38 Smart Questions to Ask in a Job Interview: via HBR. Among them: “What are your expectations for me in this role? What’s the most important thing I should accomplish in the first 90 days? What metrics or goals will my performance be evaluated against?” Also see:10 Common Job Interview Questions and How to Answer Them.
WSJ: “People are embracing and documenting their delulu online—as well as the catchphrase “delulu is the solulu”—as a way to challenge themselves and make risky career moves that they hope will pay off. Some see it as another form of manifesting, another way to affirm that whatever dreams they have will eventually come true.”
Mint: “The pick-up in construction [in India] started in the last quarter of 2021, gained some momentum in 2022, and further pace in 2023. What led to this spurt? An ongoing residential real estate boom. As companies started asking employees to head back to the office after allowing work from home during the pandemic years, the demand for homes in cities shot through the roof. On the other hand, transport infrastructure projects have picked up pace, too. “This year, the maximum construction activity in infrastructure is in railways and highways/roads. About 40% of the Union budget for infrastructure ( ₹10 trillion) was allocated towards these sectors. Projects that were going slow till 2022 have picked up significantly. There is also huge construction on the Smart Cities Mission front,” said Kushal Kumar Singh, partner at Deloitte India, a consultancy. In some ways, the current boom in India is similar to the rapid growth the Chinese construction market saw in the 2010s.”
Raghuram Rajan: “Our sense is we are fast going the old China way. We are trying to emphasise infrastructure build-out — which itself is a source of big growth. But in this case, it is largely government infrastructure, because the private sector is much slower to build out infrastructure. And then bring in low-skilled manufacturing with the hope that it will move up to higher skilled manufacturing, so that eventually we will become a workshop to the world, just like the east Asian countries did before us. The problem with this vision is that the world has sort of moved on. It is no longer open to another China coming up and flooding its market with manufactured goods. China is already there and not going anywhere. It has a lot of still low-skilled labour in its western provinces and it’s bringing them into action. Yes, it had a little bit of a kerfuffle with the US, but they’ve realised that they can’t afford that and are trying to repair bridges. But China also has the benefit of having fantastic universities and is trying to focus on the other end — intellectual property and intellectual capital. We also have competition like Vietnam. So this notion that the old, export-led growth in manufacturing is going to be available to us just like it was available to everybody else fails to recognise the current reality. In that process, we are also giving up our greatest strength — we are a society which is open, democratic, where debate is possible, and where you can challenge the received wisdom. At least that used to be the case. As we move towards the China model and become more authoritarian, we are giving up our great strengths which are going to be very valuable for the 21st century as we build out the ideas industries — brain-based industries rather than brawn-based industries.”
Arnold Kling: “My experience with creating an app to grade and provide constructive feedback on op-ed essays has been eye-opening. Before there were large language models, it would have taken me months of working all day to train a computer to do anything close to what I taught ChatGPT to do in a few hours. The ability of the LLM to understand and be understood without the user having to write computer code is a superpower. Because you can use ordinary language with ChatGPT, and because you can correct your instructions using ordinary language, you can create all sorts of apps without having to write and debug computer code. You just tell it what you want, and then go back and forth with it until it gets the app working the way you would like. It is like having a human software developer you can talk to who turns your instructions into code almost instantly. Imagine what will happen when these AIs are connected to physical tools. These physical tools might be custom robots or all-purpose robots. You could be a farmer who never has to go into the fields—just explain to the robots what you want. Or you could be a chef who gives directions without being in the kitchen. Or a scientist who conducts experiments without having to spend all day in the lab.”
