This is a single page meant to be optimized so that I can display my reading list from my Obsidian vault on my Kobo e reader. This page makes no network requests so that its super fast to load.
| Date | Title | Description |
|---|---|---|
| 08-11-2025 | Peter Thiel: Capitalism Isn’t Working for Young People | Peter Thiel thinks young people are turning to socialism because capitalism isn't working for them anymore, especially with student debt and housing costs. |
| 05-11-2025 | Writing For The AIs | This article explores the strange new world of writing for AI, questioning whether it's worth trying to teach our digital successors our ways, or if we're just hoping for a digital afterlife for our ideas. |
| 03-11-2025 | Smoking and “Early Modern” Sociability: The Great Tobacco Debate in the Ottoman Middle East (Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries) | This article talks about how tobacco sparked big debates in the Ottoman Middle East from the 17th-18th centuries, eventually changing social habits and leading to an \"early modern\" culture. |
| 27-10-2025 | A Nuclear Fission Regulatory Blank Slate - Austin Vernon's Blog | What if we could hit the reset button on nuclear power regulations? This article explores two cool ideas for making nuclear safer and cheaper, focusing on who pays for mistakes and how we measure radiation risk. |
| 27-10-2025 | Tales from Toddlerhood | Just a heads up, toddlers are wild! This post dives into the weird, wonderful, and sometimes maddening world of raising a two-year-old, with all the hilarious and baffling moments that come with it. |
| 26-10-2025 | The Journey Before main() | Amit's Blog | This article explains what happens when you ask the OS to run a program, from the `execve` syscall to the ELF format, stack setup, and finally the `_start` function before `main` is called. It highlights the kernel's role and the underlying machinery that makes it all work. |
| 25-10-2025 | The China Tech Canon—Asterisk | This article explores the intellectual influences on Chinese tech elites, contrasting them with Silicon Valley and revealing a unique blend of Western classics, Maoist thought, and ancient Chinese philosophy. |
| 23-10-2025 | Notes on India | Quick thoughts on India: culture, economy, and politics from a week-long trip. |
| 18-10-2025 | The Great Feminization | The Great Feminization is about how the increasing number of women in key institutions is changing them, and how anti-discrimination laws might be pushing this 'feminization' too far. |
| 18-10-2025 | Thread by @balajis | Balaji argues the internet makes libertarianism practical, enabling voluntary interactions and scaling of concepts like open borders and polycentric law through code, creating a de facto libertarian society despite its imperfections. |
| 18-10-2025 | Your data model is your destiny | This article explains how your product's core data model is crucial for building a competitive advantage, using examples like Slack, Toast, and Notion to show how distinct data models create defensible moats. |
| 13-10-2025 | Progress studies as a moral imperative | Progress is vital but not guaranteed; we need to study its causes to protect and advance it, as it's currently under threat. |
| 12-10-2025 | Pipelining in psql (PostgreSQL 18) | psql 18's pipelining feature makes sending lots of small queries way faster by letting the client and server do more things at once, especially over slow networks. |
| 12-10-2025 | Singapore’s Pay Model Isn’t India’s: Market Wages vs. Civil-Service Rents | Singapore pays its civil servants market wages, unlike countries like India where government jobs offer inflated 'rents', leading to talent waste. This approach keeps public sector pay competitive and avoids the issue of millions applying for a few overpaid government jobs. |
| 08-10-2025 | The Two-Minute Mile Problem | This article explores how AI enables faster learning and challenges the traditional, slow pace of higher education, asking if universities are ready for students who can master material much quicker. |
| 06-10-2025 | How Rockefeller and His Partners Built Standard Oil - Austin Vernon's Blog | This article breaks down how Rockefeller and Standard Oil grew by focusing on scaling up refining operations and improving efficiency, rather than just railroad deals, leading to massive cost reductions and market dominance. |
| 02-10-2025 | 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties | 21 tips for throwing a great party, focusing on host's ease, guest experience, and social dynamics. |
| 28-09-2025 | How much would mothers earn if they didn't have children? | This article explores how much mothers' earnings are affected by having children, looking at different research methods like event studies and IVF data, and discussing the ongoing debate about the long-term impact. |
| 20-09-2025 | Magical systems thinking - Works in Progress Magazine | Systems thinking is popular but often fails because it ignores that systems push back. The article suggests starting small with simple, working systems instead of trying to fix complex ones from scratch. |
| 13-09-2025 | Secretive vendors are exploiting a free money glitch in the U.S. healthcare system | Vendors are cashing in on a weird loophole in the Blue Cross system where different Blue insurers in the same state pay different prices for the same thing, letting them arbitrage the difference. |
| 10-09-2025 | The Islamic Argument for Competence | The article argues for competence in Muslim nations, critiquing corruption and inefficiency, and emphasizes that material advancement is not contrary to Islamic values but rather essential for the well-being of the Ummah. |
| 05-09-2025 | Indian economic strategy in the new globalisation | The article discusses India's need to adapt its economic strategy in light of changing global dynamics, advocating for a shift towards the OECD (ex-US) bloc and internal reforms to maintain competitiveness. |
| 29-08-2025 | America Against China Against America | A trip through China's tech hubs reveals a nation driven by ambitious innovation, intense competition, and a unique blend of state direction and individual hustle, offering a fascinating contrast to the West. |
| 29-08-2025 | Dispatches from India | India's journey: from elections to economy, tech to culture, this piece covers it all, sharing lessons learned from covering the world's largest country for The Economist. |
| 26-08-2025 | India, Greece, Brazil: How High Government Pay Wastes Talent and Drains Productivity | High gov pay in poor countries leads to talent drain and lower productivity, with examples from India, Greece, and Brazil. |
| 21-08-2025 | Code Review Can Be Better | We tried making code reviews better by keeping them in Git, but it got too complicated, so we're back to the web for now. |
| 14-08-2025 | How Social Media Shortens Your Life | It's engineered to speed up your time |
| 13-08-2025 | Exploring Notion's Data Model: A Block-Based Architecture | Notion’s data model enables the product’s most foundational component: blocks. Through blocks, we allow users more flexibility over their information. |
| 13-08-2025 | Open Banking and payments competition | Why the banks really hate fintechs that allow businesses to learn your account number easily. |
| 13-08-2025 | Quality Wednesdays: How we trained our team to see what doesn’t work - Linear Now | |
| 11-08-2025 | Do Things that Don't Scale | |
| 11-08-2025 | Writing Code Was Never The Bottleneck | LLMs make it easier to write code, but understanding, reviewing, and maintaining it still takes time, trust, and good judgment. |
| 10-08-2025 | Nootropics | This page deliberately left blank. It is meant to serve as a placeholder for client-side transclusion purposes. |
| 10-08-2025 | What can India do to industrialize? | A guest post by Prakash Loungani and Karan Bhasin. |
| 09-08-2025 | Choking China+1? | China is trying to stop Foxconn from moving manufacturing to India, but this might backfire and make more companies leave China. |
| 09-08-2025 | Distributed Systems 101 | |
| 09-08-2025 | Improved government buying | This article argues that government buying in India needs a serious overhaul, focusing on efficiency and value for money, not protectionism. It suggests opening up to foreign competition and reforming domestic processes to get better deals for taxpayers. |
| 09-08-2025 | The Lessons of Liberation Day | This article discusses the \"liberation day\" tariffs imposed by the Trump administration, arguing they were a miscalculated and ineffective strategy for reindustrialization due to their abrupt implementation, lack of consultation, and failure to consider the absence of domestic industries. It suggests a long-term strategy should prioritize investment in productive capacity and supply chains, with targeted tariffs as a secondary measure. |
| 08-08-2025 | How we replaced Elasticsearch and MongoDB with Rust and RocksDB | Radar offers geocoding, place search, and fraud detection APIs, powered by HorizonDB, a Rust-based engine delivering 20k QPS and sub-millisecond latency. |
| 08-08-2025 | Lago Blog - Why building a self-hosted SaaS is a headache (and how we make it easier) | |
| 08-08-2025 | The Sun Never Leaves | This post explores how mass emigration from Britain, rather than low fertility, led to its decline in global power, suggesting a counterfactual UK population of 200 million if no one had left. |
| 08-08-2025 | Why F# could be the next mainstream programming language | F# is a pragmatic, .NET-friendly functional language that's great for enterprise apps, despite a smaller talent pool and some tooling kinks. |
| 08-08-2025 | Why Postgres is a Good Choice for Durable Workflow Execution | DBOS | In this blog post, we’ll dive deep into why we chose to build DBOS durable workflow execution on the PostgreSQL DBMS. |