Nakamoto Consensus.

പ്രണയം ' ബിറ്റ്കോയിൻ ' നോടു മാത്രം. #bitcoin

[Nakamoto Consensus. @frenchman6799]

.

[halfin @halfin]

Running bitcoin

[Ed Zitron @edzitron]

SoftBank’s investor presentation is one of the greatest things ever made. I’ve been thinking about it all day. These are the real slides shown in a speech where Masayoshi Son said he wouldn’t retire for at least another decade. The goose stuff is perfect.

https://t.co/sk9cDhdWIE

[Vivek Raju @vivekraju93]

Ather using their data to build pothole map.
Atomberg using their data to build water quality report.

Startups are doing the work municipalities should be doing 🙏🏽

[i like food @messedupfoods]

Excellent use of free will

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A freelance journalist who had never taken a statistics course wrote a 142-page book in 1954 that professional statisticians still hand to students before anything else, because nobody before him had bothered to explain the tricks in plain language.

His name was Darrell Huff. The book is called How to Lie with Statistics.

I read it in one sitting and spent the next three days noticing the tricks everywhere.

Over 1.5 million copies have sold in English alone. It became a standard college textbook in the 1960s and 70s. Seventy years later it is still in print, still assigned, still the first thing a working statistician reaches for when they want to teach someone to think clearly about numbers.

The man who wrote it was not a researcher. He was a freelancer who wrote how-to articles for magazines. He had no PhD, no academic post, no institutional affiliation. He just understood that numbers could lie without technically being wrong, and he thought someone should explain how.

His opening line sets the whole tone of the book.

"The crooks already know these tricks; honest men must learn them in self-defense."

That one sentence is the entire argument. The manipulation is not coming. It already happened. It happened this morning in the article you read and the chart someone showed you at work and the study your doctor quoted. The only question is whether you know what to look for.

Huff called the first trick the Well-Chosen Average.

When someone tells you the average salary at a company is $80,000, they have told you almost nothing. If the CEO earns $2 million and the 20 employees earn $30,000 each, the mean is $80,000. The median is $30,000. Both are technically correct. One is a lie. The person reporting the number chose which average to use, and they almost always chose the one that served their argument. Huff's rule: whenever you see an average with no description of which average it is, ask.

The second trick he named the Gee-Whiz Graph.

A line chart shows company profits rising. The line shoots nearly vertical, almost doubling in height across the chart. You feel impressed. Then you look at the y-axis and notice the chart does not start at zero. It starts at 94. The actual increase in profits was 3 percent. The dramatic visual was produced entirely by cropping the bottom of the chart. Nothing in the data changed. The picture changed everything.

Every news organization on earth still does this every day.

The third trick is the one that should change how you read every study you ever encounter. Huff called it Post Hoc Rides Again, which is short for the Latin phrase post hoc ergo propter hoc. After this, therefore because of this.

Cities with more churches have more violent crime. Therefore churches cause violence. The logic is airtight. The conclusion is absurd. Both church attendance and crime go up as population grows. The two numbers track each other because a third variable drives both. The correlation is real. The cause is invented.

Huff showed that this structure is not a rare mistake. It is the default pattern of almost every study reported in a newspaper, because causation is a boring word and because proves is a better headline than correlates with.

The fourth trick was the one that floored me. He called it the Semi-Attached Figure.

A headache pill company claims their product is twice as fast as the competition. The study behind the claim is real. The product was tested and the numbers are accurate. What the advertisement does not mention is that the study measured absorption rate into the bloodstream, not relief of headaches. The two things are related but not identical. The statistic is real. It is attached to the wrong conclusion.

Huff said this is the most dangerous trick of all because the number is never fabricated. You cannot fact-check a semi-attached figure by verifying the statistic. You have to ask whether the statistic actually measures what the claim requires it to measure.

Almost nobody asks.

There is one part of Huff's story that most people who recommend the book leave out.

Years after he wrote it, he was hired by the tobacco industry. He worked on a follow-up manuscript called How to Lie with Smoking Statistics, designed to cast doubt on the research connecting cigarettes to cancer. The book was never published. He testified before Congress in an attempt to undermine the statistical evidence against tobacco.

The man who wrote the clearest guide to spotting statistical deception spent the end of his career deploying those same tricks against evidence that was killing people.

That detail does not make the book wrong. The tricks he described are real and the defenses he taught are still the right ones. But it is a reminder that the tools in the book are neutral. Understanding how lies are built does not protect you from choosing to build one.

The crooks already know these tricks.

Some of them wrote the manual.

What is one statistic you have seen recently that you now think deserves a second look?

[Spencer Baggins @bigaiguy]

A French engineer who lives quietly in Paris has spent 30 years writing software that the entire internet now runs on without knowing his name.

He wrote the code that streams every YouTube video, every Netflix show, every TikTok clip. He wrote the code that runs the virtual servers underneath AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. He calculated more digits of pi than anyone in history. He has no Twitter. He has no marketing. He just keeps shipping.

His name is Fabrice Bellard.

Here is the story, because almost nobody outside the systems programming world knows what one man has built.

Fabrice was born in 1972 in Grenoble, France. He studied at École Polytechnique, the top French engineering school. He never went to Silicon Valley. He never built a startup empire. He just wrote code.

In 2000 he started a project called FFmpeg, an open-source multimedia framework for encoding, decoding, and streaming video. He was 28. The project did one thing nobody else had done well. It handled every video and audio format that existed, in one library, on every operating system. He led it himself for years.

Today FFmpeg is the invisible engine of the internet. YouTube uses it. Netflix uses it. VLC uses it. Chrome and Firefox use parts of it. Every Android phone, every iPhone, every smart TV, every video editing tool you have ever touched runs FFmpeg somewhere underneath. If you have watched a video on a screen in the last 20 years, Fabrice's code processed it.

He was not done.

In 2003 he started QEMU, a machine emulator and virtualizer. He wrote it solo until version 0.7.1 in 2005. QEMU lets you run any operating system on any other operating system. It became the foundation of modern virtualization. KVM, the Linux kernel hypervisor, runs on top of QEMU. Every major cloud provider, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, runs virtual machines on infrastructure built around it. The Quick Emulator is the most cited piece of cloud infrastructure code on Earth.

He kept going.

In 2001 he won the International Obfuscated C Code Contest with a small C compiler that grew into TCC, the Tiny C Compiler. TCC can compile and boot a Linux kernel from source in under 15 seconds. In 2004 he calculated the most digits of pi ever computed at the time, using a personal desktop computer and an algorithm he derived himself called Bellard's formula. In 2011 he wrote a complete PC emulator in pure JavaScript that runs Linux in your browser, a project called JSLinux that engineers still cannot believe is real.

In 2019 he released QuickJS, a small but complete JavaScript engine that fits where V8 cannot. In 2021 he released NNCP, a neural network based lossless data compressor that immediately took the lead on the Large Text Compression Benchmark.

Then he turned his attention to large language models. He built TextSynth Server, a web server with a REST API for running LLMs locally. He released ts_zip and ts_sms, compression utilities that use language models to compress text and short messages at ratios traditional algorithms cannot reach. He released TSAC, a very low bitrate audio compression system. In December 2025 he released Micro QuickJS, a new JavaScript engine for microcontrollers, separate from QuickJS, designed for environments with almost no memory.

Fabrice co-founded a telecom company called Amarisoft in 2012, where he serves as CTO. Amarisoft builds 4G and 5G base station software used by carriers and labs around the world. He has been running it for over a decade while continuing to ship personal projects from his own home page at bellard dot org

He has no Twitter. He has no Instagram. He gives almost no interviews. His personal website is a flat list of projects with no styling, no fonts, no marketing copy. Just titles and links.

A quiet French engineer who never moved to Silicon Valley wrote the code that quietly runs the internet.

He is still shipping.

[Manuscripts & Inscriptions Digitization Foundation @midf_org]

2,000 manuscripts. Live. Free. Searchable now live on the #MIDF platform.

More in progress.

This is what India's knowledge infrastructure looks like,
- https://t.co/1RQXcPLlB2

#MIDF #IndianHeritage #Manuscripts #PMO @GyanBharatamMoC @gssjodhpur

[Vinod_Java @vinod_shankar]

https://t.co/s3oBTGgHY4

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

After many conversations over past year with friends, business associates & policymakers about the future of AI job disruption, I’ve tried to get my thoughts in order. With the caveat that I have no specific AI expertise, here they are. Comments and corrections encouraged.🧵
1/n

[Arnaud Bertrand @RnaudBertrand]

The philosophy entrance exam to ENS, France's most selective school and the one with the most Nobel Prizes per student worldwide.

This year's subject: "The authority of science." 6 hours. Handwritten.

[Saikat @saikatmaity1729]

One of the shortest math papers ever, and the backstory is elite.

Written by John Conway & Alexander Soifer in 2005, the text is just two words long.

The journal tried to reject it for being "too short," but the authors flatly refused to add a single word of useless padding.

[Today in History @TodayinHistory]

Napoleon was crowned King of Italy right here today in 1805.

[✮ راينر براون @dondawastaken]

Never forget that you are the main data center. Drink water, and consume as much literature as possible.

[Jacob Eiting @jeiting]

pre-ai, bad ideas were just bad ideas, now bad ideas are bad ideas with charts and tables

[Michael Mauboussin @mjmauboussin]

This is the time of year when a lot of investment firms welcome interns. While our work is geared toward institutional investors, a lot of it can be useful for learning about markets and the investment process. Here are a handful of reports and how they can guide interns:

[Yadu @Yaduvam]

Statue of Indra riding Airavata in Thailand.

[DD News @DDNewslive]

#InfiniteIndia | The Sati narrative was often distorted during colonial rule to malign India and its civilization. In the Ramayana and Mahabharata, countless women were widowed, yet widow burning was not the norm. Ancient Vedic traditions allowed widows to live with dignity and remarry, but selective interpretations were used by colonial Christian missionaries to defame India’s social heritage.

Watch the full program: https://t.co/x9tVol5pDc

@authoramish #IndianHistory #Sati #ColonialNarrative #InfiniteIndiaOnDD

[Niks @Pivot2Centre]

Buying Gold is shorting INR and hedging against inflation

Unless you are worth 1000s of crores, you are a small fish in a big ocean. Save yourself and your family, no one will come to your rescue

You can support Modi for everything and yet lookout for your finances. If you think inflation is gonna shoot up or/and INR will depreciate, go for Gold.

[Frontier Indica @frontierindica]

The Indian salaried class has been methodically stripped of every single inflation hedge available to it, one budget at a time.

You tried crypto. They slapped a 30% flat tax on gains, allowed no set-off of losses, and added 1% TDS on transfers.

You tried equities. Budget 2024 raised STCG from 15% to 20%, raised LTCG from 10% to 12.5%, increased STT on F&O, and also killed indexation for most other long-term capital gains.

You thought fine, I’ll diversify some savings abroad through LRS. They put 20% TCS on remittances above 10 lakhs for investments abroad.

You tried Sovereign Gold Bonds, because surely a government-issued, government-backed gold hedge would be the one clean instrument they would not mess with. Then Budget 2026 came along and removed the capital gains exemption for secondary market buyers.

And now the final insult.

The Prime Minister has publicly asked you to avoid buying physical gold for a year in the “national interest,” because gold imports use foreign exchange.

So let me get this straight. A middle class wagie earning in depreciating rupees, watching FD rates hover around 6.5% while real life inflation keeps eating his purchasing power, has now been told:

Crypto is taxed like a vice.

Equities are more expensive to hold and exit.

Foreign diversification gets hit with TCS.

SGBs are being wound down and tax-narrowed.

Buying physical gold is now unpatriotic.

Basically, every single exit from rupee depreciation has been systematically curtailed. You are expected to hold your savings in instruments the government controls, at returns the government sets, for a currency the government is rapidly inflating away.

Does this sound like Amrit Kaal to you?

[Aviral Bhatnagar @aviralbhat]

GCCs in India scaled to $100B in revenue in FY26

2,100 GCCs now employ 2.3M professionals, with 25% of the world's top 2,000 companies having centers here

Revenue of India's Big 4 IT firms is $75B, with GCCs now eclipsing them

Bigger threat than AI to old IT

[Abybaby @abybaby_san]

Wow idli patram building