Technology related blog posts

Explore how the US is run by lawyers, and faces challenges in innovation compared to China’s engineering-driven governance.

The standard journey of influencers Start with podcasting or video blogging (YouTube/TikTok) It is hard to build an audience when you don’t have one Start with interviewing other podcasters/creators to bring yourself to the front of their audience Alternatively, build an audience via engaging (tweet replies) high-value customers or by catching the trending topics Build a one-way connection with your audience via newsletter on email/WhatsApp The goal is to connect directly with your followers and not be dependent on social media algorithms for too long Build a community via Facebook/Slack/Telegram/Circle groups Once you have a critical number of connections, invite them to a community In the initial phase, maintaining and running a community requires work Eventually, the community becomes self-sustaining Monetize Selling branded merchandise Large-ticket affiliates like insurance Paid consultation calls Fan funding (Patreon) for exclusive content access Organizing a Conference

People love taking shortcuts in real life. Ozempic is a shortcut to losing weight. Tanning beds are a shortcut to getting tanned. Summaries are shortcuts to reading books. Few take shortcuts in the activities they enjoy. A hiker in Patagonia or climber on Mt. Fuji is not looking for a shortcut to finish the journey. There is a genuine desire to enjoy the experience. There is a genuine desire to improve one’s ability and skills. ...

GitHub stars have no value on their own. But ask yourself, what would differentiate a project on GitHub from GitLab if not for these stars?

Here’s a simple project success heuristic. All projects have some element of uncertainty but over time the questions should become more refined. If that’s not happening, then the project is almost certainly failing. The company might still succeed via a pivot but the project is unlikely to. Consider the progression of questions for a consumer (B2C) product. Would anyone use this? Would a million people use this? What’s the total addressable market? Would people pay for this? Is 10$/month too high or can I increase the price further? Notice how questions keep becoming nuanced. ...

American government goes everywhere exporting its brand of democracy. The Chinese government wants to do business and make money [with these autocracies] in Asia, Africa, and South America - Lee Kuan Yew In many ways, American companies take the same approach. They build one product, localize it a bit for the target countries, and try to win big there. However, Chinese companies seem to take a different approach. China utilizes lower labor costs than its American counterparts and builds targeted products for markets. And Temu is the perfect example of that. Temu’s parent company’s flagship product is Pinduoduo. Pinduoduo is designed for the Chinese market. A completely unrelated E-commerce product, Temu is designed for the American market.

Javascript isn’t a language. It is just a specification. Well, that’s true for many other languages like Python and Java. However, most languages have just one de facto implementation. For example, CPython for Python. Java has two major ones - Oracle’s JDK and Google’s Android Java. That’s not true for Javascript though.

There are two primary ways to generate income on the consumer Internet: through subscriptions or advertising. Additionally, unlike the enterprise world, usage-based subscriptions are often hard and confusing for consumers. So, we end up with 10$ a month all-you-can-eat buffet or we end up with ads. Now, like it or not, not all users are created equal. Some are more valuable than others. And these valuable users indirectly pay more than the users with less spending power. In other words, these users subsidize the product for the less fortunate fellows. In fact, in some ways, ads are a transfer of wealth from rich to poor users of the same service. So, next time wonder when people complain about ads, they will always be rich and powerful. These rich users would prefer a minuscule 10-a-month price instead of being worth thousands, if not millions, for the advertisers. And if the product has network effects, like social media, then it is unavoidable for these richer folks. ...

For more than 10 years, this website has been running on WordPress. Over time I come to dislike it for multiple reasons.

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.