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Let’s say 1% of kids are born with allergies. The statistic is useful for a public policy maker, someone who is setting up food menus in schools or regulating restaurants. However, the statistic is useless for you as a parent. Unless you are planning to have around 10+ kids, you are never going to experience the statistical outcome. If you have one child, either the child would have an allergy or he won’t. Statistical outcomes matter only when someone plays a game sufficient times.

While traveling in the streets of Cairo or Qahira/क़ाहिरा, I came across a group of Indians who didn’t look like tourists.

Tokyo isn’t a city per se but a prefecture. A prefecture is more akin to a county in the US. Japan has 47 prefectures. I would recommend two important cities in Tokyo to spend your time in - Akihabara Electronic District and Shinjuku (fancy) District. While public transport is great, payment requires cash, iPhone, or Suica cards. Unfortunately, Android phones sold outside Japan do not have the appropriate NFC to pay. There are multiple different types of rail companies operating in Tokyo. When you buy a JR pass (please don’t) or a 24-hour pass, it isn’t obvious where you can use it. ...

Unlike an army or a militia, mobs are loosely held groups of individuals. Mobs are held together by some identification (race, ethnicity, shared belief towards a cause, etc.). While an army/militia is more top-down, a mob is bottoms-up in many cases. A mob leader exercises much less control over the mob than an army chief. And that’s why mobs are much more dangerous.

Language isn’t just a means of communication but it is the medium of propagating culture. That’s why culturally Canada is similar to the USA while Mexico (and the rest of Latin America) to Spain. One huge advantage the USA has over Europe is that practically everyone speaks a single language. A Californian can fly 6 hours to New York City, and feel just at home, with the same language and thus, a similar culture.

Sri Lanka is a small island country near the southern coast of India. My trip was heavily focused on Ramayana and Hinduism. While I loved it, those who have little interest in Hinduism might find the trip. Like Kerala and Sikkim , I had a chauffered guide for the trip. I would highly recommend doing that, otherwise, a packed trip becomes harder to pull off. You can see a list of recommended guides here. ...

The true value proposition of LLMs lies in their ability to convert unstructured data from sources like websites and documents into structured information with reasonably high accuracy. Yet, the real profit lies in the products built on top of LLM technology. Each year, approximately 4 million books are published worldwide. On average, a book contains fewer than 120,000 words, translating to less than 160,000 tokens in LLM (Large Language Model) terms. Imagine if every single one of these books were generated by GPT-4—it would amount to an astounding 640 billion tokens. At $5 per million tokens , generating all these books would tally up to about $3.2 million! Let’s say the book market represents only about 1% of the total LLM text generation opportunity. Even then the total addressable market of LLM text generation is approximately $300 million annually—a modest figure when compared to AWS, which raked in $90 billion in 2023 as the cloud market leader.

Principles Investing is a sequential process The only goal is to maximize wealth over time. Do not “narrow frame” it to focus only on annual returns. A risk mitigation strategy must lower risk and hence increase CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate)

While writing text in Hindi/Sanskrit (Devanagari script), I need a quick way to insert the Avagraha symbol(ऽ). It turns out there is an undocumented shortcut on the Mac Hindi QWERTY keyboard for that and that is _shift + _

My flight from Los Angeles to San Francisco was overbooked. There was a generous voucher to take for a volunteer who was willing to take the next flight. The next flight was scheduled for the next day in the morning! I wondered why not take a bus through the California hinterlands instead. So, I volunteered. At the bus station’s waiting area, an Indian-looking man walked towards me. Before I could say something, he asked me in Hindi where I was from. “Haryana”, I replied, assuming he was an Indian. He didn’t recognize it. “That’s beyond west Punjab”, he asked further in Hindi. “Yes”, I replied. ...