Hi, I’m Bhuvan.This is my commonplace book.

What GDP Doesn't See

“GDP per capita turns out to be a handy and available proxy.”

There is still Alpha to be had in good training data.

Post-Training PipelineIn this release, we refrain from introducing novel post-training algorithms. The overall recipe follows the standard paradigm of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) and on-policy distillation (OPD) [Gu et al., 2024; Lu and Lall, 2025], without algorithmic modifications beyond well-established practices. Instead, our efforts are concentrated almost entirely on what the…

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Vision is surprisingly good

I was just testing DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on a bunch of vision tasks with old book pages, and it’s not bad at all. It had issues with some Sanskrit type and diacritic-heavy text, but it still managed reasonably well. And considering the cost, it’s pretty impressive. During off-peak hours, the API is dirt cheap. That…

We are the stories we tell

"To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they could unwittingly help along the psychic destruction of their people." [1, 2]

Sweden's crime problem

Gunnar Strömmer, Sweden’s justice minister, calls gang crime “a systematic threat to society” on a par with or above that posed by terrorism. On a visit to Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city, he notes that almost a year has gone by since a deadly shooting there. So bad was the country’s reputation that politicians in neighbouring Denmark and Norway talked about “Swedish conditions” as shorthand for everything they did not want…

Feelings that defy language

Post type: A very in-the-moment stream of consciousness, voice-typed and lightly cleaned up with ChatGPT. Language is probably one of the greatest inventions of mankind. I don’t think there would have been civilization, at least not in any recognizable form, without our ability to speak to one another, communicate,…

India after Gandhi

I often tell my friends that I'm white at heart because I know far more about American and European history than Indian history, and it's a shameful fact that I'm working to fix. One of the books I bought a while ago was Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi, which I hadn't got around to reading. I finally picked it…