Short read: Debugging: Google requests permission to release 32m mosquitoes in California and Florida
Silicon Valley gets a lot of flak for monopolising businesses and profit mongering. But they do use their technological prowess to solve some of humanity’s pressing problems. Google stands out among them. Its’ parent Alphabet has invested in several initiatives, most notably its AI subsidiary Deepmind which came up with protein structure prediction which opens […]
Short read: An Overlooked AI Trade…
Praetorian Capital is a hedge fund run by Harris Kupperman, who also writes this wonderful investment blog called Kuppy’s Korner. His blog titled ‘Global crossing reborn’ went viral last year as he likened the current hyperscalers’ mad rush to spending hundreds of billions on AI data centers to the spend on telecom and networking infrastructure […]
Short read: How lovingly curated independent bookstores are helping reading culture grow in India
You can judge a city by its bookshops. The lack of bookshops in East Delhi or suburban Mumbai speaks of an urban landscape where people are so engrossed in day-to-day survival that visiting a bookshop is a luxury they can’t afford. On the other hand, the multitude of excellent bookshops in central Bangalore speaks of […]
Long read: How Metrics Make Us Miserable
“What cannot be measured cannot be managed or improved upon” is a common mantra we hear often, not just in the professional context but also among fitness enthusiasts with wearables measuring everything from glycaemic index to sleep quality. But there’s also the good old Goodhart’s Law which states that “When a measure becomes a target, […]
Long read: Being creative requires taking risks
This is a superb essay on how the normal course of life wrecks our creativity and with that our chances of doing something useful in life. The author, Henrik Karlsson, used to be a programmer and then worked in an art gallery. Now he & his wife Johanna live “on a windswept island in the […]
Long read: In Delhi’s Scorching Heat, Its Poorest Women Are Back To The Chulha
If you haven’t visited Delhi in April-May in recent years, you have missed out on experiencing 50 degree Celsius. While office bound folks like us are reduced to little more than panting dogs by Delhi’s summer heat, there are millions of individuals across north India who have bear even more intense heat combined with smoke […]
What Goes into the Making of a Data Center?
An AI datacentre has 6 components: compute (the GPUs that do the thinking), power infrastructure (transformers, substations, backup generators), cooling systems (liquid cooling is now mandatory), networking (the high-speed pipes connecting thousands of chips), storage (where data and models live), and the physical building itself. Every single one of these categories is simultaneously in short […]
Short read: A Cold Shower for AI Mania
Former RBI governor and professor at University of Chicago, Dr Raghuram Rajan weighs in on the AI mania in this piece for the Project Syndicate. Whilst he begins by acknowledging with the power of AI and the inevitably of its ubiquity, he expresses worry about the massive amounts of debt being used to build AI […]
Short read: Why AI can’t replace human writing—it’s about exercising one’s mind and that can’t be outsourced
This year’s Commonwealth short story prize ran into rough weather as it was found out that its winning entry was likely created with heavy use of AI. Whilst many of us routinely use AI to write memos at work and elsewhere, here is Nandini Nair putting the idea of writing in its true context. “What […]
Short read: Ice baths, almond milk and meditation: The secrets of Mo Salah’s success
Mohamed Salah from Nagrig, a remote village in Egypt, kicked off his career kicked off his career at “Al Mokawloon Al Arab, travelling nine hours a day by bus, from the age of 14, for training in Cairo.” By the time you read this piece, Salah would have finished his career at Liverpool Football Club […]
Long read: The SpaceX IPO and Data Centers in Space
Bubblesayers believe most stock market bubbles are often pricked by an IPO of a large iconic company at seemingly absurd valuations. If the current AI fuelled rally in tech stocks is indeed a bubble, there is an upcoming IPO that meets the definition of a bubble-top IPO to the T – Elon Musk’s SpaceX slated […]
Long read: The Ethiopian running secret
Michael Crawley is an award-winning author and social anthropologist based at Durham University, UK. He is also the author of “To the Limit: The Meaning of Endurance from Mexico to the Himalayas” (2024). Geoff Burns is a sports physiologist for the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee and a faculty member at the University of […]
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