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

I got some links for you

The German chemist Felix Hoffmann (1868–1946) famously synthesized two drugs: aspirin, one of the most widely beneficial drugs ever, and heroin, one of the most harmful of illegal substances. These two drugs represent the efforts of late-19th-century chemists to create new substances that could be used as medicines, not just to isolate active ingredients from natural products or to imitate them. One approach toward this end…

Agentic payments are coming to UPI

India is preparing a framework that would let AI agents make small digital payments without approval for every transaction, three sources familiar with the matter said, potentially making UPI one of the world's largest networks with agentic payments. While leading payment companies have launched such frameworks in the U.S., Europe, Singapore and Australia, a rollout on the popular Unified Payments Interface would also put…

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