Author: Rajesh Jain

Francis Fukuyama: “There are actually several different meanings of liberalism around the world. So in the US, being liberal means you’re left of center. In Europe, it usually means that you’re right of center. In my version of classical liberalism, the most important premise is one about the equality of human dignity: That all human beings have a certain base dignity that needs to be respected. The way you respect it is by giving people rights. A right to speech, to belief, to association, and ultimately to political participation. In a liberal society, you don’t say that there’s one subgroup of humans that has greater status — based on their race, ethnicity, gender and so forth. If you believe in that basic principle of the equality of dignity and the need for a system of law that restricts governments from violating that basic dignity, then you’re a liberal….That set of principles is being challenged on both the right and the left. The people on the right would like to return to a form of nationalism where they can say, you know, Hungarians or Hindus or some other subgroup of human beings, has a special status. And on the left I think it’s more the questioning the basic liberal virtues of tolerance and freedom of speech.”

Leigh Thompson: “Do you look forward to performance reviews? If you’re like many employees, probably not. Too often reviews are, at best, a waste of time—a one-way street in which a boss tells you what you’re doing wrong, with little opportunity to disagree. But take heart: They don’t have to be that way. The best reviews aren’t meant to be monologues but rather dialogues, conversations that both parties learn and grow from, for the good of both the individual and the organization. How can an employee turn a review into something positive? By planning ahead and being strategic in the moment. Here are five tips for doing just that: ask for a face-to-face conversation, schedule strategically, focus on the future, Recast the meeting as a “learning review”, reverse role-play.”

NYTimes: “Mr. Musk, who leads SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter, has become the most dominant player in space as he has steadily amassed power over the strategically significant field of satellite internet. Yet faced with little regulation and oversight, his erratic and personality-driven style has increasingly worried militaries and political leaders around the world, with the tech billionaire sometimes wielding his authority in unpredictable ways. Since 2019, Mr. Musk has sent SpaceX rockets into space nearly every week that deliver dozens of sofa-size satellites into orbit. The satellites communicate with terminals on Earth, so they can beam high-speed internet to nearly every corner of the planet. Today, more than 4,500 Starlink satellites are in the skies, accounting for more than 50 percent of all active satellites. They have already started changing the complexion of the night sky, even before accounting for Mr. Musk’s plans to have as many as 42,000 satellites in orbit in the coming years.”

Oliver Burkeman: “There will always be too much to do, no matter what you do. But the ironic upside of this seemingly dispiriting fact is that you needn’t beat yourself up for failing to do it all, nor keep pressuring yourself to find ways to get on top of it all by means of increasingly extreme multitasking. Instead, you can pour your finite time, energy and attention into a handful of things that truly count. You’ll enjoy things more, into the bargain. My gratifying new ability to “be here now” while running or driving or cooking dinner isn’t the result of having developed any great spiritual prowess. Rather, it’s a matter of realizing I could only ever be here now anyway — so I might as well give up the stressful struggle to pretend otherwise.”

City Journal: “[Sebastian Edwards’] The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism explores how intellectuals and ideas can drive real economic change. But Edwards also illustrates that Chile’s march toward markets was more complicated than commonly realized. The central players in this story are the “Chicago Boys”: a small group of Chileans who studied economics at the University of Chicago from 1957 onward under economists such as Milton Friedman and the Spanish-fluent Arnold Harberger. The Chicago Boys coalesced around a reform program famously detailed in a book-length document called El ladrillo (“the Brick”), and they persuaded the military regime, much of which had nationalist-corporatist economic inclinations, to dismantle Chile’s dirigiste structures and replace them with some of the world’s freest economic arrangements…Free-marketers of all stripes can learn much from Edwards’s account. One lesson is that free market theorists and those economic liberalizers with more pragmatic instincts have their own distinct roles to play in effecting change. While the first group helps establish intellectual ascendancy over interventionists, the second is more effective in bringing about actual policy change.”

NYTimes: “Mr. [Mike] Masnick has a way of seeding ideas about technology that take root and grow. In 2005, he wrote about legal threats against a website devoted to amassing urinal photos. (The early internet was a strange place.) The threats, intended to remove information about certain urinal owners, instead created their own news cycle and garnered more attention for the otherwise obscure site. Mr. Masnick coined a phrase for an attempt to censor information on the internet that backfires: “the Streisand effect.” In 2003, Barbra Streisand sued an aerial photographer who had put photos of her Malibu beach house on his website, causing the little-seen images to go viral. Now the episode is internet lore, and the phrase has its own Wikipedia entry with a long list of examples. It’s a typical Masnickian principle of the internet, gleaned from lengthy observation: Poorly thought-out attempts to solve online problems will make them worse.”

NYTimes: “Google has recently begun plugging state-of-the-art language models into its robots, giving them the equivalent of artificial brains. The secretive project has made the robots far smarter and given them new powers of understanding and problem-solving…Google’s new robotics model, RT-2 [is] what the company calls a “vision-language-action” model, or an A.I. system that has the ability not just to see and analyze the world around it, but to tell a robot how to move. It does so by translating the robot’s movements into a series of numbers — a process called tokenizing — and incorporating those tokens into the same training data as the language model. Eventually, just as ChatGPT or Bard learns to guess what words should come next in a poem or a history essay, RT-2 can learn to guess how a robot’s arm should move to pick up a ball or throw an empty soda can into the recycling bin. “In other words, this model can learn to speak robot,” Mr. Hausman said.”

Timothy Lee: Large language models, explained with a minimum of math and jargon. “The goal of this article is to make a lot of this knowledge accessible to a broad audience. We’ll aim to explain what’s known about the inner workings of these models without resorting to technical jargon or advanced math. We’ll start by explaining word vectors, the surprising way language models represent and reason about language. Then we’ll dive deep into the transformer, the basic building block for systems like ChatGPT. Finally, we’ll explain how these models are trained and explore why good performance requires such phenomenally large quantities of data.”

FT: “Just the act of being a reader in a crowd of commuters gives me a sense of having and taking my time. As the editor and writer Anika Burgess noted in a 2021 essay in The New York Times, “Even in the busiest of places, if you have a good book, you can retreat into solitude.” I used to be the kind of reader who preferred to read only in libraries or nooks at home, ideally with a cat spread out over my feet (and, less ideally, over the pages of the book I was trying to read). But over time, I’ve begun to love reading while roaming — finding a quiet spot in the middle of the Frankfurt Book Fair bustle, in New York’s Central Park or on Mumbai’s Marine Drive as runners and chaat-eating families pass by…Only one rule is set in stone: do not interrupt a reader, just because they’re in a public space. You may surreptitiously note the title of a promising book, but asking “So, what’s it about?” is a minor act of cruelty. Leave them in peace.”

Adam Selipsky: “Generative AI is going to be a foundational set of technologies for years, maybe decades to come. And nobody knows if the winning technologies have even been invented yet or if the winning companies have even been formed yet. So what customers need is choice. They need to be able to experiment. There will not be one model to rule them all. That is a preposterous proposition….The most likely scenario — given that there are thousands or maybe tens of thousands of different applications and use cases for generative AI — is that there will be multiple winners. Again, if you think of the internet, there’s not one winner in the internet. Lots of folks have said that generative AI is perhaps the most important technological advance in this era since the internet. If you go down that road, then you ask yourself: “Was there one winner in the internet?” And the answer is usually no. The most reasonable hypothesis is that there would not be a single winner here. There’d be multiple use cases across a myriad of customers requiring more than one solution.”

Paul Krugman: “Will China be the next Japan? There are some obvious similarities between China now and Japan in 1990. China has a wildly unbalanced economy, with too little consumer demand, kept afloat only by a hypertrophied real estate sector, and its working-age population is declining. Unlike Japan in 1990, most of the Chinese economy is still well behind the technological frontier, so it should have better prospects for rapid productivity growth, but there are growing concerns that China may have fallen into the “middle-income trap” that seems to afflict many emerging economies, which grow rapidly but only up to a point, then stall out. Yet if China is headed for an economic slowdown, the interesting question is whether it can replicate Japan’s social cohesion — its ability to manage slower growth without mass suffering or social instability. I am very definitely not a China expert, but is there any indication that China, especially under an erratic authoritarian regime, is capable of pulling this off? Note that China already has much higher youth unemployment than Japan ever did. So, no, China isn’t likely to be the next Japan, economically speaking. It’s probably going to be worse.”

Vitalik: “One of the trickier, but potentially one of the most valuable, gadgets that people in the Ethereum community have been trying to build is a decentralized proof-of-personhood solution. Proof of personhood, aka the “unique-human problem”, is a limited form of real-world identity that asserts that a given registered account is controlled by a real person (and a different real person from every other registered account), ideally without revealing which real person it is…More recently, we have seen the rise of a much larger and more ambitious proof-of-personhood project: Worldcoin…The simplest way to define a proof-of-personhood system is: it creates a list of public keys where the system guarantees that each key is controlled by a unique human. In other words, if you’re a human, you can put one key on the list, but you can’t put two keys on the list, and if you’re a bot you can’t put any keys on the list.”

Veronique de Rugy: “The best job-creation policy is a strong economy. The government should be content to create a level playing field with transparent rules and strong protection of property and contract rights. Of course, it should also supply public goods like infrastructure and ensure a stable legal system. Be wary of those who push industrial policy as a means of job creation. It’s a short-sighted approach that distracts us from the more important question, which is whether hindering the market allocation of resources is truly justified for national security or other valid reasons.”

The Verge: “A search engine is both an enormously complex thing and a fairly simple idea. All a search engine is doing, really, is compiling a database of webpages — known as the “search index” — then looking through that database every time you issue a query and serving the best and most relevant set of those pages. That’s the whole job. At every tiny step of that journey, though, there are huge complications that require critical and complex tradeoffs. Most of them boil down to two things: time and money. Even if you could hypothetically build a constantly updating database of all of the untold billions of pages on the internet, the storage and bandwidth costs alone would bankrupt practically any company on the planet. And that’s not even counting the cost of searching that database millions or billions of times a day. Add in the fact that every millisecond matters — Google still advertises how long every query took at the top of your results — and you don’t have time to look over the whole database, anyway.”

FT: “Since it launched the wildly successful Indian Premier League tournament in 2008, India has brought unparalleled riches to the sport. Its teams now attract the world’s best players and have bought up new international franchises. The country’s governing body, the Board of Control for Cricket in India, dominates global decision making and takes a larger share of global revenues than England and Australia combined. India is even influencing how the game is played, with test teams such as England increasingly adopting crowd-pleasing, aggressive playing styles that fans trace back to the IPL’s shorter, fast-paced Twenty20 format. “India’s influence in global cricket cannot be overstated,” said Arun Dhumal, the IPL’s chair and a former BCCI executive. “The IPL has been a game-changer not only for Indian cricket but also for world cricket, in terms of the traction it has generated with fans across the globe, in terms of the financial bandwidth . . . It has been phenomenal.””

Omar Shams on the AI organisation: “Right now we’re hand-designing information flows and team structure. Instead, let’s use LLMs to share information between teams and help route important work to the right people. LLMs can summarize what work everyone does in an organization by parsing over their code, messages, and documents. LLMs in conjunction with other AI techniques can also identify common problems in an organization and rank them by severity. These models can then group the work of each team member by reviewing their code, messages, and documents, providing a comprehensive summary of their roles. We can then route important information to the right people in the organization who have the relevant expertise. This way of organizing information effectively forms dynamic ‘flash’ teams that cut across traditional organizational boundaries. By training LLMs on company code/docs and/or embedding company code/docs in a vector space we can capture institutional knowledge (‘tribal knowledge’) and spread it around the organization and safeguard it against loss due to personnel changes.”

WSJ: “Traditionally, goods come to the warehouse in trucks, then are manually unloaded with pallet jacks and forklifts. Here, Walmart is testing an autonomous forklift. A single worker can unload multiple trucks at once while monitoring cases for accuracy and damage. Walmart plans to automate or partially automate many of its hundred-plus U.S. warehouses in the coming years. The shift means Walmart can use fewer people to process more goods and make stocking shelves at stores more efficient. To keep their jobs, many of the company’s tens of thousands of warehouse workers need to retrain for new roles. Some will leave. Warehouses will also need to hire people with new skills, such as technicians. Large companies such as Walmart and Amazon that rely on massive warehousing networks have worked for years to automate more of their supply chains to increase the volume of packages they can process and reduce labor costs. Because of Walmart’s scale, its plan to make automation standard in more of its supply chain is likely to affect how smaller competitors invest in their own facilities and what a U.S. warehouse job becomes.”

RV Raman: “This is sketch of the nascent crime fiction scene in India. Stories and writers are not in short supply. Nor are publishers. But readers are. We are lamentably short of readers. For the Indian crime fiction scene to flourish, we need more people to read for pleasure. However, we do have a silver lining: there is fresh interest from overseas publishers for Indian mysteries. How much that will help remains to be seen. With luck, the new readers who currently consume romance and mythological fiction will expand their patronage to crime fiction and provide the genre the necessary boost. Just as British mysteries and Scandinavian noir have carved niches of their own, we might see Indian noir carving one for itself in the coming years.”

NYTimes: “If you have had a romantic partner, you’ve most likely had the maddening experience of realizing that while you were blabbering on about something or another, they were focused on their phone. As relationship transgressions go, “phubbing” — a portmanteau of “phone” and “snubbing” — is, on the surface, fairly benign. Yet research increasingly shows it can be insidious. A recent study linked higher levels of phubbing to marital dissatisfaction, and a 2022 study found it can lead to feelings of distrust and ostracism. One study found that those who phub a lot are more likely to be phubbed themselves, creating a kind of ripple effect.”

Renée Mauborgne: “Beyond Disruption is about how companies can innovate and achieve growth without displacing industries, companies, or jobs. It is a positive-sum approach to innovation and growth that allows business and society to thrive together. The book is the result of research that my colleague W. Chan Kim and I completed during a 30-year research journey. We set out to codify processes and tools that allow organizations to be systematic in identifying and unlocking nondisruptive opportunities in a high-value, low-cost way…Disruption occurs when you create a new market within an existing market, leading to a high level of disruptive growth. Blue ocean strategy involves developing a new market across existing industries, creating a measure of disruptive and nondisruptive growth. Nondisruption is at the opposite end of the innovation spectrum. It occurs when you develop a new market outside the bounds of existing industries, which generates largely nondisruptive growth where there is no displacement.”