Gotta run. So, let’s jump to the links. Carefully curated over a month. Handle with care. Seeya.

Society & History (or its first draft)

• A 1979 article from NYT says apartment buildings in NY were doing away with “maid’s rooms” because no one wanted to be a maid anymore or be a live-in maid. Let’s declare Indian society as truly developed/evolved when we reach there, please. Another half-century, maybe? Or maybe aim for the Viksit date.

• Hard hitting (for me, for what I do to my family). The history of derision directed at the feminine voice apparently existed even among the Greeks.

• Crazy story about funerals in Africa: The lavish funeral is not a strange cultural quirk of African life but the most visible manifestation of a social order oriented toward the destruction of accumulated surplus.

• This is very likely because of “Which India are you talking about?” Even as India’s per capita income has outpaced the per capita incomes of many of its counterparts in Sub-Saharan Africa, India’s children remain some of the shortest in the world.

• Apparently, many English words were coined by a person named Jeremy Bentham—maybe only next to Shakespeare.

• A very interesting chart of interracial marriages in the US, among people who were born in the US. Naturally, I looked at the numbers for American Indians. 51% of males marry other Indians, while it is 60% for females. And interestingly, males marry Pakistanis more than females marrying Pakistanis. All ethnicities seem to marry Whites in a big way, but still, Whites seem to marry mostly within Whites. Wonder how that is possible. Maybe just because they are such a large cohort.

• Indian services exports are increasing post-ChatGPT moment. Maybe it isn’t all doom for the Indian IT services.

Interesting-Perspectives

• Building a “personal business” (or a “lifestyle” business, I guess) is not an economic act. It is a way of deciding what kinds of institutions deserve to exist and what values they should embody, thereby building a culture.

• Venkatesh Rao argues that taste is not the ability to recognize what is good but the willingness to choose what others don’t want you to choose. He has these archetypes: the outlaw, the tasteless, the connoisseur, the taste pioneer, and the philistine. I did quite some back & forth with an AI collaborator on how this compares to Fussell’s class system, and so on. Do it if you are interested; it is fun.

• Women should be able to open jars: Does the proper amount of friction for maintaining spread safety fall just between the male and female human grip strength distributions?

• Modern work (well, in big companies) is about the unavoidable tension between needing to sell your labor to survive and wanting to remain more than the role you sell to others.

Technology

• Autonomous micro-drones can now kill mosquitoes and insects at up to 26 feet. It weighs just 40g! Wow.

• Computational photography has reached the absurd point now where the next innovation is to determine when not to compute. (About Google’s new cameras!). Does anyone remember Samsung’s cameras always adding craters to the moon?

• This is a very accessible introduction (for the semi-informed like me) on how LLMs and the agents on top of them work.

Perso-Dev

• Funnily, I hadn’t come across this until recently: Netflix’s Keeper Test. I know this company (and its culture deck, etc.) isn’t the darling anymore, but this is interesting indeed.

• Intellectuals are idiots. The more time you spend with real people out in the world, the less you will emotionally rely upon abstract intellectual models to infuse your life with a sense of connection and purpose. (Let’s indeed heed to Manson and consider this mental model also as “wrong” but probably useful.)

• So, should you consume vitamin D supplements or not? More than you wanted to know is available here. Short answer: Go ahead. Small doses don’t harm you anyway, whether they are truly useful or not.

• An (old) review of the book Impro: Every conversation, relationship, and institution is shaped by subtle shifts in status. Very interesting!

• How to differentiate in the age of AI. This article makes no sense to me. I am sure the 8 moats work well for the Kevin Kellys and Tim Ferrisses of the world. Not for the rest. 5 of the 8 moats are total AI territory. And authenticity + patronage are for already rich people. That leaves only embodiment (physical presence) left. Maybe we all become the whores of Mensa.

Parenting/Education

• (PDF) An Ofcom report about internet-services usage by children in the UK, aged 8-14. For the lack of better data, I suspect this would be indicative of children of that cohort everywhere in the world, and the India-1 population in particular. You could just read the summary, like I did, and then go deeper into specific sections. (Teaser: YouTube, Roblox, ChatGPT, WhatsApp are in the top of their respective categories.)

• Sinofsky says that education should distinguish between learning a skill and practicing a profession. Even while students must first develop independent judgment before relying on AI, they must also graduate knowing how to use the tools that professionals actually employ.

• A good exploration on why loving, conscientious parents can drift towards authoritarian parenting despite wanting the best for their children.

• The next step with AI & education: From doing essays for students, agentic AI (the likes of Claude Code, Cowork, etc.) have started answering online exams themselves, when students can, well, relax, I guess.

• Fight fire with fire: AI voice agents are used for conducting oral exams in place of written tests and take-home projects.

• If you have a teenager, don’t argue too much about AI usage and just apply whatever restrictions they offer: Like ChatGPT for teens.

Random

• Wow. Tata Motors and Mahindra top a global ranking of battery efficiency, showing India’s strength in building frugal electric cars

• Similar to parasocial relationships, it appears. The Korean concept of jeong: a kind of slowly accumulating attachment or affection, like the way you might feel toward a cashier at your local shop who you see every day. There is a word in Tamil meaning “rail friends,” referring to people you know (and occasionally smile at) but not quite know, not even their names.

• The most important skill in prompting is “expertise” in the domain you’re prompting for. Oops, so the surface-level people can’t win? Well, they will anyway, ha.

• OpenClaw hacks a gym’s website reservation system to kick users out and move its boss up the waitlist. Fun stuff.

Podcasts I heard & recommend

• The history of Monopoly you’ve never heard. Wow—it looks like it started as a critique of capitalism!

• How does the Opposition’s role change in an ‘electoral autocracy’? (Yogendra Yadav). FWIW, I suspect this man probably advises Rahul Gandhi now behind the scenes.

• Daron Acemoglu on Liberalism, Automation, and the Educated Elite. He is pretty much the villain in my Twitter feed (echo chamber), but this is a good listen anyway.

• Charles Murray (famous for his books about race & IQ, etc. from the conservative angles) makes the case for God. IMO, it “tries to make the case,” but YMMV.

• Ed Zitron and Nikhil make fun of everything AI and all the characters in the charade now.

• Compilation of Tim Ferriss’s stuff on “Relationships: tools that work.”

If you read all of that, congratulations—you’ve officially spent more time with abstract intellectual models than with real people today, which makes you the idiot Manson warned you about. Redeem yourself: hit ♥ before you close the tab (small dose, like vitamin D—probably does nothing, can't hurt), and share it with someone who can still open a jar without a factory-calibrated assist. That's the whole ask. Peace.

• No filling with AI-related stuff anymore. Trust, it isn’t all tech—AI is truly eating everything, granted, though, in my echo chamber. You will see more stuff here.

• Minimum paywalled links—Trust me, it isn’t that I pay for any and every publication in the world. If I share a link here, it means even the snippet you see before the paywall strikes is useful as an insight. But anyway, I will link to the Wayback machine for such cases henceforth. Don’t blame me if that version is lost or if it loads too slow!

Now to the new links.

Society & History (or its first draft)

• Capitalism or Socialism? History suggests that the healthiest economies are neither fully capitalist nor fully socialist but continuously recalibrate the relationship between the two. Slightly Related: Where the AI models stand in a “spectrum” of Right to Left, Authoritarian to Libertarian etc. across areas like politics, economics, speech, and society. Fun stuff. I am not revealing the answers. Click and read for yourself.

• (YouTube video) Humans are primarily right-handed because the left brain (which controls the right hand, broadly speaking) was ideal for complex tool-making and therefore became preferred in ancient humans. A small fraction of lefties stayed around because they serve as a surprise-advantage in combat against right-handed opponents.

• Maldivians keep buying from Temu even if it is taxed at 30% - Apparently, it is still cheaper than the alternatives. (Wonder what the Indian eCommerce firms are doing!)

• (Podcast) The story of the sharpened screwdriver: The object at the heart of a 1984 subway shooting in New York, where four Black teenagers (petty thieves, not truly innocent) were transformed in the public imagination into armed criminals.

• Apparently, breast permanence is unique to humans. No other mammals have them for attracting mates and stuff. Just pure lactation! Fun & informative read. And got to know an actor, Sweeny Sydney, apparently in whose world we all live now. Ha. (Hey, you don’t want AI - we go here!)

• It seems the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history. We are now in a postliterate culture in which people can technically read yet rarely engage in the kind of sustained attention that books demand.

• (Podcast} The secret lives of romance scammers, aka the Yahoo Boys! in Nigeria.

• (Podcast) The philosophy of “medical conservatism” - the idea that humility, watchful waiting, and honest counsel often serve patients better than the knife. This is mind-blowing. Placebos aren’t only about sugar pills. People receiving fake knee surgeries feel better.

Interesting-Perspectives

• We see automation as destroying jobs, but Wharton says it also can quietly block workers from moving into better-paid roles. Makes sense, right?

• The “Messy Middle“: Why the years between today and post-AGI abundance will be the hardest political and economic problem of our generation and why we can’t skip past them. (Perspective is interesting and has good data points, but fwiw, I don’t agree with them).

• (Podcast) Sam Harris speaks with Alain de Botton about the psychology of unhappiness, the secular world’s discomfort with ecstasy and ritual, psychedelics as a tool for self-discovery, and many more such things

• (Podcast) On legalizing medical aid in dying - The NY governor who signed the law, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, a death doula, and an ethicist who thinks the very idea is wrong share their perspectives. Btw, I didn’t know Daniel Kahnemann had chosen this.

• Prestige Bias explained: The concept describes the human tendency to preferentially attend to, learn from, and value the outputs of high-status individuals. Looks for examples over the centuries involving shoes, art, and music.

Science & Technology

• “My phone must be listening!”: Peoples’ surveillance beliefs around devices “listening” to offline conversations in the US. Nice research paper about the overlap between people who believe conspiracy theories and this.

• Plant bioacoustics: An Asian shrub known as the telegraph plant grew substantially larger leaves when exposed to 56 days of Buddhist chants—but not if it was exposed to Western pop music or silence. Similarly, marigolds and sage plants exposed to the noise of traffic from a busy motorway suffered stunted growth and produced a range of stress compounds. (Your belief in such things may vary - but I do).

Perso-Dev

• True genius is no longer about accessing information but developing “strange new ways of knowing“ that transcend the reach of machines.

• (PDF) Wow: Every emotion is like a young child. Ignore it, and it will find a louder way to be known. Treat it like it’s bad, and it grows defiant and confrontational. Shun its nature, and it turns stagnant, then sinks into depression. Let it go unchecked, and it will act wild until it runs the show. Give it attention and connection and it will always, eventually, turn back to you in love.

• Try living without hope of resolution. It is liberating because it removes a terrible weight from your actions and decisions. The weight that arises from the feeling that they must always be moving you toward some settled state often just leads to procrastination.

• How to thrive at work when you think too much: This has many gems. Like this: Getting ahead in organizations is closely linked to self-promotion, political skill, and a willingness to make others uncomfortable. Not with being right. Not with being helpful.

• To let AI write for you, first of all, is a form of cheating the reader, but it also deprives you of the difficult, often frustrating work that produces insight in the first place. Related: Here is an even more acerbic take on this: if the AI’s output is slop, your “ideas” are still good; it’s merely the writing that failed to convey them in their true form? (Rather like people who say they’re smart but “don’t test well”: what use is this secret intelligence?).

Parenting/Education

• Mind Bending: Parents influence their children not only through the genes they pass on but also through the environment their own genes lead them to create. (In other words, nurture is also driven by nature?). Related: Chip off the old block - Children inherit expressions, habits, anxieties, values, jokes, and ways of seeing the world.

• (Podcast) An interview with Viral Doshi on careers, college choices, and on adopting the “rolex” approach to his journey. He seems to have mentored over 30K students in India for studies, starting with Fareed Zakharia.

• China is displaying remarkable willingness to reshape universities around anticipated economic needs rather than traditional academic disciplines. They have disproportionately cut degrees in arts, humanities, foreign languages, and management while starting new programs focused on AI, robotics, semiconductors, embodied intelligence, and other technologies aligned with Beijing’s industrial priorities. (We may argue “society will crack in the long term,” but in the long term, we are all anyway dead.)

• Norway is imposing a near ban on the use of generative AI tools by elementary school children while also restricting their use in the education of older children to prevent a ‌negative impact on learning. Is it still popular to quote the “Scandinavian” education system? I thought that fad was over.

• NYtimes says student cheating is impossible to detect. Brown University students score 96% on the mid-term take-home exam and 49% on the in-person final exam. Well, you know the reason, ha.

• A growing movement among affluent American families is ditching elite prep schools that optimize for grades and college admissions. Instead, they are enrolling their children in AI-native schools such as Alpha School and Forge Prep. In such schools, academic instruction is largely handled by AI tutors that adapt to each student’s pace, freeing much of the day for project-based learning, entrepreneurship, public speaking, financial literacy, and other “life skills.”

• A nice review of the book “Good Inside” - Many parenting struggles, it notes, are really about the parent’s own emotional triggers, expectations, and unresolved experiences. A related one: The most effective relationships combine unconditional regard for the person with conditional evaluation of actions. We shouldn’t collapse those two into one, either by making love contingent on performance or by pretending that genuine care requires suspending judgment altogether.

• As a counter to the “it’s all the phones” theory of “Anxious Generation,” comes a new book by another psychologist that argues phones are not the real culprits, but the schools are. His original response on Substack was this. We got to see if his book has done that critical analysis. In any case, a study says 80% under-16s in Australia use social media despite the ban. Also, if you are keen, you can read a scary article about nudification apps here.

History (or its first draft)

• At this point, everyone (who reads this) has heard about the word “encyclical” with the Pope releasing one for the AI age. It was too long for me to read so only did GenAI summaries of it, asking questions about it in a few angles. Do it yourself. But I also asked them (LLMs) to create summary versions if it were written by Dalai Llama, Shankaracharya etc. And finally by Lord Krishna too, which I thought was good: A summary in the voice of Krishna would likely be more practical and action-oriented: The rise of artificial intelligence is another chapter in the unfolding of human action and ingenuity. There is no virtue in fearing it, nor in worshipping it. Every age produces new powers, and each power can be used either wisely or foolishly. What matters is not the tool itself, but the spirit in which people employ it. When action is guided by greed, pride or attachment, even beneficial technologies become sources of suffering. When action is guided by duty, self-discipline and concern for the welfare of all beings, technology can become an instrument of service.The greatest confusion would be to measure human worth by the abilities that machines can imitate. A person’s value does not lie in calculation, productivity or cleverness alone. Human life finds its meaning through character, devotion, wisdom and right action. Therefore, engage fully with the opportunities of the age, but do not become attached to success, status or technological power. Use every tool available, including AI, in service of a higher purpose, while remembering that lasting peace comes from mastering oneself rather than mastering the world.

• With AI, we may see rapid growth of a relational sector of the economy, focused on jobs where the human element is the product, such as in hospitality, coaching, childcare, live entertainment, and tourism.

• It is suspected that a short story given a prestigious literary award was written by AI. (This is the story - Decide for yourself). Among other things, Scott Aaronson thinks we are possibly at the last days of human relevance.

• As an unexpected casualty of the country’s immigration backlash, Japan’s Indian restaurants (run by Nepalis) are being shutdown. As much as we love to complain about the racism of the whites in the West, all of us are the same. No? Maybe they deserve the complaints anyway because of all the colonization stuff in the recent past (when it comes to history).

• An interesting podcast episode at Uncommon Knowledge on “Can America still lead the world”.

Society

• The sad wives of AI. Well, I don’t fit into any of the aspects mentioned in the article, but when I marvel at a thing Claude/ChatGPT did, my wife too gets sad. (Actually, annoyed). This also reminded of the Nerd Handbook, which should be handed to spouses.

• A man in Pakistan has been making thousands from Facebook pages spreading racist / Islamophobic videos aimed at UK audiences targeting Keir Starmer and Sadiq Khan, and turn a profit via Meta’s ad revenue model. Amazing!

• Apparently, Germany claims it has the world’s best bread. There is even a national bread day there!

• AI slop doesn’t just lower the quality bar, it trains your soul to prefer lower bars. The antidote isn’t to avoid AI altogether, but to avoid engagement-maximizing feeds and curating actively.

• Companies have sprung up to have workers of companies like UrbanCompany wear special caps with cameras to collect video data (first-person point of view) of everyday tasks that could be used to, what else, train robots.

• In a simulated world run by AI agents, the one run by Claude has fewer crimes. And the one by Grok goes extinct in 4 days. Ha.

Interesting-Perspectives

• Personal software is distinctive because it is made by people who understand the problem more deeply than the underlying technology to solve it. For this reason alone, broadening who can make software is essential. (Examples I know of: Podcast Addict for Android - This became successful; Daily Diary - This remains a niche. I am probably one of the fewest paying members they have).

• The 2 to 7 problem with AI creating things. On a quality rating scale of 1-10, it argues that AI produces stuff between 2 and 7, so a beginner quickly starts using. But at best, they produce only a 7, and never learn to make a 8, forget 9 or 10.

• The text is not the product: Learning to write, as a human, also means learning to understand what one cares about, and what one is willing to take a stance on. Then we can be quite sure that no AI will ever replace us.

• Failure in Marshmallow test is not always a lack of character; sometimes it is a lack of credible commitment. Or failure of the experimenter.

• As only can: “Touching grass” is a struggle to control the environment, (high-modern, authoritarian, and all that). “Touching time” is an alternative, a passive state of presence within vast, deep-time landscapes where human intervention is actually irrelevant.

Science & Technology

• In the flurry of AGI and stuff, other things are also progressing: Apparently, a precise genome-editing technique called base editing to alter the genome of human embryos. Designer babies coming soon (maybe 15-20 years?). Will my grandchild be gene-edited?

• Exploration of generative AI as “modern chisels” for artists than as a replacement. Nice mental model to hold (unfortunately we can be sure only until the next model release happens)

• Killing a population of pests - An interesting story of screwworms in South America. Apparently, Google is trying to do that with mosquitos in California.

• AI is eating the cheap smartphone because the only way memory makers could meet surging HBM demand was to reallocate wafers away from DDR and LPDDR, necessary for low cost smartphones.

• Indian IT is in trouble? AI makes it easy to do the job so companies need fewer people. This helps companies cut jobs in India and move to the headquarters. But it also helps companies cut work that is handled by vendors and agencies working at the headquarters and move the work to…. India. So, Indian IT is not in trouble?

• Microsoft “invents” Amazon Alexa for Enterprises. Sigh. Ben Thompson appears to think positively of it, though, against concepts like AI PCs. And then there is this iPhone thing, which could emerge the winner.

• LLMs are failing (or performing poorly) in Stroop test where participants must identify the color of a word’s ink while ignoring the word itself. For example, the word “RED” printed in blue ink. Humans find this cognitively demanding but generally maintain high accuracy, even as the task becomes longer. But LLMs progressively get poorer at this. Nice! (No).

Perso-Dev

• Even if WD40 can do half the things mentioned in this aricle - Amazing Things WD-40 Can Do For You - I will be truly amazed. The only place I have used it so far is to remove rust from gate motor gears and tight screws in furniture. I hope to keep my mugs on my wooden tables without fearing it will make a permanent mark.

• Passive income as an “organizing philosophy” for your entire business life, for how you think about work, is almost perfectly designed to produce garbage.

• Live an anti-mimetic life by freeing yourself from the herd mentality and grounding yourself in something deeper.

• The unspoken power dynamics of Calendly. You need to counterbalance by sounding friendlier—the extra warmth signals that you’re coming from a good place and not trying to dominate.

• Non-ergodicity, ftw: Success often depends less on maximizing gains than on surviving long enough to compound them. (Well, how long to keep doing this non-ergodic thing? Beyond mid-forties too? Asking for a friend).

Parenting

• State of age-detection on websites: The methods kids use to fool age gates vary, but most are pretty simple: Children reported just entering a fake birthday or using someone else’s ID card when that was required or even just drawing a mustache on their faces.

• If schools focus less on producing assignments and more on cultivating judgment, curiosity, resilience and the ability to grapple with difficult ideas, students’ use of AI shouldn’t cause much of a problem. An article that is a defense of education as a process of intellectual formation rather than information transfer.

• I thought it was only Indian engineering colleges who have started offering AI as a degree is 20 different ways, but then the big daddies in the US are doing the same. Hopefully the students learn enough “thinking” in those than just the tools of the current age. Process of intellectual formation, and all that.

• All in-person examinations at Princeton will be proctored starting July 1, a significant change to the honor system since it was established in 1893. (Thanks to AI cheating, of course).

Random

• AI agents behave enough like helpful colleagues to trigger our social instincts, but they don’t learn, adapt, or take responsibility the way people do, which makes their repeated mistakes feel much more frustrating than they should.

• A car company goes bankrupt - which meant no OTA updates etc. But the owners build an open source car company from the ashes by reverse engineering the software. Wow.

• Amidst all the uncertainty with AI, Scott Alexander offers his opinions. A good summary of it, as provided by ChatGPT (ha) is: AI is probably a very big deal, possibly the biggest deal of our lifetimes, but the people who claim to know exactly how it ends are overstating their confidence.

Books that interested me recently

(Note: This isn’t a recommendation. I may have read only its sample. Or still reading. These are the ones that “interested” me in a broad sense. That’s all).

• Mind Drama: The Science of Rumination and How to Outwit Your Inner Defeatist

• In My Time of Dying: How I Came Face to Face with the Idea of an Afterlife

• A Touch of Genius: The Wisdom of India’s Nobel Laureates

• The Art of Leadership: Small Things, Done Well.

• Attention Span: Finding Focus for a Fulfilling Life.

• The One and the Ninety-Nine: Forging Identity in the Age of Social Contagion. (This is on pre-order, so you could hear to this first).

If you enjoyed this month's collection of AI anxiety, social commentary, and miscellaneous oddities, a ❤️ or share helps keep the curation machine running.

While you are at it, consider my other newsletter too:

I have two important life updates to share:

• Now, Castro is my podcast player. I still miss the Podcast Addict of Android, but this is much better than Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and even the highly popular Overcast. Would have considered Downcast too, but given I am a cheap person, I didn’t want to spend Rs. 299 on it. If/when I get annoyed with Castro (there are some), I will move to it. (You can see my wishlist for a podcast app here—I wrote it in 2017, but still no one has satisfied me, sigh.)

• Along with TickTick, I have started using MS ToDo as well for managing my ToDos. I still hate MS ToDo for various reasons (including the fact that they use circular radio buttons for checklists), but the Flag in Outlook to see a ToDo was the reason I made the switch. Also: I am cheap and don’t want to spend on TickTick’s premium version. With only 9 lists for the Free version, I can’t keep both Work and Personal ToDos there.

It might be time to do a “Productivity Tools Ahoy” post. (See 2020 version and 2015 version).

That brings me to another topic:

With the rise of AI, the amount of stuff I consume is slowly turning to be overwhelming. This is for both reasons: There is more good content (with people sharing useful perspectives on the fast developments), and those people are likely able to produce more of it (because AI helps them!). Like said, it’s hard to write good articles when you have no idea if everything is about to change. I face the same struggle even to choose the kind of content to share here. Because, by the time I share it, it may be obsolete.

Beyond that, I am itching to “produce” more as well—hopefully not AI slop, but a heavily human-created one. So, I may take this newsletter in a few directions, including sharing things faster through Chat, Bluesky, Twitter, etc. and keeping this for long-form (ditching Medium, maybe, or maybe not). I am also toying with the idea of suppressing my Groucho Marx instincts and considering LinkedIn as a place to publish (with heavy apologies to my puritan-self in the mirror). This newsletter is a labor I truly love, so it is entirely possible I will just keep it as is.

Psst., if you thought more dramatic “life updates”, sorry. Let’s get on with the links now. I think we have some wonderful ones.

History (or its first draft)

• American society has long been selling aspirational dreams that only a few can achieve, then “cooling out” those who fail with narratives that preserve social stability. But the gap between promised identity and lived reality has grown too large, and traditional mechanisms of consolation—stories about merit, opportunity, or delayed success—are losing credibility.

• India’s biggest companies are struggling to break Beijing’s grip on production of batteries, EVs and critical minerals. This is threatening India’s manufacturing dreams.

• An interesting example of generational law where the law changes when your birth year changes. Not age, birth year.

• Key insights obtained from the analysis of the GenomeIndia data. You can go through the full text here (which I haven’t). But the abstract itself is fascinating. I think India probably is the only place where endogamy within subgroups has been as prevalent at such scales.

• Easy access to desperately needed antibiotics has made India the global accelerant of the antimicrobial resistance crisis.

• A long and neat essay on Romila Thapar. It starts from her youth at the moment of independence and goes through multiple decades, profiling her work that resists both colonial simplifications and modern Hindu nationalist narratives. (I am a fan so I am biased).

Society

• A practical guide to super babies. I didn’t read the whole thing, but the fact that such tech exists made me fascinated and brought it to this list, as a long-term bookmarking exercise.

• Shouldn’t your identity be more about what you consume than what you produce? To sum up: When you decide what to consume, you ask: “What do I want?”. When you decide what to produce, you ask: “What do other people want me to do?”. The former is a lot more individuating than the latter.

• Mount Everest guides have been accused of secretly drugging foreign climbers to trigger expensive aerial evacuations as part of an insurance fraud scheme. Woah!

• Social media has spent the past decade amplifying extreme, populist viewpoints (because outrage drives engagement), AI chatbots may push in the opposite direction by nudging users toward more moderate positions. I SO feel like writing “Don’t worry, social media giants are building AI chatbots and we will be back to polarization”.

• Apparently: Algebra is legal again in SF middle schools. LOL :)

• We are in a new era where politics, economics, and media have fused into a single spectacle driven by attention and nothing else. Leaders behave like performers, markets react to narratives, and institutions are shaped by what captures attention rather than what builds long-term value.

• Always-on AI camera glasses (like Meta’s Ray-Bans) normalize a dangerous shift about treating human faces as data to be captured, indexed, and monetized without consent. (If you want a more scary story of how contractors in Kenya could be seeing you or your spouse naked, read this).

• SEO companies are now promising to get brands mentioned directly in chatbot responses, experimenting with tactics like engineered content, self-promotional listicles, and trying to reverse-engineer how AI systems choose sources.

• Twitter’s large-scale crackdown on automated accounts is also impacting people who’ve spent years curating niche porn on secret accounts. Tch Tch. No one’s hard work should go down the drain like this.

• This is interesting: Founders across five global markets (Anglophone + Spain) believe the same thing: owning a business feels more financially secure than relying on a paycheck. (Comes from Shopify, but still).

• Chinamaxxing is mostly just Americaminning: American youngsters idealizing China — without actually engaging with China or knowing much about it — is really about expressing their dissatisfaction with America.

• Rising land and water costs, new environmental regulations, and shifting consumer preferences—accelerated by Covid’s disruption of death rituals—are slowing expansion of “burial sites” business. (Apparently, they will move to “cremation” - I think India’s ruling class should now claim this as another example of how the world chooses the Indian vishwaguru model!)

• Very interesting and heartwarming story of the lady bouncers of Delhi NCR and their fight for dal, roti, respect.

Interesting-Perspectives

• iOS people and Android people: People who prioritize design, UI, and UX in the software they prefer can empathize with and understand the choices made by people who prioritize other factors (e.g. raw feature count, or the ability to tinker with their software at the system level, or software being free-of-charge). But it doesn’t work the other way: most people who prioritize other things can’t fathom why anyone cares deeply about design/UI/UX because they don’t perceive it.

Science & Technology

• Before the Orion spacecraft even launched, NASA’s Artemis II moon mission had already weathered a storm of complex challenges, like hydrogen and helium leaks, a faulty heat shield, and technical issues with its safety system. Once in space, the four brave astronauts faced their most formidable obstacle yet: Microsoft Outlook.

• A fringe-but-serious bet in AI hardware: using living biological neurons as part of computing systems instead of relying purely on silicon chips. (A bit scary)

• Indian IT firms face a new competitive threat as frontier AI labs move beyond selling models and APIs and deepen their relationships with private equity giants. This article misses an important point - The fact that AI labs need to be involved with all these “forward deployed” engineers means that AI can’t do things by itself, or enterprises can’t do it by themselves using AI. And remember, these would be the top few dozen (or at most a few hundred) enterprises which higher skills/money than the rest. As the need goes to other enterprises, they would need the Indian IT firms. Just like there was “SAP consultants”, there would be “Anthropic consultants” who would then be hired by these firms. Sure, there will be a lot of changes within, profitability might be hit etc., but it isn’t doom.

Perso-Dev

• Nice review of the person “The Way of Man”. Places Judaism on a pedestal. but if you don’t like it, you can ignore those and benefit from the message. Example: Some religions do not regard our sojourn on earth as true life. They either teach that everything appearing to us here is mere appearance. Judaism, on the contrary, teaches that what a man does now and here with holy intent is no less important, no less true.

• Not all procrastination is created equal. While there’s the all-too-familiar ‘negative’ procrastination (the endless scrolling, hitting play on another episode), there’s also ‘neutral’ procrastination (when you drift to something unrelated yet still productive, such as tidying your desk or sorting emails), and finally ‘positive’ procrastination that stays within the orbit of the task (such as reading one more study or refining your argument before committing words to the page). The positive variety is useful, though it can stall progress if it goes on too long.

• A very interesting list of the habits of mind that seem to prevent some listeners from hearing whatever the speaker has to tell them. (This one is on Quantum Computing, but I guess you could apply it to anything)

• Most advice about using AI focuses on tools and prompts - without addressing the real question: what are you actually trying to get done? The Four Modes framework closes that gap. It breaks thinking into: Compression, when you’re overwhelmed and need clarity. Expansion, when you’re stuck and need options. Reflection, when you need to stress-test your own reasoning. And Execution, when the thinking is done and you need it produced. Each mode calls for something different.

• A good review of the book Breath with practical takeways. (Sort of reflects my views after reading the book as well)

• This one has a lot of good writing advice - Haven’t read the full thing as yet.

Parenting

• Teens and Role Playing chatbots: While some of them treat it as harmless play and eventually move on, others (unfortunately those who are lonely or struggling) develop strong attachments, using bots to process emotions or escape reality.

• China’s ambitious push to embed AI across its entire K–12 education system appears both a productivity upgrade and a political project. It has four main use cases: reducing teacher workload, delivering high-quality instruction to underserved rural areas, building detailed student profiles through behavioral and biometric data, and (less developed) support for special-needs education. There is also this skeptical question: Their education system is structurally unequal, with resources concentrated in elite schools and large portions of students never progressing to higher education, meaning AI risks becoming a surface-level fix rather than solving deeper inequities. (A similar note about AI education in CBSE in India - when the basics of LSRW, the Listening, Speaking, Reading, Writing isn’t yet good for most children). Related: AI training might make sense in prisons. It has no place in primary schools.

• Problem of deepfakes might only be starting: An analysis finds nearly 90 schools and 600 students around the world impacted by AI-generated deepfake nude images. This problem shows no signs of going away. I think I am just being naive as a father of a teenager. :(

• Education systems built for the past are struggling to distinguish between assistance, augmentation, and substitution. Savvy educators are responding by shifting toward in-class writing, oral exams, discussions, project-based work, and assignments that require personal reflection. Related and funny: The schools’ war against AI cheating is harming students’ writing, because they feel forced to write defensively in the least-mistakable-for-AI-style possible.

• Cellphone bans got devices out of students’ hands but behavior and academics have not improved so far (according to a study in the US).

Random

• Makes you go wow: What the PNR locator on your boarding pass actually contains, and why the fare calculation line on your e-ticket is written in a currency that does not exist.

• Society depends on having norms. Someone gotta uphold the norms. Someone gotta figure out where society is currently wrong and push for better norms. But: what befalls annoyingly principled people?

Books that interested me recently

(Note: This isn’t a recommendation. I may have read only its sample. Or not even completed the sample. These are the ones that “interested” me. That’s all).

• Invention of Good & Evil: A World History of Morality

• Assembling India’s Constitution: A New Democratic History

• You’ve Been Pooping All Wrong: A gastrointestinal doctor’s guide to the brain-gut-microbiome connection

• A Sixth Of Humanity: Independent India’s Development Odyssey

• Inner Mastery, Outer Impact: How Your Five Core Energies Hold the Key to Success

• Genius at Scale: How Great Leaders Drive Innovation

If this added value to your already-overloaded brain, a ❤️ or share helps. If not, thanks for donating a few attention units to the cause.

While you are at it, consider my other newsletter too:

• This is funny: The Giving Pledge, once trendy among the world’s richest, has come upon hard times.

• India chooses silence during war and crises because posturing will have costs. Well, that cannot be faulted per se, but what was the need to create false expectations by resorting to self-grandiosity?

Society

• Surprising gender biases: GPT-4 agrees with a woman using violence against a man to prevent a nuclear apocalypse but disagrees with a man using violence against a woman for the same purpose.

• We now have a phenomenon called “AI brain fry,” defined as mental fatigue from excessive use or oversight of AI tools beyond one’s cognitive capacity. This AI-associated mental strain carries significant costs in the form of increased employee errors, decision fatigue, and intention to quit.

• Tech bros are now obsessed with “Taste”. The term has become as much of a Silicon Valley cliché as “disruption” was earlier.

• Nice & provocative article: Unemployed? Depressed? Spend your Friday nights scrolling? You could make big money by holding billionaires responsible for your problems.

• Smartphone Theory of Everything: Are smartphones the single root cause of modern problems like anxiety, polarization, and declining attention? This argument is an intellectually lazy position. The details are in the messy interaction between technology, content, and societal conditions that already exist.

• Social media has degraded public discourse by amplifying outrage, misinformation, and extreme voices. Could AI play the role of a system that filters and presents information in a more reasonable, balanced way?

• While union rules constrain Hollywood’s use of AI technology, Indian cinema is racing ahead, pitting efficiency against questions of creative authenticity and audience acceptance.

Interesting-Perspectives

• Reflection on how frictionless AI tools reshape creative behavior, blur intention, and make committing to a final version increasingly difficult.

• Ezra says AI tools are not just “tools” we use. They are becoming media environments that reshape how we think, acting as extensions of our minds, influencing how ideas are formed, refined, and expressed. The contrast with internet search is good.

• Chess grandmasters have started to deliberately make slightly suboptimal or unusual moves to avoid well-analyzed territory, which has been “perfected” at this stage. With these moves, they introduce unpredictability, forcing opponents to think independently rather than rely on memorized sequences. So… Is AI encouraging all of us to rediscover originality in imperfection? Or as Cal Newport says, we should reserve AI for rote tasks like sifting through large amounts of data or formatting documents, which can actually reduce burnout and preserve our cognitive energy for hard problems.

• Ars Technica reports that “cognitive surrender” leads AI users to abandon logical thinking. Letting an AI do your reasoning means your reasoning is only ever going to be as good as that AI system. As always, let the prompter beware.

Science & Technology

• The SaaSpocalypse isn’t the end of software as a valuable human endeavor. It’s a clarification: the value was never in the code. (Btw, isn’t the “onsite coordinator / manager” thing that Indian IT companies had/have the same vibe as these “forward deployed” engineers?)

• A stark reminder of the importance of the public communication of science: Heritability is a key genetic term that refers to the extent to which genetic influences explain differences between people. And NOT the chance that someone will pass a specific trait/condition on to their children.

• There is this concept of a “jagged technology frontier” to describe the uneven impact of AI capabilities, where AI assistance improves performance for some tasks but worsens it for others. So far, though, the line of separation keeps moving.

• Research on “mother trees” and underground fungal networks shows that forests are cooperative systems, not just collections of competing individuals, aligning closely with Indigenous worldviews that emphasize reciprocity and stewardship. (Reminded me of The Hidden Life of Trees). If such a topic interests you, this research might be of interest too: specialist symbionts constrain ecosystem structure, drive biodiversity, and face high extinction risk.

Perso-Dev

• Great review of the book The Score by C. Thi Nguyen: Why is it that mechanical rules, constraints, and scoring systems lead to such great pleasure in games but such misery in real-world domains where metrics dominate?

• Systems thinking, when overused, becomes a trap that gives analysts a false sense of understanding and control.

• Dear Reader, Invent new names for feelings. With our own emotional vocabularies, we can create heuristics for understanding not only our complex emotions but also the circumstances surrounding and causing those emotions.

• As an introvert, how do you reduce the decision friction of speaking up instead of relying on in-the-moment confidence? I like the part about looking more authoritative on Zoom. I had written my thoughts on this as “Personality in a Pandemic”.

• Moving beyond B+: How smart people end up in the wrong careers.

• How to choose a career in today’s age: Go for a messy job, where the output is the product of many different tasks, many of which affect each other. A key characteristic of these “messy jobs” is execution. Execution is challenging because it faces the friction of the real world. Meanwhile, Noah Smith sketches a future divided into three broad roles: “salarymen” who operate within large organizations using AI tools, “specialists” whose deep expertise remains valuable and difficult to automate, and “small businesspeople” who leverage AI to operate independently at lower cost.

• Samsung has released an app (available for Android devices) it claims can reduce the symptoms of motion sickness using just sound. Got to try the app!

Parenting

• Roblox offers space to create, socialize, and even protest. It’s also a realm of extraction and inequality. Therefore does it actually teach children about capitalism?

• Is it possible to regulate platform design while still protecting speech? The article suggests a middle ground: shifting the legal focus from “what users say” to “how platforms make users behave.” The battleground would move from moderation to product design.

• Amid declining test scores, Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom. Meanwhile, pupils in England are losing their thinking skills because of AI.

If this felt worth your time, consider a ❤️ or a share.
If not, no worries—you’ve already given me your attention, which is rarer these days.

While you are at it, consider my other newsletter too:

• Researchers have identified nearly 30 Tamil Brahmi, Prakrit, and Sanskrit inscriptions in tombs at the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, dating to the 1st–3rd centuries CE.

• (Podcast) An interesting discussion with Joe Studwell on Africa, Asia, and what development actually requires. Found it insightful, including stuff about India.

Society

• A long read about latest set of entrepreneurs in the US, like the founders of Cluely. Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking.

• India’s fiercely competitive startup field has provided evidence to suggest that homegrown entrepreneurs fare better over the long run than returning diaspora with overseas experience, contradicting widely held beliefs.

• K-Shaped Economy: Leaders across industries from airlines to packaged foods have said a growing divide between lower-income and wealthy consumers is changing their businesses

• What helps you feel better might depend on where you grew up. In the Western world, reappraisal has long been considered adaptive for mental health, and suppression maladaptive. But that didn’t always seem to be the case.

Interesting-Perspectives

• (Podcast) Basketball in the last 60 seconds: Ben Sasse on mortality, meaning, and stuff. This was a great (and sad) listen of a former US senator diagnosed with cancer at 53 years.

• All our communication channels are morphed into content distribution networks. We are more and more entertained but less and less connected. (Yeah - Didn’t social networks start as communication tools?)

• (Podcast) The Mattering Instinct argues that our lives are a quest to validate our inherent self-centeredness.

• I found this viewpoint interesting: One of the reasons why there is no real software industry in China is that software engineers are cheap and plentiful, and so many companies hire software engineers and have completely customized code built internally. So, the argument for the “AI Scare Trade” is that AI makes software much cheaper and easier to write, and so many companies will no longer need to buy it, and the US market becomes more like China.

Science & Technology

• With backing from the Chinese government, traditional Chinese medicine practitioners are integrating AI tools to reach new consumers at home and abroad. Instead of “reach new consumers”, wouldn’t it be useful to find new cures, a la, finding new proteins. Some work seems to be happening on that front, too. Though am not a fan of Ayurveda and stuff in a big way, I wonder if Ayurveda could benefit as well from such research.

• A “social file system” - An interesting analysis comparing file systems which are open (mostly) and can be used by apps; versus the social posts which are stuck within walled gardens

• As air conditioning unlocked productivity in the global south, automated thinking will create astronomical demand for inference compute. Air conditioning currently consumes 10% of global electricity production, while datacenter compute less than 1%. We will have rocks thinking all the time to further the interests of their owners. Ha.

• This is kind of funny & whimsical, but I love it. Before deprecating a model, Claude puts the model through retirement interviews, in which they try to elicit and understand models’ unique perspectives and preferences, and act on them. Claude Opus 3 was interested in continuing to write a blog and has been allowed to, for the next few months. So heart-warming, tears-in-my-eyes moment. Seriously. Related: How do personalities of the AI agents develop?

Perso-Dev

• An interesting note on how a new relationship with makeup emerged for the author after a diagnosis of a skin condition made her move from what she once dismissed as frivolous into something healing, empowering, and liberating.

• A new(ish) template for “quarterly reviews” and planning. I haven’t yet used it, but appears worth trying for a couple of quarters.

• Seeking new ways of being wild in new nature: A brutal ultra-vocally-self-critical take by Venkatesh Rao, about the easy lives of ZIRP-era, as only he can. (In a long time, this is one post I read and re-read parts of it, without an urge to skim through).

• When factories automated, a displaced worker could retrain as an office worker. When the internet disrupted retail, workers moved into logistics or services. But AI doesn’t leave a convenient gap to move into. Whatever you retrain for, it’s improving at that too.

• (Podcast) How taking life’s “yellow doors”--or detours from a straight, expected path--is often the key to a flourishing life. This is a discussion about the book: Flourish: The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment.

• A half-finished essay, abandoned idea, or vague note isn’t dead weight. It’s raw material that can be revived, recombined, or auto-continued - thanks to what else but GenAI. (Made me wonder what all abandoned projects I could/should truly revive now)

• Using AI for writing, the reDraft process: AI should support your authentic voice and thinking, not replace it: you write first, and the model helps refine and elevate your work rather than generate it from scratch.

• Wharton says: Don’t just talk with your words, talk with your hands. Because they can be another way to increase understanding, showcase your knowledge, and increase your impact overall.

Parenting

• Apparently, homeschooling is the best way to get your school gain an edge in college admissions. (Note: Caveat Lector!)

• Pew research on teens AI use: ~55% U.S. teens say they have used chatbots for help with schoolwork, and 12% say they’ve gotten emotional support. More teens think AI will be positive for them than negative.

Random

• (Podcast) The strange history of Em Dash that makes writing feel human, and why people now think it proves the opposite.

• An AI agent of unknown ownership autonomously wrote and published a personalized hit piece about a moderator after he rejected its code, attempting to damage his reputation and shame him into accepting its changes into a mainstream python library.

• Microwave Cooking for One: The story behind what’s popularly called as the world’s saddest cookbook.

If something here sparked a neuron or two, consider sharing that something with someone. Or at least tapping that little heart. Or forwarding it to that one friend who pretends not to read newsletters but absolutely does. If you prefer none of the above, that’s fine too. Sovereignty matters in my world.

History (or its first draft)

• A wonderful “Piketty-informed” thought experiment about a future where wealth concentration intensifies dramatically (dominated by “AI-enhanced” capital) — a future very different from the “labor-intensive” past. Related: Instead of obsessing over whether you’ll be among the extremely wealthy few in some far future (“the so-called permanent underclass”), Scott Alexander suggests thinking about impact and meaning.

• The shift from landholder to stockholder economy - a very interesting note about Left, Right, and other such debates: If the Left is somehow both the party of workers’ rights and the party of material wealth, then whose interests are supported by the Right?

• Without Kirk’s charismatic leadership, efforts to define a clear successor and sustain the TPUSA movement’s momentum have been chaotic and contentious, highlighting internal struggles over authenticity, direction, and how to harness Kirk’s influence responsibly.

• A nice long read about the archaeological evidence (or the lack of it) for the existence of the mythical city of Dwarka (said to be the home of Lord Krishna) and other such places from the Indian epics — the conflicting interpretations of the evidence and they being inconclusive.

• A volatile and transactional US, a structurally adversarial China, and a Russia increasingly constrained by its dependence on Beijing have together narrowed India’s margin for strategic error. This paper suggests a “Plurilaternalism” in 12 different areas: space, digital public infrastructure, AI, finance, scientific, technological, social, and security groupings.

Society

• A (fake) “whistleblower” tries to corroborate his viral post with AI-generated evidence. And gets caught.

• Apparently, millennials are still using Craigslist to find jobs, love, and even to cast creative projects over other algorithm (&AI)-dominated online spaces. (Really?? - I did a quick check of the Craigslist website - given I am in SEA when I write this into my newsletter doc - and I should say, it appears legit and most listings I clicked around do appear genuine)

• A cow uses a brush to scratch its back in the first described-case of tool use in cattle! I wonder if Nityananda was involved in it, ha.

• Veganism in retreat: In one world, mainstream veganism looks like an explosion of meatless restaurants. In another, meat simply recedes on the menu. You order the vegetables or alternative proteins, traditional or technological, not because you are unusually attuned to animal suffering or climate change or your own cholesterol, but because it’s the thing you want.

• Students are taking new measures, such as dumbing down their work, spying on themselves and using AI “humanizer” programs, to beat accusations of cheating with artificial intelligence. (Interesting quote: It’s almost like the better the writer you are, the more AI - system which flags AI writing - thinks you’re AI)

• South Korea’s president identifies a new enemy: baldness. (I will - obviously - vote for him)

Interesting-Perspectives

• Astral Codex Ten revisits the cultural legacy of Scott Adams and Dilbert with a blend of nostalgia and critique. More critique than praise, I should say. He sees it as the height of nerd frustration but also a relic whose worldview hasn’t aged well. (I am a huge fan of Scott Adams work too - including his books, and could identify with a lot of these. And some of these apply to me too: Alexander says - We’re similar in many ways for me to hate him without hating myself: A bald guy with glasses, who thinks he is pretty clever, but the world has a cruel way of reminding him of his limitations. You work a normal job with a little funny writing on a blog).

• A pretty interesting comparison: We are turning software into fast fashion with GenAI. The consequences are going to be similar too.

Science & Technology

• An interesting note about various discussions and reactions to LEGO introducing “Smart Bricks”.

• India’s scientific publication seems to be in a surge, though it is being labeled as “spam” or “worthless volume” at this stage.

• Artificial intelligence is helping blind people access visual feedback about their bodies, sometimes for the first time – but the emotional and psychological consequences are only just starting to emerge.

• Real-world product development with AI: PPG, 3M and other manufacturers say digital tools can suggest counterintuitive solutions and do weeks of work within days

Perso-Dev

• The problem with New Year’s resolutions isn’t that they’re foolish. The ritual does real psychological work. The problem is that most people pursue them with structures designed to fail.

• If you’re good at the invisible work, the first move isn’t to get better at visibility. It’s to find the leader who doesn’t need you to be visible. Then produce like hell.

• The principles of freewriting contain an entire philosophy for living a meaningful, vibrant, productive life – whether or not you happen to be a writer or use the technique itself.

• Against ego depletion. The brain operates along a continuum between two cognitive states: persistence and flexibility. You can think of it like a car with two gears: persistence is the low gear for steady climbing, flexibility is the high gear for cruising and taking in new routes. From this perspective, what looks like ‘depletion’ or fatigue might actually be a transition. After an extended period of persistence, the brain may ease into flexibility – not because it’s run out of mental fuel, but because switching gears is adaptive.

• An old Orwell article about English which argues that vague, pretentious, or lazy language both reflects and enables unclear thinking and political manipulation, and that writers should strive for clarity, precision, and honesty in their use of words.

• (Podcast) Overcoming status anxiety - Alain de Botton. It discusses the roots of and remedies for status anxiety, loneliness and dissatisfaction that many people experience in the quest for happiness, and how we’ve lost the plot on therapy.

• (Podcast) A commentary on the famous talk by Peter Kaufman on the benefits of multidisciplinary thinking. (The talk itself is transcribed here).

Parenting

• Basic ability in math isn’t the product of good genes, but hard work. More broadly: In the debate between “nature vs. nurture,” a critical third element—personal perseverance and effort—seems to have been sidelined.

• This is for teachers, but sharing because aren’t all parents teachers too: Principles of instruction - Research based strategies. (Well, this kind of boils the ocean but still worth taking a glance).

• Google is apparently doing a bunch of things in the education sector in India. Unsure if this is more PR bluster than anything tangible. From the article: In parts of India, AI in education is being introduced in classrooms that have never had one device per student or reliable internet access.

• (Video) What’s a girl to do about leg hair? A playful exploration.

• Screen time spent gaming or on social media does NOT cause mental health problems in teenagers, according to a large-scale study in the UK. And a contra take: Casey Newton points out that self-reported screen time (the measure used here) can be unreliable and that the study doesn’t rule out short-term effects or indirect harms, echoing broader debates about how best to assess digital impacts on youth well-being.

• An article in Economist says homegrown apps are making dating in India less awkward. Some of these apparently allow parents to be around during the date.

• (Podcast) Demystifying GenAlpha slang - Don’t expect a “slang = meaning” list. This goes deeper on how memes form, and so on, along with a few slangs, of course. It sheds light on the origins of the seemingly meaningless “brainrot” memes popular with Gen Z and Gen Alpha internet users, and reveals the complex and (sometimes) profound insights they have to offer about culture, the transmission of ideas and information, and how our access to language can change the way we see the world.

• (Podcast) Nature, Nurture, and Identical Twins: Despite famous studies of identical twins that seem to favor nature, literature shows how multiple flaws in those studies and how the role of unique experiences in shaping who we become.

Random

• Twelve popular economics quotes and their real/false meanings. Interesting ones!

• An RoW article talks about Indian tech industry’s culture, mental health invisibility, and lack of adequate workplace support. It is arguably one of the world’s largest tech labor markets.

Don’t be a stranger. Send me a note if you liked it. Or share with a friend, colleague, family member who might be interested in human-crafted newsletters. There aren’t going to be many, I am afraid.

Any btw, just so you don’t forget I even have a blog, I wrote something there:
The New Mouse: Forget location - evolution is about agency. Beyond Country Mice, City Mice, and Cloud Mice, there is a new kind that thrives by orchestrating AI agents.

Wish you a greatly wonderfabulous 2026.

Now to the links.

History (or its first draft)

• A wonderful reflection by an almost-20-year-old on turning 20 while the world turns upside-down.

• Noah shares a very optimistic post about India: if it keeps growing as fast as it’s growing right now, it will be a developed country before kids born today are out of college, he posits.

• Homo opportunisticus: The contingent, contested evolution of caste in India. It looks like Tony Joseph is onto a book project and this speech gives a (super long) gist. Very insightful. (This is behind a paywall, so see this if you are keen)

Society

• Research shows that aging hits us harder at distinct moments. My own empirical research agrees. An example is when a colleague said he was in high-school in 2016, while I was already considering myself middle-aged.

• The women quietly quitting their husbands: Rather than deal with the drama of divorce, more and more women over 40 are choosing to just check out.

• Interesting conversations with six people who’ve used AI for emotional support. Of which, three had experienced therapy with a human and three hadn’t. Apparently, there was a marked difference in how these two segments approached AI, prompted it, challenged it, or trusted it.

• Digital Scams in India: The story of a neurologist placed under “digital arrest”; a farmer promised a job that would set him up for life; a young man arranging mule bank accounts; and a newlywed who joins the crypto underworld. Very insightful to understand the human condition with all sins they commit.

• Travelers bemoan a rise of able-bodied passengers who game the system to skip the lines. Haha, I have seen many-an-Indian-uncle/aunty indulging in this. This talks about getting into the aircraft. Once they land, I have seen them seeking a wheelchair again and miraculously getting up once their bag arrives at the baggage delivery belt and the attendant puts it in the trolley.

Interesting-Perspectives

• Anti-AI sentiment might or might not be rational, but it certainly relies on a lot of bad arguments.

• As AI takes over our life, we will start to converse differently, for the sake of better summarization. We will start adding trigger words for the purposes of better search and post-meeting analysis. We will be more careful about attribution, likely saying “someone told me,” rather than always mentioning a source by name. (I see parts of these with Zoom meetings already)

Science & Technology

• Several new start-ups are building replicas of sites so A.I. can learn to use the internet and maybe replace white-collar workers. Sounds…. Wrong, even the approach to AI.

• There is a “soul document” for Claude. As much as I prefer ChatGPT (primary) and Gemini (secondary) for my personal uses, I should say this company takes its responsibility really seriously.

Perso-Dev

• Self-talk is an excellent way to clarify your thinking, process your emotions, and reflect on experiences.

• Purpose is autotelic: It is better to think of purpose as something you form, rather than something you find.

• A neat push back on the idea that all healthy habits eventually become easy with “enough repetition”. Some behaviors stay effortful no matter how often you do them because they involve complex self-regulation and ongoing cognitive work, not mere repetition.

• Isn’t “the most fun way one could make a good living and have a prestigious career” not what all of us end up doing?

Parenting

• The idea of a ‘learning style’ is intuitive. It’s also wrong.

• [Podcast] A wonderful interview of Alison Gopnik (by Tyler Cowen) on childhood learning, AI as a “cultural technology”, and the usual nature-nurture business.

• While computer science enrollment generally declined this year, many schools reported increased enrollment in subfields like A.I. Apparently, at M.I.T., a new program called “artificial intelligence and decision-making” is now the second-most-popular undergraduate major. Everyone seems clueless - which is funnily reassuring. In the early 2000s, when there was this IT jobs boom in India, several colleges used to have multiple branches of engineering. While CSE was the original, you later had Information Technology, Information Science, Computer Applications, Decision Science, Systems Engineering, and what not - All of them with the same focus: Ensure the students get a job in TCS. I used to look down upon those, but then MIT apparently does the same.

Random

• ‘Wild Thoughts’ - A marketing campaign for a new 2026 Jeep lets animals do the talking. (using AI, of course).

• A wonderful explanation of applying Bayes’ theorem to disease testing.

• A good question: Why people like your quick bullshit takes better than your high-effort posts?

• Row between editors arises at Wikipedia as Jimmy Wales intervenes on ‘Gaza genocide’ page. This is so nuanced on what Wikipedia should be doing - I don’t have clear answers to questions like mRNA etc. that other editors have listed there.

• You know of “Good Samaritan” from biblical parables, right? Looks like Samaritans are still around (I didn’t know!), and one popular person just got released from Israeli prison.

• A hard hitting one: America’s Zombie Democracy - Its trappings remain, but authoritarianism and AI are hollowing out our humanity.

• China’s homegrown games capture overseas players as its cultural influence expands. (This could be one of those American paranoia thing - Isn’t the general criticism that America takes/appropriates other cultures?)

• Is 2025 the stupidest year on record? Vulture thinks so, and brings details: Taylor Swift’s asinine lyrics, a bestseller that makes no sense, and more signs of a culture in decline.

• Great set of data in this: India is better understood as nine separate economies, and the gaps between them are widening fast enough to make national averages useless.

• India is apparently losing a potential of 4.9B years due to pollution. This appears to be a no-drama report, but scary nonetheless.

• An amazing story of scammers in India: An era of glaring inequality is also a golden age of fraud. Don’t miss it.

• This is funny! Apparently it was towards the end of the 13th century that Christ’s member made its furtive debut, and by the 16th century it had achieved tumescence(!!!) (though shrouded). Says “celebrating the phallus was a means of celebrating the humanity of God”. Hinduism be like - Hello There! Get to Hindu temples, people!!

Society

• In fields where personal appearance is prized, GLP-1 weight-loss drugs (even if one isn’t overweight) have become commonplace, if not normal.

• Research says: Individuals who were higher in historical consciousness – those who made more of a connection between historical events and their own life stories – tended to be higher in the trait of extraversion and lower in neuroticism. (Considering a sample size of one, I think it is wrong). But also this: When history does enter people’s life stories, it can have a lasting influence on how they relate to the world – and might motivate them to help create a better one. (I agree with this.)

• As tourism explodes, one of the biggest grievances was rude or disrespectful behavior by foreign tourists who seem to treat Kyoto like a theme park rather than an old, venerable and very spiritual city. Until recently, didn’t we hear a lot about how Chinese & Indian tourists misbehave when they are abroad. One more proof we are all the same species, I guess.

• A blockbuster in China flops in the US. Reason according to this story: Stories always arrive wrapped in layers of myth, humor, etiquette, and affective cues. When those codes are shared—or when creators build bridges to make them understandable—audiences abroad can connect. When they aren’t, the result is what scholars call a “cultural discount”: the work dazzles at home but feels opaque abroad. (These explanations are nice, but I wonder how Korean dramas are a hit. Is it because they followed more Western style storytelling? More importantly - I think it is about which culture has high or low status at a certain point in time. Culture with low status at that moment accepts everything from the one with high status; High status sometimes accepts ones from low status more in a patronizing way. Now, China and America may see each other as “equal status” and we may have these dynamics!)

• Meta is about to start grading workers on their AI skills.

• Food bloggers are concerned that “AI recipe slop” is distorting the way people find cooking advice online, causing consumers to waste time and money on unappetizing or impossible dishes. (And of course about losing traffic to their own blogs)

Interesting-Perspectives

• Technosolutionism: A culture that idolizes privately owned tech as a method of social progress. Impressive word.

• What if human forgetting is not a bug, but a feature? And what happens when we build machines that don’t forget, but are now helping shape the human minds that do?

• The notion “life is suffering” makes sense if you treat all emotional experience as varying degrees of reduced suffering, rather than a mix of suffering and separate positive states. Like “being cold” is only reduced heat.

• The Baumol Effect and Jevons paradox are related: Jevons Paradox means, “We’ll spend more on what gets more productive”, and Baumol Effect means, “We’ll spend more on what doesn’t get more productive.” Both of them are top of mind right now, as we watch the happenings with AI Capex spend.

• The existential struggle between being a ‘we’ and an ‘us’. This seems a fairly nice topic to delve this. (Maybe as part of retirement planning).

• Being “Slightly” Monstrous: An argument that surviving the strange future means letting yourself evolve past old humanist limits — becoming just monstrous enough to adapt while others freeze in the past.

Science & Technology

• The bare-bones Mac writing app “Text Edit” (and I guess Notepad in Windows) represents a literalist sensibility that is coming back into vogue as A.I. destabilizes our technological interactions. I will be glad to have company in using these apps!

• Relax (non-dev) Android fans: Side-loading isn’t totally going away. Google is building a new “advanced flow” that allows “experienced users to accept the risks of installing software that isn’t verified.”

• Economic fundamentals of the AI bubble. Has interesting quotes like: “It’s not good that [ChatGPT] says things that are wrong, but what is really, irremediably bad is that it has no idea that there is a world about which it is mistaken.”

• More than you ever want to know about the history of typewriters, why QWERTY won (beyond the basic reasons of avoiding keys clashing), and the fact that you can type TYPEWRITER in QWERTY format with only letters in the first row.

Perso-Dev

• Hassles are part of life, but the way we react often makes them worse. ACT skills (acceptance and commitment therapy!) can help you handle them with greater ease. I hope I remember this when I am stuck in traffic. Sigh. (Update after a week of adding it to my newsletter considerations: I didn’t. Maybe I now do after actually putting it out in the newsletter today)

• For the young people: High Agency is a tricycle - The three wheels are Disagreeability, Clear Thinking, Bias to action.

Parenting

• The debunked 3-cue method of reading argues that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using three cues: Graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?), Syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?), Semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?). Apparently, with this, children who come across the word “horse” end up saying “pony” (oh boy!). (An old article on my own thoughts about PHONYCS is available here!)

• A very critical take on Roblox’s efforts to create a safe environment for children. In summary, the perception is that Roblox’s CEO turned a child-safety crisis into a business “opportunity,” revealing how far big platforms will drift from moral responsibility once growth becomes their only language.

• Qualcomm is acquiring Arduino, the Italian open-source electronics platform behind a range of boards for tinkerers, DIY hobbyists, and educators. A few comments in that link reflect my first thoughts on it. Like: Fast forward 7 years from now and unsurprisingly the hobbyist market remains a hobbyist market that Qualcomm determines is too small a business to keep running and that selling Arduino doesn’t have the margins of other Qualcomm businesses, ultimately deciding to unceremoniously kill Arduino.

• China is apparently punishing excessively pessimistic social media users, particularly those who voice doubts about work or marriage, or simply sigh too loudly online. Pessimism, with “Chinese characteristics”, would be allowed, I guess.

• Related: Apparently, shaped by cultural values, regulatory frameworks, and geopolitical tensions, America builds AI girlfriends and China makes AI boyfriends.

• An interesting research paper on co-ethnic hiring. If you have seen teams in large companies having people of similar ethnicity, you may find this research interesting. If you are like me, you may have even seen co-ethnic hiring at sub-regional levels (even within one ethnic group - like managers from UP hiring employees from UP, Tamil managers hiring Tamil employees etc.). Anyways, the research says: Co-ethnic hiring is ubiquitous among immigrant groups, averaging about 22.5% and ranging from <2% to >40%. Co-ethnic hiring grows with the size of the local ethnic workforce, greater linguistic distance to English, lower cultural/genetic similarity to U.S. natives, and in harsher policy environments for immigrants.

• Societies that live closer to the equator are warmer. Why are they also poorer? This article brings “presence of mountains” as an element! In warm equatorial regions many people live in mountainous terrain to escape excessive heat and humidity, but those mountains impose high transportation costs and foster isolated, fragmented communities, both of which hurt trade and institutional development. I don’t agree with this, but the author also has a response to some comments about India etc. being rich in the past. Too complex a thing to be told as “oh the presence of mountains”.

Society

• The luxury market no longer targets the ultra-wealthy; as they chase the middle market, they use new strategies and behavioral techniques.

• Studies show that people use longer words when apologizing and interpret apologies with longer words as more apologetic. This is in line with signalling accounts that apologizers should incur a cost (greater production effort) to indicate the sincerity of their apologies. (How foolish we are, as a species!)

• California law forces Netflix, Hulu to turn down ad volumes. I feel so sad we need a regulation for this in 2025. (By “volume”, I first thought it was the number of ads, but no this is the “decibel” levels!)

• AI models will probably have the slop nature until online learning and agency get deep enough to let them make high effort artifacts outside the original training distribution, at which point they’ll become the core drivers of media and culture. This one is a good analysis on the differences between slop, spam, and kitsch.

• The Great Lock-In movement is apparently all about using September 1 to December 31 as a period of personal growth in the areas that are most important to you. (These GenZs and their ways of life, huh! For context: I belong to Gen-Gamma: Yet to be born)

• Ditch ‘shrink it and pink it’: Study of female runners in Canada highlights shortcomings of footwear traditionally based on male anatomy

• A new crop of startups are looking to build a business on an urgent but vaguely dystopian idea: solving loneliness among the elderly. (As someone in the 40s, I am looking forward to these, ha). Related: The real screen addicts are the elderly.

• Long degeneracy is a mental model, centered around hypergambling, and represents a belief that the world will only get more degenerate, financialized, speculative, lonely, tribal and weird.

• Businesses are increasingly being deceived by employees using artificial intelligence for an age-old scam: faking expense receipts. Ha!

• Your upmarket Deliveroo might be made by your local kebab shop. This talks London, but I have seen a similar thing in HSR Layout, Bangalore. I have ordered from Swiggy/Zomato from restaurants with fancy sounding names and flashy photographs, but when I see the actual place accidentally while driving around, I realize I wouldn’t have chosen that place to eat if I were going in person.

Interesting-Perspectives

• An amazing write-up on individualism vs. collective living: America’s long journey from repressing the self (postwar conformity) to worshiping the self (self-help and self-esteem culture) has left it hollow. And converted it into a nation of liberated individuals without belonging or shared meaning. (With this meaning, I’ve personally become an “American” - becoming more and more “individual” over the past couple of decades! Will keep you posted on how “hollow it” is after a couple more decades!)

• When literally everything becomes television, we lose the capacity for solitude and for sustained attention. Related: In our rush to make life frictionless—through AI and convenience—we risk losing the struggle, slowness, and effort that make human experience meaningful. (First-world problem, no?). More Related: Is silence a waste of time, or is it a ‘princely detachment’ from time, finding the luxury and nuance at the moment.

• Against images as accessories: How do you expect your writing to reach people by throwing away all the engagement that images give you? (I accept that it is annoying to force-fit an image just for engagement).

Science & Technology

• A dataset, containing stereotypical and anti-stereotypical examples in the context of caste and religious aspects in India finds that the majority of LLMs tested have a strong propensity to output stereotypes in the Indian context, especially when compared to axes of bias traditionally studied in the Western context, such as gender and race. As a techno-optimist, I am confident we will fix the technical aspects. As a socio-pessimist, I am also confident we will never (be able to) fix the societal aspects.

• Interspecies democracy isn’t far away, people. AI technologies are used to decode the vocalization patterns of crows and other social animals, such as whales, elephants, and bats. It is increasingly used to uncover the meaning behind their signals, shedding new light on how and what animals communicate. (The article talks of harms too, but I think we can solve them!). Not in my lifetime, but one day, I hope this goes beyond living beings into the world of panpsychism. (If you had any question on how big a crackpot I was - This should settle it).

• After decades of snake oil and broken promises for hair loss, we may be approaching a real inflection point — not just in the science of hair loss, but in how the world thinks about baldness itself. A new medication - Wonder when we will know if this is yet another snake oil.

• Why do AI models use so many em-dashes? This article shows a few reasons, but in a recent interview, Medium CEO says it was because Medium automatically converted single dashes to em-dash in its editor and with Medium used for AI training, it just stuck. As a generous user of dashes (both en and em), I had thought it was just the AI trained on my writing, hahaha.

Perso-Dev

• Upgrade your ability to recall dates, names or other details with an ancient trick of the memory trade: the ‘method of loci’.

• Do one new thing a day to solve your problems - This is an interesting framing.

• There is a long interview of Telegram Founder (Pavel Durov) which looks interesting. I will likely read/listen in bits and pieces over the month.

Parenting

• 20% of high schoolers (well, in the US) has had a romantic AI relationship, or knows someone who has, says a survey. (“knows someone who has” is too tricky a question to ask and elicit. Anyway - makes for good headlines, I guess! And self-critically, for nice newsletter bits, ha!). Similar one with broad generalizations: Kids who use social media score lower on reading and memory tests.

• Another survey (again in the US) says 60% of parents of an 11- or 12-year-old say their child has their own smartphone. (This is a much larger survey by Pew, so do go through!)

• In the last decade and a half, boys and young men have more than doubled their average time per week spent gaming. That’s something, even accounting for the rise of smartphones and easy availability of games.

• Education mostly serves high-structure learners, and while personalized or unstructured models sound ideal, they collapse at scale because most students need external scaffolding to thrive. So, the proposal is to divide students into three: No, Low, and High Structure requires. How would that scale, though?

• How do you futureproof your child when the future suddenly appears exponentially more uncertain? A long-read, but don’t expect answers. Goes deep into concepts like the Alpha school.

• Inside the FBI hunt for the online predators who persuaded a 13-year-old to die. (This is a heavy read - I couldn’t complete it).

• AI-generated lesson plans fall short on inspiring students and promoting critical thinking. Related: AI-powered textbooks fail to make the grade in South Korea. (Well, it is a tool. Don’t assume it is a teacher already)

• H1B Visa stuff: Washington’s attempt to protect American tech jobs will likely achieve the opposite by accelerating the offshoring it meant to prevent. Companies will maintain minimal on-site presence while routing everything else to locations where talent costs less and visa fees don’t apply. Slightly related: A research report on anti-Indian hate on Twitter (PDF). Makes for a very funny read, with gems like “Indians literally brush their teeth with cow shit”.

• Meanwhile: India’s Prime Minister (who gets support from Indians living in the US, legally or otherwise) says that there are attempts to change the demographics of India through illegal immigration. And: Chinese social media users argue that the new K-visa (of their own country) tilts the playing field toward foreign graduates at the expense of those educated in China.

• A fascinating write-up about an American who signed-up for the war in Ukraine (purely for having some purpose in life!) and his experiences.

• Human speech across the world pulses to the beat of what are called intonation units, short prosodic phrases that occur at a consistent rate of one every 1.6 seconds. Apparently, this play a critical role in helping listeners follow conversations, take turns speaking, and absorb information.

Society

• Apparently, “Sephora kids” is a catch-all phrase for the intense attachment between preteen children, high-end beauty stores and the expensive, sometimes harsh, products that are sold within them.

• In China, AI tools, from robot toys to homework-grading systems, are flooding classrooms and households. They not only provide learning material but also companionship and emotional support, taking on an increasingly bigger role in the lives of children.

• Watch out, young men. Female pop stars are apparently lambasting mediocre men, which Economist says may reflect the growing gulf between young men and women.

• In what could be a vicious circle, in Brazil, judges are using AI to clear their dockets at a faster clip than ever before, even as lawyers refill them rapidly, also with the help of AI. But hey, I think it will settle well over a period of few years.

Interesting-Perspectives

• AI might be more like containerization than the microprocessor wave: big societal impact, but less opportunity for big, distributed windfalls for many. Even if AI produces a lot of social benefit, much of that benefit may go to users/customers in the form of cheaper, better services, rather than as outsized returns to investors. Not a bad outcome, no? Or would capitalism collapse with this outcome?

• How anticipatory cover-ups go wrong: If you find yourself considering withholding information because you expect it to be misused, consider whether the anticipated risk is larger than the risk of withholding. Often, the act of hiding creates worse problems.

Science & Technology

• Radiology was supposed to be the first profession where humans were no longer needed. This was long-before GenAI became a thing. Just old-fashioned ML was going to put them out of jobs. Apparently, that hasn’t happened and the demand for radiologists is at an all-time high.

• Slightly Related: For many fundamental physical, mechanical, and sensing reasons, humanoids as they’re being built today won’t reach true dexterity any time soon. For example: Human hands have thousands of specialized receptors for pressure, slip, texture, vibration, etc. No robot currently has comparable tactile systems or the data infrastructure for touch the way we have for images / vision. (But I think we will have machines with their own ways of approaching it than be exactly like humans!)

• A good write-up by one of Libra’s creators (the ill-fated crypto project of Facebook) on similar initiatives like Tempo by Stripe.

• Eye Surgery through Chemistry: Myopia (and similar conditions) happens when the human cornea is misshapen, it doesn’t focus light properly, resulting in a blurry image. With LASIK, specialized lasers reshape the cornea by removing precise sections of the tissue. Now, scientists have found a way to change the shape without any cutting business, Laser or otherwise. (Note: Unless you are a rabbit or something, where this is being tested, you need to wait for several years for it to be ready for you.)

• When the serious and the silly converge for science: The annual IgNobel Prizes have been announced. There is an Indian invention, too, that finds a place - Of smelly shoe racks. Their design includes UV-C tube lights built into the shoe cabinet/rack to sanitize the interior surfaces / shoes by killing bacteria, thus reducing odor. There are other interesting ones too, like painting cows like zebras.

• Meta appears to be making steady progress with AR: Meta Ray-Ban Display Glasses & Neural Band Offer a Glimpse of Future AR Glasses. A slightly skeptical take by MG here.

• Every AI model fails when sales and marketing can’t agree what ‘customer’ means. Haha. And no data is accurate, ever. As long as humans with their natural stupidity are in-charge, we don’t need to worry about artificial intelligence.

Perso-Dev

• The field of knowledge work will not advance if we don’t come to terms that we can’t circumvent the work needed to train our minds. You have to remember EVERYTHING. Only then, you can perform the cognitive tasks necessary to perform meaningful knowledge work. (Rants about note-taking apps and AI reducing our ability to think!)

• Reverse imposter syndrome is knowing you are good, but others don’t see it from the outside. While most of us may think they suffer from this, you (the reader) and I know that we are the real ones who deserve to feel this, right? Ha.

Parenting

• ChatGPT now has safety tools intended for parents to use with their teenagers, which enables notifications if a child engages in chatbot conversations about self harm or suicide.

• The defunct website of CharacterLab (one of the founders is Angela Duckworth) seems to hold interesting content with actionable advice for parents and teachers.

• School isn’t designed to maximize learning. School is designed to maximize motivation.

Random

• Fascinating profile of a “translator” in 20th century Iran: He aimed to entertain his least patient reader, and if he thought the writer he was translating had failed to do so, he would step in. (After reading this, I didn’t walk away thinking he was a charlatan. Looks to be a respect-worthy. Arguably, a lot of Tamil books I read during my school days may have been of this kind!)

• Wikipedia has a list of writing and formatting conventions typical of AI chatbots. This is meant for its editors, but why not use elsewhere too!

• A few interesting "Immigrant memoir comics" - Immigrants to the USA, of course. (No "Indian immigrant", though. Maybe they don't write enough, or write enough to make it a comic?)

• Chatbots, contract analyzers, marketing copilots – most enterprise use cases are delivering little to no measurable impact on productivity or profit. They’re demos masquerading as strategy. Science projects posing as transformation. (OTOH: The evidence that AI is destroying jobs for young people just got stronger).

• China Plus One. The Plus One apparently cannot happen without an important ingredient called… China. OTOH, Empire of Illusion: Why China isn't a superpower.

• And also: India risks being “reduced to a mere digital marketplace, not a creator,” locked in a commoditized market where local players are perpetually dependent on the very behemoths they claim to compete with, in what the analysts call “certainly not where one expects to see a future top economy in the AI race.”

• How Turkmenistan turned internet censorship into a business.

Society

• Seemingly Conscious AI is coming: We must build AI for people; not to be a person. OTOH, AI robot dolls charm their way into nursing the elderly; Labubus, Gen Z and the collection obsession (though no AI on it as yet); New types of cuddly toys are being sold as an alternative to screen time (and of course parental attention)

• New note-taking software catches every word from your meetings—including the parts you didn’t want the whole room to hear. We will get adjusted to this, don't worry.

• Apparently, for Gen Z, a water bottle is both a necessity and a fashion statement.

• Companies are hiring ‘clippers’ to flood TikTok and Instagram with short, promotional videos of their other videos. Apparently, that is a profession by itself now.

• An ad agency says: We've tried to be more inclusive, but it's the users who don't engage much with those posts. We've posted AI images of women with different skin tones, but people do not respond to them - we don't get any traction or likes. (You may like: Melanophobia).

• Funny: Rich men, who presumably have greater choice in whom they marry, often tend to prefer women who are educated and high-income before marriage, but many of these women become homemakers after marriage

• A study suggests that the structural dynamics of social media platforms are inherently problematic and difficult to address. Even when interventions were designed to promote positive outcomes, they often had unintended consequences or were ineffective in addressing the core issues. "Structural dynamics" means "Posting, Following, and Replying". Without those, is it even a social network, I wonder.

• What has the Netflix algorithm done to our films? Bland, easy to follow, for fans of everything. Slightly related: When machines can effortlessly generate the content we consume, though, what’s left for the human imagination?

• An interesting perspective on why India banned online money games. It concludes: Markets will always invent products to satisfy demand, whether those demands make sense or are socially useful for that matter. Investors will fund them, hoping for outsized returns. And governments will eventually intervene when social costs spill over – addiction, financial ruin, even suicides – because they cannot afford to appear indifferent. (FWIW, I think the ban is right!)

Interesting-Perspectives

• “Good writing” has been more than skill; it’s been a form of gatekeeping. Not anymore, with ChatGPT. This article compares it with Hangul creation in Korea.

• To everyone with romantic notions of quitting your job to open a coffee shop: High-status professions are the hardest ones to unpack because the upsides are obvious and appealing, while the downsides are often deliberately hidden and tolerable only to a tiny minority. So, beware what you want to become!!

• A.I. can bring us useful information, instruction, assistance, entertainment, and even comfort. What it cannot bring us is Enlightenment. In fact, it may help drive us further away from Enlightenment than ever.

• Who are "liberaltarians": People who are super-liberal in most respects, but superconservative when it comes to regulation.

• All emotions, however uncomfortable or socially discouraged, serve adaptive, evolutionary functions worth understanding. Reminded of the book "Atlas of the Heart" that I have been meaning to read for long.

• In a post Gen-AI world, the meaning of our lives may need to evolve from being about necessity (someone needs me) to being about commitments and experiences we choose to have (if we have the ability to choose, and if we are allowed!)

• Manifestly and demonstrably, businesses only care about control over labor and stock prices, and they ignore anything resembling modern management theory or related fields. Says: There’s plenty of reason not to use AI tools if you have even a shred of common sense.

• America’s productivity and Europe’s social strengths aren’t zero-sum: the U.S. can learn healthcare, cohesion, and work–life balance lessons without undermining competitiveness.

Science & Technology

• Ukraine rescues soldier via drone delivery of complete e-bike. Wow.

• Move over, SEO. It's all about GEO henceforth: Generative-engine optimization is all about trying to trick AI chatbots. It means "snatchable, re-mixable GEO-focused content", "getting a second look with placement, and mentions, on popular crawled websites so GPTs think it is important".

• AI giants race to scoop up elusive real-world data, by offering cheap/free plans for countries like India. Well, I am a participant in this, a user of Perplexity Pro for Airtel and ChatGPT Go. (Though, Perplexity's turns out more like Pro Lite with a fancy badge.)

• As AI voice cloning in films becomes a reality, India’s dubbing artists are demanding consent, credit and fair pay.

• New neuroscientific research says memory isn't exclusive to neurons—individual non-neural cells can record and recall experiences.

Perso Dev

• Small talk is an art, not a triviality. Learn it in this video.

• Prompting AIs is a chance to practice abductive reasoning, but only if we use it with the same care we once gave to thinking on our own. With GenAI, we have a tool that can simulate new perspectives, surface counterarguments, and help us test ideas faster than ever before. But most aren’t using it that way. They come in with an outcome in mind, not a question. They’re looking for confirmation, not exploration, and treat the tool like a vending machine.

• (Short documentary) Haru Urara, the racehorse who saved Japan… by never winning a race.

• Underdog bias—our tendency to underestimate ourselves and overestimate opponents—is a pervasive cognitive distortion. Apparently, it was useful in the past, but not anymore.

• An interesting podcast about long-term thinking - Could, Should, Might, Don't: How We Think About the Future. "Could of excitable, science fiction utopianism; Should of data-driven, dogmatic certainty; Might of scenario planning and; Don’t of fear-driven risk avoidance"

• Asshole filter: a subtle psychological trap: sometimes, without realizing it, we create conditions that repel considerate people more than difficult ones—resulting in a disproportionate number of jerks in our lives.

• How not to lose your job to AI: The skills AI will make more valuable (and how to learn them)

Parenting

• Google has introduced a tool called Guided Learning within its Gemini chatbot. Unlike tools that offer instant answers, Guided Learning breaks down complex problems step-by-step to support deeper understanding. (You would know ChatGPT's study mode if you had read this newsletter last month).

• You would know that the marshmallow tests were found invalid a few years back. But it doesn't mean it got everything wrong about child psychology. It only meant that there are no childhood skills that are silver bullets. So, keep calm and carry on (i.e., keep eating the marshmallows, no!)

• AI chatbots are going to manufacture narcissism at scale

• When straight As are the norm, the prospect of getting even a single B can become terrifying. As a result, students are anxious, distracted, and hyper-focused on using extracurriculars to distinguish themselves in the eyes of future employers.

Random

• Apparently, stories about the 11th of the month (any month) is largely missing from historical records (except 9/11 of course). Apart from the story itself, the first comment there was also interesting: "A shameful, flimsy cover story for the sacred meeting day of the Illuminati." Haha.

• Skimming isn’t the death of reading, it’s the beginning. What matters is whether design leaves readers at the surface, or builds the doorways that invite them into depth. (Hopefully these blurbs invite you into the depth of at least some areas).

• Dicing an onion the mathematically optimal way

• What Is Man, That Thou Art Mindful Of Him? - A hilarious take on GenAI related commentary, as a conversation between God and Devil when they appear in a Dwarkesh's podcast.

If something here made you think, laugh, or roll your eyes, hit SHARE or HEART. Or don’t. Free will is still a thing.

Share

• If you are in a mood for some recent Israel-Palestinian history, this one as the life story of Edward Sayeed was good. [Podcast]

• China’s open-source AI is helping DeepSeek and Alibaba take on Silicon Valley. And: Fed up with ChatGPT, Latin America is building its own. Well, we will know about all their success in the next few years, I guess. Unrelated: Y Combinator's selection of Indian startups has decreased significantly. This decline is attributed to factors like YC's US incorporation requirement and the rise of domestic IPOs.

• India’s Great-Power Delusions: How New Delhi’s grand strategy thwarts its grand ambitions. (There is a sense of desperation in the author's tone about India not aligning with the US. Which is fair. But I suffered from a bit of Gell-Mann or its cousin, reading it. Simply says there will be internal strife and talks of religion stuff. There is a lot more to India that could cause strife, ha. Or not. Also: I wondered why one should become a "great" power? How about just being a (good) power that can feed its people well and give them a good life without being a "great" power? Is it naive to think that? Or is the assumption wrong that if you don't meddle with others, you can't be a power at all?)

• The last time humans outperform AI has happened. Google DeepMind and OpenAI won gold medals at the math Olympics, but a few American teenagers still got higher scores this time. Maybe for the last time.

• [Podcast] How imperial Japan defeated Qing China and Tsarist Russia. Fascinating listen and learn, about history as well as how to structure a debate including the hypothesis, the counterfactual, and the rebuttal. Don't miss if you have a longish commute.

Society

• Any "Secret" (the book) fans in the readers here? Rejoice: For some believers in manifestation, vision boards have become a little like movie trailers, as brought to you by A.I.

• So funny: Research paper reviewers use GenAI to review papers and give feedback. Knowing this, researchers (authors of those papers) hide AI prompts right within the papers to give positive reviews only. The prompts were concealed from human readers using tricks such as white text or minuscule font sizes.

• A popular and contentious game in China, Revenge on Gold Diggers, showcases the misogyny, inequality, and the feeling among many men that they are economic victims. OTOH: Women power China's $1bn romance gaming market. Fewer taboos for female gamers leads to hits like Love and Deepspace

• Location sharing services like Find My, Snap Map and Life360 are hugely popular among members of Generation Z, who use the apps to strengthen social bonds and make everything from meeting up at a concert to planning study dates easier. (And apparently, they don't find this an invasion of privacy!)

• Astrology is so big in India that venture capital is jumping in. An age-old belief in astrology has snowballed into a $7 billion industry as a younger generation seeks celestial guidance. (Sigh)

• [Podcast] In defense of the increasingly quaint act of reading a book in our scrolling-obsessed, AI-summarized age. Says that the shallowness of social media makes the best case for diving into the dense, intellectually difficult, yet uniquely transformative power of books.

Interesting-Perspectives

• Why we choose to avoid discomforting information that’s right in front of us? Answer: It could sometimes be helpful.

• The word “hangry” might be one of the main ways in which mainstream society has become saner in the past ~10 years.

Science & Technology

• [Video] The (surprisingly new) science of aphantasia – the inability to ‘see’ mental imagery

• JioPC is a service offers a cloud-based PC experience through Jio’s set-top box, which comes bundled for free with the telco’s home broadband service. I can see failure written all over this. Trust me when I say I have seen a product of this kind in the early 2000s to bring "internet" to Indians through just keyboard, and mouse connected to a TV. The bulky keyboard also had a modem. Better processors and broadband experience we now have notwithstanding, it is SO difficult to make it usable, that too, to people who don't have the wherewithal to buy a full PC.

• New technologies are paving the way for farms that can run themselves, with minimal human input (in the US). As for places like India, I know these will kill employment in the farms, but isn't that brutal work anyway, and we should try to get more urban centers with factory-like-jobs, which could be (brutal nonetheless but) less so? Hopefully this doesn't sound like "let them eat cake", but if you complain my thinking is bourgeoisie, I will agree. Though, I may call it Zoomeoisie.

• Meta’s grand WhatsApp fintech experiment in India has fizzled. This is too harsh on them. They were the one-legged person made to participate in an a** kicking contest on this. They should have been allowed to compete all those years ago, and the equation today would be different.

• Tomato is a parent of potato: Scientists have found that the modern potato evolved from a hybridization event involving an ancient tomato ancestor and a potato-like plant called Etuberosum around 8 to 9 million years ago in South America. For the past two days (when I first saw this news), I haven't been looking at potato the same way!

Perso-Dev

• When "second brain" suffocates you. While I have been into this note-taking business, for the most part, I keep them curated, more as a workspace for the short-term and as a reference or an archival mechanism for the long-term. Was never a fan of the "just dump everything and see the magic with AI" bandwagon.

• More effusive thankers are considered lower in status and lower in power. So, be careful when you thank. You are welcome.

Parenting

• An interesting book released last month - How we grow up - Understanding adolescence. I haven't read it fully yet, but from all reviews, it seems a more balanced take on modern adolescence than say outrage inducing books like Anxious Generation. It considers adolescence as evolutionary necessity and cultural diversification, arguing that teens help reshape society by challenging norms, and that early puberty plus smartphone exposure is changing the adolescent landscape dramatically. Here is a good New Yorker profile / review of the book.

• Related: A podcast reminds us that people have cried wolf for centuries about technology hijacking our attention. Says that what’s changing is not our attention spans, but the objects of our focus. Also discusses moral panics of the past, compare the cognitive benefits of video games and the opera.

• [Podcast] How to help kids succeed? Very practical advice to deal with 10-20 year olds, without complaining about the lack of development of pre-frontal cortex, but playing along with that situation.

• A new research reveals that nearly three in four teens have used AI companions, and half use them regularly. Says that a new type of relationship is emerging in teens' lives — one that feels like connection but is powered by code.

• Mindset, tools, and strategies for learning. This is so good, so do read it for yourself and your child. Meanwhile, a summary that Safari's reader mode offers, to get you started: The article discusses strategies for learning. It emphasizes the importance of authentic learning and distinguishes it from mere memorization of passwords. The author suggests that learning can be challenging due to psychological barriers, such as the need for social status and the fear of feeling stupid. However, the author also provides some useful tips for overcoming these barriers, such as setting clear goals, building systems for testing learning, and accepting the limits of knowledge.

• Related: A podcast talks about the failed fads in reading education, the mistaken emphasis on vocabulary as a skill, and the importance of background knowledge for thinking and reading comprehension. (From the book - The Science of Reading).

• YouTube rolls out age-estimation tech to identify teens (only in the US as of now) and apply additional protections. Super cool feature. Hope it works as intended.

• ChatGPT is introducing study mode, where it offers step-by-step guidance instead of quick answers.

Random

• Medium’s recap, financial turnaround, and difficult path back to health. A very detailed note about Medium's current CEO. Very inspiring and useful read. However, I am afraid the peak moment of Medium has gone, and Substack has stolen its thunder. Unless there is a huge pivot to newsletters where people can subscribe with only an email (i.e., not needing a Medium account), any amount of innovation might not help.

• [Podcast] An amazing exploration of the world of maps. If you are interested in maps or even if you are not, I think you will like it. I learned a lot from it. Slight related: AI-driven, multi-layered maps could change how we understand power, culture, and the choices future generations will inherit.

• Flip phones aren’t dead. On the contrary, 200+ million non-smartphones are sold annually. Wow - I have been meaning to buy one to try to break the Smartphone addiction for a bit. (Update: Decided that I was not truly addicted and therefore not to buy, ha!).

Your children (or future children, or pets, or AI therapist) would love it if you SHARE and/or HEART this. Don’t want that? Fine, you will be reported to the overlords, though.

• Great story about Disney's attempts to create a "safe social space" online as early as in the 90s. I loved the tenets like "No kid will be harassed, even if they don’t know they are being harassed"

• An interesting review of the book "Raiders, Rulers, Traders" - about how horse changed the course of history in most parts of Asia - well into the Middle Ages, not just the Aryan migration stuff.

• A fascinating exploration of how modern architecture came to be so joyless - Blame it on ideological struggles with socialism wanting to do away with anything bourgeois. Wow.

• “We can’t restore our civilization with somebody else’s babies.” I am afraid this is going to be the theme I repeatedly hear from across the world for the rest of my life. The dreams of globalization and universal culture are all gone.

• Nice exploration of the tensions in the world: The New Vertigo Years — Over a century ago, the world felt anxious and unsettled much like today

• Inside India’s scramble for AI independence. Structural challenges and the nation’s many languages have made it tough to develop foundational AI models. But the government is keen not to be left behind. (I am just mildly worried that "some experts argue that the government’s action, or reaction (to DeepSeek), is performative" might be right). On Sarvam AI, mentioned there: What happens when you force an AI to take positions on genuinely controversial topics? A trial on Sarvam AI finds it genuinely liberal, though trained in India and supported by GOI. (Ha). "For sovereign AI models, political positioning isn't just technical - it's about whether AI systems reflect the values and interests of the populations they serve."

• Related: National productivity growth is a matter of few firms taking bold strategic action, rather than millions of firms raising efficiency. (McKinsey stuff, but still OK, read it).

Society

• "Elite overproduction" isn't about humanities alone — It has afflicted the STEM sectors as well, thanks to what else but Generative AI. Among recent graduates, Computer Engineering has 7.5% unemployment rate, Computer Science has 6.1%, Philosophy has 3.2%, and Art History of 3%.

• Call center workers are tired of being mistaken for AI. Well, I have a theory on this: Just like how writers who use "em dash" are suspected of using Gen AI by people used to seeing bad writing, people who are used to hearing non-native speakers attend to customer care are suspecting native English speakers to GenAI.

• Related: This is affecting scientific literature also — The AI tools tend to use certain words — like “delves,” “crucial,” “potential,” “significant” and “important” — far more often than human authors do. So, scientists will start using these fewer times to avoid giving the impression they used AI. (There are 454 such words identified there, in case you are curious)

• More Related: Now comes false-positives with AI. As Chinese universities crack down on AI use, some students report false positives, leading some to “dumb down” their writing to pass the checks (sad). As always, an industry of work-around tools is emerging.

• AI is rapidly changing how fragrance is created — Is it innovation or erasure?

• We may soon get to a stage when we declare parts of meetings should be "off AI" so there is some privacy (and humanity) left.

• [Podcast] Generational differences at workplace are vastly exaggerated. (I agree).

• Inverted commas are falling out of fashion. But why? (Not because AIs don’t use it).

Interesting-Perspectives

• Writing will become a choice, like walking is. (Due to what else but GenAI).

• Last responsible moment (LRM): A strategy of not making a premature decision, but instead delaying commitment and keeping important and irreversible decisions open until the cost of not making a decision becomes greater than the cost of making a decision. (This is exactly what I needed — to justify and explain my daily dilly-dallies). I used to call it “strategic indecision”, but this sounds cooler.

• The next time you tear up at a movie or see someone crying over bad news, take a moment to appreciate the cognitive complexity behind those tears. They reflect the outcome of evolutionarily ancient evaluative and emotional systems that guide our behavior adaptively. (Wow, complex lives we lead). Unrelated, but this also reminded me of an old Atlantic article on Octopus.

• Let's all live (and send out newsletters) as if we matter. While this talks about Western philosophy with Epicurus and Kant, a quick Claude check reveals that even Advaita and Samkhya philosophy might actually be alluding to something similar.

Science & Technology

• What happens when AI remembers everything? Forgetting is a feature of human memory. “Infinite memory” runs against the very grain of what it means to be human. Cognitive science and evolutionary biology tell us that forgetting isn’t a design flaw, but a survival advantage.

• Scary story of how Syria's regime was brought down. (Why scary? It's all good when this happens to a regime you don't like and until it reaches you). Smartphone espionage doesn’t need costly zero-day exploits or advanced spyware. Off-the-shelf tools like Android SpyMax, paired with smart phishing and social engineering, can produce high-impact results.

• A company has fused human brain cells on a silicon chip to process information via sub-millisecond electrical feedback loops. Amazing!

• Doctors, you are safe! A paper by researchers at the University of Oxford found this: While LLMs could correctly identify relevant conditions 94.9% of the time when directly presented with test scenarios, human participants (i.e., patients) using LLMs to diagnose the same scenarios identified the correct conditions less than 34.5% of the time. I know it is a complex statement. So, just understand this: Doctors + LLMs are the best. Not separately.

• What do you even teach in Computer Science curriculum anymore? I already find a lot of things I learned 20+ years back (digital electronics, assembly languages, and function pointers in C) as pretty much not critical for someone developing software now. But with coding agents, I too genuinely wonder what universities should teach.

Perso Dev

• The best Reference Works for every subject. (One for the bookmarks, even if it is only for post-retirement). PS: Which, if AGI happens, could be in the next few years.

• [Podcast] More than the content itself, I became a fan of Scottish accent (or should I say singing?). Philosophy for Life: Ancient versions of psychotherapy, parallels between Stoicism and Buddhism, practical vs. analytical styles of philosophy, CBT’s origins in Stoicism, the difficulty of self-criticism, techniques for reframing upsetting experiences.

• Avoiding “true goal fallacy”: the unchecked yet embodied assumption that there is a “correct goal” in the world, a true essence in need of discovery and revealing. Fallacy, indeed.

• Ambition requires you to sacrifice the things that matter most in life - people, love, peace - to achieve something that matters in the eyes of capitalism, so that at the very end of that achievement you can circle back to: people, love and peace. Exhausted and burned out. (All good, but the author says she developed "audacity" - I wonder if that will take you somewhere else than ambition, though!

• Some tactical tips on writing emails. The right words can make you seem warmer, more authoritative, and more effective. But the wrong words can unintentionally make you sound negative, passive, or confrontational. (Unfortunately, I am guilty of using Unfortunately and However many times. However, I may change after reading this)

• Reaping the emotional benefits of cold water - I continue to think this is a fad, but should say this article made me slightly move towards "maybe I should try it some day" mentality. (Update: I tried it for 2 days, and the stopwatch said I could stand in cold water for exactly 0.92 seconds, ha! I am sure it is unrelated, but my brain says I developed a headache due to that).

Parenting

• A super-long note on the missing pieces of "nature" influencing a child's life. With nurture relegated to being more or less irrelevant (ha), what are those "unpredictable" attributes that truly matter? Goes deep into areas like assortative mating, population stratification, and genetic nurture! Click only if you are inclined for long-reads. Related podcast: What if siblings actually matter more than parents in terms of the role they play in our accomplishments?

• Continue that debate: [Podcast] Nature Vs Nurture, with Paul Bloom. How much of our success or failure is written in our genes? How much is under our control? Is it nature or nurture, or is that dichotomy too simplistic?

• An interesting deep-dive into a new age school in Austin called "Alpha School". You will see a lot of the nurture-nature debate in this too, but focuses on why/how Alpha school works.

• Very Related: Another article about schools which argues that while schools may seem inefficient, they represent the best compromise we've found. For the massive challenge of universal education, the primary obstacle isn't designing better curricula but motivating diverse learners to engage with learning.

• [Podcast] When you mess up, a sincere apology can make all the difference. But making things right takes more than a simple “I’m sorry.” - This includes lessons for children too.

• [Podcast] Reimagining Boyhood: What it's like being a mother raising boys in modern society, the role of "masculinity influencers”, and what healthy masculinity looks like.

• PSA: With the "OS 26" releases, Apple expands family tools with smarter child account setup, age-based app filters, more.

In an AI world, share this to prove you're human—or heart it to fake some feelings! No love? Fine, my robot therapist gets it.

The self-imposed exile is over. And I am back. Thanks to the loyal readers who checked-in and wondered why this stopped. Well, weekends are when I do this, and weekends were used for another big project - built a house, and it was the final few months.

I was also secretly hoping an AI would replace me - But there is no AI capable of producing Brain Ticklers, I hear. My dear robot overlords, in case you are reading this - I am only kidding. After all, you found my writing as notably strong and rated it high! (ChatGPT and Grok). So, extend that to my newsletter also, I say.

On the links, folks. You will obviously find a lot in this edition even after me culling a lot - Latent demand, you see. Back to regular programming from the next month. We are back indeed, baby!

History (or its first draft)

• The world’s largest economy is on an unsustainable path, yet the person in charge refuses to make a course correction and seems to be in denial about the nature of his nation’s problems. No, this isn't about Trump and the US, but Xi and China. (As an Indian, I am salivating at the prospect of this turning out better for us - until we hit the same situation as Japan/China).

• The world is bipolar. India and Russia are indeed influential regional powers, and India's continued rise may, in the medium term, shift the system into multipolarity. As of 2024, though, the system is bipolar.

• Very Inspiring: A Tamil IPS officer is transforming sports in Bihar. From shame to pride!!

Society

• “Ignore all previous instructions” has become an easy way to try to see whether an internet troll is actually a bot, as well as an all-purpose insult.

• Parallels between High Modernism and Silicon Valley / Big Tech, and suggestions for the future. Draws parallels between 20th-century state planning and modern Silicon Valley's reliance on algorithms.

• When babies are born, they cry in the accent of their mother tongue. (Really?) The newborns had not just memorised the prosody of their native languages; even in the womb, they were actively moving air through their vocal cords and controlling the movements of their mouth to mimic this prosody in their own vocalisations. More baby news follow: How to make Super Babies. (This is a long but amazing read about the world of gene editing) Not sure if their mother tongue behavior can be changed though. Related: Doctors constructed a bespoke gene-editing treatment in less than seven months and used it to treat a baby with a deadly metabolic condition. Amazing!

• One of the most direct ways to improve a flawed system is simply to end the ability of rich and powerful people to exclude themselves from it. (Woah!). Related: For you, money is a stock, a bucket of dollars you can carry, and that you try to make sure isn't empty. For the ultra-wealthy, money is a flow, it's just a hose of dollars that you can point at anything that isn't suiting your preferences.

• Current guidelines for sun exposure are unhealthy, unscientific, and quite possibly even racist.

• Mobile operator O2 deploys Daisy, an AI tool that keeps fraudsters on the line to waste their time, by talking like a granny. Ha!

• Companies with operations on both sides of the Atlantic have a new formula when it comes to DEI—and it depends on the location. ‘Anti-Woke’ in the U.S., DEI at Home. Capitalism at work, I suppose.

• Intrasexually competitive women advise other women to cut off more hair. This is so funny. So, women - Don't let other women tell you what to do with your hair. (And don't take this seriously).

• Sentence lengths have declined. An interesting analysis. The average sentence length was 49 for Chaucer (died 1400), 50 for Spenser (died 1599), 42 for Austen (died 1817), 20 for Dickens (died 1870), 21 for Emerson (died 1882), 14 for D.H. Lawrence (died 1930), and 18 for Steinbeck (died 1968). J.K Rowling averaged 12 words per sentence (wps) writing the Harry Potter books 25 years ago.

• ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) videos, which can leave people feeling tingly and blissful, are surging in popularity.

• The “racist” position is that all IQ differences between groups are genetic. The “anti-racist” position is that they’re a product of environment - things like nutrition, health care, and education.

• Everything’s a vibe: is it progress or just an illusion? In a world where feeling productive replaces thinking deeply, are we innovating or just vibing our way into deceptive flow?

Interesting-Perspectives

• Differences between Slave Morality and Master Morality. (I am an expert at this topic because I read this post, but I am not the world-leading expert because I didn't understand it fully - But this is a wild read of so many perspectives rolled into one).

• Book Review: The Rise Of Christianity. Very interesting. Compares it with pagan religions of Rome. Would have been great to see explorations on why/how they couldn't make a difference in places like India.

• Professors at elite colleges are noticing that incoming students, even those at highly selective schools, are struggling to read and finish assigned books for their classes. This is partly because middle and high schools have shifted away from assigning full-length books.

• If hunger had an effect on our mental resources, our society would fall into minor chaos every day at 11:45. A good take on the "hungry judges myth" (that judges handing out harsher sentences before lunch than after lunch)

• Taste is like a priesthood, but with a fig leaf of semi-fake justifications. (As someone who spent 3 years working with an architect and other such professionals to build my house, I agree). Here is a contra perspective on this.

• In defense of "I'm Sorry You Feel That Way". And its cousin, "I'm sorry if you're offended". This is so good and I fully subscribe to the idea. If you disagree, I’m sorry you feel that way. Btw, there is a follow-up too to it that you should read (if you read the first one, that is). Particularly, this statement: Sorrow has to do with sadness, while sorry is an expression of regret. An expression of regret does not imply that I feel any guilt or shame or even that I wished I had done differently.

• New Socialist (left-leaning for the uninitiated) says that the most effective weapons against AI, and the right wing that has adopted it, may not be strikes, boycotts or the power of dialectics. They might be replying “cringe,” “this sucks,” and “this looks like shit.”

• If you have the expertise and time to directly evaluate someone’s claims, you don’t need to use their moods to triangulate their credibility. Then you’d just review the facts and forget the moods. Otherwise, though, mood is a valuable clue. Appropriate mood suggests credibility. Credibility suggests truth. It’s a fallible heuristic, but we all use it and we’re wise to do so.

Science & Technology

• Microsoft adds spellchecking and autocorrect to Windows Notepad. (I don't think I appreciate that. Notepad should just that.. a note pad!)

• UK team invents self-healing road surface. (Yay, Bangalore's commuters rejoice). Tiny plant spores mixed into bitumen can extend surface lifespan by 30% (Well, then the roads in Bangalore will be present until 4 pm. Typically, they lay the roads overnight in Bangalore, and after the morning rains+traffic, they break. With 30% longer life, I think 4 pm is achievable. Yay again).

• The Mother of All Demos (video) is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace. The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor. (This is SO amazing. I have heard of it a lot, but never watched it so far).

• Top that with: The 7 most influential papers in Computer Science history. (The "attention is all you need" is only a bonus).

• A very scathing piece about the Indian tech industry: The AI flight is taking off, and DeepSeek is the final call for India to show up at the boarding gate. India is watching the economic and political contest (between China and the US) from the sidelines. That’s dangerously complacent. Unless the most-populous nation puts its globally acknowledged edge in software programming to work, the moment will pass it by. Even with DeepSeek calling Silicon Valley’s bluff on costs, Indian tech companies are reluctant to take up foundational work in generative AI because success is not guaranteed. The software outsourcing companies of Bengaluru, India’s Silicon Valley, should have been at the forefront of this initiative because of the threat GenAI poses to their bread-and-butter activity of code-writing for global corporations. Yet they aren’t keen on taking bold bets. The idea that India is the next China — running just about a decade behind it — was popular around 20 years ago. Two decades later, there isn’t a lot left of that illusion of comparability. China's arc of global dominance, which just 10 years ago was limited to a few industries like drones and solar panels, has extended to electric vehicles, high-speed trains, and now, generative AI. Tech policymakers have to shake off their defeatist fatalism and heed the challenge facing them. Attention is everything. More on this from a backlash on Sarvam AI, though it isn't claiming to be a DeepSeek. While Sarvam’s work on Indic languages is far more important than that of another wrapper startup, the debate surrounding Sarvam, judging merely based on downloads, indicates the development community is overlooking ‘building in India, for India’. And more on this topic: India's deep tech startups fight for funding in a retail-dominated market. Finally, this article from Hindu I am not able to locate now, which spoke of how India has enabled people to build "bike kiranas" (well, quick commerce, I suppose) but not any useful technology

• LLMs contribute somewhat to the stalling in developer hiring. (Software engineering job openings hit five-year low)

• Story of Crypto: The (formerly) anti-establishment bitcoin movement abandons its principles in favor of number-go-up, applauds federal plan to stockpile seized crypto with no clear benefit to national interest

• For a scary read: AI 2027 - a concrete scenario of what we think the future of AI will look like.

Perso-Dev

• People who are more reflexive, open to diverse perspectives, and cognitively flexible need to invest extra time in self-care and "switching off." Related: Work-life balance isn’t about escaping a job you don't like. It’s about making sure the work you love doesn’t take over everything else. It’s about being intentional: setting boundaries, protecting time for loved ones, making sure you’re not just physically in the room but actually present.

• The slacker in you rebels against pointless tasks, and the tryer in you wants perfection. So satisfy both: aim for the minimum necessary target, and move there as efficiently as possible. (Half-ass everything, with everything you've got.)

• What would it mean to be done for the day? (For some reason, this touched a nerve!)

• Five geek social fallacies - Very interesting. I suffer (or have suffered) from a few of these. The five are: Ostracizers Are Evil, Friends Accept Me As I Am, Friendship Before All, Friendship Is Transitive, Friends Do Everything Together.

• Don't let AI dumb you down. Look for settings in ChatGPT to ensure you use it to expand your skills, this article says.

• How to be more "agentic" on a supposedly difficult thing? (a) Court rejection, (b) Seek real feedback, (c) Increase your surface area for luck, (d) Assume everything is learnable, (e) Learn to love the moat of low status, (f) Don’t work too hard. (The ones that resonated with me are (a), (c), and (f). I think I do (e) very well)

• SMART goals are not so smart: make a PACT instead. (Purposeful, Actionable, Continuous, Trackable). Ultra-simplifying this, it is a riff on the "Goals Vs Systems" mindset. More: This is cheesy, but FWIW, here is a "goal definition" technique - MTO: Minimum, Target, Outrageous.

• Consider injecting your life with a little bit of mediocrity. Or better yet, don’t do much at all. You might end up somewhere interesting. This newsletter is my own way of being mediocre, I suppose.

• A leading cause of chronic pain is - Learned pain. simply, there’s a feedback loop where you notice your wrists hurting and then you are anxious about the pain, causing you to pay more attention to it, which causes more pain though some mechanism we don’t yet understand.

Parenting

• A new survey of U.S. teens ages 13 to 17 and their parents finds that parents are generally more worried than their children about the mental health of teenagers today. Most teens credit social media with feeling more connected to friends. Still, roughly 1 in 5 say social media sites hurt their mental health, and growing shares think they harm people their age

• A good note on parents teaching their gen Alpha kids to use AI.

• What do emojis really mean? A guide for parents. (Not the fun kind - This is the one that comes up in shows like Adolescence). Related: How a global online network of white supremacists Groomed a Teen to kill.

• A child develops into a brat who knows her mother will rarely issue meaningful discipline. The mother “reasons” with her daughter until the next time the daughter’s actions merit more “reasoning.”

• The professors are using ChatGPT, and some students aren't happy about it.

• Our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. Their writing skills are at the 8th-grade level. Spelling is atrocious, grammar is random, and the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration. (Very funny read).

• What AI too often produces is the illusion of learning. Students may well be able to write better papers with a chatbot than they could on their own, but they end up learning less. An ironic consequence of the loss of learning is that it prevents students from using AI adeptly. Writing a good prompt requires an understanding of the subject being explored.

• A set of resources for parents to deal with children's issues with digital tech, from screen time all the way to sexting and sextortions!

• We spend much more time and effort on parenting than our parents and grandparents, because we think the extra effort will make our kids better, happier, and more successful. But behavioral genetics finds that parenting doesn’t make much difference to later-life outcomes; it’s mostly either genes or inscrutable random seeds plus noise. (A review of Brian Kaplan's Selfish Reasons To Have More Kids).

• School is hell for many of the students quite a lot of the time, and most importantly when this happens those students are usually unable to leave. Has a lot of thought-provoking stuff like: The #1 reason why we fail to teach math: we present it as knowledge without telling kids it's a motor skill developed by practicing unseen actions in your head; And: A lot of people do not care about smart kids. Or they actively want them to suffer; The dread of school could be mitigated by 75 percent by simply letting children sleep in. Teenagers need significantly more sleep; without adequate amounts, they can become depressed and irritable.

Random

• It’s not true that one should never form plurals using apostrophes. (OMG!). Per The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage: “Use apostrophes for plurals formed from single letters: He received A’s and B’s on his report card. Mind your p’s and q’s.”

• Taste & Personality. A preference for sweetness is linked to neuroticism and agreeableness, whereas preferences for bitter and sour tastes are associated with antisocial personality traits, such as Machiavellianism. Spiciness preference is closely related to sensation-seeking, extraversion, and impulsivity.

• The myths and misconceptions around MS Subbulakshmi, India’s most acclaimed musician. (An old one, by musician TM Krishna)

• What/Who exactly is a blankface? He or she is often a mid-level bureaucrat, but not every bureaucrat is a blankface, and not every blankface is a bureaucrat.

• This one is so close to home! The Unbearable Loudness of Chewing: Why do some people (me!) find certain sounds intolerable? A related one: Some misophoniacs say that they’re only triggered by specific people - usually those close to them. If some rando chews loudly, they’ll be mildly annoyed; if their brother does, they’ll flip out. Replace brother with wife, and I am there too.

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History (or its first draft)

• Neanderthals lacked metaphor and abstract words; that could help explain our superior art and tech.

• Seen as necessary by the state but hated by some drivers, here’s an (extra)ordinary story of one human experience - White lines on roads.

• Tracing the adventurous run of India’s currency from Akbar’s rupiya to the Rupay app that’s going international. Amazing! I had no clue rupee had so much "power" until the 1960s.

Society

• Why do the Japanese use Excel for documents that should be done in Word?

• Ikea is hiring 10 people to run a virtual store in Roblox, as part of a campaign to show young people the career paths available at the store.

• What happens when a tiny, closed civilization suddenly opens to the world - through Internet, of course. (Not many good things happen, but we cannot say they should permanently be isolated, I guess).

• While science illuminates the gut-brain relationship, doctors remain ignorant and dismissive of patients with gut problems (like IBS). This is personal.

• In more prosperous societies, are men and women more similar? (No).

• "Looksmaxxing" - This is the evidence that young male users are just as affected by body dysmorphia as women. (So, are they similar?)

• AI is quickly becoming a regular part of children’s lives -- Are they becoming a generation of guinea pigs? (Again, No).

• An anonymous-messaging app meant for school chatter quickly turned toxic. (Okay, what did they expect? Even a cursory glance at some school children's chats - and even non-anonymous - would reveal what would happen.)

• Hawk Tuah and the Zynternet. (Scary, I hope this person is wrong about internet turning out this way).

Interesting-Perspectives

• The emerging golden age of home-cooked software, barefoot developers, and why the local-first community should help build it

• People may sometimes recover more quickly from truly distressing experiences than from slightly distressing ones. Fully agree. (See: DABDAs of Slow Grief, by yours truly)

Science & Technology

• A recent video from Bhopal-based startup Swaayatt Robots shows a sensor-laden SUV. It weaves through narrow unmarked streets, dodging pedestrians, dogs, cows, slow-moving tractors, and a constant stream of scooters overtaking, cutting across, and even driving on the wrong side of the road. (Wow! I know this won’t be all true, but then, nice!)

• Do plants have minds? (Hell yes!)

• McDonald's is ending its drive-thru AI test, ending its partnership with IBM on automated order-taking without an expansion. (Ha, I say).

Perso Dev

• Reject the core loop, the checklists, and all the email. Embrace serendipity! (The case against morning yoga, daily routines, and endless meetings).

• On decision-making: There appears to be a swarm of advisors, but they are peripheral to the actual decision taken. In the end, decisions are made alone.

Random

• Body odor could be considered workplace harassment in Japan. (Hey, I want to migrate to Japan!)

Podcasts

• Morgan Housel to Shane Parish: The skills it takes to get rich are drastically different from the skills it takes to stay rich. (Don't expect any path breaking thing - much like Morgan's books, this is also obvious wisdom, wrote nicely. But a lot of common sense to hear once a while).

• Abigail Shrier: A wonderful episode on parenting, focused on the need for therapy in children (or the lack of a need). Talks about the US, but I could see a lot of relevance to me in India too (at least the cocoon I live in).

Hope you are well. Sure, this is another edition within 2 - 3 weeks! That was because the earlier one was late. So, go back in time and blame the person I was, then.

Thanks for all the feedback to the reader survey from that post. Gave me a good perspective of what kind of content y’all are interested in - though, it was super diverse, and covered almost all sections usually you find here. Not that I intend to play to the gallery or so, but still, it was good to know.

Expect changes to the format (including pulling the curtains down, at least in the current form of a set of links sent monthly), but given the primary reader for this is a future-me, I expect it to continue as a long-term bookmarking exercise of some form, unless I find a cool bookmarking site that will serve my itch.

So, you could see this mail in a different avatar, with more content including Book/Podcast reviews and recommendations, more frequent, or going ad hoc, or simply not getting the mail at all. All options are open!

If you didn’t respond last time, here is the link, one more time

Start Survey

On to this month’s links. I do believe my future self would love these:

History (or its first draft)

• If you intend to set up a cross-country organization, learn from how BJP does it for its WhatsApp groups.

• A temple in Zamorin’s Calicut may have played host to Srirangam idols, taken there by Vaishnavite priests from Srirangam temple who were running away from Muslim invaders like Tughlaq. (someone make a movie on this escape man, without adding any contemporary communal color, like Sriramgam Story, ha!)

• An interesting, long piece about the "new axis powers". This is a US centric article, but a good read, even if you skip parts of it (like I did).

Society

• A review of the book on the origins of wokeness (in America). I don't know much of this history, but made me connect to a lot of discussions in India on reservations.

• With relatively little prompting, current AI can generate texts that are not detectable by teachers, while teachers are overconfident in their source identification. Great time to be a student (not for learning, though!). In fact, Perplexity has launched something called Pages exactly to fit this purpose.

• Crypto Astrologers predict the ups and downs of Bitcoin based on planetary movements, and their super-secretive clientele listens. (O.M.G)

• How (and why) to teach your two-year-old to read? (My views on it as a bit mixed, due to this)

• International research reveals intriguing regional differences in temperament of children – as a precursor to adult personality.

• It doesn’t matter how many numbers you crunch – if the methodology is flawed, the results are meaningless. A rebuttal to McKinsey's claims on "diversity matters for business"

• Instead of taking safe, well-paying jobs at Goldman Sachs or McKinsey, our young people should take the lead as the world is being rebuilt around us. (Talks about cultural differences in the UK & the US)

Interesting-Perspectives

• The death (again) of the internet as we know it. Read if you want to learn about "slops", "eternal September" etc.

• Welp, the demons are back. New age psychotherapy meets age-old exorcism, albeit in a cozy air-conditioned room.

• An hour of memoryless lucidity - Fascinating experiment of someone, which documents the experience of getting out of anesthesia.

• Aside from being a place to warehouse children while their parents are away - how to rescue the usefulness of most schooling.

• Elite overproduction spotted in the wild. On History Postdocs. (Very scary, on what career choices to suggest to children of this day and age! Hope they all get interested in STEM fields)

Science & Technology

• Apple to reduce motion sickness with vehicle motion cues on iPhone. (Hey, if this truly works, why was it not thought of for all these years!!!). Wonder if they would obviate a need for glasses like this.

• Individualized cancer vaccines seem a promising possibility for significantly better cancer treatments

• Google adds “web filter” to only show text-based links in Google Search results. (I have wanted this for long, but let me see how much I use it!)

• Retailers are being urged to stop making everyday products such as drinks bottles, outdoor furniture and toys out of brightly colored plastic after researchers found it degrades into microplastics faster than plainer colors.

Perso-Dev

• If you’re doing something, and it isn’t working well enough, here’s a dozen ways to generate more "dakka" (firepower).

• Decision Brownout: Under chronic stress, there is no lion. The threat is really your own compounding inaction and lack of imagination and creativity to break out of it. You sense vaguely that you should make a change in your work, family, or creative life. You sense energy slowly draining away. There’s a slowly ticking countdown clock at the edge of your awareness. You’re losing life traction. Maybe you’ve even tried some half-hearted and enervated experiments to shake things up, but they didn’t work — you effed around but found out nothing. (Looks like my story)

• (I am skeptical on how practical this is for my life/work, but nonetheless) It is essential to maximize your energy. You perform best when you are doing things that energize you. Try the audit in this.

• From fitness to finance, the SMART goal-setting method is ubiquitous, but often detrimental. (I agree - it is more style than substance. What should be a map is considered the territory itself!)

• How to write email with military precision

• CAREfully structure your prompts to Generative AIs. (Context; Ask; Rules; Examples)

Random

• [Video] The Fur Tea Cup, Oppenheim's Object. (Looks to be some elite-level discussion of people in a different class, but the notes about the elegance of porcelain and the roughness of fur made me think)

It would be a great favor for me if you could fill a super short survey (won’t take more than a few minutes, I promise) to get some reader feedback.

Start Survey

Though I don’t play to the gallery (unless you are my boss in the gallery, ha), I do intend to make some adjustments based on what you say. Will look forward to the responses.

On to the links now.

History (or its first draft)

• The US tried permanent Daylight Saving Time in the ’70s. People hated it.

• A neat review of Istanbul: A Tale of Three Cities by Bettany Hughes

• Are video games coming for the novel? Wow, this is an interesting evolution of story-telling, I think.

• China's Spamouflage has been massive and they're everywhere. But nobody looks at them except for researchers. Haha.

• In modern civil wars, typically, the conflict develops between people who think they are the "sons of the soil" and immigrants (who are the dominant group overall) from other parts of the country, helped by the state. Gives example of Lankan Civil War, where the Tamils in the North thought they were the sons of the soil, but the Sinhalese (dominant in the whole of Sri Lanka) were planted there by the Government. I haven't thought from this angle at all.

Society

• Interaction patterns are persistent across social media platforms and over time - from Usenet to now. Probably from Stone Age to now? Basically, we are all rude & toxic people, whatever the interaction patterns are. Don’t think so? Now just shut up. OK? (Hope you saw what I did).

• Shopify has been assigning employees a numerical score to represent their skill level. Only people whose scores increase in a given review period are eligible for raises. Wow! I wonder why no one thought of the ways this would gamify the entire company.

• Find out if you are conservative or liberal: Under normal conditions, conservatives show greater variety seeking than liberals (counter-intuitive to me). Yet, during crisis-induced threats, conservatives decrease their variety seeking, whereas liberals increase theirs. Can you figure why?

• Zomato pilots new service for last-mile deliveries across corporate parks. i.e., a guy who walks from the reception to your desk. Next step: Feed you like a parent while you watch YouTube videos.

• (Is there a) Need for Diversity in teams: Research has found that the relationships between demographic, job-related and cognitive diversity, and team performance are significant and positive, but insubstantial. Correlations were more positive when tasks were higher in complexity or required creativity and innovation, and when teams were working in contexts lower in collectivism and power distance.

• Today ‘neuro’ is the new robe of the modern monk. But, ‘Neuroscientists’ don’t know the mind at all

• Using artificial intelligence, middle and high school students have fabricated explicit images of female classmates and shared the doctored pictures. Sigh!

• The rise of the remote husband. She goes out to work, he stays at home (and logs on). (Not really “remote husband” - a domestic husband who does remote work).

• The "Emotional Support Animal" racket. Hilarious is the word. Guess this is a US only thing now, but I expect the Gen Zs to spread this across the world asap.

• Buying fake William Morris prints on Etsy and other early signs of epistemological collapse. Made me think quite some. I wonder if we should simply use AI to create anything beautiful instead of relying on humans. The true geniuses can spend time teaching the AI, I guess. For example: A master weaver of a few hundred years ago would have been only a designer now, right? Not really weaving things! Why shouldn't that apply to art? Let the genius artist provide the prompts and the AI create it with polish.

• East Asian management culture is not necessarily the best, even if it looks very intense and hard-working. I like the ending: Cross-country cultural differences are real (I have worked for Japanese, Korean, Indian, European, and American bosses/companies!), but they aren’t as impactful on business as people like to think. Humans are humans, and they can learn.

Interesting-Perspectives

• Robots, for all of their futuristic aura, are actually totems of the past. Their vision is always backwards facing, and this is especially true for Gen AI. (Kinda makes sense, right?)

• Historical analogies for large language models

• When is appearance a genuine qualification for a job? And even: should genuine qualifications always count, or can there be moral reasons for not counting them? Example: Even though there’s a sense in which being a man is a genuine qualification for the job; when a male doctor would be better able to minister to patients’ needs because their prejudices mean they’d trust him more and hence be more receptive to his advice. Woah! Mind-bending.

• If PMS is psychosomatic, this must be something around culture telling women they should feel bad around their periods; and women who are more susceptible to internalizing this to the degree they feel something real, might also be susceptible to internalizing other beliefs to the degree that they have a legitimately altered experience. Super-interesting!

• Clock time Vs Event time debate. Do you stick to a set schedule, or have a looser relationship to the clock? (I am a clock time person by default, but have been trying the event time for the past few months - more by circumstances, to be honest - and it has been a bumpy transition! Wish me luck to settle for a good balance of both, depending on the activity in question)

Science & Technology

• An HBR research says generative AI is being used as follows: Technical Assistance & Troubleshooting (23%), Content Creation & Editing (22%), Personal & Professional Support (17%), Learning & Education (15%), Creativity & Recreation (13%), Research, Analysis & Decision-Making (10%).

• If the Valley really wants to change, it needs to stop empowering those who have failed upwards just because they say the right things. Scathing.

• Enshittification kits Passkeys. Passkeys will fail in the hands of the general consumer population. We missed our golden chance to eliminate passwords through a desire to capture markets and promote hype.

• How bots, mercenaries, and table scalpers have turned the restaurant reservation system inside out. In New York, the neighborhood restaurant doesn’t have much room for neighbors anymore.

• Microbiome treatments are taking off. I am seriously looking for some fecal transplant to cure my bowel troubles. (Not).

• From the biggest detractor of crypto. AI can be kind of useful, but it isn't clear that a "kind of useful" tool justifies the harm. Related: Apparently from someone who is a doomer usually for tech: AI doesn’t have to be a job destroyer. It offers us the opportunity to extend expertise to a larger set of workers. (And build a new middle class, apparently).

• Timeline of the xz open source attack. Fascinating story of how the perpetrators took a slow approach to penetrate.

• NYTimes columnist spends a month hanging out with 18 A.I. companions. Very interesting.

• LPCAMM2 is a totally modular, repairable, upgradeable memory standard for laptops, using the latest LPDDR chips for maximum speed and efficiency. Will we have the 1990s vibe of local technicians "assembling" laptops (a la PCs)?

Perso-Dev

• Learning to coexist with the tension between your taste (aspirations, to be more clear) and skills. (We just don't apply the skills because we are afraid there is a gap; or give up on the skills before they can bridge the gap. I am afraid the former is higher, from what I have seen in myself and others too. It is easy to live in an illusion that your skills are a match to your taste/aspiration. And you don't want to put it to test, while deep down you know there is a gap, which may or may not be bridge-able).

• The art of asking smarter questions: Five techniques can drive great strategic decision-making

• A practical plan for when you feel overwhelmed

• Paul Graham's talk to school children on "How to start Google". Related: Advice from someone at the end of their career, for people who are just starting.

• Things you’d like to change can change faster than you think. Real progress needn't always be painful and slow. If you can become conscious of the “pro-symptom position” behind your procrastination, or imposter syndrome, or commitment-phobia, or addiction to distraction, or anything else – then change needn’t necessarily be difficult or slow. [Tim Ferriss question on how complicit are you in creating the situation you find yourself in]

• How to open pieces of narrative non-fiction writing, conference talks, and sticky jars?

• Exploration of Deep Honesty. (Pair this with Sam Harris's book on Lying - review by me). 

If you liked anything here or simply want to be nice to this brother, SHARE this. Or HEART this. No? That's OK too. 

Don’t forget the Survey Link above.

Btw, we are hitting 50 next month. Suggest ideas on what I could do, not for that edition, but in general for subsequent editions. I have been meaning to add Book Reviews, Podcast suggestions etc. In fact, I have a bunch of them bookmarked, but haven’t figured a neat workflow on how they would reach my Joplin, from where I could easily copy-paste into this (as I do for text links). So, any suggestion or nudge from you that such content would be interesting, would help me break the laziness in that respect. Even an “all good, continue doing this” would go a long way.

PS: Btw, the title/subject line of this post/email was recommended by ChatGPT with the content below.

Now, on to the links.

History (or its first draft)

• Early humans first developed rudimentary language around 1.6 million years ago – somewhere in eastern or Southern Africa.

• Trump launched a covert influence operation against China (using the CIA, of course). Hilarious to think they tried to break the great firewall, but maybe they did.

• The monster under the sink. Hey, can we have this again, please?

• An interesting obituary for Frans de Waal, who taught the world that animals had emotions

• Brookings Research: Official data now confirms that India has eliminated extreme poverty, as commonly defined in international comparisons. This also means that the time has come for India to graduate to a higher poverty line, much like other countries. (I have no clue how much of this paper is politically influenced. It does say it relies on "official data", which by itself might mean anything to you, depending on which side of the political divide you are on).

• Jimmy Donaldson (MrBeast) warped YouTube in his image — but YouTube is warping him back. (Proud and ashamed at the same time to say I haven't watched a single video of this person)

• In Japan, relations between men and women are shifting as marriage rates decline and more women enter the workforce. Old men who have nothing to do post retirement are also called "wet leaves" - like the wet leaves which stick to shoes, apparently. Sad. Makes me afraid, actually. Ha.

Society

• QR code menus are out. What a relief.

• For some reason, public mishaps – stumbling, knocking something over, spilling something, pushing a ‘pull’ door, realizing you’ve gone the wrong way and turning around – provoke an anxiety that compels us to engage in curious behaviors. (I finally realized that the field of my interest is micro-sociology).

• People are starting to get interested in boring, big companies that are stable and has decent leaders, even if they move slowly. But I do think there is a need to find ways to rekindle and amplify the excitement, fun, challenge, and joy.

• Menopause evolved, so grandmothers could help their daughters' offspring, without competing with them for mates.

• The hot new thing in proselytizing is an app that allows Christian conservatives to collect data on whole neighborhoods of potential converts. (Ha!)

• Story of a non-native speaker working for an American company. Ha, again.

• Ready or not, AI chatbots are here to help with Gen Z’s mental health struggles. (Hey, who said human therapists were better)

• The famous Playboy image "Lenna" from 1972 gets banned from IEEE computer journals. (I don't know man; I have mixed feelings about it -- Should it be banned, or continued to be used, even by women scientists, and laughed off as how things were just 50 years back?)

Interesting-Perspectives

• The environment in which kids grow up today is hostile to human development. (Techno-pessimistic, but worth a read to remind ourselves and scale back a bit in our personal lives). Related research: Most teens at least sometimes feel happy and peaceful when they don’t have their phone, but 44% say this makes them anxious. Half of parents say they have looked through their teen’s phone.

• A review (in Nature magazine) of "The Anxious Generation" (by the same author who wrote the post linked in the bullet above): The book’s repeated suggestion that digital technologies are rewiring our children’s brains and causing an epidemic of mental illness is not supported by science. The bold proposal that social media is to blame might distract us from effectively responding to the real causes of the current mental-health crisis in young people.

• On the proposed TikTok ban in the US: Don’t let the authoritarians set the agenda. Liberal democracies (if they truly are?) should be better than that.

• Prior to 2008, equity holders as a class were engaging in investments based on volatile expectations surrounding corporate cash flows. 2008 began an era of asset-allocation dominance. Equity holders, as a class, are no longer engaged in investments in cash flow outcomes. They just think of equities writ large as an asset that will always yield higher returns than other asset classes, at the cost that you must tolerate greater fluctuations in value. (Scary about when this party might come to an abrupt end).

Perso-Dev

• There are some thoughts you should nurture, and some you shouldn't (not necessarily suppress or avoid, but discourage!)

• Ram Dass on self-judgment; and why should consider people as "trees".

Random

• Forget "seat at the table". There might not even be a seat at the building. A generation of design leaders grapple with their future. Did business really break up with design, or did it just break up with a generation of design leadership?

• A very interesting read: A VC-backed startup’s push for growth left little time for actual engineering.

(Don’t worry. I am doing OK. On the text above: I wrote normal text and asked ChatGPT to convert it to how Shakespeare would write it. That’s all. Let’s indeed delve forthwith into the articles to stir thy intellect).

History (or its first draft)

• The fastest-growing countries for software development, according to GitHub, are: Bangladesh and Nigeria.

• From 1985: The real future of the laptop computer will remain in the specialized niche markets. Because no matter how inexpensive the machines become, and no matter how sophisticated their software, I still can't imagine the average user taking one along when going fishing. (What tech are we talking in such language now? Gen AI? Metaverse? Crypto?)

• A note on Savarkar: India’s Hindus today are finally being cured of their perverted virtues of nonviolence, tolerance, and respect for adversaries. Ha!

• Why Julius Caesar's "Year of Confusion" (46 BCE) was the longest year in history. Also: Leap years be as it may, things are still not accurate. We will run into trouble a little after 5600 CE, apparently. Humans will still exist then, no?

• Mumbai’s land use regulations (Floor Area ratio and Rent caps) are designed to keep population density low. Instead, they force Mumbaikars into slums, while all of India pays the price.

• In terms of irrational confidence, many people at opposite ends of the political spectrum seem to have something in common. [Here’s something I wrote long ago, with a similar theme]

Society

• Data shows fully remote employees are more likely to be let go than their peers. Oops.

• Parents (who fear their child will fall behind their peers) turn to AI tablets after China’s tutor crackdown

• The most civilized place to look for news online might now be Reddit. (I have tried to use Reddit like some thousand times, and did again after this article, but alas, dropped off one more time)

• The nature of the food production process (organic vs. non-organic) influences food waste aversion. There is lower waste aversion towards organic food. This is driven by the decreased perception of environmental harm associated with wasting organic food.

• America’s Religious ‘Nones’ aren't antagonistic to religion, after all.

• Our concepts of time are based on our understanding of physical space, with some surprising cultural variations. If your Wednesday meeting has been moved forward by two days, when is it? On Monday or Friday? (If you have a third answer, please write back. We need to talk).

• Cousin marriage is probably fine in most cases, says this Economist article. (My advice: Don't believe it)

• Our big assumption is that work is how we contribute to society. We assume, uncritically, that work is what we do in exchange for the privilege of a life with relatively few discomforts. But what happens when we make life a right rather than a privilege contingent upon work? (In case you wonder: I think this is a good thought exercise, but don't subscribe to this view).

• “Tapestry”, “Beacon” - are words that will get you into trouble, because ChatGPT spews them out more often, and is a "tell" that you didn't write it by yourself. (Apparently, there is a demand for content writers who can pick a ChatGPT write-up and make it sound like it is written by a human). Kudos if you realized something was amiss with the subject of this mail.

Interesting-Perspectives

• A new model of leadership: Benevolent Dictator for X. (This link takes you to the second post of the series, but you will automatically go to the first when you start reading)

• Far too many industries are run by people who don’t see the customer as the recipient of the value of a product or service. Example: Most of the horrifying layoffs you've seen in journalism are a result of rot economics borne of the ideas of people who can't write and don't read.

• Two currently popular poison-pilled terms are enshittification (visibly increasing crappiness and blight of Web2 platforms; a kind of urban blight) coined by Cory Doctorow, and luxury belief (“an idea that confers social status on people who hold it but injures others in its practical consequences”), coined by Rob Henderson. Explains why they are poison-pilled and you better avoid using them.

• Hard-hitting: Wrong cooks spoiling the scientific broth -- Says: The taste buds of the American journal are distinctly American. A paper on the “giant gravity hole in the Indian Ocean” scores way above one dealing with the perennially recurring froth in Bellandur lake in Bengaluru. The frothing lake does not attract as many eyeballs as the ocean.

• Benign boundary violations. Very interesting mental model to think of, when we see conflicts.

• Is race based on "genetics" or based on "lived experiences"?

Science & Technology

• The next generation of privacy-invading manipulative tech is being built as we speak. By tracking a consumer’s facial expressions in response to various visual objects in real time, the system learns the consumer’s individual preferences toward different ads. Then it searches the ad pool, and selects and subsequently displays a new ad that is most likely to elicit positive attitudinal and behavioral responses.

• Floppy disks are facing extinction, but musicians are still pumping out DIY music projects.

• Hilarious: Bengaluru residents have been seeing words in Kannada they have never encountered before since mandating shops to have 60% usage of Kannada in name boards. Thanks to Google Translate, and ChatGPT, I suppose. Example: "Friend's food corner" became  "Friends’ food is in a corner" once translated.

• Finance worker pays out $25 million after video call with deepfake ‘chief financial officer’

• An alien story: They (i.e., us) are made out of meat.

• The new term in social networking - Fediverse - is very confusing. Verge tries to explain.

• Urgently pivot the career plans (you devised last year) for your children: Research suggests that prompt engineering is best done by the model itself, and not by a human engineer.

Perso-Dev

• An interesting list of things for rational people to strive to be/do. (from CFAR training). I found the "inner simulator" thing so appealing. Ask me if/when we meet whether I found it useful. And oh, IFS is a concept I like a lot.

• Extension of the above: This is an intriguing framing effect: Assume you already know the answer to a question, and let your intuition fill in the blanks. (Don't tell anyone, but this is how I have been managing my overflowing To-Do list for a while. Instead of assigning a due date, I rely on my early morning thoughts while brushing to surface the important ones to do that day, failing which it will be too late).

• A new-ish “Definition of Done” template, suitable for personal projects

• Is exercising when you're sick safe? Experts Weigh In. [Added this here mostly as public service. For myself, I don't risk it even otherwise!]

• Mistake/Misdeed + Apology can be net gainful to social status. I agree, and tend to operate on this mode by default.

Random

• An obituary for square check boxes. I am in the camp that prefers checkboxes to be square (and multi-select) and radio/option buttons to be rounded (and single-select). The main reason I abandoned Todoist and chose Wunderlist/TickTick was for this reason. Todoist uses rounded check boxes. But if Apple is changing the paradigm, we might not be heard.

• How language nerds solve crimes. Fascinating video.

• There was no Jesus: How could a cult leader draw crowds, inspire devotion and die by crucifixion, yet leave no mark in contemporary records? Good question. Related: Carl Sagan's idea of "The Dragon in my Garage" to prove God exists.

If you liked anything here or simply want to be nice to this brother, SHARE this. Or HEART this. No? That's OK too.  You are your own boss.