The Weekly Praegustator (16 - 22 March '26)

This week I consumed 7 manga, 7 anime, 3 films, 2 TV shows, 1 book, 3 articles, and 3 YouTube videos.

17 March

Book/ There Is No Antimemetics Division (8/10)

This was quite a unique book. The concepts were somewhat hard to digest but once you get past the initial parts and get comfortable with the environment where Antimemetics roams it's a thrilling read. Very thought provoking and challenging. Had a fun time and read it in one sitting, so it's quite digestible.

Article/ Calmly We Walk through This April’s Day | The Poetry Foundation

This stirred something in me

Article/ Shameless Guesses, Not Hallucinations - by Scott Alexander

YouTube/ Dylan Patel (Founder of SemiAnalysis) — The single biggest bottleneck to scaling AI compute (8/10)

Dylan is an absolute savant when it comes to the chip industry. This is a great video for learning the in-depths of what's going on in the AI chip race and what is waiting for us in the future. I'm watching this on the second day of GTC where NVIDIA is on a winning streak. Their acquisition of Groq will be a great move in hindsight

YouTube/ The Best Episode Yet | Punching Down Episode 34

18 March

Anime/ Kingdom Season 2 Ep. 39 (7/10)

Finished Kingdom season 2. These are the worst seasons of this show in terms of animation quality. The first season was dreadful. The second season is much better but still not great. I've heard great things about season 3 and onwards, so I'm really pumped to continue the series. The story, characters and world building are all going great. I haven't seen such an epic character as Ou Ki since Whitebeard so the author is great at creating memorable characters and stories.

Anime/ Oshi No Ko S03E10 - Private Audition

Oshi No Ko is one of those animes when you read the synopsis seems really shallow but once you get to watch it, you get hooked really fast. Great anime.

Film/ Angel's Egg (1985) (7/10)

The art is gorgeous. The story and everything is up to interpretation and very slow, so i don't think most viewers will like this movie but I enjoyed the art from start to finish also it was quite a short watch so the vagueness of the story and dialogue didn't really bother me. I thought of it more as a philosophical and psychedelic approach to hope, doubt, light, darkness, some WWII influences and rebirth.

TV/ Invincible S4E1-3 (6/10)

Apart from the second episode most of the stories were fluff and kept me wanting more "meat" from the show. The Viltrumite arc is interesting but apart from that the side stories and villains have become boring. It's still better than most shows but definitely doesn't have the impact of the first season.

19 March

Article/ OpenAI Model Craft: Parameter Golf

This isn't media I consumed per se, it's a project I've endeavored. I've been training an efficient pretrained model under the 16 MB artifact limit. I've done 12+ hours of training on my Macbook M4 Pro with 24gb of ram. I'm now porting my findings to CUDA to continue working on this project via Runpod 8xH100's. I'll be applying for the Development Compute Credit Grant after my initial run. I'll see where this pans out. It has honestly been quite fun to experiment.

20 March

Film/ Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man (5/10)

Peaky Blinders is an unserious Tv Show turned movie, where a man tries to kill himself over and over and fails. This entry wasn't a shocker as well another mediocre, substanceless movie produced for dollars and nothing else.

21 March

Anime/ Fate/strange Fake - S01E12 - At the End of the Rope

This is my first fate anime I've watched and it can become somewhat confusing at first but the animation quality is top notch.

Anime/ Frieren: Beyond Journey's End - S02E09 - Himmel’s Memoirs

Frieren is comfort food for anime people and it's one of the best animes around for beginners. Lots of nice life lessons and tender moments packed inside an adventure.

Anime/ To Your Eternity - S03E20 - Coexist

TV/ The Pitt - S02E11 - 5:00 P.M.

YouTube/ Terence Tao on Dwarkesh Patel Podcast – How the world’s top mathematician uses AI

This is a high value talk from one of the most brilliant contemporary mathematicians. He's very clear and concise in his communication which is not always a given when it comes to brilliant people. Terence Tao both excels at articulating his ideas and grasp of frontier AI models. I particularly liked when he mentioned how LLM's are good at breadth-wise search and humans are good at depth-wise search. Most of the time if LLM's are smart enough to jump above walls in front of them they can eliminate problems but they can't iterate and slowly climb walls. They can either jump above it or not, whereas humans can't jump too high but climb slowly reaching the top of the wall gradually. On his point of serendipity, are we harming ourselves by optimizing things to the teeth thus removing chance encounters out of our life? Some precious discoveries and moments happen through taking a chance, taking the unpaved road and leaping from branch to branch while learning.

22 March

Manga/ Akane-banashi - Ch. 199

Manga/ Blue Box - Ch. 235

Manga/ Centuria - Ch. 86

Manga/ Ichi The Witch - Ch. 75

Manga/ One Piece - Ch. 1177

Manga/ Sakamoto Days - Ch. 252

Manga/ Someone Hertz - Ch. 26

Anime/ Hell's Paradise - S02E24 - Ephemeralness and Fire

Anime/ Journal with Witch - S01E12 - Find

This is a really precious series and handles the topic of grief in a mature way. One of the hidden gems of this season.

Film/ Scent of a Woman (1992) (7/10)

Al Pacino gives a great performance in this film. He's energetic, manic and over the top Lt. Colonel Sanders. Cinematography is dull as well as the music. The ending got too Hollywoody for my taste. The good guy got recognized for his virtuous stance blah blah. It was still a nice popcorn movie. Al Pacino's performance is worth a watch.