Puneet Shankar

Building my AI Engineer career in public
3rd yr CSE | Python • ML • Data Science
Sharing projects, lessons and failures
#BuildInPublic

[Puneet Shankar @shankar_puneet]

We can't always choose our starting point.

But we can keep learning from where we are and make better decisions about our next step.

Life is a continuous optimization problem.

And every day gives us another chance to update our parameters.

#LearningInPublic #MachineLearning

[Puneet Shankar @shankar_puneet]

I was learning Gradient Descent in Machine Learning when I realized something unexpected…

Maybe we're all just trying to minimize the loss in our lives.

[Puneet Shankar @shankar_puneet]

So maybe the real lesson is this:

You don't need to have everything figured out today.

Learn something.
Take a small step.
Observe the result.
Adjust your approach.
Repeat.
Progress doesn't always look impressive, but it compounds.

[Puneet Shankar @shankar_puneet]

can't relate more

[Shri💐🤗 @Shri_73_]

LinkedIn 😭

[Puneet Shankar @shankar_puneet]

Bruhhh 😴 , i am done with this DSA shhitt..
I would like to speak to the manager of Test Case 1111, please. 🗣️📉 @geeksforgeeks

[Jacob Coxon @hilbertspaess]

I resigned from Anthropic today. I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives. More thoughts below.

[Puneet Shankar @shankar_puneet]

Wtf is this behaviour @LeetCode
Now, It's Personal 😤

[Puneet Shankar @shankar_puneet]

The final solution runs in O(n²) time.

But the complexity wasn't the part I found most useful.

The real takeaway:

A difficult problem can become much simpler when you change how you look at it.

3Sum → Fix one → 2Sum → Two pointers.

#DSA #LeetCode #LearningInPublic #CSE

[Puneet Shankar @shankar_puneet]

Today I worked on 3Sum.
Initially, I was looking it as a problem where I had to find 3 numbers whose sum=0
But after sorting the array, started thinking differently:

What if I fix one number and turn 3Sum->2Sum?

That made the problem much easier to reason about.

[Puneet Shankar @shankar_puneet]

The two-pointer approach then started making sense naturally.
If the current sum is too small, I need a larger value.
If it's too large,need a smaller val.
Since the array is sorted, pointers tell me exactly which direction to move.
I also had to think carefully about duplicates.

[Puneet Shankar @shankar_puneet]

The biggest improvement wasn't going from 65 lines → 15 lines.

It was understanding why those 15 lines work.

That's what I'm trying to focus on while learning DSA:

Solve → Understand → Optimize → Repeat

Day 2. Still a long way to go.

#DSA #LeetCode #LearningInPublic #CSE

[Puneet Shankar @shankar_puneet]

🧵 Day 2 of learning DSA

Yesterday, I solved Sorted Squares with my own approach.

It worked in O(n), but the code was around 65 lines.

Today, I went back to the same problem.

And reduced it to ~19 lines.

[Puneet Shankar @shankar_puneet]

The optimized approach:

→ left points to the beginning
→ right points to the end
→ Compare abs(nums[left]) and abs(nums[right])
→ Put the larger square at the end of the result
→ Move the corresponding pointer
Time: O(n)
Extra space: O(1) apart from the output array