Bloomberg: “India’s total astrology market is estimated to be worth more than $7 billion, and the digital segment alone is expected to grow tenfold by March 2030, according to Bengaluru-based Redseer Strategy Consultants last year.”
FT: “Game development is a tiresome process. Developers make something they think is good, only to discover that playtesters think it is comprehensively bad, difficult to understand or, worst of all, no fun. Then the developers revise. “About 70 per cent of the game is a rewrite. About 50 per cent is a rewrite of a rewrite,” Kurvitz estimated in 2020. The process repeats until the developers run out of money and must publish something, at which point they too may have become convinced of all the ways in which what they have made is very bad.”
Economist: “India’s very own colonial mindset [is] a deeply held belief—among leaders and citizens both—that the state sits at the centre of society and must be in control of it. In Hindi this vision of the state is called the maibaap sarkar, or “mother-father government”. The maibaap sarkar nurtures and protects, but it must also discipline and punish. The colonial mindset is distinct from the colonial hangover. The hangover describes vestiges of the past that have never been eradicated. It can be found everywhere, from the country’s elite gymkhana clubs to its old-fashioned courts. The mindset evolved in part because of deliberate decisions taken during the creation of the new Republic of India. About a third of its constitution borrows directly from the Government of India Act of 1935, which was passed by Britain’s Parliament and laid out the principles by which the colony would be governed. Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, described it as a “charter of slavery”. The constitution is colonial in that it takes heavily from a colonial document, writes Arghya Sengupta, a constitutional scholar, in his book “The Colonial Constitution”. But it is also colonial “in a more conceptual sense: it sets up a government that towers over the citizen much like colonial governments tend to do.””
Ethan Mollick: “One thing you learn studying (or working in) organizations is that they are all actually a bit of a mess. In fact, one classic organizational theory is actually called the Garbage Can Model. This views organizations as chaotic “garbage cans” where problems, solutions, and decision-makers are dumped in together, and decisions often happen when these elements collide randomly, rather than through a fully rational process. Of course, it is easy to take this view too far – organizations do have structures, decision-makers, and processes that actually matter. It is just that these structures often evolved and were negotiated among people, rather than being carefully designed and well-recorded….The Garbage Can represents a world where unwritten rules, bespoke knowledge, and complex and undocumented processes are critical. It is this situation that makes AI adoption in organizations difficult, because even though 43% of American workers have used AI at work, they are mostly doing it in informal ways, solving their own work problems. Scaling AI across the enterprise is hard because traditional automation requires clear rules and defined processes; the very things Garbage Can organizations lack.” [via Arnold Kling]
