FINALLY, SOMEONE COOKED SAMAY RAINA 😭
- This girl from Arunachal Pradesh came prepared
- She roasted Samay from every possible angle — and for once, Samay had NOTHING to say
- Bro finally got a taste of his own roasting game. 😭
Sharon Verma cooked and roasted Samay Raina in the latest episode of India’s Got Latent.
Samay Raina: Sharon Verma is a Bihari who came to Mumbai in search of a job, Just Bihari things.
Sharon Verma: At least I left my state by my choice 🔥🍿
Kishore Kumar… the legendary voice born Abhas Kumar Ganguly on 4 August 1929 in Khandwa, Madhya Pradesh.
As a singer, actor, composer and filmmaker, he became one of India’s most beloved voices.
His songs still carry laughter, longing and love.
Today, through this beautiful song, let us celebrate the sacred bond between brothers and sisters…the love that protects, supports and stays forever.
A tribute to Kishore Kumar…and to every brother and sister. 💖💞💖
West Virginia wants to turn the AI boom into a taxpayer boom.
Data centers would pay for their own power, water, and infrastructure while creating thousands of jobs and bringing billions in new investment.
The result could be no more state income tax.
🚨 JAPAN'S BOND AND CURRENCY CRISIS IS ABOUT TO GET WORSE
Japan's 2 year bond yield just hit a new 31 year high at 1.71%, and USDJPY is climbing back toward 160.
The pressure is coming from inflation that keeps building.
Producer prices rose 7.2% year over year in July, the highest in almost 3.5 years, and Tokyo core inflation has now accelerated for three straight months.
Two forces are keeping that inflation alive.
The Strait of Hormuz closure is keeping oil prices elevated, and a weak yen is making everything Japan imports more expensive.
That is pushing the BOJ toward a rate hike as soon as September, with more hikes likely to follow.
But higher rates create a second problem.
Japan already carries one of the highest debt to GDP ratios in the world, so every hike makes that debt sharply more expensive to service.
And there is no easy way to grow out of it.
Japan's labor force is also shrinking as its birth rate falls, cutting into the country's long term growth right as its borrowing costs rise.
As we discussed, Canada's recession has been revised away, and Q2 GDP growth was solid.
The Anti-Oil crew has been bailed out of their 'technical recession' because of higher oil prices.
Fate Loves Irony
Going dark or running high-risk transits with those ships is a bigger capital and safety bet than doing the same with oil tanker.
Oil can be shuttled and transferred...🇶🇦Qatari LNG still cannot, at scale.
That's why Qatar just extended LNG force majeure by another month, notifying Pakistani buyers cancellations run into October and Bangladesh's beyond September, with Edison in Italy told cancellations extend further still.
The gap between oil and LNG here is real.
Oil tankers are increasingly shuttling through Hormuz or going dark to cross the strait, but Qatar's LNG carriers are scarcer, more valuable, and tied directly to the state producer, making Doha far more cautious after 2 of its LNG vessels were attacked in July.
Hormuz normally carries about a 1/5 of global LNG supply, and the standstill has already pushed European and Asian LNG prices to nearly double prewar levels.
Qatar is keeping its Ras Laffan plant, reduced since a March attack, ready to ramp back up fast if Hormuz ever fully reopens, but with winter approaching, prolonged disruption risks pushing prices even higher.
source: Bloomberg/ @SStapczynski
An incredibly sweet Raksha Bandhan ad from Dabur Real (conceived in-house)! But, like the one I wrote about earlier this week, the brand connect is near zero and is even forced at times (when the juice is shown as part of a juice drinking session, or used as a gift), but the writing gets two things really, really well.
The first is the very fact that an ad actually shows a differently abled child. And the writing placed this girl in the most normal way without drawing attention to her the way Titan did a few months ago (see: https://t.co/HAeDgdrVHK). She is just herself and everyone in the family just accept her the way she is, the way it should be. I could just imagine a similar child identifying herself/himself when they see this ad and feel totally 'seen' and included in the mainstream. That's beautiful.
The second is the fact that despite the ad being largely predictable (I could guess what the little boy was up to, but that's also perhaps a factor of me seeing way too many ads day after day - your mileage may vary), the way he explains why he was doing what he was doing (secretively) is absolutely wonderful. The choice of his reasons is so well written and thought out.
Like that other ad (from earlier this week: https://t.co/xhlIYo7hXo), the brand connect is very weak. You could replace that brand with a tablet/iPad brand or seller/retailer... or a brand that offers internet connectivity (Airtel, Jio, ACT, etc.) and the same narrative would fit in perfectly. Ideally, I'd have loved to see the product being the enabler of the sentiment/emotion depicted in the narrative, but such writing requires a lot more thought from the ground up. And for topical (days) narratives, such expectations seem too much these days.
But what Real does within that limitation is lovely, as in they chose to tell a really heartfelt story in context of Raksha Bandhan.
#advertising #marketing #rakshabandhan
🦔CoreWeave's chief data officer just sold $21.3 million in stock while the company carries $35.6 billion in debt. The AI cloud provider has grown revenue 115% year over year to $2.6 billion in Q2, but lost $626 million in the same quarter and $1.37 billion in the first half. Interest expense alone was $985 million in six months. The stock is down 43% from its high. Nvidia, which is CoreWeave's primary chip supplier, also owns $2 billion in CoreWeave shares. The company just raised prices 25% across all its services.
My Take
$35.6 billion in debt on a $48.6 billion market cap. CoreWeave owes almost as much as it's worth and the debt grew by $10 billion in one quarter. Revenue doubled but the borrowing tripled, and interest expense hit $985 million in the first half alone. Every new data center requires more debt, every dollar of debt costs more as rates stay high, and the 25% price hike they just pushed means the margins weren't working at the old prices. At some point the growth has to outrun the interest payments, and right now it isn't close.
Nvidia sells CoreWeave the chips and owns $2 billion in CoreWeave stock. CoreWeave borrows to buy the chips, borrows to build the data centers, and borrows to keep the lights on while it waits for the revenue backlog to convert. The chief data officer set up a plan to sell stock back in March when the price was much higher, which is routine, but the stock is down 43% since then and the debt has nearly doubled. CoreWeave is what the AI buildout looks like underneath the revenue headlines, a lot of borrowed money earning less than it costs to service.
Hedgie🤗
🦔Thomson Reuters just built its own AI model for about $40 million over two years. The final training run cost $450,000. They started with Qwen, an open-source model from China's Alibaba, and trained it on their own legal and news content from Westlaw, Practical Law, and Reuters. The company said the move is about reducing its dependence on Anthropic. Their CTO compared paying for outside AI to being a permanent tenant versus owning the building. Enterprise customers broadly have been cutting spending on OpenAI and Anthropic and switching to cheaper alternatives.
My Take
I covered the DeepSeek pricing collapse a few months ago and said the frontier labs would have a hard time defending premium API pricing once open-source got good enough. Thomson Reuters just did exactly what I expected someone to do. They grabbed a free model, trained it on their own stuff, and now they're pulling back from Anthropic. $40 million, done. Anthropic charges that in API fees from a handful of big customers in a year.
The $190 to $200 billion revenue projection Anthropic is selling to IPO investors assumes companies like Thomson Reuters keep paying. They just stopped. And Thomson Reuters put their model on Hugging Face for academics to use, which means the playbook is now public. I think the frontier API business has maybe two or three years before most large companies with good data figure out they can do this themselves, and the ones who move first are going to pressure the ones still paying full price to ask why.
Hedgie🤗
A guy scanned an entire house with his phone. Uploaded it.
Now anyone on Earth can walk through it in a browser tab. No app. No VR. No agent. No appointment.
Click → you’re inside. Every room. Every angle. Every shadow. Photoreal.
The numbers are insane:
- Agent fee on a $500k home: $15,000
- Cost to make this scan: ~$200
- Time to “tour” 50 houses: one evening
- File size: smaller than a TikTok
The science is wild too:
It’s called 3D Gaussian Splatting instead of polygons (how games render), it uses millions of tiny glowing “splats” of color and depth.
AI reconstructs reality from your photos. The result loads on a phone and looks like you’re THERE.
The grift opportunity is even wilder:
Freelancers are already charging $300–$800 per scan for realtors, Airbnbs, venues, car dealers, museums.
One person + one phone + one weekend = a business.
100% Open source. Built on PlayCanvas.
Shubh #RakshaBandhan to everyone! 🙏❤️
Raksha Bandhan celebrates the beautiful bond of love and protection between a brother and sister, filled with love, blessings and family values..
Cont. 👇
╭─────────────── 🪢❤️🪢 ───────────────╮
🌸 रक्षाबंधन की हार्दिक शुभकामनाएं 🌸
╰─────────────── 🪢❤️🪢 ───────────────╯
राखी सिर्फ़ एक धागा नहीं,
यह बचपन की शरारतों, अनगिनत यादों
और जीवनभर साथ निभाने के विश्वास का प्रतीक है। ❤️
भाई-बहन का रिश्ता यूँ ही स्नेह,
सम्मान और अपनापन से हमेशा महकता रहे।
ईश्वर हर भाई-बहन को सुख, समृद्धि और
खुशियों से भरा जीवन प्रदान करें। 🙏
आप सभी को रक्षाबंधन की ढेरों शुभकामनाएं। 🪢❤️
#रक्षाबंधन #RakshaBandhan #भाईबहन #Rakhi
Home robots are coming. The first ones in will be the small ones that are safe around kids and pets.
Hugging Face's Pollen Robotics just opened pre-orders for Microduck, a $399 biped.
25cm, under 800g, 15 motors, a camera, a small LiDAR, two IMUs, and an articulated beak that picks things up.
Ships with 7 pre-trained behaviors including walking, kicking, and roller skating.
Open on GitHub under Apache-2.0: the SDK, the simulator, and the RL training pipeline. So you can teach it new tricks.