This is my public journal, a place where I think out loud & explore fascinating concepts. I love figuring out how stuff work and how everything is strangely,...
When Shoshana Zuboff named surveillance capitalism in 2019, the worry was that companies were harvesting your behaviour to sell ads. Targeted shoes. Manipulated clicks. A creepy but bounded commercial arrangement. That framing is now obsolete. The data economy stopped being about advertising and became the operating system of state power. The line between Silicon Valley and Washington, the thing…
At its core, this story is a breakdown of how smart people can look at the exact same situation, arrive at completely different conclusions, and all be technically right—while being collectively wrong. The Story in a Nutshell Seven blind men encounter an elephant for the first time. Each touches a different part, and each assumes that his specific experience represents the entire reality: The…
To understand what a reranker like zeroentropy/zerank-1 ( link ) actually does, we gotta first understand the fundamental bottleneck it is trying to solve in RAG. The Problem: Fast but Shallow Retrieval When you build a RAG system, the AI doesn't magically memorize the entire database. Instead, when a user asks a question, a backend search engine rapidly scans millions of documents, grabs the most…
In 2026, the five largest cloud companies will spend $600–725 billion on infrastructure. About 75% — some $450 billion — goes into AI hardware that obsolesces fast: roughly 6 million Nvidia GPUs at ~$30,000 each. No company can absorb a bet this size honestly. So the risk is being moved — across accounting estimates, off balance sheets, and into the retirement accounts of people who never agreed…
Most people think meditation is about stopping thoughts . It isn't. That's the trap. The mind is like a car with three pedals — and all of them are accelerators. There is no brake. Whichever pedal you press, you get more thinking. Try not to think of a monkey for ten seconds. You just thought of a monkey. Whatever you push against becomes the basis of your consciousness. So the first thing to drop…
The mind is like a car that has 3 pedals which are all accelerators (Sadhguru) The mindfulness industry now has over 100 million users on Calm and Headspace. The category is worth around $100M and projected to triple within a decade. Critics call it "McMindfulness." The critique is correct, but mostly for the wrong reason. Meditation is not a skill. It is the absence of the kind of effort that…
This is it. Everything learned spending millions on longevity. From: Your Immortal Unc and Auntie. To: Our Immortal nieces and nephews. Sleep is the world's most powerful drug. Be in your bed for 8 hours Same bedtime every night, any time before midnight Don’t eat right before bed Calm foods for dinner No screens 1 hour before bed Avoid added sugar (be aware it’s in everything) Avoid all things in…
In 2022, Balenciaga sold a calfskin handbag shaped like a municipal trash bag for $1,800. Maison Margiela released sneakers caked in synthetic mud for $1,400. Loro Piana sells a beige cashmere coat indistinguishable from a thrift-store sack for around $15,000. The strategies differ. The mechanism is the same. Veblen goods. Price functions as the source of demand, not a barrier to it. At $50, the…
When I was younger I assumed the world's religions were telling fundamentally different stories. Monotheisms, Hinduism, Buddhism — these were rival vendors, and the interesting question was which one was right. I no longer think that. The longer you read across traditions, the harder it becomes to ignore a strange pattern. Every major tradition that has spent serious time thinking about ultimate…
Every major OECD government runs a structural deficit. Financed by issuing debt. The debt rolls into more debt. None of the political conditions for paying it down exist. OECD demographics are aging fast. Pension funds are heavily loaded with equities. The net worth of the global elite is basically 100% company shares. Two different pools. Same dependency. The system got addicted to cheap…