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

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…

India after Gandhi

I often tell my friends that I'm white at heart because I know far more about American and European history than Indian history, and it's a shameful fact that I'm working to fix. One of the books I bought a while ago was Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi, which I hadn't got around to reading. I finally picked it…

Visualizing the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident

Not bad Here's what I got

The bear case for AGI

At a higher level, I guess I’d say there’s a sort of refusal to think carefully about what models are or are not useful for in a rigorous way which I find personally quite annoying, and instead a reliance on some nebulous notion of being “AGI pilled” as a replacement for serious thought. I think people are very quick to anthropomorphize LLM intelligence because humans communicate through words and we infer the intelligence of…

Research on the wealth effect

Now, you might think that broader participation in the stock market would increase the strength of the wealth effect, with more households exposed to market volatility. But this is not quite right. ++New research++ from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds that the more widely Americans hold shares, the weaker the effect of a rate change on the real economy, which is the opposite of what you might expect: instinctively,…

I got some links for you

The German chemist Felix Hoffmann (1868–1946) famously synthesized two drugs: aspirin, one of the most widely beneficial drugs ever, and heroin, one of the most harmful of illegal substances. These two drugs represent the efforts of late-19th-century chemists to create new substances that could be used as medicines, not just to isolate active ingredients from natural products or to imitate them. One approach toward this end…

Agentic payments are coming to UPI

India is preparing a framework that would let AI agents make small digital payments without approval for every transaction, three sources familiar with the matter said, potentially making UPI one of the world's largest networks with agentic payments. While leading payment companies have launched such frameworks in the U.S., Europe, Singapore and Australia, a rollout on the popular Unified Payments Interface would also put…