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

This is horrific: Unlike Savitri’s daughters, most girls in the community are born into a system in which their families expect them to enter sex work — a practice passed down over generations. According to several members of the community and NGOs in the region, while many Indians celebrate the birth of a boy over a…

​Brad Setser is one of the go-to experts if you want to understand global imbalances, the political economy of China, and the complexities of currency movements. Regardless of whether you agree with him or not, he always backs up his assertions with data—which sets him apart from a lot of other commentators in…

I’m a huge fan of Anton Jäger, and I’ve been reading his writing for a long time. I’m yet to read Hyperpolitics, but I’ve heard several podcasts in which Jäger has spoken about the concept. The concept offers a useful lens to make sense of the contemporary political landscape and its interactions with the civil society:

Hyperpolitics is what came next: intense politicisation, with neither institutional roots nor ambitions. “On the surface,” Jäger writes, “the Black Lives Matter protests would seem to have little in common with the mob that stormed the Capitol in January 2021. Morally, they are worlds apart … Organisationally, however, these movements exhibit a striking set of similarities: fleeting in duration, they maintain no membership rolls and struggle to impose any real discipline on their adherents.” As a consequence, everything explodes and nothing changes; movements surge suddenly forward and yet no territory is taken. He quotes political theorist Paolo Gerbaudo’s contemporary interpretation of the evocative phrase “bodies without organs”. Modern political movements, he writes, are “concentrated and muscular, yet without an internal metabolism”.

It’s China’s world and the rest of us are living in it. One of the persistent stories of the last decade has been the relentless rise in Chinese exports and what that’s done to everyone else. Arvind Subramanian, the former chief economic adviser, has been making a version of this argument at the Peterson Institute. His…

Lots of new inequality statistics from the World Bank’s PIP on Our World in Data:

Inequality statistics are heavily contested and rightly so, but read the right way, they still have some use.

Cool site to visualize tariffs, sanctions, and global trade deals.

Fully relate to this feeling. Even as I was reading this post, I switched to check how Codex was doing with a few side projects I was working on and then go back to finishing reading the post :grimacing: I’m feeling it right now. I had to set a timer for 15 minute on my computer and block all distractions to write…

As always, a brilliant and incisive analysis of the student protests by Pranay Kotasthane: The WhatsApp uncles and aunties generation that have seen the benefits of the two decades after liberalisation are content with their “settled” lives, their garba in Vietnam and their misguided belief about India’s standing going…

Rahul Verma on the student protests: Governments find such protests much harder to confront because there is no obvious ideological counter-narrative. One can’t simply invoke nationalism or accuse every dissatisfied student of serving foreign interests when the grievance concerns administrative failure. The usual…

The awesome Simon Willison hosted a session between Cat Wu and Thariq Shihipar from Anthropic’s Claude Code team. Given that I love Claude Code, I wanted to watch the full video but didn’t have the time to. So I was reading the edited transcript that Simon published, and this stood out to me: Thanks to Claude Code, I…

The Wire on the student protests:

What makes this moment fundamentally different is that the public is no longer appearing terrified. Despite heavy police deployment, massive surveillance cameras and the use of tear gas and force, the sheer volume of everyday citizens, broke the atmosphere of intimidation. People didn’t just step out of their homes. They stepped out and converted individual isolation into a loud, collective voice.
By refusing to be divided, labelled or silenced, this student-led movement has stripped the Modi regime of its standard playbook, leaving the political leadership, which banks on Modi’s ‘strongman’ image is looking visibly unsettled and facing an unavoidable crisis of accountability.

How far behind are open models in their cyber capabilities compared to closed models:

Xiaomi is launching an open weights robotics model.

Thoughtful piece by David Wallace-Wells on the conspiratorial and paranoid turn of American society:

But what happens when history starts to resemble myth, when the inconsistencies reveal themselves not through deep study but in the most superficial scroll of our phones?

The new age of political paranoia obviously reflects a toxic efflorescence of grass-roots distrust, not to mention the structural pathologies of a new information environment. But sometimes I wonder whether we’re putting too much emphasis on those structures in trying to make sense of that paranoia. Is conspiracy theory downstream from culture, in other words, or from history? Is it a question of how information flows to us or what flotsam is coming our way? Probably the influence doesn’t run in just one direction, however comforting it may be to believe a less polluted information environment is just a few design tweaks away.

It’s hard work remaining true to your heart!

We do not grow up learning to go against the tide. I grew up in an upper middle-class family in India being groomed to success by following the rules. Someone like Loulou Van Damme, who seemed to follow her heart, would surely have alarmed my parents. But the more I spoke with her the more I realised how much hard work it is to remain true to your heart. “I fought for living this life,” she said simply. “I have some good angel with me. But I worked a lot.” Even Isla’s Ridge was a struggle. She said she was on the verge of cancelling the contract if CGH could not be persuaded to run it as the kind of guest house she had envisioned, rather than yet another luxury hotel.

Hat tip to Kush for sharing it.

1 Then was not non-existent nor existent: there was no realm of air, no sky beyond it. What covered in, and where? And what gave shelter? Was water there, unfathomed depth of water? 2 Death was not then, nor was there aught immortal: no sign was there, the day’s and night’s divider. That One Thing, breathless, breathed…

Will Oremus on why LLMs suffer from the “it’s not x, but Y” tic: Even if researchers could figure out exactly why chatbots embrace negative parallelism, there’s another factor that could make it very hard to fix: “When something gets into these models, it’s very hard to pull it out,” Masrour, the Pangram engineer…

Came across this wonderful quote in Days at the Morisaki Bookshop:

The act of seeing is no small thing. To see something is to be possessed by it. Sometimes it carries off a part of you, sometimes it’s your whole soul. - Motojirō Kajii

If debt were inherited over generations, it’s easy to see how it would quickly leave some trapped in permanent multigenerational poverty, unable to escape no matter how hard they worked or how high an income they managed to secure. The interest on debt would compound over generations and eventually no amount of work would be enough for it to be paid off. Being trapped in debt is something many can understand. But the reverse – inherited wealth – has exactly the same effect on society.
A few people and their descendants, like

Benjamina and his magic money printer, have a distortionary effect and control over our society and our energy budgets, reducing the space of the possible, our ability to innovate, and ultimately preventing us from cracking the next energy level that leaves everyone better off. In turn, we gradually enter a new feudalism.

Brilliant post on the history of web forums! I came online too late for the heyday of web forums, but I’ve used a few. They certainly did have a distinct charm compared to modern social platforms. The reason it struck a chord is because I’ve been thinking of setting up a small forum online as a calm space to discover…

In the 1990s, one of the dominant ideas in development economics was that poor people remained poor because they lacked access to credit. If only they could borrow, the argument went, they would invest in productive opportunities, grow their incomes, and escape poverty. That belief sparked the global enthusiasm around…

Obvious but…

This article reviews recent economic studies on the causal effects of temperature on labor productivity. The negative effects of extreme temperatures are widespread, and the magnitudes of the impact differ across social and economic factors. In addition to physical outputs, extreme temperatures also impair mental productivity, including cognition and learning. In utero exposure to extreme temperatures has profound effects on human development. Although the literature has detected various adaptation strategies, the conclusions are mixed. We discuss some limitations of existing studies and propose several directions for future research.

Two brilliant posts by Pranay Kotasthane and Amey Tirodkar capture something deeply worrying about Indian politics: the rising dominance of the BJP, and the slow drift towards what feels like creeping one-partyism. I’m not using words like authoritarianism because they often flatten the nuance of what is happening.…

The internet may be a dumpster fire. Much of it probably is. But there are still plenty of corners that haven’t been engulfed by the raging wildfire that’s laying waste to everything in its path. For all our complaints about the internet—and many of those complaints are entirely justified—it remains one of the greatest…

Nabeel Qureshi recently tweeted that the winning entry of the 2026 Harper’s Bazaar short story competition was written by AI. He posted a screenshot from Pangram, one of those AI-writing detection platforms. She sat on the bench opposite, the wood damp through her wool trousers – the Jigsaw ones from three years ago…

Beautiful:

Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.

I have a theory that AI will make a lot of things that are otherwise illegible or partly legible, and in doing so can have unpredictable consequences on our society. And anyway, that’s a theory, and I wrote about it.

With each passing day, the dominant discourse about large language models continues to annoy me. On one side, you have the boosters. On the other side, you have the doomers. One side confidently asserts that this marks the twilight of the humans. The other side makes roughly the same argument, but in a doom-and-gloom…

So true:

Orhan Pamuk: I understand, I am an admirer of René Girard’s work but I have come across him later in years, The Scapegoat, Sacrifice, I like these subjects, but on the other hand it was a rather simplistic or simple idea that I think that even in the worst conditions that to be able to tell a story is a sort of a great relief for me, that I believe that in fact if there are Hegelian minds who are trying to over- rule each other which is a Hegelian point of view of history, I think that my understanding of people’s wills or minds clashing is who is going to tell who’s story earlier? Who is going to impose his or her story? It think all of my characters in various books be it My Name is Red, be it The Black Book or even Snow, the one who manages to tell his story, pass his story, survives or telling stories is a way of surviving and continuing to live.

So poetic:

They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

Carl Sagan

I was playing around with visualizing economic data, and I needed a cheap LLM to digitize or extract text from really old scanned PDFs.

I experimented with Gemini 3.1 Flash Lite. It’s a small, ultra-cheap model, but I was surprised by how good it was at extracting clean, high-quality, well-formatted text from really shoddy Indian Meteorological Department PDFs.

It got me thinking: for people working on heavy, dull, repetitive workloads like this, these cheap models unlock a lot of use cases. I’ve seen the same with OpenAI models too. They make it possible to do things that would otherwise be too tedious, expensive, or time-consuming.

I’m imagining someone genuinely interested in archival work. These models can now help people process hundreds or thousands of old PDFs at a really low cost. Hopefully, this unlocks a lot of use cases and brings otherwise undiscovered data, buried in shoddy archives, into the light.