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

I got some links for you

So yeah, had we gotten hit with Dean, Ghemawat, Vinyals, and Le – followed by Hassabis (even yes, with him technically staying, but in a new, less day-to-day role), it would have actually seemed even more catastrophic. Like Google couldn't stop the bleeding. Better to rip the band-aid off, perhaps? Regardless, it's still an optics nightmare. I mean, these people were just on stage together a couple months ago talking about…

Treat your reading list like a river

There's definitely a role for such techniques; but in the end, the only way to deal with a too-many-needles problem is to confront the fact that it's insoluble – that you definitely won't be fitting everything in. (Of course some such problems, where just scraping a living feels impossible, demand political solutions too – a topic for another time.) It's not a question of rearranging your to-do list so as to make space for…

Muffled whispers and hidden vistas

One of the topics that has been incredibly alive in all of my conversations over the last few years is authenticity. This theme has accelerated meaningfully in recent weeks.1 Hundreds of people that I speak to are stuck at their desks doing something that they know is ultimately pointless, but do so out of a fear of presenting their own authenticity to the world. As a result, they keep manifesting lives devoid of the one…

How China Escaped the Poverty Trap is free to read

Yuen Yuen Ang is one of the most thoughtful commentators on all things China, and everything she writes—including her books—is a must-read if you wish to understand the phenomenon that is China. She just made her book, How China Escaped the Poverty Trap, free and openly downloadable. As I've mentioned, I have an…

Google DeepMind model can predict cyclones

Today, in a paper published in Nature, we show that our WeatherNext AI model achieved state-of-the-art accuracy in predicting a cyclone's track, intensity, and wind structure. On average, our model gives forecasters an extra day’s worth of predictive accuracy: our three-day forecasts are as good as what prior models were able to provide for only the next two days. This scale of improvement corresponds roughly to a decade’s…

A reader for the classical Greek and Latin canon

This is pretty cool

Innovation is a random lottery