Potpourri

I discovered the Anirudh Varma Collective through their new song, “Rut Sawan Ki”, which I loved!

I later checked out their other songs and videos on YouTube — Bhimpalasi, Tilak Kamod, Dekho Sakhi — are all very good. Highly recommended!

I enjoyed the Andrej Karpathy interview on No Priors — great show, and good to hear the optimism around AGI from one of the pioneers & great teachers of “modern” artificial intelligence.

I loved reading this article — “Hallelujah, Leonard Cohen, and a Pulitzer Price-winning writer’s suicide”. Great read that shows how fragile, how flimsy a thing genius is, and how creating anything new is prone to fail…

Researchers have created a robot that is controlled by mushrooms — it’s a wild video.

1. Why is India so bad at sport on FT was interesting in parts, I found this visual especially telling

   

2. Who killed the art of product management in India on Ken was frustrating, since it didn’t really say anything new: I found it a bit of a shallow piece. My own short take on this question is: a) It’s not unique to India b) It’s always been this way c) Refer to the Leonard Cohen piece above. A slightly longer explanation is: Creating products (like anything else) is incredibly hard, and requires people with talent and will; doing this consistently is almost impossible for most people. What is easier to do is to give up and push paper (stating it in an extreme way). That is what most people do — not blaming them, given how hard the alternative is — constantly battling naysayers, having to be subversive for the sake of your product, and even after all that you may still fail. This is true not only of product management, but of every profession. This is also not to say that the average product manager is not adding value: they are adding value, it is just that they are not building products. Maybe the positive / best way to say it is: you need just 1 “artist” (from the article) in a company; most of the rest of the people are helping that artist scale (in an ideal company setting)

Until next week, keep reading…