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

Omawrite

Heard DHH mention this on Lex Fridman's podcast

AI is NOT guzzling water!

Posting for reference: the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory estimates 2023 US data centre water withdrawal at 66bn liters (17.4bn gallons). With all this investment, that might triple in the next few years. Big number! But total US freshwater withdrawal is 102tr gallons a year. Data centres were about 0.017% of total US water withdrawal. This can be a local planning issue, if you build in the wrong place. But the idea…

Sonder

“Poetry is the language that sits really close to feelings that defy language.”

When everyone take the fastest route

This is a clever paper. I didn’t know this. I mean, it seems obvious once you hear it, but I didn’t know it. Reading this reminded me of something I heard someone say, maybe Liv Boeree or someone like that, on a podcast. She said something to the effect that individual rationality can lead to collective irrationality.…

The rise of agentic commerce

Grok bot can now buy things for you

Small language models are all we need

This is an interesting post on small language models, and I completely agree. For most tasks people have, whether in an organizational setting or in a personal capacity, frontier or large models are overkill. It's like using a chainsaw to slice a piece of bread. Most of our everyday use cases, inside a company or…

How does the preference for sons impact the mental well-being of women in rural India?

The researchers surveyed a sample of married women of reproductive age and their co-residing mother-in-law in Jaunpur district, Uttar Pradesh. When there was more than one daughter-in-law in the household, they included the youngest woman. They collected socioeconomic and demographic data, as well as information on mental health using a survey that screens for the risk of depression and anxiety. They found the strongest…