Varun Das

Building tools for faster eCommerce. Big on the small things. Keeping things simple.

Currently building Brella | Savor | TaskMan

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@pushmeet @GoogleDeepMind Very proud of you all. This is an amazing milestone!

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@ku1deep Access to energy is how we solve for most of our problems.
Our leaders simply aren't talented enough to do so.

Sucks, but it is the reality.

There is no reason why tech parks in BLR have great roads, walkable footpaths but the rest of the city doesn't.

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@Rishhari @harshulj It is a terrible deal for the Bangalore Metro.

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@mssakshinarula Selling to Indians won't let Temple hit a 50 billion USD valuation.
So it makes sense to ignore the market completely.

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@VazeKshitij I also want to get into wifi firmware!!
Are you in Bangalore?

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@abidsensibull Unless strong legal action is taken against such malpracices, there won't be any change.

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@Hardism But they don't do it well. Please use vfx, but do it well. Else it just looks shabby.

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

People would still get the Bugatti.
EVs are soulless.

[Felix Hamer • electricfelix @electricfelix]

speeding up past 300km/h
speeding up past 400km/h
topping 500km/h

scary
congrats team BYD or should I say Yangwang?
⚡️⚡️⚡️
#alwaysbecharging

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@vb_speak @Janilokal The 2nd design is the good design in this case. The first one is boring and stale.

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

Dictators don't lose in elections. They literally "dictate" elections.

[Saurav Das @SauravDassss]

Dictatorial Trump’s party loses control of both the US House and Senate! Seems like wanna-be Dictators are having a very tough time worldwide?

But do remember, it does not end with elections. The Dictator, his henchmen, and every SINGLE person that aided and abetted the Dictator’s acts must be punished.

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

None of this points to any wrong doing btw. It is a sad reminded how apathetic and incompetent the State actually is.

Which is a far bigger crime, imo.

[Ritika Chopra @RitikaChopra__]

Five weeks ago we reported that two Election Commissioners had objected 14 times in 10 months, revealing an unprecedented rift inside the Election Commission.

Since then the Commission has reversed course on almost EVERY move the two Commissioners had
red-flagged.

The last was Form 6.

The SIR declaration is now out of the online form everywhere, including the states where the SIR is still running. It’s a separate declaration now.

With this, the reversal is complete. Let me explain.
https://t.co/LK207jMCu5
🧵 (1/13)

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@karthiks i had build something similar earlier this year. Though I didn't launch it as a chrome extension

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@saurabhchandra @madmanweb @grok This shouldn't require dialing up intelligence though.
I have noticed Claude doesn't slip up as much.

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@saurabhchandra @madmanweb @grok tested now. I have a paid account.

Trillion dollar company. Future of intelligence.
Much wow.

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@TweetinderKaul Sucks that you are Utd fan as well.

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@nutanc Let's build a new internet.

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@Nandakishorm1 I will sit over the weekend and figure out how to get this implemented internally. There are use cases which Laya can be really useful.

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@nutanc What replaces it?

[Varun Das @filteredkapi]

@MaxAnderson It has become a joke.

[Max Anderson @MaxAnderson]

As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty:

This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term

Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries

Google’s response?

Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for

A few examples to illustrate:

For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model

I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid

This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much

However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding

It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem

Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision

Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting

This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed

But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact
-match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)”

The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off

So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam

This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants)

This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes

Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day

And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off

Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target

These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow

Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs

Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future

This is now no longer the case

At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose