Gihan Jayatilaka : Blog : Dump

As the name says it, this will be a dump of random stuff. I don't think I will ever write longer articles about these. I am happy to hear your thoughts about any of these if you have something interesting to share.

[2025-May-08] I attended the "How the Buddha Met His Mother": Book Talk by Donald Lopezat the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art. I am listing some interesting insights from the author here. My takes on them are written in italic. Please note that I am not an expert on the matter beyond having taken a class in Buddhism up to the middle school examination.

1. The mother component of the Buddha's five considerations before being includes a woman whose natural life span is only pregnancy period + 7 days.
   We didn't pay attention to this factor when we learnt Buddhism in middle school. That is probably because it would have been a traumatizing detail for the kids.
2. Most of the Suttas don't have much information about the first 29 years of Buddha's life. That information comes in Dhammapada Commentary written in 5^th century AD.
3. The story goes as the Buddha went to heaven and preached Abhidhamma to his mother (who was born in heaven). This story claims that Abhidhamma was put together by Buddha during his lifetime. However, the generally accepted idea is that Abhidhamma was developed centuries after Buddha's death. Also, this claim about preaching Abhidhamma comes from Dhammapada Commentary (written later).
4. Karl Eugen Neumann has put forward a claim as to nuns (female monks in Buddhism) having not existed during the Buddha's lifetime. His claim is that the stories about the order of nuns were added later to the pali texts.
   I looked this up. These claims are not generally accepted by the scholars.

[Loosely related]: The middle school education (up to GCE Ordinary Level examination) in Sri Lanka requires students to take 6 core subjects and 3 optional subjects. The core subjects include history and religion. However, you take one religion of choosing [ (a) Most of the time -- this is the religion students practice. (b) In few occasions -- this is the religion student's grew up in even though they don't practice it anymore. (c) Very rarely -- this can also be a religion for which the school has a teacher while the student might be practising a whole different religion. Most of my knowledge on Buddhism comes from (b) ]. I am quite happy about the history class because it broadly covered Sri Lankan as well as world history. The Buddhism class gave a good overview. However, one could hope for a religion class in which we learn about multiple religions, along with the pros and cons of individual religions as well as the religion in general.

[2025-Apr-08] "Imagine an email finding you well" -- email footer goals!

[2025-Mar-26] Guilty pleasure-- eavesdrop.png

[2025-Mar-21]
#Showerthought: When you are using exclamations in a text where you can have a factorial, use a comma.
For example, in complexity analysis:

Surprisingly, the space complexity does not depend on array size n,!

[2025-Mar-18] Terrible applications of AI

1. Optifye YC Pitch

[2025-Mar-13] Started using Windows 11 IOT Enterprise. Yeah, it has almost zero bloat. Yes, it is fast (this is too early to tell. Any OS installation is fast during the first week). Let us see how this goes after a few weeks. Small hiccup -- there is no way to go and buy a license. You can use this only if your institution has a purchase agreement with Microsoft. If not, you have to go with the 90 day trial from Microsoft. Also, I got to know about this from Chanaka's FB post (thanks!).
Similarly, Office LTSC 2021 is a "classic" version of office without any AI features.
Arguably, Windows 11 IOT Enterprise has less bloat that Ubuntu!

[2024-Mar-03 To think and write] Consolidated acts.....

[2024-Feb-25] Why You Will Marry the Wrong Person talk by Alain de Botton (Courtesy of Jameel)

[2024-Feb-20]

• If someone (outsider) who only speaks English (i.e. not familiar with any local language) were to read a book (or watch a movie/TV show) to understand contemporary Sri Lankan culture, what would that book be?
• ANSWER = The Lanka Box.

[2025 Feb 14] Happy Valentine's Day! Greetings from ML twitter.

[2025-02-12] Japanese website landing pages are on a whole different level! , https://www.utsubo.com/

[2024 Nov 01] I am guilty of following this 59 sec workout video from an unverified source.

[2024 Aug 16] If Elizabeth Swaney is (arguably) the coolest olympian ever!

I keep forgetting parser.add_argument('--fp16', action='store_true', default=False)

[2024 July 30] Runners loop [Youtube]

[2024-July-29] One line lessons from Eat That Frog (by Brian Tracy)

1. Eating the biggest frog as the first activity of the day is to do the most important/difficult task before you go to easy tasks for the day.
2. Planning on paper is always better than keeping plans in mind.
3. Personal interpretation: It is easier to get distracted by easy (and useless) in comparison to being distracted by entertainment for multiple reasons.

[2024-Jul] I have to add a version of the following tweet to my list.
"Our schools never taught us how to console a grieving friend, how to say sorry as you mean it and how to be a good listener. I guess we're spending lives applying Newton's 3rd law everywhere not knowing that human reactions can be disproportionate sometimes & that can be okay."

[2024-June] To read: How to Hug a Porcupine

[2024-June] I have heard contradictory remarks from different sources about how competitive Sri Lankan GCE AL is. Here is a back of the envelope calculation. Sri Lanka GCE AL, Physical science stream had 35386 candidates [1]. 2238 (6.32%) out of them got selected to Engineering programmes [2] and 895 (2.52%) out of them had merit seats. India had 1,415,110 students taking JEE mains, 186,584 taking JEE advanced and 17740 (1.25%) getting into IIT Engineering programmes [3].

[2024-June] Comments that are kinda useless when it comes to any research paper

1. It is not in a good venue.
2. It does not beat the state of the art in all the benchmarks.

[2024 May 27] TO DO: Test alternatives for Gotukola in the US -- Parsley (curly Parsley NOT Italian one), Arugula/rocket leaves, Cilantro, Kale, Carrot leaves, Vietnamese markets [e.g. Lotte in MD]

College Park translates into සරසවි උයන (Sarasavi Uyana). This might be interesting for the very few people who learnt at both Peradeniya and University of Marylnd in College Park.

Coffee stains for $ \LaTeX $

Phrases people should not use in talks given to graduate students

1. "$\forall x \in \{ \text{graduate school, research, work}\},$ Think of $x$ as a marathon instead of a sprint." -- Whoever saying this is significantly over-estimating how athletic grad students are!
2. "No free lunch" as an expression for tradeoffs in a phenomenon -- Most probably 50% of the students in your audience are there for free lunch!

[2025 Jan 05] Nanathambara is looking for volunteers who can teach programming for school children. You should talk to Gayana (email on the bottom of his webpage) if you are interested.

[2024 Jan XX] I need to make a checklist for flying.

1. Passport, ticket, i20 (updated)
2. Put bag tags! (why am I actually doing this?)
3. Do the online check in. Get the aisle seat. Window seat is never worth it :-)
4. Laptop, ipad and phone
5. Be prepared to have either the US or UK plug sockets.
6. A charger that can give out both USB C and iphone output.
7. The in flight entertainment system will have USB 2 (most probably). I am yet to see one with USB c
8. USB 2 to USB c cable
9. USB 2 to iphone/ipad cable
10. If there is a chance of staying stuck in the transit -- a change of clothes and a tooth brush!

[2023 Sep 01] The summer vision project PDF

Reading list (2023 Summer): Girl in Room 105, Reader, Lolita -- this is too boring to read.

Retweets are not endorsements. They are performative engagement markers that intentionally confound direct alignment with ironic promotion, ambivalent reflection, or personal brand management so as to reveal all or nothing of one’s authentic perception depending on the observer. [source]

Dr. Maithripala made us listen to this song during the undergraduate orientation in Peradeniya.

BlogGadol has so many cute stories. I read them all through middle school until they stopped posting.