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.

AI cybersecurity doomsday, or a case of fud

Shantanu Goel

The beginning

It’s October 2026, and a few things happened:

  • eMudhra was found to be using trivial numbers, a single byte, as their private keys
  • PHP CVE-2026-109619 AND CVE-2026-109619 were made public
  • Railway got hacked and customers lost their keys/env vars stored in their systems
  • LiteLLM had another supply chain compromise for a few hours

And then it began. People started looking at CVE trackers and found out tons of CVEs across all the software they use being disclosed there. And somehow everyone collectively decided that it’s all AI. And then it restarted the usual thing about how AI is going to bring about the downfall of everything because now anyone can hack anything.

300 Million Steps And A Flagpole. Or How I Taught Machines Super Mario

Shantanu Goel

It’s-a me!!

It’s a me

Almmost anyone who grew up in the 80s can beat World 1-1 of Super Mario Bros in their sleep. This level was the rite of passage that taught a generation where jump buttons belong. So when I set out to teach a reinforcement learning agent to finish it, I expected a long afternoon and a short victory lap.

Instead I got days of training, a laptop that doubled as a space heater, and a genuine lesson about how badly I had misunderstood my own childhood.

One Wrist, Two Trackers: Fitbit Air and Apple Watch in Apple Health

Shantanu Goel

What’s better than one health tracker? Two health trackers. I kid, I kid. But maybe not :)

I like my Apple Watch Ultra. It is the better workout tracker, lets me leave my phone behind, and is useful as an actual smartwatch when I am out. It is also a fairly large slab of metal to wear around the house and, especially, to bed. If I take it off, though, I lose the boring background data which makes health tracking useful in the first place.

Lessons in Human Psychology, Or How I taught Machines Kung Fu

Shantanu Goel

I Know Learnt Kung Fu

I Know Kung Fu

Imagine yourself in a Hollywood Thriller. You wake up in a dark room without any memory of how you got there or what are you doing there. All you know is you need to get out somehow but don’t have any instructions on how to do so. You can’t really see anything, but someone keeps shouting random words. Every time you do something, you either feel a sharp bout of pain or a bit of exhilaration that becomes your sole guide. Gradually, you figure out the connection between those random words and your actions and you start making your way through and soon see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Bytes and TIL For Week 52 2025

Shantanu Goel

Laser Engravers!

  • Thought about buying a portable laser engraver, started with xTool F1 Lite and almost settled on xTool F2
  • Seemed small enough to be portable so I can use it in my balcony to avoid venting complications
  • F2 also has a higher power diode laser than F1 Lite, and a small IR laser for some acrylic/metal work too!
  • But then decided against it finally. Unsure how much I’m going to use it for all the hassle. Maybe some day!

Some notes about electronics

  • Pomodoro cube

  • WLED

    • WLED has a built in tool for images, pixel art, gifs, scrolling text etc which can be accessed by going to < wled-ip>/pixelforge.htm
    • Built a nice little display piece with a 64x64 LED matrix, an INMP441 mic and WLED for my stuff/office

    https://x.com/shantanugoel/status/2003821491696378325

  • Bought some “mist maker” modules and tried running them off of a battery but of course that didnt work.

    • Ultrasonic piezoelectric mist makers require a driving circuit and cannot run directly from a battery because they need AC signal at a precise high frequency to function.
    • Piezoelectric transducers change shape when an electric field is applied and to produce mist they need to vibrate rapidly.
    • A special circuit can take DC voltage and act as an oscillator using a timer/transistor/dedicated chip to convert into a high frequency AC signal that matches the transducer’s resonant frequency

  • Capacitive Touch

    • Found that ESP32 can detect touch without a dedicated sensor by using its built-in capacitive touch pins, connecting just a wire or foil to a supported GPIO pin and reading changes in capacitance. Your body acts as the capacitor.
    • Also found that TTP223 Capacitive touch sensors work THROUGH plastic/glass etc. I thought I’ll have to expose them directly.
      • They have onboard pads to control their behavior (momentary v/s toggle and high/low triggering) so can use them directly as a switch without an MCU

  • ESP32 S3 Super mini boards (at least on hubtronics) seem to have built in BMS (LTH7R), which would simplify a lot of my circuits