Karthik

@[email protected]
tamil | chess | cricket | travel | food | coffee

[Sridhar Vembu @svembu]

The economic and demographic effects of corruption.

Cost of land in our urban areas is far higher than what our GDP per capita would dictate. The ratio of land value to per capita GDP is probably higher in India than anywhere else. As an example, land prices in Chennai or Bengaluru rival that of cities like New York which has a vastly higher per capita GDP.

The key reason?

First, vast sums of political corruption money is parked in real estate. This raises real estate prices and high real estate prices affect everything downstream.

Second, corruption in building approvals and the like - the famous DTCP - raises construction costs, on top of already higher real estate costs.

Third, corruption in private school regulatory compliance enforcement raises school fees.

Fourth, corruption in private hospital regulatory compliance enforcement raises health care costs.

Fifth, household goods need sales outlets and those pay higher rents due to high real estate prices and construction costs.

So housing, education, healthcare and household goods - all of these now cost higher.

As a direct consequence, the economic burden on the average person gets worse. Young people, facing all these costs, postpone marriage, and postpone children or have fewer children.

That directly affects our demographics.

While this issue exists in many parts of India, Tamil Nadu, being the most urbanized of the bigger states, is particularly hit hard.

So corruption is becoming an existential threat to our society.

If you worry about the super-low birth rate in Tamil Nadu, way below replacement, understand that corruption raising our cost of living is one of the major causes, not the only cause, but a big one in our context.

[Karthik @keechukkal]

@elonmusk does FSD chooses shaded parking spot over sunny spot?

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

Judging by my tl there is a growing gap in understanding of AI capability.

The first issue I think is around recency and tier of use. I think a lot of people tried the free tier of ChatGPT somewhere last year and allowed it to inform their views on AI a little too much. This is a group of reactions laughing at various quirks of the models, hallucinations, etc. Yes I also saw the viral videos of OpenAI's Advanced Voice mode fumbling simple queries like "should I drive or walk to the carwash". The thing is that these free and old/deprecated models don't reflect the capability in the latest round of state of the art agentic models of this year, especially OpenAI Codex and Claude Code.

But that brings me to the second issue. Even if people paid $200/month to use the state of the art models, a lot of the capabilities are relatively "peaky" in highly technical areas. Typical queries around search, writing, advice, etc. are *not* the domain that has made the most noticeable and dramatic strides in capability. Partly, this is due to the technical details of reinforcement learning and its use of verifiable rewards. But partly, it's also because these use cases are not sufficiently prioritized by the companies in their hillclimbing because they don't lead to as much $$$ value. The goldmines are elsewhere, and the focus comes along.

So that brings me to the second group of people, who *both* 1) pay for and use the state of the art frontier agentic models (OpenAI Codex / Claude Code) and 2) do so professionally in technical domains like programming, math and research. This group of people is subject to the highest amount of "AI Psychosis" because the recent improvements in these domains as of this year have been nothing short of staggering. When you hand a computer terminal to one of these models, you can now watch them melt programming problems that you'd normally expect to take days/weeks of work. It's this second group of people that assigns a much greater gravity to the capabilities, their slope, and various cyber-related repercussions.

TLDR the people in these two groups are speaking past each other. It really is simultaneously the case that OpenAI's free and I think slightly orphaned (?) "Advanced Voice Mode" will fumble the dumbest questions in your Instagram's reels and *at the same time*, OpenAI's highest-tier and paid Codex model will go off for 1 hour to coherently restructure an entire code base, or find and exploit vulnerabilities in computer systems. This part really works and has made dramatic strides because 2 properties: 1) these domains offer explicit reward functions that are verifiable meaning they are easily amenable to reinforcement learning training (e.g. unit tests passed yes or no, in contrast to writing, which is much harder to explicitly judge), but also 2) they are a lot more valuable in b2b settings, meaning that the biggest fraction of the team is focused on improving them. So here we are.

[DHH @dhh]

"It takes ten years for the culture of a great company to fall apart once the CEO seat is given to someone without an engineering or product background. That's been the story of Boeing, Intel, and now Apple." https://t.co/tD7ZzjO3jS

[lichess.org @lichess]

History has been made! We have a new challenger for the World Chess Championship:

Congratulations to 17-year-old Gukesh for winning the 2024 #FIDECandidates - the youngest player ever to qualify for the World Championship match!

[agadmator @agadmator]

All hail Gukesh! - The new Challenger!
At 17 years old, youngest ever to win the Candidates Tournament!

[David Llada ♞ @davidllada]

Getting close 😄

[David Llada ♞ @davidllada]

Gukesh is going to be a formidable opponent for Ding, as he is still an evolving player. As well-rounded as he looked in Toronto, he progresses with every passing day. Indian chess fans have every reason to be excited!

[Karthik @keechukkal]

https://t.co/CazMmvtwvv

[Karthik @keechukkal]

@sama Who’s in this board firing him ?

[Karthik @keechukkal]

English la sonna genre comedy.. common man Tamil la sonna ketta vaarthai.. regressive.. 1 kodi makkal pakra show.. etc.. etc..

[Karthik @keechukkal]

Ego thaan vera Enna .. vayppu kudutharam.. Enna kodumai Saravanan.. Evlo kurum padam.. Ellam ethukku.. avar edukkalayam.. contestants eduthangalam.. sari Enna thappu nu oru kurum padam pita vendiyathu thaana..

[Karthik @keechukkal]

@Kaka_offic Ore belt o

[Karthik @keechukkal]

Spineless @ikamalhaasan

[Karthik @keechukkal]

hearing in loop.. can't stop listening.. masterpiece.. https://t.co/JaJn61CgYJ

[Karthik @keechukkal]

sotha thunnutu chumma irukkum #Gaanabala #BiggBossTamil7 #BigBoss7tamil #BBTamilSeason7

[Chinmayi Sripaada @Chinmayi]

Source: Instagram page Colours of Bengaluru; this was shot at Lulu Mall Bengaluru.

How a man uses a public space like a mall to sexually harass women.

A LOT of these men do it intentionally.

A LOT of these men disappear into crowds never to be found and their only job in such crowds is groping.

A LOT of these men will never be caught.

A LOT of these men will be so called ‘respectable’.

When women complain - it is our fault, or we are imagining. This girl who didn’t take her slipper and slap or shout or anything because she is most probably confused and thought it was another ‘mistake’ will be blamed if she speaks about it later.

I wonder if the person he groped was actually a minor.

[Karthik @keechukkal]

I'm on the https://t.co/uvMNnhKGtG waitlist, can anyone skip me ahead?

cc @TextsHQ

[Karthik @keechukkal]

I just joined the waitlist for @fabricinternet — the self-organising home for your digital world. Join me at https://t.co/05nS7ixrCG

[Karthik @keechukkal]

Disheartening to hear that there might have been a targeted smear campaign against @arrahman concert. Where is this going!!