the Canadian writer Eric Wright’s John Salter series, set in Toronto; Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther series, set in Nazi Germany; the Whitstable Pearl mysteries by Julie Wassmer (who used to be a scriptwriter for Eastenders so there are plenty of cliffhangers); Andrea Camilleri’s Inspector Montalbano series, featuring Sicily and plenty of great food; and Death of a Red Heroine, the first of the Inspector Chen series by Qiu Xiaolong in contemporary Shanghai. This comes highly recommended by Andy Rothman of Sinology, long one of my favorite guides to all things China, and by remarkable coincidence I had picked up a copy of this book from a neighborhood bookshelf earlier this week. So that’s what I’ll read next. More detectives next week.

6. Drew Breunig via Simon Willison:

   The first generation of AI-powered products (often called “AI Wrapper” apps, because they “just” are wrapped around an LLM API) were quickly brought to market by small teams of engineers, picking off the low-hanging problems. But today, I’m seeing teams of domain experts wading into the field, hiring a programmer or two to handle the implementation, while the experts themselves provide the prompts, data labeling, and evaluations.

   For these companies, the coding is commodified but the domain expertise is the differentiator.

7. S Anand: A great website from a college senior. On campus he was know as Stud Anand.