I got some links for you
Source rabbitholes.gardenM.G. Siegler on the massive brain exodus at Google:
So yeah, had we gotten hit with Dean, Ghemawat, Vinyals, and Le – followed by Hassabis (even yes, with him technically staying, but in a new, less day-to-day role), it would have actually seemed even more catastrophic. Like Google couldn’t stop the bleeding. Better to rip the band-aid off, perhaps?
Regardless, it’s still an optics nightmare. I mean, these people were just on stage together a couple months ago talking about the future of AI at Google as three of the four co-leads of Gemini. Now they’re all gone – except for Kavukcuoglu.
I have been running a lot of data visualization experiments, and I came across this report with the lot of useful tools for data viz:
Adding this paper on critical minerals to my reading list.
Be more fucking chalant. Amen a 100 times!
This tweet speaks to something I’ve been increasingly thinking about. It started off as a clichéd diagnosis of why India is the way it is—that is, “premium mediocre.”
Much like all flawed social commentary, I had a mono-causal reason: indifference or apathy at the root of all the problems that plague India. It feels like we’ve stopped giving a shit about things, that we’re okay with things being mediocre, and that we are perfectly comfortable with muddling along in life. At one point, it also started seeming to me that the reason there’s so much indifference and apathy is because people have stopped believing that tomorrow is going to be better than today. And if that’s the case, why would people even bother to fight for things to be better?
Nonetheless, I’m self-aware enough to see the flaws in my own argument—especially this penchant for a lot of otherwise well-meaning people to compress complex problems into a single reason.
Shaking the Needle a Few Millimeters
That being said, after thinking about this long enough, I’ve come to the belief that there’s no point in waiting for things to be better.
In our own ways—regardless of whether we are rich or poor, in the cities or in the villages, in a position of influence or not—there are small actions that we all can take. There are things we can do in our own capacity, given our own circumstances, abilities, and access to resources, that can marginally make the needle shake a few millimeters.
If more of us start doing things that might shake the needle in the direction of things being better, those small actions add up. We’re in an environment where we’ve stopped appreciating just how much small actions compound over a period of time to lead to change. Clichés are clichés for a reason—all those metaphors about an avalanche or drops of water adding into an ocean have a deep truth in them.
This has been a late realization in my life, one that should have been obvious. But what is life if not a journey to rediscover all the things that other people have already discovered, written about, spoken about, and demonstrated? In that sense, life for a lot of us is a remake and not really original.
Doing Things in the Open
To make things a little concrete: in the last couple of years, especially since the advent of LLM coding tools, I’ve become increasingly interested in all things around open knowledge, the public commons, open data, and open information.
What I do with side projects like akshara.ink, thisindianlife.today, hopendespair.world, soochi.fyi, or paperlanterns.ink might not seem like much. But I think I’m okay with doing whatever little I can rather than just sitting, complaining, and writing posts about how shitty things are. That doesn’t help anything or anyone.
My own inspiration comes from other people doing small things. It’s not really from grandiose attempts at wholesale change, but from people who are trying to change things in their own way, within a setting where their ability to act is circumscribed by their capabilities and resources. That has left a deep mark on my psyche. It has changed the way I see things, and I’ve stopped being so pessimistic. Instead of complaining, I’d rather just sit and try to do things.
Action as a Cheat Code
“Doing things” has become somewhat of a caricaturish phrase in the age of AI, but it’s one I deeply believe in.
- When in doubt, doing things is always better than not doing things. It is infinitely better than sitting, ruminating, complaining, or being one of those pessimistic assholes.
- Every action creates forward momentum. People underappreciate the act of doing things—big, small, or otherwise. Taking action automatically opens doors in front of you.
It’s shocking to me how big of a cheat code this is for going through reality and letting good things happen to you. I’m a living example of that. All of this was triggered by this one tweet, but these are things that I’ve come to truly believe.
View this post on X
View this post on X
Taxi drivers and ambulance drivers are less likely to die of Alzheimer’s:
The implications of whether sustained spatial reasoning protects the brain reach beyond mapmakers and cab drivers. Studies have repeatedly found a link between mentally complex occupations and delayed cognitive decline and lower dementia risk, even after accounting for education.
Research on cognitive reserve – the brain’s capacity to continue functioning despite disease – can help explain why two people with a similar disease burden can show markedly different levels of cognitive impairment. If demanding spatial thinking protects the brain, then how societies design schooling, professional training and retirement all become questions of brain health.
Spatial reasoning can be trained, and training opportunities are already widespread. GIS and remote sensing instruction are available through geography, engineering, public health and environmental science programs worldwide.
View this post on X
Nearby leaves, connected by subject and form.