artificial intelligence
A particular line from the open statement mathematicians wrote against the design of the latest Caltech Mathathon, due to happen in late October, has stuck with me: Mathematicians do not only prove theorems: they also take measures to ensure that the future of a field remains healthy after the extraction
Raghuram Rajan
There’s a passage in an interview of former RBI governor Raghuram Rajan, published by Frontline on September 1, that many people seem to have misunderstood, especially on Twitter, where — perhaps unsurprisingly — it has been reduced to “India shouldn’t make chips because it can smuggle them in instead”. Excerpt:
artificial intelligence
From 'Why not normalise use of AI in writing?', by Amit Kumar, assistant professor in the Institute for Development and Communication, Chandigarh, in The Hindu, August 29, 2026: Whose authority is being protected by that resistance and challenged, if AI writing gets the green signal? With a good
digital journalism
My friend Dhiya has been writing and publishing one blog post every week for the last 87 weeks in a series she simply calls ‘dilettante’. The eighty-fifth edition focused on an issue I am currently engaged deeply with at work: as a journalist trying to make their team’s
Anthropic
On August 24, Levent Alpöge (@__alpoge__) posted on X.com that they had solved a maths problem with Claude’s help in a way that was contrary to a human proof of it, albeit a reputedly unsatisfactory one. Let us set aside the validity of the new proof. In one
Analysis
The following is a review of Journalism in the Age of AI: From Acceleration to Reimagination by Seth C. Lewis, Rodrigo Zamith, and Tomás Dodds, available here. The authors write, and I agree, that journalism has spent 25 years on a “hamster wheel” of technologies — web, then social media, then
Analysis
Indian society has inhabited at least three distinct structures of feeling in relation to science since independence — and they are not as continuous as one might expect.
Analysis
1. India is not likely to find success by regulating hardware because (i) such regulations will be hard to enforce in practice and in principle, (ii) the regulatory regime could set up a new license raj, and (iii) the regulations will age very poorly when similar technological capabilities come to
Op-eds
Dear Chief Justice Surya Kant: I commend you for your discovery this week that time is finite. On Wednesday, when a petitioner confronted you with video evidence of police brutality on July 20 against the students protesting peacefully in and around Jantar Mantar over exam paper leaks and a dire
Science, culture, and complexity
In a study published in PNAS Nexus on July 14, two researchers affiliated with institutes in France, Italy, and the UK analysed more than 4,400 launches in 16 geographical entities and with 330 rocket configurations to find that every time the cumulative payload sent to orbit has doubled since
The physicist Carlo Rovelli makes a strong case in this essay that consciousness is “of the same nature” as everything else in the universe, but in the course of doing that, he often writes as if the alternatives to dualism — the view that the body and the mind are irreducibly
From ‘Zero-deforestation commitments in Indonesia’s palm oil sector achieve high compliance but no additionality’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, July 13, 2026: … we evaluate the compliance and additionality of zero-deforestation commitments (ZDCs) in the Indonesian palm oil sector, a major driver of tropical deforestation. We
That thermodynamics has so very many applications is as fascinating as what it so often illuminates. Its tools and methods can be brought to bear on everything from celestial bodies and industrial machines to cellular biology and human endurance. The simple reason is that energy is the fundamental currency of
Daily writing promptIs a little chaos actually good for us? View all responses I'm just going to invert that question a little and ask: Is a little order good for us? I'm doing this because the question "Is a little chaos good for us?"
As silly as it sounds, as a student of mechanical engineering, I am partial to technologies that make use of mechanical forces. Today they are harder to come by because the solutions to the problems they solved were replaced by electronic components from the mid-20th century on. Today, newer
A new PNAS Nexus paper has shed light on a major source of hidden energy waste on the bitcoin network. Here, miners compete to solve a complex mathematical puzzle. The miner that solves a puzzle first is rewarded by the network with a block: new bitcoins plus transaction fees. An
Daily writing promptEmperor Palpatine has announced open elections for a new Emperor — and he’s nominated Darth Vader. You get to nominate one challenger. View all responses Even against his long career of deception, Sheev Palpatine announcing an open election for the seat of galactic emperor sounds particularly cynical. In
Daily writing promptWhat’s a book, movie, or TV show that you wish you could experience again for the first time? View all responses This has to be the TV show Friends. I feel like I know too much these days. The show hasn't aged well. Its attitudes
Daily writing promptHow do you build loyal subscribers? View all responses I've always found that a somewhat strange thing to aim for. I understand there are several thousand people worldwide working to build a loyal subscriber base ("building loyal subscribers" makes one sound like Dr. Frankenstein)
I'm writing this post on Write, the new text composer/editor on WordPress.com. According to the official blog post, Write is a response to last year's Creators survey, where "'simplify the editor' was the single most-requested improvement from the people already
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From 'The Sulur horror story of child sexual assault and murder', The Hindu, May 31, 2026: Mr. Vijay, who sent Director-General of Police Sandeep Rai Rathore and Additional DGP (Law and Order) Maheshwar Dayal to Coimbatore after the crime, said the murder had caused immense pain and
