virendra kumar

Ph.D.
interests in AI, International Relations, diplomacy, technology, coding

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

In awe of SpaceX and its story - past, present and the future. You can think about it in 10+ different ways and continue re-blowing your mind in circles. Huge congrats to the team! 🚀

[virendra kumar @kumarvirend]

@elonmusk @Coinvo In major colonies like British India or the Dutch East Indies, infrastructure was overwhelmingly funded by taxing the colonized population, not European taxpayers. Colonialism was the engine that accelerated capital accumulation and industrialization in Europe.

[virendra kumar @kumarvirend]

@sandeep_PT @grok how valid is this statement?

[sarah guo @saranormous]

nothing as humbling as having kids

[Harj Taggar @harjtaggar]

Finding a startup idea is usually a mix of breadth-first and depth-first search.

You look at a bunch of branches, then force yourself to go deep on the one that seems most promising. Repeat until something pulls you in.

Tokenmaxxing helps with the breadth-first part. But the hard part is still building enough conviction to go depth-first for a while.

[virendra kumar @kumarvirend]

Current AI models, especially LLMs, have democratized talent; anyone can be a good programmer or writer now. In this new era, our value systems and our will to work hard remain the final arbiters of the direction we take as a civilization.

[Vatican News @VaticanNews]

Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica humanitas, on preserving the human person in the age of artificial intelligence, will be released on May 25. A presentation event with the Pope and various speakers is scheduled for the same day at the Vatican.
https://t.co/Yi0qywaE1r

[Brian Halligan @bhalligan]

This seems to be different than what most AI-pilled CEOs that I talk to are doing right now:

@ivanhzhao rebuilt @NotionHQ's eng org around a barbell: super junior ICs + very senior architects.

Capability got democratized by LLMs. Taste and agency didn't.

[virendra kumar @kumarvirend]

@clashreport @McFaul End of history didn't end very well!

[David Senra @davidsenra]

My conversation with @RickRubin

0:00 Less Is More But Harder
2:00 Def Jam From The Dorm Room
4:00 Capturing Club Energy On Record
6:00 Going Deep On Influences
12:30 Why Reduced By Rick Rubin
14:00 Beatles Structure Meets Rap
16:00 The Ruthless Edit
19:30 Eminem: The Most Obsessive Artist
22:00 Lazy Workaholic
25:30 Protecting The Moment Of Magic
29:00 Dana White And Becoming A Podcaster
32:30 Professional Listener
44:00 Fishing And Showing Up
47:00 Johnny Cash And Constraints
55:30 Church Business vs. Banking Business
58:50 Run On Intuition Alone
1:01:00 Jay-Z vs. Eminem Process
1:04:30 In Service Of The Artist
1:09:00 Work As Diary Entries
1:13:30 Four Ways Success Destroys You
1:16:00 How To Sustain Success
1:21:00 The House On The Mountain

Includes paid partnerships.

[virendra kumar @kumarvirend]

@manpreetsethi01 Congratulations Ma'am

[Bureaucrats Media @MBureaucrats]

Prime Minister Narendra Modi recently issued a sharp rebuke to the Indian Foreign Service (IFS), expressing dissatisfaction with senior diplomats for their slow, cautious, and narrow approach to international relations. The appointment of Dinesh Trivedi as India’s Ambassador to Bangladesh signaled this shift, highlighting a move toward more strategically calibrated appointments.

The core criticism centers on "diplomatic vectoring" a tendency to reduce diplomacy to routine courtesies, cultural events, and bureaucratic rituals rather than substantive strategic engagement. This inertia, observed in both veteran and younger officers, is seen as a structural fault line that hinders India’s global ambitions and doctrine of strategic autonomy.

To address this, the government is advocating for a transition to "Smart Power Diplomacy." This model demands a "whole of government" approach, where officers move beyond siloed operations to build deep, resilient networks and actively engineer pathways for India’s strategic and economic interests. The message from the top is clear: the era of "photo op diplomacy" is over. The IFS must now replace bureaucratic routine with intellectual sharpness and purposeful urgency to match India’s accelerating rise on the global stage.

[Movez @0xMovez]

Spotify's Chief Architect just showed how they ship 4,5K deployments /day with Claude at Anthropic stage

27-minutes. free. By #1 music app dev

"More than 99% of our engineers use AI coding tools. Adoption took off after Opus 4.5"

Worth more than any $500 vibe-coding course.

[Dwarkesh Patel @dwarkesh_sp]

One of the most important and under appreciated trends in the world right now.

1. 100s of billions of dollars will soon be available to solve big problems (making the world resilient to ASI, ending factory farming, etc).
2. The projects and organizations which will turn billions of 2027/28 dollars into impact need to be started NOW.
3. We need really talented people to start and run and work for these new projects. What @nanransohoff calls general managers, who feel personally resposible for solving one of the world’s important problems.

What is especially scarce are detailed visions about what making AI go well looks like. These will help inform what problems these new projects ought to work on.

[virendra kumar @kumarvirend]

@karpathy @TheAmolAvasare

[ᴛʀᴀᴄᴇʀ @DeFiTracer]

🚨 BREAKING:

THE GUY WHO MADE $5.25B IN 1 YEAR, LEOPOLD ASCHENBRENNER, SAID:

"BY 2028, A 10-GIGAWATT CLUSTER WILL COST HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS."

HE TURNED $225 MILLION INTO $5.5 BILLION IN JUST 12 MONTHS

HE DEFINITELY KNOWS SOMETHING!!

[Yun-Ta Tsai @yunta_tsai]

There was no award when Newton discovered three laws of forces, nor when da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa.

There was no Grammy for Beethoven or Chopin, nor a Nobel Prize in Literature for Homer.

Masterpieces do not seek transient trophies but aim to be timeless.

[virendra kumar @kumarvirend]

Eileen Wang, the mayor of Arcadia, California, resigned Wang from both her mayoral position and her seat on the City Council. ​Her former fiancé, Mike Sun, is already serving a four-year prison sentence after pleading guilty to similar charges in 2025.

[TIME @TIME]

California mayor resigns, admitting to being an agent for China https://t.co/yoCVVLET35

[Rajesh Sawhney 🇮🇳 @rajeshsawhney]

Founders don’t complain, they adjust, change, pivot to build around fast changing landscape.

This resilience to pursue their dreams despite all the odds is what differentiates them from ordinary.

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Why Brian still obsesses over recruiting:

"Sam Altman (@sama) told me you're going to spend 50% of your time on hiring. I never did. It was my death blow.

As a leader, you can choose if you want to spend time hiring or managing. The more time you spend on recruiting, the less time you get to spend on management.

The first and last call I make every day is the recruiting team, still. I probably spend two, three hours on it every day.

The 2000s, I didn't. I thought it was all about having a recruiting machine, managing people. The great thing is I don't manage as much anymore because the really good people are self managing.

People should think about their first employee being a recruiter, not an engineer. Because they are the ones that get you every other person.

A company is as good as its people. The difference between the good companies and the great companies are the people."