Been travelling to weddings and back home over the last week. It’s amazing how so much can change over a few years - took us approximately 25 mins to get from the railway station to home a couple of years back. Now, it takes only about 8-10 min, thanks to the new flyover right in front of the main gate. Even when I visited Hyderabad over the weekend, I was pleasantly surprised to see the rapid pace of development in the fringes of the city, the new metro and rapid transit ecosystem. Interesting times ahead!
In this stead, I began reading about design of Smart Cities and urban planning, what really struck me was how little Municipalities give importance to planned development. Prime example of this experience last week in Bangalore when I had to visit Maratahalli - this was unusually a part of the outer ring road and one of the busiest parts of the city leading to jams all over the neighboring localities. Providing sanctions for tech parks, workplaces and residential areas needs better work.
Adding onto their arsenal of GPT-3, OpenAI did their demo of Codex this week. In lines with github pilot, we now have a Natural Language to Code beast. Codex calls it the “natural language interface ". They have opened their APIs up to the dev community in hope of sourcing better use cases (?)
In this week’s list of amazing places around the world to discover, I found out about this amazing island in Greece called Zakynthos
An investigative piece on the connecting pieces of Pegasus and Bhima Koregaon. It is so interesting how State oppresses resistance of all kinds, and this is not specific to India but many right leaning governments.
Superhuman is one of the most talked about ‘product’ company. It’s interesting especially because of the way it reinvented a seemingly solved problem by strong focus on the gamification and understanding of the human psyche from first principles. In this lovely piece, Rahul Vohra talks about the elusive PMF, how we can measure for PMF and how it is something you just know when it happens. It’s easy to think of a ‘throw it out there and see what sticks’ approach for PMF but it’s also important to understand that PMF isn’t something you chance upon. TLDR : PMF is when 40% of your customers answer “very disappointed” upon being asked “how would you feel if you could no longer use the product?”
In this week’s crypto resources I came across this blog WTF Happened in 1971?
There's a "Museum of Failure" in Sweden which highlights 150+ failed products. It's meant to show that innovation requires risk-taking and failure.
A couple of weeks ago I linked to a thread on everything fintech. I found this amazing blog inside that rabbit hole. Aditya dissects the core everyday concepts in fintech and brings to a layman’s understanding, quite similar to how he gets inspiration from, Richard Feynman.
In other news, it’s disheartening to see the situation in Afghanistan. Videos of people fleeing holding onto dear life in planes and trucks.
Wonderful to see the Indian Cricket team, especially the pace quartet maturing into a relentless skillful 20 wickets-on-any-day attack. Love to see the lord’s balcony coming to life.
Also have my onthedeck interview this week! So fingers crossed for that.