Welcome!

Welcome to my personal blog! My name is Ankil. Feel free to chat with me regarding any of my previous research, work experience or startups at Salesforce, Electronic Arts, Thales, Ensnif or the University of Waterloo. Please note that all opinions are my own.

Feel free to explore some of these blog posts or go here for more info about me.

Featured

• Tower of Babel

  Published:Jan 13, 2025 |  at 07:13 AM

  Tradeoffs have shaped human civilization. Every law, every institution, every economic rule is a compromise between structure and flexibility & order and adaptation. But can we free ourselves from some of the most fundamental tradeoffs?

• Fashion after climate change

  Published:Oct 23, 2024 |  at 12:00 AM

  Should we be borrowing fashion concepts from hot countries as temperatures here grow y2y?

• High fidelity vs high understanding

  Published:Oct 3, 2024 |  at 12:00 AM

  How can we preserve nuance without making knowledge inaccessible?

• Imagination vs Intelligence

  Published:Sep 5, 2024 |  at 12:00 AM

  The real gap is in imagination not intelligence

• Anti-fragility in (Distributed) Systems

  Published:Aug 30, 2023 |  at 12:00 AM

  The distributed system world is up for a paradigm shift

• Short stories

  Published:Nov 30, 2022 |  at 08:28 AM

  A collection of short stories around various frustrations

• Poems

  Published:Oct 17, 2022 |  at 10:15 AM

  A collection of poems around various frustrations

• Advertising is (Partially) Broken

  Published:Oct 17, 2022 |  at 07:30 AM

  Information should be decoupled from its presentation

• Bike Marathon Experience

  Published:Jun 13, 2022 |  at 06:01 AM

  A brief recollection of my bike marathon experience

• Google Hashcode

  Published:Mar 1, 2021 |  at 05:14 AM

  One and a half year's solutions to Google Hashcode solutions

Recent Posts

• Thinking about thinking about thoughts

  Published:Jul 25, 2024 |  at 12:00 AM

  How do we differentiate a good conspiracy from a revolutionary scientific idea?

• Advertising Can Be Microloans

  Published:Oct 17, 2022 |  at 10:02 AM

  Advertising is outdated and we need a better way to decouple people from being consumers

• Value of Mentorship for Senior Members

  Published:Oct 11, 2022 |  at 08:41 AM

  If pro athletes need coaching, so does everyone else

• Why I Don't Use Smart Watches (for now)

  Published:Jan 15, 2022 |  at 05:41 PM

  When the usage of a product exceeds its utility, the gap in expectations can be suffocating