Rajesh Jain

WSJ: “The best way to understand the Japan of “Shogun” is to think of it as a mini-international system. The feudal domains were like autonomous nations, fighting each other from the late-1460s through 1600 for survival and power. Success depended on learning key lessons that remain relevant today. In a land consumed by warfare, each daimyo, or feudal lord, knew that internal instability would threaten the survival of his domain. One way to help maintain stability was to create a thriving economy by reducing barriers to trade and attracting the finest artisan talent, while avoiding waste and profligacy. Economic surplus was used to build massive defense establishments, including the greatest castles the world has ever seen and armies of samurai—warriors adept with sword, bow and pike, on horse or foot. Warfare was a combination of mass maneuver and logistics combined with archaic notions of personal honor and disgrace. The wise daimyo ensured that his forces were absolutely loyal; losing the samurai’s devotion could bring defeat in battle.”

FT writes about forecaster Peter Turchin: ““One hundred years ago, people could not predict weather. Now we can predict weather a week ahead. What we would like is a social weather service that would collect a lot of data, put it into a big model, and the model would tell us, ‘We’re going to have a social quake several years ahead.’ And we would start yelling, ‘Political leaders, you’ve got to take notice.’” Except the moisture in the atmosphere doesn’t have free will, I say. “No, but we overestimate how much free will affects the movement of populations of millions of people.” Turchin’s next project is to build a model for 10 countries “like China, UK, Russia, Germany. Then we run the model for 10 years. We publish the scripts on which the model is based. And we see what happens.””

WSJ: “New research suggests links between ultra-processed foods—such as chips, many cereals and most packaged snacks at the grocery store—and changes in the way we learn, remember and feel. These foods can act like addictive substances, researchers say, and some scientists are proposing a new mental-health condition called “ultra-processed food use disorder.” Diets filled with such foods may raise the risk of mental health and sleep problems. The science is still early and researchers say there is a lot they don’t know. Not all ultra-processed foods are equal, some scientists say, adding that some might be good for you. A diet high in ultra-processed foods has been linked with obesity, Type 2 diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease, but researchers are still figuring out exactly why, beyond calorie counts and nutrient composition.”

The Generalist: “Before making an investment, Reid [Hoffman] believes you should have an internal view of the market’s development and how a company either complies with that or defies it. While many investors talk about understanding the market, Reid’s configuration comes from his love of strategy games and carries that sense of nimbleness. He also expects founders to have their own “theory of the game,” relative to the business they’re building. When I meet CEOs, especially in the early stages, I like trying to understand what their theory might be.” More: “Venture capital as “predictive anthropology.” This is how Reid described the art of investing in the future. I’ve found it a particularly helpful way to assess startups. What will the world of tomorrow look like? What will successive generations need most? And how does the company in front of me fit those beliefs?”

WSJ: “Measuring organ age is the latest frontier in the world of biological age, the idea that your body’s physical age can be different from its chronological one. For example, a 50-year-old man hypothetically might have physical health that more closely resembles that of a 53-year-old, with, say, a 51-year-old heart and a 54-year-old brain. Knowing the age of your organs might one day help you prevent and treat disease. In theory, if you knew that your heart was aging too fast, you could take steps to ward off heart disease. “Heart aging predicts future heart disease, and brain aging predicts future dementia,” says Hamilton Oh, one of the paper’s lead authors and a graduate student at Stanford.”

NYTimes: “In interviews over the past year, Mr. [Emmanuel] Todd has argued that Westerners focus too much on one surprise of the war: Ukraine’s ability to defy Russia’s far larger army. But there is a second surprise that has been underappreciated: Russia’s ability to defy the sanctions and seizures through which the United States sought to destroy the Russian economy. Even with its Western European allies in tow, the United States lacked the leverage to keep the world’s big, new economic actors in line. India took advantage of fire-sale prices for Russian energy. China provided Russia with sanctioned goods and electronic components. And then the manufacturing base of the United States and its European allies proved inadequate to supply Ukraine with the matériel (particularly artillery) needed to stabilize, let alone win, the war. The United States no longer has the means to deliver on its foreign-policy promises.”

Ishan Bakshi: “As the [Indian] economy searches for new drivers of growth, the government is caught in its own rhetoric. The contradictions are hard to ignore. If the underlying economic momentum is really as robust as is believed, if high growth is generating gainful employment opportunities for the millions entering the labour force, then why must the government provide free food to 800 million people? Why must it continue to drive the investment momentum in the economy? Why is private investment, both domestic and foreign, still tepid? And why is private consumption growing at just 3 per cent?”

Ethan Mollick: “The three most successful approaches to prompting are both useful and pretty easy to do. The first is simply adding context to a prompt. There are many ways to do that: give the AI a persona (you are a marketer), an audience (you are writing for high school students), an output format (give me a table in a word document), and more. The second approach is few shot, giving the AI a few examples to work from. LLMs work well when given samples of what you want, whether that is an example of good output or a grading rubric. The final tip is to use Chain of Thought, which seems to improve most LLM outputs. While the original meaning of the term is a bit more technical, a simplified version just asks the AI to go step-by-step through instructions: First, outline the results; then produce a draft; then revise the draft; finally, produced a polished output.” [via Arnold Kling]

Marc Rowan: “[India is] just an incredible labor pool. We have a place that grew up as a back office for everyone, where it’s now just become another office. The English-speaking, the time zone, the work ethic, quality of people, and we’re scaling almost every business in India. Professional businesses, risk businesses, technology businesses, and what you would consider traditional back office — it’s all happening…The biggest obstacle is just capital markets. I’m not sure we’re going to deploy all that much in India.”

WSJ: “Ask people where they met their best friends, and many will have the same answer: at work. It makes sense: We traditionally spend much of our lives in the office, so it’s only natural that’s where we have met many of the people closest to us. The rise of remote work has upended all that; the less time we are in the office, the less time we have to form and cement the bonds of friendship. That’s true for all remote or hybrid workers. But the impact is being felt most strongly for people with the least time working—Gen Z. With few experiences to draw from, young remote workers increasingly don’t even think of the office as a place to make friends. The impact—on people’s personal and professional lives—could be profound. Removing the social aspect of work further encourages remote workers to keep their jobs at arm’s length. This detachment could have the twin effects of maintaining a better work-life balance, but leave workers lonelier than they would be had they made office friends.”

Inverse: “Like all roguelike deck-builders, Balatro is run-based, meaning that whenever the player fails to complete a blind (the game’s term for rounds), they have to start the entire game over. New cards and card types are unlocked between each run and can be used to modify your base deck to be more effective. Where other deck-builders will start you out with 15 or 20 cards, Balatro begins with a familiar 52-card deck (unless you’re using the Ancient Deck, you freak). The game is extremely simple at first blush. Each run is broken up into eight antes in which you’re presented with three “Blinds,” each requiring a certain score to pass. To score points you’ll draw eight cards at a time and choose from those to play various poker hands like a full house or a flush (each have their own point values) until you either beat the blind and move on or run out of hands, ending your game. But this simplicity is a trick because Balatro has some of the densest deck-building I’ve ever encountered thanks to its understanding of combos, the feature that makes roguelike deck-builders so uniquely satisfying.”

WaPo: “A much-debated theory holds that 4 billion years ago, give or take, long before the appearance of dinosaurs or even bacteria, the primordial soup contained only the possibility of life. Then a molecule called RNA took a dramatic step into the future: It made a copy of itself. Then the copy made a copy, and over the course of many millions of years, RNA begot DNA and proteins, all of which came together to form a cell, the smallest unit of life able to survive on its own. Now, in an important advance supporting this RNA World theory, scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., have carried out a small but essential part of the story. In test tubes, they developed an RNA molecule that was able to make accurate copies of a different type of RNA. The work, published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, gets them closer to the grand goal of growing an RNA molecule that makes accurate copies of itself.”

City Journal: “Machines can now talk with us in ways that aren’t preprogrammed. They can draw pictures, write passable (if generic) college essays, and make fake videos so convincing that you and I can’t tell the difference. The first time I used ChatGPT, I almost forgot that I was communicating with a machine. Artificial intelligence is like nothing that humans have ever created. It consumes vast amounts of data and organizes itself in ways that its creators didn’t foresee and don’t understand. “If we open up ChatGPT or a system like it and look inside,” AI scientist Sam Bowman told Noam Hassenfeld at Vox, “you just see millions of numbers flipping around a few hundred times a second. And we just have no idea what any of it means.”…So what do we actually know? That AI is coming faster than almost anyone realizes, that the pace of change will accelerate, and that nobody—not computer researchers, not economists, not historians, and definitely not me—knows where we’re heading. But for what it’s worth, I see artificial intelligence as something like fire: it will warm us, and it will burn us.”

NYTimes: “China unleashed the full might of its solar energy industry last year. It installed more solar panels than the United States has in its history. It cut the wholesale price of panels it sells by nearly half. And its exports of fully assembled solar panels climbed 38 percent while its exports of key components almost doubled. Get ready for an even bigger display of China’s solar energy dominance…At the annual session of China’s legislature [recently], Premier Li Qiang, the country’s second-highest official after Xi Jinping, announced that the country would accelerate the construction of solar panel farms as well as wind and hydroelectric projects. With China’s economy stumbling, the ramped-up spending on renewable energy, mainly solar, is a cornerstone of a big bet on emerging technologies. China’s leaders say that a “new trio” of industries — solar panels, electric cars and lithium batteries — has replaced an “old trio” of clothing, furniture and appliances.”

Economist: “The world is in the midst of a city-building boom…Edward Glaeser of Harvard University has lauded cities as mankind’s greatest invention. He notes that agglomerations of money and talent make societies richer, smarter and greener. Since companies move closer to their customers and people closer to their jobs, growing cities beget economic growth. Economists think that doubling a city’s population provides a boost to productivity of 2-5%. Given both the pressing need for new urban areas and the constraints on physical growth in existing ones, starting afresh is sometimes a shrewd decision.”

Chris Dixon: “A much better outcome would be to construct a new covenant, a new relationship between content providers, AI, distribution, and search engines. What is the natural way to do that? Get large groups of people to coordinate on the internet and create networks. That’s what blockchains are. It’s the technology for creating networks that are open and governed by the participants. There are a bunch of entrepreneurs working on things like this, where you basically think of them as economic networks, where content providers can join, AI providers can join. They can come and agree on terms and collectively decide on what the optimal relationship is for everybody to have the best outcome. We didn’t really have systems like this on the internet before, where you could come together and have large groups of people collectively decide on what kind of economic relationship they’d have.”

WSJ: “Delivering a reality check to an overconfident underperformer is one of the toughest tasks bosses face, because there is no guarantee critiques will click. “I had somebody who outright told me, ‘I heard your feedback, but I disagreed with it,’ ” says Sara Censoprano, associate director of client experience at Movable Ink, a marketing software company. She has decided to be more explicit with staff about what’s a recommendation and what’s an order. She also asks new members of her team how they want to hear constructive criticism. Managers who dread the inevitable confrontations with clueless people would be wise to ask, up front, whether employees prefer bad news face-to-face, or in an email, so they can digest it ahead of a conversation, Censoprano says. As a boss, it’s a way to C.Y.A. against future complaints about your leadership.”

ET on retailing in India: “Retailers across categories are opening bigger bricks-and-mortar stores along with expanding their existing stores as consumers are increasingly looking for a better experience in physical retail. According to data from real estate services firm Anarock, the share of stores smaller than 2,000 square feet declined to 52% in the first half of 2023-24, as against 61% a year ago. The share of stores sized 2,000-5,000 sq ft increased during this period, to 21% from 19%, as did that of those sized 5,000-10,000 sq ft (11% from 9%) and 10,000-15,000 sq ft (13% from 9%). Anarock said last year that retailers across categories are adopting a two-pronged approach by expanding and entering newer markets and also increasing their store sizes to capitalize on the growing share of the organised retail market. “Store is now more about experience than merchandising. Brands have realised that, and by expanding the store they are expanding the offering,” Pankaj Renjhen, COO and joint MD, Anarock Retail, had said.”

WSJ: “Of course, our planet is resource-rich. The theoretical magnitude of Earth’s mineral abundance could supply any imaginable demand for centuries to come. That isn’t the challenge. Instead, it’s timing. The last time global mining production expanded at this scale it took place across eight decades—from 1940 to the present—not the one or two decades the transitionists imagine. The other challenge involves people. Mining has always been as much about people as it has about geology, technology and money. In “The War Below: Lithium, Copper, and the Global Battle to Power Our Lives,” Ernest Scheyder highlights the myriad difficulties faced by the people who build mines, as well as those hurt by or opposed to them. As Mr. Scheyder notes, mining is “dirty work.” That’s no invective; it’s just reality.

NYTimes on how to salvage the day after a bad night’s sleep: “To mitigate these effects, the number one thing experts recommended is taking a nap. Not only can it help you feel less sleepy, but it can actually improve your performance on many of the cognitive processes that are impaired by lack of sleep.To avoid the “sleep inertia” some people feel after napping, try to limit yourself to 30 minutes…Caffeine can also enhance alertness and cognition…Regular exercise has been shown to counteract the health consequences of sleep loss in the long-term, and there is some evidence that it improves performance immediately after a bad night of sleep, too…Exposing yourself to bright, natural light is another way to increase alertness, said Soomi Lee, an associate professor of human development and family studies at Penn State University. To get the benefits of both light and exercise, she suggested taking a midday walk.”

Donald Boudreaux: “As the economist David Friedman points out, trade is a technique of production. We can produce, say, more steel here at home directly, or we can produce additional steel by growing more corn, put that corn into machines called “cargo ships,” and allow the cargo ships to transform that corn into steel that’s unloaded on our docks. Protectionists’ proposals to obstruct trade are proposals to obstruct the use of what are often the lowest-cost techniques of production. How such obstruction enriches the nation is anyone’s guess.”

FT: “With Temu, PDD wants nothing less than to change the way the world shops, a faster, leaner and cheaper version of Amazon that has spread from China to 49 countries after less than two years in operation. The plan, as best can be inferred, is to use blanket advertising to lure western consumers to Temu’s app, where algorithms and AI anticipates their whims and desires. Products are shipped for free direct from China’s factory gates, cutting out the middleman and ensuring low prices. Temu’s sister app Pinduoduo already dominates China. When it still published such numbers, PDD reported more than 870mn active users in the country supplied by over 13mn merchants who, it claimed, together generated a third of all parcel traffic in the country, tens of billions of packages a year.”