Balasubramanian V

It is probably a given, but I will still say it 'Personal Views only.' General stuff on whatever catches my fancy.

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

There are two parts to this story.
1. Indian cities need walking infrastructure desperately (along with the transit infra that makes it practical)
2. We also need to respect the infra we have. We tend to use pavements to park cars and bikes. That's behaviour that needs changing.

[Niranjan Rajadhyaksha @CafeEconomics]

What all Indian cities need …

cc: @sumitakale

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

Strongly endorse this one -- But will add that small talk is not easy to teach (or to learn). Instead, its something to practice.

[Devina Sengupta @DevinaSengupta]

🥁I love ‘small talk’! It’s an art that doesn’t get its due in India Inc.The need to be fascinating, cerebral is so high that we look down upon the beaut skill of ‘small talk’. This skill is honed, never accidental, is strategic & India’s CXOs lack! My column in @livemint 👇🏼

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

I'm saying this as a commuter who uses an electric scooter and am very happy with it. But watching sanctimonious advice from folks who are hiding self interest behind "national interest" can be quite irritating.

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

Mr. Gadkari wants us to use E85 and pure ethanol because it saves valuable forex. Why? so that rich Indians can use that valuable forex to take subsidized flights?
A slightly better route is offering viable commercial value to "switch". Consumers will switch...if there's value!

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

Indian aviation customers being subsidized by an ATF cap is pretty funny to me. I would love to know a) why is this better than free bus for women or whatever and b) what Indigo margins are!
I like free markets. I am not sure these sort of caps really do that.

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

with regard to India infrastructure projects, how delayed is the Indian Ahmedabad bullet train? And what's the cost likely to end up?
Asking because Bengaluru Mumbai trains still take somewhere between 22-24 hours.

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

Promoters and CEO's like this are a terrible advertisement for Indian innovation. Great job by @Mrwhosetheboss who's doing the right thing!

https://t.co/VUh8sV0hRz

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

Appeals to folks to change purchasing habits or behaviour generally don't work. It needs to be backed by "something". I expect our political leadership also knows this....and something will be coming soon!

[Avinash M. Tripathi @qfint]

Lots of noise about "Exit Polls". Before you take them seriously, do ask the following questions:

> What is the forecasted vote share for each political party? While seat projection is an art, estimating vote share is science. If the pollster is not revealing it--or consistently getting it wrong--it should not be taken seriously.

> Who pays for it? Doing statewide survey is expensive. A few days of engagement farming on social media and TV discussions don't monetize it. If a pollster is releasing data without obvious source of funds, it is likely pulling numbers out of thin air. Not to be taken seriously.

> Some pollsters do surveys for political parties and/or business groups and then release the findings for public consumption. They are better because at least they have done serious work. But remember their first priority lies with their paying client, not with the public debate.

> There is confirmation bias. If viewers have strong political priors--and react negatively to bad news--pollsters may be reluctant to share their unbiased findings.

> Poll of polls type projections don't make much sense unless weighed by the reliability of the survey. But reliability factor is hard to estimate, given insufficient documentation of methodology.

Given these limitations, I would not advise taking exit polls too seriously. Sleep peacefully and wait for the official counting.

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

@skdh There's obviously only one answer -- Potatoes and Lentils! Ok...That's two!

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

This hits hard after a night of chaos in Bengaluru after 30-40 minutes of heavy rain.
Good quality city governance is a scarce commodity in most of the country, and municipalities are both chronically underfunded and mostly unaccountable.
Citizens need to demand better!

[Richard Rossow @RichardRossow]

The first state in India to really empower city leaders will win the race to prosperity.

Two things must happen simultaneous with transfer of power:
- First, more money;
- Second, improved governance skills.

Can't have one and not the other.

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

@qfint Loved this -- amazing level of detail showing the value of green cover and water. 5 degree variance across a 5km radius!

[Avinash M. Tripathi @qfint]

shows median temperature in last 7 days. You can use slider to find areas in a particular temperature range. Disclaimer: Beta version so errors are possible; for information only. 2/n
https://t.co/ghd24yqi1H

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

This is also misleading. NVIDIA gross margins are at 80 odd percent. Intel for decades was at 50+%. In India, the IT companies used to have 20-30% margins. Usually these are indications of systemic advantages / monopolies. They tend to die out over time, but seem not to now.

[Chris Freiman @cafreiman]

People wildly overestimate profit margins:

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

@skdh The broken copyright system is unfortunate. But building a good solution at scale appears to be impossible!

[Sabine Hossenfelder @skdh]

I received a false copyright claim on one of my videos and YouTube removed the video because of this.

It's a video about the Riemann Hypothesis. The claim comes from some person who submits a link to their paper about "The Continuity Engine: A Formally Verified Framework Prime Resonance Unification with Medical, Physical, Mathematical Evidence" with links to two unpublished papers that are completely unrelated to my video content. It's obviously some crackpot work, I receive dozens of those a day.

YouTube took the video down based on this false claim.

The only way they allow me to react to this requires me to submit my personal contact information to some random crank on the internet. Alternatively, I am supposed to hire a lawyer (!!) on my own costs, to track down some random guy from whom I then have to extract my up-front expenses.

I have complained to YouTube support about this multiple times. No success, the video is still down.

This procedure is completely unacceptable. It allows random people to try and blackmail me into responding to them. I have no time for this bullshit and no patience either.

Frankly the only sensible course of action forward that I see is to sue YouTube for facilitating fraudulent DCMA claims.

@YouTubeCreators @YouTube

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

This is an AMAZINGLY direct explanation of why NVIDIA is NOT an example of a free market system. When you directly state that your model depends on locking in your customers and admit that Open Source models will win, you rely on barriers to exit to ensure you win. That's bad!

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

Distilled recap of the back-and-forth with Jensen on export controls:

Dwarkesh: Wouldn’t selling Nvidia chips to China enable them to train models like Claude Mythos with cyber offensive capabilities that would be threats to American companies and national security?

Jensen: First of all, Mythos was trained on fairly mundane capacity and a fairly mundane amount of it by an extraordinary company. The amount of capacity and the type of compute it was trained on is abundantly available in China.

Dwarkesh: With that, could they eventually train a model like Mythos? Yes. But the question is, because we have more FLOPs, American labs are able to get to this level of capabilities first. Furthermore, even if they trained a model like this, the ability to deploy it at scale matters. If you had a cyber hacker, it's much more dangerous if they have a million of them versus a thousand of them.

Jensen: Your premise is just wrong. The fact of the matter is their AI development is going just fine. The best AI researchers in the world, because they are limited in compute, also come up with extremely smart algorithms. DeepSeek is not an inconsequential advance. The day that DeepSeek comes out on Huawei first, that is a horrible outcome for our nation.

Dwarkesh: Currently, you can have a model like DeepSeek that can run on any accelerator if it's open source. Why would that stop being the case in the future?

Jensen: Suppose it optimizes for Huawei. Suppose it optimizes for their architecture. It would put others at a disadvantage. As AI diffuses out into the rest of the world, their standards and their tech stack will become superior to ours because their models are open.

Dwarkesh: Tesla sold extremely good electric vehicles to China for a long time. iPhones are sold in China. They didn't cause some lock-in. China will still make their version of EVs, and they're dominating, or smartphones, they're dominating.

Jensen: We are not a car. The fact that I can buy this car brand one day and use another car brand another day is easy. Computing is not like that. There's a reason why x86 still exists. There's a reason why Arm is so sticky. These ecosystems are hard to replace.

Dwarkesh: It's just hard to imagine that there's a long-term lock-in to the Chinese ecosystem, even if they have this slightly better open-source model for a while. American labs port across accelerators constantly. Anthropic's models are run on GPUs, they're run on Trainium, they're run on TPUs. There are so many things you can do, from distilling to a model that's well fit for your chips.

Jensen: China is the largest contributor to open source software in the world. China's the largest contributor to open models in the world. Today it's built on the American tech stack, Nvidia’s. Fact.

All five layers of the tech stack for AI are important. The United States ought to go win all five of them.

in a few years time, I'm making you the prediction that when we want American technology to be diffused around the world—out to India, out to the Middle East, out to Africa, out to Southeast Asia—on that day, I will tell you exactly about today's conversation, about how your policy ... caused the United States to concede the second largest market in the world for no good reason at all.

[Michael Warburton @For_Film_Fans]

In 2006 a high school English teacher asked students to write to a famous author & ask for advice.

KURT VONNEGUT (who left us 19yrs ago today) was the only one to respond.

His reply was a doozy.

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

I'm not going to repost the Election Commissions Tweet. But want to say that it is disappointing to see this.

[Balasubramanian V @balahla]

I'm going to do a hard disagree here. One of the finest folks I know has yet to "finish" a book. His content is primarily video / audio / websites, but he knows "everything about everything". From Pharma supply chain to history of money.

[Cora Harrington @CoraCHarrington]

There isn’t a TikTok or YouTube video that can replace reading books.