Archive
All 278 ideas in the garden
2026
Large language models (LLMs) are index funds
LLMs are like index funds. You get beta of humanity.
Library in the wild
The world needs more Chinnathambis.
Misunderstanding China's ambitions
Too distracted, too bored, and too stupid to care?
We don't give a shit about anything anymore because we are bored, distracted and getting dumber by the second in the flickering shadow of the screen.
The brutal economics of music streaming
Spotify is fucked, or so this piece tells me.
Use the damn tools and then judge
Terrence Tao on AI
This is a wonderful interview.
AI-powered power review
AI will make research a whole lot better.
Cognitive war
China's cognitive war on the west?
Jeremy Siegel on an AI Apocalypse
Jeremy Siegel says there will be no AI apocalypse.
The physical limits of AI
The physical bounds on AI.
The stupidty of luxury goods
Why Is Fertility So Low in High-Income Countries?
There are no solutions. There are only trade-offs
Parody is now reality
AI as an excuse to fire people
I think Altman is right. Many companies are using AI as a excuse to fire people.
Another dodgy self help guru?
A few musings on self help.
Nate Silver on the political impact of artificial intelligence (AI)
Nate Silver has some prescient thoughts on the fallout of AI if all the advertisements about the tech indeed come true.
Chesterton fences everywhere
How India gives
India give about ₹54,436 crores to charity.
Trump's stupid trade war takes a stupid new turn
The US Supreme Court rules that Trump's tariffs are illegal. Trump decides to double down.
Geopolitical survival guide
Nic guide on navigating geopolitical volatility by Joachim Klement.
A promise is a direction taken
An AI reading companion
A simple app to read eBooks with an AI reading companion by the side.
AI-assisted coding is the new entertainment
Technology saturated beings
The fundamental problem is complicity
What the Epstein saga exposes.
Iain McGilchrist on attention
What it truly means to pay attention to something.
Go to the limits of your longing
What a beautiful poem.
We are all unhappy wanderers
An emotional wreck
I loved this interview of Daniel Radcliffe
Social media bans are hard to enforce
Social media platforms are easy to ban but it's hard to enforce the ban.
Simone Weil is awesome
Going down the rabbit hole of learning more about who Simone Weil is.
Things we lost in the fire
What we gain and what we lose when AI writes all our code.
We don't know how it all works
Nobody knows everything.
Build something you care about and benefits others
Zena Hitz on great books.
Pratap Bhanu Mehta on the India-US trade deal
We no long even pretend with the pretense of fairness.
The shadowy world of abandoned oil tankers
Big spike in abandoned oil tankers.
A moderately ambitious India
India is in a no risks, only maintenance mode.
Be alone!
In praise of solitude.
Big tech capex numbers are ridiculous
Big tech companies are on track to invest $600+ billion in capex for AI capabilities build out.
LLMs are bad at solving math problems not in their training data
Predictions are hard
Predictions are hard, especially about the future.
My adventures in vibe coding
I feel like a kid in a candy store thanks to AI coding tools.
People were, are, and will be dumb
Stupidity is Lindy.
Introducing small web
A small corner on the internet to discover wonderful writing.
Kimi 2.5 is as good as Sonnet 4.5, ChatGPT O3 and Grok 4
Open source models are almost as good as frontier LLMs
Normie AGI is here
Artificial general intelligence (AGI) for normal people is here.
Toni Morrison on evil
Will Storr on smartphones
Human psychology is eminently hackable.
159 years of momentum investing
The momentum effect is real.
Age of anxiety
Are we ready to deal with the age of grievances we're heading into? I don't think so.
Psychoanalysing Dario Amodei
John herrman on Dario Amodei's recent essay.
The future of work
Good perspective on how AI is changing the nature of work on different types of organizations.
Coding is automated, vision is not
Vibe coding vs automatic programming
Finland considers social media ban for kids under 15
Finland is looking to follow Australia in banning social media access for kids.
Great mystery, teach me how to trust my heart
I have always felt alright in my company
What does it mean to translate something?
A good post on what does it mean to translate a literary work.
new age bribery
New age shitty bribes.
Paul Goodman's anatomy of silence
Some interesting facts
Some weird, wonderful, and depressing facts.
Unintended consequences
Do markets make people moral?
Yes but...
The murderous robots are coming!
A considered life
The world needs a ginormous amount of copper
Robert Friedland on how much copper the world needs.
Post-AI world scenarios
Vibe coding is like gambling
Rachel Thomas takes a shot against vibe coding by comparing it to gambling.
China's dominance is nuts
Feel the AGI!
We need to think about the welfare of digital minds
What factors enabled China to dominate so many critical industries?
Electric vehicles are reducing pollution
Fuck you money
Money may not make you happy, but it makes you free.
The coming of the robots is delayed
To know is to be assured of defeat
A short intro to Baruch Spinoza's philosophy
Dare to feel
Flimsy beliefs
The defining question of our times: "Who are you without your job?"
What fills the work shaped hole in us in a post-work world?
The fault in our precious metals
O ye of little hope
On the dangers of too much cynicism
How to write a good spec for AI coding agents
A great guide on how to use AI agents to build good software. Although this is for developers, there are plenty of takeaways of normies as well.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are no longer just next word predictors.
LLMs are no longer predicting the next word. They've left you behind in their dust, you puny human.
Orchestrating is the new doing
AI agents will change the way we work.
Suffering from prosperity
Things are so good that we can't bear it.
Can books teach you anything?
On reading classics
Using Obsidian with an AI assistant
Useful video on how to use Obsidian with Gemini
We are living in wild times
On the magic of conjuring software with plain English, voice-writing blog posts over filter coffee, and why I still can't wrap my head around these times.
What drives us
The whole is not the sum of its parts
China derangement syndrome
Influentists
The past is the present
The future of AI and automation
You don't know much
On AI regulations
On AI coding
Small tyrannies
The Bullshit job apocalypse
Yeah, sure, AI is useless
The virtual co-workers are here?
The future of coding
Open source voice transcription tools
Automation is a moral imperative
The short-termism in our stars
Best of times and worst of times for cognitive peasants
AI is killing software jobs
If you can describe it, you can solve it
All habits are hard work
On AI and job automation
Ben Thompson makes an optimistic case for AI
Code is now content
I dwell in possibility
A Psalm of Life
Emotional returns vs financial returns
Neo-gangsterism
Writing as a way to converse with yourself
Now is the time for fun
The future of work
We're all unique protons and electrons
2025: The year LLMs felt real
Gitanjali 48
Industrial-scale production of software
Wild times in AI land
2025
AI and the compression of everything
On the joys of writing
You can just do things
Reflections on Scott Belsky’s Predictions
Building at the speed of thought
Skyfall post-AI world edition
Welcome to the slopocalypse
Intellectual bacchanalia
Gitanjali 3 by Rabindranath Tagore
Why write
Summoning Ghosts: Why You Need to Try AI Coding Tools
Another lament for literature
G.K. Chesterton on miracles
Self improving systems are not possible
Why AI is not a bubble
A dumb model of AI
AI is overdelivering
Claude Code is awesome, but terribly named
The debt part of the AI cycle
Some non-advice advice
Preserving India's artistic heritage
We are a collection of particles but...
Blogging is good for your soul!
The case against superintelligence
AGI for normal people is here
Predictive AI > Generative AI
The digital world is the only escape
We are summoning ghosts with LLMs
My little heart
Be human
AI coding tools keep getting better and better
LLMs as your reading partner
On China and chips
Vibe engineering
Ads everywhere
Poor countries are not catching up with rich countries
László Krasznahorkai's Nobel Prize lecture
An unified theory of vibes
Links for later
How to read more
Monkeys are really good at predicting electoral winners
We're are all unoriginal
How much knowledge has been lost
Learn some philosophy
Virtue cannot be known without knowing vice
Charlie Munger on dealing with setbacks in life
The future of global trade
Oral traditions in India
Ah, but is not this a glorious time for your deep inward fires?
How many jobs can AI kill
Take big shots
AGI will be business as usual?
What to expect when expecting
Did we get evolution wrong?
Evil by Arthur Rimbauld
Reading as escalation
Leviathan by George Oppen
AI as a research partner
Human nature will never change
The guy who financed Johannes Gutenberg
AI blind spot
Dhwani: A directory for Indian public domain works
Invention of modernity
Post-cognitive world
Can AI eliminate information advantages
Economic impact of AI
Institutional impact of AI
Don't want to die? Drink coffee
The value of asking right questions
AI-powered invoice fraud
The value of education in the shadows of AI
Brian Eno on being pretentious
AI is kicking your butt; just accept it
On having a philosophy of money
Fun is a skill
Rousseau on reflection and reason
Here come the robots
The prerequisites for scientific progress
China is playing long games
Naked without values
On ritual
You never know when the carousel stops spinning
For A Cynic by Countee Cullen
On hope and despair
On billionaires and the ultra-wealthy
Odds and ends
Tools for thinking
Where death is cheaper than life itself
Rilke's advice to a young poet
A few good rabbit holes
A beautiful line from Camus
Meditation by Charles Baudelaire
odds and ends
Henry Oliver on how to have good taste
How Terence Tao uses AI
C.S. Lewis on reading old books
On nostalgia
On pursuing things
The cost of extreme weather
AI links
Everything everywhere all at once
The day is gone by John Keats
The infinite pleasures of diving down rabbit holes
Zero Sum thinking is ruining the world
I got some links for you
Kafka on reading
Philosophy of life and Seneca’s letters
Twilight of the humans?
Wild Geese by Mary Oliver
How Americans use AI and what they think about it
How long do we have left?
Today in learning
The Second Coming by William Butler Yeats
We are borrowed stardust
Philosophy understood as a way of life
The economics of tyranny
A hopeful view of large language models (LLM)
Social media is a funhouse mirror
The solar revolution
Poetry is a salve for the soul
Aggregating book mentions
I got some links for you
How fiber optic cables work
Think of a fiber optic cable as a super-thin strand of glass (about as thin as a human hair) that carries information using light instead of electricity. It's like a tiny, flexible glass tube that light can travel through.
What is artificial intelligence (AI)?
Bhuvan's law
Will the poor countries catch up the rich?
The heart wants what it wants
The heart wants what it wants.
Speculation Is like water—it always finds a way
From a front-row seat in Indian markets, I trace how post-COVID tech and payments supercharged both investing and gambling. The essay makes a simple case: bans without internet, payments, platform, and cross-border enforcement just move the problem. Better to design the dam—keep play on regulated rails and cut harm.
Vibe Physics? Not Yet
The weight of telling stories
I watched this conversation between Dave Chappelle and Mo Amer and got really thinking about what artists are supposed to do. Mo's Netflix show Mo is about Palestinian refugees, and he literally finished writing it right before October 7th happened. Hearing him talk about navigating that timing as one of the few Palestinians in Hollywood made me appreciate how hard it is to be an artist dealing with heavy, real-world stuff. I loved their discussion about how you know when a story or joke is worth telling—basically, if it makes people laugh, think, or feel something. Both of them talked about just "calling it like you see it," even when it's risky.
Your next good read
A collection of the most insightful articles on culture, philosophy, history, science, finance, economics and much more.
I just want to know
Sometimes, the most important discoveries come from simply wanting to know. This video by Betül Kaçar, "Why we explore, even when there’s no payoff," is a beautiful reminder of the power of pure curiosity in science.
On luck and randomness in life
On Walking
Henry David Thoreau's essay Walking isn't just about nature—it's a diagnosis of modern life's deepest tragedy: we've become estranged from our wild selves. In a world dominated by left-brain thinking that treats everything as a resource to exploit, we've lost our contemplative spaces and buried our primordial desire to wander.
On AI-assisted writing
On AI taking jobs
All knowledge is my province
The cost of collective apathy
That simple matter of fact is that we don't bother about so many bad things that happen in our local communities, let alone at a national level. If we keep ignoring this accumulation of evils, petty or profound, what price we are paying?
The greatest anonymous poem
Understanding the greatest anonymous poem.
Why read?
Reflections on Harold Bloom’s interview with Charlie Rose on why should one read.
Is the twilight of the humans? A few AI links
LLMs show promise but can’t yet build software. AI's rise is slow, uneven, and energy-hungry—progress needs breakthroughs or massive infrastructure.
Welcome to the age of weaponized interdependence
What It Means to Be Human in the Age of AI
A few thoughts what AI might do the human ability to think critically.
The world won't end with a bang but with a shrug of indifference
The troubling decline in conscientiousness. A critical life skill is fading out — and especially fast among young adults
The death of silence and the loss of contemplative spaces
An essay about how the loss of contemplative space is robbing us of our humanity.