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.

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:

Enabling ONVIF and RTSP in V380 Pro Bulb Camera from Amazon

Shantanu Goel

V380 Pro Bulb Camera

I use a bulb camera from Amazon for my doorway, because it is very easy to set it up since just goes into the existing bulb socket without any additional wiring, and connects over wifi to my internet. Most of these cameras are based around V380 / V380 Pro platforms, which are typically nice to work with 3rd party software via the ONVIF and RTSP protocols. ONVIF allows good control over the camera besides just streaming, and RTSP allows you to only stream the camera feed to other devices, such as your phone or tablet. But basically the end result is that you can use great software like Synology Surveillance Station to monitor the camera and control it remotely, which is what I do. Or you could also use things like VLC on your computer to just watch the feed. If you really want to play around with it, you can install scrypted on a server and connect the camera to almost anything like Apple HomeKit or Google Home.

3dprinting Changes Lives

Shantanu Goel

Imagine that you wake up one day and discover that you have the power to bring your ideas to life! You think of something, design it and it appears in front of you. Wouldn’t that be life-changing for you?

If you can imagine it, you can have it

In the sweet monsoons, some 25 years ago, a lot of Indian kids started dreaming of this when the show Shaka Laka Boom Boom went on air. It had a magical pencil that the show’s protagonist Sanju could use to draw anything, and it became a reality. Now, I didn’t really watch the show because I was already in my 20s by then and it felt too childish to me at the time. But the kids around me could not stop singing praises about it and how they wanted to be the lucky Sanju.