Short things, kept in the open. A commonplace book, formerly rabbitholes.garden.

I woke up to the news that the great Perry Mehrling has passed away. He was 67. I was shocked. It feels unfair that all the cool and awesome people keep getting taken away while assholes still roam free on Earth. Perry was brilliant. A lot of what I understand about global macro, the dollar and the global financial…

The real change India needs is for people to clean up after themselves and to maintain things. We’ll go a long way if we just maintain what’s already built. A cult of preservation and maintenance is underrated. Building things is sexy; preserving and maintaining them is not.

They seem to be living in an era where if you don’t have the ability to change your opinion on something on a dime, you’re toast.

We live in exponential times and we need exponential mental models to navigate these disturbing, treacherous, exciting, wonderful, shocking, and scary times.

Hard agree. For all it’s flaws, Twitter is still awesome

Daring Fireball · daringfireball.net ↗X Once Again Marks the SpotIf you returned from exile on a desert island and took a look at X today for first time in a year, you might reasonably guess that Elon Musk got bored and sold it while you were away.

This is funny

“Rage economy” is a really nice framing:

These AI videos are crazy:

A thoughtful essay) by Mahika Dhar in Public Books on brain rot as political resistance. Please read it. I want to preface this by saying I could be wrong. This might well be a misreading of her piece. But I came away with a small confusion, and I think it’s worth sitting with. A little mental exercise: replace “brain…

A snippet from this Hindu article with an excerpt from Rama Chandra Guha’s Arguments with Gandhi: Ambedkar saw Gandhi as a timid and hesitant reformer. Orthodox Hindus, on the other hand, saw Gandhi as a dangerous revolutionary attacking the very basis of scripture and tradition. This disjuncture in viewpoints brings…

I’m reading Ramachandra Guha’s magisterial India After Gandhi, and one section stopped me in my tracks: his account of how India conducted its first general election. The scale of it is staggering. Guha walks through the numbers, the infrastructure, the people and the resources it took, and he credits much of it to one…

Nice note from BlackRock: Outside China, the key question is whether companies use Chinese technology or compete against it. Cheaper Chinese industrial robots and machinery can boost productivity and ease labor shortages for their customers. For rival producers, the economics are less appealing. European machinery…

Raghuram Rajan on industrial policy:

I’d say that I am not against the government’s actions; I am very much for the government’s actions on dealing with the fundamentals. So let’s focus on public goods such as education and healthcare, let’s focus on building good roads, let’s focus on creating a good business environment, let’s focus on utilities, let’s focus on water, electricity, logistics. These are areas where you have a much better chance of success improving things rather than [picking winners and sectors].

Whenever our government showers a sector with love, it has not ended particularly well except for the areas I just mentioned. Kudos to the current government for building out Indian infrastructure. That’s great. But I think if you test them on manufacturing, have they really created more manufacturing jobs? The line is flat [on the chart]. Look at the line. I’d say that just the evidence suggests that we have not been great. Maybe some other countries have seen success.

The weight loss revolution in India seems to be doing ok?

And right on cue, the fakes have arrived on the scene:

Spurious drugs are a recurring problem in India, said Mahesh Zagade, a former commissioner of the Maharashtra Food and Drug Administration. He said that while the country’s laws are robust, implementation and enforcement have been lacking. Short-staffed regulators, the possibility of corruption, and easy access to raw materials have contributed to the problem, in his view. “This is a failure of the official machinery,” he said, adding that until action is taken to fix the broader system, “this situation is just not going to improve.”

What a legend. Came across the name for the first time in India after Gandhi: With the enactment of the Government of India Act 1935, the couple joined the Muslim League and entered electoral politics. In the 1937 elections, she was one of the few women who successfully contested from a non-reserved seat and was…

New entry in This Indian Life:

Interesting model. Yet to test it out:

NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Diarization is an open-weight, 100M-parameter model that ranks #1 on VoiceArena’s Diarization-Bench leaderboard with a 14.72% Diarization Error Rate (DER). Supporting up to eight speakers across live and recorded conversations, it handles overlapping speech, chunked processing for flexible recording lengths, and customizable streaming latency

huggingface.co ↗**Know Who Spoke When: Build Real-Time, Multi-Speaker AI with NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Diarization**A Blog post by NVIDIA on Hugging Face

Years ago, I came across a quote by John Kenneth Galbraith in Tom Butler-Bowdon’s 50 Economics Classics—a brilliant book, by the way, and an accessible introduction to fifty foundational works that most of us are unlikely to ever read cover to cover. Galbraith’s point was simple: “Where the market works, I’m for that.…

I’ve been using Claude Code, and to a lesser extent Codex, from my phone, and it is genuinely game-changing. I’m very late to this, obviously. But this is really awesome. I just switch on my laptop, open a bunch of sessions, and then no matter where I am — at a coffee shop, out for a walk, whatever — I can quickly tell…

Today in learning: In his first book, The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups (1965), he theorized that what stimulates people to act in groups is incentive; members of large groups do not act in accordance with a common interest unless motivated by personal gain (economic, social, etc.).…

Valuations for cokeheads: Now, TAM is de rigueur in any venture capitalist’s slide deck or IPO prospectus. Its usefulness is another matter. Uber touted a $12.3tn TAM in its 2019 listing; its annual revenue today is less than $60bn. WeWork’s $3tn addressable market of office properties didn’t save it from bankruptcy.…

Interesting model launches from Qwen. Omni Flash especially seems promising as a workhorse model for simple text classification and voice transcription tasks. Just started testing it in a voice dictation app I built myself to transcribe my voice notes and so far so good.

some audio tasks and so far so good.

qwen.ai ↗QwenQwen offers comprehensive functionality spanning chatbot, image and video understanding, image generation, document processing, web search integration, tool utilization, and artifacts.

qwen.ai ↗QwenQwen offers comprehensive functionality spanning chatbot, image and video understanding, image generation, document processing, web search integration, tool utilization, and artifacts.

If AI is slop, then so are humans!

x.com/kmcnam1/status/2101356137396265106 ↗

The bulk of my vibe-coding experiments over the last few months have involved audio and video, or rather audio and vision, and I’ve been experimenting pretty heavily with multimodal models. So this is just a small guide based on what I’ve used. If you have some project where you need vision capabilities for text…

IMF on why Japan matters: The Japanese government bond market is among the world’s largest and deepest and remains an important safe haven for investors when conditions deteriorate. Combined with Japan’s open capital account, sizable international investments, and growing foreign participation—including in mutual funds…

To read:

One of India’s biggest digital vulnerabilities sits on a six-kilometre stretch of Mumbai’s Arabian Sea coast.

Around Versova, a densely populated neighbourhood on the city’s northwest, at least 13 of ++India’s 18 intercontinental submarine cables++ come ashore within six kilometres of one another.

Together they carry as much as 95% of India’s international bandwidth to Europe, Africa and West Asia.

“This network faces a critical vulnerability due to severe geographic concentration,” says Anwesha Sen of Takshashila Institution, a think tank.

Donald Trump is a man who lives by a singular philosophy: “Aaj kuchh tufani karte hain” (Let’s do something daredevil today).But sadly, his deep desire to be disruptive is completely at odds with what the world actually needs. Today, the entire planet is paying a steep price for his almost orgasmic fixation on…

As always another thoughtful and prescient post by Ruxandra Teslo.

If we want humans at all to be in charge in any way over the world, we need them to continue exercising their intellect and gaining mastery over intellectual domains. If we deplete the institutional and cultural resources that underpin that, in a generation or two our minds will atrophy and no human will be in charge of anything (or the world will be horrendous).

Yet another interesting debate on the limits of GDP, this time triggered by David Deutsch posting about fixing his dishwasher with ChatGPT, and Jesús Fernández-Villaverde riffing on what that means for GDP, welfare and taxation. Amen to this: This is one of those debates that keeps coming back in economics because…