Greetings, Earthling 🖖

I’m Shantanu, aka Shaan.

Your friendly neighborhood co-inhabitant of this tiny speck of dust, I maintain this site as a stochastic log of my calculations towards the futile aim of weeding out the anomalies from the equation that gives me my “42”.

In my Clark Kent mode, I spend my day at The Trade Desk, trying to crunch through petabytes of data and trillions of queries every day to understand the human behavior and make the advertising technology world a little bit better.

Before that, I spent a couple of decades in the Semiconductors world at Qualcomm and Google, building processors and AI accelerators, tinkering with chips, operating systems, device drivers, human interface devices, security et al.

When the lights go out everywhere, I like to don my maker hat and build stuff that no one wants.

I like to make and break things around me ranging from my smart toaster/TV to my web and phone apps to my car, strumming a bit of guitar, 3d printing stuff, and of course, shit-posting on twitter @shantanugoel.

Sometimes I post some of my travel and 3d print outputs on instagram, because I’ve been told by my gen-z interns that that’s a thing to do.

Do check out some of the other subdomains that I run.

Analyzing Superbowl Ads Trends Over The Years (with a bit of help from AI)

Shantanu Goel

AdTechGod recently posted an interesting question on twitter “How many Super Bowl advertisers return year after year, and how much churn is there? I assume the ROAS isn’t strong enough to justify long term commitments.” Do Super Bowl Advertisers Return?

This got me thinking about the Super Bowl ads and how they have changed over the years, and I set out to do some analysis on it.

First steps

At the outset, I needed to get some information about the ads shown during Super Bowl in the past years. I found a few data sets which were fairly incomplete but a good starting point nonetheless, and I did a quick and dirty pivot table to get an initial insight.

Building a Resilient Home DNS Setup with DNSdist

Shantanu Goel

Running Pi-hole or AdGuard Home provides great network-wide ad blocking, but creates a single point of failure. When your DNS server crashes or needs maintenance, your entire network loses DNS resolution. I had this problem and thus far had chosen to do a sub-optimal solution of using both AdGuard DNS as well as an upstream Google DNS server in my internet gateway. dnsmasq running on the gateway that manages DNS requests from all the clients in my network has no concept of a failover DNS server, or server priorities. It dispatches requests to all the servers it has configured, and ideally should honor whichever servers responds first.

You Can Just Do Things (If You Simplify)

Shantanu Goel

Around an year ago, I spent a few weeks setting up the “perfect” workout tracking system. Custom spreadsheets, progress graphs, integration with my calendar, and so on. I was proud of this beast of a system. But you know what I didn’t do all those weeks, and several following ones? Actually work out.

Sounds familiar?

We’ve all been there - caught in the trap of over-engineering solutions to problems that could be solved with a simple notebook and pen. We’ve become so good at planning, organizing, and systemizing that we’ve forgotten to just…do things.

Advertising in a Post AI World

Shantanu Goel

Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity) recently talked about how advertising might work in a future dominated by AI. His vision? A world where we never see ads because our AI agents handle them all behind the scenes. Sounds neat, but I’m not entirely convinced.

Here’s the thing. What Aravind describes isn’t really advertising. It’s more like super powered comparison shopping.

Taking his example of “Book me two nights at Rambagh”, the “human” equivalent of this is a human agent (Either yourself or a physical agent). One who goes to let’s say MakeMyTrip, or Google Flights, or Booking/Agoda/Airbnb etc to see and compare deals and then booking the best one. Maybe the human agent will also take decisions around the location, and the view, and the services/reviews besides just the cost to make it a well rounded decision. But essentially, this is a filtering of offers, not advertising.

PKMs: Less Management, More Knowledge

Shantanu Goel

PKM: Personal Knowledge Management

I love it. I love taking notes. I love saving all bits and bobs of information that I come across. Bookmarks, memes, quotes, code snippets, whatever. I love it.

But I run into a bunch of issues with them.

  • I can’t find them. I can’t remember them. I can’t use them.
  • I spend a lot more time managing them than I do learning.

I had an epiphany recently that why was I so miserable with my PKMs? In my quest for the perfect knowledge management system, I’ve made a lot of mistakes which lead to the above issues: