AshokSaravanan

Building SignalsAI | Prev: InMobi

[AshokSaravanan @amAshoK]

@rahulj51 Wavy lines in every direction and cursive 8s. Helps identify the scratchiness.

[Vaidehi Murthy @ButVai]

Getting older is learning to be graysful.

[AshokSaravanan @amAshoK]

@khaarabun Doing great! Yeah, it's been a while.

[Sanjay Sipahimalani @SanSip]

Show some consideration.

[KENNYMARTIN @Kennymaartin]

@readswithravi @grok but why should one study all these?

[Sukhada @appadappajappa]

Thissss

[svs 🇮🇳 @_svs_]

There is no substitute for reading fiction.

If you struggle to articulate your thoughts it's because you don't read enough fiction. And articulating thoughts is the highest alpha known to man.

Don't skip the fiction chat.

[Dharmesh Ba @dharmeshba]

I keep thinking about the doorman fallacy Rory Sutherland keeps referring to.

A hotel can replace a doorman with an automatic door and call it efficiency.

On paper, it saves money.

But the balance sheet only sees one job: opening the door. It does not see everything else the doorman was doing.

He was security. He was status. He was recognition. He was the first human signal that this place is cared for. He noticed who came in. He made regular guests feel known. He made strangers feel watched. He made the hotel feel like a hotel.

This is the danger of cost cutting. It often removes value that was never measured.

Many businesses make this mistake. They define a human role too narrowly, automate the visible function, and then wonder why the experience feels worse.

A receptionist is not just answering calls. A call center agent is not just closing tickets. A postman is not just delivering letters.

Human beings carry invisible value.

They create trust, warmth, reassurance, and memory. These things are hard to quantify, so finance departments treat them as waste.

But customers don't behave like numbers inside an excel sheet.

They live with feelings and emotions that are hard to measure.

And sometimes the thing you remove to save cost was the thing that made people trust you.

[Aaron Levie @levie]

Jevons paradox is happening in real time. Companies, especially outside of tech, are realizing that they can now afford to take on software projects that they wouldn’t have been able to tackle before because now AI lets them do so.

We’re going to start to use software for all new things in the economy because it’s incrementally cheaper to produce. Marketing teams at big companies will have engineers helping to automate workflows. Engineers in life sciences and healthcare will automate research. Small businesses will hire engineers for the first to build better digital experiences.

And as long as AI agents still require a human who understands what to prompt, how to review when an agent goes off the rails, how it guide back, how to maintain the system that was built, how to fix the ongoing bugs, and more, we will still have humans managing these agents.

This is why all the advice you get of not going into engineering is wrong. The world is going to increasingly be made up of software, and the people that understand it best will be in a strong economic position. This will happen in other roles as well where output goes up and demand increases.

[Ritesh Banglani @banglani]

Recently my son asked me why he needs to do mental math when calculators exist. I told him if he doesn't, he will make irrational decisions throughout his life.

Let me explain. Say you see two packs of snacks. A 500g pack for ₹100, and a 200g pack for ₹45. Which one should you buy?

The math is not at all hard, but people who are scared of mental math will not do it. This is not such an important decision that you pull out a calculator for it. So you make the decision on vibes - say ₹100 "looks too high", or that the smaller pack costs "less than half of the biggest one" or some such.

The problem isn't that you made a poor decision on snacks. It is that if you do this repeatedly, you train your mind to make decisions on vibes. Over time your reasoning muscle atrophies - so you start relying even more on vibes.

Before you know it, you are taking even big decisions on vibes. Should I rent or buy a house? Let's decide based on "EMI affordability", not rental yield. Should I invest in this IPO? I have heard of the company's brand so I'm all in. It isn't only financial or quantitative decisions either - in my mind the math muscle and the logic muscle are closely correlated, so a decline in one certainly affects the other.

Like the Arab who let the camel's nose inside the tent, fear of math is the first step towards thoughtlessness, and needs to be nipped in the bud. Intellectual laziness starts with snack prices.

[Su 🪷 @su_dreams]

Something that shifted how I think about distraction: the urge to open a new tab, check the phone, get up for the third time - it's not random.

It arrives at a specific moment. Usually right when something gets slightly harder, or slightly more vulnerable, or requires a kind of presence I'm not quite ready to bring.

The distraction is the tell. It marks the exact spot where something worth paying attention to is trying to happen.

[John Crickett @johncrickett]

Software engineers: Context switching kills productivity.

Also software engineers: I'm now managing 19 AI agents and doing 1800 commits a day.

We’ve spent years complaining that managers who expect a quick 5-minute chat ruin our focus for the next hour. But a ping from an agent every few minutes, that’s ok?

We celebrated Paul Graham’s essay “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule” in which he argued:

“When you're operating on the maker's schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in.”

Now we see software engineers claiming huge productivity gains from hordes of AI agents, celebrating thousands of commits per day from their 19 agents.

Either context switching was never really the problem, and we oversold our need for deep focus. Or we're not actually reviewing 1800 commits a day.

If we couldn't context switch before, we're not managing 19 agents. We're blindly trusting them.

That’s not engineering, it’s gambling.

[Karthik 🇮🇳 @beastoftraal]

Truly terrific writing - full of carefully assembled snark on multiple targets and all of them land perfectly without seeming malicious 😁 Iceland Cricket Association's social media team's game is truly ace, whether their actual cricket is or not.

[Paul Dix @pauldix]

https://t.co/pE2pQ1isw8

[Klaas @forgebitz]

"i want to start my own company so i can do whatever i want"

you are going to be very disappointed once you realise you are going to do a lot of things other people want

[AshokSaravanan @amAshoK]

@Raaga_Suresh @DanishSait Haha. Looking forward to his meeting with Generalists.

[@_rt* @literatura_rte]

Kaoru Yamada

[love drops @lovedropx]

I respect the moon's unwillingness to be photographed on a phone