Rl-Level1 on Unmesh Mali

Week 38, 2025 : Meditation

Sat, 20 Sep 2025 17:08:29 -0400

Week 38, 2025

“bas hujum-e-na-umidi (feeling of despair) Khak mein mil jaegi…
ye jo ek lazzat (pleasure) hamari sai-e-be-hasil mein hai – Mirza Ghalib

Having spent the last 2 weeks recovering from the joy, I decided I need to do something different to get on track. That’s why I started meditating this week. I have always had a tumultous relationship with meditation. Even though I am always convinced of its powers to streamline my life, I, for some reason, never do it consistently. I wished to change that starting this week. I meditated almost everyday.

Week 35, 2025 : Multi-Arm Bandit Blues

Sun, 31 Aug 2025 17:08:29 -0400

Week 35, 2025

“Yun toh humne kya kiya lekin …
ye kiya hai ke din guzaare hai – Jaun Elia

This week hasn’t been very productive but not wasterful either. All my priority work items below got distracted attention from me. I guess this is just part of the process between start and end when it’s all ungratifying but you keep moving on.

Work ★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

I went into the Manhattan office once this week. It was a very productive Monday. That gave me the necessary momentum to keep going for the next few days. I also started gathering data to pitch the Reinforcement Learning project to my manager. It seems promising. I have seen a lot of “exploitation” (RL term) of knowledge of offer and customer behaviors and less “exploration”. As soon as I saw these results, I got yippy, I almost sent an email to my manager but held back. I want to further strengthen my case with a possible PRD (Product Requirments Document). I have some hopes that this may just work.

Week 34, 2025 : Nashville Hot Chicken Sandwich

Sat, 23 Aug 2025 17:08:29 -0400

Week 34, 2025

The highlight this week was definitely the Nashville-style hot chicken sandwich. I hadn’t been eating any meat for over 50 days (practising the month of Shraavan). This Friday the Shraavan month ended and I immediately went for my favority type of chicken - Nashiville hot fried chicken sandwich. For the whole week, I had been exercising great restraint in eating and putting in disciplined workouts. Hence, the one Friday dinner with fried chicken was delicious and guilt-free - making it more enjoyable even in memories.

Week 33, 2025 : Fighting FIFA addiction & RL Recommender insights

Fri, 15 Aug 2025 17:08:29 -0400

Week 33, 2025

This is a blog of complaints. Complaints against myself. Complaints of not taking control of the things I do. Complaints of letting myself drift through life out of focus. I didn’t get a single workout this week. Many social commitments and my addition to FIFA. I don’t even know how many hours I spent playing the game. It must be a lot. Even though I blame social commitments for my lack of progress throughout the week, I know the reason to be the time spent on FIFA and social media. Need to fight these addictions.

Week 32, 2025 : Hosting Friends in NYC

Fri, 08 Aug 2025 17:08:29 -0400

Week 32, 2025

The weekdays were good but I couldn’t make progress on any of my priority items below. I had a ball of a time over the weekend though. Bhushan and his wife were visiting. We selectively toured NYC and NJ with them over the weekend. It was Kiran’s birthday weekend and the expectations weighed heavy on me (but just a bouqet of flowers lifted a lot of that weight - easier than I thought).
I played Cricket in New Jersey (won man of the match for the first game), ate at a really good Marathi restaurant, went to Brooklyn waterfront one evening, watched the sunset over the Brooklyn Bridge and the World Trade Center and then saw the night lights and night life come on in Manhattan, ate Falafel wrap at a food truck in Dumbo. Kiran also got a lot of good pictures which made her birthday more complete. Couldn’t complain (but you know I will down below lol).

Week 30, 2025 : Started RL learning journey

Mon, 04 Aug 2025 16:22:59 -0400

Week 30, 2025

I started learning Reinforcement Learnig this week. Inspiration? - It’s uses in formatting LLM answers. I remember Deepseek’s responses to be visually appealing than any other LLMs at the time and I knew they used RL (RLHF) to format the answers. Also, the rise and proliferation of Robotics and Visual Intelligence will necessitate that skillset. Fun fact: I spent 18 months in Amherst, Massachusetts. That town was the birthplace of RL (UMass).