Ajay Panagariya

BREAKING🚨: Today’s Ring of Fire solar eclipse in its stunning peak phase seen over Antarctica...

ultimate irony: bayes, the man whose name is on the most important eqn in rationality, never published it & likely did not think it was a law of the universe. bayes wrote his thoughts on inverse probability in a private notebook to solve a specific problem about billiard balls. when he died in 1761, the notebook was stuffed in a drawer. his friend, richard price, found the papers & price spent 2 yrs obsessively refining the math cos he wanted to use it to prove the existence of god (by calculating the probability that the universe's order was not an accident). price is the one who presented it to the royal society; w/o his search for god, the math for modern AI & medical screening would have been thrown in the trash.

One of my favorite charts in the entire economics literature. Price discovery and information technology are good.

@jrkelly @EvanZhao6 I think they just beat on price a lot of the time, and suck the air out of the room for everyone else. It's not even clear that they're beating on price by using automation a lot of the time.

@EvanZhao6 Which companies ? I try to keep an eye on them and haven’t seen any that are very good at lab automation so far.

I’m sorry this is how we beat China? This dude knows Chinese companies already crush his team at automation.

A super interesting new study from Harvard Business Review. A 8-month field study at a US tech company with about 200 employees found that AI use did not shrink work, it intensified it, and made employees busier. Task expansion happened because AI filled in gaps in knowledge, so people started doing work that used to belong to other roles or would have been outsourced or deferred. That shift created extra coordination and review work for specialists, including fixing AI-assisted drafts and coaching colleagues whose work was only partly correct or complete. Boundaries blurred because starting became as easy as writing a prompt, so work slipped into lunch, meetings, and the minutes right before stepping away. Multitasking rose because people ran multiple AI threads at once and kept checking outputs, which increased attention switching and mental load. Over time, this faster rhythm raised expectations for speed through what became visible and normal, even without explicit pressure from managers.

San Francisco teachers union now encouraging students not to study during the strike

Giraffes endured a heavy storm at the Maasai Mara Game Reserve yesterday.

@rohanpaul_ai Isn't that a bit disingenuous? The software industry went through a whole cycle of downsizing after covid-era overhiring. It would be wrong to attribute this graph entirely to AI.

Software Development job postings on Indeed in the United States

256 Tb/s data rates over 200 km distance have been demonstrated on single mode fiber optic, which works out to 32 GB of data in flight, “stored” in the fiber, with 32 TB/s bandwidth. Neural network inference and training can have deterministic weight reference patterns, so it is amusing to consider a system with no DRAM, and weights continuously streamed into an L2 cache by a recycling fiber loop. The modern equivalent of the ancient mercury echo tube memories. You would need to pipeline a bunch of them to implement modern trillion parameter models, but fiber transmission may have a better growth trajectory than DRAM does today, so it might someday become viable. Much more practically, you should be able to gang cheap flash memory together to provide almost any read bandwidth you require, as long as it is done a page at a time and pipelined well ahead. That should be viable for inference serving today if flash and accelerator vendors could agree on a high speed interface.

@ShannonJean That's a 1.4 acre lot?

You know the market is soft when... First sub-$1 M I've seen on an oceanfront property in California in a long time.

@babugi28 @shloke_patel @ycombinator nice! Not a ton of good US grown mangos in the market. do you have to boil/irradiate? I'm in california and I know they're pretty strict, even across state lines.

@apanagar @shloke_patel @ycombinator florida lol

My mom just sent me this video of my co-founder @shloke_patel and me pitching our mango business when we were 13. Now, in 50 days, we’ll be pitching at @ycombinator's Demo Day in SF. None of this would've been possible without our rockstar parents. Order some mangoes this summer at mangounited.com

Autonomous Snow Blower Update: The @yarboglobal completed the first pass of the driveway and went back to the charging dock. After about 1.25hrs, it will be 80% charged and will automatically return and continue to clear the driveway. I plan to run it during the entirety of the storm and will post my review video on @stateofcharge this week. So far, it's kicking A$$!

In 1848, engineers planning the first permanent bridge across the Niagara Gorge faced a basic but dangerous problem. They had no safe way to get an initial line across the nearly 250-meter wide chasm below Niagara Falls. The gorge was too deep for boats, the currents were violent, and walking or climbing across was impossible. Without a first line, construction could not even begin. To solve this, a kite-flying contest was organized on the American side of the gorge. A young local boy successfully flew a kite across the gap, allowing its thin string to be secured on both sides. That string was then used to pull across a thicker cord, followed by progressively stronger ropes. Each replacement increased the load capacity until heavy cables could finally be drawn across the gorge. Those cables became the basis for a temporary footbridge, which allowed workers to begin construction of the Niagara Falls Suspension Bridge, completed in 1855 under engineer John A. Roebling. The bridge later carried rail traffic and directly influenced Roebling’s work on the Brooklyn Bridge. What started with a kite became a key step in modern suspension bridge engineering. #archaeohistories

Interesting Hacker News comment that Waymo fares basically pull the money out of the local city And send it to the San Francisco bay area

Socialist mayors are elected by voters seeking the next step beyond just irresponsible spending, and thus inherit budget deficits that make it impossible to implement their campaign promises.

As much as this takes me back to being in college, I would bet the one in the picture posted by @johnarnold has lower maintenance overhead - both long term (replacing hoses and wear parts) and short term (consumables, sterility, etc.). Those are also similar to the types of SCARA robots use in semiconductor manufacturing facilities, so it benefits from from economies of scale. Based on the build, I'm guessing even though it's behind glass, it's designed for operator safety. Not saying they don't have the above one in semiconductor manufacturing facilities too though... people need fuel!

@johnarnold Got some of those already in Houston airports and at least one local library.

Just returned from my first trip to China, mostly looking at the energy and robotics industries. Fascinating. Random observations, both business and general, below... 1/x

re-read “The Odyssey.” recently, It’s cool that Amazon suggests I follow the author so I can be notified about new releases. It’s been a little bit since this Homer guy wrote anything, I’m sure his next one is right around the corner, right after MM book 3...

Saw this 500 yr old Italian map of India (referred as "Indostan") in a Florence museum from the Medici collections. What struck me wasn’t the accuracy, but the mindset behind it. It reflects a time when India was seen as something to understand and trade with, not something to rule. It’s shown as a civilisation made up of many kingdoms, rivers, and cultures. Look harder and you can find mentions of Gujarat, Orissa, Deccan, Bengal, Malabar. Remember, this is a 500yr old map. No borders. No rulers. No “ownership”. Just geography, trade, and prosperity. Maps tell you how the world sees you. This one reminds you that before colonisation, India was already seen as vast, wealthy, and complex. It also reminds us how much our country hasn't changed. History often begins earlier than we are taught. And, it repeats itself.

For the first time, researchers have identified exactly what Roman builders were adding to their concrete to make it last for centuries.... At an unfinished building site in Pompeii, abandoned during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 AD, archaeologists uncovered something rare: Roman concrete materials that were prepared but never mixed. That frozen moment revealed how Roman builders actually made their concrete. Instead of mixing lime and water the way we do today, they combined quicklime with volcanic ash first, then added water. The reaction produced intense heat and left behind tiny fragments of reactive lime trapped inside the hardened concrete. When cracks later formed and water seeped in, those fragments reacted again and sealed the damage from within. In other words, some Roman concrete was intentionally engineered to heal its own cracks — and it’s still doing it nearly 2,000 years later. Archaeological Park of Pompeii #archaeohistories