Hi, I’m Bhuvan.This is my commonplace book.

Rare earths are neither financially valuable nor financially viable

Expensive to produce, expensive to store... so what’s the solution? Government intervention — and lots of it. All along the supply chain, the US has stepped in. It has bought stakes in several US rare earth producers, struck offtake agreements with some of those producers to ensure a minimum price for their products, and pledged $10bn in debt backing for Project Vault, a stockpiling initiative designed as a backstop against…

A 17GB miracle

The fact that a 17GB file can do all of this stuff on my home machines is a miracle. Once again, I’m delighted and amazed at how much progress local models have made this year. A year ago this would have been competitive with the best and most expensive of the proprietary models—today it can run on a capable laptop. The only thing holding this back from being a daily driver is performance. It feels pretty slow on both the M5…

Macro boogeymen

💯

Olivier Blanchard what will trigger a debt crisis in France

I keep being asked. How long can France go on with budget deficits and increasing debt until we get a crisis? The answer: I cannot tell. Not because I am particularly dumb (this is a separate issue). But because there is a potentially large danger zone, where the crisis may or may not happen, depending on the whims of investors. Given our debt and our deficit, we have probably entered the danger zone. If investors continue to…

Neuroscience is in trouble

Damn

AGI for dummies is here

AGI for normies is already here. I completely agree with Derek Thompson on this—in fact, I’d go so far as to say that even back with Sonnet 3.5, it had already arrived for the rest of us. The first time I heard a similar take was from Tyler Cowen, who pointed out that AGI, for most normal people, is already in our…

The Chinese LLMs are good!

I’m addicted to vibe-coding, and the reason is simple: thanks to coding tools like Codex, Claude Code, and others, I sincerely think that I can build the next Amazon, Google, or Notion from my bedroom—and also sometimes from when I'm sitting on the potty, because I can still send remote commands from my phone. Coding…