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

The price of Trump's stupidity

Iranian officials have said the war won’t end and shipping routes won’t reopen until all of the conflicts in the region are resolved. Gulf states that had hoped for a quick end to the war are now grappling with the realization that the U.S. has pulled them into a conflict that could run for years with no clear strategy for ending it.“This isn’t just a Yemen story,” said H.A. Hellyer, a senior fellow at the Royal United…

What GDP Doesn't See

“GDP per capita turns out to be a handy and available proxy.”

What does it mean to think in the shadow of AI?

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).

There is still Alpha to be had in good training data.

Post-Training PipelineIn this release, we refrain from introducing novel post-training algorithms. The overall recipe follows the standard paradigm of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) followed by reinforcement learning (RL) and on-policy distillation (OPD) [Gu et al., 2024; Lu and Lall, 2025], without algorithmic modifications beyond well-established practices. Instead, our efforts are concentrated almost entirely on what the…

DeepSeek V4.1 Flash Vision is surprisingly good

I was just testing DeepSeek V4.1 Flash on a bunch of vision tasks with old book pages, and it’s not bad at all. It had issues with some Sanskrit type and diacritic-heavy text, but it still managed reasonably well. And considering the cost, it’s pretty impressive. During off-peak hours, the API is dirt cheap. That…

We are the stories we tell

"To poison a nation, poison its stories. A demoralised nation tells demoralised stories to itself. Beware of the storytellers who are not fully conscious of the importance of their gifts, and who are irresponsible in the application of their art: they could unwittingly help along the psychic destruction of their people." [1, 2]

Sweden's crime problem

Gunnar Strömmer, Sweden’s justice minister, calls gang crime “a systematic threat to society” on a par with or above that posed by terrorism. On a visit to Gothenburg, Sweden’s second city, he notes that almost a year has gone by since a deadly shooting there. So bad was the country’s reputation that politicians in neighbouring Denmark and Norway talked about “Swedish conditions” as shorthand for everything they did not want…